Crossing the Crescent

(Nov. 10th) As reporters and investigators comb over the history and background of Maj. Nidal Hasan, the prime suspect in the Ft. Hood attack that left thirteen people dead, some noteworthy new details have emerged.

For one, it turns out that contrary to his family’s assessment that he was an “observant” Muslim, Hasan apparently frequented a local strip club three times this month, sipping beer and buying lap-dances. (Yes, it’s Fox News, but it directly quotes staff at the club).

For another, authorities monitored and knew of Hasan’s communication with a radical American-born imam who now serves as an al-Qaeda cheerleader in Yemen, but didn’t think the contact warranted further investigation.

It’s always easy to pass judgment in hindsight. No family member can know with full certainty what a loved one does with all his time, and no government official can be expected to assume from one or two exchanges that a man is teetering on the edge of violence.

Yet there is a third, crucial piece of information about Hasan that should have absolutely set off alarm bells, and the fact that it never did indicates a serious, glaring problem in the Army.

In June 2007, Hasan was supposed to make a presentation on a medical topic of his choice to an audience of other military personnel, including supervisors who served as senior Army doctors. Instead, he presented an utterly bizarre and disjointed 50-page PowerPoint that was nominally about Islam.

Hasan’s rambling slides, replete with basic grammatical and spelling errors, argued in part that the military should let Muslim soldiers opt for conscientious objector status in order to avoid “adverse events” arising from opposition to serving in Muslim countries. For obvious reasons, this is the focus of media’s attention.

But more importantly, a look beyond the first few slides makes it blatantly obvious that Hasan was merely projecting and telegraphing his own growing confusion, ambivalence and frustration with serving in the U.S. military as a Muslim. The cherry-picked verses, un-cited assertions, basic theological errors and huge assumptions about what constitutes offensive and defensive jihad clearly signify that he had begun to go off the rails.

For instance, in suggesting that Muslim soldiers would oppose the wars specifically because it meant that they would be fighting other Muslims (there are plenty of other reasons that millions of Americans have opposed either war), Hasan evidently forgot that the Islamic extremists themselves have overwhelmingly been killing other Muslims, that terrorism violates one of the most basic tenets of the faith and that one obligation incumbent upon Muslims is to stop fellow Muslims from committing injustice.

Stunningly, however, not one person among the 25 attendees picked up on the significance of the presentation. It went unreported to any authorities. It seems that Army staff and leadership were so uniformly ignorant about Islam that they took this warped, radical presentation as an accurate, if unsolicited, reflection of mainstream Muslim thinking. It cannot be argued that Hasan presented his slides as an effort to show how only extremists think: the whole point of the exercise was to convince those assembled that Muslims in their own ranks essentially couldn’t be trusted if they were true Muslims.

We’ve already seen many instances since September 11 — indeed, including September 11 — where absence of critical information about Islam or Muslims has led to disaster. Lawmakers’ ignorance about something as basic as the difference between Sunni and Shia, for instance, enabled blunders that contributed to the bloody panorama that was the Iraqi civil war.

That senior officers within the Army as late as June 2007 were utterly unable to distinguish a rational presentation of Islamic thought from the wild distortions of a man desperately trying to telegraph his own radicalizing views reflects poorly on the institution and is part of the problem Adm. Mike Mullen identified in a recent address:

“Good communication runs both ways. It’s not about telling our story. We must also be better listeners. The Muslim community is a subtle world we don’t fully — and don’t always attempt to understand. Only through a shared appreciation of the people’s culture, needs, and hopes for the future can we hope ourselves to supplant the extremist narrative.”

By all accounts, on November 5, Army Psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 12 soldiers and one civilian at the Fort Hood Army base where he was stationed.

While investigators and reporters try to piece together the events and what prompted them, one fundamental aspect of the rampage is not in doubt: the alleged attacker was Muslim.

Writing shortly after the incident, the perceptive young American Muslim writer Wajahat Ali understandably cautioned against leaping to conclusions:

“A cousin of Hasan, interviewed by reporters, has suggested an alternative motivation, not necessarily influenced by religious conviction. ‘He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy,’ said Nader Hasan. ‘He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there [in Iraq and Afghanistan].’”

But in the face of additional evidence that emerged today, it is not reasonable or logical to pretend that some great wall separated Hasan’s own sense of Muslim identity from his motive. Witnesses report that he shouted “God is great!” ahead of his rampage; family indicated that he was deeply upset over discrimination he said was visited upon him for being Muslim; and he openly expressed his hostility to the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan by describing it as a “war against Islam.”

Of course, we do not yet know precisely what combination of factors led to the attack, and with more than 20,000 Muslims actively serving in the U.S. military, it would be absurd to mistake one man’s warped and skewed understanding of Islam and graft it onto every other Muslim.

But the scale and nature of this incident raises a number of uncomfortable questions about what usually goes unseen and remains unsaid outside of military circles.

A psychiatrist, Hasan heard the stories of soldiers returning from combat: did these accounts of killing, abuse and other horrors fuel his anger at American policy as the date of his own deployment to Afghanistan neared? What kind of harassment was Hasan subjected to on base for his Muslim identity? How widespread is enmity toward Muslims and Islam among the very soldiers who Gen. McChrystal is sending to fight alongside Muslims against Islamist extremists?

