Nausheen Husain

“Their contempt for us was unnatural, like we were lesser beings”

[Dec 2023]

I’ve found myself repeating a phrase this semester when asked what my research has been like lately: “horrifyingly relevant.” Work for a fellowship I was awarded last spring began in earnest this week; our team of researchers will assess how specific aspects of the ‘War on Terror’ were covered in mainstream American media, which ‘experts’ were used as a credible source in written stories, and how language was deployed. The research goes all the way back to twenty-five years ago, and also to just last week.

Some of our younger scholars were born after 2001 so part of our work has been assembling research that can serve as a literature review for them, but also as a timeline of the more recent American attempts to deal with political violence (and what policies this stated intent has hidden). While compiling relevant works, I came across research from Erin Steuter and Deborah Wills. Steuter and Wills’ 2010 paper is called “The vermin have struck again’: dehumanizing the enemy in post 9/11 media representations” (email me if you’re a researcher or reporter and you’d like a copy of this excellent paper) -- just the title brought my mind directly to a Dec. 12 Al Jazeera story covering the recent rounding up of men and boys by Israel’s military. In it, a 14-year-old boy calls the Israeli soldiers’ contempt for the Palestinians “unnatural,” going on to say, “There was no reasoning with them. They kept saying, ‘You are all Hamas.’”

In their paper, Steuter and Wills collect headlines from mainstream publications from many countries between 2001 and 2008, in which the headlines reflect a “remarkably coherent and consistent set of metaphors which represent the enemy as animals, particularly noxious, verminous, or pestilential animals, or as diseases, especially spreading and metastatic diseases like cancers or viruses.” The paper is now 13 years old but I imagine an updated collection of headlines from 2023 may yield very similar conclusions. People are compared to beasts, monsters, rats, weasels, snakes, spiders, viruses, cancers, objects that must be cleansed.

a screenshot from the aforementioned paper, containing a list of headlines that refer to people as rats

A screenshot from “The vermin have struck again’: dehumanizing the enemy in post 9/11 media representations”

One thing we spoke about in our team is Edward Said’s idea of ‘communities of interpretation,’ which he wrote about in his 1981 book, Covering Islam:

No one lives in direct contact with either truth or with reality. Each of us lives in a world actually made by human beings, in which such things as “the nation” or “Christianity” or “Islam” are the result of agreed-upon convention, or historical processes, and, above all, of willed human labor expended to give those things an identity we can recognize.

One of the forms of ‘willed human labor expended’ in this case are our newspapers, which contribute to our ‘community of interpretation’ of Islam and Muslims. There is nothing new about the idea that Arabs and Muslims, and Palestinians of all or no faiths, are particularly dehumanized in American media and pop culture. The Western ‘community of interpretation’ regarding this group of people contains the idea that they are so ‘other’ that we don’t need to consider each of them as even separate from each other. They are presented, often, as a mob of rage; in the case of Steuter and Wills’ observations of headlines, a pile of vermin who deserve “indiscriminate eradication.”

[The paper’s authors include what was written in 2006 by Daniel Pipes, a raging racist, who justified his call for seeing all Muslims as suspicious with what he deems “Sudden Jihad Syndrome” -- “whereby normal-appearing Muslims abruptly become violent.” Absolutely wild, but I don’t not want this on a t-shirt.]

I’m tired of saying that dehumanization of peoples by journalists is wrong. I don't think I have ever been so bored and frantic at the same time. It doesn’t seem to be heard or registered, no matter how frequently many of us repeat this, because our mainstream press isn’t very self-aware, particularly when it comes to assessing its own coverage. (We will continue repeating these things because Palestinians have asked people to keep saying the obvious thing out loud, and it is important to center their voices.)

What Steuter and Wills also pointed out, besides that dehumanization is dangerous, is that the comparison of “the enemy” to vermin or disease is a metaphor used by the military, so the repetition of these words to describe people reflects news practices opposite to objectivity. Reporters and editors are not just degrading people, they are doing so at the behest of the state. We can see the result of this when we listen to the Palestinian child’s bafflement at an Israeli soldier who sees him as subhuman.

In The Myth Of Sisyphus, Albert Camus, who was also a journalist among other professions, writes that the artist must work amidst those who are working and struggling, not removed from them:

One of the temptations of the artist is to believe himself solitary, and in truth he hears this shouted at him with a certain base delight. But this is not true. He stands in the midst of all, in the same rank, neither higher nor lower, with all those who are working and struggling. His very vocation, in the face of oppression, is to open the prisons and to give a voice to the sorrows and joys of all.

I think of this when I consider the viewpoint of a journalist and, especially, when I see the actions and choices of Palestinian journalists today. To report away from the state and those in authority, but alongside the people, is what Steuter and Wills mention in their work as ‘peace journalism’ or ‘conflict-sensitive journalism’: “If they choose to be complicit with military or government, as they often are in demonizing the enemy and enlisting public support for war policies, then they give up their vaunted and largely illusory objectivity in the service of war.”

The idea of striving for objectivity in reporting has been questioned by progressive American journalism, particularly since the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the subsequent media coverage. In the case of reporting on Palestine and, more generally, Arabs and Muslims, even an attempt toward objectivity -- even just refusing to repeat the words of the state -- would be a huge step forward.

Newhouse School Assistant Professor Named 2023-25 Lender Center Faculty Fellow

[July 2023]

Syracuse University News interviewed me when I was selected to be the new Lender Center faculty fellow. My project, “The Stories We Told Ourselves: The American ‘War on Terror’” will assess American news coverage of 'War on Terror' infrastructures set up after 9/11: surveillance and security operations around Muslim and Arab neighborhoods, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, the prison bureau’s communication management units, FBI stings targeting young Muslim men, etc.
Read more here.

Briefly, two things I have been thinking about while compiling this year's snippets

[Jan 2023]

1. The day after I left my newsroom job, I wrote in my journal that I now wanted to develop neater handwriting. The cause-effect relationship between leaving the newsroom and suddenly producing neat handwriting was so direct a line in my mind then that I didn’t feel the need to explain it. I have been thinking about this entry since I wrote it, more than three semesters ago. (There has been very little change in my handwriting.)

Writing a word neatly by hand, by writing one letter, then stopping, then writing the next letter, didn't seem like a goal I could pursue in a newsroom. It felt luxurious to slow down in that way. It required the ability to pause momentum in order to consider each separate act.

2. As a kid, I’d frequent neighborhood swimming pools in the summertime with friends, and I have been thinking this year of the advice given by a mom to a son, who felt apprehension at jumping off a diving board into the deep end of a pool: climb up to the diving board, stand on the edge and look down at the water. Don’t jump until that view is familiar enough to you to be comfortable. Create a pause in momentum.

For me, 2022 was this kind of pause. 2022 consisted of me reading and re-reading sentences as a way to revisit building blocks, focusing more on them than the books they live inside. 2022 has been a year in which it’s taken me days, sometimes weeks, to write down one complete thought.

I know now that it is not luxurious, but it is, at best, the surveying of some apprehension, the seconds before a dive.

The concept of 'objectivity' in investigative journalism doesn't exclude nor hide its inherent purpose of reform

[May 2022]

Quotes about objectivity from Mark Lee Hunter's 'Story-Based Inquiry' that I wish I read when I was 25, and then read every year since then:

"Conventional news reporting aims to create an objective image of the world as it is. Investigative reporting uses objectively true material – that is, facts that any reasonable observer would agree are true – toward the subjective goal of reforming the world. That is not a license to lie in a good cause. It is a responsibility, to learn the truth so that the world can change."

"By objectivity, we mean three very precise things.

> The first is that we have to accept the reality of facts that we can prove, whether we like them or not. In other words, we are objective toward the facts. If the facts say the hypothesis is wrong, we change the hypothesis. We do not try to make the facts disappear.

> The second is that we have to do this work with the understanding that we could be wrong. If we do not keep that in mind, we will not get the help we need from others. Would you help someone who already knows all the answers, and isn’t listening to what you have to say?

> Even if you remain objective toward the facts – and you must – there is a subjective basis to this work that will not go away. Trying to make the world a better place is not an objective goal. We are not recorders when we investigate; we are reformers. We use objective facts, and are objective toward the facts, to further that goal, because we happen to believe that any attempt to reform the world will fail if it is not based on reality. In other words, we use our subjectivity as an incentive to remain neutral toward the evidence, and to incite us to take all the evidence into account."

"A classic error of reporters trained in the canons of 'objective' reporting, or of reporters in a hurry, is to listen to sources only for information, and not for emotion. They tend to consider emotion as noise – including their own emotions. In his classic work The Powers That Be, David Halberstalm suggests that this is why two relatively inexperienced reporters from the Washington Post got the Watergate story, and not their competitors. The young reporters allowed themselves to be impressed by the fear of their sources, and to feel it themselves: The fear told them the story was major."

"Yet the investigator must also be objective in a specific way: neutrality and honesty toward all the facts in a given situation. Such neutrality does not, and cannot, mean indifference toward the consequences of certain facts, which is what many politicians would love to obtain when they accuse reporters of lacking objectivity. The fundamental purpose of investigative reporting is reform, and the desire to reform the world is inherently individual and subjective."

book report: praxis

[Jan 2022]

When bell hooks passed away last year, I realized I had never read any of her books, despite her being, famously, a revolutionary educator, and despite my recent, desperate need to quickly learn how to become a passable professor. When I started in academia, I was given "McKeachie's Teaching Tips," but not "Teaching To Transgress."

I felt bonded to hooks on many an occasion while reading this set of essays, but particularly when she described coming to academia without ever having wanted to be an academic. In reference to Paulo Freire, she writes:

"One of the ways that this book has made me think about my teaching process is that I feel that the way I teach has been fundamentally structured by the fact that I never wanted to be an academic, so that I never had a fantasy of myself as a professor already worked out in my imagination before I entered the classroom. I think that’s been meaningful, because it’s freed me up to feel that the professor is something I become as opposed to a kind of identity that’s already structured and that I carry with me into the classroom."

Elsewhere, she cites Freire as an academic who "gave her a language": "He made me think deeply about the construction of an identity in resistance."

Since reading this, I have been thinking about what it means to construct an identity as an academic without buying into the academic fantasy, nor the tropes of a revered professor. I grew up wanting to be a journalist, became one, recognized the ways in which American newsrooms diminished me and my areas of interest, and then stumbled upon academia in a Slack channel. hooks reframed my newness to this world as a bonus rather than a weakness. Because I am simultaneously unlearning what I learned in newsrooms, and trying to teach young people how to function in these same spaces, I am creating my identity as an academic in resistance of the norms and narratives I have learned. hooks says this is a powerful location from which to create this identity. She cites both Freire and Thich Nhat Hanh when she describes her idea of "praxis" -- the focus on practice in conjunction with contemplation, or "action and reflection upon the world in order to change it." You have to practice your current ideals, they say, and process how these ideals have come into being, in order to grow in those very same ideals.

This may sound familiar to readers of the scholar and activist (and professor) Farid Esack. In "Qur'an, Liberation and Pluralism", he argues for liberation theology, rather than accomodation theology, and writes about praxis:

"Praxis as a source of knowledge has always been widely recognized in Islamic scholarship and the Qur’an itself is explicit in its view that theory can be based on praxis: 'And to those who strive in us [our path] to them we shall show our ways.' (29:69)"

hooks writes that praxis can be a source of guidance for an educator and Esack writes that it can be the same for a Muslim -- indeed that by doing praxis, you reveal more guidance. In The Study Qur'an, an interpretation of the verse he cites explains that if one strives to act upon what they do know, they will be guided to greater knowledge.

While planning for courses, I have ruminated on what it means to bring hooks' and Esack's concept of praxis and building an identity in resistance to, of all things, a data reporting course at a Western journalism school. Despite the scrutiny and rigidity of academia, how do I resist succumbing to teaching the very methods of journalism that perpetuate a U.S.-centric narrative, the narrative that our government encourages, even concocts?

In one class, we talk about eviction data. We listen to a podcast episode in which a data journalist argues that looking at only a person's inclusion on a dataset of evicted citizens omits all the other kinds of datasets in which they may have been included, if those datasets existed: people who have lent money to family members, people who have participated in community volunteer efforts in their neighborhood, people who come from absolutely no generational wealth. We talk about how choices around who is the data collector and who is the data collectee betray our data infrastructure's service toward, in this case, landowners.

One student is exasperated: 'But how can we not track who hasn't paid rent? If someone wants to rent out their property, they should be able to check a name against a database.' Then he goes quiet and so do the rest of the students, hearing what he has said. There is discomfort and uncertainty, including from me, when considering how to proceed.

Weeks later, I read about how hooks remembered discomfort that her students felt in her classes:

"I have not forgotten the day a student came to class and told me: 'We take your class. We learn to look at the world from a critical standpoint, one that considers race, sex, and class. And we can’t enjoy life anymore.' Looking out over the class, across race, sexual preference, and ethnicity, I saw students nodding their heads. And I saw for the first time that there can be, and usually is, some degree of pain involved in giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches."

hooks acknowledged that developing ideology through praxis would be uncomfortable; a discussion is, by definition, a loss of one person's control. It is also the only way to break the absolute authority and rigidity of a traditional professorship, and the default instruction of traditional reporting methods, which have always been flawed in their instinctual trust of American institutions. It is painful for someone at the age of 20 to consider that the narratives and structures their place of birth asks them, as journalists, to put forth are designed to benefit a certain group of people, ignoring and actively harming the others. At worst, this pain can turn into cynicism but at best it can help create a reporting populace willing to forge an identity in resistance to the default.

