SAJAforum

ISLAM: Anti-terrorism fatwa to be issued in London

Salman Ahmad, the lead singer of Pakistan rock band Junoon and author of "Rock & Roll Jihad: A Muslim Rock Star's Revolution," sent along this alert about a potentially big development. Please take a look.

Asked for a comment, Ahmad told SAJAforum: "The fatwa against suicide bombing, terrorism is long overdue and should be widely highlighted by both the Muslim community and the global media. It's about time the terrorists are (religiously) held accountable for their unholy deeds and made clear that Islam condemns their violence in letter and in spirit."

[His book hits some of these same themes. You can read about the book and see interviews with him at http://bit.ly/sajarrj ]

There's contact info below for Quilliam, Britain's first counter-extremism think tank and which sent out the press release. Post your thoughts and updates/news items in the comments section below.

Press Release: Anti-terrorism fatwa launch in London today

AUTHORED: Dilara Hafiz on "The American Muslim Teenager's Handbook"

Introducing SAJAforum's new "Authored" series. The idea here is to have writers tell us the back story of their book--how it came to be--as well as the nasty, unwriterly business of getting out there and selling their wares. We think this will accomplish two things: get the word out about new or upcoming releases, and educate other authors (and aspiring ones) about the biz.

Authors, editors, publicists: talk to us.

Our inaugural book is "The American Muslim Teenager's Handbook," by the mother-daughter-son combo of Dilara, Yasmine and Imran Hafiz, who are Pakistani-American. The book is being released on February 10, by Simon & Schuster, but as you'll see in Dilara's account, the work only got picked up by S&S after the family initially self-published it. She also provides some great insights into the marketing of the book, setting up a website, getting blurbs and how going after the NYT can in fact pay off, handsomely.

The Story Behind "The American Muslim Teenager's Handbook" - by Dilara Hafiz, Yasmine Hafiz and Imran Hafiz

The Idea...

“You’re writing a non-fiction book about Islam in America…with your two teenagers?  Are you crazy?”  This was the standard response I received from various friends and relatives - but I’m grateful that it was the occasional comment of “Oh, that sounds interesting - I think you guys could do a great job!”  that we listened to.

The Why…

Life in post 9/11 America has been challenging for America Muslims: the ‘random’ searches at the airport, the impression that hijab = oppression, that Muslims are "the other." We heard so many misconceptions about Islam in the media, yet no coherent Muslim voices ever got airtime.  Where are the Moderate Muslims?  Well, we’re fairly moderate - maybe we should speak up.  So in 2002 we sent out a survey to 44 Islamic full-time and Sunday Schools across the country. The 150 responses which we received displayed such a variety of opinions and stories that we felt motivated to continue with our project - of not only writing an educational and entertaining handbook for the average American Muslim teenager, but also an enlightening guide to the basics of Islam for non-Muslims who are curious about Islam or want to pursue an interfaith dialogue. 

The How...

After three years of writing, re-writing, editing and surreptitious editing (remember, we’re 3 authors here) - our manuscript was finally ready.  Full of quizzes, lists of Do’s & Don’ts, results of the teen questionnaire - we knew we wanted the book to appeal to teens, so it needed to have pictures, humor and variety.  But the response from Muslim publishers?  Too progressive - you have pictures of girls without headscarves - haraam!  The response from mainstream publishers?  Your audience is too narrow, your treatment of religion is too humorous, your information content is interesting…but we’re going to pass on this manuscript. The project was badly stalled, until my Dad decided to go on Hajj in 2006. 

MUMBAI ATTACKS: What the NYPD learned from the attacks

My fellow reporter at WNYC, Bob Hennelly, has been watching how the NYPD are responding to the Mumbai attacks. This is from a great piece he did last month, where he entered the Millennium Hotel near Times Square, and as could be expected, easily wandered the various floors without being questioned. Via the stairwell, he gets to the fifth floor and encounters a hotel guest from Houston, Tania Vaughn. From "How Safe are Hotels and other Urban Spaces":

HENNELLY: I am with WNYC National Public Radio and I am doing a story about hotel security. As a customer how do you feel about it?

