I am sending thanks to my friend Bill for tipping me off to this fantastic video of a ride down San Francisco's Market Street before the earthquake in '09. The music is by Air
Was that a crack whore on the corner of Jones and Market? Some things never change....
Last night I dropped by an event called Kalfana Balkan to check out the music being spun by my friend's baby daddy, "Zeljko"- a Serbian bike messenger who lives in my neighborhood (my friend and her child have long since moved on to Brooklyn)
I've been wanting to check out Baltic music for a while now. Last year when working my shift at the childcare co-op another parent raved on and on about the greatness of Gogol Bordelo (featured in the video above).
Also my tattoo artist, Marie Wadman (incidentally the greatest tattoo artist in the world) filled me in while tattooing my upper bicep on the fantastic Fillmore show by Balkan Beatbox she had attended.
Last night was my first foray into the Balkan music world and it was a good, good time. Zeljko's set was mighty fun, but I loved the live band Brass Menazeri the best, which sounded like some bizarre mixture of Fela Kuti and the Klezmatics and a really good Brazilian batteria. There were six horns, a big drum that was worn in front of the drummer and a clarinet. The band was equally divided between men and women. The women were my age and older, they were not skinny glam queens. They were all dressed as if headed for a bar mitzvah. I loved them.
Everyone in the audience was dancing with ecclectic dance moves, including samba reggae (this former sambista executed a few of those herself) waltz, polka, slam dancing, every kind of dance imaginable.
Can't wait to go to my next Balkan music night.
"The minaret is a symbol of Islamist supremacy, a token of domination that came to symbolize Islamic conquest. It was introduced decades after the founding of Islam.
In Europe, as in other places in the world where Muslims settle, the places of worship are simple at first. All that a Muslim needs to fulfill the obligation of prayer is a compass to indicate the direction of Mecca, water for ablution, a clean prayer mat, and a way of telling the time so as to pray five times a day in the allocated period.
The construction of large mosques with extremely tall towers that cost millions of dollars to erect are considered only after the demography of Muslims becomes significant.
The mosque evolves from a prayer house to a political center.
Imams can then preach a message of self-segregation and a bold rejection of the ways of the non-Muslims.
Men and women are separated; gays, apostates and Jews are openly condemned; and believers organize around political goals that call for the introduction of forms of sharia (Islamic) law, starting with family law.
This is the trend we have seen in Europe, and also in other countries where Muslims have settled. None of those Western academics, diplomats, and politicians who condemn the Swiss vote to ban the minaret address, let alone dispute, these facts.
In their response to the presence of Islam in their midst, Europeans have developed what one can discern as roughly two competing views. The first view emphasizes accuracy. Is it accurate to equate political symbols like those used by Communists and Nazis with a religious symbol like the minaret and its accessories of crescent and star; the uniforms of the Third Reich with the burqa and beards of current Islamists?
If it is accurate, then Islam, as a political movement, should be rejected on the basis of its own bigotry. In this view, Muslims should not be rejected as residents or citizens. The objection is to practices that are justified in the name of Islam, like honor killings, jihad, the we-versus-they perspective, the self-segregation. In short, Islamist supremacy.
The second view refuses to equate political symbols of various forms of white fascism with the symbols of a religion. In this school of thought, Islamic Scripture is compared to Christian and Jewish Scripture. Those who reason from this perspective preach pragmatism. According to them, the key to the assimilation of Muslims is dialogue. They are prepared to appease some of the demands that Muslim minorities make in the hope that one day their attachment to radical Scripture will wear off like that of Christian and Jewish peoples.
These two contrasting perspectives correspond to two quite distinct groups in Europe. The first are mainly the working class. The second are the classes that George Orwell described as "indeterminate." Cosmopolitan in outlook, they include diplomats, businesspeople, mainstream politicians, and journalists. They are well versed in globalization and tend to focus on the international image of their respective countries. With every conflict between Islam and the West, they emphasize the possible backlash from Muslim countries and how that will affect the image of their country.
