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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://medium.com/@Prof.hatembazian/how-does-it-feel-to-be-a-muslim-8361f13d6c5">medium.com</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">How does it feel to be a Muslim? <br></h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Prof. Hatem Bazian - April 26, 2022<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><p><img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/490/1*MsrOa5mVQjNk7-_DEaWvew.jpeg" role="presentation" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="392" height="261"></p><a href="https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/muslim-family" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Image from iStock</a><p id="gmail-c5c4">Events in the Arab and Muslim world direct me back again to W.E.B. Du Bois and the pressing question in his book, <em>The Souls of Black Folk</em>–
how does it feel to be a problem? The question posed by Du Bois in
relations to Black Americans and the problem of race in America and
around the world has not ended and is as intense today as it was at the
time he wrote the book. The problem of race is ever present but
constantly ignored or brushed aside for other more pressing issues. “Why
are you so hung-up on race?” was one comment and Islam is not race so
why bring it into conversation? Race and racism is the canopy that
covers every aspect of modernity while everyone either deny its
existence or attempt to obfuscate its impact by pointing to other
factors-sociological, economic, cultural, etc.</p><p id="gmail-6a37">The
question and comments reflect a very rudimentary understanding of race
and the process of racilization. Yet, the more profound undertone in
these refrains is a real preoccupation with race on those complaining
since the basic contours of the argument is that the status quo is a
work in progress and Blacks (and minorities) should see the glass
half-full since real progress has been made since enslavement time.</p><p id="gmail-9b42">A
note of caution for those reading further: The Black question is not
similar to any other racial question and borrowing Du Bois’s framing
does not mean to create equivalency between Black experiences with
racism and Muslim predicament in the contemporary era. I do believe and
hold the firm view that the Black experience in the Americas is unique
and can’t be compared to any other group of immigrants, ethnic or
religious communities that are facing racism and discrimination at
present. Enslavement, Jim Crow laws and structural racism toward the
Black subject is an class of its own and should be approached with this
lens in mind.</p><p id="gmail-3231"><strong>How Does it Feel to Be Muslim Today?</strong></p><p id="gmail-2379">Inspired
by Du Bois’s framing, I ask a similar question– how does it feel to be
Muslim today? To listen, watch and read news about Muslims is a daily
act bringing with it a process of self-doubt, paiful memories and
devastation. Bombings mosques in Pakistan, non-stop deaths in Iraq,
Libya, Syria, Somalia Mali, and Yemen with no one stoping for a moment
of silence, remembering their names or even counting the numbers. No
flags or colors raised to express solidarity and no sport event takes a
moment of silence for the Muslims. In addition, we are confronted with
starvation in Afghanistan, slow moving genocide, lynchings and assaults
in India and concentration camps for the Uyghur in China, settler
colonialism in Palestine and Kashmir, just to name the well-known
events; but countless others fill the daily news cycle to chip away at
ones soul.</p><p id="gmail-6299">How heavy does
it feel to be a Muslim today! Muslim women are targeted daily and face
verbal and physical assaults from every racist and “civilizational”
White Supremacist warriors expressing their cowardly formed masculinity
within Western societies. Replacement theorist and Clash of Civilization
“elite” circles pontificate on the threat of the Muslim subject and the
constant atmospheric Islamophobia that penetrate every facet of the
society.</p><p><img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/328/1*y-gRcuvd_zY_ju25fZdx4g.png" role="presentation" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="292" height="392"></p><p id="gmail-fcd1">I
dread the morning news for it is as sure as the rising sun that the
Muslim subject is everywhere: dead, maimed, bombed and bloody. Muslims
are keeping the Military Industrial Complex, and the journalistic
enterprises afloat by the sheer madness of violence directed at them and
monetizing their collective condition to drive endless profits. No news
day is a good day but these are rare and far between for if it bleeds
it leads and daily the Muslim wound is deepening and gushing profusely.
