philosufi

"Back Up!": Artist Anida Yoeu Ali

If you haven't heard about Khmer Muslim artist Anida Yoeu Ali, listen up. The Cambodian-born, Chicago-raised woman is an interdisciplinary artist; she describes herself as a "performance artist, writer, and global agitator." Ali's work explores issues related to identity, particularly hybridity and transnationality. She recently completed an MFA in Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As part of her work there, she put together a multi-faceted installation called The 1700% Project--the title of which refers to the post-September 11 increase in hate crimes against people perceived to be Arab or Muslim in the US.

The 1700% Project is collaborative, and consists of a poem, a video (below), audio recording, performances, and installation. In June, the video The 1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim, which was directed, edited, and shot by Ali's husband Masahiro Sugano, won the $25,000 grand prize in the One Chicago, One Nation Online Video Contest. It also won the $5,000 prize in the music video/spoken word/animation category. 

The whole project is a powerful statement against racial profiling of Muslims and the crimes of hate and violence that accompany the practice. In May 2010, when she was first mounting the installation, Ali's own art became the subject of a hate crime. She returned five days after painting the installation to find that the work itself had been the target of racist vandals. It had been defaced with large caricatures and a dialogue balloon emphasizing a particular part of her text: the phrase "Kill all Arabs." Here are images of the work before and after the defacement.

Ali wrote on the 1700% blog about the traumatic experience of discovering and trying to deal with the defacement: Articulating the Assault. Ali really had no choice but to alter her intended project to incorporate the experience of being targeted by racists; to try, as she puts it, to turn an act of defacement into an act of defiance:

My original performance was going to entail a scheduled performance of the text followed by a public staining of the walls. The point of the “1700% Project: Otherance” has always been to make what is seemingly invisible more visible. However, based on this recent incident, I am responding by modifying the performance to include a facilitated dialogue with faculty, students, the public and the communities to which these acts of hate and bias crimes address. The “1700% Project: Otherance” is a politically charged art installation that cannot be silenced and disrupted in this manner. During Saturday’s performance I am asking for the public to join me in the staining process — to transform the marks of vandalism and hate into acts of collective healing and reclamation. This is a call to action to respond as a community within and beyond the borders of SAIC. This is not just an assault on me as an artist, this is an attack on multiple communities to which the work speaks for.

Take note, racist fools: Ali is not someone you can screw with. She is a force to be reckoned with. She is fierce.

Don't miss her correspondence with the administrators of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, about their apathy and indifference. Very disappointing "response" on their part. How gratifying that she went on to win the grand prize in that video contest.

Ali has other great things to check out: her personal blog, Atomic Shogun, which she's been keeping for five years, and where you can find out about past performances and artworks; and the spoken word CDs, books, and anthologies she's created or contributed to, which you can buy here. (I love the cover for I Was Born with Two Tongues.) Whatever you do, be sure to watch this video. And then watch it again: it deserves (and rewards) multiple viewings. I've already watched it about seven times, and it holds up. (You can find the poem/text of the video here.) Can't wait to see what she does next.
   

Domo Arigato Mr. Salato: Virtual Spirituality

Douglas Adams once wrote about an Electric Monk, whose job was to believe you, no matter what. It wasn’t there to take your confessional, to offer advice, or anything else. Just to save you the labour of finding someone to believe you. Adams had a unique gift for creating Chindogu characters, and the Electric Monk’s endearing desire to uncritically believe you was one of his subversive, but underappreciated, highlights. The technology required to have a humanoid robot listen to you, believe you, and act upon your beliefs is of course, far beyond us right now, but what about the AI and robotic tech that’s near-term, or already here?

There have been automatons of varying quality, for hundreds of years, some pretending to be human, and others simply humanoid. Those pretending to be human can recite a sura or bust a rakat with the best of them. But does it qualify as fulfilling a religious duty? (Let’s flip this around to make it a more familiar question – if you’re human, and recite Qur’an or perform salat without knowing the meaning or reasons, what portion of your religious duty are you fulfilling?)