There are also other, equally pressing questions that directly affect young Muslims, such as me, who call this country our own. People will invariably ask why and whether Muslims are in the military — or perhaps even in the country at all — and what sort of measures will be taken to “monitor” this minority.

The Council of American Islamic Relations released a statement condemning the attack, labeling it “heinous” and contrary to Muslim principles. An assault upon one’s own unarmed and unsuspecting comrades is unquestionably cowardly and immoral, but I suspect that no number of official statements will stave off questions of Muslim “loyalty” to the state or disrupt the almost magnetic attraction between conservatives and anti-Islamic rhetoric.

(Nov. 6th) The greatest and most pressing questions of all, however, are whether incidents like this one mark a growing trend of radicalization, isolation or anger among Muslims in the U.S. — and if so, why? A few years ago, it was commonplace to observe that Islamist terrorists were foreign-trained and foreign-born, but the Fort Hood attack was at least the fourth this year involving American-raised or American-born Muslims.

The status and station of American Muslims — who by and large have enjoyed prosperity and contribute to the country as doctors, scientists, translators, and yes, soldiers, — is a living rejoinder to fantastic rhetoric about a clash of civilizations or religions. But it is not a relationship that can be taken for granted or neglected by either side.

(Oct. 7th)

Last month’s elections in Afghanistan, intended to codify democracy’s arrival only laid bare the corruption and venality of the Karzai regime. New U.S. commander for Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, just finished an exhaustive military assessment that essentially recapitulated the “surge” strategy of Iraq in a land that is nothing like Iraq.

President Obama, who has only spoken with his top commander once since he took office, is looking for any option other than further escalation, but faces pressure from the military, the punditry and the Democrats’ own long-running insistence that this war is a “war of necessity.”

Last month, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen offered his own blunt assessment:

“The problem isn’t that we are bad at communicating or being outdone by men in caves. Most of them aren’t even in caves. The Taliban and al Qaeda live largely among the people… I would argue that most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all. They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are.”

Mullen’s missive about America’s lack of credibility among the common people is unlikely to generate any immediate changes. And so, as the most powerful men in the world haggle over military strategy, the real needs of people in the region — those whose poverty, desperation and lack of infrastructure enables the militants’ ferocious success — continue to go unmet.

But far away from the war rooms and think tanks, there are those who are trying. Faizan Ahmad is one of them.

Ahmad, who was born in the congested city of Karachi, Pakistan, graduated from the University of Dayton with degrees in physics and mechanical engineering this year. He teamed up with an expert in solar energy, Dr. Richard Komp (pictured right), to embark on an ambitious program to cultivate the groundwork for solar power by training young men and setting up grassroots assembly industries in Pakistan.

Last July, with little more than $3,000, he helped supervise a small photovoltaic pilot project that employed young Pakistanis to bring solar power to areas with poor infrastructure, with the support of Pakistani NGOs and the government’s Alternative Energy Development Board (AEDB).

Ahmad says it was a no-brainer to make the project happen: “All that was needed was some organization and channeling of energies in the right direction.”

And, one might add, helpful connections: Ahmad’s grandmother runs an NGO called Galaxy of Youth, which operates a girls’ school that served as the solar cell workshop; his father is a member of a key association of Pakistani engineers, the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Pakistan (IEEEP).

Ahmad headed to Karachi a month early to help make preparations for Dr. Komp. When Komp arrived, Faizan said, “He was enthusiastically received everywhere. I was surprised that hardly anyone asked where he was from while we were roaming the busy markets downtown.”

Ahmad explains that local Pakistani organizations recruited 22 poor and unemployed participants for the project, most of whom were in their twenties. Reflecting some of the difficulties and realities of Pakistan, two participants were recent refugees from the Swat Valley.

The trainees approached the task of constructing solar power modules (to be sold to local residents) with enthusiasm. “There were no issues of disputes or disagreements,” Ahmad says. “It was quite interesting in a way. Given the well-defined class relations in Pakistan, everything was quite egalitarian.”

The point of such solar power projects, Ahmad noted in his grant proposal, is to help close the gap confronting poor countries with overwhelming energy needs and decrepit infrastructure. For instance, in Karachi — a teeming city of 15 million people — the government frequently cuts power during predetermined hours, sometimes for more than 12 hours a day. Solar panels provide clean electricity with little need for maintenance; they operate silently and the sunny climate of most of Pakistan makes it a particularly suitable choice.

Ahmad hopes that the success of the workshop in Karachi can be replicated in more rural parts of the country, where the need is even greater. Even though it was just a pilot, he says that the relative ease with which people can be trained to make the modules can spur small businesses and help provide basic lighting for homes.

He believes that such small-scale projects, nurtured locally and at the grassroots level, offer an alternative to the foreign corporate investment that leads to a smattering of KFC and McDonald’s restaurants but nothing that addresses poverty. “We don’t need foreign development experts who are overpaid and prefer to crunch numbers in offices rather than spend any time in the field,” Ahmad adds.

Given the scant resources and manpower, it requires no great insight to observe that projects like this one are not going to single-handedly erase poverty or illiteracy among unemployed youth — the known breeding grounds of militancy. Such small steps, however, are closer to the solution than the deadly footprints left by massive weaponry, or the endless string of meaningless apologies for civilian losses caused by such weapons.

