Video of CAI awards to Todd and Ethan, 9/26/10
Here’s a nice video, with brief remarks from me and Todd:
Muslims in America: Time for a Movement?
Walking for Pakistan flood relief, San Ramon, California, October 2, 2010. The walkathon was organized by the group Mashal (www.mymashal.org).
COLORADO SPRINGS – I spend much of my time veering between the worlds of Muslims and non-Muslims in America, and sometimes I wonder if ever the twain shall meet. Recently in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey they did meet, in a moving and encouraging way. They need to meet like this more often.
On October 8, after Friday prayers at the Islamic Society of Central Jersey mosque, fifty or so invited members of the wider community arrived to take part in a conversation with teenagers from the Noor-ul-Iman school (whose students, incidentally, have a 100% college acceptance rate and average 1920 on their SAT scores).
“What it is, is an Islamic education along with our other education,” one student explained. “Being an American Muslim is something that’s very easy to do. The laws in America are very similar to the laws in sharia.”
“We’re Americans,” said another. “We all want the common good of this country.”
“We want our voices to be heard more,” said a third student. “It is our job to go out and educate both Muslims and non-Muslims about what Islam is all about.”
It sure is. In a country brimming with urgent needs and wake-up calls, I can’t think of any task more urgent, or anyone better equipped to take it on than the young Muslims I know who are already helping build a new, improved America for the twenty-first century.
But the most moving moment that day came from a voice of historical memory. A 67-year-old woman in the audience – she later told me her name was Rita – raised her hand to tell the young people that she knew what it must be like for them, as members of a misunderstood and suspect religious minority. Growing up Jewish in America half a century ago, she told them, she had endured “Christ-killer” and other slurs from her classmates. And she wanted to share with the young Muslims what her father had always told her: “Hold your head up high and be proud of who you are.”
In the past month I’ve walked in a walkathon for Pakistan flood relief in San Ramon, California (put on by the wonderful Pakistani-American organization Mashal); heard the all too typical story of a Muslim girl who grew up post-9/11 in small-town Texas; attended prayers at what is provocatively and inaccurately called the “Ground Zero mosque” in lower Manhattan; and had many public and private conversations with both Muslims and non-Muslims in New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Colorado. And what I’m seeing are the seeds of a much-needed movement.
It’s time for Muslims in America to hold their heads up high and be proud of who they are. I say this cautiously, because I’m not Muslim and thus not vulnerable in the ways Muslims are. But I’m vulnerable enough; after speaking at a Pakistan flood relief fundraiser at Gettysburg College, I received hate mail (anonymous, of course). And it’s high time all of us who remember and/or hope for an America governed by the better angels of our nature stopped apologizing and reacting to bullies and started assertively changing the conversation.
The ugly truth is that Muslims are the people against whom, in today’s America, it’s considered not only okay but, somehow, even laudable to be bigoted. But it’s not okay. As my late grandmother would have put it, that’s just plain wrong. What’s dismaying to me, as an American, is that I thought we had learned that lesson. But we don’t seem to have learned much from the Vietnam War, so I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that we’ve also failed to learn – or are willfully unlearning – the lessons of the civil rights movement. Most disturbing is that anti-Muslim bigotry and moral recklessness cut across the American ideological spectrum, from the Quran-burning pastor in Florida to the young woman in Seattle, whose silliness does not excuse her irresponsibility, who now lives in hiding because of the cartoon she published. I drafted this paragraph before the Juan Williams fiasco erupted, and that sorry episode only underscores my point.
What would be the shape and goals of the movement I’m positing? For starters, the civil rights movement offers a model in terms of both moral and political urgency and methods. The parallels are not exact, but it’s not far-fetched to hope that one day places like San Ramon and Monmouth Junction might be remembered the way Greensboro and Selma are (or should be) today. (To learn the relevant history, read the three volumes by Taylor Branch, starting with Parting the Waters.)
One thing the example of the civil rights movement ought to motivate us to do is to get off our rear ends and out from in front of our laptop screens. “Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice,” writes Malcolm Gladwell in an excellent recent New Yorker article, “but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.” In other words, you can’t make a better America simply by “liking” it. Gladwell drives home the point:
Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. … If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.
What is to be done, specifically? I have a few suggestions. It’s time we Americans re-learned how to make genuine political statements. For example, how about an assertively nonviolent Million Muslim March on Washington? If Glenn Beck can dishonor King’s legacy by filling the National Mall with Tea Partiers on the anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech, surely we can – and should, and must – honor and reclaim it.
Here’s another idea: National Wear Muslim Garb on Airplanes Day. I’ll do it if you will, and I’m not joking. As any student of King or Gandhi knows, nonviolent resistance is anything but passive. The point is to flush out and shame bullies and bigots, by confronting them. What if thousands of ordinary Americans wore “Muslim garb” through airport security and on planes, all on the same day? Some of the reactions might not be any prettier than Bull Connor’s dogs and water cannons, but they sure would get across the point about who’s violent and who isn’t.
In the August 31 issue of The New York Review of Books R. Scott Appleby and John T. McGreevy, historians of the Roman Catholic experience in America, published a helpful and encouraging article titled “Catholics, Muslims, and the Mosque.” In it they wrote:
Must Muslims unequivocally reject all forms of terrorism—especially those Muslims who wish to promote full Muslim participation in American society? Of course. But if the Catholic experience in the United States holds any lesson it is that becoming American also means asserting one’s constitutional rights, fully and forcefully, even if that assertion is occasionally taken to be insulting.
