So, what does this story have to do with modern-day Iran and Iranians? Everything. For the vast majority of Iranians who identify as Shi’a and even for many who don’t, the story of Karbala lies at the heart of all struggles against oppression and tyranny — personal and political.
—Melody Moezzi writes this smart, informative piece about the relevance of the one-thousand-year old story behind Ashura and modern-day politics in The Washington Post.
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Unforeseen Beauty and Possibility: A Decade of Discovering Islam
by Krista Tippett, host
The Brooklyn sun on September 11, 2001. (photo: by Joshua Treviño/Flickr, cc by-nc-nd 2.0)
In a perfect world, or at least a perfectly informed one, most Americans would have known something about Islam as the 21st century opened. They would have been aware that over one billion of the world’s people belong to this faith that emerged from the monotheistic soil of Christianity and Judaism. They might also have known that Muslims would soon be the second largest religious group in the U.S., after Christians. And that statistic might have come alive in American imaginations in the form of the doctors and teachers, parents and citizens it represents.
But we don’t live in a perfect world. September 11, 2001, was many Americans’ catastrophic introduction to Islam. Certainly, up to then, there were Islamic images that populated the American sense of the world out there — threatening images, many of them, associated with bombed embassies or the first failed World Trade Center attack. Islamic terrorists were default suspects, too, we recall, in the immediate hours after the Oklahoma City bombing.
But September 11 was the day, as someone said, when the Middle East came to America. That Tuesday we woke up as post-Cold War people — citizens of the prosperous remaining superpower. By Wednesday we had become post-9/11 people, with newly fearful eyes on the world. And our new enemies declared themselves agents of Islam.
I was in Washington, DC, on that day seeking funding for the wild idea of a weekly public radio program on religion. I had been piloting programs for about a year, getting an enthusiastic response from listeners and a tepid one from programmers. Talk of religion, many argued, was necessarily proselytizing and divisive. Moreover, faith wasn’t an appropriate focus for a weekly hour of public radio — not a reasonable, weighty subject for public life like politics or economics or the arts — best left as a private matter.
Time-Lapse of a Faith in a Quieter Mecca
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
This time-lapse film from Hosain Hadi shows the Masjid al Haram (“Sacred Mosque”) in Makkah (Mecca) in more serene moments, which may be different than most depictions videos you’ve seen of the sacred site shot during the Hajj.
The complex is shot in the off-hours, so to speak. It’s not packed to the hilt with worshipers from all over the world. It’s not shot from that same, single overhead view we often see, the one that brings the Kaaba into focus. In Faith, Hadi shares many angles with the viewer, but always from a distance. This gives one a better sense of the pulse of the shrine and its visitors. Literally, during one time of prayer, the image flickers as the adherents kneel and stand. White and grey, white and grey.
What I’m most particularly drawn to are the images rolling during the credits. Several women stand outside the mosque with their boys, one taking photos while the other holds his mother’s hand and balances on one leg. Another group of women and men race past; the first group lingers. It’s an exquisite sequence that humanizes these black-veiled women. The distance should make them feel like objects, like ants in motion. It doesn’t. You actually see these women as mothers and friends. The extension of a hand to her son, a gesture of intimacy to return home.
(ph-scale via almaswithinalmas)
Who Speaks For Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think
Shiraz Janjua, Associate Producer
Ingrid Mattson, head of the Islamic Society of North America, is someone we’ve dubbed a “new voice for Islam.” A new book, meanwhile, is the result of six years of interviews with thousands of Muslims worldwide. There are great interviews on Altmuslim and ReligionWriter, respectively, with the two authors of this new book called Who Speaks For Islam: What A Billion Muslims Really Think. Some important ideas, especially as we are in an election cycle, though we have become used to hearing and tuning out these weighty analyses. I’m not sure we know what to do with them; one hopes our politicians do, though.
Says co-author of the book, Dalia Mogahed:
There are essentially three prisms or filters through which everything the U.S. does or says is viewed by Muslims worldwide. The first filter is the perception of cultural disrespect, that the United States does not respect Islam and Muslims. That I could talk about for a long time. The second filter is the perception of political and economic domination. It’s the perception that the U.S. believes, “Democracy is great, but not for Muslims,” and props up dictators so that the wealth of the nation can be exploited. The third filter is that of acute conflicts — Palestine, of course, and now Iraq and Afghanistan.
These three filters are not independent of each other. They overlap, and one reinforces the other and is in turn reinforced by the other. The filters of cultural disrespect and acute conflicts, for example, overlapped in Abu Ghraib. So changing that won’t be easy; it will require both diplomacy and engaging people on policy.
