Misbah Magazine: Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2008)

MisbahPrinceton’s First Magazine Exploring Islam and the Muslim World

Spring 2008 Volume 1, Issue 1

Misbah is Arabic for “lamp,” a symbol of illumination

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Misbah - Exploring Islam and the Muslim World

Misbah MagazineExploring Islam and the Muslim World

EDITOR-IN-CHIEFBabur Khwaja ‘09

EXECUTIVE EDITORJoy N. Karugu ‘09

SENIOR EDITORWasim Shiliwala ‘09

LAYOUTWaqas Jawaid ‘10

CONTRIBUTORSNabil Abdurehman ’11Humayra Ali GSM. Jehangir Amjad ’10George Hatke GSCelene Marie Ayat Lizzio ’08Faraz KhanIntisar Rabb GSFethi Mübin Ramazanoğlu GS

Misbah Magazine explores the ideas, history and development of Muslims and Islam in the world. It is offered free of charge to all students, facultyand staff of Princeton University. All questions about donations and off-campus subscription and advertising ratesshould be directed to [email protected].

Views expressed in Misbah Magazine do not necessarilyreflect those of the editors, sponsors, trustees or of Princeton University. Letters to the editor can be directed to [email protected] and may be edited for length and clarity.

Printing of this journal is made possible by generous grants from the following sources:

Office of the Dean of Religious LifePeter B. Lewis Center for the ArtsPrinceton University Center for Human Values Undergraduate ForumPrinceton University Council of the HumanitiesPrinceton Institute for International and Regional Studies

The front and back covers feature the Sultan Ahmet Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey. Photos by Timothy Neesam and Rafael Schwemmer, respectively. The above photo, by Seccad Yazicioglu, shows the mosque’s interior. Calligraphy by Said Bak.

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Princeton University - Spring 2008

ContentsEditor’s Note 2

The Decline of Muslims in the Sciences 3

Zia’s Destructive Legacy 4

Katrina: Continuing Lessons for the Muslim and American Communities 6

‘Modern’ Visions of Islam: At the Junctures of Humanism, Pragmatism and Scriptural Authority 12

A Translation of Faiz Ahmed Faiz 13

Of Traders and Tribesmen: The Hadramawt Region of Eastern Yemen 14

“Blessed are the Peacemakers” 17

A Pearl in Mawaraunnahr 19

A Call for Understanding 21

Photo by Mohamed Somji.

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Editor’s NoteWelcome to the first issue of Misbah Magazine. After

months of planning, our staff has created the first magazine at Princeton University dedicated to promoting an intellectual discourse on the ideas, debates and cultures relevant to Islam and the Muslim world. Misbah is an Arabic word that translates to “lamp,” and we hope similarly to provide illumination. We intend to explore the Muslim world by engaging in intellectual debates, presenting diverse art forms and analyzing historical legacies. We hope to achieve this goal with articles, poetry and photography that explore a broad range of subject matter. As this magazine is intended primarily for a Princeton University audience, we attempt to present our ideas through a lens that recognizes Islam’s relations with other cultures and traditions.

This first issue offers a range of articles and artwork. The feature article by George Hatke GS examines the trade diaspora that grew from the Hadramawt region of Yemen, analyzing how the diaspora affected social dynamics and the spread of religion. Not to focus exclusively on politics and history, an article by Humayra Ali GS examines the legacy of scientific achievement in Muslim civilizations and explores the causes of the decline in scientific innovation in Muslim societies today. Each article presents a different realm to explore.

No discussion on Muslim civilization would be complete without some reference to its art. This issue presents poetry and photography from around the world. Maryam Wasif Khan ’08 has translated works of a Pakistani poet from Urdu to English, and our staff has assembled pictures of historically significant sites from around the Muslim world.

Given the variant forces and movements within the Muslim world, this magazine can provide a means for Princeton and the broader community to engage in issues that are relevant today. This discussion can only be enhanced if more people participate in it. We plan to release our second issue in the Fall of 2008, and we invite anyone of any belief to submit articles or artwork.

Yours truly,

Babur Khwaja ‘09Editor-in-Chief

The Mezquita of Córdoba, Spain. Photo by Félix Gutiérrez.

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It is a historical fact that the Muslim world once made re-markable scientific contributions to the world at large. Over a thousand years ago, Muslims introduced modern experi-mental science—new methods of experimentation, observa-tion, and measurement—placing far greater emphasis on experimental science than had the Greeks. From Al-Khwariz-mi’s invention of algebra, to Ibn al-Haytham’s introduction of the laws of the reflection and refraction of light and illumi-nating the principles of inertia long before Issac Newton, to Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine—a 318-page medical textbook that served the basis for medical teaching in Europe and the Middle East for hundreds of years—all bear testimony to the phenomenal scientific work and spirit brought about by the Muslims in the early and high Middle-Ages up until the 16th century. A part of this period is better known as the Golden Age of Islamic Science.

Unfortunately, however, there has been a shocking decline in the involvement of Muslims in the scientific arena since the 16th century and up through the present day. Despite the fact that Muslims comprise roughly one fifth of the world’s population, today only a miniscule fraction of scientific pub-lications are made by the Muslim world in comparison to the United States and the countries of Europe.

Many theories emerged as to why there is such a diminished interest in the realm of science in the Muslim world. Some of these factors include: (1) The decline of economic prosperity and affluence in Islamic states after the 15th century, which doomed the flourishing of science. This idea has been exten-sively studied in Ibn Khaldun’s (a famous historian’s) Muqad-dimah, the first volume of his book on universal history. He observed that as economies suffer, the marketplace or the demand for scientific professions decreased as a result. When cities like Baghdad, Cordoba, al-Qairawan, al-Basra, and al-Kufa became prosperous in the early centuries of Islam, civili-zation was established and as a consequence both science and scientists flourished in these areas. On the contrary, when prosperity and civilization faded in those cities, the affluence of science and its profession decreased as well. (2) From the 19th century, some have suggested that this decline of Islamic science can be attributed to the negative views of Muslim theologians towards the progress in science and scholasticism, though this idea has been challenged and dismissed by many scholars. There was no one religious authority that controlled the entire educational system; so the educational system was free from dominance of orthodox influences. (3) The Madrasa

system that came about after the founding of the Nizamiyya Madrasa in Baghdad in the 11th century favored the study of theology and law rather than natural sciences as suggested by others. It is claimed that traditionally the orthodox Ash’ari school of theology held such a view. This idea was also chal-lenged since the study of natural sciences was performed independently by different instructors, in different institu-tions. So it is not that the teaching of science did not prevail at that time, but rather that scientific research institutions did not flourish as a result of their dependence on the prosperity of the Islamic states and the effect of these states economic decline—whereas the Madrasas were sustained by funds from the people in authority and endowments from pious and wealthy individuals. (4) Conflicts between Sunni and Shia Muslims, in addition to the invasions by Crusaders and Mongols on Islamic lands during the 11th and 13th centuries also contributed to the decline of Islamic science. Invasions by the Mongols caused the destruction of Muslim libraries, observatories, medical hospitals and educational institutions. These annihilations ultimately destroyed Baghdad, the Ab-basid capital and intellectual centre in 1258. Again, this can tie back to factor (1), that the economy of the Islamic world decreased a great deal after the invasions of the Crusaders and Mongols—rendering scientific progress rather stagnant.

If indeed the most viable factor that contributed to the impediment of scientific growth in the Muslim world is the decline of prosperity in Islamic states after the 15th century, then there still remains some hope; because fortunately, today, a good part of the Islamic world is blessed with both human and natural resources. It seems that the Muslim world will depend heavily upon the successful utilization of its man-power and natural resources in order to bring about a fruitful economy that will reinitiate the importance of research and development and recreate the scientific infrastructure needed to sustain a job market for the growth of scientific professions. Furthermore, an economic co-operation and prudent collabo-ration between Islamic states that have a wealth of researchers and states that are rich in natural resources is critical. Not only must the Muslim world today devote itself whole-heartedly to the study of science, but it also needs to do so at a high level of proficiency. Otherwise, we will surely fail to revive our lost legacy, a glorious past.

Humayra Ali is a sixth-year graduate student in the Molecular Biology Department at Princeton University.

The Decline of Muslims in the SciencesBy Humayra Ali GS

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Religion and ethnicity are arguably the two most significant ideological forces that have molded the Indian Sub-continent into the form in which it finds itself today. It is not surprising that ethnic issues find themselves at the forefront in modern-day India and Pakistan, considering the vast diversity found across the region. Religion, on the other hand, has always been a shaky fault-line. Ever since the advent of Islam in the Sub-continent, brought about by the conquest of Sindh by Mohammed bin Qasim in the early 8th century CE, the people of the region have braced a topsy-turvy ride along the religious fault-line. The divide itself, separating Islam and Hinduism, remained blurred for many centuries only to be replaced by periods of clear demarcation and bitterness on both sides.

