Issue 29 by Foto8

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CONTRIBUTORS Christian Als Uprisings: Algeria Als is represented by Panos Pictures. www.panos.co.uk David Cowlard The Pursuit of Perfection www.davidcowlard.com Nicoló Degiorgis On the Fringe Degiorgis is represented by Contasto. www.contrasto.it Peter Fryer Al-Burdun, South Shields An online presentation of this project is available at http://vimeo.com/2931212 Hengameh Golestan Uprisings: Iran www.hengamehgolestan.com

Simon Norfolk The Days of Arabia Felix www.simonnorfolk.com Ivor Prickett Uprisings: Egypt Prickett is represented by Panos Pictures. www.panos.co.uk www.ivorprickett.co.uk

8 M A G A Z I N E - T h e P h o t o grap h y B iannua l

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THE ISLAM ISSUE Cover: Simon Norfolk

Newsha Tavakolian The Fifth Pillar A selection from this project will be shown at the British Museum as part of an exhibition on the hajj in 2012. www.newshatavakolian.com

8 Magazine

Munem Wasif Observing Islam This work is produced with the support of Fabrica, Italy. Wasif is represented by Agence VU and Fabrica. www.munemwasif.com

ISSUE 29 - SPRING/SUMMER 2011

France Keyser Lawful Slaughter A book of Keyser’s wider project, Nous sommes Français et musulmans (We are French and Muslims), was published in March 2010. www.invisuphoto.com/11,1337.html Jehad Nga Melody of Mogadishu www.jehadnga.com Mads Nissen Uprisings: Libya Nissen is represented by Panos Pictures. www.panos.co.uk

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ISSUE 29 - SPRING/SUMMER 2011

Peyman Hooshmandzadeh Licence to Publish Hooshmandzadeh is a member of 135 Photos in Iran.

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As a contender for a subject to explore in words and pictures, Islam was at once too obvious and too risky. “The Question of Islam” was our starting point – in determining what we wanted to know and what others had already explored. It’s for predominantly negative reasons that Islam, and its attendant politicised incarnation, Islamism, is rarely out of the headlines. While all religions succumb to extremism, it is the specific tactics of Islamist fundamentalists – suicide bombings – that have bred a culture of fear in which the religion and terror have become conflated. We, however, wanted to look at Islam in its myriad manifestations – cultural, political, social and spiritual. As a spiritual path, Islam leads its pilgrims on the hajj, as Newsha Tavakolian shares with us in her photographic essay of her own journey to Mecca. And in Bangladesh, Munem Wasif observes his family and friends as they live their own interpretation of faith. Although apostasy is the ultimate act of impiety for Muslims, Islam welcomes converts. Paul Hayward looks at the appeal of Islam for black American sportsmen from when Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, while white British convert Kevin Brice looks at media misreadings of his own indepth research into the subject. While the UAE offers its subjects the most opulent spaces for prayer, as photographed by David Cowlard, in countries that are traditionally not Muslim, it can be difficult to find the space to speak the word of God. The building of mosques is not yet banned in Italy yet rigid rules and regulations have led to a culture of makeshift mosques springing up on the edge of towns. In France, although Halal butchery is in the ascendant, life for French or immigrant Muslims is far from easy – the niqab and burka are banned there, as of April 2011. Yet in one of the UK’s whitest regions, Sunderland, a boarding house for a community of Yemeni seamen provided a home from home. Integration and the multiculturalism policy, now belittled by the present UK government, is explored thoroughly by Ziauddin Sardar. The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia at the beginning of this year took us all by surprise. The speed at which other countries began to

oppose their governments, in what has become known as the “Arab Spring”, has secured these movements their own moment in history. As well as featuring the brilliant and brave work of three photographers – Ivor Prickett, Mads Nissen and Christian Als – from Egypt, Libya and Algeria respectively, we questioned the role of Islam in these uprisings, or whispers of dissent. We turned to one of the world’s most highly respected Middle East correspondents, Robert Fisk, for an answer. In our Report section, historical context is added with the photographs of Hengameh Golestan, of women protesting for their rights in 1979. In two of the world’s poorest countries, however, a creeping Islamification is apparent. Sana’a, the exquisitely beautiful capital city of Yemen has played host to a spate of bombings targeted at tourists, in a concerted campaign by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. In Somalia, Jehad Nga has witnessed a total cover-up by women in the six years he has been photographing the country, for fear of public stonings carried out by Islamist groups like al-Shabaab. In Pakistan, too, Islam is not just the state religion, but an ideology harnessed to oppress. Madiha R Tahir writes from her home in Pakistan on the pernicious blasphemy laws and Malu Halasa brings us banned Iranian art. Elsewhere in the magazine, we are proud to feature elegant fiction by Aamer Hussein, excerpts from Kenan Malik’s sharp book From Fatwa to Jihad and Leila Ahmed’s study of the veil as worn by American Muslims, as well as an exclusive interview with the extraordinarily prescient photographer Abbas, who has been investigating the subject of Islam and militant Islam through his camera since 1984. We are approaching the subject of Islam from the only perspective we can: from a Western viewpoint. In this way, we are of course limited. Yet how Islam is seen by the West, how it is represented by writers, photographers, artists and the media at large, is critical. We hope that our selection of work by a wide variety of practitioners sheds a little light on what has become one of the most hotly debated and divisive topics of our times. The Editors

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8 M A G A Z I N E - T h e P h o t o grap h y B iannua l

Simon Norfolk The Days of Arabia Felix www.simonnorfolk.com Ivor Prickett Uprisings: Egypt Prickett is represented by Panos Pictures. www.panos.co.uk www.ivorprickett.co.uk

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THE ISLAM ISSUE Cover: Simon Norfolk

Newsha Tavakolian The Fifth Pillar A selection from this project will be shown at the British Museum as part of an exhibition on the hajj in 2012. www.newshatavakolian.com

8 Magazine

Munem Wasif Observing Islam This work is produced with the support of Fabrica, Italy. Wasif is represented by Agence VU and Fabrica. www.munemwasif.com

ISSUE 29 - SPRING/SUMMER 2011

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ISSUE 29 - SPRING/SUMMER 2011

Peyman Hooshmandzadeh Licence to Publish Hooshmandzadeh is a member of 135 Photos in Iran.

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Name withheld, 26 years old, pictured at an undisclosed location in Moroccan controlled Western Sahara (Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic). The subject’s name and location have been withheld for fear of reprisals by the Moroccan government. Saharawis living under Moroccan control claim to continually suffer oppression and human rights abuses. © ANDREW MCCONNELL telephone +44 20 7253 1424 email pics@panos.co.uk web www.panos.co.uk multimedia www.vimeo.com/panospictures updates www.twitter.com/panospictures

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THE ISLAM ISSUE

contents IN PICTURES 20 THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTION

58 LAWFUL SLAUGHTER

138 THE DAYS OF ARABIA FELIX

30 ON THE FRINGE

118 LICENCE TO PUBLISH

150 AL-BURDUN, SOUTH SHIELDS

42 OBSERVING ISLAM

122 MELODY OF MOGADISHU

170 THE FIFTH PILLAR

14 INTERVIEW: ABBAS

113 ON A STORMY AFTERNOON

148 THE TRUTH ABOUT CONVERSION

40 FROM FATWA TO JIHAD

116 REIMAGINING PAKISTAN

168 A BRITISH EXPERIENCE

62 VEILED IN AMERICA

146 FOLLOWING ALI

David Cowlard

Nicoló Degiorgis

Munem Wasif

France Keyser

Peyman Hooshmandzadeh Jehad Nga

Simon Norfolk

Peter Fryer

Newsha Tavakolian

IN WORDS

Max Houghton Kenan Malik

Leila Ahmed

Aamer Hussein

Madiha R Tahir

Kevin Brice

Ziauddin Sardar

Paul Hayward

REPORT: UPRISINGS 65 EGYPT

94 IRAN

78 THE QUESTION OF ISLAM

102 ALGERIA

Ivor Prickett

Robert Fisk

Hengameh Golestan Christian Als

80 LIBYA

Mads Nissen

COLOPHON Founder and Publisher Jon Levy Editors Lauren Heinz Max Houghton Contributing Editors Sophie Batterbury Peter Beaumont Maurice Geller Ken Grant Leo Hsu Colin Jacobson Guy Lane Design Jack Hamson

Islam Contributing Editors Ghaith Abdul-Ahad Dimitri Beck Malu Halasa Asad Hashim Paul Lowe Caspar Melville Jenny Matthews Aaron Schuman Contributors Abbas Leila Ahmed Kevin Brice Robert Fisk Paul Hayward Aamer Hussein

Kenan Malik Ziauddin Sardar Madiha R Tahir HOST Gallery Manager Anna Pfab Gallery Assistant Ruth Grimberg Subscriptions Emily Wright Online Editor Lucy Maria Wren Interns Sasha Joelle Achilli

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Back issues at: foto8.com/shop sales@foto8.com ISSN: 1476-6817 ISBN: 978-0-9559580-5-2 Foto8 Ltd and HOST Gallery 1-5 Honduras Street London EC1Y 0TH, UK +44 (0)20 7253 8801 www.foto8.com Copyright © 2011 Foto8 Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be copied or reproduced without the prior written consent of the publisher or the editors.

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INTERVIEW ABBAS Magnum photographer Abbas has dedicated his working life to a photographic questioning of the world’s religions. In 1987, he began a seven year exploration of militant Islam, travelling across the globe to witness a movement he felt was reaching a critical mass. The work culminated in his singularly prescient book Allah O Akbar. After the events of 9/11, Abbas picked up the trail again, connecting with the Muslim Ummah in 16 countries from the US to Indonesia, Afghanistan to Zanzibar, to find out In Whose Name these terrorist acts were committed. Iranian by birth, Abbas lives in Paris where he continues to provoke the proselytisers and push the limits of “writing with light” Max Houghton: Throughout your work you suggest that devotion to Islam, or a turn to Islamism, is really a way of trying to preserve a culture rather than a religion. Can you expand on this insight? Abbas: People call it faith, but the resurgence of Islam is cultural, civilisational, not religious. Nobody forbids the practice of religion, so it is cultural. An example, apart from the veil which we can discuss later, is the sound of the muezzins. I was in Varanasi recently, the hub of Hinduism, and the sound of the muezzins has become louder and louder. It’s to shame the less devout into praying five times a day. It was horrible, two muezzins trying to outdo each other; impossible to sleep. I asked why no one dares to complain – and it is because local officials want the Muslim vote. It is a cultural and political issue, not a religious one. Islam as a faith is not my concern. It’s when it affects the polity that it becomes my concern. MH: In the West, there is a sense of shame over our imperialist past, over Crusades past and present. In Allah O Akbar (AOA) you touch upon the idea of the Arab Crusades, after the death of the Prophet, a kind of Arab imperialism. Is this a view commonly held by Muslims or is this your view? A: Of course it is my personal view.

