"This is my martyred brother, Omar, recorded by my martyred brother, Hamza, under a month ago.
We were proud that Omar had memorized a song they had taught him in preschool, which went: (1/2)
هاد أخوي الشهيد عمر قبل اقل من شهر، بيصوره أخوي الشهيد حمزة.
كنا مبسوطين انه عمر حفظ الأنشودة اللي علموه ياها في الروضة، وكانت بتقول:
"أبطالك يا فلسطين، رفعوا راسك بالعالي
شهيد يودع شهيد، لعيون الأقصى الغالي"
"His name is Bilal. His face is familiar to many who go thru Ramallah; he sold sage,thyme,zatmana,figs,& cactus pears. He's 40 yrs old & from Al-Sawiya in south Nablus. This kind & simple man went out this morning to pick olives, & a settler killed him w/ a bullet to the chest."
إسمه بلال، وجهه مألوف للكثير من المارين في وسط رام الله حيث كان يبيع الميرمية والزعتر والزعتمانة والتين والصبر، عمره 40 سنة وهو من قرية الساوية في جنوب نابلس، هذا الرجل الطيب والبسيط، خرج صباح اليوم لقطف الزيتون، وقتله مستوطن برصاصة في صدره.
Today I found out that a Gazan friend of mine—whom I met at a program for Arab youth in Istanbul in 2019—was murdered by an Israeli airstrike while praying maghrib at the mosque. He was such a gentle, kind person. Just days ago, he asked program alumni to pray for Palestine.
it's obviously fine if you think the hagia sophia should be a museum rather than a mosque or vice versa, but there's really no good explanation for the global drama about this and the language being used except, well, islamophobia. (1/)
Just in case ppl were wondering, I just confronted
@Lowkey0nline
(at an Ox event) abt his position on
#Uyghur
genocide &
#Assad
's violence against Syrians & he outright said he doesn't consider what's happening to the Uyghurs genocide & refused to clarify his position on
#Syria
.
look what my islamic studies professor commented on my (very short) paper in which i had the audacity to suggest that western hadith scholars could/should approach the hadith corpus with more epistemic humility :) :) :) :) :)
I found out about his death from the insta story of another Palestinian friend whom I met—entirely separately—in undergrad. It turns out he's a relative of hers. Palestine is so small. So is the Arab world. We are all so connected.
reflecting today on how much damage the translation of "ḥayā'" as "shyness" did (and continues to do) to me as an outspoken—and decidedly NOT shy—young muslim girl/woman. our language really matters!!
I'm not even Palestinian, but this isn't the only loss I've been close to. One family friend lost 40 family members; another lost her brother, his wife, their kids & grandkids; still another lost 15 family members (& he found out on television). The devastation is so close.
like??? have you seen turkey's mosques??? they're beautiful & well-maintained & open to everyone & meanwhile the world is acting like turning the hagia sophia back into a mosque is some profound defilement.
do you care about HS or do you just hate muslims taking up space? (2/)
I don't want to center myself, only to say that what's happening in Palestine is not far away—it's close to all of us. So many of us are devastated and angry, and these are days and people we will never forget. Please pray for my friend Abu Omar and for all Palestinians in Gaza.
"i" "hate" "stem" but i don't hate stem! i just hate the ways it is taught and the culture surrounding it and the ways empiricism is treated as totally separate from and superior to philosophical thought and feelings and morals (i.e. meaning)
Personal news I am grateful to share:
This fall, I will be headed to Oxford University (St. Antony's College) to begin a two-year MPhil in Islamic Studies and History. I will be moving to the UK (!) in late September.
this move only seems regressive because christianity ("western heritage") is what's being "erased"—no one is mourning the diversity/islamic history of mosques-turned-churches in spain that surveil muslim tourists & stop them from praying inside. that erasure is acceptable. (5/)
yes, history & imagery should & (per court) will be preserved. but holding HS up as beacon of "coexistence" conveniently ignores how traumatic the fall of the ottoman empire—& the attendant secularization & ~rationalization~ of society—is/was for turks & muslims everywhere (3/)
defending the secularity of a site that was secularized as part of a destructive & colonial (& continued) effort to destroy non-western cultures (&/or return the world to its pre-muslim christian glory) is really not the testament to tolerance that you think it is (4/)
to close i'll just say that my feelings about turkey generally & erdogan specifically are, as always, very complicated. but it's moments like these that show how disingenuous the collective western hatred for them can be (even if there also may be good reasons for it) (7/7)
tired of talking about "women's issues" in islam. let's talk about men's issues instead: misogyny and toxic masculinity and gatekeeping and fragility and violence and and and
a very belated ramadan mubarak to you all!⭐️🌙🕌
AND an update from me: I'm very [🫢💃🏾💖🤪🥳🤲🏾🥲] to say that I'll be spending the next 5 to 7(+?) ramadans (& the rest of the year) as a PhD student in political theory at the University of Chicago! 🏙️👩🏾🎓
(just adding here that there are many very interesting questions brought up by the historical differences between the turkish and spanish cases (like who is a perpetrator vs victim of cultural violence and what reclamation means) that are too complicated to get into here) (6/)
i'm so excited to get my Islamic Studies Degree so that i, too, can make broad generalizations about diverse groups of people with little accountability
@Stasis119
settler is generally used to refer to Israelis living in settlements that transgress 1967 borders, making them illegal under international law. they are often far-right, armed by the IDF, & habitually engage in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
إنا لله وإنا إليه راجعون
The world lost beautiful Libyan-Canadian artist Arwa Abuoun this week.
