Young Muslims Build a Subculture on an Underground Book
Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called “The Taqwacores,” about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo.
[ ]…For many young American Muslims, stigmatized by their peers after the Sept. 11 attacks but repelled by both the Bush administration’s reaction to the attacks and the rigid conservatism of many Muslim leaders, the novel became a blueprint for their lives.
“Reading the book was totally liberating for me,” said Areej Zufari, 34, a Muslim and a humanities professor at Valencia Community College in Orlando, Fla.
The U.S. and the west has this powerful not so secret weapon called pop culture. For those that like the solid pop of automatic weapons or the awesome cloud kicked up by a daisy cutter, pop culture and the enlightenment at its core, seems like a tedious unsatisfying way to deal with extremism, but it works, eventually. In internet time it seems prehistoric, but not too long ago we were burning witches, the last racially motivated lynching occurred in the 70s – and despite recent set backs, one day gay Americans will have the right to marry and be as miserable as every other married couple. Pop culture, many will be relieved to know, others frustrated, doesn’t turn everyone into atheists and agnostics. It does soften up the rigidity of religious and political dogmas. One of the great ironies of the recent past has been the Right’s inability to see the funhouse mirror reflection of themselves in ultra conservative Muslims. Conservatives have been on the losing side of history for well over a hundred years. They were against voting rights, women’s sufferage, civil rights and laws to protect workers and children. It stretches credulity to believe conservative Muslims will succeed where non-Muslim counterparts with plenty of power, money, media oligopoly and too much spare time failed.
pink’s ankle tattoos. i’m lost on the asian symbols, but the dog tags have a remarkable amount of detail. there are two names, serial numbers and blood types, just like real tags.
If critques were knives, Dick Cheney’s can consider himself eviscerated courtesy Dahlia Lithwick, Dick Cheney’s unique gift for making hard questions easy and vice versa,
Cheney thinks torture is effective and legal.
Cheney says water-boarding is not torture. That question has been resolved as a legal matter for centuries and is not actually open to relitigation on ABC News. Water-boarding has been deemed torture and prosecuted as a war crime in this country. It violates, among other things, the Convention Against Torture, the War Crimes Act, and the U.S. anti-torture statute. Its illegality is neither an open question nor a close one. Yet again, the handful of people—including Dick Cheney—who maintain that torture is completely legal corresponds almost perfectly to the number of people who could be prosecuted for war crimes because it is not.
Cheney and his sidekick George also thinks that when some war is semi-declared as in the Authority to Use Military Force – an open ended nebulous condition that has been redefined every few months for years, the executive branch has nearly unlimited rights. All covered by something called the theory of the unitary executive. This belief slash behavior may derive from a biological condition where methane gas normally routed through the intestines backs up all the way to the brain choking off clear thought and creating delusions in the sufferer,
As MacKenzie writes: “The unitary executive has come a long way for a theory that has a hole in its heart and no basis in history or coherent thought. It simply is devoid of content, not expressed or even strongly implied in foundational documents such as The Federalist, not to mention the Constitution.”
inkbluesky 