As Adm. Mullen wrote, “To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate.”

(From my WireTap column)

An early morning flight to D.C., day-long conference and empty cityscape drained me of energy.

Exhausted, I stepped out of my nondescript hotel into the street and felt a heavy air pregnant with moisture. Heading down the sidewalk to find dinner, I came across the shadow of a man who had the unmistakable gait of a beggar.

The homeless in D.C. were different from the homeless back home in New York City, where amid a shifting and seamless mass of indifferent women and men they are frequently seated — if cold concrete can be called a seat — with despair dampening their eyes and quarters rattling in their cups.

Here, the homeless seemed to move with the crowd but were not of the crowd. They zigzagged aimlessly, hands often outstretched — and equally often, empty — amid professionals in pressed suits who strode by with confidence and turned at square angles.

Tonight, however, there were no crowds. As the man in the street stumbled toward me, he asked with some urgency whether I knew where the nearest mosque was. I hadn’t gone to a mosque in years aside from Eid functions, never mind one in the capital. I responded flatly: “No.”

But his question was actually an introduction. The man came closer and began to relate his story; gesticulating with a hand two fingers short, he claimed that he had a wife and child but lost his job, and asked me politely and pleadingly for any spare change I might have.

I paused for a moment, nodding my head understandingly but not reaching for my wallet. As I contemplated what to do, the sky cracked loudly with thunder and a rumble tore through the air as raindrops tapped the pavement, as if on cue in a cliché movie scene. I took this as a sign that I should help this man in some small way, and so I unfolded my wallet and handed him a five-dollar bill.

In the Qur’an, after all, God constantly and insistently speaks to Muslims about His signs as expressed through nature; each “verse” in Islam’s holy book is called an ayah, or Arabic for “sign.”

“Verily, in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and in the alternation of night and day, there are indeed signs for those who are endowed with insight.” (3:190)

Taking the bill from my hand, the man smiled at me broadly and thanked me profusely. He reached slowly for my face and, with a laugh, tugged gently at the end of my beard, saying, “I knew you were a Muslim because this” — meaning the beard — “is Sunnah,” or a tradition of the Prophet Muhammad.

I returned his smile — even a smile is charity, Muhammad had said, although I suspect the money might be more helpful — and laughed appreciatively. I said nothing else as he thanked me yet again and went on his way. I did not bother to tell the beggar that my beard, which was neither close-cropped nor particularly long, wasn’t an example of Sunnah but apathy: I had simply not bothered to shave it amid the stress of the past few days.

Jogging back to the hotel to wait out the rain, I felt refreshed. In truth, I didn’t know whether this man had a child, a wife or a need to find a mosque, but none of this really concerned me. What I was reasonably certain of already assured me: He was a Muslim, he was in need, and I felt a higher power had prompted me to brush aside the curtains of irritability and exhaustion and crack open a small window of kindness.

Meeting the poor man in the street had reminded me of my own poverty in Muslim companionship. I realized that this was the first time I had even met another Muslim spontaneously in a long while. I have spoken to Muslims for articles, columns and interviews, but this random, fleeting incident was the first time I had approached — or been approached by — a complete stranger because of a shared Muslim identity.

Despite my conscious attempt to learn, read and write about the history, politics and ethos of Islam, my personal lived experience with Islam in America was, I realized, impoverished.

My own neighborhood is only a mile away from significant Pakistani and Arab populations, where I frequently see women in gowns and headscarves and men in shalwar-kameez and prayer caps. Yet I had almost never introduced myself to any Muslims.

I often walk by a mosque and think about entering. But then I think again: Will they understand me? Are they “old uncles” with no experience of growing up as a Muslim in America? What is expected of me by others? Are there FBI informants here, those a little too eager to befriend and quiz newcomers? This barrage of questions has served as a barrier between me and a fuller realization of Muslim identity.

Such isolation may seem odd in America. Freedom of religion is a guaranteed and enshrined right. But the law does not preclude the existence of a chilling effect. Indeed, the very presence of law forces discriminatory groups to seek avenues more inventive than outright, crude repression. Consider, for instance, the vilifying smears, lies and stereotypes paraded before the public in the run-up to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A naive observer may assume that such propaganda produces an impact only upon those predisposed to prejudice, leaving everyone else magically untouched. A more judicious observer, however, understands that the rhetoric of demonization ricochets and resonates: it creates a clanging noise that rings loudly in the ears of the target, and it desensitizes others such that the loud shouts of hatred gradually fail to register as even a whisper worth notice. How else to explain the relative ease with which reality has been stood on its head the past few years?

A monumental upset of reason has allowed “extreme” and “crazy” forces to implement deadly agendas that have been challenged with too little force: An invasion spun as liberation in Iraq, ethnic cleansing and occupation defended as justifiable security measures in Israel, a program of perpetual war hailed as part of the presumed path to peace, among other absurdities.

A complementary cavalcade of jargon, doublespeak and coded terminology still marches triumphantly out of pundits’ mouths and across the newspapers, trampling plain language and clear thinking, which are conspicuous only by their absence.

What prominent national figures have spoken out in the last nine years not in the name of rubberstamped strategies, buzzwords or mantras, but in the name of ordinary Muslims — the supposed beneficiaries of this gigantic war effort? Our television screens splash our retinas with images of young American soldiers killed in combat, and now, Iranian protesters brandishing a slain woman’s picture. Where on these screens are the images and names of the tens of thousands of ordinary women and children slain by our own bombs and bullets in the Middle East?