If, like the students at the International Islamic University of Malaysia, you program a robot to go through the motions of salat (see video below), what does it mean? Is any of your own intention transferred to the robot? Is the robot’s salat like that of angels – duty-bound, not one of choice like humans? Constant, repetitive, and just following orders? I remember when I was a kid, learning the stories of how humans came to be from an Islamic perspective. God created Adam and blessed him with free will, like the jinn. The angels were created simply to obey. It was pretty clear that the intentional prayers of Adam or Iblis would be worth far more than the automatic prayers of the angels.

We’re less than a month away from Hajj. Imagine you had a robot capable of crowd negotiation and carrying out the Hajj duties. You can perform Hajj for someone else; my father’s done that for his own father, who never had a chance to go. Could you one day have an Electric Monk perform Hajj on your behalf (assuming you couldn’t meet the criteria for going yourself)? Could you pilot a telepresence system through Hajj, maybe have it throw a few stones for you? This idea isn’t completely without precedent. For those who cannot walk, there’s a type of porter who will carry you through the various stations of Hajj, being, in effect, proxy legs.

This conversation ultimately leads to the very definition of humanity, but from two angles instead of the traditional one. The standard millennia-old approach involves a “who are we, what are we” line of questioning. The newer one, brought on by various humans-playing-God stories like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, involves something even atheists must grapple with: What of our component structure makes us human? An artificial tooth doesn’t detract from your humanity, and neither does a transplanted lung. Replace body parts with artificially created options, some of which are engineered to be better than the original, and the conversation changes. Artificial heart, iron lung, and hyper-engineered replacement legs are only the start. Once we've uncovered the brain's Application Programming Interface, we can start tinkering with memory and storage, and we’ll be at the point where we can codify information held in the brain. The end goal of course, is to put your brain on a hard drive. (What are the moral and ethical implications of life-caching? Who cares, when you can have cool toys like this?) There is significant support in Islam for organ donation, but I’m not aware of the current discourse on alteration with the intent of improvement beyond natural functional range.

When we do get to that stage, you’d better hope someone's opened up the gates of ijtihad. Like, yesterday.

(Click here to watch the video in another window.)

Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam

How can we NOT love this film? We’re both in it. No, seriously, we are! Okay, just barely: you can see the backs of our heads in some of the scenes of Michael Muhammad Knight’s reading at The Gladstone in Toronto in early 2009. Director Omar Majeed was there, too, showing some scenes from the then-unfinished version of Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, a documentary that was released in late 2009. We were thrilled to see those scenes then and couldn’t wait to see the finished film, which we did last year.  It's gotten very strong, even stellar, reviews. It's still making the rounds on the festival circuit and tomorrow night, it premieres on the Documentary Channel.

Almost any discussion of this documentary has to start out by distinguishing this film from the very similarly-titled drama The Taqwacores: The Movie, which came out this year. That movie, directed by Eyad Zahra, is based on the 2003 novel The Taqwacores, by Michael Muhammad Knight, which imagined and then spawned a Muslim punk scene…which is what Canadian director Omar Majeed then made his documentary about. Got that? Good.

Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam looks at the very marginal subculture that sprung to life after Knight self-published his provocative novel, a book he says he wrote “from a place of extreme loneliness,” several years ago. Majeed focuses the film around the experiences of Knight and a band called The Kominas (“scumbags” in Punjabi). The first half of the film follows them as they set out on a old school bus to tour around the US, meeting up with the members of the widely scattered North American Muslim punk movement (Secret Trial Five, Al-Thawra, Diacritical, Vote Hezbollah) and doing shows on what was called The Taqwatour. The climax of the first half is their performance at an Islamic Society of North America annual conference, which is met mostly with the disapprobation of the organizers, although some of the audience members are receptive. The ISNA organizers object primarily to the performance of Secret Trial Five, whose lead singer is a woman, Sena Hussain. Apparently one of the main policies for musical performances at ISNA conferences is “no female singers” (whether or not they’re in hijab).  The ISNA people finally call in the police, and the bands choose to leave, chanting “Pigs are haram in Islam!” rather than get arrested.