VAUGHN: I don't think hotel security is adequate enough. I feel like anybody can pretend to get locked out of a room and say to the housekeeping staff, "oh let me in" and it could not be their room. I am on the 21st floor, trying to keep her occupied for a couple of minutes. I have been just wandering around looking into rooms nobody has asked me any question. I am just floating around.

HENNELLY: In a statement responding to my ability to roam throughout their Midtown property, Millennium Hotel management says they have extensive security training in place. I was assured their lobby has a security presence at all times. They add that in the days since the Mumbai attacks -- and after my visit -- they conducted an additional training session.

HENNELLY: Yet on Millennium's own Web site, complete floor plans are readily available. And that's exactly the kind of information police say the terrorists had in Mumbai. Earlier this month at One Police Plaza, several hundred executives who manage security for both public and private facilities packed an auditorium to hear the NYPD's take on vulnerabilities in Mumbai."

The geopolitical intelligence journal Stratfor has a new report, Mitigating Mumbai, in which it notes the weak security at soft targets in the West, like hotels. But in the US and Europe, it says there are significant deterrents to anything on the order of Mumbai's attacks:

Among the most troubling aspects of the Mumbai attack were accounts by journalists of Indian police shooting at the attackers and missing them. Some journalists have said this failure can be explained by the fact that many Indian police officers are armed with antiquated revolvers and Lee-Enfield rifles. But the Lee-Enfield is an accurate and reliable battle rifle that shoots a powerful cartridge, the .303 British.

Further down:

By and large, U.S. and European police officers are better-trained marksmen than their Indian counterparts. U.S. and European officers also must regularly go to the shooting range for marksmanship requalification to maintain those skills. This means that in a Mumbai-type scenario in the United States or Europe, the gunmen would not have been allowed the freedom of movement they were in Mumbai, where they were able to walk past police officers firing at them without being hit.

Last week, NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly was in DC, speaking to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. I've pasted his full remarks below, in which he raises the issue of the media disclosing law enforcement tactics in real time, something that has been heavily debated in the Indian media since the attacks (In Outlook magazine, Shrinidhi Hande recommended banning live reporting of such attacks).

One of Kelly's most noted points was that the Mumbai attackers used cell phones to such advantage: From the AP:

Kelly said his department is examining ways it might be able to shut down cell phone calls in and around future hostage-taking scenarios, without also shutting down the communications devices of the police trying to rescue them.

More from Reuters:

New York sent representatives to Mumbai to study the attacks and the response, and conducted simulations on how its police would respond.

MUMBAI ATTACKS: NPR's comprehensive coverage

[See SAJAforum's full coverage of the Mumbai attacks]

During the Mumbai attacks we tried to highlight resources for journalists and others. Our goal now is to look at some of the coverage itself. We asked a few questions of Madhulika Sikka, the Deputy Executive Producer of NPR's Morning Edition (see below). The show (independent of other NPR programming) has an audience of about 13 million people, making it the most listened-to radio program in America, after the Rush Limbaugh show.

NPR's coverage was anchored by Philip Reeves, its New Delhi correspondent. Here are some of his reports from Mumbai and its aftermath (full list here), ending with his earliest reports:

• In India, Anger Grows At Response To Attacks (Dec. 2)
• India, Pakistan Relations Hurt By Mumbai Attack
  
• Security In Mumbai: An Impossible Task?
• India Reeling From Mumbai Rampage
• Mumbai Siege Ends With Gunmen's Deaths (Nov. 29)
• In Mumbai, Militant Violence Not Quelled
• Indian Commandos Try To Oust Gunmen
• Indian Forces Continue Battle With Mumbai Gunmen
• Toll In Mumbai Attacks Expected To Rise (Nov. 26)

But NPR also turned to a number of Mumbai writers and other commentators to round out its coverage:

• Suketu Mehta: "Mumbai is India's New York" 
• Filmmaker Smriti Mundra & Journalist Sara Rajan: "Witnesses describe attacks on Mumbai"
• Sandip Roy: "Mumbai Attacker's photo haunts commentator"
• Sree Sreenivasan: "Technology helps speed Mumbai web call-in show" (ie., SAJAforum's webcasts)
• Shobhaa De: "Columnist: Mumbai bigger than terror attack"
• Vikram Chandra "Mumbai terrorist attacks echo an Indian novel"
• Shashi Tharoor "Mumbai stands out from other terror attacks"
• Madhulika Sikka's written piece: "Why the location of the Mumbai attacks matters" 

In response to a few of our questions, Madhulika gave us a window into NPR's work, in coordinating its reporters and commentators from around the world:

On the overall coverage:

We approached this as we would any breaking news story, try and provide the most up-to-date information we could (on a major holiday I might add), but also provide some context.  This was complicated by the fact that it was an ongoing story that lasted three days and obviously it was
constantly changing.

MUMBAI ATTACKS: Roundup of op-eds

[See SAJAforum's full coverage of the Mumbai attacks]

[See our earlier post, from a few days ago, when Sree compiled a number of essays written during the attacks. Also note the many comments.]

So, was this or was this not India's 9/11? For a country that has many years of first-hand experience with terrorism, it's funny that India is now playing nomenclatural catchup with the West. But even the Indian media, amazingly enough, has latched on to the phrase. In The Guardian, Priyamvada Gopal writes "Comparing Mumbai to 9/11 diminishes both tragedies":

To characterise last week's tragedy as India's 9/11 is to privilege the experience of the United States as the iconic form of national suffering. The attacks on the twin towers were appalling but the fetishisation of September 11 disregards the experiences of the millions who have suffered as much elsewhere, sometimes at the hands of the US. In an India where globalisation has, on some fronts, spelled a relentless Americanisation, a question must be asked. The gated communities, the lifestyles of the rich and the rampant consumerism carry American labels. Should a calamity as well?

And Amitav Ghosh chimes in, in The New York Times - "India's 9/11? Not Exactly":

The question now is this: Will the November invasion of Mumbai change this? Although there is no way of knowing the answer, it is certain that if the precedent of 9/11 is taken seriously the outcome will be profoundly counterproductive. As a metaphor “9/11” is invested not just with the memory of what happened in Manhattan and at the Pentagon in 2001, but also with the penumbra of emotions that surround the events: the feeling that “the world will never be the same,” the notion that this was “the day the world woke up” and so on. In this sense 9/11 refers not just to the attacks but also to its aftermath, in particular to an utterly misconceived military and judicial response, one that has had disastrous consequences around the world.

But in The New Yorker, Ligaya Mishan titles his blog post "India's 9/11," in which he turns to Pankaj Mishra, who says:

I broadly agree with Steve Coll’s argument. I think it is India’s 9/11 in the sense that it shows very brutally that India is not insulated from extremism in the neighborhood or from the consequences of its own foreign and internal policy blunders. Whether this is the lesson the Indian élites will learn remains to be seen. I hope they have the sense not to lash out blindly.

Writing solidly from the left are those who find the Indian government complicit in the attacks, by having failed to provide the necessary social mobility to Indian Muslims (and others) or allowing Kashmir to go unresolved.

Asra Nomani's op-ed in the LA Times is called "Muslims--India's new untouchables":

"Muslims are India's new untouchables," I said sadly to my mother, in the room with me. "India is going to explode if it doesn't take care of them." Now, indeed, alas it has. And shattered in the process is the myth of India's thriving secular democracy.

FOLLOW UP: Police arrest Muslim student for faking hate crime

On October 11 we posted an item about a female student at Elmhurst College, outside Chicago, who claimed to have been attacked by a masked man, and that he struck her over the head with a gun. The assailant also apparently wrote "Kill the Muslims" on the bathroom mirror. Now, the police and college say she made it all up. From the Chicago Tribune:

A week after the case roiled the small college, Elmhurst Police Chief Steven Neubauer said Safia Jilani, 19, of Oak Brook had been booked on a felony charge of filing a false police report, which is punishable by 1 to 3 years in prison.