The first conquest to be borne out of Saudi Arabia was not to spread the faith of Islam beyond Arabia. They did not propagate their faith with words but with swords. And the same thing happened later, as it spread to India and what is now Pakistan. These were Arab conquests and we should call it imperialism. When we read about Africa, we hear of the white man bringing colonialism, but with Islam somehow it is accepted. The Arabs of course were slave runners in the history of East Africa. That Islam is perceived as liberation is an irony of history. I know it’s not politically correct to say so, but there were good sides to colonialism. Intellectuals picked up on these ideas – of rationalism, of democracy, of the rule of law, of the importance of the individual and so on – and have gone beyond them. When people say to me now “You are a Westerner!” they mean it as an insult, but to me it is a compliment. My mind is born of the Enlightenment and I am very proud that is the case. Look at the Arab world; it’s finally moving towards Enlightenment ideas. The West should not be so ashamed of colonialism, not all of it, anyway. The values of a civilisation based upon rationality rather than religious faith is almost universal. MH: In your chapter on Egypt in AOA, you state that the dream of a golden age of Islam feeds the desire to return to the Umma, but that it is a myth, and, moreover, that from “this tragic dialectic between his dream and his fantasy springs the Muslim’s sense of frustration that makes him prone to extremism.” Do you still think this is the case? A: I wrote that in 1987 and it was not taken very well in those days. But I am proven right, don’t you think? The great hope of Tahrir Square is that the Egyptian state becomes secular. Faith is personal. Faith cannot meddle with politics. So what the Islamists wanted back then and what the jihadists want now, these ideas should take a back seat now. What happened in Tahrir Square was a big defeat for bin Laden. If it goes the way it seems to be going, a more open society will be created. I will really believe that these are real revolutions when I see women taking off the niqab. At the moment, it is only a revolt. The whole idea of the headscarf is political. It marks a woman saying that “Allah 15

Friday prayer (previous pages) at the al-Azhar college in Jakarta, Java During the celebration of the first anniversary of the Islamic Revolution: a young man has fainted in the crowd. Tehran, Iran. 11 February 1980 Symbolising Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son to his new and only God, camels are slaughtered on the day of Eid al-Fitr which marks the end of the hajj pilgrimage, 1992

controls my society, my world.” Many women wear it unconsciously, but others wear it consciously. What struck me in the images from Tahrir Square was that the overwhelming majority of women were veiled, some of them holding their veiled infant daughter’s hand. Infants veiled! When I see the first niqab taken off, then a second, and a third, then we have a real revolution of the mind. In relation to the ban in France, I am absolutely for it. It is the French saying: we are a secular state, a law we have had since 1905, separating the state and religion. The wearing of the scarf is always a political act. If a kid comes to school in a scarf, I want to say, keep your faith in your heart, not in your school. I am 100 per cent for the ban because it stops Islamists trying to probe how far they can go in French society. If they can wear the scarf, they will start to ask that girls do not sit next to boys, then it will be that girls cannot be educated in the same room as boys, then not in the same school. The only way religion can be practiced is to have a secular state. Then all religions are equal. MH: You spent your teenage years in Algeria. What images do you have in your head from that time? And do you think it will play its part in the Arab Spring? A: I lived through the Algerian war of independence and it was this that made me want to become a journalist, since I was 11 years old. I grew up with history being made around me. As it says in my Magnum biography, I was born a 16

photographer. I have such vivid images of historical happenings. I don’t know what will happen next in Algeria, but what’s happening in all these countries is a wave, a tsunami even. MH: You wonder in AOA if your record of Islam will be only one of its excesses. Do you think it’s hard to avoid that? A: I did not want to concentrate on excesses. I wanted to study the sort of society that germinates these excesses. I have written that Islamism feeds upon Islam; the two are linked. I did not want to show Islamism only but also focus on what Islam looks like. Moderate Muslims say that extremists aren’t Muslims… yet all the actions of jihadists are within the framework of Islam, and are justified by the sayings of the Prophet. For moderates, it’s a way of exorcising the part of Islam they don’t want to look at. For me holy books are novels full of characters and violence. You can read them any way you like, as you would read poetry. Of course all religions have their extremists, not only Islam. MH: After watching the Hindu pilgrims bathe in waters containing animal excrement, you say “I shall never understand religion of any kind”. Does this continue to be the case? A: I have been working on religion for more than 30 years, so yes it does, otherwise I would not do it anymore. Right now I’m working on Hinduism. I saw a young woman, drinking polluted water from the Ganges in Varanasi. I said

to her “You are an educated woman; why are you drinking polluted water?” She replied “It may be polluted but it is holy, so it will not harm me.” [But] I am still fascinated by religion. Otherwise it would not be possible to sustain it as the main subject of my work. MH: In the chapter on Pakistan, you say you were particularly struck by the decadence you saw there. Can you expand on this point, given that Pakistan is “the Land of the Pure”? A: I have not been back to Pakistan for a long time. I hope things have changed. Islam in Pakistan is a daily exercise in exorcism. The people of Pakistan are Indians. They dance like Indians, they pray like Indians, they feed like Indians, they even sit like Indians. But they had to justify the existence of Pakistan. Don’t you see the arrogance there: we are pure, meaning you are not. It’s a kind of intellectual decadence I am talking about. MH: How pivotal do you think the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1990 was in changing people’s perception of Islam in the West? A: It was enormous. There have been two very important events in the shaping of people’s perception: the fatwa and 9/11. Both were turning points. The fatwa separated the West from Muslim societies. Suddenly you saw an old mullah, Khomeini, who had no idea at all about the intellectual firmament of the West, objecting to it. His reasons were political, not religious. Of course

A French woman who converted to Islam leads a demonstration in favour of wearing the hijab in secular schools Muslim demonstrators burn typewritten pages of Salman Rushdie’s book ‘Satanic Verses’. Birmingham, 1989 A student wearing the niqab in front of a microscope in the biology department of Cairo University, 1987 A little girl in niqab, the full Islamic veil, jumps rope, Zanzibar

Salman Rushdie had not been politically correct about an aspect of the life of the Prophet, but Khomeini’s purpose in issuing the fatwa was to accept a ceasefire against Iraq. He wanted to cultivate an image as a revolutionary, and in doing so, reclaim leadership of the Muslim world. In that aim, he was totally successful... for a short while. MH: Your text is intensely personal – not many journalists at the time would have put themselves on the line like that. How was your book received, critical as it is of aspects of Islam? A: My book was well received in the West. People understood. It was banned in most Islamic countries. My publisher took it to Iran, to a book fair, but the police removed every single copy before it was seen by anyone. It was for sale in Turkey. But in my natural constituency, the countries of the South, my book is not distributed. It’s useless. In odd ways, though, it got through to people, it seeped in.

MH: In Saudi Arabia, you talk of the vast scale slaughter to commemorate the sacrifice of Abraham – is this dialogue between violence and gentleness, between life and death, the key to your fascination with religion, with Islam in particular? A: I was the one to notice it! This schizophrenia. It is the most devout Muslims who take part in the hajj. They won’t scratch themselves for fear of killing a flea. MH: In your book In Whose Name, you talk about the world tilting off its axis after 9/11 and how photography changed irrevocably. Did your photography change? A: I am the same photographer as I was when I started photographing in 1968. I was using a 28mm lens then, which distorts a little. Now I use a 35mm. But my photography has not changed. I would take the same picture. There are many discussions at Magnum about how to “go forward”, whether to start using

colour, to try 6x6. I don’t have to change. I renew my subject, not my style. I describe my style as “the suspended moment”. When I take a photograph, it contains an essence of what was happening before and what would happen after. I don’t freeze the moment; I look for continuity. The most important thing in relation to my work is the sequencing, not the single photograph. When I say I am a ‘“photo-grapher”, that means I write with light. That is how I see my work: writing. The “graph” of photography can mean drawing or writing; for me, it is writing. My photographs make up individual sentences, paragraphs, chapters, in a flow. When people understand photography culture, it is possible to make a whole book without words; the sequencing would tell the story. But otherwise: words are necessary. Never as substitutes for the image, but to inform the image. That’s why the book is the definitive statement. MH: Are there some contexts for which you feel your work is particularly well suited, in which the photographs are assisted by the context? A: I liked working with magazines, but they are not commissioning work anymore, so we can forget that. Books are my full statements; I am responsible for everything, to the last comma. But how many people buy books of photographs? The internet offers possibilities but it is not so good for words, and of course there is no income. Magnum is looking into this with a project called M3, which brings in sponsorship and advertising to the internet. Apparently I am the third most viewed photographer on Magnum! MH: When you are in Indonesia, you talk of chance happenings leading you to photographs. As a general principle in photography, would you advocate having an argument to prove via your photography, or rather a truth, as yet unknown, to uncover? A: I don’t give answers; I ask questions. I hope my photographs ask questions, too. Chance is very important, but you must deserve that chance. Before photographing, you see. Before seeing, you perceive. You have to be prepared to see the significance of the event. I know what to look for, but I am not trying to prove a point. A photograph can have

so many meanings. A photograph of mine of a women in full niqab, looking through a microscope, for me showed the dichotomy of faith and science. But devout Muslim friends of mine saw it a different way. They saw harmony where I saw conflict. I am reaching all the time for these moments. MH: I was interested in how you describe the North/South relationship in In Whose Name: “the sudden invasion of the South into the life of the North” via the media of the North. Can you expand on this? A: Everything is related. Look at Libya now. We have to be interested, even if only for selfish reasons. If the South doesn’t develop, doesn’t become intellectually liberal, that has consequences everywhere. I was born in the South. Sometimes you point to things others don’t see because you can see more clearly. MH: To revert to a comment from AOA, you state there has been a population explosion in Egypt, a million more Egyptians every month, its foreign debt, its inequality… this was in 1987. Did you foresee the unrest and the expulsion of Mubarak? A: No one foresaw it, and anyone who says he did is a liar. We hoped for it but no one foresaw it. Artists and intellectuals move ahead of societies, there are tremors present and these tremors appear in the art: there was none in Egypt, or in the Arab world. The

only places where there has been real intellectual movement is in Iran and in Turkey. All Arab countries were asleep. MH: In the 30 years you have been photographing religion, Islam, and Militant Islam, you maintain a sense of compassion, your scepticism has not degraded to cynicism... A: Compassion? Are you sure? Let us rather call it a sense of cynical optimism. The last statement in In Whose Name is optimistic [Abbas writes of Sheikh Tantawi, Rector of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, who has decreed that apostasy, though it should be condemned, should not be punishable by beheading the apostate, as Sharia law dictates, because only Allah can call the apostate to account]. Let us hope we may hear other such voices. It’s what we are hearing now in Tahrir Square and beyond. There is of course a pessimistic view that everything is becoming ever more fanatical. But I saw 9/11 as a symptom of weakness. Islam as a political ideology, as a polity, has failed, and as a consequence it has resorted to extremism on a world scale. To join the modern world, Muslims need to put their religion into historical perspective – not everything is God’s will – and exorcise its violence. That is my hope. Allah O Akbar: A Journey Through Militant Islam was published by Phaidon in 1994 and In Whose Name by Thames & Hudson in 2009. Abbas has been a full member of Magnum Photos since 1985 19

THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTION photography David cowlard TExt leo hsu

The most spectacular mosque in Abu Dhabi is the Sheikh Zayed Mosque, or Grand Mosque. The world’s 10th largest mosque boasts the world’s largest rug and largest chandelier, and accommodates 40,000 worshippers in its building and courtyard. Its opulence, however, as David Cowlard’s pictures indicate, is not only a display of wealth but also of piety. The design of the ceremonial mosque, from its extravagant provision of light and space to the flower and vine motifs floating across its cool surfaces, speaks to a sensibility about nature that exemplifies Islamic ideas about the importance of cultivating one’s relationship to God through nature. “The sacred architecture of Islam,” wrote Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “becomes an extension of nature as created by God within the environment constructed by man. It becomes encompassed by and participates in the unity, interrelatedness, harmony, and serenity of nature even within the environment of the city and town. It becomes in fact a centre from which these qualities emanate to the whole of the urban environment.” There are more than 2,200 mosques in Abu Dhabi, up from less than a thousand in 2001, ranging from local mosques to Friday mosques that can accommodate large crowds on the one day of the week in which mosque attendance is compulsory, to the makeshift mosques in which the large migrant worker population prays. Cowlard observes that the “true legacy of the urban mosques may be in the influence they have on shaping the urban fabric and social interactions of the future development of the region”. The regulation of mosque construction supports governmental goals to express Emirati and Islamic identity in a 21st century city. Plan Abu Dhabi 2030 is the city’s comprehensive policy for growth and details guidelines for urban development in the city. The plan describes ideal standards for Emirati communities: parks and public gathering areas, and no more than 400 metres walk to the nearest mosques to create car-free areas that foster community worship. (Notably, an existing construction regulation requires that mosques be positioned no closer than 700 metres to one another, for fear of crowding. Will these rules conflict?) These policies contribute to the larger effort of guiding the development of Abu Dhabi. But Abu Dhabi’s sustainability strategy is ambitious and to some it will seem counterintuitive. In the short term the UAE has the world’s third highest carbon emissions per capita and the world’s highest per capita daily water usage. Construction, the oil industry and air conditioners all contribute to high consumption. Ameliorating strategies tend to focus on technology innovation and not on reducing usage. Any project of environmental concern is underpinned by ideology. Abu Dhabi aspires to follow both principles of sustainable development and Islamic principles concerning the relationship between people and nature. In the plan laid out for Abu Dhabi, both sets of principles have been interpreted in ways that are mutually supportive as well as in support of a third principle, the financial growth of the UAE. But if, as Nasr writes, “the Earth itself is the primordial mosque and spaces of human-made mosques are themselves emulations and recapitulations of the space of virgin nature,” what does it mean that Abu Dhabi’s goal is to transform the Earth itself in pursuit of a more perfect nature?