In the Indian Sub-continent Islam faced its most unique challenge: Hinduism. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, Hinduism was an entirely disparate brand of religious ideology and shared little in common with orthodox Islamic principles. Muslims never became a numerically superior community in the Sub-continent, but when they became the ruling class in the region, a great theological challenge arose. This change occurred during the conquests of Mahmud of Ghanzi in the 11th century CE. India and Hinduism were unexplored horizons for Muslim rulers and scholars alike. Therefore, with the exception of Abu Raihan Muhammad Alberuni (973-1048 CE), Muslim scholars and rulers were unaware of the theological challenges and difficulties in governance that were to become apparent as soon as the Islamic conquests of the Sub-continent began to consolidate. This is because unlike Christianity and Judaism, Hinduism’s philosophical approach was entirely disparate from Islam and entirely alien to Muslim scholars. Therefore, there was no consensus about the best approach towards dealing with Hindus and Hinduism. The response, thus, hovered between orthodox, legal, and formal [Category A] on the one hand and unorthodox, syncretic, and informal [Category B] on the other. Mughal Emperors Akbar, Jehangir, and Shah Jehan put Category B into practice and achieved peace in the region and experienced periods of artistic, economic and intellectual growth. This was all undone by Aurangzeb who replaced Category B with Category A. This dichotomy of policies remained fact up until partition in 1947.

It was unexpected that a 96 percent Muslim majority Pakistan would continue to experience this dichotomy of policies that were an answer to challenges posed to Islam by Hinduism. But it realized itself in modern-day Pakistan as well, only with socialism and Western liberalism replacing Hinduism. The choice of responses to this new threat were similar to Category A and Category B. Category B, in this

case, was put into practice by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who was then overthrown by General Muhammad Zia ul Haq who responded with a Category A response. The ideological similarities between Aurangzeb and General Zia’s rule are illustrated in the chart, adapted from Akbar S. Ahmed’s renowned book Islam, Ethnicity and Leadership in Pakistan.

As a direct consequence of the orthodox Sunni Islamic mindset and policies of Aurangzeb, the Hindus, other non-Muslim communities, Muslims with non-orthodox Sunni leanings and liberal minded conciliatory Muslims felt alienated and downgraded to the status of second-class citizens. Aurangzeb was most severe towards the Hindus and at his death it was clear that the religious divide in the Sub-continent was severely deepened. Sir Jadunath Sankar wrote in A Short History of Aurangzeb 1618-1707: “Schools of Hindu learning were broken up by him, Hindu places of worship were demolished, Hindu fairs were forbidden, the Hindu population was subjected to special fiscal burdens in addition to being made to bear a public badge of inferiority; and the service of the State was closed to them.” This deliberate alienation of the numeric majority of the Sub-continent kick-started the demise of the Mughal Empire and eventually paved the way for partition along religious lines. Singh further observed: “The detailed study of this long and strenuous reign of fifty years drives one truth home into our minds. If India is ever to be the home of a nation able to keep peace within and guard the frontiers, develop the economic resources of the country and promote art and science, then both Hinduism and Islam must die and be born again.” Of course, both Islam and Hinduism were not reborn and an India free of internal religious strife and prosperous in terms of the arts, economy and scholarship was never again

Zia’s Destructive LegacyBy M. Jehangir Amjad ‘10

The Badshahi Masjid, Lahore, Pakistan. Photo by Jawad Zakariya.

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GENERAL ZIA UL HAQ

Orthodox, formal Islam, prays five times daily, visits holy 1. places in Saudi Arabia regularly

Ummah supreme over ethnicity2. Culture defined by Islam3. National Assembly called Majlis-e-Shoora (Ideally good 4.

Muslims)Personally austere; Abstains from alcohol; Public meetings 5.

formal, protocol (wears military or national costume)Personal and ideological fan of Alama Maududi-a 6.

renowned orthodox Pan-Islamist religious scholarHeroes: Prophet Muhammad and Muslim generals7. Wishes to draw boundaries firmly around Islam8.

AURANGZEB

Orthodox, legalistic Islam1. Emphasis on ummah, Muslim community2. Discouraged art (singing, music etc)3. Supported clergy/ulema4. Outward signs of orthodoxy: rejected silk clothes and gold 5.

vessels, the Nawroz-the Persian new year, the solar yearPatron of Fatwa-i-Alamgiri, the most comprehensive digest 6.

of Muslim jurisprudence ever compiledFavorite reading: the Qur’an7. Wished for Muslim society to revert to orthodox mold 8.

thus drawing boundaries

Comparing Aurangzeb and Zia

a realistic possibility. Aurangzeb, ironically, dealt the most venomous death blow to the Mughal Empire himself and eventually made way for the British domination of the Sub-continent to be followed by partition in 1947.

Zia ul Haq did not have Hindus to alienate. He controlled a 96 percent Muslim populace but still managed to rekindle a battle between orthodox Sunni Islam and Western liberal minded Muslims. Only this time, those targeted included Shia Muslims and ordinary Pakistanis whose daily lives were influenced by Hindu customs. Zia’s adventure in Afghanistan endeared him to Islamists all over the world, but he managed to leave behind a culture that threatened the very existence of Pakistan itself. The millions of Afghan refugees from the decade of internal and external warfare who were welcomed but not effectively documented by Zia are now a cause of major tension within the country. Micro-economically, the Afghanistan adventure diverted resources and capital away from development and welfare projects to the military which absorbed all economic aid from the United States and Saudi Arabia. The hundreds of thousands of militant jihadis inspired by Zia’s orthodox version of Sunni Islam returned home, loaded with immense quantities of arsenal and a great sense of motivation to ‘help’ Pakistanis revert back to the glorious days of the Caliphate. It was only during and after the Zia era that the Shia-Sunni divide in the country became wide enough to bring about open confrontation. The Klashnekoff became a public symbol and an entirely new militant era in Pakistan’s history was born.

Just like Aurangzeb, Zia’s legacy continues to haunt Pakistanis to this day, twenty years down the line. His brand of Islamization is still being preached and the generations of Pakistanis who grew up and were educated to think like orthodox Sunni Muslims are now carrying the torch forward. Even after a return to parliamentary democracy, there are numerous political parties that owe their popularity and monetary survival to the legacy of Zia: “The Jamaat-i-Islami party, which is the counterpart to the fundamentalist wing of the Afghan resistance, still campaigns for his version of

Islamization and the subjugation of women and dissent,” notes Atlantic Monthly contributing editor Christopher Hitchens. Among some of the other problems that survive to this day are the absolute control of all affairs of the State by the Pakistan Army, the bitter ethnic divide and alienation that was felt by non-Punjabi Pakistanis due to the rejection of their ethnic and cultural practices by Zia and the ideology of Pan-Islamism and the brutal destruction of the political process, media and other forms of popular expression. In the words of Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a former Professor of Pakistan Studies at Columbia University, “Political polarization, strengthening of Islamic fundamentalism, ethnic conflict in Sindh and distortion of the 1973 constitution are the legacy of Zia’s military rule.”

The similarities between Aurangzeb and Zia are striking both in terms of their thinking and implementation of policies as well as in their outcomes. There is no doubt that the situation of Mughal India at the time of Aurangzeb was different from that of Pakistan under the rule of Zia. This difference was largely due to the absence of a majority Hindu population in modern-day Pakistan. But, the underlying fact that I have tried to highlight here is the similar use of the orthodox brand of Sunni Islam by both rulers and the

Mujahideen in Peshawar, Pakistan. Uncredited photo from 1982.

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Katrina: Continuing Lessons for the Muslim and American Communities By Intisar Rabb GS

similar outcomes with respect to their situations and enemies. Although not even twenty years have passed since Zia ul Haq’s death in office in 1988, the immediate legacy he has left behind suggests nothing but a pattern similar to that of the post-Aurangzeb Mughal Empire. Economic decline, an immensely powerful and interventionist yet corrupt military, stagnation in the fields of arts, sciences and the humanities and a widening religious gap leading to isolation and violence and a feeling of deprivation and alienation among minority ethnicities are all similar legacies to that of Aurangzeb. History has surely returned to haunt Pakistan and the future looks extremely bleak. Zia has unleashed a brand of Islam that is not only unpopular with the masses but is also incompatible with slightly differing religious or ideological views. By brutally exterminating Bhutto and any other dissenting views, Zia and his legacy have ensured that

the masses remain in check even if they do not align with his outlook on Islam. Unfortunately, just like the Mughal Empire, the problems left behind by Zia are numerous and transcend many facets of the society. The future only promises to further widen the gaps cracked open by Zia, leading to an eventual break-up of Pakistan along ethnic lines (reminiscent of the partition of the Sub-continent along religious lines). Any diversion from this replay of history should be treated as an anomaly and would, most definitely, be against the run of play. It will be a violation of the pattern that has been characteristic of Islam in the Sub-continent since Mahmud’s raids in India in the early 11th century.