The Abuoun family cared for my mom when she first moved to Canada alone. This is a terrible loss for a wonderful family & for all Libyans.
More on Arwa:
there is so so so much (male) demagoguery in conversations about ~islam and modernity~, and what morally and spiritually bankrupt conversations they end up being!
Some wisdom from early Islamic history: "The best of rulers are those who love scholars, but the worst of scholars are those who love rulers."
(Abu Hazim al-A'raj cited in Abu Nu'aym's Hilyah)
i get that no one knows anything about libya but the fall of the ottoman empire literally led to libyans being killed en masse and put into concentration camps so maybe just take a beat before denying that there is trauma associated with that particular historical event
@ihamza1435
term is used positively & negatively, & can refer to nature &/or virtue. I'd suggest "self-awareness" as a catch-all translation.
it *can* mean shyness, self-consciousness, embarrassment, timidity, fear of action. as a virtue, might be closer to self-possession or self-restraint.
There's a growing subset of (alt-right-adjacent) Muslim men who define "liberal influence" as "things I don't like/that challenge my authority," ironically just replicating modern logics of moral superiority at odds w/ the historically pluralistic Islamic tradition they "defend."
the extent to which every single university mental health service has been so obviously designed by someone who has little to no experience with mental illness...... it's almost laughable
14th c. Ashʿari Shafiʿi scholar (& Mamluk chief judge) Ibn Jamāʿa wrote a defense of taʾwīl—metaphorical interpretation of divine attributes mentioned in the Qur'an (e.g., yad, wajh)—against salaf-based affirmations of these attributes as stated without further inquiry.
(1/9)
akh-right out here talking about how women don't have a right to education and the best your masjid/msa/isoc can do is host another event about "the wives of the prophet" or "misconceptions about hijab." give me a break
Libyan people -- did your tribe/tribal identity mean anything to you growing up? What did it mean/what was its role in your/your family's life?
(I didn't even know I had a tribe until like 2013 so am curious about other people's experiences.)
what they give us are self-righteous hordes of alt-muslim men on the internet who believe that anyone who disagrees w their very specific formulation of islam is "brainwashed" by modernity or liberalism or whatever other buzzword sits in for "ideas that threaten my dominance"
To be clear, DC police have spent the last 6.5 hours *literally* laying siege to at least one private home on/near Swann St, even though the owner of the home (the iconic rahul) has made it clear that the peaceful protesters taking shelter there are not trespassing.
#dcprotest
every time there's muslim drama on here i write out a take & don't tweet it because i have resigned myself to the futility of discourse. then i write out a tweet on how i've resigned myself & then i delete that. repeat ad infinitum & that's why all you get from me are dumb tweets
This was my submission to the "Class Report" being compiled for my five-year Harvard reunion.
Solidarity with
@HarvardPSC
, and
#FreePalestine
today and always!
this is ofc an extremely alienating & overtly hostile space for young muslim women who want to live fully while also being in community with muslims
but also what a corrosive space it is for young boys coming into their muslimness! what a dangerous compulsion for power it seeds
we all agree that boys are victims of patriarchy & (toxic) masculinity. thing is, that victimization leads to attempts to assert power via violence. how do we interrupt that? heal it?
boys, the men they grow into, & their relationships to power drive so much violence worldwide.
@Stasis119
there is of course a sense in which all Israelis are settlers given that Israel is a settler colony. but when reference is made to settlers it is generally—just as it is here—in relation to those living on illegal settlements in the West Bank
rant: so hard to criticize the boys clubs that are scholarly spaces of educated youngish western muslims (& their views & politics) w/o being labeled by them as a ~liberal feminist rabble rouser~. & so it becomes difficult to inhabit these spaces w/o compromising your womanhood.
@rokwon
@chenchenwrites
reminds me of this hadith (saying of the prophet muhammad): "whosoever of you sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to do so, then with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart - and that is the weakest of faith."