ON THE PHOTOGRAPHY Nicol贸 Degiorgis TEXT Guy lane

FRINGE

Across Italy’s north-east, in Treviso and Trento, Venezia and Verona, Muslims are at prayer – in mosques that are not mosques. Warehouses, car parks, sports centres and industrial estates serve as ersatz places of worship for many of the country’s estimated 1.5 million followers of Islam. Rome hosts one recognised mosque, as does Milan, but elsewhere the faithful must perform their observances, as best they can, in makeshift, temporary, frequently al fresco locations. As photographer Nicoló Degiorgis observes, “Everyone calls them mosques, but they are not mosques.” “In Italy they are not allowed to build proper mosques because, although the constitution actually grants the right to religious liberty and freedom, there has to be an agreement between the state and the specific religion. And at the moment there are a lot of issues concerning immigration in Italy – the

government is being quite harsh towards the immigrants – and there is a lot of Islamophobia. That’s one of the main reasons why they can’t pray inside the places they own.” While Italy is not the only European country to exhibit a reluctance to agree to the construction of new mosques, its refusal to allow Muslims to pray in buildings they have already acquired is a measure all its own. Not that such intransigence is enshrined in law. It depends instead on bureaucratic guile and administrative resistance meted out at local level. “The difficulties of building a mosque are more widespread – but specifically in Italy the complication is that even if they own the place, they are not allowed to pray. The reasons given are always very basic... it could be that the toilets are not proper, or there are not enough exits, or that on Fridays there are too many cars parked outside.

“Or in the case of Treviso – where they have to pray outside in the parking lot – the reasons change all the time. The last time, the reason given was that it was in an industrial zone, and that they weren’t allowed to gather in such an area. But the Muslims usually have to go to industrial zones and warehouses because those premises are big and cheap. Also, those areas are outside the city – so the worshippers have more freedom because the local population doesn’t complain.” One would imagine the current impasse cannot hold. Immigration from North and sub-Saharan Africa continues apace, and the number of “mosques” will no doubt rise. A recent report by the country’s security services (who else?) suggested that, on average, every four days a new mosque or Islamic organisation was established. As such, there is an urgency to Degiorgis’ project.

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FROM FATWA TO JIHAD

Europe, 2020. A dark veil is being drawn across a continent that has been “remorselessly evolving month by month into Greater Bosnia”. Britain, France, Holland and Denmark have all fallen to the Islamists. It is only time before the rest of Western Europe also opens its democratic legs to the mad mullahs. English pubs have stopped selling alcohol. Islamic rather than fashion police ensure that French women are veiled from head to toe. And Holland’s gay clubs have been relocated to San Francisco, though where the gays themselves have been relocated, we do not know. What we do know is that Madrid and 7/7 were just the “opening shots of a European civil war” that eventually led to “societal collapse”, “fascist revivalism” and a never-to-return journey into “the long Eurabian night”. As Europe’s white population flees, the continent becomes “reprimitivised”. America alone is left to defend the values of Christian civilisation. This is not a fantasy from some white supremacist website, but a prophecy from the pen of Mark Steyn, a Canadianborn American shock-jock-turned-shock-journalist whose work appears everywhere from the Washington Post to the Australian. Steyn’s delight at baiting Muslims is matched only by his fear of what Muslims might do to Western civilisation. The problem with Muslims is that their numbers are “expanding like mosquitoes”. The “European races”, on the other hand, are “too self-absorbed to breed”. Their failures in the bedroom are allowing the “recolonisation of Europe by Islam.” Steyn’s demographic arguments are as outlandish as they are crude. There are currently 13 million Muslims in Europe – out of a population of some 491 million. To become the majority population by 2020 they would have to increase their numbers twenty-fold in little over a decade. Even if Muslims continued to breed like mosquitoes, it is unlikely that Steyn’s demographic prophecy would come to pass. According to Steyn, the welfare state is responsible for the poor performance of the “European races” in the bedroom. State intrusion into “healthcare, childcare, care for the elderly” 40

has “effectively severed its citizens from humanity’s primal instincts, not least the survival instinct”. Yet the highest fertility rates in Europe are in those nations with the best state childcare provisions – Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Countries with poor childcare facilities – such as Poland or Romania – have much lower rates. Steyn ignores the fact that of the five most populous Muslim countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iran) the fertility rate for all but one stands at three or less, and the figures for all are plummeting. In 1979, before the revolution, the fertility rate in Iran was 6.5. Today it is 1.7, lower than for most Scandinavian countries and below the rate needed to stop the population from falling. Convinced that Europe is about to be transformed into Eurabia, Steyn believes that violence is both the inevitable outcome and the only realistic response to the Muslims’ looming demographic victory. “Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two?” Steyn asks. Because, “In the 30 years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 per cent to 31 per cent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 per cent to 44 per cent.” Faced with such figures, the Serbs came to the conclusion that “if you can’t outbreed the enemy, [you have to] cull ’em”. And what the Serbs figured out, Steyn warns, “other Continentals will in the years ahead.” Steyn has gained a hearing not just among right-wing antiIslamic activists, but among liberals too. “Mark Steyn believes that demography is destiny,” Christopher Hitchens wrote in a review of America Alone, “and he makes an immensely convincing case.” Hitchens would not “concede that Serbofascist ethnic cleansing can appear more rational in retrospect than it did at the time”. Nevertheless he could not “deny Steyn’s salient point that demography and cultural masochism, especially in combination, are handing a bloodless victory to the forces of Islamisation.” Martin Amis is another liberal admirer of Steyn’s

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demographic arguments. And while he, like Hitchens, would not sympathise with the Serbs’ solution to the “Muslim problem”, he nevertheless has felt “a definite urge”, as he told Ginny Dougary of the Times in London in September 2006, “to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.” Dougary described Amis’s call for collective punishment as “hardline, inflamingly so”. He is not alone, however, in expressing such views. The philosopher and neurobiologist Sam Harris is one of the so-called New Atheists – the wave of militantly anti-religious thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Hitchens himself that has swept into public consciousness in recent years. In a column for the Los Angeles Times, Harris flayed fellow liberals for appeasing Islamism, concluding that, “The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.” Christopher Hitchens (who had previously defended Amis on the grounds that “the harshness Amis was canvassing was not in the least a recommendation, but rather an experiment in the limits of permissible thought”) found Harris’s comment “alarming” and “irresponsible”. A best-selling author who seems ambivalent about the use of violence against Muslims; Britain’s leading novelist imagining collective punishments against the Muslim community; one of America’s most prominent intellectuals praising fascists for their sensible discussion of Islam: the arguments of Steyn, Amis and Harris seem to add credibility to the belief that hatred and revulsion for Muslims are deep-rooted in Western societies. Yet, as in the discussions about police harassment and racist attacks, we need to maintain a sense of proportion. However unpleasant the claims of Steyn, Amis and Harris may be, we should not exaggerate their impact. Their arguments no more make Western societies institutionally Islamophobic than the actions of Mohamed Atta (who piloted the first plane into the Twin Towers) or Mohammad Sidique Khan make Islam an institutionally violent religion. The attempt to demonise Muslims is matched by the attempt to institutionalise respect for Islam. It has become a mantra from virtually every Western leader that Islam is really a religion of peace and that jihadists distort the message of the Koran. “The most remarkable thing about the Koran,” Tony Blair has written, “is how progressive it is. I write with great humility as a member of another faith... The Koran is inclusive. It extols science and knowledge and abhors superstition. It is practical and far ahead of its time in attitudes toward marriage, women, and governance.” Blair is not alone in his enthusiasm for Islam. “There is much we can learn from Islam,” Prince Charles told a conference organised by the Foreign Office in 1996. “Everywhere in the world people want to learn English. But in the West, in turn, we need to be taught by Islamic teachers now how to learn with our hearts, as well as our heads.” While the former prime minister and the monarch-inwaiting enthuse about Islam as a faith, the head of the nation’s judiciary and the leader of its established Church are both sympathetic to the introduction of sharia law into Britain.

In July 2008, Lord Phillips, Britain’s most senior judge, told the London Muslim Council that he was willing to see sharia law operate in the country, so long as it did not conflict with the laws of England and Wales, or lead to the imposition of severe physical punishments. He was echoing comments made five months earlier by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. In a speech on “Civil and Religious Law in England”, the archbishop argued that in a plural world of divided cultural, religious and ethnic loyalties, it is “very unsatisfactory” for a citizen “simply to be under the rule of the uniform law of a sovereign state”. Secular law must be modified to accommodate religious sensibilities. Muslims should not have to choose between the “stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”. There is a “danger,” he told the BBC, in saying that “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said”. What all this suggests is that the relationship between Western societies and Muslim communities is a highly complex one and not easily reduced to simple formulas such as “the West is Islamophobic” or “blame it all on Islam”. There is certainly fear and hatred of Islam. But this is only one of many strands of opinion. Islamophobia is matched by Islamophilia. What is most troubling is the common desire to play the victim. On the one side, many Muslim leaders view Western societies as institutionally Islamophobic and all Muslims as living under a state of siege. On the other, the likes of Mark Steyn view the West as living under the lash of Islam and seek some form of collective revenge. The two sides feed off each other, creating ever more exaggerated fears. Such exaggeration is the life-blood of grievance culture. It helps create a siege mentality, stoking up anger and resentment, and making communities, both Muslim and non-Muslim, more inwardlooking and more open to extremism. In 1993 Ed Husain, then the organiser of the Islamic Society at Tower Hamlets College in east London, put on a 30-minute documentary on Bosnia. “In the dark lecture theatre,” he remembers, “there were sobs at what people were seeing; gasps of shock at what was going on two hours away from Heathrow airport; the serving of Muslim men’s testicles on trays, Serbs slaughtering pregnant Muslim women, reports of group rape within the borders of Europe.” The students reacted as Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had done the previous year when he had watched a similar documentary at the freshers’ fair at the LSE, an experience that put him on the road to jihad and eventually led him to murder the American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. In east London, Hizbut-Tahrir followed up the film by organising a rally entitled “Bosnia Today – Brick Lane tomorrow”. The idea that the massacre of Srebrenica could be replicated in Whitechapel might seem a bit far-fetched – except, perhaps, to a community whose leaders constantly claim, seemingly in all seriousness, not only that Britain is a brutal police state but that Muslims are a whisker away from being swept into the gas chambers. Once you begin to hear the echo of jackboots in the high street, once you start believing that your neighbours are really SS guards in waiting, then it is but a small step to imagine that blowing them up on a bus might be a virtuous act. Extracted from From Fatwa to Jihad by Kenan Malik, Atlantic Books, 2009 41

OBSERVING ISLAM PHOTOGRAPHY and TEXT MUNEM WASIF

A group of boys at a madrassa in Bangladesh (previous pages) perform ‘ozu’, ablution, before the afternoon prayer, ‘Asar’ Students at the madrassas start their day at dawn and have breakfast after studying for three hours. One student who lives nearby goes home for breakfast

A student from the madrassa plays badminton during a break. Students only get one break, after afternoon prayer and before â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Maghreb Namazâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, evening prayer

Wasifâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wife Reetu and friend Topu, a young photographer, at Coxâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Bazar beach, southern Bangladesh

Wasifâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sister Munmun, a young doctor, gets ready to go to hospital. She has started wearing a hijab after returning from hajj

Topu prepares for Fridayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Jumuâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ah prayers. Every Friday he puts on a traditional robe that his father brought him from Mecca after returning from hajj

Wasifâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s friends Shibly, his wife Mili and their two daughters at Dhakaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ramna Park on the weekend

Sculptors, painters, artists and writers join teachers and students of Dhaka University in a street protest against the removal of Bangla Baul, the Bangla cultural symbol from the airport roundabout, under pressure from religious zealots

Followers of an Islamic political group wait for their leader, who is known as Char Monai’s ‘pir’ (the spiritual leader from his locality, Char Monai) in Paltan, central Dhaka

Traditional bands play music on Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, in the Manikganj district in central Bangladesh

Devotees mourn in remembrance of the Battle of Karbala when Imam Hussain bin Ali, the grandson of Muhammad, and the last prophet of Islam, a Shia Imam, were killed by the forces of the second Umayyad and Yazid. They chant â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;ya Hussain, ya Hussainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and beat their chests. Some are in a trance or cry and hold each other

According to a Muslim marriage system both bride and groom has to say ‘kabul’ or ‘yes’ three times in front of witnesses. The bride is crying, holding her mother before saying ‘kabul’. The groom sits separately until the marriage registration is complete

Islam in Bangladesh is like the multiple colours of a mirror under the sun: veil and lipsticks, verses and azans, jeans and beards, all together. On one hand, people here go to the grave without the hope of “rebirth”; on the other, fakirs and saints in mazars chant prayers for the eternal soul. While madrassas are frequently feared to be breeding grounds for terrorism, the childhood of madrassa children is as spirited as any child in this society: they run in open fields, read books, sing, and play badminton with vigour. I grew up with traditional middle-class Islamic values. As a Muslim my father is a strong believer. All of the members of my family observe religious festivals together. Whether or not they say prayers daily, Eid or Jumu’ah prayers are customary. For this project I photographed the people closest to me. It had been two years since my sister Munmun came back from hajj. It came as a complete surprise when she decided to wear a hijab. The way Islam is practiced in our family we never felt it necessary – covering properly was enough. But since my sister started wearing a hijab it has created new meaning for her life, visible to everyone around her. She seems more confident than she ever was, and I have had to give up my preconceived ideas about her. I used to photograph her a lot. Now it has become difficult because I can’t show any of her uncovered photographs in public. It is an interesting challenge for me and I really respect her position. As a photographer, each time I photograph a person I now ask them, “Do you want to be seen like this?” Reetu, my wife, is a theatre activist whose form of belief in Islam is completely different from the conventional. Topu, a young photographer, practices the orders of Muhammadism, the last prophet of Islam. He is trying to challenge orthodox representations of Islam through his images. I include Munmun, Reetu and Topu as subjects to portray the diversity and depth of Islamic culture in Bangladesh. I wanted to produce a body of work that could counter conventional photographs of “fanatics”, “fundamentalists” and “terrorists” to show Islam as a presence in people’s lives rather than as a symbol of suppression. This is a story of my family and friends, about little views that we don’t see in the headlines of newspapers. This is a story about how “we” see Islam.