May our painful praxis beget knowledge and direction.

A shift to slow thinking

[July 2021]

One of the first things that happened when I left my job of seven years in a major metro newsroom was that I started to excitedly consider how I could change my relationship to Twitter. I thought for weeks about what my new Twitter schedule would be. Would I delete it from my phone entirely? Would I keep the phone app but only check Tweetdeck twice a week? Would I alternate week-by-week, one week checking it normally (incessantly), and one week being off it completely?

I didn't know it then but I didn't have to muse so much. As my planning brain worked overtime, coming up with different options for me, my habits changed on their own. Because I didn't have a morning meeting at 9AM, I didn't open up Tweetdeck at 8AM, in order to read (scroll through) the news. I didn't leave it open throughout the day to check on what my colleagues and other Chicago journalists were talking about, or to update myself on the latest thing the mayor said. I tweeted less, I found less to comment on.

Other things changed too:

> I am waking up past 8AM. For someone who thought this was physically impossible, the extra sleep, the first time especially, was truly wild, how it felt in my body, what my brain felt like. Coffee became less of a necessity immediately, and something pleasant to enjoy a little later;

> I take notes on a yellow legal pad rather than a reporter's notebook. Yellow legal pads are luxurious for my fingers, which, after years of reporting, became used to the cramped scribbling I did in interviews and meetings, the reporter's notebooks seemingly being generated on my shelves like cards from a deck at the end of a Solitaire game. Yellow legal pads seem prepared to take full sentences, full paragraphs even;

> When I need to make sure I understand something very well, or that something will be 100% legible later, I am able to slow my processes down to read and write slowly. When I notice my gaze gliding over a part of a book that seems 'unnecessary' -- a description of a garden or what exact facial expression took over at a certain moment -- I'm able to stop and go back and re-read, slowly. When I am writing down a schedule or notes after a meeting, I am able to separate the letters in a word so they are each individually legible, something I haven't even tried to do since high school.

What is obvious is that these changes are the result of a lack of a work schedule, a newsroom schedule -- the schedule of a place where most things are emergencies. I have developed work habits that ensure I'm ready for an emergency, even when my work developed to building large projects rather than breaking news.

I'm starting an academic career in about a month; though I'll still be publishing reported work, it will likely never be an emergency or breaking news, and my primary job will be to summarize ideas and histories for students. In one of several conversations I've been having with friends who are academics, one person mentioned that I'm going from thinking about the what and how, to thinking about the why and the patterns behind the whys. As I try to retrain my newsroom mind into a slower, more intentional machine, I'm also settling on which other day-to-day habits could help me start to notice the whys and their patterns. Though I didn't notice it at the time, newsrooms aren't good at encouraging this kind of thinking for all reporters, to their own detriment.

In his book about his journalism and work habits, "Working," Robert Caro talks about slow thinking: "When I decided to write a book, and, beginning to realize the complexity of the subject, realized that a lot of thinking would be required -- thinking things all the way through, in fact, or as much through as I was capable of -- I determined to do something to slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through." In a newsroom, this is a luxury few are afforded; typically you write and report at the same time. Sometimes, you're writing while you're figuring out what the story is. (Robert Caro left his newsroom job at Newsday after six years to write books and, presumably, think slowly.)

As I temper the constant tug-of-war of input and output, in academia and writing, the place where my mind settles, I hope, will be a place of few emergencies.

Reporting on prison conditions during COVID-19

[March 2021]

When the global pandemic came to the U.S. in spring of 2020, my journalistic work shifted -- we were all suddenly on the COVID beat. My focus in late spring and early summer was on covering the disproportionate amount of Black Chicagoans contracting and suffering from the virus. Strife is segregated in my city and it wasn't an easy story to tell, but it was an obvious one to find.

In July, I got an email from a young man worried about his dad. His father was in a federal prison in southern Illinois, a place where inmates were complaining that COVID protocols weren't being followed, that they were being put on lockdown all the time. The young man told me that, when he called to check in on his father, they told him to stop calling. For the next seven months, I talked to inmates, in official and unofficial ways. I published two stories for the Chicago Tribune, one covering the death of an inmate at that federal prison and the other wrestling with the fact that we don't have carceral systems that easily allow for people to leave early, even if the only other option is death by pandemic.

These stories were difficult to pursue for many reasons: getting data from any department of corrections or the Bureau of Prisons is a slow process, and the inability to get any confirmation of basic facts from prison administration is a constant hindrance to reporting. Even more frustrating are the layers of disconnect erected between an inmate and effective communication. While reporting this story,

> one inmate could only talk to me seven minutes at a time. Some of that time would go to him expressing, understandably, his frustration with his situation. When he inevitably got cut off by the phone, he'd have to wait in line to use the phone for another seven minutes. These were some of the hardest source calls I've had.

> two inmates talked to me using an unofficial communication device. One of them eventually was caught with the device and put in solitary confinement for three months, according to the other inmate.

> a family member of an inmate who died found out he was in the hospital when another inmate with an unofficial communication device contacted her to let her know. Prison administration contacted her later to let her know her son had died.

> the local hospital couldn't confirm or deny that a person had been admitted to their institution if they were an inmate, I think because of HIPAA policy.

I've reported on communication management units before -- units where communication is severely limited with the outside world because the fear is that the inmate will remain in touch with their alleged co-criminals in order to continue criminal activity; these are controversial for a whole slew of reasons. In standard prisons, where a stated goal is to help maintain the inmates' outside relations to make it easier to transition into a more stable life after prison, the number of barriers between an inmate and the outside betrays a loyalty to carceration -- the very thing that created hesitation around releasing inmates to home confinement during a global pandemic.

What is increasingly not enough/To seek a middle way

[May 2019]

When I was younger, just my community was enough. My needs were fulfilled by it; its logic around faith and history, which were given to me by my family and elders, made sense. The more intimately I understood it as an adult, however, the more I felt it was necessary to gift it, over and over again, the generosity of context, and a world around it. But even with more and more context, the position and agency of my faith community within the wider group of Muslims in America became blurrier with age, even while my awareness of the blurrinesses in other faith communities increased. Observing Ramadan, for me, is a claiming of space for me and my community in the confusion of colors and shapes that is the wider Muslim community, a community that has sometimes rejected us, and sometimes been rejected by us. For me, it is a way to say, “We are here, too; we are of you, and you us.”

On a practical level, I am objectively bad at Ramadan. I have trouble slowing down, I do not retain my patience in the face of want, I sometimes break my fast early, and sehri is sometimes on time, sometimes whenever I wake up. I do not swear less — I work in a newsroom. More devastatingly, I work in a capitalistic system, so my days, even during Ramadan, are dictated by labor and profit, and not by my intrinsic value as a soul from the viewpoint of the divine. It seems that every Ramadan I observe, I am reminded of how far I am, how far we are, from what a life oriented by the centering of the spirit feels like.

For much of this Ramadan, as part of a youth program I help with every year, I spent my days thinking about civil rights and the history of the Muslim community in the U.S. — from enslaved African Muslims to South Asian immigrant Muslims to Central Asian refugee Muslims to white convert Muslims. We talked about what oppression can look like among immigrant communities, and how hierarchies are perpetuated particularly firmly in South Asian Muslim communities. Most challenging was articulating the complexities of this reality to young people — a way of gently shattering the perfection they wanted to see and showing instead, just as gently, that the existence of blurrinesses in their understandings of their community is a form of clarity, because it is accurate.

Much like how adults respond to blurriness around something into which they’ve invested time, some people embraced these realities and many decidedly did not — a reminder that an instinct toward justice or truth is not magically or automatically higher among younger generations. I felt frustrated. In the early mornings during suhoor, I read parts of the Qur’an.

While the Ramadan of my youth was mostly about breakfast foods at Eid celebrations, the Ramadan of my adulthood has increasingly been about a balancing of two particular ayaat that reflect the frustrations that I have not been able to settle:

“Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these. Do not strut arrogantly about the earth: you cannot break it open, nor match the mountains in height.” (17:36-7)

The pairing of these ayaat encourage me to “seek a middle way” (17:110) between the necessity of continuous critical thinking and reasoning around the established systems of a community, while retaining an attitude of humility and patience as a form of love toward those around me, if nothing else, as a reflection of the awe a Muslim, a person, can experience toward the divine. The anti-complacency and active compassion this requires — and the grace of this reminder in the Qur’an — is enough for this month.

islam for reporters

Islam For Reporters

Islam For Reporters tracks data on Islamophobic incidents in the U.S. and provides tools for reporters covering Islam-related issues or Muslim American communities. It started as my Master's project at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, in affiliation with the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project. As part of this project, I interviewed several Islamic Studies scholars -- below are summaries of these interviews.

Ali Asani on the denial of identity

[Winter 2013]

Ali Asani came to the U.S. from Kenya, started as an undergraduate student at Harvard, and then just never left. Today, he’s a professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures and Director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Asani and I’ve always been struck by the nuance in his arguments and, more importantly, his immense humility. We spoke a bit about his own navigation of identity and the global aspect of Islamophobia:

People often say, okay the Jews went through this, and the Catholics went through this, and the Irish went through this and Italians went through this. And it’s true that you know it’s part of the whole process of becoming American, you have to go through this. I do see it as different. Unlike I think some of those other groups, you don’t have the manifestation of this at a global level…It’s not just the U.S. It’s a global phenomenon. You see it in Europe, definitely. You see the links between Islamophobic groups in Europe with those in the U.S., but you also see it in places like India. You see it in Bosnia. You see it in Burma. You can see it in many, many different places. You see it in Russia. You see it in China…And that’s what I think makes it a little bit different from saying, okay, this is a normal part of the American hazing experience. That’s what I think makes it dangerous. Because it’s global.

He told me what struck him about election-time Islamophobia and the revision of history in people’s minds:

The thing that really stood out to me as an Islamophobic thing was made by Rev. Rod Parsley who was spiritual advisor to John McCain and who wrote in his book “Silent No More,” among other claims he makes, that 9/11 was a call to arms because America was founded in part to see the false religion of Islam destroyed, and that’s why America was created. And 9/11 now means that we are in a full-fledged war with Islam. That, for me, was an outrage because it’s just a revisionist form of reading history and documents and texts. When I saw that, I said, wow. And you can see how it was tied with the whole election of Obama. And that behind it was this whole idea that Obama was a secret Muslim and that electing him is going to be the ultimate triumph because now Muslims will be in power, they’ve taken over the White House and then they’re going to take over the country. So this was a strategy pandering to people’s fear for Islam — “Do not vote for Obama because if you vote for Obama, it’s a vote for Islam, it’s a vote for the enemy.” The implications of all of that are just astounding.

On the many ways he was denied his own identity in the U.S.:

When I came to Harvard as an undergraduate, one of the things I was astonished about was how ignorant people were about Kenya — they didn’t know where it was — and their perceptions about who was African. So someone like me would not qualify as African because, “Oh, you must be from India.” Even though my family’s been two generations in Africa. So I would say there was this broad illiteracy. My first encounter was this illiteracy about Africa that impacted me directly because people were not able to label me correctly or they thought I was a misfit or they wanted to impose their own labels on me, so you have to be — you can’t be African. And in Africa, people who are of Indian origin are called Asian. So if I said I was Asian, “No, you can’t be Asian because Asian means you’re Chinese.” So I was denied my African identity, I was denied my Asian identity, and then at a certain point I would find out of course that they were also very ignorant about Islam as well.

Jocelyn Cesari: It’s worse in Europe

[Winter 2013]

I met up with Jocelyn Cesari at Harvard’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program office. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University and directs the Islam in the West Program at Harvard University. She explained to me why Europe’s Muslims have it much harder than America’s:

I would say that, even when it concerns the Islamic or religious signs only, the discrimination is higher for Muslims in Europe because it is not automatically an institutional discrimination, while I think in the U.S., most of the discrimination comes from policy-making or institutional settings, but not automatically from the society, although you will find groups that will say, “Yes, it has increased,” but if you look at where Islamophobia comes, it comes in police or law enforcement, it comes in airport and air traffic regulation; it’s not dominant in civil society, despite what Muslims are saying. But in Europe, it’s both an institutional discrimination — and a strong one, sometimes — but it’s also day-to-day discrimination by people who are not Muslim and who would attack women with hijab, or refusing to provide halal food, or refuse to acknowledge when kids are fasting. You have more of these things going on, that come more from a daily life perspective. I know that activist groups here tend to say that Muslims are in a bad situation; I’m not saying that there are no reality to that, but if I compare to the life of Muslims in Europe — immigration, they are at stake; ethnicity and culture, they are at stake. Economically, too, when people talk about underclass or ghettos, they think Islam. It’s not the case in the U.S. Any kind of laws about security of the country, they are at stake. And then you have the daily discrimination. And very little recourse.