Yes, the eyes of the world are fixed on the Ukraine but Muslim deaths is
so normal that it is used as a point of comparison: this is not
Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria.</p><div role="button" tabindex="0"><p><img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/560/1*QykG1wuC2Zh1elLOBvjLIQ.jpeg" role="presentation" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="392" height="221"></p></div><a href="https://www.trtworld.com/asia/afghanistan-to-free-up-to-2-000-taliban-prisoners-after-ceasefire-offer-36591" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Image taken from TRT</a> World<p id="gmail-9075">How
do you mourn the nameless and faceless when by the time you get to know
what happened to them another group of nameless and faceless Muslims
are killed and maimed! Who are these Muslim subjects? What crimes have
they committed? Why are they reduced to mere numbers and GPS geographic
locations? All of them are beautiful human souls with names, families,
mothers, fathers, wives, brothers, sisters and friends who agonize over
the sudden loss, yet their collective voice is not heard beyond the
confines of the silenced self.</p><p id="gmail-fef8">As
the day progresses then one is daily confronted with answering
questions about the motive of the murderers and their claim of religious
authority for killing and murdering all types of Muslims. Explaining
differences or similarities between Sunni, Shia, Salafi, Wahabbi, Sufi,
Ahmadi, Zaydi, Ismaili and countless other names becomes a full time job
next to ones daily work schedule. A Muslim has no down time and even
among family members the discussion will get back to the crazy and
insane death and destruction involving distant and not so distant
relatives in the Muslim world.</p><p id="gmail-2e2c">A
Muslim is an injured soul walking numbed from the sheer magnitude of
the suffering and death visited upon cities, towns and places fixed into
his/her cultural and historical memory. The Muslim landscape is ablaze
and with it the collectively held meaning is reduced to ashes and often
many times over. How do you recover and heal from this non-stop and
transgenerational trauma!</p><div role="button" tabindex="0"><p><img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/560/1*hV0jypttD0JOQ1K0yGY8rg.jpeg" role="presentation" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="392" height="221"></p></div>Image from <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/iraq-baghdad-protesters-security-forces-massacre-cover-up" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Middle</a> East Eye<p id="gmail-2874">Baghdad,
the city of a Thousand and One Nights’ fame, has been bleeding non-stop
for forty years and no end in sight for Iraq and its ancient people:
Sunni, Shia, Arabs, Kurds, Yazidis, Jews and Christians. Damascus, one
of the first continuously inhabited cities of the world, sitting in ruin
and the stench of death and destruction is everywhere and likewise no
end in sight. Syria was bombed by everyone and the largest refugee
population in the world but they are not “worthy victims” to be named,
remembered and invited as “quality immigrants.” The press and political
elites framed Syrian refugees as a threat and constituting a stepping
stone into the Replacement Theory, which resulted in massive human
rights violations, death on the high seas and detention centers and
barbed wire across Europe while the US instituted extreme vetting.</p><div role="button" tabindex="0"><p><img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/560/1*NGQVAzUXfKQr1AMoYKYEbQ.jpeg" role="presentation" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="392" height="261"></p></div><a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2020/03/19/all-eyes-covid-19-refugee-suffering-continues-greece-turkey-and-syria" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Image from American Magazine</a><p id="gmail-3288">Egypt,
the land of Al-Azhar, the Pyramids and papyrus narrating and recording
civilization’s long march and human ingenuity is fracturing at the seem
and its best and brightest are in graves, jails or exile. Kabul and
Afghanistan, the land of Abu Hanifa and the passageway for the Silk
Road, has been at war and focus of Great Game of powers with the dead
and dying are collateral damage to drones of unconsciousness. Libya,
Tunisia, Sudan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Mali all are close to
either a disaster zone or hanging on a thread away from total collapse.</p><p id="gmail-2660">What
should be the answer when the questions about Islam and Muslims are
inside each and every household– and ones own mind? Can I answer my own
questions about all these areas being put into a path of death and
destruction extending from the colonial era and all the way into the
postcolonial! A Muslim today is a problem that has no ready answers and
those coming forward attempting to solve the riddle themselves emerge
from within the same questions and not outside of it. Yes, everyone can
point and site a text to support their actions but it is a matter of
rationalizing a pre-determined course through narrow ideological
selections and readings while leaving behind mountains of evidence
demonstrating the total opposite.</p><p id="gmail-c6e0">Are
Muslims violent, terrorist, barbaric, uncivilized, backward, despotic,
oppressive toward women, irrational, and a death culture celebrating
destruction while suffering deficiency in love, mercy and imagination!