Topu at home. He is taking a nap on a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;jai namazâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (the prayer rug) after midday prayer

LAWFUL SLAUGHTER PHOTOGRAPHY FRANCE KEYSER TEXT GUY LANE

Turn on French TV and, chances are, before long you will see an advertisement for halal pasta. Visit the local supermarket and you’ll be able to buy halal ready meals, or choose a halal burger from the freezer cabinet. If your visit takes place during the festival of Eid el-Kebir you might even be able to choose the sheep you would like to have slaughtered. Halal cuisine is in the ascendant. Recent estimates suggest that French Muslims consume around 300,000 tonnes of the meat each year; at current levels the halal sector annually generates over three billion euros in sales. In France they say that the sheep has travelled from the bath (in fevered popular imagination, the scene of unspeakable ritual 60

sacrifice) to the shopping trolley (emblem par excellence of untroubled bourgeois consumption). As part of a long-term project recording aspects of Muslim life in her country, photographer France Keyser has studied the development and change in status of halal food. “It has changed a lot in the last five or 10 years or so,” she notes, “because food companies and supermarkets have understood that it is a big market – one that is growing. For example, in the past, French Muslims have had difficulty finding a safe place to slaughter the sheep, quietly and in accordance with the practices of their religion. But now the situation is improving – there are more and

more places becoming available to them. “For instance, one of my photographs shows a scene inside one of the most modern abattoirs in the country, in a neighbourhood north of Marseilles. It’s a slaughterhouse built to comply with national and European hygiene rulings. And it is designed with windows so that Muslims can watch and follow the killing of the sheep they have picked out. One frame shows a man asking the official to wait and ensure that the animal is truly dead before butchering it. “The main point of this work – and of my larger project looking at everyday life for French Muslims – is to show the other reality

behind all the clichés we hear, both in the press and in general. Because those views didn’t correspond to my reality. I wanted to make some pictures that showed who these people are: they are not terrorists; not all Muslim women wear the burka; and so on... All the time Islam is stigmatised in France, so I wanted to react against that process. I wanted to see French Muslims who were engaging with society while quietly practising their religion. I wanted to see how they managed to negotiate that arrangement between their religion and their society. But it’s a situation that is new, and constantly developing. Islam has to find a place in France, and France has to find a place for Islam.” 61

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VEILED IN AMERICA

I recall a particular evening a few months after I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts as one of those moments that was the genesis of what became my book, A Quiet Revolution. After an early dinner with a friend who was visiting from the Arab world – a well-known feminist of Muslim background whom I will call Aisha – we were taking a leisurely stroll back to her hotel. Rounding a corner, we came to a spontaneous halt at the sight of a crowd gathered on the Cambridge Common, evidently enjoying a private event or celebration. What was arresting was that all the women were in hijab – the veil or head covering that some Muslim women wear. This was in the late 1990s, when the hijab was much less common than it is today in America. Seeing a public gathering of 40 to 50 people, among whom all the women were in hijab, was still exceedingly rare. In fact, this may have been the first time I had seen such a gathering in America. “To them,” said Aisha as we stood observing the scene, “we are the enemy. That’s how they see us, all of us, people like us, feminists, progressives. That’s just how it is.” She spoke ruminatively, as if resuming a conversation, which in a way she was. I understood at once of course whom she meant by “them”: Muslims who wore or required the wearing of hijab. “We can’t ignore that,” she continued, “or simply pretend it isn’t so. And anyway they are our enemies. They threaten us, ban our books or try to, oppose everything we stand for. That’s just how it is.” It was one of those lovely, long summer evenings, a perfect sliver of moon in the deep sky. The Islamic calendar being a lunar one, I wondered for a moment whether the group had gathered in connection with a significant date or feast, but I couldn’t think of anything, nor could Aisha. In the Muslimmajority countries in which we had both grown up, one didn’t have to make a special effort to know where we were exactly in the Islamic calendar since its significant dates and feast days were ordinarily marked and celebrated by the broader society. But here we lived our lives by other times and other calendars, 62

and special dates and feasts typically slipped by unremarked and unremembered. Even discovering when Ramadan was (in those pre-internet days) required special effort and research. Today, astonishingly to some of us, the Empire State Building is lit green to mark the month of Ramadan. “And now,” said Aisha, as we resumed our walk, the twilight now perceptibly closing in, “our own friends defend them. And what’s worse,” she went on, “as we were saying, they’re right to do so. This is what they have to do in this country, defend minorities, defend people’s right to be different. That’s why we love their societies. That’s why we want to be like them.” We had gone back and forth many times on this subject through the past few days, over coffee and tea and the meals we had shared. This was a new and different time for us, posing new questions in the field of women and Islam, in which we both worked. When we began working on the subject in the 1970s there had been neither a Muslim immigrant “problem” in Europe, as was brewing now, nor was fear of Islam and Muslims in connection with terrorism even an issue. Both of these had begun to become issues mostly in the 1990s. In France the subject of women and Islam and the veil in particular were emerging as highly politicised issues in the fierce national debates under way around immigration policies, and they were topics that were often invoked in particular by the Right, who were in favour of restricting immigration. How, we wondered, would these winds of change complicate our subject even further, and how would this affect our work? I have not seen Aisha since that time. She used to visit the United States quite often but now no longer does so. When she was invited to a conference here some years back, soon after we had embarked on our wars with Afghanistan and Iraq, she wrote to say that she and many other intellectuals in her country had decided to suspend their visits to the United States so long as the wars continued. She has not published

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For me the sight of women in hijab in America was an arresting and, frankly, given my memories of the Muslim Brotherhood, disturbing sight: disturbing if it was part of a growing trend, which, by the late 90s, it distinctly appeared to be

anything on women and Islam since. Many Americans and Europeans, in the 1990s and today, assume that some Muslim women wear hijab simply because they are observant Muslims. Wearing hijab, they assume, is just what devout, observant Muslims do. But for Aisha and myself, the hijab’s presence meant not just piety – for we both knew many women in our home societies who were deeply devout yet never wore hijab. Rather, to us it plainly signaled the presence of Islamism: a particular and very political form of Islam that had been gaining ground in Muslim societies since the Islamic Resurgence of the 1970s, a resurgence significantly fueled by the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood. Thus for us the hijab had meanings that it did not have for most Americans and even perhaps for many among the younger generations in our home societies – essentially because of the history we had ourselves directly lived and witnessed. This was history that we knew viscerally, in our memory and in the pulse of our being. For myself, for example, having grown up in Cairo in the 1940s, the hijab that I was seeing now in America, in its looks and style, powerfully evoked the hijab I recalled seeing in childhood worn by the women of the Muslim Brotherhood – and only by the women of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was a different kind of hijab from the traditional sorts that one might occasionally see at that time, albeit by the 40s and 50s quite rarely, on the streets of Cairo. So for me the sight of women in hijab now in America – in styles directly reminiscent of the hijabs of the Muslim Brotherhood – was an arresting and, frankly, given my memories of the Brotherhood, disturbing sight: disturbing in any case if it was part of a growing trend, which, by the late 90s, it distinctly appeared to be. My memories of the Muslim Brotherhood also dated back to childhood. They included a strong if vague impression of them as people who bombed places, including cinemas – a memorable detail for me since I enjoyed going to the movies.

But most particularly I remember the Brotherhood for the assassination of Nuqrashi Pasha, prime minister of Egypt. His death cast a tremendous pall over our home, as he was also a friend of my father’s. Needless to say, this was not a home in which the Brotherhood and its goals and actions were viewed with even the slightest sympathy. The Brotherhood women’s style of veil remained for me forever charged with these negative associations and memories. Its style was distinctive enough to cause me to ask, as a child, “Why are they dressed like that?” Because, was the answer, they are women of the Muslim Brotherhood. I left Egypt in the late 1960s, by which time the Brotherhood had almost disappeared, many members having gone into hiding or fled the country because of the Nasser regime’s systematic attempt to eradicate the group. In the late 1960s hardly anyone in such cities as Cairo or Alexandria wore hijab. By the later 1990s other events were fueling my sense of wariness and unease with respect to the hijab’s spread – and its incipient spread seemingly now even to the West. By this time the Islamic Resurgence had made extraordinary gains across Egyptian society. Even by the early 1990s, seemingly in direct correlation with the gains of the Resurgence, an escalating number of acts of militant Islamic violence were occurring in the country in a growing atmosphere of intellectual repression. Just following the news coming out of Egypt was disturbing. In 1992 a well-known journalist, Farah Foda, a critic of Islamism, was murdered. The following year Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, a professor at Cairo University, was tried on the grounds that he was an apostate. He was declared guilty and had to flee the country with his wife. In 1994 Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate, was stabbed, and, although he survived, he was seriously injured. Mahfouz was in his eighties at the time, and his novels had been appearing freely in Egypt since the 1940s. The attack – by an Islamist on the grounds that Mahfouz’s works were blasphemous – seemed a shocking gauge of the country’s drastic descent into 63

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intolerance with the spread of Islamism and always, along with it, its signature dress, the hijab. Through the 1990s the life of my colleague Nawal elSaadawi, an Egyptian feminist, was repeatedly threatened by Islamists. Then, in 1997, an Islamist group perpetrated a horrific massacre at the temple of Hatshepsut (the only woman in ancient Egypt to rule as pharaoh) in Luxor, killing 58 tourists. I was not at the time making a study of the veil’s resurgence or of these events, but cumulatively such news seemed reason enough to make one exceedingly wary about the spread of the hijab as part of a trend now also growing in the West. All of this then, and the possibilities, fears, and questions that these associations opened up for me, were instantly brought to mind by the sight of this distinctively modernlooking hijab. At some point in the ensuing months, as I continued to think over the questions that the hijab’s presence inevitably raised for me (and always paying attention now when I saw women in hijab in the street or in the malls or in Harvard Yard – women who were, strikingly, almost always young), I found my questions growing more and more compelling. What history was this that I was living through and witness to? Was some kind of extremist, militant Islam taking root in the West, including in the United States? Was that what the presence of the hijab signified? Could the Muslim Brotherhood have somehow managed to establish a foothold here and in other Western countries? Where were these young women getting their ideas that they should wear hijab? And, most intriguingly, since they lived in a free country where it was quite ordinary for women to challenge patriarchal ideas, why on earth did they feel bound to accept whatever it was that they were being told? Often referred to in Arabic as “al-Sawha al-Islamiyya,” the Islamic Awakening, or simply as al-Sawha, the Awakening, the Islamic Resurgence brought into being the form of Islam now most commonly referred to in English as “Islamism.” In the early 1990s this term began to replace other terms – among them “fundamentalism”, “radical” Islam, “political” Islam and Salafism – which had all been used to refer to various aspects of the Islamic Resurgence and the spectrum, or “continuum of movements” it comprehended, some radically militant while others, by far the majority, moderate and nonmilitant. The attribute all Islamists share, as Azza Karam wrote in her work on Islamism, is the commitment to the “quintessentially political agenda” of Islamising society. The “sine qua non of being an Islamist,” she notes, is that of being actively engaged in the work of bringing about social and political change in society – people and structures of government. To be an Islamist, she continues, “it is by no means sufficient to be a Muslim.” Rather, “an Islamist must be committed to active engagement in the quest for a more Islamic and just society. All Islamists will share this ultimate aim.” It is still even today a rare week when some issue or other relating to women, Islam, and/or the hijab or burka does not make headlines in Western media. This broad public interest in the subject seems in turn to have energised religiously committed Muslim American women, precipitating them into active engagement with the topic of Islam and women’s rights. In consequence, Islamic feminism in America is more lively today than at any other time in my own lifetime. 64