She also explained why the biggest problem in the U.S. is not the media, but the politicians:

When you hear politicians — and I have heard them — all this started against the building of mosques in the U.S. and some politicians saying that Islam is not a religion and cannot be protected by the first amendment. These are very — for me, this is much more worrisome. Because then, what do you expect the media to do? They have to report on that, too. They are not making things up. They are also giving visibility to things and positions that people have that are far from being favorable or easy on Muslims. The whole shari’a campaign. It was not a media campaign. It was really orchestrated by anti-Islamic groups in different cities with the role of so-called experts coming and being concentrated in different localities. And Muslims have not even asked for shari’a in this country, which is mind-boggling to me. It’s whole construct — yes, the media report on it — but I would say they are not building it. I would say that some are trying to be more fair in the way they are report about Islam.

Omid Safi on waging beauty after 9/11

[Winter 2013]

I’ve told myself that, at some point in my life, I’m going to go on a trip to Turkey with Omid Safi and Illuminated Tours. But, for now, just a conversation with Safi will have to do. I met up with him on UNC, Chapel Hill’s beautiful campus in January to talk about the different kinds of Americans America has, the Iranian blogosphere and our perceptions about the worth of different lives. On using 9/11 as a measurement tool:

I have to say, as somebody who adamantly and unapologetically adopts a global humanistic outlook, of course I’m frustrated as much as the next person when 9/11 is allowed to become the new birth of Christ. It’s what you measure everything before and after it…I think it’s important for us to pause and think about, how do we have a conversation in which we can say, with the same breath, with the same moral commitment, that we mourn and stand against the actions of 9/11 and the loss of human life, and at the same time, we have to think about, what does it mean if the loss of 3,000 human lives on American soil is allowed to re-write the global order in a way that the loss of 30 million people with HIV in sub-saharan Africa does not? Or the loss of millions of lives in Vietnam or in other conflicts does not?…And actually, in North America, we’re completely unwilling to enter that conversation — it does say a lot about our assumption about the superior worth of some lives over others.

On the oft-sighted “kind-of-sort-of-basically-tolerated-as-long-you-keep-quiet-and-go-to-the-suburbs Americans” around the time of the Park 51 controversy:

I’m interested in the conversation about Islamophobia, but I actually don’t think you solved the problem by persuading people that Islam is great. I mean, I’m a professor of Islamic Studies, I teach about Islam. Obviously, I’m committed to presenting accurate and scholarly views of Islam, but I don’t think you solve this by just replacing people’s stereotypes about Islam. The place where you have to fight this fight — it’s an American conversations. It’s about laws; they bought this land legally. You don’t like it? Tough. It’s a conversation about citizenship. These are American citizens. If they’re American citizens, they’re allowed to do what other American citizens can do. We don’t like all of our citizens, but nowhere is it written in the Constitution that us liking each other is a prerequisite to people getting to exercise their constitutional rights. And I think that’s really the conversation that I want to see us have, I want to see Muslims have and non-Muslims have. Let’s have this based on liberties and civil rights and constitutional rights and freedoms. What does it mean to be American? Are all of us equally American? Are some of us really American? And others are kind-of-sort-of-basically-tolerated-as-long-you-keep-quiet-and-go-to-the-suburbs Americans? And I think that’s really the conversation I’m much more interesting in having now.

On Iranians, who are just a Google hit away:

One small example: Iran’s not a particularly large country, or it’s not in terms of population — certainly nothing compared to India or Pakistan. It’s a country of 77 million people — less than a quarter of the population of the U.S. And there’s very few other countries in the world in which Persian as a language is a major presence. Persian is now the fourth most heavily blogged language in the world. Iranians, in spite of and perhaps because of the extraordinarily repressive mechanisms of censorship imposed on them by their government, are among the most tech-savvy and connected and wired populations on the planet. Many of them have websites which are mirroring in Persian and English…I think that the overwhelming majority of Americans cannot name an Iranian who’s not a cleric, whether it’s Khomeini or Ahmedinejad when he was in power as the president. Hopefully now, they can at least add the figure of President Rouhani. But there’s such a broad range of artists and musicians, civil society workers, women’s rights activists, spoken word artists who are just a Google hit away.

On becoming “khalils”:

There’s this beautiful Qur’anic metaphor — the Prophet Abraham was thrown into the fire and God rescues him from the fire, and makes the fire be cool towards him. And interestingly enough, the Qur’an says when God rescues Abraham, Abraham or Ibrahim in Arabic, becomes called the “khalil,” which is called “the intimate friend of God.” And I’ve oftentimes used that metaphor for the condition of Muslims in post-9/11 America. A number of things can happen to people when they’re thrown into the fire — you can either burn, or you can emerge as a “khalil,” you can emerge as an intimate friend of God, and I see both having taken place in the Muslim community. I see lots of burnt and burnt out Muslims, but I also see people that have gone through the crucible of purification and have emerged as these moral beings that not only are interested in defending their own community, but are really engaged in a redemption process that there are people who are waging beauty, unrelentingly, and are interested in uplifting and transforming and redeeming this wider world that we all actually share. And that community gives me an immense amount of hope… There’s an extraordinary number of women in that population, there are African Americans, brown Muslims, white converts, Latino Muslims, for whom these kind of sectarian labels of Sunni and Shi’i are much less relevant than, “Who are you?”, “How deep do you love?”, “Whom are you serving?” and “Where is the community that you’re devoting yourself in service to?” Those are the important places that I look to and draw inspiration from.

Carl Ernst: There is no “Muslim world.”

[Winter 2013]

I read Carl Ernst’s “Following Muhammad” in 2007, back when it was my dream to study Persian literature and become an academic. Understandably, I was fan-girling a bit when I finally got to meet him in person. Ernst is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As someone who has been directly involved with Islamophobia and the media, he had some very blunt advice for journalists:

If you want to tell a good story, you can get a skeleton from a single person, but you need to have a little bit of context and know where they’re coming from. And one of the most important things to say is, there is no “Muslim world.” There is no separate planet that is inhabited exclusively by Muslims who somehow have never had any contact with America or Europe…What you need to know if you want to understand a Muslim is, what country do they come from? What political formation? What economic class? What ethnic group? What language? What religious teaching or grouping or community or tradition? What tendencies are there? Because there are lots of different things going on. The next thing to do after listening to somebody, if you want to have a context, you need to know the kinds of things you would need to know about anyone to place them in time and space, because they’re not on some remote asteroid out there that just zoomed in for a quick bit of terrorism.

He spoke a bit about the need for more Muslims in journalism, education, the arts and culture, etc.:

In recent years, in fact for quite some time, I’ve had this conversation when I’ve been invited to speak to Muslim groups. I ask, you know, what are the professions of the people who are there and then I ask how many people are involved in journalism, the arts and culture? And there’s hardly anyone. And so my question at that point is, for people who are worried about Islamophobia and about media representations of Muslims, if you’re not involved in it, you really don’t have very much of a right to complain. I think that, for people like yourself who are going into journalism, education, the arts and culture, that’s a very appropriate thing to do and it needs to have more attention by everyone.

And he gave me a little bit of his own background:

I had an experience as an exchange student in South America when I was 16 and I was kind of taken aback by how little prepared I was for that experience. And this drew my attention to the way in which many Americans are simply not in a good position to be familiar with other cultures. People come here from around the world, but then it’s no longer necessary for us to know anything about those other cultures. That’s the paradox. So I think international studies and global culture is a big challenge for American education. So I’ve really devoted my career to that. So I asked myself at one point — I thought religious studies would be a good way to deal with this because it deals with such a profound level, that goes all the way through culture, society, you name it. And then — what is the area of biggest ignorance? To say Islam is the area of biggest ignorance is still obviously the case.

Eli Clifton: America is just one poorly-regulated fraternity.

[Winter 2013]

The Center for American Progress came out with a report in 2011 that did some important Islamophobia-related math: the Islamophobia industry — an American industry built on the fear of almost one-sixth of the world’s population — is a $40 million industry. $40 million. Reporter Eli Clifton did some of the math for the report. I spoke to him in January. We talked about the funds, the players and the consequences. We talked about the oft-mentioned “clash of civilizations” viewpoint on Islam and the West:

I understand where folks like Peter King come from, and it’s from a view of Islam and the West as two things at war. It’s a dangerous narrative because it’s al-Qaeda’s narrative; that is the narrative of the terrorists – that Islam and the West are inherently in conflict, that of course they’re at war. I mean, you’re quite literally letting the terrorists win if that’s the type of rhetoric and perspective on Muslims that you’re adopting.

We talked about America’s hazing process:

As a country, we’re probably getting better at identifying when we’re suggesting that a certain group doesn’t fit in the United States. Jews, Catholics, the Irish, the Italians, Japanese Americans have all faced similar types of charges. The story hasn’t changed that much. It’s a pretty consistent set of charges that are laid against “the other.” And I think we’re getting better at identifying it. That’s a narrative right there — to talk about how this is largely an immigrant community, how this fits into an American narrative. And it’s a good story, I think. America is just one poorly-regulated fraternity.

We talked about what makes him angry about American counterterrorism efforts:

My view is that counterterrorism is best accomplished by treating it as a criminal problem. You shouldn’t glorify terrorists and you glorify them when you buy into the narrative that they are involved in a war, a cultural or religious war. You should treat them as common criminals. You try to set off a bomb, we’re going to treat you as a criminal. We’re not going to give you the glory of being some sort of a war hero. I found that very troubling. That’s a very lousy way of going about counterterrorism training, to suggest that we’re involved in this centuries-old conflict. No. Your job is to stop terrorism in all forms. If the terrorists happen to be Muslim. The problem is that they’re terrorists; it’s not that they’re Muslim. You’re giving them their narrative, and you shouldn’t be.

Let’s talk to the guy who was MSA president at NYU when 9/11 happened.

[Winter 2013]

When I interviewed Haroon Moghul, he told me he’s tired of being a “professional Muslim” and he’s trying now to focus on other things that are a part of his identity. My first thought was that if this actually happens, we’ll have lost one of our funniest professional Muslims. I got a laugh while transcribing this interview because Haroon and I talked for a solid five minutes about how special it feels to go to the eye doctor (“It’s all about which one I think is better,” he explains. “They’re like, ‘This one or this one?’ and I’m like, ‘Show me other ones.'”) Why is he so funny?

Humor always works. Humor terrifies people who don’t like you. If you are at all approachable, it destroys their narrative. So, I’ve been invited to discussions with very hostile audiences, where I will just play a comedian. It drives them off the wall. When you win over part of an audience, you’ve won. I think humanizing communities is really important.

We spent a good amount of time talking about why the Iraq War was more relevant for Islamophobes than 9/11:

I was in New York on 9/11, I had the great fortune of being MSA president at NYU, which is like a 15-minute walk from Ground Zero; we all saw it happen. What I saw in New York is, in that year after 9/11, that was my senior year, there was a lot of anger, obviously. There was hate and frustration, but there wasn’t a narrative provided to people to make sense of 9/11. And as a result, I think, people didn’t know what to do with this event. And when you don’t know what to do with an event, you don’t know how to respond thereafter. I think that the need to come up with a narrative to justify the Iraq War is what created the upsurge in Islamophobia…How we responded to 9/11 is really a critical issue. We could have made it a police action, we could have made it a ‘We’re just going to take out al-Qaeda’ thing, but instead we made it a ‘We’re going to invade Iraq and Afghanistan’ thing. And all these things are connected – so this secular Arab dictator has something to do with this religious zealot in Afghanistan? I don’t know, let’s make it up. I think that created the context for the momentum and basically it took off from there.

We talked about the consequences of the surveillance of Muslim American communities:

I think the main issue is that, 1. You’re not allowed to do this, you know? You have to show a cause for it. And 2. It has an effect on people. It affects the way they behave and it affects the meaningfulness of democracy. This applies to the NSA as well. And 3. It’s just a waste of money. And 4. The problem we have in the U.S. is that we never really look at context. Now that you have the drone wars and special operations command and the CIA running the kill list and things like that, we believe or we’ve been led to believe that we have a clean war. We don’t invade countries; we’re just firing missiles at bad guys. But nobody has ever explains how this ends. You’ve just kind of gotten through 9/11, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and there’s just another wave of al-Qaeda being produced. It’s just going to happen again and again and again and again…So you’re just creating this monster and eventually it becomes autonomous. It seeks out threats to justify itself. And if there are no threats, it will invent threats.

We spoke a bit about his theory that we should be funding Islamophobes:

I see Islamophobia as a positive force. It forces people to be on their game. If you don’t have an opponent…I think Muslims are lucky because most Islamophobes are idiots. Like, they’re just not very intelligent people. They reproduce their ignorance whenever they’re presented with anything different. So my theory for Islamophobes is that we should be funding them. Just give them a microphone and let them talk. Eventually, they’ll say something about black people or gay people or women or Latinos and then, goodbye. We may not be the third rail, but something in there is the third rail.