It is in this searing political context that I consider myself connected to Islam. I feel an inseparable link to those abroad, whose names I do not even know, who have suffered the impact of modern weapons unleashed on ancient pretexts. I insist on this connection precisely because the full weight of national propaganda is aimed at erasing, ignoring and discarding the memory of these victims, these invisibles.

The cost of this remembrance, however, is alienation from Muslims around me. Just as an Islamophobe’s mind may produce menacing images when he encounters a Muslim, I see Muslims through the lenses of war, occupation, invasion and torture.

If I see a woman in a hijab, my mind races to a recent surreal murder or questions about whether it reflects, for this particular person, a conscious choice of modesty, the inertia of tradition or the weight of oppression. If I see a man in chapals and shalwar-kameez, I immediately begin to speculate about his politics, what grievances occupy and animate his mind and his degree of reconciliation with modern life.

In this politicized projection, the actual human being at the other end of one’s tinted lenses never comes into focus. The Muslim greeting assalam-alaykum, “peace be upon you,” is shorn of meaning because peace is neither in me nor bestowed upon most Muslims in these times; a few have violently rejected the concept altogether and have instead embraced a mindless nihilism.

The inversion of rational thinking that lies behind this absence of peace leaves me drained, tired and deflated. And it will, I think, take more than a chance encounter in the streets and a clap in the clouds to change it.

(Similar version first published in WireTap)

The turmoil in Iran presents the current regime with its greatest crisis in the thirty years since the Islamic Revolution. More than that, however, it offers insight into whether and to what extent political Islam will address and reflect the needs of the younger generations in Muslim countries stretching from Turkey to Indonesia.

Iran is an instructive example in the Muslim world because its population is so young: The median age is 26.4 years. Half the population is under 30 and a third is between the ages of 15 to 29 — too young to have experienced the 1979 revolution or to understand firsthand its causes.

In broad strokes, the Muslim world at large is also disproportionately young, with those under 24 comprising 50 to 65 percent of the Middle East’s population. Many of these youth live under dictatorships or quasi-dictatorships and cannot find employment or any meaningful outlet to realize their potential in the ossified societies that suffocate them.

It is through this prism that Iran can be analyzed and its Islamic revolution will ultimately be judged: What concrete solutions can the state offer to the next generation of Iranians? The fault-lines of Iran’s internal struggle shed light on what younger Iranians themselves think of their state.

In a June 19 blog post, I argued that the turmoil in Iran reflected not simply secularism versus Islamism, but a central disagreement about Ayatollah Khamenei’s status and station as the supreme leader within the context of the Islamic Republic. After the disputed Presidential elections, some clerics who rejected the election results backed the Mousavi-led opposition, while Khamenei relied on the power of the military apparatus to enforce his decree that Ahmedinijad’s re-election victory was a “divine blessing.”

Events since then seem to confirm this view. Only days after the Basij militia — responsible for beating and killing protesters — called for Mousavi to be prosecuted, Khamenei’s own propaganda arm, the daily newspaper Khayan, echoed that sentiment in an editorial, accusing Mousavi of being an American agent. And on the other side of the split, an important voice of the clerical establishment, Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, brazenly defied Khamenei by declaring the election and the government illegitimate.

The clerical insistence that the elections were rigged points to the heart of the matter because the one clear demand of the  youth-led protests is recognition of their basic democratic rights. The questionable election results, tainted by widespread accusations of fraud and then stained with the blood of peaceful protesters, indicate that Khamenei wishes to do away with any element of democracy in order to consolidate his theocracy.

As I had indicated in my earlier blog post, the demand for more democracy calls into the question the very legitimacy of the role that Khamenei occupies. The innovation of Valet-e Faqih (a religious scholar’s claim to not only spiritual but temporal authority) was not universally accepted in Iran by religious scholars even on the eve of the revolution, and even given the commanding presence of its designer, Ayotallah Khomenei.

“Some found his line of reasoning and the sources on which he relied weak. Others saw it as a violation of Shia historical tradition and even theology,” the prestigious scholar Vali Nasr writes in his seminal book, The Shia Revival . The mentor of Ayotallah Sistani, Grand Ayatollah Abol-Qasem al-Khoi, bitterly opposed Khomenei’s innovation, Nasr further notes.

As Noah Feldman presciently and bluntly put it in his book, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State , “[I]nstead of restoring the balance between the ruler and the scholars,” — the historical precedent in Muslim societies prior to colonialism — “[Khomeini] sought to merge these two separate institutions under a single supreme jurist-ruler-and the failures of the Islamic Republic of Iran are the legacy of this megalomaniacal mistake.”

Millions of young Iranians clearly take this viewpoint, and for them Khamenei has lost the aura of authority. Though the Supreme Leader will not likely regain his standing through his over-reliance on the military’s bludgeon, the status quo is worthy of some reflection.

According to a hadith (or recorded saying of the Prophet), Muhammad said, “The worst scholar is one who visits princes, but the best prince is one who visits scholars.” In Iran, the scholar (Khomeini) did not go to the prince but became the prince, yet his successor must appease other powerful elements in the palace - the Revolutionary Guards and Basij — in order to retain his increasingly tenuous claim to dual authority.