All of these conditions and developments collectively – be it the wave of anti-Muslim sentiments, the wars into which we plunged, and the emergence of the subject of women in Islam as a topic of national and public import – directly and indirectly affected the lives of Muslims in America and also critically shaped the trajectory of American Muslim feminist activism through this decade. My original idea has developed to a book-length study. In it I describe the lively activism that has been taking place among American Muslims around issues of women and gender, by drawing together my findings about women, Islam and Islamism, and the new and unexpected trajectory that Islamism appears to be taking in the new democratic environment in which it is evolving. This excerpt is adapted from the introduction of A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America by Leila Ahmed, published by Yale University Press (New Haven and London) May 2011

REPORT

PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT IVOR PRICKETT

EGYPT

I left my home in Beirut and arrived in Egypt for the first major organised protest on 28 January 2011. Tunisia had just happened and I had regretted not going there. There was definitely the feeling of a domino effect. There was a very strange atmosphere in Lebanon that week – different and unrelated – but a feeling of uncertainty and restlessness. In the beginning, I was concerned about getting through the banks of riot police who had taken over the whole of downtown. There were reports of journalists and photographers being arrested – I knew Jack Shenker [who was reporting from Egypt for the Guardian] had been arrested and beaten up. But I found myself among the protesters, who were incredibly happy to show you their side of things. The only danger was being hit by tear gas. The protesters were running around shoving onions in everyone’s faces, to counteract the tear gas. Other remedies were to wash your eyes out with Coke, or put Vaseline up your nose. I just ended up with a sticky face. It was my first ever day on Egyptian soil, and to walk into that was pretty surreal. I was in Egypt for nearly three weeks in the end. These pictures are from the earliest, most violent days, when pro-Mubarak supporters were unleashed on Tahrir Square, which led to huge clashes. It could have gone either way at that stage if they’d managed to get into the square and attacked people who couldn’t defend themselves. It’s a tempting angle, to say that the protest was a youth movement, and while it’s true they started it and kept it alive through social media, the people who stayed in the square represented a huge cross section of Egyptian society. The picture of the guy throwing stones stands out for me – maybe because I remember what it felt like to be there – how the streets of downtown Cairo were turned upside down. When a group of young guys took over a derelict house on a corner of Tahrir Square, to throw stones at the pro-Mubarak men, it was like something out of Lord of the Flies… kids gone mad. It was incredibly heroic. They defended their country with their bodies.

A man sleeps in a destroyed car (previous page) outside the Omar Makram mosque in Tahrir Square Anti-government protesters hurl stones at Mubarak supporters from the roof of an abandoned house on the edge of Tahrir Square

A volunteer medic in Tahrir Square treats a young boy who was caught while fighting with Mubarak supporters

A man sleeps in front of a projection screen in Tahrir Square. In front of him there is a sign that says ‘Yes we can’, the phrase made famous by Barack Obama and one that was adopted by the protesters of Egypt

Anti-government protesters stand guard at a barrier set up to prevent Mubarak supporters from entering liberated Tahrir Square

Protesters take a break from the crowds in Tahrir Square to have some lunch while others answer the afternoon call to prayer

Members of the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;26th of July Movementâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, an activist group set up through Facebook in 2007, discuss plans to take the protests out of Tahrir Square. The following day, 11 February, Mubarak stood down

A burnt-out car lies in the street outside the Omar Makram mosque in Tahrir Square

A man sits by the River Nile near Qasr al-Nil bridge, which became the main entry and exit point for antigovernment protesters

Residents of the neighbourhood of Zamalek guard one of the many checkpoints in the area set up to prevent looting

Soldiers patrol Tahrir Square amid celebrations the day after Mubarak stepped down. It was rumoured that angry supporters of the old regime were nearby

A pro-democracy protester with an injured leg rests in an alleyway near Tahrir Square

THE QUESTION OF ISLAM Mubarak claimed that Islamists were behind the Egyptian revolution. Ben Ali said the same in Tunisia. King Abdullah of Jordan saw a dark and sinister hand – al-Qaida’s hand, the Muslim Brotherhood’s hand, an Islamist hand – behind the civil insurrection across the Arab world. Then the Bahraini authorities discovered Hizbollah’s bloody hand behind the Shia uprising there. For Hizbollah, read Iran. How on earth do well-educated if singularly undemocratic men get this thing so wrong? Confronted by a series of secular explosions – Bahrain does not quite fit into this bracket – they blame radical Islam. The Shah made an identical mistake in reverse. Confronted by an obviously Islamic uprising, he blamed it on Communists. Bobbysocks Obama and Clinton have managed an even weirder somersault. Having originally supported the “stable” dictatorships of the Middle East – when they should have stood by the forces of democracy – they decided to support civilian calls for democracy in the Arab world at a time when the Arabs were so utterly disenchanted with the West’s hypocrisy that they didn’t want America on their side. “The Americans interfered in our country for 30 years under Mubarak, supporting his regime, arming his soldiers,” an Egyptian student told me in Tahrir Square in February. “Now 78

we would be grateful if they stopped interfering on our side.” I heard identical voices in Bahrain. “We are getting shot by American weapons fired by American-trained Bahraini soldiers with American-made tanks,” a medical orderly told me. “And now Obama wants to be on our side?” The events of the past months and the spirit of anti-regime Arab insurrection – for dignity and justice, rather than any Islamic emirate – will remain in our history books for hundreds of years. And the failure of Islam’s strictest adherents will be discussed for decades. There was a special piquancy to the footage from al-Qaida, recorded just before the overthrow of Mubarak, that emphasised the need for Islam to triumph in Egypt; yet a week earlier the forces of secular, nationalist, honourable Egypt, Muslim and Christian men and women, had got rid of the old man without any help from Bin Laden Inc. Even weirder was the reaction from Iran, whose supreme leader convinced himself that the Egyptian people’s success was a victory for Islam. It’s a sobering thought that only al-Qaida and Iran and their most loathed enemies, the anti-Islamist Arab dictators, believed that religion lay behind the mass rebellion of prodemocracy protesters. The bloodiest irony of all – which

dawned rather slowly on Obama – was that the Islamic Republic of Iran was praising the democrats of Egypt while threatening to execute its own democratic opposition leaders. Not, then, a great moment for “Islamicism”. There’s a catch, of course. Almost all the millions of Arab demonstrators who wish to shrug off the cloak of autocracy which – with our Western help – has smothered their lives in humiliation and fear are indeed Muslims. And Muslims – unlike the “Christian” West – have not lost their faith. Under the stones and coshes of Mubarak’s police killers, they counterattacked, shouting “Allah akbar” for this was indeed for them a “jihad” – not a religious war but a struggle for justice. “God is Great” and a demand for justice are entirely consistent. For the struggle against injustice is the very spirit of the Koran. In Bahrain we have a special case. Here a Shia majority is ruled by a minority of pro-monarchy Sunni Muslims. Syria, by the way, may suffer from “Bahrainitis” for the same reason: a Sunni majority ruled by an Alawite (Shia) minority. Well, at least the West – in its sagging support for King Hamad of Bahrain – can point to the fact that Bahrain, like Kuwait, has a parliament. It’s a sad old beast, existing from 1973 to 1975 when it

It’s a sobering thought that only al-Qaida and Iran and their most loathed enemies, the anti-Islamist Arab dictators, believed that religion lay behind the mass rebellion of pro-democracy protesters

was dissolved unconstitutionally, and then reinvented in 2001 as part of a package of “reforms”. But the new parliament turned out to be even more unrepresentative than the first. Opposition politicians were harassed by state security, and parliamentary boundaries were gerrymandered, Ulster-style, to make sure that the minority Sunnis controlled it. In 2006 and 2010, for example, the main Shia party in Bahrain gained only 18 out of 40 seats. Indeed, there is a distinctly Northern Ireland feel to Sunni perspectives in Bahrain. Many have told me that they fear for their lives, that Shia mobs will burn their homes and kill them. All this is set to change. Control of state power has to be legitimised to be effective, and the use of live fire to overwhelm peaceful protest was bound to end in Bahrain in a series of little Bloody Sundays. Once Arabs learnt to lose their fear, they could claim the civil rights that Catholics in Northern Ireland once demanded in the face of RUC brutality. In the end, the British had to destroy Unionist rule and bring the IRA into joint power with Protestants. The parallels are not exact and the Shias do not (yet) have a militia, although the Bahraini government has produced photographs of pistols and swords – hardly a major weapon of the IRA – to

support its contention that its opponents include “terrorists”. In Bahrain there is, needless to say, a sectarian as much as a secular battle, something that the Crown Prince unwittingly acknowledged when he originally said that the security forces had to suppress protests to prevent sectarian violence. It’s a view held all too savagely by Saudi Arabia, which has a strong interest in the suppression of dissent in Bahrain. The Shias of Saudi Arabia might get uppity if their co-religionists in Bahrain overwhelm the state. Then we’ll really hear the leaders of the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran crowing. But these interconnected insurrections should not be seen in a simple ferment-inthe-Middle-East framework. The Yemeni uprising against President Saleh (32 years in power) is democratic but also tribal, and it won’t be long before the opposition uses guns. Yemen is a heavily armed society, tribes with flags, nationalistrampant. And then there is Libya. Gaddafi is so odd, his Green Book theories – dispatched by Benghazi demonstrators when they pulled down a concrete version of this particular volume – so preposterous, his rule so cruel (and he’s been running the place for 42 years) that he is an Ozymandias waiting to fall. His flirtation with Berlusconi – worse still, his cloying love affair with Tony Blair whose foreign

secretary, Jack Straw, praised the Libyan lunatic’s “statesmanship” – was never going to save him. Bedecked with more medals than General Eisenhower, desperate for a doctor to face-lift his sagging jowls, this wretched man was threatening “terrible” punishment against his own people for challenging his rule. Two things to remember about Libya: like Yemen, it’s a tribal land; and when it turned against its Italian fascist overlords, it began a savage war of liberation whose brave leaders faced the hangman’s noose with unbelievable courage. Just because Gaddafi is a nutter does not mean his people are fools. So it’s a sea-change in the Middle East’s political, social, cultural world. It will create many tragedies, raise many hopes and shed far too much blood. Better perhaps to ignore all the analysts and the “think tanks” whose silly “experts” dominate the satellite channels. If Czechs could have their freedom, why not the Egyptians? If dictators can be overthrown in Europe – first the fascists, then the Communists – why not in the great Arab Muslim world? And – just for a moment – keep religion out of this. Robert Fisk is the Middle East correspondent of The Independent. He contributed this article to 8, which was first published on 20 February 2011 79

LIBYA

PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT Mads Nissen

He comes up to me, friendly but persistent, and screams at me directly in the face. What touches me is not the actual words, but what seems to be this man’s own surprise when the words take form in his mouth, leaving his lips and surging out in the open for everyone to hear. The phrase “Gaddafi is a dirty rat!” can be heard over and over again on the streets of Benghazi. Until very recently, saying those words out in public was equal to prison or death. And as I write at the beginning of April, this is still the case in many cities in Libya. To me, this man’s euphoric surprise at hearing his own words contained much of what the Libyan revolution is all about. Years and years of repression. Years and years of fear. Years and years of not knowing who to trust. It seemed that suddenly an era may be ending, and now with eyes wide open, this young guy and his friends couldn’t stop themselves from dancing, singing, honking car horns and shooting spontaneously in the air. Crossing the border from Egypt into Libya was like entering a bubble of extremes. In February and March, during two trips, I spend about a month in this bubble, experiencing and documenting feelings of absolute joy, relief, anger, fear, hope, loss, pain, as well as the ever present anxiety of what the future might bring.