Intelligent discussions and “Princess Bride” references with Hussein Rashid

[Winter 2013]

No one I know makes more sci-fi/fantasy references in conversations about anything at all (including Islamophobia) than Hussein. A New Yorker, professor, blogger and leader, Hussein is one of the reasons my own interest in Muslim American communities and Islamophobia developed. I talked to him in New York last week. We talked a bit about the weaknesses of journalists and editors:

News media also looks for easy stories. So we look for words that we think the audience understands, that don’t really mean what we think they mean. It’s this Princess Bride moment – “I do not think that word means what you think it means.” Jihad, shari’a, Allah, the Qur’an – these are words that have very specific meanings. Jihad, for example has a very modern definition, but then you try to read it back into 1400 years of history and it doesn’t make sense, and unless you start cutting and trimming stuff, it’s going to tell you a very different story than what you’re trying to tell. I understand there’s only so much you can write in 800 words, but I think careful selections in word choice, looking for experts in the field rather than the loudest voices, would go a long, long way...

...I think if we look at the entertainment industry, it’s a really mixed bag there, but I would be remiss in not shouting out some really great explorations of what it means to Muslim. And I don’t mean shows like “All American Muslim.” You know, in the Simpson’s, Bart had a Muslim friend, which was a really great episode about this whole Islamophobia thing that the “average American” feels. Bones or NCIS, they have really great story lines around Muslims and are they perfect? No, but that’s kind of the point, right? Muslims are human beings and the all-evil representation is as bad as the all-perfect representation. You need complex, nuanced representations of Muslims because Muslims are people at the end of the day. You’re going to get the unsung heroes and you’re going to get the people you pass by on the street every day.

He explained what he means by “intelligent discussions”:

Part of what I do is try to create more intelligent discussion around religion generally and Islam specifically. A lot of this came out of, interestingly, not September 11, but the run-up to the second Iraq War in 2003. People were saying that al-Qaeda was in bed with the Iranians. But wait, do you actually understand that al-Qaeda thinks the Iranians are heretics and they deserve to be put to death because they’re Shi’i? So, how did we get to be friends with them? And that they’re partnering with Saddam Hussein, who’s a secularist with a religious nationalist movement – do you actually understand anything about how these pieces fit? Oil and water do not mix and realpolitik can only cover so much of that. It was at that point that I realized people just don’t know that much about religion. The term now is “religious illiteracy.” And I think anti-shari’a legislation is a good example of this. People say, “Oh, you must mean only Muslims because shari’a is a scary, foreign-sounding word,” but not actually realizing the things it’s affecting are other communities who live by religious laws, like Jews and Catholics.

Hind Makki wants to clean our dirty laundry.

[Winter 2013]

If you’re a Chicago-area Muslim, you’ve probably heard of Hind Makki or seen her blogs, Hindtrospectives and Side Entrance. I interviewed her a couple weeks ago.

She talked a little about Side Entrance, a blog that documents “the beautiful, the adequate and the pathetic” of women’s prayer spaces in mosques:

I was always interested in how different communities build their mosques. At least in my mosque, women and girls were encouraged to go, they would give lectures, they were part of the community. Lots of other communities don’t do that. I remember very clearly, when I was 15 years old, my sister, my dad and and I went to a mosque in Devon Street, which is a heavily immigrant, South Asian community in downtown Chicago, and we went to a mosque to attend the Friday prayer. We got there and my dad goes, “Okay, where are my girls gonna go?” And the uncle said, “Oh, there’s no place for women.” And my dad’s like, “Where are they going to go?” This was before cell phones. The uncle’s like, “They can stay in the car.” And we were like, “Wait, do we not need to pray?” It was such a weird experience...

...I was in a mosque in downtown Chicago that had a really small space for women; it’s not where women pray for Friday prayers or Taraweeh prayers during Ramadan, but it is where you go if want to duck in there and pray on a random day, it is where you’re going to pray. It’s eight feet wide, twenty feet tall. I took a picture of this and posted it on my Facebook. What surprised me was that my Muslim male friends were like, “What the fatwa?” That started me thinking: “I wonder what my Muslim male friends would say if they saw where Muslim women pray.” I think that Muslim men and women need to work together; it says in the Qur’an that believing men and believing women are partners to each other. That little picture that I posted, my Muslim male friends were shocked...

...I’ve gotten some flack for the name, Side Entrance. Some men have been like, “Why are you calling it that?” And I say, “Because I literally have to enter through a side entrance to get into a mosque!” I’ve actually gotten much more support than flack, but the flack I have gotten is about Islamophobia. Some boys have said to me, “Well, why are you giving fodder to Islamophobes?” My response to them is, “We need to clean our dirty laundry.” This is true – this is our dirty laundry. Islamophobes will say, “Look at how Muslim women are treated in their mosques.” We need to clean it.

And she gave some suggestions to media organization on how to better include the narratives of Muslim Americans:

If a reporter has a contact who is of a Muslim background, they can ask, what else can you talk about? They can pass that contact around to talk about other things. Most Muslims in this country fall into four professional categories: doctor, engineer, small business owner, cab driver. You want to talk about medical ethics issues? Okay, well, if the president of the mosque is a doctor, maybe you want to reach out to him or her. Set aside the Islamophobia question and ask, “What do you think about this medical issue? What do Muslims think about this ethical issue?” For small business owners, “What do you think about this local zoning issue?” It’s important to expand how Muslims can contribute to public conversations...

...For me, one of the reasons I wanted to do Hindtrospectives, my blog, was because I write a lot about Muslims, interfaith, women, racism, I love that stuff. I live and breathe and read that stuff all the time. But I also really want to write about Sleepy Hollow, I want to write about the intersection of popular culture and religion or race. I’m happy to talk about that! Nobody’s ever talked to me about that. When I got my media appearances earlier this year, it was about Muslim women, women in scarves, Femen, things like that. I’m happy to talk about it, but it’s not the whole of who I am. I love figure skating! How come nobody’s ever asked me about figure skating?

“What the fatwa?” is definitely my new favorite phrase.

These are the worst things that could happen to me on a travel reporting trip.

[Winter 2013]

I’m sitting in an airport food court area at 4:30 a.m. surrounded by depressed-looking single travellers and even-more-depressed-looking pairs of travellers when the feelings hit me: the creeping, deep-in-the-black-hole-that-is-your-gut sadness that repeats to your brain, over and over again, and echoes throughout your entire being, “You are alone. You will fail. You should give up.”

I’ve just begun my first ever one-woman travel reporting trip for a project upon which my Master’s degree depends. I should be excited and nervous, like on the first day of school, but I’m not. I’m (and I’ve considered these terms carefully) sad and puke-y, like when you’re in grad school. I don’t really have enough energy to spend on being sad and puke-y, given the importance of this project and the lack of time I have to complete it, so I’ve decided to just face my fears. Below is a list of the worst things that could happen to me on a travel reporting trip.

I could interview everyone and then realize my camera was off/the lens cap was on the whole time.

My camera could break.

I could miss a plane or bus and have to call a source and be like, “Uhhh, I missed my bus.” And they could be like, “Wow, you’re a massive failure and I hate you.”

I could lose my belongings and then have to use a makeshift tripod for every interview.

A variety of places I go to eat and rest could just not have coffee.

I could just spend all my travel time thinking about how life is really just a long process of dying and how small we are and how really, nothing we do matters and the people we call our own will leave us in a variety of ways and the chances of each person finding people they are compatible with is slim to none and how, for most of us, in just 80-100 years, no one will remember who we were or what we did.

I could get back to school and find out my audio sucks a whole lot and it isn’t usable at all.

I could get a call from Berkeley while I’m out reporting and they could be like, “We just checked our records and realized we were actually trying to accept the other Nausheen into the j-school, not you. Lol sorry!”

I could get a call from my mom and she could be like, “Oh hey, I don’t love you anymore. Hope you’re well, ttyl.”

(I know the last two are highly unlikely, but admit it, you’ve thought them, too.)

Reporting and life are both for the brave. I will try to be one of the brave.

snippets

snippets 2023

[Dec 2023]

The Last White Man, Mohsin Hamid

…often he did not have the energy to think, but when he did, he thought of what made a death a good death, and his sense was that a good death would be one that did not scare the boy, that a father’s duty was not to avoid dying in front of his son, this a father could not control, but rather that if a father did have to die in front of his son, he ought to die as well as he was able, to do it in a way that left his son with something, that left his son with the strength to live, and the strength to know that one day he could die well himself, as his father had, and so Anders’s father strove to make his final journey to his death into a giving, into a fathering, and it would not be easy, it was not easy, it was almost impossible, but that is what he set his mind, while he had his mind, on attempting to do.

Reader, Come Home, Maryanne Wolf

The question I must confront in my self-appointed role as reading worrier is whether the carefully built internal platforms are being sufficiently formed in our young before they automatically turn to their default intelligence and look up an unknown name or concept. It is not that I prefer internal to external platforms of knowledge; I want both, but the internal one has to be sufficiently formed before automatic reliance on the external ones take over. Only in this developmental sequence do I trust that they will know when they do not know.

The Lonely City, Olivia Laing

What I am trying to say is that the vicious circle by which loneliness proceeds does not happen in isolation, but rather as an interplay between the individual and the society in which they are embedded, a process perhaps worsened if they are already a sharp critic of that society’s inequities.

Sacred Nature, Karen Armstrong

If we could see God clearly, it would not be God. But if we could learn to contemplate nature correctly, we find that the tiniest particle of soil can yield a glimpse of the ineffable divine.

Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey

The idea of living in a world but not being part of it is a long-held tradition taught to me by my Ancestors. My grandparents and parents lived it daily and I grew up in Sunday School singing congregational songs with lyrics like: “This joy that I have / The world didn’t give it to me / The world didn’t give it / The world can’t take it away.” I am grateful for this politics of refusal and of listening to what we know to be true.

Where The Past Begins, Amy Tan

-- When I received prizes, I gave dour acceptance speeches. One went something like this: The moon is more admired when it was full than when it was a sliver, and yet it is the same moon even when the perspective of others had changed. A book reviewer for the local newspaper wrote that I gave the most morose acceptance they had ever heard.

-- A poet friend quoted another writer -- who? -- that we write to prolong the time between our two deaths: the physical death of our being when we cease to exist, and the death of us when no one remembers us, which can be weeks, months, years…I write to prolong my memory of life now, to see that I have had thoughts, emotions, ideas, encounters, and experiences. If I cannot remember, it is as if I had not lived those days, and that my life was the barest of details I do remember.

Becoming The Writer You Already Are, Michelle R. Boyd

-- What I am saying is that uncomfortable, unpleasant feelings are an unavoidable part of being a writer. And you are mistaken if you believe that the writing struggles you face are proof that you are “just not cut out” for this work. Instead, quite the opposite is true. The research tells us that, when you have those feelings, “you are not being weak-willed, thin-skinned, oversensitive, underdisciplined, or lazy. You are reacting to a subconscious awareness of a potential thread” (Bane, 2012, p. 27)

-- In other words, when you make time to develop your writing process, you are not just writing. You are also choosing, at that moment, to ignore the institutional and professional pressures to overwork and overproduce. You’re deciding to move with more care and deliberation in your writing, despite the possible negative consequences that come with prioritizing the quality of your experience over the pace of your production (Ahmed, 2014).

Go Tell It On The Mountain, James Baldwin

Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in pause, the void, the terror between the living and the dead; how, all garments rent and cast aside, the naked soul passed over the very mouth of Hell. Once there, there was no turning back; once there, the soul remembered, though the heart sometimes forgot. For the world called to the heart, which stammered to reply; life, and love, and revelry, and, most falsely, hope, called the forgetful, the human heart. Only the soul, obsessed with the journey it had made, and had still to make, pursued its mysterious and dreadful end; and carried, heavy with weeping and bitterness, the heart along.

Bewilderment, Richard Powers

Watching medicine fail my child, I developed a crackpot theory: Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing. My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody’s perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.

Saving Time, Jenny Odell

-- In Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, Caitlin Rosenthal surveys the bookkeeping practices of these plantations and finds an uncomfortable analogy with more contemporary business strategies: “Though modern practices are rarely compared to slaveholders’ calculations, many planters in the American South and the West Indies shared our obsession with data…Plantation owners were some of the earliest users of what we would now call spreadsheets, producing preprinted work logs and conducting labor-timing experiments similar to the ones Taylor would become famous for many decades later.

-- Perhaps this is precisely what Pieper meant with his “vertical” time -- maybe it is vertical not just in that it’s the opposite of horizontal, but also in that it reaches deep into the recesses of history even as it stretches up toward an infinite and utopian ideal. If the concept of leisure has any utility, for me it has to be this: an interruption, an apprehension, a glimpse both of the truth and of something completely different from what we normally see. The leisure is alien not just to the world of work, but also to the habitual, everyday world. Given the opportunity to slow down, what I find is not slowness per se, but simply what has been happening all along, just outside my perception.

-- For Davies, what happens in Cancer Alley illustrates the concept of slow violence, a term coined by Rob Nixon, of the High Meadows Environmental Institute, for harms that remain below the level of public perception because they’re too gradual and lack a spectacle. But Davies makes one important clarification: “Instead of accepting Nixon’s oft-cited definition of slow violence as ‘out of sight,’ we have to instead ask the question: ‘out of sight to whom?’” A spectacle means something different for those who view it on the news for a week than it does for the people who live in it.

