Posts tagged Life
Posts tagged Life
Muslim Doodles by Mehreen Kasana
That’s me. While I understand these doodles don’t represent all the problems Muslims face in this age, I thought I’d start off with a few commonly occurring ones. e.g. The pseudo-liberating complex often shoved in front of Muslim women, the ridiculous misconception folks have that all Muslim women wear body coverings like the burqa, niqab, hijab, etc. Of being called “terrorists” by bigots, of putting up with it on a frequent basis. Of having to answer the irritating question pertaining to why some of us choose to cover our bodies. This is the first part. More to come. (Because ignorance thrives in today’s world.)
All this with a dash of my humor. Be well, folks.
I approve highly of this. Going to a school with a decent Muslim population and also an annoyingly vocal and corpulent Bible Fellowship table that probably mutters in secret about how the student-organization table across from them is either taken up by the Muslim Student Association or the Feminist Student Union (never both, because it is a smaller table than that of the Bible Fellowship), and how this is secretly a Feminist-Muslim-Terrorist plot. Still, that notion that everyone wearing a body covering (for religious reasons) is somehow being repressed is…just fucking idiotic.
Very glad the point of these doodles is being received well. Thanks for your input!
Love remains forever that part of life we can never control. It continues to resist indoctrination and ideology. It does not yield to the inquiries of theory. The world has tried to bring it within the realm of reason and ethics, make it modern and progressive. There is no progress in love. It will always be a surprise.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are ‘The Advertisers’ and they are laughing at you.
Banksy On Advertising (via felixsalmon)
They are laughing at you.
(via felixsalmon)
Bangladesh rickshaw driver builds clinic.
Bangladesh suffers from a severe shortage of medical facilities. Most doctors live and work in the cities, so rural folk must travel long distances for treatment.
One rickshaw driver, who saved for 30 years on $6 per day, founded a small hospital in the remote village of Tanhashadia. His efforts have made him a national celebrity and his clinic now treats 300 patients each day.
subhanAllah, may Allah reward him immensely. Rickshawallahs barely get enough money for their own basic needs, let alone saving up for 3 decades to build a hospital!
Majority of the patients treated by the small hospital created by this amazing, beautiful spirited rickshaw driver are women and children. This man can’t read or write but his devotion for healing his people overcame his literary disability. Today a doctor works for his little hospital in Tanhashadia while he continues to find more villagers in need of medical aid.
This gives me so much hope. Do watch.
(via jasonnosaj)
Hubb” is love, “ishq” is love that entwines two people together, “shaghaf” is love that nests in the chambers of the heart, “hayam” is love that wanders the earth, “teeh” is love in which you lose yourself, “walah” is love that carries sorrow within it, “sababah” is love that exudes from the pores, “hawa” is love that shares its name with “air” and “falling,” “gharm” is love that is willing to pay the price.
The humanist insistence on an autonomous, willful human subject capable of acting independently in the world was based on a very particular type of human. Human civilization had been forged in the image of the male, white, well-off, educated human. Humanism installed only some humans at the centre of the universe. It disparaged ‘the woman,’ ‘the subaltern’ and ‘the non-European’ even more than ‘the animal.’ As a result, it is hardly surprising that many of these groups rejected the idea of a universal and straightforward essence of ‘the human’, substituting something much more contingent, outward-facing and complex. To rephrase Simone de Beauvoir’s inspired conclusion about women, one is not born, but made, a human.
A monoculture doesn’t mean that everyone believes exactly the same thing or acts in exactly the same way, but that we end up sharing key beliefs and assumptions that direct our lives. Because a monoculture is mostly left unarticulated until it has been displaced years later, we learn its boundaries by trial and error. We somehow come to know how the mater story goes, though no one tells us exactly what the story is or what its rules are. We develop a strong sense of what’s expected of us at work, in our families and communities — even if we sometimes choose not to meet those expectations. We usually don’t ask ourselves where those expectations came from in the first place. They just exist — or they do until we find ourselves wishing things were different somehow, though we can’t say exactly what we would change, or how.