Jilani reported Oct. 9 that the man beat her with the gun in the college's science center, authorities said. Anti-Muslim graffiti was written on the wall, similar to a threat written on the same student's locker the previous week.

But there was no gunman, according to a joint statement from Elmhurst Police, the college and the DuPage County state's attorney's office.

"The totality of all the evidence, and interviews with staff and students at the college . . . concluded that this incident never happened," Neubauer said, although he would not elaborate.

The news has angered other students at the college, who staged a rally after Jilani said she'd been attacked. From a local edition of the Sun-Times, soon after the supposed incident:

COMEDY: Narinder Singh's comic cause, in Newsweek

Narinder Singh has a piece in Newsweek on how he took to the comedy circuit to change perceptions about Sikhism. From "My Turn: Standing up for the Truth":

I began doing stand-up to educate my fellow Americans about my religion. I wanted to show that Sikhs were not fanatical Muslims. I laced jokes with facts conveying that 99 percent of people with turbans in America were Sikhs, that Sikhism started in India 500 years ago and was now the fifth largest religion in the world. We believed in one God and equality for all, regardless of race, color, gender, religion and caste. But I was not funny.

I started reading books on stand-up comedy. After performing on each new-talent night, I stayed till the end to watch other comics and studied the audience to see how each age group reacted differently. At home I watched professional comedians on Comedy Central for hours and changed my material, making it more biting and provocative.  <snip>

I now wanted to show the entire audience that Indians, Muslims or brown people in general were affable and moderate. Because I received my first couple of threats from Sikhs, I had to convince myself that my fellow Sikhs were in fact also moderate. But it felt strangely exciting reading the verbal barbs posted on my first YouTube clip: I was having an impact.

An impact perhaps, but judging from the article, not necessarily the funny kind. A sampling:

DOCUMENTARY: A new campaign for "Divided We Fall," on violence against Sikhs

Among the aftershocks of 9/11, a Sikh man was killed in a fatal hate crime, confused for a person of Middle Eastern descent because of his turban and beard. South Asians reeled as pictures of Balbir Singh Sodhi flashed across television screens. But this was just the first of many cases.

In 2001, 20-year-old Valarie Kaur, a third-generation Sikh American started the journey that would become the award-winning documentary, Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath.

With her camera and cousin, she traveled to Sikh and Muslim communities, speaking to victims affected by hate crimes throughout the nation. She spoke with a Sikh man chased through Manhattan as the towers crumbled. She visited an elderly Sikh man whose wounds from being beaten with a baseball bat had not yet healed. Her concluding interview was with Balbir Singh Sodhi’s widow in India. who spoke of the love she still felt for American people.

Director Sharat Raju stepped into the picture in 2005 with his film crew. New footage, including interviews with lawyers, scholars and legislators was added, according to the film’s Web site. Kaur's blog highlights her tour to promote her film as well as discussions at schools and communities.

This month, seven years after Sodhi’s death, two years after the doc's 2006 premiere, a campaign set out to spark “50 screenings, 50 dialogues." The campaign organizers provided the film, promotional materials and dialogue topics to a number of participating communities.

Toward the end of the film, Kaur’s comical cousin Sonny turns the camera and asks her what message she had about the Sikh turban and her film.

She answered: “So other people don’t look at the turban and see fear, hatred, something laughable, something less than human,” she said. “So people don’t look at the turban and see an enemy where I see a brother.”

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And here's from a transcribed excerpt of a CNN segment addressing anti-Sikh violence after 9/11:

BROOKE ANDERSON: Days after 9/11 a Sikh man in Arizona was shot to death by a man who thought he was an Arab. In 2003 this Sikh man in New York was beaten by a crowd of white men who taunted him with anti- Arab slurs.