In the film’s second half, Basim Usmani of the Kominas goes to Pakistan, and eventually Knight and Usmani's bandmate Shahjehan Khan haul themselves to Pakistan, too. Khan and Usmani start a band called Noble Drew and try to unleash their brand of punk in a Muslim country with varying results. They explore some of the many expressions of Islam in Pakistan (specifically, Lahore), visiting Sufi shrines and a Shi’a mosque, taking part in a ritual that I’m fairly sure is connected to the mourning of Ashura. Knight travels by himself back to Islamabad, to revisit the Faisal Mosque where he spent time as a teenage convert, getting enough Wahhabi indoctrination to push him almost completely out of the religion. In Lahore, Noble Drew tries to put on a concert that quickly gets shut down, and they struggle to figure out how to connect with audiences in Pakistan. A local friend explains, “In order to make a difference in someplace, you first have to be absorbed in it. That takes time.”

They finally decide to put on a free show on a rooftop overlooking both the beautiful Badshahi Mosque and Lahore’s red light district—one can hardly think of a more perfect location. It’s not easy to get people interested. Someone in the film describes the way musical appreciation tends to fall along class lines in Pakistan: pop music is for the rich people, traditional music is for the poor. And who even knows what the hell this Muslim punk thing is? Noble Drew and their supporters are trying to reach anybody/everybody, and it’s not easy. But they finally manage to attract a pretty enthusiastic crowd to the free concert, and give a really successful, well-received show, which forms the climax for this half.

The juxtaposition of the two very different cultures and worldviews works well, I think; on some level, it’s kind of amusing how uptight and/or ambivalent the North American ISNA scene is, contrasted with how receptive and open the Pakistani audience is. Everything and everyone in the film underlines how complex, how multifaceted, how diverse Islam really is—and you’re only seeing a small fragment of that diversity in this movie. There isn’t just one kind of Muslim, no matter what certain mullahs and media outlets would have you believe. There isn't only one right or good way to be Muslim. And no matter how much cognitive dissonance the notion of Muslim punk might evoke, it still exists. As Knight says at one point, people should understand that “in the so-called war of civilizations, we’re pointing the middle finger in both directions.” Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam looks at some of the challenges in getting that message out there.

The one criticism I think I would make of the film is that as a Muslim woman I would like to have seen and heard a little bit more from the women in the Muslim punk scene. Sena Hussain, the lead singer of Secret Trial Five, gets to talk and sing a bit, and I realize there aren't a ton of women putting out Muslim punk music, but we could have heard more from the female fans, especially the women at the basement concerts and so on. However transgressive it may be for the men involved in Muslim punk, it’s more transgressive for the women. I think there would have been room for it in the film; it’s certainly not overly long at 79 minutes and it’s consistently engaging.

Anyway. I’ve gone on a bit longer than I meant to, but I really enjoyed this film and I want to encourage you to see it. If you’ve got the Documentary Channel (US version), it’s on Saturday, October 23, at 8 p.m. Join the film’s Facebook page to be kept abreast of festival screenings and other opportunities to see it. As Knight says in the film, “There is a cool Islam. You just have to find it. You have to sift through all the other stuff, but it’s there.”

 

I’m Too Sexy For This Burqa: The NiqaBitches

France's burqa ban (more of a niqab ban, but you can't beat the power of alliteration) continues to make news. At the end of September, a video was released of two female students in Paris walking through the city "wearing a burka and mini-shorts." Young, twentysomething women baring the bottom halves of their bodies all over Paris, but with a harsh niqab on top. In other words, a perfect media event, sacred and profane, in a hot pair of French shoes. The anonymity provided by the full face coverings has extended to the online world; they are largely operating under virtual niqab as @NiqaBitch on Twitter, and by the same name on YouTube. We don't know a lot yet, but one says she is Muslim, and both say they are political science and communications students.

What was their motivation to pull off this guaranteed attention-getter?

"To put a simple burka on would have been too simple. So we asked ourselves: 'How would the authorities react when faced with women wearing a burka and mini-shorts? We were not looking to attack or degrade the image of Muslim fundamentalists – each to their own – but rather to question politicians who voted for this law that we consider clearly unconstitutional. To dictate what we wear appears to have become the role of the State (as if they didn't have other fish to fry …)."