Micheals demonstrates that ours is “a monoculture shaped by economic values and assumptions, and it shapes everything from the obvious things (our consumer habits, the music we listen to, the clothes we wear) to the less obvious and more uncomfortable to relinquish the belief of autonomy over (our relationships, our religion, our appreciation of art).” Very, very interesting theory.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Albert Einstein.
One of the reasons why I place much emphasis on intuition.
Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War IINorman Gershman has become accustomed to the reactions from people who see his photos and read his stories about Muslims sheltering Jews and saving their lives during the Holocaust.
“I had people say ‘Muslims save Jews! How is that?’” the American Jewish fine art photographer told IslamOnline.net in a telephone interview.
Gershman has been engaged in a 5-year project that honors stories of Albanian Muslims’ heroism in saving thousands of Jews, who either lived in Albania or sought refugee there, during World War II.
Beautiful. Spread this as far as you can. Well worth your time.
I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her “I love you madly”, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly”. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.
I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.
The trailer for the documentary “Scarlet Road” about a sex worker who focuses on men who are mentally/physically/developmentally disabled. As a guardian/student teacher of people with disabilities, this brings tears to my eyes. I wish that my 20 year-old kid (actually sister, but I largely raised her) had this opportunity to experience sex in a safe and comfortable environment like the men in this vid. So many people think that mentally and physically disabled people don’t experience any sexual desire (even involved parents who are otherwise educated about said conditions). I try and combat this stereotype whenever I encounter it (resulting in lots of awkward impassioned speeches). This DOESN’T MEAN REPRODUCTION. I don’t want my sister to reproduce, as she neither likes children nor is capable of caring for them (plus odds are any offspring would have major developmental problems). I still want her to happily experience this major facet of the human experience though. (Plus I’d like to limit the number of times I walk in on her masturbating as it is mortifying). Individuals with disabilities fantasize about the same things the rest of us do, and shouldn’t have to live without the sex they desire simply because of the way they were born. I know of at least one disabled man who has a relationship with a female sex worker and he is one of the happiest disabled adults I know (which is at least 40 individuals). We all deserve to have that chance. Sorry for the meandering ruminations, but this is a subject I have felt passionate about for many years/I have had a few cocktails. If this raises problems for you, please respond, as I would love to have an honest, polite, conversation (made possible by the superficial anonymity of the internet) about this subject.
Recently watched this and it is fantastic, thought-provoking, and educational all rolled into one. I highly recommend anyone interested in sex positivism, sex work activism and/or disability watch for themselves.
This clip made me cry. Rachel is a goddess and a blessing for these people.
Oh, my heart.
(via brooklynmutt)
Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self. The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.
Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts. - Jonathan Franzen
Seconded.
Alright, history buffs. Let’s have a look at 100 Years in 10 Minutes compiled and created by Donolinio Studio. This video has garnered viral popularity for its great attempt at collecting and presenting dynamic events from the past 100 years. I would like to add that the video contains several highly graphic and intense clips from various uprisings and wars. You have been warned.
You could also call this 100 Years of Constant Conflict and Scare Joy but that’s just me.
Contributors share a deep concern about the problems that 21st-century Muslims find ourselves mired in. There is often dissatisfaction with the lack of nuance and insight in traditional religious leaders’ responses, but this is accompanied by a keen awareness of the numerous agendas that often hijack this discussion. While it would be too crude to label them all as “Islamophobic”, many external hijackers do not necessarily have the best interests of Muslims at heart. Social media interactions have the advantage of making these respective intentions clear, sifting the sincere people from the obscurantists.
Tehmina Kazi - Redefining Islam for the 21st century.
Progressive activists in the ‘critical Muslim’ movement are growing in strength and number.
Yes!