BOOKS: Five Questions for Rinku Sen, Author of "The Accidental American"

This month, SAJA member Rinku Sen launches a new book, "The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization." In the book, Sen, along with Fekkak Mamdouh, narrates the story of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, an organization that supports and organizes workers in New York's restaurant industry. ROC-NY was initially founded by Mamdouh and fellow organizer Saru Jayaraman to support workers, like Mamdouh himself, who were displaced from their jobs at Windows on the World, the restaurant that was at the top of the World Trade Center's North Tower. In the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attack, which claimed the lives of 72 individuals who worked at Windows, ROC-NY helped the surviving Windows workers launch a cooperatively-owned restaurant, Colors. Since then, the organization has expanded its work to organize and advocate for improved working conditions for restaurant workers throughout New York City, and has explored the prospects for expanding its work nationally.

Sen and Mamdouh tell the story of ROC-NY's founding and the ups and downs of its subsequent campaigns on behalf of New York's restaurant workers, critically assessing the challenges faced by advocates for immigrants' rights and drawing lessons from the local story about ROC-NY for the broader, national debates over immigration reform and globalization. Sen previously wrote about ROC-NY in a 2007 article, and she and Mamdouh discuss the themes of the book in a short video prepared in connection with the book's release. They launch a national book tour in New York on September 3, 2008 (details are available here). Journalists with interview requests and other inquiries about "The Accidental American" for Rinku Sen and Fekkak Mamdouh may email their publicist, Ina Howard-Parker, at ina [at] representinc.com. Tell 'em SAJAforum sent you.

Sen is currently president and executive director of the Applied Research Center and publisher of ColorLines, ARC's magazine on race and politics. She began her career as an organizer in 1988 with the Center for Third World Organizing and was named one of Ms. Magazine's "21 Feminists to Watch in the 21st Century" back in 1996. Her previous book, "Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy," offers advice for activists and social change organizations based on her own experiences as an organizer and other case studies. She recently answered a few questions from SAJAforum about her new book, the role of journalism in her work as a community organizer, and her views on the current debate over immigration reform:

SAJAforum: When and why did you decide to write this book, and why did you decide to call it “The Accidental American”?

BOOKS: Neal Katyal features in a Supreme Court account

Jonathan Mahler's new book, "The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power," didn't receive the most inspired review in The New York Times--it's called "a terribly intricate and somber hymn"--but for our purposes it's worth noting. Supreme Court star Neal Katyal is one of the three main characters, along with Lt. Commander Charles Swift of the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps. The case at hand concerns Salim Hamdan, aka Osama's driver. From the review:

But Swift, it turns out, is not your average legal gasbag; he suffers from attention deficit disorder, which may sound entertaining but gets old quickly. The young constitutional specialist he brings into the case, Katyal, is his intellectual opposite, an Indian-American grind who is math club all the way. While Swift, naturally, handles most of the talking — to judges, reporters, pigeons, dust mites — Katyal masterminds their legal theories and briefs. Much of the book is taken up with the writing and editing of Katyal’s briefs. Mahler does everything he can to inject color into this process; we learn of every all-nighter Katyal pulls, every ski and beach vacation marred by these all-nighters, plus every alcoholic beverage (“Hungarian dessert wine”) Katyal consumes in celebration — and that’s not to mention myriad marital strains as well as the pathos of his father’s long illness and death.

A little of this is fun, as when Katyal, attempting to calm himself as he awaits his first appearance before the Supreme Court, disappears into a bathroom stall to sing the theme from “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The tension that rises between Katyal, with his perfectionist ways, and just about every other lawyer in the book is pleasantly familiar; it sounds like any writer’s relationship to his editors. Much of this side color, however, feels superfluous. By the third or fourth time Katyal and his wife have overnight difficulties with their newborn, it’s a relief to get back to the legal editing.

And then, further down:

The climax is Katyal’s argument before the Roberts court in 2006, which Mahler, in the book’s strongest sections, retells in vivid detail. The victory results in a revamping of the military-commission process and, sad to say, the destruction of Swift’s marriage.

Earlier on SAJAforum:

• Neal Katyal and others on The Colbert Report
• Neal Katyal's op-ed in the NYT, calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the US DOJ's attorney scandal