I stand with the Syrian revolution today and always—against Bashar al-Assad, against all the states that enable him, and against all the so-called "leftists" in the US and abroad that whitewash the regime's crimes!
(Pic from the London Palestine protest last weekend)
i'll say it: smoking around other people is rude, ableist, and a direct cause of measurable harm. i don't care if it's part of your european academic aesthetic. stop it.
CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS:
@LibyanAlliance
is looking for vols to help collect stories abt ~600 civilian victims of current Libyan war. Stories will be presented on memorial website & used to advocate end to war/accountability frm war criminals. DM or info
@libyanamericanalliance
.org
I love Yaqeen, but it is disappointing that there is only one woman on this team -- especially when they list Islam's treatment of women as one of the three examples of what they address 👀
Take a peek behind the scenes and discover the History and Islamic Thought wing at Yaqeen's Research Department!
What questions do you have for our researchers about their process? Bring them to our next roundtable event tomorrow at 7 PM EST! Sign up now:
(not to mention the little muslim boys that get lost in the fray. your lectures about how "islam honors women" aren't giving them tools to stay afloat in these online cesspools and they certainly aren't equipping them to be good sons, brothers, cousins, husbands)
hello lovely friends & followers, i am still looking for a part-time job! remote or near oxford. things i am good at: writing, research, editing, doc/bib formatting, tutoring, computer things, care work, nonprofit things. hire me & help me pay for school! 😬😬
my big takeaway from my self-imposed several-month deep dive into the philosophy of law is that muslims (and scholars of islam) should engage much more with philosophies of law (from both within & outside the tradition) in our convos about islamic law!!!
constantly oscillating between 'wow men are victims of patriarchy in such intricate ways' and 'i'm gonna kill one man per second for the rest of my life'
@ihamza1435
what's clear is that the term is relational—those with ḥayā' don't just think about themselves, they think about how their actions are perceived by some other: could be God, could be other people (in which case it can be good *or* bad). it suggests a conscience & sense of shame.
18th-century British orientalist Charles Hamilton was best known for his translation of al-Hidayah, a compendium of Hanafi fiqh.
"To the political & speculative inquirer," he wrote, "the most curious features in this book are the passages which particularly concern WOMEN..."
I've always believed that to face today's challenges, we need to radically expand what we see as possible. I hope that engaging w/ history will be a powerful tool through which to understand & unsettle our own theoretical commitments & the political worlds we build upon them.
but sure yeah it's "just banter" or they're just "good guys who just go a little too far" in fighting whatever -ism we've decided is the devil today (glossed, of course, as defending the "sunna" or "Muslim epistemology" or "Islamic tradition" against "Western ideology")
me, a year ago: i'm not gonna be one of those muslim islamic studies people who never shuts up about ghazali
me, today: has 11 tabs open, each focused on ghazali's work
"The incidence of divorce in Mamluk society was remarkably high," writes Yossef Rapoport in his book Marriage, Money, and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society...🧵
waking up to the TX ban/bounty on abortion AND ppl comparing it to sharia law AND release of the FACE report on fatih seferagic highlights how suffocatingly little value is placed on my life, voice, choices in my home & my community. what is left for muslim women but ourselves?
Grateful to God, my friends, family, & community who motivate me &, more importantly, keep me accountable. Lmk if you'll be around or have recs (& also if you have thoughts about the merits of Persian vs Ottoman Turkish, which is one of the first decisions I'll have to make!).
imagine encountering a ~1300-yr-old scholarly tradition focused on historical narration that has comprehensively articulated epistemological bases & an evidenced history of fierce debate. & then imagine dismissing it wholesale! imagine being joseph schacht! orientalism is a trip!
given that the us military is so overfunded, it's pretty ridiculous that they haven't been able to hire social media managers good enough to know that i am a very bad target for recruitment ads
The all-female Bee Club has its own clubhouse once again, thanks to a $2.2 million purchase of the former Cafe Pamplona by the club’s president, a College junior.
Their Islamic discourse, which they claim is "more authentically Islamic" because it "lacks the modern biases" that the rest of us have, is utterly devoid of the humility, compassion, and contextual nuance that is so central to good Islamic reasoning.
did the arab spring (+ aftermath) dramatically and irrevocably transform your ideas about the nature, value, and impact of political action or are you normal
A number of NYC’s Muslim elders and grassroots organizers will not be accepting Eid greetings from local officials unless they come with an explicit condemnation of Israel’s violence against Palestinians and Al-Aqsa. Until our pain is affirmed we do not want your “Eid Mubarak.”
Eid mubarak everyone! Remember that the ummah is a body -- if one part of it is hurting, all of it is. On this day of all days, let's keep fighting for justice, from East Turkestan to Palestine ✊🏽✊🏽