Fair enough. France and other countries are conducting their own jihad with hijab. In France's case, choosing to wear more clothing will be punishable by a fine of 150 euros and possibly re-education camp citizenship lessons. (This from the country that gave us Voltaire?) Here in Ontario, it's the 19th anniversary of Gwen Jacob winning the right for women to go topless in public. At some point, like maybe a few thousand years ago, the state – and men – should have stopped dictating what women wear. Left to their own devices, it's clear women are fully capable of choosing the worst possible clothing imaginable. (Oh man... did I just wreck my own argument or what?)

There's always the security argument to be made; if you can't see the person's face, you have a difficult time identifying who they are, and they can vanish anonymously into a crowd. Sounds like a pretty good argument for banning Santa Claus outfits to me.

The video reinforces a few things very clearly. People aren't comfortable with niqab. Women are encouraged to be sex objects. Putting them together just blows the citizenry's circuits. It also questions the definitions that the law enforcers will have to deal with. If someone walks around town naked but for a head covering, will the police charge them, and with what? Is the law meant to further the emancipation of women, or is it meant to target certain religious groups and lock in one way of being French?

Regardless of the intentions of these women, or those who staged pro-topless rallies here in Ontario, the men gawking for a glance of something yummy always outnumber men appearing in solidarity. For reasons I can't figure out how to state, that always reduces the value of the action, probably because the spectators won't be engaged in the discourse. (Special shout-out to those men who come to such rallies bringing videocameras: Are you really so sad and pathetic that creeping is what does it for you? What do you do with the videotape when you get home? Good lord, don't answer that.) Disclaimer: Of course I'd take pictures of an occurrence like this. Anyone who looks at my photos on Facebook knows I'm taking pix all the time. But I'd like to point out that none of the men below are me; it should be clear as none of them are using a BlackBerry or wearing a Soccer Imam T-shirt, which makes me further question their morality.

On the video, most of the men shown were actually talking to the NiqaBitches, and probably learning more than leering. But of course there were those too. Hey, this is supposed to be confusingly sexy. If no one paid attention or gave a second glance, they wouldn't be making their point.

The state can really just bug off here. The number of Muslim women this law is targeted at is very low. The harm they're causing others or themselves is probably negligible. Like other niqab bans around the world, the power of the state is being used to hit a statistically insignificant target with really high visibility.

For your viewing pleasure, we present to you: The NiqaBitches (with their original Beastie Boys soundtrack)! (Editorial note: Lyrics not work-safe.) Click here if the video fails to play.

 

Finally, a set of well-presented arguments and much deeper thoughts than mine entitled Does NiqaBitch Enrich the Burqa Ban Debate? at MuslimahMediaWatch. Enjoy!

(Yet another editorial note: The French ban on facial veiling cleared its last legal hurdle yesterday.)

 

The Taqwacores: Coming Soon to a Festival Near You

Hey! Good news: if you can be in Toronto this Saturday night, there are still tickets for Eyad Zahra's new film The Taqwacores. (Not to be confused with Omar Majeed's 2010 documentary, Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam -- also very worthwhile. You should see that, too.) Both films were inspired in different ways by Michael Muhammad Knight's self-published 2003 novel, The Taqwacores, which invented--and then spawned--an entire subculture of Muslim punk rock.

I'm really excited, because ever since I read the novel many years ago, I wanted to make this film. I knew I'd never manage to assemble the time, money, and skills to do so, though, so the next best thing was hoping that someone else would do a bang-up job. The film's been showing in festivals all over, and winning accolades, so I have high hopes.

Anyway, it's been recently included in this year's FILMI South Asian Film Festival in Toronto, and will be showing Saturday night (October 2) at the Revue Cinema on Roncesvalles. And one of the stars, Noureen DeWulf, will be there for a Q&A after the screening. Tickets are available online here. I'll be there, and I'll have Philosufi's review of the film for you soon.

