avari | haroon moghul

Please join me on Thursday, October 28th at 5pm for the event below.  Adelphi University is located in Garden City, Long Island.  Click here for directions. 

Monday, October 25 | 3-5 pm
Harkness Hall, Room 309
100 Wall Street, New Haven, CT

A scholarly panel will examine, contextualize, and historicize underlying assumptions about space and belonging vis-à-vis Islam in the United States. Sally M. Promey, Professor of Religion and Visual Culture and Professor of American Studies, will offer words of welcome.

Moderator:      Perin Gurel, American Studies, Yale University

Paneslists:       

Zaheer Ali, History, Columbia University

Rosemary Hicks, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Humanities, Tufts University

Haroon Moghul, Middle East and South Asian Studies, Columbia University

Matthew Jacobson, American Studies, Yale University

Presented with the Yale Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion, the Office of the Chaplain, the Program in American Studies, Public Humanities at Yale, and the Department of Religious Studies

I'll be speaking next Monday at Wagner College (Staten Island) at 7:00pm in Spiro Hall (not Spiro Sports Center, right next door) Room 2.  The panel is titled "Mosque Building in Community," and will discuss and present arguments against and in favor of mosque-building in certain locations, as well as an outline of the Muslim community as it stands today.  The other two panelists are Jane Eisner, a columnist from the Jewish Daily Forward and Abe Greenwald, a contributor to Commentary Magazine.

I'm honored to share with you some wonderful news: Auburn Seminary has chosen me to be their religious leader of the week (featuring a short video clip about why I think the right is targeting America's Muslims, and the larger purpose -- often invisible -- at work). 

Last week, I spoke at the Seminary as part of an incredible panel, including Rabbi Visotzky from Jewish Theological Seminary, Reverend Dr. Forbes and filmmaker and activist Valarie Kaur, titled "Take the Bully Out of the Pulpit".  That's now now available to watch or download (for free) as an (audio) podcast.  I hope you'll share widely, and appreciate my (restrained) comments on Glenn Beck and the far right's one-sided conversation about Islam.

In a series of fascinating interviews with the New York Times, somebody says:

And I’d say, well, you know, if it was really about healing, why isn’t it a shrine dedicated to the victims of 9/11 or the 270 million victims of over a millennium of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilations and enslavements?

That is to say, over 1,000 years of "jihadi wars" and so on and so forth, jihadis (Muslims?) have allegedly killed 270 million people.  This is an amazing claim, and never mind parsing whether jihadi means Muslim, which for this person, according to her own interview, does and does not.  It is at the end of it all inaccurate, because it is inconceivable.

I began this khutbah based on an incident of domestic violence in Texas not too many weeks ago.  It got me thinking, and I've been thinking about this a lot lately, but what is Islam's attitude to collective institutions?  People are talking about shari'ah all the time these days, as if it's a dirty word.  Now, I do not believe that there is one constant and unchanging Islamic social philosophy, which can be applied abstractly -- that contradicts the tradition and form of Islamic law.  But, I look to the life of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and the different ways in which he sought to establish justice and protection for the poor and vulnerable.  My conclusion?  Islam is real, and the Prophet (pbuh) supported institutions of justice and fairness where he found them.

If Society Fails by Haroon Moghul from ICNYU on Vimeo.

Just a quick reminder: I'll be joining a great panel this Wednesday at an Auburn Seminary event.  For more information, including how to RSVP, please visit this page.  If you can't make the event, you can watch it live at the same website, where it will be streamed, or catch a short video summary that will be made available after the event.

This past Monday, I was honored to be a part of the University of Florida-Gainesville's Fast-a-thon, put on by Islam on Campus.  Hundreds attended, and raised close to $5,000 for a local charity devoted to feeding and helping the homeless and hungry.  The Independent Alligator, an area newspaper, produced a short clip of the event, which was really fun -- but went by far too fast.  (Bad pun.  Really bad.)  Here's the video, which is however not as cool as 'Muslim Bachelorism':

From the Oct 15, 2010, issue of Rolling Stone:

"I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."

"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"

"Me?" he says proudly. "Oh, I'm a property appraiser. Have been my whole life."

I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"

Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!

"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"

"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."

"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"

"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much." Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of s**t. All of them.

At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations.

Have you heard the name Abdullah Sabawi?  You should and, likely, you will.

When I arrived in Orlando, Florida, a few days ago, it was for a fast-a-thon at the University of Florida.  After a few days vacation, I got a ride up to Gainesville -- to the University of Florida campus up there -- by an area student.  I was really happy to discover the student in question is a filmmaker.  It's always so nice to meet some of the fascinating people who make up our Muslim community; Abdullah, a college student at Central Florida, exactly meets that description.

Turns out Abdullah's short film, Muslim Bachelorism, played at two Orlando area film festivals and was very well received.  I asked him to share the film with me, and he generously agreed to let me embed it on my blog.  I found it a wonderfully entertaining, hilarious and subtly insightful take on the mad rush to get married that preoccupies so many young Muslim men (and it's not for the romance, I'd venture.)  Please watch and share (the original link is here if the below doesn't play properly).  And I hope we'll see much more from him.  Insh'allah.