Iran’s official leadership, of course, takes a different view of things. For them, the opposition represents the insertion and infiltration of Western agents and ideas intent on undermining Islam. They have leaned heavily on this crutch, as indicated by the wild accusations leveled at Mousavi, himself a veteran of the 1979 revolution. But in a country where many are too young to remember the American-backed Shah, let alone the American-backed coup against Mossadegh, these wild charges are no more likely to resonate than a hairpin dropped into a haystack.

It is true that, whatever course Iran charts, it will not determine the trajectory of other Muslim countries: it is the only Shiite country in the world with no claim to spiritual guidance over, say, Turkey or Indonesia, two Muslim countries with functioning democracies.

Nonetheless, Iran is the only large Muslim country that has restored — with whatever distortions — the importance of the role of the scholarly class, or ulema. Its 1979 revolution signaled the ascent of Islam as a political force in the post-colonial era. If the revolution cannot adapt to the demands of its children, and instead mutates from a theocracy with democratic elements to a military junta with a theocratic face, it will reinforce for many Shia Muslims the disastrous idea that they must make a choice between their faith and democracy. Or, as Mousavi said, “the ideology that Islam and republicanism are incompatible will be proven.”

As the tensions and contradictions of Iranian society have been laid bare over the past week, some Western observers have adopted a predictably self-centered view of events, eschewing sober analysis of the protests for ungrounded assertions that do little more than telegraph their own wishes and biases.

Topping the list as always are the neoconservatives, who, apparently not yet hoarse from bellowing for the destruction and invasion of Iran, are now squealing and squawking with feigned concern for the Iranian people as they scold President Obama for not intervening on the protesters’ behalf.

Even much of the mainstream coverage imparts to viewers the impression that Iran’s internal conflict is a Manichean matter of the secular versus the religious; those eagerly aspiring to Western liberal democracy squaring up against dour-faced and ancient Islamists.

A more dispassionate view reveals a much different picture. The protest movement, swelling in the streets of Tehran and other major cities with hundreds of thousands of adherents, has adopted as its banner the signature color of Islam: green. Its defiant nighttime chant is not culled from Die Hard or de Tocqueville, but the iconic cry of the Islamic Revolution: God is Great. The leader of the opposition, Mir Hussein Moussavi, is himself a veteran of the 1979 revolution.

This reality is entirely alien to “experts” who have divided Iran (and the Muslim world at large) into two imaginary camps: radical Islamists who denounce the Great Satan and aspiring secularists who swill wine while swooning over Sex and the City.

Iran has been an Islamic society for 1,300 years, but it has not always been an Islamic Republic. The critical point missed in much of mainstream analysis is that Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution of 1979 was not a wholesale restoration of some glorious Islamic past, but partly an innovation with no precedent in Muslim history—and it is this particular innovation that is the focal point of the current crisis.

Khomeini introduced the principle of Valet-e Faqih into Iranian political discourse—the idea that the wisest and most authoritative Muslim jurist should serve as the representative of the Twelfth Imam, who, in Shi’ite belief, did not die in the 10th century but was hidden by the hand of God and will return alongside Jesus to restore peace and justice on earth.

Khomeini’s theological innovation marked the first time in Muslim history that a cleric claimed not only spiritual but supreme political power—and, quite conveniently, placed him as the head of Iran . Khomeini’s shrewd combination of charisma and ruthlessness ensured that the station of Supreme Leader remained untouchable and irreproachable—but only so long as he was alive.

His successor, the current leading Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is but a shadow of the revolution’s founder; he lacked the religious legitimacy to occupy Khomenei’s post and was therefore forced to consolidate his power by pandering heavily to Iran’s military.

Some commentators on both the left and the right believe that it is precisely Khamenei’s over-reliance on the military that has forced him to throw his weight behind Mahmoud Ahmedenijad (a Revolutionary Guard veteran) and preemptively declare him the winner of the likely-rigged elections.

This theory goes a long way toward explaining the composition and attitudes of the opposition.

In a comprehensive poll conducted by an outside non-profit group three weeks before the election, four-fifths of Iranians said they wanted to make Khamenei’s post elected rather than appointed, vitiating the entire theological basis behind the Valet-e Faqih. This same poll also showed Ahmedinijad holding a commanding 2 to 1 lead, but as it was conducted before the opposition’s impressive push on the eve of elections, it’s not outlandish to assume that an even greater majority support making Khamenei accountable to the people.

Furthermore, what separates this round of protests in scale, scope and substance from the largely student-led eruptions of the past is the support of sections of the clergy, which includes not only relative moderates like Moussavi but firmly established figures like former president Hashemi Rafsanjani. This unlikely alliance between progressives and pragmatic clerics may have come about because the latter feel that their power is being eclipsed by the military.

A fitting illustration of the situation’s complexity is today’s Washington Times article that says the protests “are led largely by young nonreligious Iranians” but then goes on to note that clerics and ayatollahs are among the opposition’s main leaders.

Whatever the particulars, the situation in Iran is complex, fluid, and contradictory, and cannot be oversimplified into a “secular versus religious” schema superimposed by Western onlookers.

I do not think it is an exaggeration to call the speech groundbreaking.