By contrast, those who reject the ideas and practices of political Islam are in touch with Muslims on a local level. They have been asked to accept Muslim immigrants as neighbors, classmates, colleagues – they are what Americans would refer to as Main Street. Here is the great paradox of today's Europe: that the working class, who voted for generations for the left, now find themselves voting for right-wing parties because they feel that the social democratic parties are out of touch.
The pragmatists, most of whom are power holders, are partially right when they insist that the integration of Muslims will take a very long time. Their calls for dialogue are sensible. But as long as they do not engage Muslims to make a choice between the values of the countries that they have come to and those of the countries they left, they will find themselves faced with more surprises. And this is what the Swiss vote shows us. This is a confrontation between local, working-class voters (and some middle-class feminists) and Muslim immigrant newcomers who feel that they are entitled, not only to practice their religion, but also to replace the local political order with that of their own.
Look carefully at the reactions of the Swiss, EU and UN elites. The Swiss government is embarrassed by the outcome of the vote. The Swedes, who are currently chairing EU meetings, have condemned the Swiss vote as intolerant and xenophobic. It is remarkable that the Swedish foreign minister, Carl Bildt, said in public that the Swiss vote is a poor act of diplomacy. What he overlooks is that this is a discussion of Islam as a domestic issue. It has nothing to do with foreign policy.
The Swiss vote highlights the debate on Islam as a domestic issue in Europe. That is, Islam as a set of political and collectivist ideas. Native Europeans have been asked over and over again by their leaders to be tolerant and accepting of Muslims. They have done that. And that can be measured a) by the amount of taxpayer money that is invested in healthcare, housing, education, and welfare for Muslims and b) the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who are knocking on the doors of Europe to be admitted. If those people who cry that Europe is intolerant are right, if there was, indeed, xenophobia and a rejection of Muslims, then we would have observed the reverse. There would have been an exodus of Muslims out of Europe.
There is indeed a wider international confrontation between Islam and the West. The Iraq and Afghan wars are part of that, not to mention the ongoing struggle between Israelis and Palestinians and the nuclear ambitions of Iran. That confrontation should never be confused with the local problem of absorbing those Muslims who have been permitted to become permanent residents and citizens into European societies."
Aayan Hersi Ali may have an axe to grind- in girlhood her genitals were mutilated by her family in the practice of a coming-of-age rite (she is Somali by birth). She currently lives in hiding because Muslim extremists seek to kill her, they have already succeeded in killing her artistic collaborator, Theo Van Gogh in 2006 in a grisly assassination in Holland.
What I like about her analysis, is the attention paid to class perception about the "Islamic threat", which are not unsimilar to the class differences in threat perceived by Americans. What she seems to miss though, are the reasons for disaffected Muslims in Europe, a phenomenon that is much less prevelent in the U.S. Ali is correct in stating that European nations have taken in Muslims, have educated and housed them. Perhaps that's the problem. In France large numbers of African and Muslim young men are on the dole and in state housing. A good number of them are highly educated but find themselves unable to get good jobs. Many young Muslims in Europe find themselves warehoused by an enlightened, socialist system that would never allow them to starve, but that also appears unable or unwilling to fully assimilate them. England has similar problems and faces an increasingly radicalized Islamic population.
The U.S. has not been as generous to Muslim immigrants. Ample government housing is not forthcoming, nor are welfare checks. Yet social mobility is more easily achieved and I think it's fair to say there is greater assimilation here.
Ali accuses European Muslims of being insular and resistant to assimilation. Is the insularity, I wonder, a response to a structure that doesn't easily assimilate otherness due to an long-standing national identity that didn't traditionally include Africans and Muslims? Sarah Palin et al, would like to have us believe that there is a cohesive national idenity in the U.S. that doesn't include large swaths of people, but Americans who live in urban areas know this isn't true at all. In the US the national identity is constantly morphing, the avereage American completely different today from the Anglo puritan that founded the country and we are better off for it. The fact that most of our ancestors didn't speak English presents no barrier to us feeling fully American.
Ali is correct in asserting that the threat in Europe is real. Radicalism is real, the toll, in honor killings and mass terrorist bombing in Spain and England, is real (yes, there are honor killings in Germany, England, and other European countries). These countries have to be vigilant about the threat of radical Islam. Is the banning of Islamic practices a way to counter the threat? I am not convinced.