The news and events around the world daily reinforce this lens and I
find myself often reduced to stupefying silence and an inability to
explain the inexplicable even to ones own self. More critically, a cadre
of Orientalist, Zionist and Muslim upwardly and colonially formed
political, economic and Eurocentric “elites” offer “answers” or produce
research to affix the distorted set of questions and problematic
framings.</p><p><img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/200/1*EbjjNXA3FR8A7fG9UxuCgg.jpeg" role="presentation" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="200" height="212"></p><a href="https://www.islamicity.org/1899/is-a-clash-of-civilizations-unavoidable-a-western-view/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Image from Islam City</a> website<p id="gmail-182c">What
does Islam say or not say is irrelevant when blood and death is the
language and the syntax is stitched together with mayhem, bullets and
guns. Islam is a noun that drives its meaning from an action verb but
not the one contemplated or identified daily in the news, published by
Orientalist and pushed by pro-Israel Hasbara network. The Islam of the
news points only to violent verb that attempts to create a noun without a
reality, permanency or metaphysics attached to it. I don’t know the
Islam of the news: the noun and the verb are masquerading in an
Orientalist reality show producing something akin to a non-stop running
of the night of the living dead.</p><p id="ec98">A
Muslim today is walking in the midst and living the aftermath of a
night filled with the living dead proclaiming a defense of God while
killing Him at every corner. The names flashing daily on the news are
seared into Muslim consciousness and begin to rewire and frame ones own
view of him/herself as well as the Islam claimed to be represented in
such actions. We must kill you to save you from yourself is the
Orientalist and Western prescription for the Muslim world. We must bomb
you with drones so as to bring “democracy, open marker economy and
women’s rights” even though all will be dead but at least “we sincerely”
tried.</p><p id="gmail-30eb">Certainly, the need
for rethinking monumental issues in Muslim societies are paramount and
will need the best and brightest in this generation and a few others to
put themselves to the task. Muslim societies can no longer assign
religious education to the current postcolonial state or those who have
the lowest achievement while the best and brightest are preoccupied with
the world and race to accumulate more wealth. Current Muslim
postcolonial states and elites are operating within the colonial
epistemological structure and view Islam and Muslimess as a negative
attribute that needs to be extracted so as to “modernize” the society.
Modernization means or is reduced to Westernization, accepting Western
domination and imperialist killing fields.</p><p id="gmail-da8f">A
new path must b forged by Muslims for Muslims without the West that is
living inside our collective minds. The starting point is re-examination
of our education, which has been Eurocentric, constructed to produce an
inferiority complex and posit the West as the universal norm of the
ideal human.</p><p id="gmail-f633">Thus, an
investment in educating ethicists, historians, political philosophers,
economist and religious ethicists in particular is what is urgently
needed. However, these educational enterpirses should not be rooted in
attempting to replicate or reproduce Western epistemology through a
translation or immitation project. Such an effort will make the medicine
be worst than the sickness we are attempting to address.</p><p id="gmail-0c23">If
ethics, politics, economics and its pursuit are made to be impoverished
then the outcome is what we are witnessing across the Muslim world. The
problem is not uniquely Muslim, rather, it is a structural outcome of
colonization, distorted ‘reform’ agendas, post-colonization, imposed and
never thought-out modernity, privatization benefiting the global north
and current elites ‘leading’ nation-states by brute force — while all
along focused on their own power and wealth over the welfare of their
own populations in partnership with the West and settler colonialism</p><p><img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/431/1*dj7zVc3aWvjq04yZcFh5zw.jpeg" role="presentation" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="392" height="392"></p><p id="gmail-62e5">The
challenge of being a Muslim today is both a crisis and an opportunity
in the same moment. For the Muslim task is to imagine the impossible and
set out to actualize it in the eye of the most unforgiving storm — a
material world that dresses Islam, religion and human discourse in an
imperial violent garb. Our task according to the Prophet, “if the end of
the world comes upon you while planting a seed then continue planting,”
a most hopeful message in the midst of the storm. As a Muslim I feel
like planting a seed today for future generations and the best seed
according to the Qur’an is education.</p></div></div></div>
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