M. Jehangir Amjad, a sophomore at Princeton University, hails from Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the coastal areas of Lousiana and Missisippi, the national memory of the dire situation it left behind has dimmed. The economy, education, health care, and yes, Iraq, are all important issues to top the ongoing presidential campaigns. But where, one wonders, are the myriad other issues that Katrina left behind and that still plague communities on the Gulf coast and beyond? These are matters that continue to face every American in general and every Muslim American in particular; Katrina and her aftermath should jostle the consciousness of both. Lest we forget, in the face of the racism, poverty, and inequality that Katrina brought to the fore, we might look to both American democratic and Islamic ideals for reminders to not only remember but also to do. The following article was written not long after Katrina hit, but its message is—unfortunately—as true and urgent today as it was then. In 2005, there were thousands of people displaced, most roads blocked, countless schools closed, and billions in infrastructure and personal belongings lost. It was a humanitarian disaster, and everyone recognized it. In 2008, while there has been some progress made by those who returned to Louisiana and Mississippi and others who commendably lent their help, thousands remain displaced,

roads blocked, schools closed, and more. It remains a humanitarian disaster; does everyone still recognize it? The hope is that this renewed printing will help serve as a reminder to stop the light that Katrina shed from dimming or her victims from receding back into invisibility.

BEFORE KATRINA: THE INVISIBLE PROBLEMRalph Ellison was either prescient or invisible. How did he

develop a character who spoke as if he were an inhabitant of New Orleans 58 years before Katrina? The protagonist of Ellison’s famous work of fiction remarked:

“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywoodmovie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”1

Katrina forced the world to see the poor people of Louisiana and Mississippi. It forced them to see what those attuned to America’s socio-political and economic realities already knew: economic disparities of an unacceptable nature persist in America. They afflict the Black population disproportionately.2 They also relegate too many Whites,

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Latinos and others to a life of squalor. For these people, there is no way out. Indeed, no one sees them.

Most policy and opinion leaders refuse to acknowledge this ongoing humanitarian crisis in a meaningful way. Every now and again, a politician or media pundit will raise a hue and cry about one Black child whom the system failed or identify one depressed town. They passively assert that “more needs to be done,” and occasionally call upon Congress to act.

They fail to realize (or acknowledge) that one Black child or one Black town merely represents larger, systemic phenomena. Case in point: the Katrina aftermath. Politicians and pundits raised the hue and cry but the government responded with an anemic form of disaster relief that hardly addressed the emergency, much less the underlying problems of the region.

The fact is that post-hoc public band-aids in the form of disaster relief do not address the greater predicament that threatens America’s social and democratic fabric. Neither do diluted measures crafted in response to the occasional public outcry. Where are the effective civil rights legislation, fair and affordable housing measures, small business incentive programs, public welfare and social security plans, educational reforms, and healthcare initiatives? If such programs survive the politics that postdate the campaign promises, what becomes of such proposals in practice? Did the affirmative action of the past few decades level the structurally uneven playing field that slavery’s 300 years left behind? Is no child left behind? What ever happened to the national healthcare plan? What ever happened to the social security overhaul? What of implementation, oversight, accountability?

What does all this have to do with Katrina? Some view Katrina as a “natural” disaster that has nothing to do with social or policy issues. To the contrary, the response to Katrina has everything to do with race and poverty in America, everything to do with the promises of equality and democracy, everything to do with community. In short, our leaders’ approach to national crises highlights serious issues that continue to exist while at the same time creating new ones. Katrina dredges up these problems from the mud of invisibility.

After Katrina, most of those left homeless, stranded or dying on the side of the road, were Black. This is no coincidence, for their plight began with slavery and since then many remain “poor and powerless.”3 Yet, how is it that these freedmen’s children continue to live in deplorable conditions in a country whose GDP is the largest in the world? More important still, how is it that no one sees them? Just after Katrina, they were visible. Here, I focus on one question: How do we keep them in sight?

KATRINA & THE INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSE: DISASTER RELIEF

For starters, we can assess the response to a formerly invisible problem on an institutional level. To that end, we need not reiterate the failures of President Bush, the Federal

Emergency Management Agency, Congress, the Senate, state governors and city planners. Others have highlighted their shortcomings in the wake of Katrina. Instead, our institutional inquiry focuses on the four most important lessons that emerge from the government’s lackluster response. The first lesson is: we have a problem. The problem has been outlined above: fellow human beings, often from Black or other minority communities, live in deplorable conditions.

The second lesson is: band-aids don’t work. We pump billions of dollars into solving a problem once disasters occur, but an influx of money to relieve disaster fails to address the heart of the matter: the prior status quo. This is bad policy. Not only is it costly, but disasters like Katrina underscore the extent to which a policy of ignoring domestic problems leaves us underprepared and overwhelmed.

On a human level, the disaster band-aid policy also costs residents anguish, pain, and death. Monetarily, disaster relief costs the government billions of dollars, far more than useful pre-emptive strikes such as building adequate infrastructure for everyone (rather than just the select few) and ensuring that city dwellers (rather than those who fled the city) have at least enough resources to prepare to evacuate when their lives are threatened.

Instead, the government expends our resources abroad before taking care of problems at home. Now that disaster finally forced it to face some domestic problems, the government should realize that its policies merely exacerbate existing problems. Simply put: disaster relief band-aids do not stick. They cover the wound so long as it is visible and fall off when the public eye turns back to its previous affairs.

This brings me to the third lesson: the injuries still exist. After applying the band-aid, we think the problems have disappeared, but more often than not, we have merely made them invisible. Reconstruction efforts may strengthen levies, but they do not give poor residents jobs; address the failing local educational system; ensure individual mobility, liberty or safety; offer healthcare; guarantee housing or prevent predatory lending and home foreclosures; or provide opportunities for a better life. Rather, disaster relief policy aims to return the city and its residents to the status quo, with perhaps a few nominal improvements to infrastructure. Once the aid is delivered, the job is “done.” We can then return to “our” lives. For many, that will mean again being poor, disenfranchised, invisible. So the predicament persists. And that takes us to lesson four: we still have a problem.

AFTER KATRINA: IT AIN’T OVER, EVEN AFTER THE FAT LADY SINGS

After slavery, after Jim Crow, after integration, America has yet to achieve the promise of equality. Lamenting the same situation, Cornel West wrote that Charlie Parker sang the blues because it was either do that or kill somebody.4 But Charlie Parker’s song is nothing like that of the fat lady who signals the end of dramatized operatic fiction. For we are

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dealing with reality. In reality, even if Charlie Parker sings, it still ain’t over. It won’t be over until everyone lives (not has the theoretical, constitutionally-guaranteed opportunity to live, but lives) the decent life that the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, religious and humanistic mores, democratic and humanitarian norms promise. That project requires an ongoing effort to identify, concern ourselves with, and address problems—even the sort that are invisible to the public eye until disaster strikes.

If Katrina tells us nothing else, it tells us that we must constantly work to ensure justice, even in “invisible” arenas. From Katrina, we learn the outcome of attempts to address the problem of slavery. America’s elite thought they achieved justice by abolishing legal slavery. But then they noticed disparities in the ways Blacks were treated vis-à-vis whites under the Jim Crow regime of segregation. Then they thought they had achieved justice and equality with the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson.5 But a belated realization of years of injustice, unequal opportunity, disparate resources, and routine exclusion of Blacks finally drove the Supreme Court to declare in Brown v. Board of Education that separate was “inherently unequal.”6 Then they thought they had achieved justice and equality with “integration” or at least nonsegregation. Now we’ve got it!

But it is the same old story all over again—both in terms of slavery’s legacy and also quite literally. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood prior to Katrina, and it devastated Louisiana along with six other states. Then, as now, the disaster took its greatest toll on the most impoverished people: Blacks, who were sometimes forced at gunpoint to repair the levees. Then, disaster relief housing efforts came in the form of refugee camps, the conditions of which were so horrible that Herbert Hoover asked the media to overlook reports that detailed those deplorable conditions. He promised in exchange to effect reforms for Blacks after the election. He failed to make good on his promise.

Historians and analysts credit these events with spurring on the voting rights movement of the time, the shift in Southern Black allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic party, and providing the spark for New Deal proposals for more government services. They also credit these events with major demographic shifts such as the Blacks’ Great Migration to the North and a great deal of Black cultural output. Examples of the latter include folksongs and blues music such as those by Bessie Smith and “When the Levee Breaks,” by Memphis Minnie (If it keeps on raining, levee’s goin’ to break / And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay … I works on the levee mama both night and day / I ain’t got nobody, keep the water away). That spoke of the days of segregation. But after

segregation, not all that much changed. Notwithstanding all the advances in race relations, the parallels of 1927 Louisiana and 2005 Louisiana are striking. Reality on the ground says that a regime of nonsegregation does not ensure integration, and even if it did, integration does not ensure equality or justice.

For all our progress and all our success, what of the people who lack opportunity, who cannot speak of generations of entrenched wealth and Ivy League legacies, who can barely make a living, who cannot access proper education, who are caught in a cycle of poverty-fomenting violence and drug-pushing, who are stuck in Louisiana when Katrina hits?

KEEPING AN EYE ON THE STORM: DOING DEMOCRACY

Katrina invokes needs that range from the immediate to the long term and that implicate Americans in general and Muslim Americans in particular. On a general plane, each American can urge the government to address America’s problems at the policy level. On a particular plane, Muslim Americans should urge each other and fellow Americans to address America’s problems at the community level.