-- Sitting like that in the midst of a chaotic meantime, the Buddha reminded me of an anecdote from Ajahn Chah, a Thai meditation master: “You see this goblet? I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When the sun shines in, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over, my elbow knocks it off the shelf, and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.”

The Sea, John Banville

I do not entertain the possibility of an afterlife, or any deity capable of offering it. Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him. No, what I am looking forward to is a moment of earthly expression. That is it, that is it exactly: I shall be expressed, totally. I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said. Has this not always been my aim, is this not, indeed, the secret aim of all of us, to be no longer flesh but transformed utterly into the gossamer of unsuffering spirit? Bang, crash, shudder, the very walls shaking.

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Mahmood Mamdani

-- When he told me that he was a survivor of Auschwitz, I asked him what lesson he had drawn from this great crime. He explained that, like all victims of Auschwitz, he, too, had said, “Never again.” In time, though, he had come to realize that this phrase lent itself to two markedly different conclusions: one was that never again should this happen to my people; the other that it should never again happen to any people. Between these two interpretations, I suggest nothing less than our common survival is at stake.

-- Some years before, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force J. Michael Kelly had told a 1983 National Defense University conference attended by Colonel North: “I think the most critical special operations mission we have today is to persuade the American public that the communists are out to get us. If we win the war of ideas, we will win everywhere else.”...No matter the language, the message was consistent: first waged in Vietnam, the war for “hearts and minds” was to be brought home, and in this propaganda effort all institutional safeguards that we may think of as key to a functioning democracy -- particularly congressional oversight and an independent press -- were considered as no more than inconveniences to be set aside in organizing an efficient war effort.

-- Few would fail to notice the growing common ground between the perpetrators of 9/11 and the official response to it called “the war on terror.” Both sides deny the possibility of a middle ground, calling for a war to the finish. Both rally forces in the name of justice but understand justice as revenge. If the perpetrators of 9/11 refuse to distinguish between official America and the American people, target and victim, “the war on terror” has proceeded by dishing out collective punishment, with callous disregard for either “collateral damage” or legitimate grievances. Both practices are likely to nurture the spirit of revenge.

Feel Free, Zadie Smith

-- I am writing about her first and foremost because she is an old woman and therefore a destination point on a journey that lies before me. For I have finished being a young woman. Now I embark upon the process of becoming an old one, a long process, to be sure -- I don’t pretend I am very far along in it -- but it would be another kind of delusion to imagine I haven’t begun.

-- I saw myself as some kind of decorative Moor, the kind who does not need to wrestle dolphins or anything else, a Moor of leisure, a Moor who lunches, a Moor who needn’t run for her livelihood through the public squares. A historically unprecedented kind of Moor. A late-capitalism Moor. A tourist Moor. The sort of Moor who enters a public square not to protest or to march (or, in an earlier age, to be hanged or sold) but simply to wander about, without purpose. A Moor who has come to look at the art. A Moor who sits on the lip of a fountain and asks herself: “What, if anything, is the purpose of the artist today?” A Moor with the luxury of doing that.

Islam And The Destiny Of Man, Charles Le Gai Eaton

-- Religion is a different matter.
Other subjects may lend themselves, in varying degrees, to objective study, and in some cases personal commitment serves only to distort what should be a clear and balanced picture. Religion is a different matter because here objectivity only skims the surface, missing the essential. The keys to understanding lie within the observer’s own being and experience, and without these keys no door will open. This is particularly true of Islam, a religion which treats the distinction between belief and unbelief as the most fundamental of all possible distinctions, comparable on the physical level to that between the sighted and the blind.

-- It is said that ar-Rahman is like the blue sky, serene and full of light, which arches over us and over all things, whereas ar-Rahim is like a warm ray coming from that sky, touching individual lives and events an vivifying the earth…If ar-Rahman is simply what is there -- a sky full of light -- then it might also be translated as ‘joy,’ and joy by its very nature is expansive and communicates itself; in this case ar-Rahim represents that act of communication.

-- Muslims mystics refer to the ‘heart’ as the barzakh, which means ‘isthmus’; on the one side is the sea of this world, subject to wind and weather; on the other, the ocean of the Beyond, the celestial ocean. An isthmus divides two bodies of water, but it is also the link between them. On this side you step into the sea of change, but if you cross that little strip of land, you may plunge into the great ocean. The isthmus belongs to both, just as the ‘heart,’ the centre, is ours and not yet ours.

-- God is the Creator not only at the beginning of time but now, in this instant, and forever; He creates a new world in each infinitesimal moment of time. Phenomena cannot be the cause of other phenomena, event cannot beget events, for then they would be ‘gods’ beside God…The audience watching a movie sees a smooth sequence of cause-and-effect operating in time, but in fact the successive frames on the film passing through the projector do not have any such relationship. A single frame is flashed on the screen; there is then a moment of darkness, imperceptible to the human eye, after which another frame appears.

Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad

...she went on to explain her theory, which she presented as truth, that when you read a novel about the occupation and feel understood, or watch a film and feel seen, your anger, which is like a wound, is dressed for a brief time and you can go on enduring, a bit more easily, and so time goes on running like an open faucet and each film at the cultural centre ends and we applaud as the credits roll with the list of crests of institutional donors like great European aristocratic families of old, and while there are moments in these concerts and poetry readings and lectures and plays when you might feel connected to the other people in the room, to the people behind the screen, you might feel a kind of flowering in the chest at this sight of your community’s resistance embalmed in art, some beauty created out of despair, all of this means that in the end you, or at least the middle classes, are less likely to fight the fight because despair has been relieved, momentarily...

Tremor, Teju Cole

-- You said the djinns were grieving one of their own or welcoming him home. Such are the things we say about death to the ones who are nearest to us. We speak this way because the present is infinite, always infinite, from the point of view of all we cannot yet know.

-- In this city of permanent ruin improvement is not possible and so the inhabitants have no dreams of improvement. Rather every night in their deep collective sleep they dream of a perfect city which in their dream language is a house that cannot be fixed but only knocked down and rebuilt and in that way perfected. These are not daydreams, they are real dreams and the dreamtime is busy with the activity of construction. The dream-citizens meet nightly and rebuild the razed city with elegant parks, sustainable infrastructure, humane architecture, and inclusive principles. They build from perfectly rational blueprints, bringing the city to perfection each night. They work all night on the dream city and in the morning they wake up exhausted without knowing why.

-- You think you know how hard life can get. Then something else happens, something of a kind different to what you ever allowed yourself to expect and you have to revise your whole picture. This doesn’t stop happening, there is no end of surprise. Strangeness arrives again and again, without end. With live on the accumulated ruins of experience.

Hostile Homelands, Azad Essa

-- The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), for instance, formed originally in 1913, has found ways to present itself as a civil rights organization while simultaneously working with the FBI in spying and sabotaging the work of Black and Arab activists, and most routinely conflating criticism of Israel to anti-Semitism.

-- For instance, in 1997, the VHPA formed the American Hindus Against Defamation (AHAD), modeled on the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Just as the ADL said its aim was to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” AHAD described itself as “dedicated to preserve the sanctity of Hindu symbols, icons, culture and customs.”

-- India seeks to tame Kashmiri sentiments for Palestine, knowing that it both expresses a solidarity with a global Muslim issue as well as a recognition of parallels between the two struggles. When police and army have harassed non-violent protests, Kashmiri boys and girls have restored to stone pelting, like the “children of the stones” as Palestinian youth were referred to during the first intifada.

Whereabouts, Jhumpa Lahiri

This is the private morphology of a family, of two people who fall in love and have children: an enterprise as mundane as it is utterly specific. And all at once I see how they form an ingenious organism, an impenetrable collective.

Stay True, Hua Hsu

-- There’s a telos of self-improvement baked into the immigrant experience. As a teenager, I busied myself with the school newspaper or debate club because, unlike with math or science, I thought I could actually get better at these things. You flip through your father’s old physics notebooks, and you know in your bones that these formulas and graphs will never make sense to you. But one day, you realize that your parents speak with a mild accent, and that they have no idea what passive voice is. The next generation would acquire a skill on their behalf -- one that we could also use against them. Commanding the language seemed like our only way of surpassing them. Home life took on a kind of casual litigiousness. The calm and composed children, a jaunty bounce to our sentences, laying traps with our line of questioning. The parents, tired and irritated, defaulting to the native tongue.

-- Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” I had always thought it was the other way around…The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them. This isn’t meant to be sad. To love friendship, he writes, “one must love the future.”

Bestiary, K-Ming Chang

-- Mrs. Kersaint wrote our lessons in red marker on the birdshit-stained window instead of on the blackboard. She said we should always face outside, learn in the direction of the trees…We got in trouble with the other teacher for never using plurals. When I said that Chinese words have no plural forms, she said, Then how do you know if it’s one thing or many? I said, One thing is always many.

-- Is it possible that she threw her daughters into a river? Maybe she thought they were on fire. Maybe she thought she was saving them. Is there a way to tell a story without sides?

snippets 2022

[Dec 2022]

Collected Short Fiction, V.S. Naipaul

To be the ascetic, to be mild and gentle and soft-spoken, withdrawn and ineffectual; to have created for oneself that little clearing in the jungle of the mind; and constantly to reassure oneself that the clearing still existed.

Our Country Friends, Gary Shteyngart

They had spent so much time of their lives boarding buses and watching the figure of the other recede in the dust.

teaching to transgress, bell hooks

Some thoughts on this book here.

-- One of the ways that this book has made me think about my teaching process is that I feel that the way I teach has been fundamentally structured by the fact that I never wanted to be an academic, so that I never had a fantasy of myself as a professor already worked out in my imagination before I entered the classroom. I think that’s been meaningful, because it’s freed me up to feel that the professor is something I become as opposed to a kind of identity that’s already structured and that I carry with me into the classroom.

-- It is not easy to name our pain, to theorize from that location.
I am grateful to the many women and men who dare to create theory from the location of pain and struggle, who courageously expose wounds to give us their experience to teach and guide, as a means to chart new theoretical journeys. Their work is liberatory.

Nobody Is Ever Misssing, Catherine Lacey

You’d think after all these months I’ve spent thinking about what we were and what we became that I’d have some kind of clue but I don’t have any. Do you have one? Could I see it? Could I borrow it? Or is this the kind of game where you keep all the clues to yourself until the game is over and someone opens the envelope and it says: It was the husband, in the office, with the chalkboard (which is funny because we were all so sure that it was the wife, in the kitchen, with the chef’s knife).

The Liar's Dictionary, Eley Williams

Perhaps the hourglass caused so much anxiety because as a graphic it offered no hint of eventual relief. Yes, it confirmed, you are rotting where you sit! This is all pointless! It was all for naught! Why did you learn all those piano scales, why did you memorise song lyrics, why did you ever care about pronouncing pronunciation correctly? The constant trickling of sand from one obconical end to the other gave no indication that any specific amount of time was being counted down.

How To Write A Thesis, Umberto Eco

-- A student makes hundreds of pages of photocopies and takes them home, and manual labor he exercises in doing so gives him the impression that he possesses the work. Owning the photocopies exempts the student from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo of accumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens to many.

-- If the book is yours and it does not have antiquarian value, do not hesitate to annotate it. Do not trust those who say that you must respect books. You respect books by using them, not leaving them alone. Even if the book is unmarked, you won’t make much money reselling it to a bookseller, so you may as well leave traces of your ownership.

A House For Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul

Anand, who had read in an American newspaper that ‘journalist’ was a pompous word, had said that his father was a reporter; which, though not grand, was unimpeachable.

Home In The World, Amartya Sen

-- As I was growing up, I was struck by the fact that so many of my uncles, including my mother’s only brother Kankarmama and various cousins on both sides, were in one jail or another. They were all kept in custody not because they had been convicted of doing anything, but because the colonial rulers had decided that they could harm the Raj if they remained at large. They were therefore imprisoned under the widely used colonial practice of ‘preventive detention.’ A few of them did have connections with organizers of violent events, but most of them, like Kankarmama, were staunchly committed to non-violence. However, non-violent writing and speeches in favor of independence, especially those aligned with Mahatma Gandhi, were enough of a qualification to be preventively detained by the Raj.

-- It turned out Mrs. Hanger’s fear of coloured people had some rational basis in her understanding of science. On my first day, after welcoming me warmly, she popped the question. ‘Will your colour come off in the bath -- I mean in a really hot bath?’ I had to reassure her that my colour was agreeably hardy and durable.

The Sentence, Louise Erdrich

For some reason, all this was making me uncomfortable, shy, ridiculous. I tried to shake that off because I want to be a person who can be trusted with these kinds of words.

Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, Ved Mehta

Ordinarily, when I finished something, even just a Comment piece, I would feel that it wasn’t any good, become overwhelmed by depression and fatigue, and ask myself, “Who needs more stuff to read? Why produce anything?”

The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje

-- She returned to her husband.
From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.
Seas move away, why not lovers? The harbours of Ephesus, the rivers of Heraclitus disappear and are replaced by estuaries of silt. The wife of Canduales becomes the wife of Gyges. Libraries burn.

-- I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently, just as Clifton might have opened a car door for you a year earlier and ignored the fate of his life. But all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.