Family and friends pray for a rebel who died of a gunshot wound in the fighting with Gadaffiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s forces

Mourners at a funeral for the 20 people who died on the evening of 4 March, when a huge deposit of ammunition exploded outside of Benghazi. Rebels claim that it was Gaddafiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s forces that did this, others fear that it was an accident caused by the rebels themselves

Bodies of the victims of the 4 March explosion in Benghazi are received at Jala hospital

A boy has the Royalist, pre-Gaddafi, Libyan flag painted on his face at the rebelsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; headquarters in Benghazi

An â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;armyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of 1000 rebel volunteers march through the streets of Benghazi

They have no military background and have undergone just five days of training before being sent to the front to fight Gaddafiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s forces in the west

One of the 20 people killed is brought to Jala hospital in Benghazi after an explosion on 4 March

Captured soldiers and foreign mercenaries are kept prisoner in a local school. Soldiers from the Gaddafi regime together with foreign mercenaries arrived at Shahat airport to fight the protesters. They destroyed the airport and killed more than 100 civilians, before they were killed or captured by the protesters

A rebel fighter joins the front at Ajdabiya

A young man helps carry a coffin at a funeral for six people who died during fighting between Gaddafiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s forces and the rebels for the control of the city of Brega. Around 500 people attended the funeral

A man waving the pre-Gadaffi era Libyan flag stands on a burning tank that had been a part of the proGadaffi forces attacking Ajdabiya

IRAN

PHOTOGRAPHY Hengameh Golestan TEXT MALU HALASA In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini had been in Iran for less than a month from his exile in France when he started to roll back the hard-earned rights of Iranian women. They were banned from the judiciary, Family Courts were disbanded and age of marriage reverted back to nine. When on the eve of International Women’s Day, newspapers announced that women had to wear the hijab, the Islamic headscarf, in public, the response the next morning – as seen in these recently rediscovered pictures by the photographer Hengameh Golestan – was electrifying. Women from all walks of life, students, teachers, nurses, parliamentarians and actresses, all went on strike and gathered at Tehran University for a mass demonstration against the enforced wearing of the veil. Golestan remembers 8 March 1979 as cold, rainy and eventually snowy. The early morning atmosphere of the march was goodtempered. “At the beginning, we were very cheerful and all those nurses were joking, stopping the cars with men and saying that you have to wear the scarf as well. Nobody believed it would become violent.” Quickly however the mood changed. By the time the demonstration turned into Enghelab (Revolution) Avenue, the women were attacked. “Suddenly in the middle of Enghelab we realised we were surrounded by a chain of men who were pushing us,” recalls Golestan. “Then they started to beat us up and throw some of the women on the side of the road.” Fearful for her own safety, Golestan, then 27, ran away. She joined the march again in front of the Russian embassy, where women on the roof of a bus confronted a young cleric from the office of Ayatollah Taleghani, a moderate political figure, who had sent his own militia to protect the women, something they failed 95

to do. When the situation once more turned violent, Golestan fled again. There are photographs from the march taken by her husband, the photojournalist Kaveh Golestan, in which the attackers are holding knives. She observes, “We never knew who they were. They said that they were from ‘the people’ but they were some sort of militia, either Basij or Hezbollah.” Although it would be another year before an official law about the veil was

A well-known Iranian TV actress (previous pages) takes one of Ayatollah Taleghani’s clerics to task Women protest on the top of a bus, watched by embassy guards

passed, the next day Golestan wore a headscarf in the street for fear of being arrested or beaten. “From then it was too much pressure on all of us. I used to go with Kaveh all the time and work as his assistant. Then they told him not to bring your wife, because no women were allowed. I became really depressed. That was one of the reasons why I left the country.” These photographs, never published in Iran, languished out of sight for over 30

years until last November when they were exhibited during the Eighth Annual Women’s Art Festival of Le Pont Gallery in Aleppo. When the photographs of butterflywinged vaginas, by Erika Harrsch, were banned and taken down by the authorities, Golestan thought her images would be next, but they were left alone. In Syria it seems that female genitalia are far more subversive than women demanding their rights in Iran so long ago.

A young protester is consoled after she was attacked

A cleric from Ayatollah Taleghaniâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s office addresses the march The militia that had been sent to to protect the women protesters proved ineffectual

At the start of the march, demonstrators, including nurses in white coats, were jubilant

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â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Why are you pushing us?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Frightened women flee the sudden violence. Some men attending the demonstration to support their wives and sisters, also try to get out

101

Unemployed 19-year-old Amine Tighri plans to flee Algeria as soon as he has saved enough money for a spot in one of the boats that tries to reach the Spanish coast daily. Algeria is suffering an unemployment crisis, with up to 50 per cent of 18 to 30 year olds out of work. Educated young people are becoming increasingly disillusioned and resentful about the state of their nation

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ALGERIA

PHOTOGRAPHY and text Christian Als

I visited Algeria in August 2010 to run a workshop for a group of leading Algerian photographers. I noticed a lot of things on that trip, but two things in particular stood out. It was very difficult to work there as a photographer, and – wow – there sure are a lot of unemployed young men hanging about in the streets with nothing to do. Two months later I decided to return to work on a story about these young men. I wanted to investigate how big an issue unemployment was, and what it does to a country, when almost 50 per cent of the youth are without work. What I found was really devastating. Almost everyone I met during my stay in Algiers wished to leave their country, because they saw no hope of a better future. Of 150 young men I talked to, only two had no desire to leave. These guys practically live on the streets at night with friends, which they refer to collectively as family. Some abuse drugs, others have stacked up huge criminal records, but all just want to leave. The core problems of Algeria are common to just about every country in North Africa – a growing population of young people who are at once educated and ambitious, unemployed and frustrated, suppressed and resentful. The practice of self-harming is becoming increasingly prevalent – these men are cutting themselves to feel alive. “Why don’t you just start a revolution,” I wanted to know? The answer was always the same: “The authorities will kill us all. We don’t dare. Don’t you know what happened to thousands of young people during the brutal civil war in the 1990s?” they would throw back at me. I understand. So many disappeared back then. And it is not so long ago, still fresh in their minds. I was overwhelmed by their frustration. After the first week, I simply stopped asking the question whether they had a desire to leave Algeria, because it wasn’t really a matter of desire, but more a matter of when and how to fund it. I left the country heartbroken over this desperate generation, living without any kind of hope. They had totally lost their religion and any faith in the authorities in a way I have not seen anywhere in the world. How could so many young people tell me: “We are alive, but dead”?

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Saturday afternoon at the Port of Algiers suburb of Rais Hamidou. Most young men in Algeria have abandoned their religion, but this group hold on to Islam and pray every day that God has not forgotten them

104

A group of friends hang out in a park by the Port of Algiers where they gather every day. They are together seven days a week. They say, ‘what else would we do?’ The 18-23 year olds are all unemployed and live with their parents where they are not particularly welcome. ‘This is our family’

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Young men at an arcade in Algiers. The small, damp room is plastered with posters of football stars and celebrities. The oldest of the group displays his cuts, which are self-inflicted. Like many other young people in Algeria, he describes his situation as hopeless:â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;We are alive, but dead!â&#x20AC;&#x2122;

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Families of victims of enforced disappearance hold peaceful protests once a week in Algiers. They demand that the authorities reveal the fate and whereabouts of their relatives who vanished after being taken by security forces during the violent civil war of the 90s. No proper investigations have been carried out by the Algerian authorities

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Norrdine Khelfaoui, 31, is unemployed and dreams of leaving Algeria. He has completely lost faith in the future and has attempted suicide several times. He lives with his parents and nine siblings, yet spends most of his life on the streets, especially at night â&#x20AC;&#x201C; there is more room to sleep in the tiny apartment during the day when the rest of the family is not there

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Young men drink alcohol, smoke hash and sniff glue in a shadowy part of Algiers

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A typical residential block in a suburb of Algiers. French colonials built the affordable housing complex at the time of Algerian independence in 1962. All apartments have their own satellite dish to be able to follow what is happening outside Algeria and to watch the hugely popular European football matches

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Amine tattooed himself on his stomach with a needle and mascara: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Je veux vivre ou et avec qui?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; - I want to live, but where and with whom?

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A group of young men play football on a dirt field in the Port of Algiers. During breaks they sit in the twilight and dream of life in the West and getting aboard one of the many cargo ships that anchor in the Bay of Algiers

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on a stormy afternoon

“Look at the rain,” Dr Kazi says. “No electricity for hours on end. The traffic’s crazy. Getting here in this torrent was an ordeal. More of this and we won’t be able to meet for lunch tomorrow.” He taps the ash off his cigarette onto the tiled floor, though there’s an ashtray beside him. “No girls in bikinis today,” Colonel Jami says, peering out at the empty pool. “No sun for them to bathe in. Can you believe it? My niece was here in a bikini last week. She said she was too pale and was suntanning! In my youth we’d have called her dark and told her to stay out of the sun.” “I know. I was there. They say the storm’s coming here.” Through a curtain of rain, the garden’s still visible; beyond it, white-capped waves. A young woman, blonde and tall, sweeps by, twinkling her fingers at them. Her shoulders are bare, her legs revealed almost to the knee in short white trousers. “That’s old Burhan’s wife,” Jami says. “Looks younger every day and she’s been married at least 10 years. I saw her in a swimming costume last week. Look at her clothes. And yesterday she wrote a letter to the London Times defending Islamic headgear...” “Did you hear what I said? They think the storm’s going to reach us soon.” “God’s punishment, they say.” “Where do you think I live? I’ve been watching TV all morning, and hearing what the bigots said. Received ideas. That’s what you’re repeating. Punishment for what? I’d have thought someone like you...” “Let me tell you about Burhan and his wife. You know he has a son who’s almost her age? Well, one day he came home from a trip abroad and found his son’s clothes in her bedroom. He got a gun and shot the boy in the leg…” “That’s not what I heard,” Kazi says. ‘The boy’s a good 10 years younger. She brought him up like a son. Spoilt him. The boy had a fight with his best friend over a girl. The father rushed him off to the Gulf before he got into any trouble. You’ve been watching too many soap operas. Anyway, let’s go

FICTION

back to the table. I want some of those lamb chops. Last time we were here there weren’t any chops when we went back to the table.” “Biryani for me,” the colonel says. “You should learn to appreciate local cuisine instead of hankering after foreign...” “And what about you?” The doctor nudges his companion. “Let’s admit it, the very world you and I live in is foreign. Cars. Fans. Mobile phones. Cash machines. Girls in bikinis, though I don’t know how long that will last, given our current rate of progress towards perdition. Or paradise, should I say. And when did you stop drinking your double whiskeys? After your pilgrimage to that shrine near Multan? Karim” – he beckons to a white-clad waiter – “keep an eye on our table?” They go to the buffet to fill their plates, then return to sit at their table, in the covered veranda overlooking the garden. Beyond the low wall, the sea is grey and turbulent. A single boat bobs on the water’s surface; it seems suspended in mid-move, its red sail dimmed by the rain. On an overhead screen, three men with embroidered caps are asking for donations for victims of the storm near the coast. Starve, starve, feed the wretched, redeem your sins. A food pack will take you halfway to heaven. A tent will take you all the way. “I can tell you where that money’s going,” Kazi says. “Into someone’s pocket, and it won’t be the victims who...” “Don’t be cynical. We live in such a beautiful country.” “With the most awful people.” “You know what your problem is? You see the dark side of the moon. Our young only talk about feudals and fundos and terrorists. Look at the progress our people have made. Doctors. Scientists. Sportsmen. Women moving ahead in every field...” “Well let me tell you I know people who’ve built villas on the shores of the Mediterranean with money they stole from donations and aid. Next you’ll be saying that democracy brings chaos and we should never have voted the General out,” the doctor says. “And just four years ago you were 113

FICTION

‘You know what your problem is? You see the dark side of the moon. Our young only talk about feudals and fundos and terrorists. Look at the progress our people have made. Doctors. Scientists. Sportsmen. Women moving ahead in every field...’

berating him for allowing corruption and creating misrule.” “You know I left the army in ’75, when I came back from that Indian camp in Bareilly and I’d lost nearly four years of my life. I wasn’t even 50. But you have to admit there’s something to be said about our army. Ayub’s heyday, once he’d settled into power; now that’s what I call a good time. We had values! A Golden Age I call it…” They’ve finished their food, and, as usual, they beckon to the waiter to ask him about the day’s dessert. A burly man in cream-coloured shalwar kameez comes up to greet them, raising the tips of his fingers to his forehead. “Did you hear about Asad’s son?” the colonel asks. “No.” “Well you know Asad had been having an affair with Pasha, that singer in the shampoo ad,” the colonel says. “His wife was going crazy. She said she’d leave him if he didn’t stop seeing her. Then their son came back from Harvard. Somehow, the next thing you know is that Pasha’s out of the father’s life and seeing the son. And you know what? Pasha isn’t even a girl.” “You mean she hides her age?” “Not her age,” says the colonel says. “Pasha’s not a woman, she’s a man in disguise. Can’t you tell? No breasts, no hips...” “But that’s an old story. Someone borrowed it from a novel. A French novel. It’s been told before. The truth is that Pasha made a blue movie and...” the doctor says. “A blue movie? You watched a blue movie?” “Come on, old man, I’m joking, and you’re right, Pasha does look like a boy. And you, my friend: you should write soap operas. You seem to know all the plots. Just think, with the stories I could tell you…” “I did publish a book of poems once.” “A pamphlet privately printed for your fiftieth anniversary.” “No! Not that, that was only an invitation card. A book of poems. In Urdu. I was 20 and in my final year of pre-med. Full of hope and courage! But that’s all so long ago.” “You joined the army. I was still at boarding school in Dehra 114

Dun,” Kazi says. Karim, the waiter, comes to clear away their plates. “Tea or coffee, sir?” He knows, but he always asks. Coffee for the colonel, tea for the doctor. Once, long ago – how long ago? – he’d worked in the surgery the Kazi still owns, though he hasn’t practiced for some years now. “But you didn’t really know me then,” Jami says. “You were – what, 16? Speaking of stories, you keep saying you’re going to tell me about your last summer in Wimbledon.” “Surely I’ve told you about London already. And that was – what, five years ago?” They light up, Jami his cigar, Kazi a filter-tip. The sound of the wind seems, for a moment, to have relented slightly. “Five years ago? So tell me again. I’ve forgotten.” “Not much to tell. Ali and Mandana were busy all day as usual and I spent a lot of time going for walks. Then I twisted my ankle and had to stay a home a lot. The neighbour would drop in when Ali and Mandana were at work and she’d tell me how she’d once been a famous singer. Her name was Valentine Voss. She was probably 90. She lived all alone in an attic flat that she’d furnished like a little jewel box. I’d visit her for cups of tea sometimes. And she’d say, Look at this country, there are thieves and fare dodgers and scroungers on the dole. It’s a wonder you all still keeping coming here for such slim pickings! It must be so nice where you live, sun and sea and sand… so when are you going home? And your son? We’ve got too many foreign doctors here! Don’t they need young doctors in your country? Don’t you want them to come home and take care of you? “Then those boys from a Northern town bombed half of the London Underground and the city was in chaos. And that night I had a dream. I dreamed I’d been in jail for a long, long time for a crime I hadn’t committed. When I came out and went home my wife was covered in a white veil from head to foot. And so was everyone else. Men and women.”