As for policy proposals, avoiding Katrina-like situations demands a paradigm shift. For times of crisis, our government should transform its ineffective, debilitating, and costly band-aid approach into a clear-eyed, forward-looking, humanitarian, ends-based, democratic approach that recognizes problems and addresses them before they turn into disaster. In essence, they must be proactive.

Such an approach is clear-eyed and forward-looking insofar as it constantly monitors the welfare of its citizens. This will enable the government to take comparatively small and inexpensive steps now to avert infinitely more expensive disaster later.

It is humanitarian because it seeks to ensure that every

The 9th Ward in New Orleans. Photo by Gail Williams.

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human enjoys a decent standard of living along with a measure of safety and security. If we truly believe in the equal value of human life, and each individual’s right to pursue liberty and happiness, we must work to reasonably ensure that those words ring true not only for those who already have access to Washington’s package of rights and entitlements, but also for the invisibles.

The approach is ends-based inasmuch as it measures success in terms of success itself, not in the empty promise of a hypothetical opportunity for success.

Finally, it is democratic because full civic participation and a sense of community can only occur once people’s basic needs are met, once they receive adequate schooling, once they live in safe communities, and once they know that they have a say in their own governance. In any community, the problem of one member is the problem of every member. Focusing on the most vulnerable members is like paying attention to the canary in the mine; its faltering lungs signal to the miners that the air has been contaminated. The community would do well to address its problems rather than live with pollutants that will take their inevitable toll on everyone.7

Advocating a paradigm shift cannot itself create one. The government is a slow-moving machine for which policy changes are difficult, and even when they occur, can take decades to transform reality. But to acknowledge the difficulty of demanding democracy is not to minimize the need for doing so. In fact, it means that much more responsibility falls on average citizens to keep Katrina’s invisibles visible to the policy world and to average citizens, that is, to each other. This is what it means to say that, “[d]emocracy is never a thing done … [but] always something that a nation must be doing.”8 It takes conscious citizens to do democracy.

WHIRLWIND OF COMPASSION: COMMUNITY CONSCIOUSNESS

Here is where the Muslim American contribution comes in.

Ramadan has [long since] passed [the month of fasting that began in September 2007], but hopefully, it leaves behind its imprint on the Muslim conscience. Ramadan is the annual reminder to Muslims to be conscious of the invisible. God says in the Qur’an that he prescribed fasting on Muslims so that they might learn consciousness (2:183). Consciousness of what? The immediate suggestion is God of the unseen world, which automatically devolves to a consciousness of the things with which God is concerned in the world in which we live, including the unseen invisibles. Like that consciousness about which W.E.B. Dubois speaks with respect to Black Americans, this is a double-consciousness. It stems from the “twoness” of the spiritual and corporal aspects of the human, which are virtually inseparable.9

For Muslims, the first aspect of that consciousness partially takes the form of certain beliefs—beliefs in a compassionate God who wants justice, in an afterlife in which each will be evaluated according to their deeds and in prophets who deliver that message. The second aspect entails a heavy community component that is always concerned with justice, not for Muslims, but for human beings. The Qur’an emphasizes this imperative for justice over and over again. It calls upon Muslims to stand up for justice, in its deepest sense, even if it be against themselves (4:135, 6:152).

It also promotes a form of distributive justice by repeatedly calling for Muslims to make contributions that ensure the welfare of their neighbors. For example, the Qur’an always pairs prayer (a focus on the divine and spiritual for personal welfare) with charity (a focus on the corporeal and communal for public welfare). Particularly during Ramadan, Muslims are encouraged to pray more and to be more generous. The days of fasting serve as a reminder of those who may be hungry all the time. As such, Ramadan functions as an annual reminder to be conscious of the invisibles and to do something to improve their situation.

The Qur’an says:It is not righteousness that you turn your faces to the East or

the West, but righteousness [describes] one who believes in God and the Last Day, the Angels, the Book, and the Prophets; [who] gives of their resources, for the love of God, to relatives, orphans, the indigent, travelers, to those who request it and to those in bondage; [who] stand in prayer and give in charity; those who fulfill their promises when they enter into agreements and those who are patient in adversity, disaster, and in the midst of tribulation. Those are the people of truth, and those are the ones who are conscious (2:177).

Quite obviously, America is not an Islamic country, nor does it aspire to be. My point here is that Islam builds into its practice constant reminders for Muslim adherents to be conscious of the invisibles. This value coincides with fundamental American democratic and constitutional values. To the extent that it does, Muslim Americans should draw upon their own inspirations to be at the forefront of promoting positive American values.

Communities destroyed. Photo by Greg Hounslow.

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It is worth mentioning that the Muslim Black American combines attributes that render her contribution even more valuable, for she possesses a triple-consciousness. She is Muslim, Black and American. As such, like other Black Americans of faith, her makeup inspires the capacity for God-consciousness, human self-consciousness, and Black consciousness. There is the Black American double-vision that comes from seeing themselves not only as they are, but through the gaze of others who look upon them with a mixture of “amused contempt and pity.”10 Combined with the other traits, these multiple elements push the Black American Muslim to have a constant regard for the invisibles and a passion for justice.

Indeed often, the Black American Muslim, her family and community members are themselves invisible, even as some of her Muslim brethren garner visibility by gravitating towards a certain iteration of the American dream and, in the process, forgetting their own doubleconsciousness. The Blackamerican Muslim does not have that luxury. He is a minority on all fronts, cannot shed his identity, cannot easily reach visibility, certainly not on a community scale. In this regard, the Black American Muslim himself often represents the passenger on the bottom deck of the boat, the Muslim canary. With one eye on the canary and the other on God, the American Muslim community has internal impetuses to constantly urge itself and its wider American community to see its own invisibles.

What are some concrete ways in which this can take form? In the aftermath of Katrina, there are several projects to which Muslims can contribute and encourage contributions. Here, I do not limit these suggestions to victims of Katrina, as those in need of such services reside in every state. Nor do I limit these suggestions to the obvious form of giving: monetary donations. For this is not the sole scope of giving that Islam encourages or society requires . Rather, I point to a range of measures with respect to the visibly urgent needs after Katrina that may help bring the needs of other invisible pockets to the fore.

In addition to the reminder provided by Ramadan annually and prescribed prayers daily, Muslims can join together with others peoples of faith in the mosque, church, and synagogue, to pray and work to help those in crisis situations in their local communities. This is the type of work in which The Mosque Cares11 organization in Chicago has been engaging for decades.

Community members and community organizations can contribute to efforts to address the root causes of suffering in the inner city by creating and promoting dynamic community programs as alternatives to difficulty and hopelessness. The Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN)12 in Chicago takes this as its mission, as should be duplicated in every city. The Jamestown Project13based in Cambridge, MA promotes such efforts on the scholarly and policy arenas. Community members or mosques can adopt a family to provide lodging,

shelter, food, clothing or financial and moral support to those who need it. Some have contributed to the Adopt a Katrina Family project.14 Islamic Relief International has turned its generally international focus inward to address some short-term and long-term humanitarian and reconstruction needs after Katrina;15 it also has a number of ongoing programs for feeding the homeless and providing health services to the needy.

Doctors can provide medical services to the poor for free or at reduced cost. An example of this is the University Muslim Medical Association (UMMA) Community Clinic16 in Los Angeles, or the IMAN17 Health Clinic Initiative.

Educators, college students and professionals can take on a student in poor or mediocre schools to provide mentoring, college-counseling, and to help ensure that the student receives a good education. An outstanding example of an organization dedicated to focusing on our youth is Brotherhood/ Sister Sol18 in New York. Community members can join efforts like those of the Islamic Networks Group19 based in San Francisco to provide educational resources to local schools or the Muslim Public Service Network,20 both of which promote civic engagement in public institutions.

Social workers can redouble their efforts to help address problems of domestic violence and children living in bad situations. Bait ul Salaam21 in Atlanta is an organization that provides homes for battered women. Those who live or work in the cities can help address the drug problems that run rampant there through donating or helping to replicate the work of community organizations. An example of one outstanding drug recovery program of this type is I Can’t, We Can in Baltimore.22

Entrepreneurs and businessman can contribute to the efforts of community-oriented non-profit ventures, small business start-ups, and job-training initiatives aimed at economic empowerment and viability. GraceLine products aim at facilitating such economic empowerment.

Lawyers have and can continue to provide legal services to the multitude of cases that have arisen after Katrina and that existed before Katrina. For example, some of the most urgent needs involve criminal defense, to addresses situations in which prisoners have been displaced, have been improperly held in prison, have suffered Abu Ghraib-type prison abuse, or simply were never afforded adequate or effective legal counsel. The Justice Center (and its Louisiana Capital Assistance Center)23 has been working to address these issues, as has the newly reformed Orleans Public Defender Service under the guidance of Harvard law professor Ronald Sullivan, a ten-year veteran of the D.C. Public Defender Service. As I have discovered, there is plenty that can be done remotely.

