Author Archives: Editors

I’m a Muslim, a woman and an immigrant. I voted for Trump By Asra Nomani

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Asra Q. Nomani is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement. She can be found on Twitter at @AsraNomani.

A lot is being said now about the “silent secret Trump supporters.”

This is my confession — and explanation: I — a 51-year-old, a Muslim, an immigrant woman “of color” — am one of those silent voters for Donald Trump. And I’m not a “bigot,” “racist,” “chauvinist” or “white supremacist,” as Trump voters are being called, nor part of some “whitelash.”

In the winter of 2008, as a lifelong liberal and proud daughter of West Virginia, a state born on the correct side of history on slavery, I moved to historically conservative Virginia only because the state had helped elect Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States.

But, then, for much of this past year, I have kept my electoral preference secret: I was leaning toward Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Tuesday evening, just minutes before the polls closed at Forestville Elementary School in mostly Democratic Fairfax County, I slipped between the cardboard partitions in the polling booth, a pen balanced carefully between my fingers, to mark my ballot for president, coloring in the circle beside the names of Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence.

After Hillary Clinton called Trump to concede, making him America’s president-elect, a friend on Twitter wrote a message of apology to the world, saying there are millions of Americans who don’t share Trump’s “hatred/division/ignorance.” She ended: “Ashamed of millions that do.”

That would presumably include me — but it doesn’t, and that is where the dismissal of voter concerns about Clinton led to her defeat. I most certainly reject the trifecta of “hatred/division/ignorance.” I support the Democratic Party’s position on abortion, same-sex marriage and climate change.But I am a single mother who can’t afford health insurance under Obamacare. The president’s mortgage-loan modification program, “HOPE NOW,” didn’t help me. Tuesday, I drove into Virginia from my hometown of Morgantown, W.Va., where I see rural America and ordinary Americans, like me, still struggling to make ends meet, after eight years of the Obama administration.

Finally, as a liberal Muslim who has experienced, first-hand, Islamic extremism in this world, I have been opposed to the decision by President Obama and the Democratic Party to tap dance around the “Islam” in Islamic State. Of course, Trump’s rhetoric has been far more than indelicate and folks can have policy differences with his recommendations, but, to me, it has been exaggerated and demonized by the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, their media channels, such as Al Jazeera, and their proxies in the West, in a convenient distraction from the issue that most worries me as a human being on this earth: extremist Islam of the kind that has spilled blood from the hallways of the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai to the dance floor of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.

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Can next Army Chief of Pakistan get rid of anti-India lot? By Cyril Almeida in Dawn

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ULTIMATELY, they’re going to have to do it. They know it, we know it and the targets do too: decommission the favourites; defang the good ones.

Get rid of militancy.

Think of it as an arc: from Musharraf to Kayani to Raheel to the next chief, a progressive clampdown against groups that had to be taken on.

For Musharraf, it was Al Qaeda — 9/11 changed the world and the world changed how we did business.

From Kayani to Raheel, a second purge — the anti-Pakistan lot. They came after us, so we had to go after them.

And soon the next chief — confronted with the spectre of a roiling Kashmir and the long-term presence of a right-winger in Delhi causing the last line standing to go into agitated motion.

Something will have to be done before they do us in.

One, two, three — is there an arc of inevitability to it? Each successive chief having to go incrementally further than the last, not necessarily because he wanted to, but because he had to.

Lost in the warfare of the last month was an important consensus: the civilians said something needed to be done and the boys agreed — though, tellingly, the civilians resisted other actions in Punjab.

But the path to recognising that something has to be done about the anti-India lot has begun to be trodden.

It is the logic of utility, institutional self-preservation and the mechanism of jihad: if the groups exist, they occasionally have to go into action; and when they do, the outside world has a reaction.

Once, twice, thrice — from Mumbai to Pathankot to Uri, the future is being written for us.

Uri was perhaps the least significant and so the reaction the most telling. Pathankot was really the bigger deal, but it came a week after Modi’s Christmas Day Lahore surprise.

He couldn’t react as angrily because he had just pushed open the door to normalisation. So India swallowed its rage and the world kept quiet.

When Uri happened, there was no such luck. India went into a rage and the world sympathised, even before the facts were known.

On India, we don’t have the advantage we have with the Afghan-centric lot. There we can always nudge them across the border — go home to where you belong, we can tell them when the time comes.

With the anti-India lot, this is home. They’re from here and this is where the fallout will be suffered.

And so this is where they’ll have to be dealt with.

The past offers some clues about what the future could look like. With Al Qaeda there was an opening wallop followed by sustained action.

The wallop came because 9/11 was momentous. It is how history will be measured, time before 9/11 and time after.

The sustained, years-long pursuit of Al Qaeda, in Fata and the cities, came because America insisted and America had the resources to make sure we listened.

But then came the Osama anomaly — what the hell was he doing here for those long years in plain sight?

The lesson: we’re like the kid who hates homework. We’ll make a show of it in the beginning and then find reason to go slow or switch off.

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What Motivated Arab Scholars To Translate and Preserve Greek Works-By Peter Anderson

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“What drove the political class of Abbasid society to support this enormous and difficult undertaking? Part of the explanation is no doubt the sheer utility of the scientific corpus: key texts in disciplines such as engineering and medicine had obvious practical application. But this doesn’t tell us why translators were paid handsomely to render, say, Aristotle’s Metaphysics or Plotinus’ Enneads into Arabic. Research by leading scholars of the Greek-Arabic translation movement, especially by Dimitri Gutas in Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (1998), has suggested that the motives were in fact deeply political. The caliphs wanted to establish their own cultural hegemony, in competition with Persian culture and also with the neighbouring Byzantines. The Abbasids wanted to show that they could carry on Hellenic culture better than the Greek-speaking Byzantines, benighted as they were by the irrationalities of Christian theology.”

Muslim intellectuals also saw resources in the Greek texts for defending, and better understanding, their own religion. One of the earliest to embrace this possibility was al-Kindī, traditionally designated as the first philosopher to write in Arabic (he died around 870CE). A well-heeled Muslim who moved in court circles, al-Kindī oversaw the activity of Christian scholars who could render Greek into Arabic. The results were mixed. The circle’s version of Aristotle’s Metaphysics can be almost incomprehensible at times (to be fair, one could say this of the Greek Metaphysics too), while their ‘translation’ of the writings of Plotinus often takes the form of a free paraphrase with new, added material.

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Modern Muslim Fashion Identity (NYT)

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( In the last TFUSA meeting we were discussing Muslims/Islam after 50 years. Indonesian designer Hasiban has her models in Hijab in recent NYC Fashion show. Perhaps it gives a glimpse of future. Western culture with a veneer of Muslim identity? f. sheikh )

Last week, quietly and without much fanfare, the 22nd global Vogue went live.

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Framed in striking black and gold, the glossy digital pages look, in many ways, much like any other international issue of the world’s most powerful fashion magazine. There is a video interview with the star model Gigi Hadid, a colorful carousel of spring 2017 runway trends, a lavish editorial featuring the latest Chanel, and bright, chatty pieces about hot local brands and social media stars.

Image result for Hasibuan models,

Image result for Hasibuan models,

 

But then there is this: “How to Style Your Hair Under a Hijab.” And this: Malikah, a fiery Beirut-raised hip-hop star, describing how she began her career spitting lyrics into a face mask to hide her identity from disapproving conservatives.

And, just after a cinematic short film featuring the Lebanese designer Elie Saab and the model Elisa Sednaoui amid ornate dining rooms and lush walled gardens, there is this: the definitive edit of this season’s most stylish abayas (robelike dresses).

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Welcome to Vogue Arabia, a digital-first, bilingual foray into the hearts, minds and wallets of women in the 22 countries of the Arab League. As such, it is the latest, and potentially the strongest, new voice to join a growing chorus demanding global recognition and respect for Muslim culture and its commercial clout.

A story on the Vogue Arabia website on hairstyles for hijabs. Vogue Arabia

From Arab Fashion Week, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which debuted last month on the heels of Paris Fashion Week, to Jakarta Fashion Week, held last week in the Indonesian capital, formal fashion showcases are being institutionalized across the Islamic world.