I am generally sympathetic to the banning of minarets, since I am the kind of person who, if given the chance, would ban 90% of the architecture out there today. Minarets look like missiles, which never create a sense of peace or serenity. I feel differently about the banning of head scarves and whether such a measures is effective in assimilating European Muslims. In schools in France the hijab is banned, Germany is considering a similar ban among teaching staff.
I've been surprised that there's been so much uproar over the right to build minarets yet little protest over the right of a woman to cover her hair if she chooses to. Mind you, banning burquas while driving or in a court of law where identity has to be established makes complete sense. But why should a woman be compelled to show her hair if she feels it is immodest, especially in a culture that unfairly judges and rewards women based on their appearence and "attractiveness"? Plenty of women feel the male gaze is oppressive and some of them would like to opt out of that game. I am sympathetic to women who of their own free will choose to to cover themselves rather than be judged by men about their relative attractiveness. I even wonder sometimes if the headscarf debate is so heated because of a collective sense of entitlement to judge and observe a woman's appearence. There were whole decades during the reign of the Shah when the chador was banned in Iran. The "habit" wasn't broken, though. In fact, it came back with a vengance after the revolution, as a symbol of national pride. The same will happen when the hijab is banned in Europe. It's not a battle worth fighting when women are dying in honor killings, being forced into marriage against their will, and being mutilated.
Ali questions, along with other Europeans, whether it is possible to be a practicing Muslim and live in a liberal democracy, believing that Islam in fundamentally incompatable with democracy. Is it possible to be a Muslim and tolerate free speech, for example, when that speech is a cartoon lampooning the prophet Mohammed? Islam compells its adherents to challenge that which opposes Islam. Kirsi Ali was raised a devout Muslim and maintians that the directives in the Koran are clear- non-believers are to be compelled to become believers, submission to God is a directive.
Terrorism is a threat but so are a small accomodations, or so the argument goes, to bend liberal democratic values in order to accomodate socially conservative Muslim values. In England Sharia civil courts are becoming a popular way for Muslims to settle disputes. When I first read about Sharia civil courts, I was very much a supporter. After all, the state courts are overburdened and costly, if two people with a dispute would like to settle it before an imam, it brings relief to the courts, the state, and Joe taxpayer. In fact, Christian civil courts would be a great idea in the U.S. The churches enjoy tax exempt status, maybe they can "earn" it by unburdening our courts. It's crystal clear though, that the minute Sharia law creeps into the criminal system that's is when it would get, well, creepy. And this is what Ali and other people who share her concerns say, that the people who are drawn to radical mosques want to live by Sharia Law and will continue to push for it or dole out justice on their own according to Sharia principles. In Germany, where there has been a rash of honor killings, are courts willing to give harsh sentences to Muslim offenders when burdened with the Nazi legacy, there is fear of being branded xenophobic or racist?
I believe Europe has reason to fear. Not fear the "other" mind you, but rather, fear for losing something hard won. It was wasn't so long Europe struggled to rid itself of fascism. Now it enjoys the development is the natural result of liberal democracy- good health outcomes, wide access to education, a mostly fair justice system without capital punishment, free press, and a populace that places a high value on the rights of minorities and women. These achievements have to continue to be guarded and valued- but what is going wrong if the inherent worth of these freedoms isn't obvious or desirable to a segment of the population that is supposedly benefitting from them?
But what actually takes place in this series of extraordinary encounters between man and beast is so specific, so inimitable, so unpredictable, that it is impossible not to be moved.
One big man approaches confidently. With gliding, cherishing hands, he feels his way over the elephant's skin, finding its ears and face without strain, and whispering tender, awestruck things like "You're beautiful," "It's like the ocean in here," and "I hear you." Afterward, as he r
eflects in voice-over, he says, "You feel the power and the strength, but you also feel the tenderness." If asked to reflect on its own encounter with this man, you suspect the elephant might say something similar."An animated Eddie Izzard skit. Darth Vader goes to the Death Star cafeteria for Penne Arrabiata and hilarity ensues.
It's Eddie Izzard's world, we're just living in it.