Community leaders should reign in the consciousness of the community in a way that moves toward publicly articulating shared American values, demanding policy action against ignoring (or worse, discriminating against) the invisibles, and contributing to or building projects like those listed here.

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Community leaders and members alike should seek out the invisibles to help address their problems; they should not wait for a crisis mode or for disaster to strike to discover the plight of their neighbors.

CONCLUSION (THOUGH IT STILL AIN’T OVER) I have tried here to examine some of the problems that

Katrina brought to light just three years ago. Katrina revealed that America has very ineffective and costly policies for handling its problems. America ignores or fails to see its problems until it reaches a crisis point. Rather than post-hoc efforts to address past wrongs or disasters, America would do much better to see its problems and address them in advance. This is a goal that American citizens should urge. Yet, we cannot expect overnight results. As such, Americans have a duty to act as the community members and democrats they are to ensure the values of humanity and democracy. These policy and community projects are ones in which Muslim Americans have a great role to play. They should draw upon their internal mechanisms for consciousness of the invisible to promote better communities and a better America at the local and policy levels. In this way, we might, just might, finally achieve the promise of democracy and equality.

Otherwise, the specter of invisibility persists. Ralph Ellison was not prescient; he was explaining problems that were extant then; and that exist now. Will they continue to exist in the future? The answer to that question depends on what we take from the memory of Katrina. For all the havoc she wreaked, Katrina at least gave us a means to see the invisible man. We must not forget her lessons to us all.

Intisar Rabb holds a JD from Yale Law School and is currently a PhD candidate for studies in comparative American and Islamic law at Princeton University.

Originally printed in the Winter 2006 issue of Islamica Magazine as “Hurricane Katrina: Lessons for the Muslim and American Communities.” Reprinted with permission of the publisher of Islamica Magazine.

References

1 Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (1947), prologue.2 According to US Census Bureau 2004 statistics, Black households had the lowest median income ($30,134) and the highest poverty rate (24.7%). C. DeNavas-Walt, B. Protor and C.H. Lee, Income, Poverty and Health Coverage in the United States: 2004, U.S. Census Bureau (August 2005).3 Christopher Morris, “In New Orleans, Once Again, the Irony of Southern History,” History News Network (September 3, 2005), available at http://www.hnn.us/

articles/15163.html.4 Cornel West, “Exiles from a City and from a Nation,” The Observer (September 11, 2005 available at http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1567247,00.html.5 163 US 537 (1896).6 347 US 483 (1954).7 Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres have expanded on the notion of the miner’s canary in their book, The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2002). The Prophet Muhammad is said to have related a parable with a similar message. He compared people to passengers on a boat; a hole anywhere on the boat will affect all, whether on the lower deck or the upper deck.8 Archibald McIeish, quoted in Paul Taylor, Stepanie Robinson, Eddie Glaude, & Ronald Sullivan, Jr., While Democracy Sleeps: A White Paper on Democratic Citizenship in the United States (New Haven, CT: The Jamestown Project, 2005).9 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (new ed., New York: Dover Publications, 1994) p.2.10 Ibid.11 www.themosquecares.com12 www.imancentral.org13 www.jamestownproject.org14 www.adopt-a-katrina-family.com15 www.irw.org/katrina16 www.ummaclinic.org17 www.imancentral.org18 www.brotherhood-sistersol.org19 www.ing.org20 www.baitulsalaamnetwork.freehomepage.com 21 www.muslimpublicservice.org22 www.icantwecan.org23 www.thejusticecenter.org

Whole neighborhoods underwater. Photo by Greg Hounslow.

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As a community accustomed to seeing itself in relation to ‘the other’, and as a community often seen by ‘the other’ as occupying a liminal space between modernity and the ancient world, Muslim societies and their global diasporas are wres-tling for definition in politics, discourse and livelihood vis-à-vis numerous competing interest-poles. There are demands for a progressive reconciliation of monotheistic universality with pluralistic societies; there are seemingly irreconcilable ques-tions of ethics, not to mention religious rhetoric informing violent political allegiances and law being exercised in coun-terproductive or unjust manners; there are interests arising from power politics and geo-political alliances involving land and resources; there are demands to comply to standards set forth by international governing institutions; there are pres-sures from civil strife and concerns for securing property and sustenance. In the midst of such circumstances, Muslims are navigating variant interpretations of foundational texts and negotiating religious practices through conflicting claims to authority.

As such tensions of interest come to fruition, they demand that the contemporary Muslim body-politic do two things: 1) Distinguish the time-bound and pragmatic needs of its living framework, needs which must be met to maintain relevance for followers, and 2) Discern precisely how the universal val-ues and ethical frame of reference that the community takes to be its foundation can still triumph any in-the-moment pragmatism, i.e. there is a marked need for the Muslim com-munity to preserve a sense of continuity with its heritages while at the same time accommodating a long list of demands for flexibility and in the face of ever-changing social realities.

Today, in a spirit of reinterpretation and re-evaluation of sacred texts, there are Muslims adamantly vouching that no contradictions of interest exist between ‘liberal values’ and their religious counterparts, or arguing that ‘pure Islam’ is not inherently at odds with precepts of human rights, and actively pursuing these lines of thought through public diplomacy, activism or academia. Other groups of Muslims argue that secular liberal precepts pose a danger to Islamic societies, and the best forms of governance for Muslims can and should be derived wholly from the foundational religious texts. Coalesc-ing around these two general orientations are multifarious opinions vying for bargaining power. With history as a testa-ment, preserving community and maintaining a continuity

with heritage comes with its challenges; more frequently than not a contentious plurality of opinion reverberates, tensions are drawn, positions etched out, contentions bubble and fuse, and objectivity perchance takes momentary respite on the sideline.

Approaching religious landscapes in this manner, we see a continuity of events, countless divisions, alliances, battles for authority, and conflicts to establish acceptable modes of worship, governance and other processes of law, still eluding our best efforts to define them. Rather than being gloomy, the value in looking at religion from this perspective is in confirming that the religious landscape is discursive, often contentious, and that social traditions and ‘Truth’ are most of-ten built upon dialogic argumentation, rather than ubiquitous agreement. Emerging from this continuity is the legacy of today and the vision that no religion is defined independently of the individuals who were there, subjected to desire, to bias, wrestling with practical circumstances, and interpreting and re-interpreting the pages of communal histories to frame con-ceptions of reality. With such a dynamic at play it is natural to expect integral ruptures in how vested parties negotiate community allegiances. Extending this proposition, there are figures articulating a dubiously coherent and at times overly prescriptive Islam, figures who maintain self-interests and individual visions against greater communal sentiments. The Muslim community is well served when those who do not

‘Modern’ Visions of Islam:At the Junctures of Humanism, Pragmatism and Scriptural Authority By Celene Marie Ayat Lizzio’08

Arabic calligraphy from Seville, Spain. Photo by Tiffany Tong GS.

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concur with unjust prescriptions and elitist visions exercise their bargaining power on public forums. After all, religion and other value systems do not come to be defined indepen-dently from human articulation and our communal on-going efforts define sound theology from invention, good from evil, right from wrong, and other such inevitable binaries.

Indeed, across the territorial expanse that has at one time or another been sway to Muslim influence, many of the consid-erations that I have mentioned in one way or another occupy notable positions in discourse, polemics and dialectics. The contemporary Muslim discourses recalled above are not lim-ited in scope to the present moment, nor are they simply reac-tions to ‘modernity’ on our contemporary terms. As Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, Muhammad Qasim Zaman, and other prominent Islamic scholars have shown, most often intra-Muslim discourses reflect, dare I say, ‘fundamental’ dynamics having reflections in, or traceable to the very beginnings or antecedents of the religious polity, and with it the beginnings of Muslim theology, law, governance, and social institutions.

Amidst the undeniable push for renewed commitments to piety, and amidst salient yet diverse aspirations for self-de-termination, we may readily agree with the premise: “Islamic discourse is dynamic, fluid, and ever-transforming, within the parameters of a highly political ongoing project of producing ‘orthodoxy’ through the interminable reinterpretation and re-evaluation of texts and practices” (G.P. Makris, Islam in the Middle East, 2007:201). Indeed, even a neophyte soon finds out that to be Muslim does not just imply the willing sub-scription to God’s moral order, but frequently entails sifting through a host of other considerations deeply rooted in the domain of the political.

Celene Marie Ayat Lizzio is a senior majoring in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. She is also an undergraduate fellow at Princeton’s Center for the Study of Religion and at the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination in the Woodrow Wilson School.

Stay close to me, my killer, my lover. Stay close,when the night walksdrunk with the blood of the skiesbearing the balm of musk, diamond crusted

arrows,lamenting, laughing, singingwith the bells of the azure anklets of pain.

When hearts stifled by the breastgaze at the trails left by wandering hands bathed in sleevesbearing desire

and the wine in its cupwhimpers, perverse and unfulfilled like a child.

When resolution unwinds.When speech falters.When the night walksmourning in solitude.

Stay close,my killer, my lover.Stay close to me.