Such assertion, by Muslims and the rest of us, is long overdue. This is what I mean when I say, as I’ve found myself saying many times in public recently, that I believe Muslims have a historic opportunity to play an important leadership role in American society today.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of the travel books Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti for publication in 2011. He can be emailed at ethan@ethancasey.com and his books and articles are available online at www.ethancasey.com/books/ and www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans.
Now what? Tony Judt helps us understand our 21st-century world
Published just before his death earlier this year, Ill Fares the Land is Tony Judt’s great parting gift to us denizens of the anxious, perilous 21st century. There is more to come – a book titled Thinking the Twentieth Century and a collection of his remarkable series of personal essay will be published posthumously – but this short manifesto reads like Judt’s urgent statement. Judt insisted in interviews that the urgency was external, not a function of his final illness, and we would do well to take him at his word.
Over what turned out to be the final two years of his life, as he raced to tell the world what he thought it needed to hear, Judt deservedly came to be recognized as one of the great intellectuals of our time, indeed as a thinker of a relevance rarely seen anymore. Unapologetically, he does the work of a European-style “public intellectual” in an American context and argues that, urgent though it is for us to act, we must first relearn how to understand and converse. “This book was written for young people on both sides of the Atlantic,” he writes.
American readers may be struck by the frequent references to social democracy. … One of my goals is to suggest that government can play an enhanced role in our lives without threatening our liberties – and to argue that, since the state is going to be with us for the foreseeable future, we would do well to think about what sort of a state we want. … Our problem is not what to do; it is how to talk about it.
I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall as if it had just happened, but for the young readers Judt hopes to influence, it’s a historical event. Before it recedes entirely from our rear view, it’s important to articulate its meaning. “The real problem facing us in the aftermath of 1989 is not what to think of communism,” Judt writes. “The vision of total social organization – the fantasy which animated utopians from Sydney Webb to Lenin, from Robespierre to Le Corbusier – lies in ruins. But the question of how to organize ourselves for the common benefit remains as important as ever. Our challenge is to recover it from the rubble.”
“We shall have to ask the perennial questions again, but be open to different answers,” he writes.
… If 1989 was about re-discovering liberty, what limits are we now willing to place upon it? Even in the most “freedom-loving” societies, freedom comes with constraints. But if we accept some limitations – and we always do – why not others? Why are we so sure that some planning, or progressive taxation, or the collective ownership of public goods, are intolerable restrictions on liberty; whereas closed-circuit television cameras, state bailouts for banks “too big to fail,” tapped telephones and expensive foreign wars are acceptable burdens for a free people to bear?
There may be good answers to these questions; but how can we know unless we pose them? We need to rediscover how to talk about change: how to imagine very different arrangements for ourselves, free of the dangerous cant of “revolution.”
I’ve long felt that, for better or worse, Detroit is the most American of American cities. There’s much more that I’d like to say about that, elsewhere. In the context of this review, suffice it to say that Judt’s seemingly eccenctric but quite persuasive enthusiasm for railroads and argument for their importance strikes an especially poignant note to anyone who, like me, has looked out over the city that lived and died by the automobile from the roof of its once-magnificent, never-completed, long-abandoned train station. “If we throw away the railway stations,” Judt writes, “… we shall be throwing away our memory of how to live the confident civic life. It is not by chance that Margaret Thatcher made a point of never traveling by train.”
Ill Fares the Land is above all a plea for historical memory, and a call for retrieval of both a necessary confidence and a becoming modest in the face of the daunting problems of our profoundly uncertain time:
The best reason for hoping that we shall not recycle the errors of the 1930s is that we have been there before. However inadequately we recall the past, it is unlikely that we shall neglect all the lessons that it has taught. More plausibly, we shall make unprecedented mistakes of our own – with perverse political consequences. … We take for granted the institutions, legislation, services and rights that we have inherited from the great age of 20th century reform. It is time to remind ourselves that all of these were utterly inconceivable as recently as 1929. … Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.
Read the New York Times obituary of Tony Judt
New York magazine: “The Liveliest Mind in New York”
Purchase the book here: Ill Fares the Land
CAI Spirit Award remarks, Sept. 25, 2010
On September 25, 2010 in Santa Clara, California, I was honored by Greg Mortenson with the Central Asia Institute Spirit Award. Below are the remarks I made on the occasion:
Many thanks to Central Asia Institute for this honor. Knowing Pakistan and Pakistanis as my friends and teachers for fifteen years has improved me as both a writer and, more importantly, a human being.
I’m humbled to remember the suffering of flood victims in Pakistan, and I’m very disturbed by the apparent lack of concern most Americans are showing for it. As urgent as flood relief and education in Pakistan are, what’s no less urgent is to enhance awareness of Pakistan, and compassion for Pakistanis, in non-Muslim Americans. I’m trying to help by writing and speaking to Americans about Pakistanis the same way I write and speak about Haitians: as human beings whom I love and respect.
I attended Friday prayers yesterday at a local mosque. In his remarkable sermon, the imam challenged his congregation to ask themselves, “What do I as a Muslim bring to this society?” One thing I believe all of us, Muslim and non-Muslim, can bring to our society is simple sympathy and friendship between Americans – between human beings – of differing faiths and backgrounds. America needs this urgently. The world needs it urgently.
Thank you. And now it’s my honor to hand over the microphone to one of the great humanitarians of our time, Greg Mortenson.