Here's a current list of upcoming screenings:

• 2010 Ourense International Film Festival
  Ourense, Spain - Oct 1-9
• 2010 FILMI South Asian Film Festival
  Toronto, Canada - October 2nd
• 2010 Scottsdale International Film Festival
  Scottsdale, AZ - Oct 2nd & Oct 3rd
• 2010 Warsaw International Film Festival
  Warsaw, Poland - Oct 8-17
• 2010 BFI London Film Festival
  London, England - Oct 13-28
• 2010 Eastern Oregon Film Festival
  La Grande, Oregon - Oct 21-23
• 2010 San Diego Asian Film Festival
  San Diego, CA - Oct 26
• 2010 Virginia Film Festival
  Charlottesville, VA - Nov 5-8

Keep an eye on The Taqwacores website, or its Facebook page, for news and details. In the meantime, enjoy the trailer:

 

Moschee Baba: Shooting Muslims & Minarets for Political Gain in Austria

Austria has up to 500,000 Muslims and 200 mosques. Three of them – in Vienna, Bad Vöslau, and Telfs – have minarets. Accordingly, Austria's far right Freedom Party (FPÖ) leader Heinz-Christian Strache, and Gerhard Kurzmann, the party's candidate in the province of Styria, have released a video game called Moschee Baba (Bye Bye Mosque). Moschee Baba encourages you to shoot – excuse me, stop the building of – minarets and Muslims. Since one doesn't really stop the building of people, and the targeting circle looks pretty much like, well, a target, it's easy to understand why I was confused when I first saw it. That, and the red Stop sign that follows when you pull the trigger kinda makes you think of blood.

Speaking of blut und ehre, the right-wing party's new election campaign poster series calls for "Mehr Mut für unser 'Wiener Blut' - Zu viel Fremdes tut niemandem gut," meaning "More Courage for our 'Viennese Blood' – too many foreigners does no one any good." This apparently rhymes pretty well, and is not racist or xenophobic at all, no sirree bob. It's simply a shout out to Johann Strauss' music for Wiener Blut, or for the less culturally sophisticated amongst us (i.e. me), Falco (+2 for the fish ties, Der Kommissar). Because really, there's nothing more authentically Austrian than Strauss and Falco. (BTW, despite the Nazi overtones of racial purity, I can't stop snickering at the phrase "Weiner Blut.")

Quite a while back, the FPÖ used the slogan "Daham statt Islam," which translates as "(at) Home, no Islam." Over one-fifth of the Muslims in Austria are Turks, so the slogan efficiently mixes racism and Islamophobia. Charming bunch of folks, the FPÖ. They are well-practiced demagogues who are predicted to gain much more than their 2005 showing of 14.8% in the October 10 Vienna election.

Vienna is a city of migrants, so in reality, Weiner Blut has been salmagundi for hundreds of years. It's said that every other household has at least one member of a migrant background. But just like the much-loved fictions of race and racial purity, the fiction of Wiener Blut holds strong. And why shouldn't it? Thinking somehow you're different and special lets you blame others for your own shortcomings, and once you get rid of those thieving, scheming Turks / Muslims / Jews / Blacks / Gypsies / Catholics / Hmong / Mormons / Hatfields / McCoys / etc., all will return to Utopia once again.

There's a lot of outrage around the now-offline game. The Moschee Baba site now has a still of a frightened cartoon Muslim, followed by a Get Ready graphic where the sun symbolically rises over the dark night in (presumably) Styria. Just when you think you can lock and load, a note comes up to let you know, dear visitor, that interference by political opponents resulted in the banning of the game, but you can decide on September 26. There are quite a view YouTube videos showing "walkthroughs" of the game; don't ask me to explain the soundtracks.

At the end of the 60 seconds of "play" a message pops up stating "Game Over. Styria is now full of minarets and mosques! So that this does not happen, on September 26 choose Dr. Gerhard Kurzmann and the FPO!" It's not all politics; they do tell you your score. But clearly you cannot win without voting for the gut doktor.

Double Marginality: the Arabic “Calligraffiti” of eL Seed

Respect Your Elders by eL Seed

You might think you’ve seen Arabic calligraphy or Islamic art, but you probably haven't seen it like this: beautifully spray-painted fifteen feet high high on brick walls in the street, on canvases in art galleries, and on hoardings at festivals. Oh, and on the coolest skateboard ever.

eL Seed is a talented Tunisian artist, born in France and now living in Canada, who describes his work as “Arabic Inspired Street Painting.” It’s equal parts classical Arabic calligraphy, Islamic art, modern graffiti and urban sensibility. From his website (where you can see lots of his work under the sections Street, Canvas, and Video):

His art is a mixture of street art and Arabic Calligraphy. It is the product of a double marginality, that of an oriental art seeking a voice in the occidental world, and that of street art struggling to legitimize its presence on the contemporary art scene. This duality enables the reconciling of two supposedly opposing worlds and two supposedly clashing cultures.

He elaborates further on his blog:

eL Seed perceives Arabic calligraphy as a tangible expression of his search for identity. Throughout his work, myriad paths intersect and mirror the multiple sources of inspiration which nourish his art. Emanating from this confusion is an amalgam of harmony and balance.

And this is cool: just as I was writing this piece, eL Seed posted on his Facebook page a video of the production of the piece above, Respect Your Elders. Among things, it shows that in addition to spray paint, he uses paint rollers to get those big solid black strokes of calligraphy. I was wondering about that.

eL Seed was at MuslimFest in Mississauga, Ontario a few weeks ago, and we missed him! We hadn’t yet discovered him. (Mental note: next time, read the program guide more carefully.) We could only stay a couple of hours at the beginning of the event on Saturday. As we were leaving, we actually noticed a guy just starting to paint something on a wall that had been specially set up, and watched him curiously for a few moments before leaving. I’m so bummed that we missed seeing more of eL Seed in action, and seeing the final product in person. Here’s a link to eL Seed's MuslimFest photo album on his Facebook page and here’s a nice shot of the finished piece which "invites  viewers to reflect on the contribution of all the different civilizations in the creation of humanity and our common histories":

Fantastic. eL Seed is an artist whose evolution I will avidly watch.

A Comedy of Ethnic Proportions: The Infidel

What would you do if, all your life, you thought you were a Muslim…then found out you were born a Jew? Well, that’s the premise of The Infidel, "a comedy of ethnic proportions" created by comedians Omid Djalili and David Baddiel. Djalili’s character, Mahmud Nasir, is not particularly observant or knowledgeable about Islam. He prays once in a while, drinks more often than that, and is a soccer nut like most Britons. (Hey! He needs one of our shirts!) Rummaging around, he discovers his birth certificate, learns he was adopted, and realizes he is actually Jewish. To complicate matters, his son wants to marry into a conservative Muslim family, and it won’t happen unless they approve of Nasir’s family. Djalili is such a perfect choice for this role, it’s hard to imagine who else could fit.

To figure out his new identity, Nasir turns to a Jewish taxi driver named Lenny Goldberg (Richard Schiff, who played speechwriter Toby Ziegler on The West Wing). There’s lots of comic potential here; the internal and external struggles of identity, ethnicity, spirituality, religiosity, even geography – Nasir is a Pakistani living in Britain. Nasir has to prove who he is to himself and others, deal with the real possibility of syncretism, and ultimately arrive at how he will live his life.

Reviews are mixed, although landing a bit more on the positive than negative side. Nonetheless, we've been eagerly looking forward to seeing the film, but it just made it to the Toronto area as Ramadan began--not the greatest timing. With many Muslims devoting more time to praying and fasting (which for many people includes avoiding movies, TV, internet, etc.), and little free time during the non-fasting hours…it's probably not going to knock The Expendables on its keister. (Okay, maybe that was never going to happen anyway.) Although it seems to be available in at least some countries on DVD/Blu-Ray already, it's apparently not available in Canada until late October, so I hope it's still playing somewhere when Ramadan ends...

Irony bit: Muslim countries (even Iran) snapped this film up during its release in April 2010, but Israel…not so much. (Also not so much: Dubai.) Guess we get a mubarak and an oy vey at the same time.

Watch the trailer for The Infidel:

If you have trouble with the Flash video, click here.