Islam is pretty cool

It’s got five pillars:
1) there’s one god and mohammed is his prophet
2) pray five times a day
3) fast Ramadan
4) give to charity
5) alHaj, or pilgrimage

muslims also believe Abraham & Co as well as Jesus were prophets, as Islam is the newest of the bunch and builds on the others. Not quite related- this whole sunni shia thing is nowhere near a 50 50 split. Shias, who think ali was mohammeds first true successor are mostly an Iranian thing, and sunnis who think there were a few other guys before Ali comprise most of the rest of muslims. Also not quite related- there’s four schools of interpretation of islam, each named after a different imam(~rabbi~priest), roughly situated in a different region, and with little differences like how to hold your arms when you pray or how far you have to travel to merit taking a day off of fasting during Ramadan.

Muslims wash a specific way before prayers (which resembles the way super jews wash before Shabbat dinner) and pray facing mecca which is northeast from here (behind my left shoulder right now). Marie and Shukri, who are Senegalese and Somali respectively, say they learned to pray slightly differently, likely because of their regions belonging to different schools of islam.

According to islam, muslims are supposed to fast sunrise to sunset during the month of Ramadan so as to experience what it is like to be hungry. Today, middle through upper class Moroccans actually eat even more than usual during Ramadan- breaking the fast with crossaints and hareera, waking to eat dinner at midnight, and snacking again in the early morning. Because it’s a special month, they always have meat and usually sweets, which is much less common at other times. During Ramadan, smokers don’t smoke, lots more people take time out to pray all five times a day, there’s tons of fistfights because everyone is tired and hungry, and people race home like you wouldn’t believe when the sun starts to dip.

I don’t remember the word for charity offhand, maybe SDKh, but I know it sounds a hell of a lot like the Hebrew tzedakah. yay for semitic languages.

Pilgrimage to Mecca (in Saudi Arabia) is required of those with health and wealth, once in their lifetime. alHaji (lit. the pilgrim) is a respectful way of referring to someone who has returned from mecca.

Eid Mubarack!

Wakh’kha. Feen nbdaa? (right/ok/well. Where to begin. Actually, that’s easy. Lets begin with you guys stepping up the Arabic, so I can just have fun playing languages and quit with the parenthetical translations.)

Anyways, it’s Eid AlKabir! That means big celebration and it’s the holiday where Muslims celebrate when Gabriel came down and was like, “wait a sec, Abraham, why don’t you sacrifice this sheep instead of your son Ishmael?” and Abraham was like “humdolilah!”. Gotta look into how Isaac turned into Ishmael.

So, to celebrate here, every family buys a sheep, which they bring home sometime the week before the holiday. Families with lots of money who are planning on entertaining sometimes get multiple sheep or a cow (my friend has had a calf in her house since Wednesday). Our sheep arrived Friday afternoon, and was pushed into the apartment building, up the stairs, down our hall, and through my room to the balcony. Me and the kids watched it and pet it for awhile and this morning it woke me up with ‘baaas’ which are actually only vaguely ‘baa’ like, pretty snort or cough like, and a little scary sounding.

Later this morning, a butcher came over and dragged the sheep back through my room and down the hall to the kitchen, where he tied its legs together and took a knife to it’s throat. When slaughtering animals, Muslims draw the knife across the throat twice (back, forward) but Jews only do it once. Everything kosher is halal, incidentally, but halal isn’t necessarily kosher because there can be milk and meat. Back to killing the sheep- it took a hella long time to die. For the first five minutes it kicked and twitched pretty regularly, and then another five minutes after I figured it was definitely over it went into spasms again. After it was finally over, the butcher popped a hole in the skin near the ankle, shoved a tube in, and started blowing up the sheep balloon style with a pump. He cut a line across the balloon sheep, going from one back foot to the other, and slowly tugged the skin down off the sheep, ripping off the feet too in the process. Once the sheep had been turned into a carcass, he cut it open down the middle and started taking out organs one by one. Yay science- I knew what more of them were! After he pulled out one of the intestines, he opened one end of them and started pouring water in, until he was holding essentially the world’s longest water balloon. When he did that, all the poop floated to the top, and he was able to just dump it right out! The stomach was a hell of a lot grosser. When he sliced that open, A WHOLE LOT of what was basically vomit fell out.

I had a barbeque not-too-sure-what-part-of-the-sheep-but-hopefully-just-meat sandwich for lunch (decent), ate two pieces of heart (tasted ok, consistency was off), and tried the liver and stomach (bad. Bad. Bad.) I also had lots of nice, familiar, calming mint tea, so inshallah it will all stay down.