It is true that the president did not announce any new concrete plans for achieving greater peace. But it is equally true that the language of respect, dignity, and tolerance is an essential precondition to any such peace.

The president’s willingness to recognize that Islam was not born on Sept. 10th, 2001; that extremism neither defines Islam nor is exclusive to Islam; that the Palestinians have suffered disproportionately under humiliating occupation -  these are all vital prerequisites, vital concepts, without which intercivilizational healing would be impossible.

In short, it is a good beginning. What remains to be seen is whether these words will be followed by corresponding actions and policies.

(Near-identical version appeared as my monthly column in WireTap Magazine).

To watch my country of birth unravel has been a curious thing.

As the Taliban continues to sweep across vast swaths of northern Pakistan, American pundits and officials ask incredulously, “How can their government let this happen? How can their people let this happen?” The United States looks on anxiously like a jolted passerby watching a train suddenly jump the tracks.

I was also initially shocked, but I found myself more surprised by my response than the calamitous events themselves. As the Taliban threat metastasized, my minimal sense of attachment to Pakistan began to intensify. While I had mostly kept my memories of Pakistan well out of my mind’s eye, I now began meticulously scanning these recollections, like fingers running across Braille in search of clues as to what went wrong.

After some searching, I realized that Pakistan’s existential crisis should not be seen as a shock but rather as an expected disappointment. The train of the Pakistani state did not jump the tracks; it merely arrived at the destination announced long ago by a series of indifferent conductors.

I was born in the congested southern port city of Karachi, which my parents soon left for Canada and then the United States. Every few years, we would visit our many relatives in Karachi and in the verdant capitol of Islamabad for a month or two. In sixth grade, I spent a full year in Pakistan. I have not gone back in many years; the last time I visited was only weeks before the September 11th terrorist attacks.

My happier memories of Pakistan stand in stark contrast to the grim images of dour, menacing militants that are now beamed into our retinas and burned into our consciousness.

I remember my mother’s frequent trips to teeming shopping centers, where, flanked by a phalanx of my various aunts adorned in loose, colorful headscarves, she haggled with an endless cavalcade of tailors and merchants who respectfully addressed her as baaji, or, sister.

I remember standing on the grass in the evenings, waiting for the warm air to be leavened by a cool breeze that carried the sound of overlapping and lyrical azaans sung by muezzins at local mosques.

I remember the kindness and hospitality of my aunts and uncles, who indulged my American proclivities for pizza and the like by preparing special meals and taking me to ambitiously-named imitators such as “King Burger.”

I remember nearly everyone trying to teach me the local language, Urdu, which synthesizes the sharpness of Arabic with the softness of Farsi (Persian). Even today, my father scarcely fails to remind me of Urdu’s linguistic richness or its venerated poets like Iqbal, Ghalib and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose works I can understand only in translation.

Of course, these are not my only memories.

What most struck me was the astonishing and omnipresent poverty in Karachi. Beggars and amputees lined the busiest streets; masses of tents flanked the roads, surrounded by garbage picked at by youngsters and vultures; little children spat into filthy rags and wiped windshields, hoping for a handout.

In my early teens, when I had yet to bother trimming my beard, the sight of such desperation once prompted me into a fit of frustration. I recall entering a nearby bank office filled with clerks and a guard armed with an assault rifle to reflect and cool down. It was, apparently, a poor choice: the staff, fearing I was a jihadi, became nervous, and my parents had to swoop in and defuse the situation.

Worse than the poverty was the elite’s refusal to address it. A sea of garbage and huts surrounded the most opulent and magnificent houses, separated by concrete walls topped with shards of glass. In the districts of the military and business elite, homeowners hired armed guards who kept watch over their masters’ playgrounds. I imagine the scene must have been much worse in the northern rural areas that are now Taliban sanctuaries, where the government never even pretended to address the poverty created by feudal elites.

The country also suffers from a near-absence of binding nationalism. During my year there in sixth-grade private school (no respectable middle-class family sent their kids to the pitiful government schools) we performed the martial ritual of standing at attention and singing the national anthem every morning. But the whole system was handed down from the British: the uniforms, the shoes, the canteens, the headmasters — even the English, which is, absurdly, Pakistan’s official language and the only one students were allowed to speak outside of Urdu class. Pakistani education was a slavish imitation, a kind of ventriloquist nationalism in which students opened their mouths but only the echo of the ex-colonizer was heard.

I often wondered what would happen to those whose misery I impotently observed; those left for decades without the housing, food or education I was afforded. History has now caught up to the present and supplied us the answer in the form of the Taliban.

The militants, of course, assert that they are simply bringing “true Islam” to Pakistan. Even a cursory glance at Islamic precepts and the Prophet Muhammad’s own example reveal an ethos sharply at odds with the Taliban’s harsh practices which, more than anything else, reflect a history of Pashtun tribalism that precedes Islam’s arrival by centuries and constitutes the militants’ base.

The Taliban’s ascent is not a failure of Islam, but rather the failure of the Pakistani national project to fulfill the basic functions of a sovereign state; to heed the call of its great poets, who denounced inequality and called for a revival and modernization of Islamic thought.

Most Americans are, understandably, more interested in results than reasons: As the Taliban limns the outlines of Pakistan’s demise with the unforgiving scalpel of extremism, will Pakistan confront this force, or succumb to it?