Covering Muslims, Erik Bleich and A. Maurits van der Veen

Overall, articles in these more positive categories of family, culture, and education offer powerful testimony that shared values -- an appreciation of the beauty of art, the importance of family, and the value of education -- are at the heart of more positive coverage of Muslims and Islam…In addition, it points to a way that newspapers, and the journalists who produce their content, can work to balance the negative coverage associated with foreign, violence, and law and order topics.

On Being A Muslim, Farid Esack

-- ‘Wisdom,’ as the hadith says, ‘is the lost property of the believer, we retrieve it from wherever it comes.’ If this wisdom is the product of involvement with the mustad’afun fi’l ard (the downtrodden in the earth), in this case, Christians in Pakistan, then it is far more valuable than that produced by the enthralling theological gymnastics of the ‘ulama (clerics) of the court.

-- The Qur’anic use of sabr has little to do with the word saaba that is often invoked in South Africa or the Urdu sabr as used in India and Pakistan. The latter denotes patience, endurance, self-restraint, resignation, submission or suffering. Sabr in Arabic, not necessarily Arab society, is the active quality of exercising fortitude and perseverance in the midst of a struggle to heed the voice of one’s islam. It is fortitude during the struggle to discern what is required from us in the various stages of our journey to Allah, the struggle to gradually narrow the gap between our beliefs and actions.

-- The choice is not between revelation and revolution, nor is the question whether we should get involved in politics or not, for all of us are already involved. The question is not whether religion can be used for political purposes, either. The question is which religion -- that of the feudal lord or the villager -- and for whose objectives: for a narrow class of capital’s interest or for God’s family -- ‘the people’ and their only home -- the earth.

Black Paper, Teju Cole

-- “You once wrote, 'For both hunters and hunted, hiding well is the precondition for survival. Life depends upon finding cover. Everything hides. What has vanished has gone into hiding. An absence -- as after the departure of the dead -- is felt as a loss but not as an abandonment. The dead are hiding elsewhere.'
When I got the terrible news that you'd died, it felt to me like a sudden darkness. But, John, since then, I've been discovering a fragment here, a passage there, a drawing over there, signs of you around the world, and these are like feathers you've thoughtfully placed in the places where we meet.
I know you're only hiding.”

-- Photography writes with light, but not everything wants to be displayed. Among the human rights is the right to remain obscure, unseen, and dark.

False Papers, Andre Aciman

Or am I afraid of finding Caffè Reggio totally empty but for one table, occupied by one person, sitting as I had pictured her sitting exactly thirty years ago to remind me that I’ve never forgotten her, that she, too, may have never forgotten me, and that if I eventually managed to forget her and have long ceased to love her, she remains, to use Nietzsche’s words, the “star love” of my life, the quasar that lost its light but continues to exert silent gravitational pull on every planet I’ve encountered?

snippets 2021

[Dec 2021]

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Franz Kafka

A long time ago he had firmly decided to observe everything with complete thoroughness, so that he might not be somehow taken by surprise in a roundabout way, from behind, from above. Now he once remembered that long-forgotten decision and forgot it, as one draws a short thread through the eye of a needle.

Essays One, Lydia Davis

-- I became willing to allow aspects of the painting to remain mysterious, and I became willing to allow aspects of other problems to remain unsolved as well, and it was this new tolerance for, and then satisfaction in, the unexplained and unsolved that marked a change in me.

-- Etc. is a sign of the process of thinking and writing. Etc. is a note within a note from the author to himself reminding him of the rest of a thought or an association so evident to him that he does not need to write it out. Etc. in a work released to a reader invites a witness, a closer witness to the process, the act of writing. Etc. invites or demands that the reader complete the thought, the association; etc. says that both writer and reader know how this continues.

-- Why is there any need to find them again (childhood friend and grammar book)? To tie together that past and this present, but also that self that I was then with this self now? Is it once again a question of saying, Yes, I do exist, and Yes, I did exist all along? This self that must somehow be dealt with -- reaffirmed, subdued, or merely ignored and taken for granted.

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

-- Personally, my hope lies in the last days. The prophet Muhammad -- peace be upon Him! -- tells us that on the Day of Resurrection everyone will be struck unconscious. Deaf and dumb. No chitchat. Tongueless. And what a bloody relief that will be.

-- Reporters were factional, fanatical, obsessively defending their own turf, propounding the same thing day after day. So it had always been. Who would have guessed that John and Luke would take such different angles on the scoop of the century, the death of the Lord? It just went to prove that you couldn’t trust these guys.

Red Pill, Hari Kunzru

-- The truth is the savages should always eat the anthropologist. They should murder the botanist who comes tripping through the jungle looking for the blue flower, because after him will come the geologist and the surveyor and the mining engineer and the soldiers to protect the miners as they work.

-- I looked at the books and papers on my desk, carefully piled up and straightened. They seemed diminished, unserious, the detritus of a boy’s hobby. Why had I not chosen to do the things that men do? Ordering the world. Exerting my will. Instead I’d built whatever this was, this rat’s nest of paper.

Brick Lane, Monica Ali

Poetry is something different. You have to drink it with your mother’s milk.

The Lover, Laury Silvers

“And you?” Yulduz faced him. “Now that you’re police? What’re you off to do today?”
“Kill children. Then we’ll roast them on a spit.”
Zaytuna slapped his arm and then turned to her, “Auntie Yulduz, he’s not that kind of police.”
Looking Tein square in the face, she stated, “There’s no other kind of police.”

Homie, Danez Smith

-- & my grandma is my president & her cabinet is her cabinet
cause she knows to trust what the pan knows
how the skillet wins the war

-- you are not
a thing i can touch, a voice i can call
a shot at the bar, a shot at making it big
but didn’t you? didn’t you make it big, fam?
aren’t you all of it now? i call for God.
i call for God but out comes your name.

The Novel Of The Future, Anaïs Nin

-- This book is dedicated to sensitive Americans. May they create a sensitive America.

-- A diary is valuable to a writer; I am certain of that. The negative aspect is merely one of range. If it is limited, trivial, narrow in its range, it is valueless. If it grows in depth and range, it can be indispensable to the writer.

My Cat Yugoslavia, Pajtim Statovci

Over time I forgot the most basic words in my mother tongue and started speaking Finnish to my siblings, and though he punished us harshly for it, we carried on because none of us wanted him to understand.

The Light At The Bottom Of The World, London Shah

We’ll do anything to hide in a familiar past, hoping it’ll save us, distract us from facing this world. But trying to hold on to the Old World leaves nothing for here and now -- only fear.

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

“There is still one of which you never speak.”
Marco Polo bowed his head.
“Venice,” the Khan said.
Marco smiled. “What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?”
The emperor did not turn a hair. “And yet I have never heard you mention that name.”
And Polo said: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”

On Becoming A Novelist, John Gardner

The feeling that one’s friends have no taste, even if it’s true, is not a healthy feeling for a writer: it fills him with arrogance and self-pity, makes him a bad friend and, as a result, makes him a person plagued by secret guilt. One approach is to find a better pack of friends; another is to strive to become a more generous person. The latter way, if the writer can bring it off, will considerably enhance his odds of becoming a good writer if he ever starts working again. Occasionally, mean-spirited people have written good books, but the odds for it are long.

Working, Robert Caro

In my defense: while I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is. And finding facts -- through reading documents or through interviewing and re-interviewing -- can’t be rushed; it takes time. Truth takes time.

The Remains Of The Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

‘I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better if the Almighty had created us all as - well - as sort of plants. You know, firmly embedded in the soil. Then none of this rot about wars and boundaries would have come up in the first place.’

On Writing, Stephen King

-- It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

-- If you write a novel, spend weeks and then months catching it word by word, you owe it both to the book and to yourself to lean back (or take a long walk) when you’ve finished and ask yourself why you bothered -- why you spent all that time, why it seemed so important.

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

-- You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

-- I now warn the reader not to mock me and mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate’s way -- even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications.

Immigrant, Montana, Amitava Kumar

-- Before I left India, my grandmother had joked that I would marry a white woman and become a sahib. I would never return home. But I’m going to bring my white bride to the village, I said to her. And she said, No, no, don’t do that. She will ask you why your grandmother has got such a flat nose. It is flat like a bedbug’s back.

-- I am dazzled by the trappings of urban civilization. In our mentor’s class, a line from Trotsky: Yet every time a peasant’s horse shies in terror before the blinding lights of an automobile on the Russian road at night, a conflict of two cultures is reflected in the episode. I am and I am not the peasant; I am never not the horse.

The Wrong End Of The Telescope, Rabih Alemeddine

-- Writing simplifies life, you said, forces coherence on discordant narratives, unless it doesn’t, and most of the time it doesn’t, because really, how can one make sense of the senseless? One puts a story in a linear order, posits cause and effect, and then thinks one has arrived. Writing one’s story narcotizes it. Literature today is an opiate.

-- Did you believe that writing about the experience would help you to understand what happened? You still cling to romantic notions about writing, that you’ll be able to figure things out, that you will understand life, as if life is understandable, as if art is understandable. When has writing explained anything to you? Writing does not force coherence onto a discordant narrative.

Quicksand, Nella Larsen

She now believed sincerely that there was a law of compensation, and that sometimes it worked. For all those early desolate years she now felt recompensed. She recalled a line that had impressed her in her lonely school-days, “The far-off interest of tears.”

Dubliners, James Joyce

-- He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence in the third person and a predicate in the past tense...He allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob his bank but, as these circumstances never arose, his life rolled out evenly -- an adventureless tale.

-- In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: “Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?”

Chronicle Of A Death Foretold, Gabriel García Marquez

The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many chance events that had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we weren’t doing it from an urge to clear up mysteries but because none of us could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate.

A Time Outside This Time, Amitava Kumar

I have delayed it so far, but this is what I need to say: the writer’s job is to reveal where the experiment in living goes wrong.

Covering Islam, Edward Said

Every American reporter has to be aware that his or her country is the only superpower with interests and ways of pursuing those interests that other countries do not have. Independence of the press is and admirable thing, whether in practice or in theory; but nearly every American journalist reports the world with a subliminal consciousness that his or her corporation is a participator in American power which, when it is threatened by foreign countries, makes press independence subordinate to what are often only implicit expressions of loyalty and patriotism, of simple national identification. But surely this is not surprising. What is surprising is that the independent press is not normally thought of as taking part in foreign policy, although in many ways it so effectively does.

snippets 2020

[Dec 2020]

My Seditious Heart, Arundhati Roy

-- Take it very personally.

-- And there will not always be spectacular carnage to report on. Fascism is also about the slow, steady infiltration of all the instruments of state power. It's about the slow erosion of civil liberties, about unspectacular day-to-day injustices.

Life Of Pi, Yann Martel

Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Exhalation, Ted Chiang

-- Because even if a universe’s life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not. The buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the very lives we’ve led: none of them could have been predicted, because none of them was inevitable. Our universe might have slid into equilibrium emitting nothing more than a quiet hiss. The fact that it spawned such plenitude is a miracle, one that is matched only by your universe giving rise to you.

-- Lord, perhaps you don’t hear my prayers. But I’ve never prayed with the expectation that it would affect your actions; I prayed with the expectation that it would affect mine. So I pray now, for the first time in two months, because even if you’re not listening, I need the clarity of thought that prayer provides.

Enemies: A History Of The FBI, Tim Weiner

-- “Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: ‘Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful? Is it legal? Is it ethical or moral?’ We never gave any thought to this realm of reasoning, because we were just naturally pragmatists.The one thing we were concerned about was this: will this course of action work, will it get us what we want?”

-- Nixon had been bombing Cambodia, a neutral nation, seeking to strike Vietcong and North Vietnamese supply depots. The bombing violated international law. But the story violated international law. But the story violated the principles of secrecy. The president saw it an act of treason -- “a leak which was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans.”

-- “If we don’t do this, people will die.” You can supply your own this: “If we don’t collect this type of information,” or “If we don’t use this technique,” or “If we don’t extend this authority.” It is extraordinarily difficult to be the attorney standing in front of the freight train that is the need for this...It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say “no” when it matters most. It takes moral character.

The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai

-- “This is putting the cart before the horse a bit,” Yale sad. Esme raised her glass. “Well, here’s to the carts. May the horse catch up.”

-- “The whole play is about Hamlet trying to avenge his father’s death, trying to tell the truth, right? And then when he dies, he hands it all to Horatio. In this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story...But what a burden. To be Horatio. To be the one with the memory.”

The Overcoat And Other Short Stories, Nikolai Gogol

But there is nothing enduring in this world, and that is why even joy is not as keen in the moment that follows the first; and a moment later it grows weaker still and finally merges imperceptibly into one’s usual state of mind, just as a ring on the water, made by the fall of a pebble, merges finally into the smooth surface.

The Life Of The Mind, Hannah Arendt

-- The ideas in sleep, he suspects, “may be clearer and broader than the very clearest in the waking state,” precisely because “man, at such times, is not sensible of his body.” And of these ideas, on waking up, we remember nothing. Dreams are something still different; they “do not belong here.”

