Sakirin Mosque
September 4th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Turkish designer Zeynep Fadillioglu, who was responsible for the interior decoration and design of the mosque, poses during its opening in Istanbul in May 2009. Sakirin Mosque is Turkey's first mosque designed by a woman. REUTERS/Murad Sezer
Officially opened in May 2009, the beautiful Sakirin Mosque in Turkey is the result of a direct effort to merge antiquity with modernity in a society immersed in constant and contentious debates about religion and secularism. The interior of the mosque was designed by Zeynep Fadillioglu, a famous British-Turkish female interior designer, and is located among several other classical mosques. In a 2008 BBC article Fadillioglu, who is not religious herself, admitted that she wept tears of joy when she was asked to join the project:
Especially at a time when so much is being discussed wrongly of Islam not allowing women to have equal rights. The fact that a woman can build a mosque disproves this.
The issue of women’s rights and Islam is certainly not clear cut and those who discuss it in polar terms (as people often do) are either not aware of, or choose to ignore, certain inherent complexities, but creations like this are representative of tides of change which are penetrating Islamic societies and creating spaces for debate.
Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation
September 4th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Times they are a changing. Kudos to Naomi Klein and company for this groundbreaking initiative. BDS is on a roll.
An Open Letter to the Toronto International Film Festival:
September 2, 2009
As members of the Canadian and international film, culture and media arts communities, we are deeply disturbed by the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to host a celebratory spotlight on Tel Aviv. We protest that TIFF, whether intentionally or not, has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine.
In 2008, the Israeli government and Canadian partners Sidney Greenberg of Astral Media, David Asper of Canwest Global Communications and Joel Reitman of MIJO Corporation launched “Brand Israel,” a million dollar media and advertising campaign aimed at changing Canadian perceptions of Israel. Brand Israel would take the focus off Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and its aggressive wars, and refocus it on achievements in medicine, science and culture. An article in Canadian Jewish News quotes Israeli consul general Amir Gissin as saying that Toronto would be the test city for a promotion that could then be deployed around the world. According to Gissin, the culmination of the campaign would be a major Israeli presence at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. (Andy Levy-Alzenkopf, “Brand Israel set to launch in GTA,” Canadian Jewish News, August 28, 2008.)
The Politicization of Security
September 3rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
In a recent interview with former US Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow probes Ridge on the war on Iraq, events leading up to and after Hurricane Katrina and certain eyebrow raising passages from Ridge’s new book which indicate that decisions to raise the official threat level in America during the Bush Administration were not solely made out of concerns for America’s safety, but intertwined with political concerns for the administration’s own well-being.
After having survived the dark era of the Bush Administration where fear was deployed through various methods in an attempt to inspire trust in the government and keep the population in manageable complacency, many won’t find this news surprising, but Maddow’s own masterful navigation of the interview with Ridge, where he stumbles more than he walks, is a breath of fresh air.
You can watch one part of the interview below. Catch the rest here.
Civilizing Mission
September 2nd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
M. Shahid Alam
“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production,
by the immensely facilitated means of communication,
draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization.”
– K. Marx and F. Engels
From get go, this system was built
on carnage. Once capital connected
with power, there was no turning
back. The galleons set sail, guns
blazing at the ports, disembarking
death on the shores of America,
barging into Mocha and Malacca,
and making the return journey,
decks piled with gold and silver,
hulls hoarding cloves and calicoes.
The ships went out again, winged
predators, to the ports of Africa
harvesting her flesh and bones,
African bodies to work a continent,
drained, depleted of native fauna.
The ships still make the round, wide-
bodied, steel-hulled, through air
and water, carrying a new cargo
from ruined lands whose human
detritus is harvested for body parts.
Surfing on Islamophobia
September 1st, 2009 § 2 Comments
On Sunday, our good friend Phil Weiss posted a sympathetic piece by Scott McConnell, editor of The American Conservative, on Christopher Caldwell’s new book about Islam in Europe. Here is the response by PULSE editors Muhammad Idrees Ahmad and Robin Yassin-Kassab which was published on MondoWeiss today:
There are two sets of population statistics about Europe, writes Eliot Weinberger in a post on the London Review Blog: ‘those of the Islamophobes and those of everyone else.’ Weinberger is commenting on the recent of flurry of books trading in the ‘Islamic threat’, among them one by neoconservative writer Christopher Caldwell. In his encomium to Caldwell, Scott McConnell couldn’t possibly have been referring to the statistics of ‘everyone else’. It would be hard otherwise to elevate a minority of 3.6 percent into a civilizational threat. So presumably he accepts the numbers of the Islamophobes. But he does more; he also echoes their assumptions. Small wonder then that he should consider ‘nuanced’ a book that describes Muslims as ‘conquering Europe’s cities, street by street’.
But before we get to Caldwell lets address McConnell’s own assumptions.
McConnell splits ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslims’ into opposing camps, and understands their relationship only in terms of harm. ‘Had I to weigh the extent to which the Islamic world is more victim or victimizer of America and the West’, he opines, ‘the scales would tilt decisively towards America as the more guilty party’. American crimes include the Iraq war and support for Israeli conquest of ‘the Arab sections’ of Jerusalem and the West Bank. Support for dictators, the proponderance of military bases, the exploitation of resources, Somalia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and support for the Israeli conquest of the ‘Arab sections’ of Tel Abib and Yaffa, clearly do not factor in McConnell’s narrow vision. But it’s fair enough in itself. Where logic fails McConnell entirely, or rather where he fails logic and turns to racism instead, is where he places Muslim immigration into Europe ‘on the other side of the ledger’.