=)

cracks in traditional gender make me optimistic like nothing else

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/fashion/08cross.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/fashion/19ANDROGYNY.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1

If I had to describe myself in three Softer Worlds…

My teacher told us female masturbation was a myth. So I got up on his desk and became a legend.

I don’t hate love, or marriage, or monogamy. I just really like sex. Here, let me show you.

Sexually transmitted infections are like hangovers. They’re not great. But neither is moderation.

Sexual Assualt

What’s there to say? It sucks? It’s dehumanizing?

I hope you’ll keep trying to make it stop.

There’s a limit to how tough I can be, and I’ve been standing on it for weeks.

~

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Anti-Semitism

1) A has an issue with the word anti-semitism, because semites are arabs and jews and other speakers of semetic languages, but anti-semitism is all about jews.

2) I was talking to D after school, and before he headed out to the store he said “I really hope I don’t get jewed on the prices. See you later! … Oh fuck. Shit. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m really sorry.”

It’s not like that hurt my feelings or anything (he’s just an idiot) but I hate that he felt “so terrible” upon realizing he was talking to a Jew. This goes for all kinds of nasty things. People who say anti-semitic, sexist, racist, etc-ist stuff and don’t care, but hate it when they embarrass themselves are real dumb.

The Word Rape

Another student here “got raped” by her Arabic test.

I’m not certain if she meant that in the sense of “my Arabic test had sex with me against my will” or “my Arabic test spoiled and destroyed the region of me” but I think it was probably the former. Assuming this is the case, it’s of course not actually possible.

Furthermore, someone who had actually experienced sexual violence was listening. There’s basically always a chance, definitely when speaking with people in our age group, that someone who has experienced sexual violence will be listening. It’s also worth noting that this person will probably always feel that comment a little more sharply than the other people and that they might not always have the energy or inclination to say something about it.

Male Rape

When we talk about male rape, we have a tendency to assume we’re talking about prisons or the gay community.

Heterosexual male rape, or women raping men, is quite literally inconceivable for us based on our understandings of sex as penetrative and our notions of men as aggressors. We can maybe imagine how such a thing could happen in situations with enormous power differentials, like those of Guatanamo Bay or between a teacher and very young student.

However, heterosexual male rape is not only possible under bizarre circumstances, but can and does happen in normal environments and between normal people, like this-

(From a conversation with a friend: )

“Well, when I had sex for the first time, it wasn’t exactly by my design”
What happened?
“My girlfriend and I were making out and I was kindof grinding on her and she just slipped it in. I’d already told her a few times that I didn’t want to have sex because she kept asking if I wanted to, and why not. I didn’t realize what had happened right away, but a few seconds later when I did I stopped and was like look I said I don’t want to do this right now”
What did she do?
“She tried to play it off like it was too late and it didn’t matter anymore so we should just keep going.”

“It really messed me up for awhile”

Whenever you’re about to sleep with a new partner, you should ask out loud for consent, and only proceed upon receiving an enthusiastic yes. Not teaching us that is potentially the biggest failure of our sex ed curricula.

i love kate. so much.

http://katebornstein.typepad.com/kate_bornsteins_blog/notes-for-the-tao-of-mitzvah-sabbath-and-boddhisatva-by-kate-bornstein.html

Racist Imagery

Another person I met at school thinks it’s really stupid that his alma mater, Dartmouth, doesn’t have a mascot anymore because a bunch of people who were overly concerned with political correctness thought the old Indian Brave was racist. One way he expresses his opinion is by wearing an old Dartmouth sweater with a big Indian head complete with a feathered headdress on it.

I’m going to answer this with another anecdote.

This summer, when I was teaching in Germany, I used my host’s map of the United States to show the students where I lived in America. The map had little drawings on a bunch of the states, like corn in Iowa, the Statue of Liberty in New York, and a few Indian heads floating in between the Dakotas. When we hung the map up on the board, one kid shouted out look! Indians! and started doing that hand on the mouth Indian call thing. A bunch of other kids joined in on the Indian calls and one made his fingers into a gun and started shooting, cowboy style.

To be honest, I hadn’t thought anything of the Indian heads on the map until this happened. Caricatures of Native Americans remain normal and acceptable in the US (even in the midst of increasing ‘political correctness’) despite stereotypical depictions of other groups of people becoming absolutely not ok.

I know what I think about this, so I’m gonna hand it over to you-
Why and how are pictures of “Indian Braves” still uniquely socially acceptable?
Does this promote negative or untrue stereotypes about Native Americans? If so, how?
Does this potentially obscure the problems Native American people and communities face today? If so, how?
Are these images only sometimes problematic or always? Why?