-- We all know: Unpredictably, decades ago, You arrived/ among that unending cascade of creatures spewed/ from Nature’s maw. A random event, says Science./ But that does not prevent us from answering with the poet:/ Random my bottom! A true miracle, say I,/ for who is not certain that he was meant to be?

Kartography, Kamila Shamsie

-- Aba had always said that it was easy to condemn people; condemnation was an act of smugness, wasn’t it? Didn’t it arise from the certainty that you would never do what you were condemning someone else for? But how could you say that unless you could slip into their soul, peer around and see what serpents fed there, what abysses gaped?

I backed away. “God, you’d make a good tyrant.”

“I’m a mother. The boundary between the two is sometimes very blurry.”

Her Body And Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado

-- Only after the sixth small black girl goes missing does the police commissioner finally make a statement, interrupting the season finale of a popular soap opera. The enraged letters start coming soon after. “Are you going to tell me if Susan’s baby belongs to David or not, Mister Police Commissioner??????” says one. Another person sends anthrax.

-- I was reminded, for the umpteenth time, of Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarization; of zooming in so close to something, and observing it so slowly, that it begins to warp, and change, and acquire new meaning.

Are You My Mother?, Alison Bechdel

Eleven is the first number that can't be counted on two human hands. It goes beyond, transgresses, and for that reason has an association with sin.

So Sad Today, Melissa Broder

I don’t want to be older and wiser, I want to be younger and hotter: a love story.

I miss the sex that I thought was love, but you knew was just sex: a love story.

You said spirituality couldn’t be bought but I felt really holy eating egg salad sandwiches in your apartment: a love story.

My Sister, The Serial Killer; Oyinkan Braithwaite

I watched a TEDx video once where the man said that carrying around a notebook and penning one happy moment each day had changed his life. That is why I bought the notebook. On the first page, I wrote, I saw a white owl through my bedroom window. The notebook has been mostly empty since.

Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman

At the moments when you’re leveling up -- say, you’re accepting a promotion or you’re on an extravagant vacation you can finally afford or you’re at the Grammys -- take a look at who is surrounding you. You cannot be surrounded by people you’ve known for only two years.

Orientalism, Edward Said

-- Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.

-- In 1973, during the anxious days of the October Arab-Israeli War, the New York Times Magazine commissioned two articles, one representing the Israeli and one the Arab side of the conflict. The Israeli side was presented by an Israeli lawyer; the Arab side, by an American former ambassador to an Arab country who had no formal training in Oriental studies.

English, August, Upamanyu Chatterjee

-- He realized obscurely that the sense of loneliness was too precious to be shared, and finally incommunicable, that men were, ultimately, islands; each had his own universe, immense only to himself, far beyond the grasp or the interest of others. For them the pettiness of the ordeal was unrecordable, worthy, at best, only of a flicker of empathy.

-- “I feel quite happy when two really fucked people marry each other -- the world begins to look organized.”

Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeleine Thien

-- “I promise you that for all our life together, I will seek worlds that we might never have encountered in our singularity and our solitude.”

-- “The things you experience,” she continued, “are written on your cells as memories and patterns, which are reprinted again on the next generation. And even if you never lift a shovel or plant a cabbage, every day of your life something is written upon you. And when you die, the entirety of that written record returns to earth. All we have on this earth, all we are, is a record. Maybe the only things that persist are not the evildoers and demons (though, admittedly, they do have a certain longevity) but copies of things.”

-- Tomorrow begins from another dawn, when we will be fast asleep. Remember what I say: not everything will pass.

Muslim Cool, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer

-- For most of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the yearly conventions of the community of Imam W.D. Mohammed and ISNA were held in two different parts of the Chicago metropolitan area during the Labor Day weekend. The tens of thousands of Muslims attracted by each convention were segregated along an ethnic divide, with the primarily US Black American Muslim “Warith Deen community” inhabiting hotels in the Loop or the south suburbs and primarily South Asian US American Muslims of ISNA, along with some Arab US American Muslims, filling a convention center in Rosemont, a northern suburb.

-- Specifically, he cited the Qur’anic verse 2:141: ‘Now those people who have passed away: unto them shall be accounted what they have earned; and unto you, what you have earned; and you will not be judged on the strength of what they did.’ He amplified the point by referencing Frantz Fanon: ‘Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.’

Native Son, Richard Wright

To those who wanted to kill him he was not human, not included in that picture of Creation; and that was why he had killed it. To live, he had created a new world for himself, and for that he was to die.

The Death Of Ivan Ilych And Other Stories, Leo Tolstoy

-- “Will the human race come to an end? Can any one who looks at the world as it is have the slightest doubt of it? Why, it is just as certain as death is certain. We find the end of the world inculcated in all the teachings of the Church, and in all the teachings of Science it is likewise shown to be inevitable.”

-- This wound in the side was fatal, and he felt that he was dying. Memories and pictures succeeded one another with extraordinary rapidity in his imagination...All these images passed through his mind without evoking any feeling within him: neither pity nor anger nor any kind of desire; everything seemed so insignificant in comparison with what was beginning, or had already begun, within him.

Redefining Realness, Janet Mock

Being exceptional isn’t revolutionary, it’s lonely. It separates you from your community. Who are you, really, without community? I have been held up consistently as a token, as the “right” kind of trans woman (educated, able-bodied, attractive, articulate, heteronormative). It promotes the delusion that because I “made it,” that level of success is easily accessible to all young trans women. Let’s be clear: It is not.

In The Light Of What We Know, Zia Haider Rahman

-- When I once asked him how a physicist could believe in God, his answer was that physics did not explain everything and it did not answer the question, Why these laws and not others? For him, it was not enough to regard the world as being simply as it is. I would have to decide, he told me, whether science was enough for me.

-- The archbishop of York appeared on the show, and the presenter, Jonathan Dimbleby, said to him: Your Grace, there is a great upsurge of the urge in people for certainty. Their charge is that you offer them not that kind of certainty but doubt. The archbishop paused to reflect. With his hands clasped, as if in prayer, he replied: Has it occurred to you that the lust for certainty may be a sin?

The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert

-- “The bird that is shot is a parent,” he observed in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. “We take advantage of its most sacred instincts to waylay it, and in depriving the parent of life, we doom the helpless offspring to the most miserable of deaths, that by hunger. If this is not cruelty, what is?” Newton argued for a ban on hunting during breeding season, and his lobbying resulted in one of the first laws aimed at what today would be called wildlife protection: the Act for the Preservation of Sea Birds.

-- Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will be forever closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.

Kafka On The Shore, Haruki Murakami

“A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is not life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that observes to reason that acts. That’s what’s critical.”

Bland Fanatics, Pankaj Mishra

-- The barbarians, it turns out, were never at the gate; they have been ruling us for some time.

-- “Political thought as we understand it began in Athens,” Ryan asserts in the serenely pedagogical “Great Books” style of the early twentieth century; the hundreds of pages of lucid exposition that follow show no awareness of Chanakya, Mencius, Ashoka or al-Ghazali, or of traditions of political thought older than Greece’s.

Known And Strange Things, Teju Cole

-- Even though around the same time my own belief in God had faded away, I found that I needed to somehow retain belief in a cloud of witnesses. I had strayed away from religious dogma, but my hunger for miracle speech had not abated.

-- Then, one Sunday, in his hotel room, he realized that the pears sitting on the windowsill might make an interesting picture. And so he worked on the composition for twelve hours, until a breeze lifted the curtain in just the right way… “People ask me why I worked on one composition so long,” Abell wrote in response to my questions about this image. “My answer: for solace.”

-- The eagerness with which, minutes after he was declared winner of the elections, Obama was being narrated into the conventional African American story betrayed, I thought, an American longing for simplicity. The country had a love of clear narratives and optimistic story arcs, hence “We Shall Overcome” on the heels of a massively well-funded and astute display of machine politics.

-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, once asked whom the best reader of One Hundred Years Of Solitude was, responded with a story: “A Russian friend met a lady, a very old lady, who was copying the whole book out by hand, right to the last line. My friend asked her why she was doing it, and the lady replied, ‘Because I want to find out who is really mad, the author or me, and the only way to find out is to rewrite the book.’ I find it hard to imagine a better reader than that lady.”

-- I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.

Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi

Anne shook her head. “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” she said, and I shot her a killing look. “Opioids are the opiates of the masses,” I said.

Debriefing, Susan Sontag

-- She once told an interviewer that while the living room was fine for essays, short stories needed to be written in the bedroom. This distinction between outer and inner sancta seems a good way of approaching the contents of this volume.

-- A boyfriend had to be not just a best friend but taller, and only Peter qualified.

-- I saw you and thought, If I cannot say I love you I am lost. But I didn’t. Instead I am going to write a letter. The weakest move.

-- Love, please go on writing. Your letters will always reach me. You can write me in your real, your littlest script. I will hold it to the light. I will magnify it with my love.

snippets 2019

[Dec 2019]

A Treasury Of Kahlil Gibran

…With two hearts do/People live; a small one of deep/Softness, the other of steel. And/Kindness is too often a shield,/And generosity too often a sword.

Octavia’s Brood

I must call her soon, I thought many times. I must call Octavia. But what if she’s writing.

An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alammedine

-- Consider this: In order to elevate the Prophet Moses above all men, God granted him the miracle that would dazzle the people of his era. In those days, magicians were ubiquitous in Egypt, so all of Moses’ miracles involved the most imaginative of magic: rod into serpent, river into red blood, Red Sea into parting. During the Prophet Jesus’ time, medicine was king. Jesus healed lepers and raised the dead. During our Prophet’s time, poetry was admired, and God gifted Muhammad, an illiterate man, with the miracle of a matchless tongue. “This is our heritage, our inheritance — this is our magic.”

-- No nostalgia is felt as keenly as nostalgia for things that never existed.

The Myth Of Sisyphus, Albert Camus

-- Yes, there is beauty and there are the humiliated. Whatever may be the difficulties of the undertaking, I should like never to be unfaithful either to one or to the others.

-- One of the temptations of the artist is to believe himself solitary, and in truth he hears this shouted at him with a certain base delight. But this is not true. He stands in the midst of all, in the same rank, neither higher nor lower, with all those who are working and struggling. His very vocation, in the face of oppression, is to open the prisons and to give a voice to the sorrows and joys of all.

Twelve Steps To A Compassionate Life, Karen Armstrong

It is said that a pagan approached Hillel and promised to convert to Judaism if he could recite the entire Torah while he stood on one leg. Hillel replied: “What is hateful to yourself, do not to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah and the remainder is but commentary. Go study it.”…It is not that other devotions and beliefs are unimportant; the point is that there is something wrong with any spirituality that does not inspire selfless concern for others.

The Border Of Paradise, Esmé Weijun Wang

Beauty, if you’re like most un-truly-beautiful people, is unlike the self, with its strangeness being part of what makes it novel, and therefore pleasurable. To love something different and inexplicable is a natural state of the human condition.

Qur’an And Woman, Amina Wadud

Just as the essential male/female is contingent, so, too, are the physical beings; there is a tranquil link between the human pair, man and woman: ‘Among His signs is this: that He created azwaj for you from your own anfus so that you may find rest in them’ (30:21). Man is intended as a comfort to woman; woman is intended as a comfort to man. This statement does not make it a reality.

The Other Americans, Laila Lalami

Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember.

The Study Qur’an, S.H. Nasr

[17:13-14] And for every man We have fastened his omen upon his neck, and We shall bring it forth for him on the Day of Resurrection as a book he will meet wide open. “Read your book! On this day, your soul suffices as a reckoner against you.”

Al-Razi, however, describes the spiritual reality of this recording metaphorically, suggesting that every deed one commits in life is like a drop of water that, no matter how small, leaves some small impression upon the “rock” that is the substance of the soul. Thus each deed — and especially repeated or habitual behaviors — eventually has a part in inscribing the destiny of each individual upon the soul…Read your book! In reading one’s own book, one effectively renders judgment upon oneself; since the book is composed solely of one’s own deeds, all individuals can be said to be able to judge as to whether they deserve to enter the Garden or the Fire by “reading” their own actions…Some describe the book in this way, “Your tongue is its pen, your saliva is its ink, and your limbs are the paper upon which it is written; it is you who dictates [it] to your own memory.”

Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name, Audre Lorde

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. But people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that pain was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret to not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving. It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.

The Architecture Of Happiness, Alain De Botton

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, Kate Bernheimer

Never to be yours, he said in his mind, about his love, never to be anybody’s but ours, and he knew this was true, because he and Rapunzel were impossible, everyone said so. And to hold something impossible in your hands, not just in your heart, was a rarity God afforded almost no one.

Qur’an, Liberation, and Pluralism, Farid Esack

Inclusivity was not merely a willingness to let every idea and practice exist. Instead it was geared towards specific objectives, such as freeing humankind from injustice and servitude to other human beings to that they might be free to worship God. As has been explained, according to the Qur’an, the belief that one is not accountable to God and shirk were intrinsically connected to the socio-economic practices of the Arabs. In order to ensure justice for all, it was important for Muhammad and his community to work actively against those beliefs and not accord them a position of equality.

My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

Up or down, it seemed to us that we were always going toward something terrible that had existed before us yet had always been waiting for us, just for us. When you haven’t been in the world long, it’s hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don’t even feel the need to.