Tum miray paas rahoMairay qaatil, mairay dildar, miray paas rahoJis gharri raat chalayAasmaanon ka lahoo pee kai syaah raat chalayMarhum-e-mushq liyay, nishtar-e-almas liyayBain karti hui, hansti hui, gaati niklayDard kai kaasni paazaib bajaati niklay.

Jis gharri seenon mein doobay huay dilAasteenon mein nahaan haathon ki rahtaknay lagein.Aas liyay

Aur bachon kai bilaknay ki tarhaan qulqul-e-maiBehr-e-naasoodgi machlay tu manai na manay

Jab koi baat banai na banay Jab na koi baat chalayJis gharri raat chalayJis gharri maatmi, sunsaan raat chalay

Paas rahoMairay qaatil, miray dildaar, mairay paas raho.

Tum Miray Paas RahoBy Faiz Ahmed Faiz (from Urdu)

CloseTranslated by Maryam Wasif Khan ‘08

Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984), a Pakistani, was among the most celebrated Urdu poets of his time.

Maryam Wasif Khan is a senior in the Comparative Literature Department at Princeton University.

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Ask the average man on the street what he knows about the Hadramawt and chances are, if he has heard of it at all, he will immediately associate it with the Bin Ladens, a Saudi family of Hadrami origin. An arid region of wadis and towns of multi-storied mud-brick houses stretching across the eastern two-thirds of Yemen as far as the Omani border, the Hadramawt makes up most of what was once the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen—South Yemen in Western parlance. Though the Bin Ladens are now inextricably linked with one particularly infamous family member, their wealth is the product of the same history of migration and entrepre-neurship which has characterized the Hadrami diaspora for centuries. This history is one not of terrorism but of trade, scholarship, and cosmopolitanism spanning the entire width of the Indian Ocean and linking such cities as Aden, Hydera-bad, and Jakarta in a maritime network.

The Hadramawt has always been a meeting place of differ-ent cultures. It was linked with the rest of the ancient world by land and sea, and exported its famous frankincense by both routes. With the coming of Islam many sayyids took up residence in the region, teaching Islam and gaining notoriety as holy men. Under the rule of the Rasulid Dynasty of Yemen (1228-1454 CE) Sufism became popular, and many Hadra-mis were drawn to the teachings of Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240 CE).

It was at this time that the Shafi‘i school took root as the madhhab par excellence of the Hadramawt. Hadrami sea trade brought the Shafi‘i madhhab to the Swahili Coast and Southeast Asia, where it remains the predominant school today. After the Rasulids’ successors, the Tahirids (1454-1517 CE), lost the interior of the Hadramawt to the Kathirid tribe by the latter half of the fifteenth century, Tarim, located in the center of the Hadramawt, emerged as a center of scholar-ship not just locally but for the Indian Ocean as a whole. It boasts no fewer than 360 mosques and its wealthy families still possess large manuscript libraries. Though the neighbor-ing city of Say’un, which the Kathirid Dynasty (1395-1967 CE) established as its capital, often sought to outdo it as the chief Hadrami center of learning, Tarim’s reputation remains undiminished. Its Dar al-Mustafa school continues to attract students from throughout the Islamic world and beyond.

However, though Hadramis remained actively involved with sea trade throughout the Middle Ages, it was not until the sixteenth century that they began settling permanently in the port cities of the Indian Ocean. This region would henceforth be their mahjar, or place of emigration. By the twentieth century Hadrami communities had been established in Egypt, the Sudan, the Hijaz, the Swahili Coast, Madagascar, the Arabian Gulf, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia,

Of Traders and Tribesmen:The Hadramawt Region of Eastern Yemen By George Hatke GS

The seaport at the Hadrami city of Al-Mukalla. Photo by Grete Howard.

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Singapore, Brunei, and Indonesia. One early luminary of the Hadrami mahjar was the scholar

‘Abd al-Qadir b. Shaykh al-‘Aydarus (d. 1628 CE). The son of an immigrant Hadrami father and an Indian mother, he wrote a history of the Indian Ocean region in the tenth Islamic century (17th century CE), hence the book’s title Tarikh al-Nur al-Safir ‘an Akhbar al-Qarn al-‘Ashir (History of the Travelling Light, Concerning the Events of the Tenth Century). Though a child of the diaspora, al-‘Aydarus still felt a special affinity for the homeland of his father, and notes that many of the Hadramis whose stories he records went back there to live out their final days. This sense of genealogical connection to the Hadrami homeland, and indeed the desire to die and be buried there, was what gave the Hadrami mah-jar its cohesiveness. Such ties allowed Hadramis to survive as a distinct community over the centuries, no matter how well they were assimilated to the foreign societies in which they lived.

Of course there were other factors that tied Hadramis in the mahjar to the homeland. Since very few Hadrami women ventured abroad, Hadrami men who settled in India or Southeast Asia usually took local wives, and the children of these marriages, known as muwallidin, grew up eating local food, wearing local dress, and often speaking better Hindi, Tamil, Malay, Bahasa Indonesia, or Chinese than Arabic. In an attempt to better acquaint them with Arabic and with Hadrami ways, as well as to instill in them a pride in their roots, many muwallidin were sent back to the Hadramawt by their fathers for their education, but while there they fre-quently felt very much out of place in their sarongs and their taste for spicy Indian or Southeast Asian cuisine.

Once the Qu‘ayti tribe captured the port cities of Mukalla in 1858 and Shihr in 1866, their Kathirid rivals were left landlocked and, while this never stopped the flow of Had-rami emigrants from the interior, it gave the Qu‘aytis greater opportunities to participate in Indian Ocean trade. For years the Qu‘ayti sultans commanded the armies of the nizam of Hyderabad, and many spent most of their time in India, marrying Indian women and becoming very Indianized in the process. Even women living in Qu‘ayti territory were fond of wearing their hair in the Indian style, parting it down the center instead of plaiting it.

Some Hadramis who lived—and married—abroad also had a Hadrami wife waiting for them when they periodically went back to the Hadramawt to visit. At times, however, years might pass when such hapless women did not see their husbands, and in some (albeit rare) cases a woman would not see or hear from her husband for as many as forty years. The dichotomy between mahjar and homeland in the Hadramis’ Indian Ocean diaspora thus placed some at a disadvantage.

The clash between cosmopolitanism and parochialism was also played out in the incessant feuds that raged in the Hadramawt. Well into the twentieth century, many wealthy returnees from the mahjar, having made their fortune abroad,

retired to the Hadramawt only to become embroiled in decades-old tribal feuds. Their wealth was often resented by the have-nots of Hadrami society. There were disparities in wealth even between those who had spent time abroad, a phe-nomenon that reflects the differences in emigration patterns according to region. Emigrants from the Wadi Daw’an in the western Hadramawt typically went to East Africa, where they worked as peddlers in cities like Mombasa and Zanzi-bar. Those from the Upper Hadramawt, by contrast, went to Southeast Asia and struck it rich as business-owners. Clearly, fortune shined on some more than others.

British intervention did little to calm intertribal disputes. Though Great Britain had acquired the port of Aden as early as 1839 it was not until the 1870s that they established contact with the interior regions of the Hadramawt and began signing so-called “protection treaties” with local rulers. The end result was the formation of the Aden Protectorate, which covered most of the Hadramawt by the mid-twentieth century. The guiding principal behind these treaties was that, in return for arms and money, these rulers—of whom there were no fewer than ninety—would not initiate relations with any foreign power except Great Britain. Though the

A community in the Hadramawt. Photo by Jon Bowen.

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British managed to keep the Turks out of the Hadramawt by this means, they also left the Hadrami interior isolated while foreigners were allowed to monopolize businesses in Aden. The influx of wealth acquired by Hadramis in the mahjar did not remedy the situation either, as much of it went into the wasteful construction of palaces in cities like Tarim and Say’un. Some wealthy Hadramis even had cars imported, though these had to be disassembled on the coast and then transported piecemeal on camelback. Even when reassembled, cars were of little use in the roadless Hadramawt except as a status symbol for the elite.

In a region like the Hadramawt where every tribesman carried a rifle, tribal feuds often made for difficult living conditions, and cases in which families were stuck in their tower-houses for decades were not unheard of as late as the twentieth century. Already weakened by competition with imported Southeast Asian rice, Hadrami agriculture suffered further as a result of local warfare. At times the fighting between tribes became so intense that farmers had to build protective mud-brick walls along the pathways linking towns to fields out of fear of getting hit in the crossfire. Those farm-ers who did make it to their fields in safety often found their date-palms already destroyed by their rivals’ having poured kerosene on them.

But inter-tribal jealousies were not the only problem faced by Hadramis. As in any society in which wealth is unevenly distributed, the elite dominated social life, and since Hadra-mis placed great emphasis on genealogical descent as a guide to social interactions, members of the elite who also happened to be sayyids enjoyed numerous privileges denied to others. In both the Hadramawt and the Hadrami mahjar, sayyids fre-quently insisted on occupying the first two rows in mosques at prayer-time. They also led processions through towns dur-ing major religious events, and when greeted by non-sayyids they would expect to have their right hand kissed. In South-east Asia sayyids insisted on occupying positions of leadership in social organizations within the Hadrami community. In addition, sayyids viewed genealogical credentials as the basis for kafa’a (compatability) in marriage. Thus, while there was nothing to prevent a sayyid man from marrying a non-sayyid woman, a woman of sayyid origin was strictly prohibited from marrying a non-sayyid man. Even after generations of intermarriage with local women, sayyids of Hadrami origin in Southeast Asia still rigidly adhered to these standards.

But as early as the 1880s, many Hadramis in Southeast Asia were expressing discontent with this state of affairs. Non-sayyids who had acquired wealth through business or construction were particularly resentful of having to defer to sayyids. During this time the influence of egalitarian ideals promulgated by such Islamic modernists as Muham-mad ‘Abduh and Muhammad Rashid Rida began to be felt throughout the Hadrami mahjar. Arriving in Batavia (pres-ent-day Jakarta) in 1912, Ahmad Muhammmad al-Surkatti, a Sudanese shaykh educated in the Hijaz, helped disseminate

these ideas further, and three years later issued a fatwa repudi-ating the sayyids’ interpretation of kafa’a. Though al-Surkatti was met with much hostility from the sayyids and eventually returned to the Hijaz, some of his Hadrami followers founded the Jam‘iyyat al-Islah wa’l-Irshad (Association of Reform and Guidance), a charitable organization which built hostels for orphans, widows, and the handicapped as well as clubs and libraries. Though open to all Muslims, the organization spe-cifically barred sayyids from serving as directors.

In the Hadramawt itself, different solutions were found for social inequalities. After Great Britain withdrew from the region in 1967, an independent Marxist state known as the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen was formed out of what had been the Aden Protectorate. The rhetoric of class replaced that of genealogy, and while this naturally served to undermine sayyid influence, one of the leading revolutionar-ies at the time, Faysal al-‘Attas, was from a well-known sayyid family. Some members of the Indonesian Communist Party were also of Hadrami sayyid background. But if traders and tribesmen had been the key components of Hadrami society in previous centuries, a new model was found in the Qarami-ta. A radical Isma‘ili movement which established what was intended as a utopian society in eastern Arabia in 899 and gradually shed its Islamic trappings to the point of eradicating religion from public life, the Qaramita advocated a communal sharing of resources, and were upheld by the South Yemeni regime as Arabian proto-socialists. (Conspicuously absent from South Yemeni state dogma, however, was any reference to the fact that the Qaramita also advocated the indiscrimi-nate sharing of women, with no regard to Islamic marriage laws. Needless to say, this latter feature of Qarmati society never caught on in South Yemen even among the most ardent of Marxists!)

Marxism had overall little impact on the Hadrami popula-tion, though. Islam has always played a central role in Hadra-mi life, and continues to do so today, nearly two decades after the unification of the two Yemens in 1990. The nationaliza-tion of the economies of the countries of the Indian Ocean has undermined the role of Hadramis in local businesses, but the descendants of Hadrami immigrants, particularly in Southeast Asia, remain active in trade and construction. The Hadramawt itself has not fared quite as well. Like the rest of Yemen it lacks the abundant oil reserves of other regions of the Arabian Peninsula, which is why its cities have not under-gone the radical modernization witnessed by Riyadh or Abu Dhabi. In many ways the cosmopolitanism of the Hadrami mahjar never did mesh well with the traditions of the conser-vative Hadramawt. Yet it is this same conservative attitude that has allowed the region to retain its old character, the likes of which other parts of Arabia have long since lost.

George Hatke is a fifth-year graduate student in the Near Eastern Studies Department at Princeton University.

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In the name of God who created the heavens and the earth and all that is within them. Glory to Him, we are unable to praise Him in accordance with His praise. Thus, we accept our shortcomings and ask God for compassion, forgiveness and grace.

God mentions in the Holy Qur’an: “O people, we have created you from a male and a female, and then we made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.” 49:13

Islamic tradition is very clear about the human family in that we all come from Adam and Eve. God tells us in the Qur’an that he created us to know one another. Our differ-ences in language, color, ethnicity and culture are a sign from God that we should connect with each other, not harbor suspicion and hatred for one another: “If God had willed, He would have made you one community but things are as they are to test you in what He has given you. So compete with each other in good.” 5:48

In addition, God mentions that He would have made us into a monolithic community, but it is a test and part of His grand plan to observe our actions : “If God did not enable some men to keep back others, hermitages, synagogues, chapels and mosques where the name of God is mentioned would have been demolished.” 22:40

Muslims believe that many religious teachings of the earlier prophets were preserved by various religions. As long as the source of the teaching is God, harmony and justice will exist in these teachings.

As God commands the believers to say, “We believe in what has been revealed to us and what has been revealed to you; our God and your God is one.” 29:46

One may ask then why there would be a need for interfaith dialogue; if we are on the truth, why spend time learning other than the truth? Should we not protect our faith by iso-lating ourselves from other ideas?

Let us look into the lives of the people of God for guidance. Indeed, the prophet Muhammad welcomed dialogue and he welcomed the Christians of Najran and allowed them to stay and pray in the mosque of Medina. He never compelled people to become Muslim. God says to the believers in the Qur’an, “There is no compulsion in religion.” Islam requires that one become a believer by his or her own volition.

Religion is a matter of conviction of the heart and mind. It is a commitment to do good work based on shared values to uplift human experiences. In essence, we have an obligation to humanity based on our belief in God.

Unfortunately, some people have the perception that religion teaches prejudice, intolerance, and division, and, as proof, they mention all the wars and crimes committed in

the name of religion and/or God. Here I would like to point out that no war is holy. No crime committed by a religious or nonreligious person is above the justice of God. Foul behavior has no religion, no scripture, no temple, and no prophets. Those who engage in such criminal behaviour are charlatans, wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Any crime committed in the name of God or freedom does not exonerate any individual from their evil action. The prophet Muhammad said, “God does not look at your faces and physical bodies but rather he looks at your hearts and actions.” For this reason, believers should come forward with exemplary behavior.

It certainly takes courage and a deep conviction in one’s own way of life to reach out to others. But this reaching out may also help in clarifying various religious positions. For example, a Muslim or a member of any religious community who makes the news by committing evil deeds does not represent his or her religion. Yet people may confuse an individual’s misbehavior as representing the entire religious teaching of a tradition. Hence, a dialogue is crucial to better understand and appreciate people of other faiths.

My first encounter with interfaith discussion was about five years ago with Paul Heck, a former fellow at Princeton University. In his talk, he casually asserted that many religious people claim to possess the whole truth. He then followed by stating that we need to be humble before making such strident claims. His words left me a bit confused. How could I be “humble” when I believe that, as a Muslim, I do possess the truth?

God tells us in the Qur’an that “Those who strive for our sake, we shall guide them to our paths. Surely, God is with those who do good.” There are many paths to God. Those who accompanied Abraham went on his path to God. Those who followed Moses took on his path. Those who loved and became disciples of Jesus took his way. And those who fol-lowed the prophet Muhammad are on the path to God.

God is the truth (al-Haqq) and calls us to become people of the truth. To quote Gregg Mast, president of the New Bruns-wick Theological Seminary, “We don’t possess the truth but the truth possesses us.”

Dialogue is what brings us closer, as in the words of Rabbi Reed of Rutgers University Hillel, “How good it is when brothers (referring to the children of Ishmael and Isaac) come together.” There is an active dailogue between Muslim and Jewish students at Princeton University, thanks to the efforts of Muslim and Jewish students and the leadership of the former Princeton chaplain Khalid Latif and Rabbi Julie Roth, executive Director of the Princeton Center for Jewish Life/Hillel. These are commendable efforts that need community

“Blessed are the Peacemakers” By Faraz Khan

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support.In this time when people are vilifying and demonizing the

other, it is urgently necessary to have a dialogue to rid our-selves of stereotypes and misinformation. Unless we commit to an active dialogue between our various religious traditions, suspicion will fill the void. Rev. John Larson, campus pastor for the Lutheran Campus Ministry at Rutgers, mentioned in an interfaith discussion after the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001 that a local imam said it was the responsibility of Mus-lims to reach out to and educate their non-Muslim friends, neighbors and coworkers about Islam. But as this responsibili-ty has not been adequately shouldered thus far by the Muslim community, the result of such neglect is that Islamophobia is on a rise. Regrettably, the latest surveys show that many Americans believe that Islam endorses violence and hatred.

Today, the world is in pandemonium because the luna-tics have seized the cockpit and taken us further away from dialogue and mutual understanding. Due to the urgency of this call, we must not be passive in pursuing tolerance and understanding. American Muslims must take a lead in bridge-building and fostering a respect for human rights and social justice. Certainly, God is not prejudiced, and we are all equal

in his sight as children of Adam. God in his infinite wisdom did not make us a monolithic community. Consequently, it is incumbent upon us that we keep the dialogue open and genu-inely try to understand our brothers and sisters in humanity. We must accept and welcome diversity in our ranks. A person who is sincere to God will also be sincere to people and vice versa.

In conclusion, what kind of world would we like to leave behind for our children? A place full of suspicion, insult, prejudice and hate or a place full of love, understanding, com-passion and justice? Let us work together and let our actions speak louder than our words. For surely, we are at a shortage of people who can contribute to peace, love and understand-ing. As our prophet Jesus Christ mentioned, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Be peacemakers, contributors and callers to God. Let us pray and recognize the bonds that unite us and let not our differences divide us. Amen.

Faraz Khan is a regular khatib (speaker) at the New Brunswick Islamic Center. He frequently lectures at local mosques and college campuses on issues related to Islam and Muslims.

The Al-Hakim Mosque in Cairo, Egypt. Photo by Sarah Dajani ‘09.

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If you were to rank the centers of the Islamic World throughout the centuries, which cities would be at the top of your list? Probably you would start with Mecca and Medina, and continue with Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo. If you wanted to add a bit of a western source, maybe you would add Granada or Cordoba. These would all be fine choices, but, now, I would like to draw your attention to one of those cities which was perhaps never as brilliant as the aforemen-tioned ones, but yet has a unique signature in our history. A city which, as it has usually been in the shadow of a nearby giant, deserves to be mentioned first as one of the “secondary” cities: Bukhara.

Bukhara is a city located in the historical region of Tran-soxiana, the region between the rivers of Amu Darya (Oxus) and Syr Darya (Jaxartes) in today’s Uzbekistan, and known in Arabic as Mawaraunnahr,. If it was not for a single figure, the famous hadith scholar Imam Bukhari, probably many of us would not even know that Bukhara existed. Even though it is currently on the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list, very few of us have probably ever planned to visit Bukhara one day. Perhaps one reason for this is the fact that it was overshad-owed by Samarkand: Amin Maalouf probably never thought of naming his celebrated novel after Bukhara. Enough said about the bad luck of Bukhara, let us talk about its merits.

The region around Bukhara has been inhabited for many centuries, but the city itself was established around 5000 BCE. Due to its position on the Silk Road, it has been an im-portant cultural and economic center throughout its history. As a major city in the Iranian sphere of culture, it was not left unnoticed in the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, and legend con-nects its history to the killing of the Iranian prince Siavush.

Bukhara was conquered by Ubaydullah bin Ziyad in 54 AH/673 CE and was quickly Islamized during the 2nd cen-tury AH/8th century CE. The following centuries marked Bukhara as a major cultural, educational and economic center under the rule of various dynasties, most notably the Samanids. It was a highly cosmopolitan city containing ele-ments from Iranian, Turkic, Arab and even Chinese cultures.

Destruction was not alien to Bukhara since it was burnt down at various times due to the common use of timber as a building material, and it was again fire, not the armies, that devastated the city shortly after its fall to the Mongols on 4 Dhul-Hijja 616 AH/10 February 1220 CE. Bukhara quickly recovered from the Mongol invasion, but there were massacres and looting on various occasions afterwards. Most notably, the city population was almost totally killed in 671 AH/1221 CE by Ilkhanids and there was even a period when Bukhara was uninhabited. Even after a century, in 733 AH/1332 CE,

A pearl in Mawaraunnahr By Fethi Mübin Ramazanoğlu GS

Samanid architecture in Bukhara. Uncredited photo.

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the famous traveler Ibn Batuta narrates that the masjids, ma-drasas and the bazaars of the city were in ruins.

Revitalization came in the following centuries and Bukhara once again became a major center for various Turkic dynas-ties. Uzbek control started in the 10th century AH/16th cen-tury CE and continued until the Russian invasion. Bukhara was one of the strongholds of the resistance against Russian invasion both during the Czarist and the early Soviet eras, but Russians attained the final victory in 1345 AH/1926 CE. This era added a Russian element to the multicultural charac-ter of the city. Nevertheless, Bukhara partially maintained its status as a living Islamic center as it was home to one of the only two madrasas in the region during the Soviet era.

The city of Bukhara and its province are the birth place of two legendary figures in the history of Islam: the compiler of the famous hadith collection Imam Bukhari (d.256 AH/870 CE) and the world renowned philosopher and physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna b.428 AH/1037 CE). Another prominent fig-ure from the area is Baha-ud Din Naqshband Bukhari (d.791 AH/1389 CE), who is the founder of the Naqshabandi sufi order which has influenced millions of followers all around the world, and continues to exist today. These preeminent scholars were not only born in Bukhara, but also educated there at least through their teens. This fact alone shows the high quality of the education and the high level of scholarship fostered in the city through a six-century period.

Today, Bukhara is still an important historical and cultural city. Many ancient masjids and madrasas, as well as the tomb of Baha-ud Din Naqshband, are in the city, but in terms of population and economic influence, it has even stronger rivals than its long time fellow Samarkand: currently Bukhara is

the fifth most populous city in Uzbekistan. Nevertheless, it is not the number of people or the gross domestic product of a city that attracts us to it, rather it is the important role it has played throughout Islamic history and the connection we should all thus feel with it.

Fethi Mübin Ramazanoğlu, from Turkey, is a graduate student in the Physics Department at Princeton Unversity.

The courtyard of the Kalon Mosque, Bukhara. Photo by Alan Cordova.

Kalian Minaret, Bukhara. Photo by Dave Rawlinson.

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I remember where I was the morning of September 11, 2001; I was in seventh grade, sitting at my desk in home-room. My teacher carted in a TV and changed the channel to CBS, which was replaying the footage of the towers being hit. A little while later, after the teacher returned the TV and re-entered the classroom, she looked at me (I must have still been groggy) and asked if anyone had said anything to me, presumably about me in connection with the attacks. Puzzled how, in my mind, anyone could connect me in Tennessee with the destruction of buildings which I’d never heard of before in New York, I replied to the contrary, curious of the consequences that would result from that indelible day in American history.

My sophomore year at school in AP European History, I remember the section we spent covering Islam, the entire half page of it. How is it that in a history book with over 1000 pages, only a little more than half a page of text was devoted to the Muslim influence in Europe? They ruled in Spain for over 700 years, yet I don’t remember any mention of this being given except for their final ousting in 1492 from Grenada, shortly before Christopher Columbus’s expeditions to the West were financed by the monarchy. What do we make then of Lady Macbeth, who says, “Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, Oh, Oh!” “Oh” indeed, as during this time Europeans, let’s say, less than emphasized the importance of bathing and cleanliness; James Loewen mentions in one of his books how some of the explorers who came to America and lived in the woods smelled so bad, the animals were repelled by their scent and the Native Americans attempted to show them how to bathe. Compare this to the Muslim practice of performing ablution every day before prayers, and the detailed rules distinguishing between what is filthy versus pure, so that a certain degree of cleanliness is mandated by the religion. This quote of Shakespeare’s indicates that, at least in some re-spects, Western society held Muslim culture as a sort of model to which their own was compared. Islam’s immutable ideals are still held as a foil to the West’s changing values, but in a light far more critical than curious or inquisitive. And recently Islam has come under an increasing number of attacks for its beliefs and practices.

Among the most blatant of these attacks were the cartoons claiming to depict the Prophet Muhammad published by Danish newspapers under the guise of free speech. Of course, when Muslims were being denounced and insulted as barbar-ic, it was not the wisest move to mob and attack different em-bassies, but it is understandable how they could be so deeply insulted by such a violation of their beliefs. I mean, Spain has

a law that firmly prohibits any defamation of its royal family, punishable by two years in jail - but wait, isn’t this hypocrisy on Spain’s part, to preach free speech but to practice other-wise? With cases like this, is it difficult to see how tensions are increasing between Islam and the West?

But what is Islam, and what does it teach? It is because there are so many different possible answers to this question that there is much confusion and misunderstanding about the religion. Traditional Islam isn’t what Elijah Muhammad or Louis Farrakhan teach in the so-called Nation of Islam, which promotes racism and attributes to God anthropomor-phic characteristics. It’s also not represented by the extremists who falsely claim that traditional Islam allows suicide bomb-ings (on the contrary, these are prohibited for several differ-ent reasons). Muslims believe that nothing deserves to be worshiped except for God (the Arabic for God is “Allah,” a contraction of “the” and “God,” emphasizing the monotheism at the core of Islam). We believe that God is not a human, a body, a shape, a color, an image, nor does God in any way whatsoever resemble anything in creation. A famous saying goes, Whatever you imagine in your mind, God is other than that.

An understanding of the basic tenets of Islam is becom-ing more and more crucial, especially since this religion, the world’s fastest growing one, is receiving an unprecedented amount of worldwide attention, and with that, scrutiny. As long as there are extremists, everyone is in danger, especially mainstream Muslims who are being blamed for the misguided acts of a very small number of deviants. Don’t forget, Mus-lims died in the World Trade Center, too. People, Muslim and non-Muslim, need to learn more about Islam, for all our sakes.

Nabil Abdurehman is a freshman and prospective math major from Memphis, TN.

A Call for Understanding By Nabil Abdurehman ‘11

Spring 2008

Documents

Misbah Magazine: Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2008)