Saturday, September 11, 2010
Haroon Moghul on 9/11
I had long planned to become a corporate lawyer. Two years later, I enrolled in law school, only to leave within months. There were many reasons why, but among them was this: I could no longer go down the path I’d imagined, a quiet professional life in suburban America. This realization grew from the first impulse to grip our city that day, a desire to help, in whatever way possible, in the face of horrific attack; it was a mark of a courage and goodness common to New Yorkers of all types on that day and in the months and years that followed. [...]
I still think back to that day, and wish I’d stood up and said: Those people are not us, and their beliefs are not Islam. But these are the kinds of moments we learn from. It may not be fair to American Muslims that we must prove we are not those who have tortured Islam into a hideous thing. In fact, it is not fair. But this is the reality of our time: We must direct our lives into fighting the capture of our religion by those who, claiming Islam, have nothing to offer the future but barbarity.
-Haroon Moghul
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/3301/%22you%27ve_never_met_a_muslim%22/
Friday, September 10, 2010
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Imam Zaid - Rupyard Kipling's IF
Imam Zaid:
In conclusion, I will offer you some time-honored advise. One of my favorite poems, although it is written by a person who is not one of my favorite poets - Rupyard Kipling. How he got from "Take up the white man's burden, bring forth the best you breed" to "If" is a mystery to me. But as I reflected on this poem, I wanted to relate in the context of my remarks, a single..two lines actually. But as I reflected on the poem in these days and times, it contains really precious advise and although it's oft-repeated, and I'm sure many of you, if not all of you, have heard it at your junior high school graduation and your high school graduation, I think you will receive it in a new and unique light on this occasion as our country stands at the precipice it currently stands at. So he says:
IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
[via Sumaya]
-from Imam Zaid's remarks at the Zaytuna College Convocation 2010
In conclusion, I will offer you some time-honored advise. One of my favorite poems, although it is written by a person who is not one of my favorite poets - Rupyard Kipling. How he got from "Take up the white man's burden, bring forth the best you breed" to "If" is a mystery to me. But as I reflected on this poem, I wanted to relate in the context of my remarks, a single..two lines actually. But as I reflected on the poem in these days and times, it contains really precious advise and although it's oft-repeated, and I'm sure many of you, if not all of you, have heard it at your junior high school graduation and your high school graduation, I think you will receive it in a new and unique light on this occasion as our country stands at the precipice it currently stands at. So he says:
IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
[via Sumaya]
-from Imam Zaid's remarks at the Zaytuna College Convocation 2010
David Harvey quote on Free Markets
To live under capitalism is to accept or submit to that bundle of rights necessary for endless capital accumulation. 'We seek', says President Bush as he goes to war, 'a just peace where repression, resentment and poverty are replaced with the hope of democracy, development, free markets and free trade.' These last two have, he asserts, 'proved their ability to lift whole societies out of poverty'. The United States will deliver this gift of freedom (of the market) to the world whether it likes it or not. But the inalienable rights of private property and the profit rate (earlier also embedded, at US insistence, in the UN declaration) can have negative, even deadly, consequences.
Free markets are not necessarily fair. 'There is', the old saying goes, 'nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals.' This is what the market does. The rich grow richer and the poor get poorer through the egalitarianism of exchange. No wonder those of wealth and power support such rights. Class divisions widen. Cities become more ghettoized as the rich seal themselves off for protection while the poor become ghettoized by default. And if racial, religious and ethnic divisions cross-cut, as they so often do, with struggles to acquire class and income position, then we quickly find cities divided in the bitter ways we know only too well. Market freedoms inevitably produce monopoly power (as in the media or among developers). Thirty years of neoliberalism teaches us that that the freer the market the greater the inequalities and the greater the monopoly power.-David Harvey, “The right to the city,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27, 4, 2003, 940.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Quote on the City
"The city is the high point of human achievement, objectifying the most sophisticated knowledge in a physical landscape of extraordinary complexity, power and splendor at the same time as it brings together social forces capable of the most amazing sociotechnical and political innovation. But it is also the site of squalid human failure, the lightning rod of the profoundest human discontents, and the arena of social and political conflict. It is a place of mystery, the site of the unexpected, full of agitations and ferments, of multiple liberties, opportunities, and alienations; of passions and repressions; of cosmopolitanism and extreme parochialisms; of violence, innovation and reaction. The capitalist city is the arena of the most intense social and political confusions at the same time as it is a monumental testimony to and a moving force within the dialectics of capitalism's uneven development [...] How to penetrate the mystery, unravel the confusion, and grasp the contradictions?"
--David Harvey, The Urban Experience (1989)
-from Neil Brenner's syllabus for "Introduction to Metropolitan Studies: the urban experience in historical and contemporary perspective"
--David Harvey, The Urban Experience (1989)
-from Neil Brenner's syllabus for "Introduction to Metropolitan Studies: the urban experience in historical and contemporary perspective"
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Monday, September 6, 2010
"Why I Write"
Just read and loved this quote!:
"I write out a greed for lives and language. A need to listen to the orchestra of living. It is often said that a writer is more alive than his peers. But I believe he might also be sleepier than his peers, a sort of narcoleptic who requires constant waking up by his own imaginative work. He is closer to sleep and ream, and his memory is more haunted, thus more precise."
-Barry Hannah, Harper's Magazine, June 2010, pg. 13
"I write out a greed for lives and language. A need to listen to the orchestra of living. It is often said that a writer is more alive than his peers. But I believe he might also be sleepier than his peers, a sort of narcoleptic who requires constant waking up by his own imaginative work. He is closer to sleep and ream, and his memory is more haunted, thus more precise."
-Barry Hannah, Harper's Magazine, June 2010, pg. 13
Sunday, September 5, 2010
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