Portrait Of A Marriage, Nigel Nicolson

I felt like a person translated.

The Overstory, Richard Powers

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

Howard Zinn Speaks

I want to read you something that Vanzetti had in his pocket when he was on that streetcar in Brockton the day he was arrested. What he had in his pocket was a leaflet advertising a meeting where he was going to speak. The leaflet said, “You have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the capitalists. You have wandered all over the countries. Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On these questions, on this argument and on this theme, the struggle for existence, Bartolomeo Vanzetti will speak.”

Of course, he never got to give that speech. But I thought that says it. You don’t want to let somebody make a speech like that. If that speech were made often enough, by enough people, to enough people, in a country where for so many people that message resonates, we might have some resounding movement for social change.

The Beautiful Struggle, Ta-Nehisi Coates

I paid little heed to great injustice, despite my mother showing me blueprint of slave ships and children’s books tracking the revolution of Dessalines and Toussaint. Still, I could spot even small injustices when they shadowed me personally. I knew that to be afraid while on the way to school was deeply wrong.

Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart

My father once showed up to a parent-teacher conference where one of the teachers informed him that “Gary is very smart. We hear he reads Dostoevsky in the original.” “Phh,” Papa said. “Only Chekhov.”

snippets 2018

[Dec 2018]

Rubaiyyat Of Omar Khayyam

Ah love! could thou and I with fate conspire/To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,/Would not we shatter it to bits — and then/Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire!

Open City, Teju Cole

Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villain of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.

Qur’an Of The Oppressed, Shadaab Rahemtulla

-- In a global context of manifest injustice, a friendly, law-abiding Islam projected through the lens of the powerful will inevitably devolve into a theology of accommodation, toeing the simplistic lines of peace and dialogue, while an Islam channelled through the experiences of the oppressed will take on a fundamentally different character. In fact, [Farid] Esack writes, if one’s eyes are those of the world and not of the USA, then it is capitalism, not religious fundamentalism, which represents the most devastating form of terrorism.

-- ...the Qur’an conceives of righteousness in acutely communal terms: that is, to one’s ethical relations with the wider human family (Q. 2:177; 90:8-17; 107:1-7). In other words, it is the community — not the individual — that is the centerpiece of moral agency. As [Asma] Barlas herself notes, the text ‘defines moral personality in terms not only of ‘ibadah [worship], but also in terms of responsibilities to the ummah, and that the two are connected and inseparable.

A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara

Now, though, as an almost forty-eight-year-old, he saw people’s relationships as reflections of their keenest yet most inarticulable desires, their hopes and insecurities taking shape physically, in the form of another person. Now he looked at couples — in restaurants, on the street, at parties — and wondered: Why are you together? What did you identify as essential to you? What’s missing in you that you want someone else to provide? He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.

The Future Is History, Masha Gessen

It took only a few sessions — too few, Arutyunyan later realized — to conclude that the rages stemmed from repressed anxiety. Shortly after, the man decided to stop therapy. Getting in touch with his feelings was too risky a proposition. “I am a tightrope walker,” he explained. “Imagine what can happen to me if I pause to think.”

Algorithms Of Oppression, Safiya Noble

Digital-divide narratives have focused on three key aspects of disempowerment that have led to technological deficits between Whites and Blacks: access to computers and software, development of skills and training in computer technologies, and Internet connectivity — most recently characterized by access to broadband…Thus, the context for discussing the digital divide in the U.S. is too narrow a framework that focuses on the skills and capabilities of people of color and women, rather than questioning the historical and cultural development of science and technology and representations prioritized through digital technologies, as well as the uneven and exploitive global distribution of resources and labor in the information and communication ecosystem.

Born A Crime, Trevor Noah

Neighbors and relatives used to pester my mom. “Why do all this? Why show him the world when he’s never going to leave the ghetto?” “Because,” she would say, “even if he never leaves the ghetto, he will know that the ghetto is not the world. If that is all I accomplish, I’ve done enough.”

The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri

And yet these events have formed Gogol, shaped him, determined who he is. They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.

Chicago Stories: Tales Of The City, John Miller

-- Never make friends in the dark, is what I learned in Chicago.

-- Sammie Schmaltz, the paper man, yelling his final box-score editions, a boy’s broken hoop left forgotten against the elevated girder, the people hurrying out of the elevated station and the others walking lazily about, all bespoke the life of a community, the tang and sorrow and joy of a people that lived, worked, suffered, procreated, aspired, filled out their little days, and died.

The Generous Qur’an

Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these. Do not strut arrogantly about the earth: you cannot break it open, nor match the mountains in height. [17:36-7]

The Master And Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

“You’re not Dostoevsky,” said the woman to Koroviev. “How do you know?” “Dostoevsky’s dead,” said the woman, though not very confidently. “I protest,” exclaimed Behemoth warmly. “Dostoevsky is immortal!”

The Spirit Of Tolerance In Islam, Reza Shah-Kazemi

-- If the diversity of religions is perceived to be an expression of the will of God, then the inevitable differences between the religions will be not only tolerated but also celebrated: tolerated on the outward, legal and formal plane, celebrated on the inward, cultural and spiritual plane.

-- “Tolerance of ‘others’ is one thing, and a very good thing indeed, but the effects of taking pleasure in contradiction within one’s own identity can be richer…internal tolerance of contradictory identity is the basis of a superior and first-rate language and identity.” (Menocal)

The Bridge Of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder

It was not of him, at all events, that the bitterest tongue in France had remarked only fifty years before: that many people would never have fallen in love if they had not heard about it…Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well.

Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi

“Have you heard the story of Anansi and the sleeping bird?” she would ask them, mischief dancing behind her eyes, and they would all shout “No!” and giggle into their hands, thrilled by the lie they were telling, for they had all heard it many times before, learning then that a story was nothing more than a lie you got away with.

The House On Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros

My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain…I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am the one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.

Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

-- He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

-- Before he left he suggested coming back on the following Tuesday at the same time. She asked herself whether she should be so acquiescent. “I don’t see what sense so many visits would make,” she said. “I hadn’t thought they made any sense,” he said.

What Is Found There, Adrienne Rich

To write as if your life depended on it: to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public words you have dredged, sieved up from dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence — words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

We Were Eight Years In Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates

I don’t ever want to lose sight of how short my time is here. And I don’t ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the lifespan of the resistors, almost always fails. I don’t ever want to forget, even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people or a nation, that the larger story of America and the world probably does not end well. Our story is a tragedy.

Lincoln In The Bardo, George Saunders

I could not bear it; must I, even now, be beyond all hope? (Perhaps, I thought, this is faith: to believe our God ever receptive to the smallest good intention.)

The Displaced Children Of Displaced Children, Faisal Mohyuddin

…You see,/Nothing depends on the catch. Rather, true wisdom is rooted/In casting yourself into the growing grandeur of this new love.

Nausheen Husain

[no'sheen hoo-sane']

@nausheenhusain

@nausheen.bsky.social

et cetera

A Palestinian man in Istanbul is keeping a spreadsheet of dead family members

1. The AP story about him from several days ago reports that in the past 20 years, 10 family members were killed by Israeli air strikes but between October and the time of publishing, his family's death toll was 270 people. It has undoubtedly increased since then.

2. On day one of my data journalism class, I normally share this thought from Ta-Nehisi Coates, on why he wrote the book "Between The World And Me":

"I did not do this in the hope of convincing any of the disciples of raw myth that they were wrong, at least not in any critical numbers. I did it to know that I was not crazy, that what I felt in my bones, what I saw in my people, was real."

3. The necessity to count the war crimes in Gaza has defied the usefulness of data journalism. The stories are shocking, the numbers are incomparable, and very little has changed on the ground for Palestinians suffering at the hands of Israel.

To know all the data, for months, has seemed to make no difference in this genocide.

“Their contempt for us was unnatural, like we were lesser beings”

One thing we spoke about in our team is Edward Said’s idea of ‘communities of interpretation,’ which he wrote about in his 1981 book, Covering Islam:

In The Myth Of Sisyphus, Albert Camus, who was also a journalist among other professions, writes that the artist must work amidst those who are working and struggling, not removed from them:

More on our research here.

Newhouse School Assistant Professor Named 2023-25 Lender Center Faculty Fellow

Briefly, two things I have been thinking about while compiling this year's snippets

Writing a word neatly by hand, by writing one letter, then stopping, then writing the next letter, didn't seem like a goal I could pursue in a newsroom. It felt luxurious to slow down in that way. It required the ability to pause momentum in order to consider each separate act.

For me, 2022 was this kind of pause. 2022 consisted of me reading and re-reading sentences as a way to revisit building blocks, focusing more on them than the books they live inside. 2022 has been a year in which it’s taken me days, sometimes weeks, to write down one complete thought.

I know now that it is not luxurious, but it is, at best, the surveying of some apprehension, the seconds before a dive.

The concept of 'objectivity' in investigative journalism doesn't exclude nor hide its inherent purpose of reform

Quotes about objectivity from Mark Lee Hunter's 'Story-Based Inquiry' that I wish I read when I was 25, and then read every year since then:

"By objectivity, we mean three very precise things.

> The first is that we have to accept the reality of facts that we can prove, whether we like them or not. In other words, we are objective toward the facts. If the facts say the hypothesis is wrong, we change the hypothesis. We do not try to make the facts disappear.

> The second is that we have to do this work with the understanding that we could be wrong. If we do not keep that in mind, we will not get the help we need from others. Would you help someone who already knows all the answers, and isn’t listening to what you have to say?

book report: praxis

I felt bonded to hooks on many an occasion while reading this set of essays, but particularly when she described coming to academia without ever having wanted to be an academic. In reference to Paulo Freire, she writes:

Elsewhere, she cites Freire as an academic who "gave her a language": "He made me think deeply about the construction of an identity in resistance."

This may sound familiar to readers of the scholar and activist (and professor) Farid Esack. In "Qur'an, Liberation and Pluralism", he argues for liberation theology, rather than accomodation theology, and writes about praxis:

"Praxis as a source of knowledge has always been widely recognized in Islamic scholarship and the Qur’an itself is explicit in its view that theory can be based on praxis: 'And to those who strive in us [our path] to them we shall show our ways.' (29:69)"

Weeks later, I read about how hooks remembered discomfort that her students felt in her classes:

May our painful praxis beget knowledge and direction.

A shift to slow thinking

Other things changed too:

> I am waking up past 8AM. For someone who thought this was physically impossible, the extra sleep, the first time especially, was truly wild, how it felt in my body, what my brain felt like. Coffee became less of a necessity immediately, and something pleasant to enjoy a little later;

As I temper the constant tug-of-war of input and output, in academia and writing, the place where my mind settles, I hope, will be a place of few emergencies.

Reporting on prison conditions during COVID-19

> two inmates talked to me using an unofficial communication device. One of them eventually was caught with the device and put in solitary confinement for three months, according to the other inmate.

> a family member of an inmate who died found out he was in the hospital when another inmate with an unofficial communication device contacted her to let her know. Prison administration contacted her later to let her know her son had died.

> the local hospital couldn't confirm or deny that a person had been admitted to their institution if they were an inmate, I think because of HIPAA policy.

What is increasingly not enough/To seek a middle way

While the Ramadan of my youth was mostly about breakfast foods at Eid celebrations, the Ramadan of my adulthood has increasingly been about a balancing of two particular ayaat that reflect the frustrations that I have not been able to settle:

“Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these. Do not strut arrogantly about the earth: you cannot break it open, nor match the mountains in height.” (17:36-7)

islam for reporters

Islam For Reporters

Ali Asani on the denial of identity

He told me what struck him about election-time Islamophobia and the revision of history in people’s minds:

On the many ways he was denied his own identity in the U.S.:

Jocelyn Cesari: It’s worse in Europe

She also explained why the biggest problem in the U.S. is not the media, but the politicians:

Omid Safi on waging beauty after 9/11

On the oft-sighted “kind-of-sort-of-basically-tolerated-as-long-you-keep-quiet-and-go-to-the-suburbs Americans” around the time of the Park 51 controversy:

On Iranians, who are just a Google hit away:

On becoming “khalils”:

Carl Ernst: There is no “Muslim world.”

He spoke a bit about the need for more Muslims in journalism, education, the arts and culture, etc.:

And he gave me a little bit of his own background:

Eli Clifton: America is just one poorly-regulated fraternity.

We talked about America’s hazing process:

We talked about what makes him angry about American counterterrorism efforts:

Let’s talk to the guy who was MSA president at NYU when 9/11 happened.

We spent a good amount of time talking about why the Iraq War was more relevant for Islamophobes than 9/11:

We talked about the consequences of the surveillance of Muslim American communities:

We spoke a bit about his theory that we should be funding Islamophobes:

Intelligent discussions and “Princess Bride” references with Hussein Rashid

He explained what he means by “intelligent discussions”:

Hind Makki wants to clean our dirty laundry.

If you’re a Chicago-area Muslim, you’ve probably heard of Hind Makki or seen her blogs, Hindtrospectives and Side Entrance. I interviewed her a couple weeks ago.

She talked a little about Side Entrance, a blog that documents “the beautiful, the adequate and the pathetic” of women’s prayer spaces in mosques: