Bashir

The Peninsula On-line: Qatar’s leading English Daily: A fasting Muslim who is onboard a flight or in a tall building needs to wait until he sees the sun disappear to break his fast. For him, the Iftaar time would be a little late compared to those on the ground, according to a fatwa (religious edict) issued by renowned Islamic scholar Dr Yousuf Al Qaradawi.

Let me see. How can I put this? Hmm…

WHY?!? FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY AND GOOD, IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, THE MOST MERCIFUL, THE MOST BENEFICENT, WHY DO WE NEED FATWAS ON EVERY TINY LITTLE THING!?!?!?

I mean, what happened to, you know, human judgement and free will? Must everything be mandated by some authority figure? I mean, come on! A separate iftar time for people in tall buildings?!

Well, I have had it. In the spirit of frivolous fatwas that seem to be all the rage these days, I’m going to start issuing my own. Expect one every Friday. And, since we’ve missed this Friday’s Fatwa, here’s one to tide ya’ll over till next week.

Here is it, the Fatwa Of The Week from America (FOTWA).

Fatwa on the inclusion of industrial-strength exhausts in all Muslim homes.
It is the duty of all Muslims that intend to cook food using any of the following ingredients: curry(of any kind), onions, garlic, ginger, any herbs from South Asia or the Middle East, to install industrial-strength exhaust fans in their kitchens. You have an obligation not to stink up the clothes of your visitors (and yes, their hair as well) with the pungent smell of your cooking.
Failure to observe this fatwa will result in boils, warts and nail fungus.
And of course, Allah knows best.

Please come back again for the next installment of the FOTWA.

I read this earlier today…

Herald Sun: Muslim call to arms [06nov05]:

AN inflammatory pamphlet urging Muslims to oppose Western governments was handed out at an important Islamic festival in Melbourne yesterday.

The flyer, distributed at a family carnival to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan in Preston, bore the name of the fundamentalist group Hizb ut-Tahrir – which is banned in Britain and Germany.

It claimed new terror laws were part of a conspiracy to eradicate Islam in Western countries.

It occurs to me that although this story is about Australia, this sort of thing actually happens in the United States all the time.

This never ceases to amaze me. Muslim immigrants are perhaps the least integrated immigrants I’ve ever seen in my life.

I am a Muslim from India. I came to the United States more than a decade ago, in the early 90′s, and am proud to call myself an American. Not a Muslim-American or an Indian-American, but an American of the unhyphenated kind. And throughout that time, the ignorance, arrogance, hostility and xenophobia of my fellow immigrants has never stopped astounding me.

I’m a proponent of immigration to these United States. This nation is a nation of immigrants, from Europe, Asia, the Middle East and every other part of the world. Immigrant labor helped build the railroads that connected the coasts. Immigrant labor plowed our farms. Immigrants helped build our cities, our infrastructure and our societies. The top scientific and technological research labs in America are staffed by a preponderance of immigrants. The phrase “melting pot” applies to the US like no other country.

I also believe wholeheartedly in the words that are engraved on a bronze plaque on a wall in the museum in the base of the Statue of Liberty. “Give me your tired, your poor,” read the words, “Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

I went to Liberty Island on the same day I arrived in America. My flight had come in, thanks to several delays, early in the morning, at around 4 am. I had brought very little; a backpack containing four pairs of jeans, four sweatshirts, some other garments and a few personal items was slung on my back. In my pockets were $278 and 32¢ – all the money I could scrounge together before I left India – my immigrant visa papers, and a sheaf of letters from my family in India to my family in America. A cousin picked me up at JFK, eyeing me warily as I stared wide-eyed at the absolute marvel that is New York.

We drove – the route is a blur in my memory now – into Queens. I gaped at the skyline, my mouth wide open as my breath frosted on the window. It was late October and it was cold, much colder than I was used to. The landscape changed so much, it took me by surprise. One moment, there were these magnificent brownstones, the next, run-down, ramshackle tenements. But the majesty of New York still shone through with richness and brilliance.

Until we came to Jackson Heights.

There are parts of Jackson Heights that are beautiful, with architecture and neighborhoods that were, when I finally got around to exploring the area, quite enchanting. The area that my cousin’s family lived in, however, was anything but.

Jackson Heights – the areas known as Little India, anyway – is a world unto itself. Here, you forget that you are in America. The area is almost entirely made up of South Asian immigrants, and it has somehow morphed into a state that has rendered it nearly indistinguishable from some of the most crowded portions of Bombay.

That is not a compliment.

‘Microcosm’ doesn’t even begin to explain it. The place is a madhouse of people who seemed to have decided that this country that they came to to escape their own, wasn’t good enough – or hospitable enough – for them to live in. So they recreated the environs of the nations they left, leaving me to wonder just what the hell they were doing here in the first place – or why this sort of thing was even tolerated.

I haven’t got any issue with multiculturalism, mind you. But I do have an issue with filth and garbage strewn on the streets, with dirty puddles of cooking oil in the gutters, with the ugly red of paan streaking the walls of buildings, with crushed cigarettes and beedies littering the sidewalks. I have a problem when, within an hour of arriving in America, I have to dart out of the way of a cascade of dirty water poured from a third-story window.

There are, of course, many reasons why this sort of place exists. Many of these people arrive – as I did – in the U.S. with nearly nothing to their name, relying on the generosity of their families here to survive for a time. Abject poverty is often the name of the game – I stayed in a one-bedroom apartment with five other people while I was in New York. That whole apartment could easily fit into the living room of my current place, and my closet is as big as the bathroom that this family – two women and three men – shared.

No, I can understand – and accept – the economic duress these people are under, and even acquiesce that there is probably a very complicated socio-economic and political equation that requires such places to be.

What I can’t understand, what I don’t accept, are the attitudes that I was bombarded with five minutes after meeting my cousin. A KKK member would have been put to shame by the invectives that issued forth from his lips about – and I quote here – “Niggers and Spics”. Not content to stop there, he continued, cursing the entire white race – including his very white girlfriend who lived in Queens as well. He narrowed it down, too: Italians and Irishmen were the worst (lot of those in Jackson Heights, I guess), followed by the Russians and, inexplicably, the Germans (was there a glut of former Nazis in early 1990′s New York that I missed?).

Yet the worst of his tirade wasn’t reserved for racial epithets. No, the worst was reserved for non-Muslims.

I had heard this tripe, of course. I had heard it shouted the previous year by angry mobs on the streets of Bombay, and I had seen the destruction that such hate had wrought. I came to America partly to leave some of that shit behind, which is why this cousin’s vitriol struck a nerve. I tuned out his bullshit then, and his expletives and rants about Kafirs and Jahils rescinded into a drone in the background as I absorbed the sights of New York City.

I spent nearly a week with my cousin and his family. The first day was a whirlwind of activity, as my cousin was tasked with showing me around New York. We visited Liberty Island that day, wandered around Manhattan for the rest of the day, and came back to Queens in the evening. We hung out with his friends, who shared my cousin’s views on nearly everything, until late at night. We prayed together, ate together and I listened to the trash pouring out of their mouths as they ridiculed and derided everything about America, yet clearly, showed no hesitation in taking advantage of every opportunity this country had to offer.

Throughout the week, I walked and talked with people in Jackson Heights and, when my cousin accompanied me into Manhattan and introduced me to his friends there, with them as well. My first week in America is colored with the dichotomy – no, the hypocrisy – of an immigrant community that seemed to have come here for no other reason than the almighty dollar.

I left New York City the following week, and came down to Orlando, Florida, where I have lived ever since. The taste of immigrant attitudes that I received in that first week was never washed from my mouth, because here in Orlando, the attitudes of my fellow Muslim immigrants was just as vitriolic towards the society and nation that many eventually became citizens of. They hate America, sling mud at its people, its principles and its practices at every opportunity, yet yearn for American citizenship because it brings them prestige and increases their standing among fellow immigrants. They hate non-Muslims, call them Kafir and Jahil, yet have no issues driving expensive Cadillacs and Ford Expeditions (built, presumably, by Kafirs and Jahils).

Economic duress exists in the world – I get that. People seek to come here and build a better life for their kids – I get that too. But I can’t stand the people who think that that opportunity does not come with an attached responsibility – the responsibility to respect the laws, societal norms and traditions of the host country, and the responsibility to integrate and assimilate into that nation. Yes, you have the right to say just about anything, and you have the right, as guaranteed by the Constitution, to practice your religion and uphold your customs. This isn’t about abandoning Islam or abrogating your obligations to your traditions. This is about recognizing that you are here because you are seeking something that this country has and that yours doesn’t.

Do you walk into the home of a friend, insult him, abuse him, then ask him for money? No? Then why do you do it to America? What many of my fellow immigrants are doing is reprehensible – this sort of “have my cake and eat it too” behavior is wrong and I don’t see how they can reconcile this with Islam. And if they can, well, that’s an Islam I want no part of. If the customs and traditions and beliefs that you practice can only be practiced to your satisfaction in your home country, then go back there. But if you chose to come here, to MY country, to these United States of America, then you need to bear the burden of the responsibility inherent in that choice.

You aren’t legally mandated to shoulder that responsibility, of course. No, you’re free to be bigots, hypocrites and filthy muckrakers. It’s your Constitutional right.

And if you can reconcile your hate with your faith and the basic tenets of humanity, then you’re neither one of the Faithful, nor are you even human.