It is difficult to say. Ironically, it is America’s own mode of involvement that harms its interests: Our only visible contributions there today are drones, missiles and destruction. This has produced a polarizing effect whereby any force that opposes America — regardless of its real aims — elicits sympathy from sectors of the military and the rural masses.

Pakistan may be willing to plunge a sword through its heart just to pierce the skin of American interventionism, a case of spite through national suicide.

It is also impossible to know when a people will say enough is enough. While it’s incomprehensible to most of us that any government could comport with the Taliban and its horrors, it is worth remembering that America was willing to permit the horror of slavery for almost 100 years until the slave states declared secession and initiated war.

If the people of Pakistan do choose the path of resistance to preserve their country’s future, they may find inspiration from verses that belong to their history:

This is the way that autumn came to the trees:

it stripped them down to the skin,

left their ebony bodies naked.

It shook out their hearts, the yellow leaves,

scattered them over the ground.

Anyone could trample them out of shape

undisturbed by a single moan of protest.

The birds that herald dreams

were exiled from their song,

each voice torn out of its throat.

They dropped into the dust

even before the hunter strung his bow.

Oh, God of May have mercy.

Bless these withered bodies

with the passion of your resurrection;

make their dead veins flow with blood again.

Give some tree the gift of green again.

Let one bird sing.

- Faiz Ahmed Faiz

(Published in WireTap)

As he engages the Islamic world, President Obama has gone to considerable lengths to distinguish himself from his predecessor in tone and language. He has made express rhetorical overtures several times during his first months in office: in his first interview with an Arab news outlet, the president repeatedly called for “mutual respect” with the Muslim world; in his address to Iran during its spring celebrations, he openly addressed it as the “Islamic Republic”; and in his visit to Turkey, he unequivocally stated that America “is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.”

Obama’s efforts to indicate a clean break with the past, however, only thrust into sharper relief one unchanged feature of American foreign policy that has for decades shaped the contours of Muslim resentment: unconditional support for Israel.

Prominent Americans alighting on this third rail of American politics have learned that it carries a stinging current. For daring to dissent, former CIA chief Michael Scheuer found himself booted from a university foundation, PBS journalist Bill Moyers was smeared by the head of the Anti-Defamation League, and Charles Freeman was bullied into declining an offer to chair the National Intelligence Council.

New York Times columnist Roger Cohen also found himself pilloried by hysterical neoconservatives, fresh off the conveyor belt from the “clash of civilizations” factory, after writing that Israel has “conveniently conflated” its local conflicts with American interests.

What prompted this flurry of attacks against dissenters is the presence of dissent itself—a rarity in either conservative or liberal America, where those questioning Israel frequently find the Damocles’ sword of the anti-Semitism label held above their heads.

These dissenters have not taken up their stance because they suddenly discovered that Israel was created through ethnic cleansing, or that it has killed thousands of civilians in absurdly lopsided “battles,” or that it uses civilians as human shields: none of this is new.

Rather, what prompts their concern is that America today views 1.5 billion people through the crosshairs of a tiny belligerent state, and that a quarter of humanity is staring back at us through the same jaundiced lens. The dissenters wisely asked themselves, “How does this benefit the United States?,” and came to the obvious conclusion: it doesn’t.

If Obama truly intends a realignment of America’s relationship with the Islamic world, the process will have to begin by decoupling the chariot of American policy from the warhorse of Israeli aggression.

Israel’s decision to mount its attack on Gaza as Obama took office is a vivid illustration of just how easily the president’s hopes for rapprochement can be suffocated in the rubble of Arab anger. Even the prime minister of Turkey, whose country houses Israeli warplanes, was so repulsed by the massacre that he stormed out of an international conference after arguing with Israeli President Shimon Peres, vowing never to return.

It was also revealing to see Shimon Peres make his own heckling and threatening “appeal” to Iran—which Israel is hankering to bomb—on the same day Obama issued his measured message, a blatant attempt to undercut the president that went largely unremarked upon here.

Worse still was the recent election of Israel’s right-wing government, which, as a New York Times Op-Ed contributor acidly observed, is more hostile to a peace agreement than Hamas. The new foreign minister, a grotesque figure who would not escape classification as a fascist in any other country, has proposed a “transfer” of Israel’s Arab population to the Palestinian ghettoes, demanded a loyalty oath from the state’s Arab citizens, and suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza.

To propose rapprochement with Muslims while backing such a violently anti-Muslim regime is like extending an open hand with a scorpion in one’s palm.

In his appeals to Muslims abroad, Obama has accurately observed that Islamic extremists can only destroy, not create. Imagine how vividly he might illuminate that point for his intended audience if, as the president of the United States, he shields Muslims from Israeli violence while “Islamic” terrorists continue inflicting violence on their overwhelmingly Muslim targets.

It would be a clarifying moment in history—if the president has the courage to pursue it.

(A near-identical version was published in WireTap Magazine as my latest monthly column there, and that version includes some great pictures)

Tyranny, domination, oppression, control: such words are employed with great frequency in describing the open, explosive conflicts that leave homes in rubble and cities in ruin.

There is another kind of violence that leaves walls untouched and buildings unharmed, but merits the use of these same words: Domestic violence.

While it may not be debated at the United Nations as often, and does not prompt countries to dispatch diplomatic envoys with great pomp and circumstance, it afflicts communities across the world.

Globally, one in three women will be subject to physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner in her lifetime. According to a 2000 National Violence Against Women study, one in every six U.S. women has been a victim of sexuall assault or rape. In 2005, according to the FBI, 789 white and 337 black women were killed by intimate partners; 44 women falling into neither racial category met the same fate.

The striking photos of a bruised and beaten celebrity, 21-year-old Rihanna, recently thrust this complex and delicate issue into the limelight for many younger Americans. Some decided to blame the victim, particularly when it appeared that the young star had reunited with her alleged abuser.

A survey of 200 teens in Boston showed that almost half blamed Rihanna for the violence inflicted on her. A reporter’s foray into the halls of New York City high schools revealed much the same. “She probably made him mad for him to react like that,” one ninth-grade girl told the New York Times. “You know, like, bring it on?”

Within the American Muslim context, tackling domestic violence can be doubly difficult. Activists intent on raising awareness about problems within the community must be cognizant of those outside the community who seek to exaggerate or distort these problems for their own ends — such as citing domestic violence by Muslims as yet another reason to intensify military violence against Muslims.

Navigating these competing currents is a daily task for Robina Niaz, founder and executive director of Turning Point for Women and Families, a Muslim anti-domestic violence agency based in New York City.

Niaz explains that Turning Point, founded in 2004, is dedicated to addressing domestic violence in the New York Muslim community and creating a safe supportive space to mentor Muslim girls.

The initial reception to the agency was mixed. “The general response from Muslim women, girls, a few imams and Muslim men was quite positive,” Niaz says. “But it was difficult making inroads in the larger community as there was a lot of denial about domestic violence.” Over the past four years, however, Turning Point has seen a positive change in the community and acknowledgement and support for its work — including financial support.

Niaz says the hardest part of her work is fending off common Western stereotypes about women in Islam. The anti-Muslim rhetoric that metastasized in the aftermath of September 11, she adds, underscored the need for the organization’s existence.

“We try and address the stereotyping and negative media attention by constantly raising awareness about women’s rights within Islam, by separating religion from cultural practices and by encouraging Muslim women to… challenge the stereotypes among their peers,” she notes. Each year during Ramadan, the organization invites a female Muslim advocate or scholar to “challenge the notion that somehow abuse of women is okay within our faith.”

That notion surfaced just last month, when Aasiya Hassan, a Muslim woman, was murdered and beheaded, allegedly by her husband, in Orchard Park, New York. The scene of the crime was the very television station that the couple had created to offer Americans an alternative view of Islam. (Turning Point issued a joint press release with another Muslim anti-domestic violence group condemning the murder and asking that the perpetrator receive maximum punishment.)

Although the attack bore markers common to many domestic violence cases — a prior history of abuse, protective orders and divorce proceedings — some leapt to exoticize the act as an “honor killing” specific to Muslims. When the New York State President of the National Organization for Women (NOW), Marcia Pappas, described the act as “a terroristic version of honor killing,” Turning Point strongly registered its objection in a letter signed by eight other domestic violence agencies.

“Would you call a Christian woman in this same scenario murdered by gun violence a victim of an honor killing?” the letter pointedly asked in a reference to the hundreds of other domestic violence-related murders that occur each year in the United States. “Femicide is femicide and this tragedy is one more disturbing face of domestic violence.”

Addressing the oft-heard assertion that Islam endorses domestic violence, Niaz makes several points: It is easy, she says, to misinterpret religious passages, restrict the meaning of key phrases and take them out of context to justify one’s own immoral behavior. She points out that, according to contemporary accounts, the Prophet Muhammad never struck a woman and in his final sermon “reminded Muslims that the best among them were those who were best to their wives.”

She also cites the following Quranic verse: “And among His signs is this, that He created for you spouses from among yourselves, that you may live in tranquility with them, and He has put love and mercy between your (hearts) — verily in that are signs for those who reflect.” (30:21)

It is not history or hermeneutics alone that vitiates the idea of an inherent connection between domestic violence and Islam.

Turning Point’s youth leader, Moumita Zaman, has been actively involved in the fight against domestic violence by working with other young Muslim women to organize against abuse. She said that during high school, it was apparent that South Asian students didn’t go for help when faced with issues of abuse, violence and trauma aimed at either themselves or their mothers because of limited support services.

Determined to help address that gap, Zaman joined Turning Point as a volunteer and now creates programs and workshops for young Muslim women. For Women’s History Month in March, she helped five Muslim girls create their own written tribute to Aasiya, the Orchard Park victim, which they then presented. She described the process as “a breakthrough experience… as [the participants] gained confidence and had an opportunity to speak directly to their community members.”

Zaman, who also participates in a Muslim women writers’ workshop, says she has found strength in her identity by playing an active part in defining it. “As a Muslim woman, I’ve sought out or created spaces that help to empower me and other females… I’ve managed to surround myself with women who are changing the paradigm on how Muslim females are represented, and who represents us.”

Through their advocacy and tireless groundwork, Niaz and Zaman have achieved a measure of success that shows progress is possible in addressing this issue within the American Muslim community.

While domestic violence can neither collapse walls nor shake buildings, it is fair to say that between the walls and within the buildings of New York City, the level of awareness and dialogue around this problem has improved thanks to Turning Point’s efforts.