FICTION

“Veiled men?” “No. Men and women all in white. I thought someone had died. All hail to the Revolution, they chanted, and I didn’t know what revolution they were talking about. Thank God you’re free, they said. Thank God we’re all free. In my dream I wished I was dreaming, that I wouldn’t see the people in white again, and then I woke up...” “More tea, coffee, sir?” The waiter’s hovering. “You’re off the point now,” says the colonel. “Get on with your story!” “Well, a day or two after the bombings, I went down to the pharmacy for some Calpol and who do I see but Mrs Voss, struggling with two heavy shopping bags. Hello, she said, I left my shopping trolley at home. I took the bags from her hand. Visitors to our country! She said. Foreigners abusing our hospitality! We should have sent them back all those years ago when that man called Mr Powell said they’d take us all over if we let any more of them in. And look at us now! Men with bushy black beards. Women in veils. Keeping their shops open all night and selling stale food. Living off our charity. Telling us what to do… I think she’d forgotten where I was from. “And then I said, you have people like my Iranian daughterin-law, and my son, both working as doctors for your National Health Service when they could make so much more at home, with a private practice like mine. Both over 50, and working something like 24 hours a day! I keep telling them to come back. She must have known then she’d upset me. But doctor, you’re one of us! she said. They need someone like you to teach them all to be like you. I kept silent. But then I started thinking. I thought about the boys who’d so wantonly killed others and then killed themselves. What were they doing? Were they really jihadis? Who believed in heavenly beauties and rivers of milk? I don’t think so, not for a moment. Weren’t they reacting in frustration to want and need? Mandana worked in the North and she said the young men there lived on the margins. I’d always thought suicide bombing was a cowardly act. And then I thought how brave they must be to blow themselves up, but such misplaced bravery, such a waste, and yet they paralysed the world. To what avail? What did they do for you or me? I have to wait months for a visa to see my son, and I can’t, at my age, be bothered to go back. As for my son, he said that if he wanted to go to almost anywhere in the world he had to wait for weeks.” “Doesn’t he have nationality yet?” “He’d only applied that year. He’s British now, says it’s a relief as far as airports are concerned, but they still pick him out of the crowd to search him, if there’s no one else – luckily for him, they prefer them younger these days.” “Sir, they say the roads are closing down because of the flood.” Karim is hovering, again. “You’d better wait for the storm to be over.” “How dark it is, already. What if it doesn’t stop raining, tonight? It stayed light almost all night one June when I visited Denmark. Is England like that, too? But sometimes everything seems dark to me. Do you remember the woman they shot last week? Dr Masooma Usmani? And what had she done wrong? She was in a van carrying boxes of clothes to an orphanage, her office said. Was it because she belonged to the wrong party? Or the wrong religious sect? Someone said she was carrying explosives. Or guns. Or because they thought they could rob her

van? Search me. She’s in a coma and may never recover.” “So you admit there’s dark here.” “It’s dark everywhere. Sometimes I think of a story I heard long ago. A king was so sickened by defeat that one day he said he heard the owls call his name and say he was an unjust ruler. He took to his bed; he turned his face to the wall and his back to his subjects and wouldn’t rise. His son took over the affairs of state but there was anarchy on the street on the rebellions on all the frontiers of the country. “Suddenly darkness overtook the land and night and day looked the same. The holy men said that unless the king took his place on the throne the sun would never rise again. His son went again to rouse the king but when the ruler opened his eyes he cried out loud: I can’t see. I’m blind. They summoned doctors and holy men of all faiths and charlatans to his bedside and all of them said the king’s eyes were healthy, there was no reason he shouldn’t be able to see with them; it was his senses that had gone blind, and while he refused to see the land and the people would remain in darkness. Are you asleep?” Jami checks his watch. “Oh, time for prayers! I missed the last two today.” Outside, the waves are lashing out and the wind and the rain wail like the soundtrack of a Gothic movie. Jami rises to go to the prayer room. In his chair, eyes closed, Kazi wishes the rain would stop. He wishes Ali and Mandana were here, or at least Ali. Jami, the man who’d had no time for things of the spirit, says his prayers every day now. Once he drank, blasphemed, and though he said he he’d discovered faith in the prison camp, Kazi remembers, he continued for years to scoff at rituals. He became steadily more pious after his wife lost her sight when she was 70. Maybe his faith has seen him through years of solitude, rheumatism and gout, emptiness. Kazi, himself, has always taken a gambler’s chance on eternity; if he were capable of praying he would, but all he’s ever been good at is his work, and he wants to go back to work now. During his years at the operating table, removing tumours and growths and counting the days people might keep on living, or telling them their cancer was terminal, he often wondered whether somewhere, something might exist. Now, in his retirement, he still wonders. And if there is a power, has He forgotten about His creation? Perhaps, in his dotage, Jami’s right to leave it to heaven, he thinks with a twinge of what might be envy. The last notes of the muezzin’s call fade and fall away. I’m going to call Ali when I get home, he thinks. I’m going to tell him to fly over. If the storm gets worse. He’ll take me to the coast to help. Anyway, it’s definitely time for him to come back for a while. Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi in 1955 and moved to London in 1970. He is the author of four collections of short stories. His novel Another Gulmohar Tree was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Europe and Asia) 2010. His most recent novel, The Cloud Messenger, was published this year

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REIMAGINING PAKISTAN

A scientist exhorts his followers to pray, and to hope for miracles. Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, a nuclear physicist by training, speaks in apocalyptic terms. He declares to an overcrowded room that Pakistan will soon be deluged by a “clerical tsunami” unless the Pakistani Army takes its task seriously. This is a popular brand of Pakistani secularism at fevered pitch: it puts its faith in a miracle, its trust in the Army and it may be part of the reason why Pakistan is losing the battle for a secular, democratic, liberal future. At the Karachi Literature Festival where Pervez Hoodbhoy delivered his lectures this February, the most popular panels had little to do with literature and a lot to do with the question of political Islam and extremism. The festival, hosted by Oxford University Press, underwritten by British and American government money, was largely an elite affair where Pakistan’s chattering classes exchanged pleasantries with the local and foreign media. Feminist poet, Kishwar Naheed, remarked that the pagri, or headgear of Muslims should be removed so that “their minds may open up”. To hear the panellists tell it, political Islam is less a coherent project than an ensemble of murderous acts, each more pitiless, savage and more irrational than the last. And, the whole of the country is drowning in it. 116

Certainly, there’s reason to be aghast. On 4 January, Salmaan Taseer, the socially liberal governor of Pakistan’s most populous province, was shot dead by his own elite force bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri. A smiling Qadri admitted on television that he had killed Taseer because he had been advocating reform of Pakistan’s religious offences laws, popularly known as the “blasphemy laws” – a linguistic coup for Islamists who’ve managed to recast the law in divine terms. Then, last month, the Federal Minister for Minority Affairs, Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian, was also gunned down in the capital, Islamabad. He too was a vociferous critic of Pakistan’s religious offences laws. The ruling Pakistan People’s Party government has refused to condemn the murders. Little of this is new. Islamist parties have been seeking to capture state power and institute their interpretations of sharia since Pakistan was founded. They made gains under the populist, secular Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who acceded to their demands banning alcohol and criminalising a small Muslim sect, the Ahmadis, to bolster his weakening position. His successor, General Zia ul-Haq who took power in a military coup and hanged Bhutto, pushed ahead with Islamisation, institutionalising it in the state bureaucracy while churning

out mujahedeen with the support and financial backing of the US. Today, these organisations – a hodgepodge of acronyms armed with weapons – continue to operate backed by the Pakistani Army which sees them as a strategic asset. Pakistan’s largest demographic today – urban youth under 30 – cannot recall a time before General Zia. But, that does not make them militants. These youth don’t want to smash the state; they want Pakistan to take its rightful place as a leader and keeper of the Muslim community. Their ire is mainly directed at outside forces from America to India to non-state actors that they believe are the cause of the country’s ills. They turn out for the rallies of Islamist parties to shout with them even if they won’t vote for them. The blasphemy battle began as a feud over a woman. Taseer had filed a mercy petition for a poor Christian labourer and mother of five, Aasiya Bibi, who was sentenced to the death penalty last November for allegedly defaming the Prophet. Following his murder, Islamist political parties held a 50,000 strong rally in Pakistan’s teeming port city of Karachi to support the laws that Taseer had opposed. Besides me, there is only one other woman at the demonstration: an overly large poster of Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani scientist convicted of terrorism and sentenced to 86 years in

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Islamism as an electoral programme is not widespread. The parties fare badly in elections. But it counters the disappointment of secular nationalism to deliver, the failure of state modernisation and government complicity in the American imperial project

the US, hangs over the crowd of men. The poster sways gently as the speechmakers fulminate and the men fervently respond. As a culminating gesture, a group of boys burn three American flags, tossing the burnt rags into the air. The repertoire of visual imagery and performance embody a complete political narrative. It is not accidental that a rally demanding blood from one woman should revere the other. Between Aasiya and Aafia, spans an entire political discourse. If the first marks the limits of the community, the second has become a potent symbol of its essence, the “daughter of the nation” whose imprisonment in the US underlines the relationship between the Pakistani nation and the American one. That’s the backdrop to objections to amending the religious offences laws. An advocate inside the camp of a banned Islamist organisation tells me that it’s not the religious ordinance but other political decisions that have killed many people. “The government is following American edicts,” says Omar Faitan, “That’s why thousands of people have been killed.” The vice-chairman of a local Islamist party here, Owais Noorani, tells me that he objects to any amendment to the religious ordinance because: “You want to check the temperature of my nerves. This whole thing should not be touched,” then adds, as if for clarity,

“I am a Muslim.” The last is as much a political statement, as a religious one. Being a Muslim at this rally means being somebody who supports the political narrative – a narrative that’s far from the incoherence that secularists ascribe to it. Islamism as an electoral programme is not widespread. Islamist parties fare badly in elections with awesome regularity. But, what Islamism does offer is a conception of the good life that counters the disappointment of secular nationalism to deliver, the failure of state modernisation projects and governmental complicity in the American imperial project. It’s a point utterly lost on Pakistan’s secular intelligentsia. Here’s how Hoodbhoy describes the project as he understands it. He writes, “Islamofascism is a reality. This country is destined to drown in blood from civil war.” The term Islamofascism was popularised by the journalist Christopher Hitchens who employed it to highlight features that he says, fascism and Islamism share. The late critic and academic Tony Judt debunked its usage as part and parcel of a dying American liberalism. That it’s found its way into Pakistani discourse speaks to the paucity of Pakistani liberal thought and a complete failure of the imagination. For Pakistani secularism to survive, we will need to reimagine ourselves, our enemies and our possibilities.

Madiha R Tahir is a freelance journalist based in Pakistan. She is also co-editor of the forthcoming Dispatches from Pakistan 117

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LICENCE TO PUBLISH photographs Peyman HooshmanDzadeh TEXT Malu halasa

Along with the thousands of other banned artworks, films, posters and books held by the Culture and Islamic Guidance Ministry (Ershad), in Tehran, are the photographs from Peyman Hooshmandzadeh’s exhibition Our Paradoxical Life. Hooshmandzadeh wasn’t in the Asar Gallery in 2007 when ministry officials arrived. Normally when a new exhibition goes up, they make a point of visiting the show.

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The authorities don’t need an excuse to ban an exhibition and usually don’t give one. However, in the case of Our Paradoxical Life they said that the photographs were offensive to “holy names and religion”. That these same names and blessings can be found on nearly every car and truck windshield throughout Iran was apparently lost on them. “That’s the point actually,” stresses Hooshmandzadeh through an interpreter on the phone from Tehran. “That’s our everyday life, you see it everywhere but when you take a photograph and put it in a gallery, it’s banned.” The series for Our Paradoxical Life was inspired by Hooshmandzadeh’s own walks through Tehrani streets. He explains, “The first time I saw these kind of religious sayings and where they were being put up, I thought to myself these people are really stupid because who would want to use these sorts of things on their cars and windshields. Then I started seeing them everywhere. Some people were putting them up because they were religious but many were putting them on their cars in case they were stopped by officials who, thinking they were religious, would let them go.” So the stickers were a beard – a kind of disguise? “Something like that,” agrees Hooshmandzadeh, but what also struck him were the people sitting behind the slogans. “You could tell by the way they dressed or looked, they were a totally different character from what’s written on the windscreen; they weren’t religious. We have to live this parallel existence in Iran, where life is totally paradoxical.” He wanted to photograph the owners of the cars and trucks behind their windows in situ but the sun’s reflections made that impossible. Instead he scoured the coffee shops and his friends for possible models and took authentic windshields into the studio. On the windscreen in front of the helmeted figure (facing page, bottom right) the name “Fatemeh Zahra” appears, a reference to the daughter of Prophet Mohammad, who as the wife of Ali symbolises goodness and holiness, along with a few alterations of his own. The mobile phone number that appears on the glass is Hooshmandzadeh’s. Much of his earlier work on wrestlers, maleonly teahouses and men’s moustaches and belts documented Iran’s patriarchal society. In 2004 he turned his attention to objects such as religious clocks and posters in Time (FOTO8, Spring 2009). New York Times art critic Holland Cotter called his work a “self study” as part of a larger trend, among Iranian artists and photographers, of “cultural self portraits”. It was a detailed examination of society that came to a sudden halt during the pro-democracy protests of the Green Movement, after the disputed 2009 presidential elections, when hard-line authorities began to wage a war against the image. Not only was taking photographs on the street dangerous, the authorities harassed, arrested

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and tortured photographers, artists, journalists and filmmakers. (Jafar Panafi, among others, still remains in jail at the time of writing.) As a prominent Iranian photojournalist recently revealed to me, “Today in my country the camera is the equivalent of a spy.” Hooshmandzadeh admits, “After the elections and what happened, we were so depressed and couldn’t do anything. Then I thought I’m going to start to create work for myself and for the people around me. I wanted to go into another world and get out of this one.” The Bank Notes series is incredibly evocative and, like Time, a seemingly decorative Islamic overlay disguises an important message about social transformation in Iran. His rials feature the people he loves and trusts. “You’ve never had these kinds of happenings in your life so that is perhaps why you cannot understand,” Hooshmandzadeh tells me. “However, whenever the government changes, it’s always the pictures on the money that changes. One day it’s the Shah, one day’s it’s Khomeini. When I wanted to change ‘my world’ I changed the pictures on the bank notes.” Last summer when both Bank Notes and Time were exhibited together at the Aran Gallery in Tehran, officials from the Ministry of Ershad made their obligatory visit. “But this time,” adds the artist, “it was easier. They didn’t take the exhibition away. They told us to take down all of Time and the three bank notes that had images of women on them” (his daughter Leila, his mother, his wife and the artist Shadi Ghadirian). When asked if they gave an excuse this time, there was much hilarity at the other end of the line as the translator interjects, “They beat you up like hell and that’s it, they don’t give an excuse!” Then Hooshmandzadeh observes ominously, “We never know what the reason is. Usually when they are suspicious of the person, they ban the work anyway.” When Our Paradoxical Life was banned in 2007, he was told not to work for three years but it wasn’t bona fide because no “paper” was issued. The officials also took the opportunity to ban his book, Horn, also in the exhibition. Interestingly the part fiction, part non-fiction book had already gone through two reprints and had been given an official licence to publish – a mojavez – but it was still banned in the gallery. He’s written a new book, Hazf be gharineh masti, loosely translated as “Omission of Symmetry When You’re Drunk”. Instead of applying for a mojavez and seeking official permission to get it published from the Ministry of Ershad, he has written out all of the copies by hand.

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MELODY OF MOGADISHU

PHOTOGRAPHY JEHAD NGA TEXT MaX HOUGHTON

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Somalia’s current status as a “failed state” does not eradicate its more glorious past, as the charmed holiday resort for wealthy Libyans and Italians, who, from the 1930s onwards, experienced its generous boulevards, its Roman Catholic cathedral as well as the extraordinary architectural spectacle of the Abdul Aziz mosque. Mogadishu was one of the first Muslim settlements on the east African coast as early as the 9th or 10th century. By the 14th century, it had become a thriving city and port, known for the excellence of its cloth, which it exported to Egypt. From the 15th century onwards, it was the mystic Sufi strand of Islam that has flourished throughout Somalia. This devotional practice is very much at odds with the Islam of one of the most prominent religious – and political – movements in contemporary Somalia: al-Shabaab. Al-Shabaab’s presence in Somalia stems from 2004, as the youth and military wing of the Islamic Courts Union (its name translates as “youth”). The ICU controlled much of central and southern Somalia, until its collapse in 2006 led to the instigation of the Transitional Federal Government, which still clings to power today. A major offensive against the Islamist al-Shabaab has been taking place since March 2011, with more than 50 peacekeepers from the African Union losing their lives so far. After six years of working in Somalia, Jehad Nga was pulled towards the heart of the country. His photographs operate at the level of a veneer, their inherent superficiality offering the viewer as much as an outsider could hope to understand, yet at the same time, Nga intuits and offers an unexpected sense of intimacy. Since he first began his relationship with the city, Nga has witnessed a creeping conservatism in Mogadishu. Visually, this is most apparent in the dress code of local women, every one of whom now covers herself in public. In a country where public stonings take place, the fear of becoming a target is ever present. It is a city in chaos; its administrative structure, photographed by Nga from the windows of Villa Somalia, has ceased to function. The gleaming hotels, offices and banks downtown are but a mirage. Nga’s feat is to conjure Mogadushu’s past lives onto the plane of the photograph, offering flashes of insight, moments of beauty, as well a lament for an increasingly devastated society. 128

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THE DAYS OF ARABIA FELIX PHOTOGRAPHY SIMON NORFOLK TEXT MaX HOUGHTON

The days of Arabia Felix, Yemen’s ancient moniker, meaning “happy” or “fortunate”, are long gone. Its tribal politics and the growing presence of al-Qaida in the south of the country have given rise to a new nickname: “the next Afghanistan”. Indeed, as 8 goes to press, al-Qaida are promoting the southern Abyan province as an “Islamic emirate”. The islamification of the south was once encouraged by the now embattled leader Ali Abdullah Saleh, desperate to defeat the more secular and formerly Marxist region, during the brief civil war of 1994. As embedded as Gaddafi in his own nation’s psyche, Saleh, like the Libyan despot, presides over a divided tribal society, and has maintained his supremacy by appeasing or supporting whoever necessary – from tribal leaders to the US government – in order to resist the development of alternative bases of power. Saleh’s grip on power has looked increasingly fragile, his government losing control of four provinces at the time of writing. The mass protests of 1 April 2011, demanding the end of the president’s 32 year rule, may yet oust Saleh from power, but at the cost of 92 lives to date, according to Amnesty International. Whether the deaths were predominantly as a result of government repression or opportunistic attacks by

al-Qaida will prove difficult to determine. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, makes the most of the notoriously difficult terrain in the south of the country to deter its opponents. AQAP is active within Yemen, increasing the tempo of attacks on military checkpoints and security convoys, while at the same time also targeting the West. In its “near” war, al-Qaida in Yemen as it was then known, attacked a group of Spanish tourists in July 2007, Belgian tourists in January 2008, and the US Embassy in Sana’a in September that same year. On 14 March 2009, AQAP suicide bombers attacked South Korean tourists in Hadhramout. Four days later, AQAP militants executed a suicide attack against a South Korean official convoy investigating the previous bombing. In its “far” war, AQAP planned and executed the Christmas Day attack on Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in 2009 and has attacked British embassy targets twice in 2010. As more of Yemen – already the poorest country in the Middle East – descends into a state of chaos, even the arrival of the Queen of Sheba could not prevent a turn to extremism, as its people seek a sense of nationhood in the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden.

The Old City of Sana’a. In the distance is the new al-Saleh mosque, named after and paid for by the president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, at a cost of $80 million

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Wadi Dawâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;an, the ancestral home of the bin Laden family. In the foreground is the village of al-Rehab

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The city of Shibam in Wadi Hadhramout, entirely mud-built. In April 2009, four South Korean tourists were blown apart by a suicide bomber while taking just such a photo

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A public water fountain (above) by the mosque in the village of Mashhad at the mouth of Wadi Dawâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;an One of the mosques in Shibam in Hadhramout province (left)

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The centre of Shibam in Hadhramout province (above) View over the Old City of Sanaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;a (right)

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FOLLOWING ALI

One spring morning in March 1995 a gaggle of reporters stood in a potato field outside a state penitentiary in Indiana waiting for the release of prisoner 922335, who had a convoy ready to take him to a local mosque. There, he would become a “child of Islam” and share a breakfast of potato curry, parathas, cantaloupes, cheese and olives with the most famous of all converts to the Muslim religion. Mike Tyson, a convicted rapist, was the recruit. Muhammad Ali was the pioneer he followed to a new faith. At 7.20am in the dining room of the headquarters of the Islamic Society of North America, Tyson saw Ali shuffling towards him with his breakfast tray and rose to make space and serve him tea. It was a curiously mundane setting for two of the most recognisable people on earth to come together for such a newsworthy ritual. Along with the fastest man on earth, the title of world heavyweight champion was the most illustrious of all sporting designations up until the 1990s, when boxing’s marquee division disintegrated and Olympic sprinting became tainted by performance enhancing drugs. Through unrelated circumstances, the two most famous prize-fighters of the post-war era turned to Islam: Ali, as part of his struggle against white America, in the 1960s, and Tyson in a less political effort to lend shape to his chaotic existence. The abandonment by Ali of his 146

“slave name”, Cassius Clay, was a seismic act, at first religious, but then steadily more political, as his dissent became synonymous with the Civil Rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam war. No figure in history had combined the roles of world’s most celebrated sportsman, religious iconoclast, and pacifist, which was at odds, in one deep sense, with the violence of his profession and its association with American machismo. For Ali to join the Nation of Islam after defeating Sonny Liston to become world heavyweight champion was a challenge to the most cherished American values. In previous eras, black champions were expected to be grateful recipients of white patronage. When Jack Johnson became the first black holder of the belt in 1908, Jim Jeffries, his white opponent, declared: “I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.” The ringside band played “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” and the promoters encouraged the crowd to chant “Kill the nigger”. Ali, “the Louisville Lip”, and an Olympic champion, broke onto the professional scene with many of the assumptions about how a black fighter should conduct himself still intact. The story of him throwing his Olympic gold medal off a Louisville bridge into a river is thought to be apocryphal. It was

one of the many stories he embellished to illustrate a point about oppression. But the political and religious stance taken by Ali in an era when it would have been immensely profitable to play up to white society mark him out as the most inspirational and influential of all sportsmen and women. In the moment of his ascent, after Liston had lain prone, Ali joined an organisation that classified white people as “devils” and argued for selfdefence and segregation. Broadly, the black struggle was divided between Christianity and Islam, violence and nonviolence. “Integration is wrong. White people don’t want it, the Muslims don’t want it,” Ali announced, in his earliest post-Christian phase. As the Civil Rights struggle evolved, Ali shifted away from doctrinal austerity. He was suspended by the Nation of Islam for a year for breaching religious strictures. Fighting for money was one sin for which he never found a cure. His conversion came to be seen as his first major step on a road to personal emancipation, as a black man, as a voice refusing to surrender to inequality and repression. His aphorisms ring through the ages: “I don’t have to be what you want me to be.” And: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me nigger.” In his time these were hugely noble, and contentious, statements, to which even some fellow black fighters

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Ali shifted away from doctrinal austerity. His conversion came to be seen as his first major step on a road to personal emancipation, as a black man, as a voice refusing to surrender to inequality and repression

took exception. Those calling him Cassius Clay long after his rejection of that label paid the price in the ring, as Ali would accompany each blow with a shout of “What’s my name?” For refusing the draft he was stripped of his title and didn’t fight for three years. In the 1970s he reasserted his athletic greatness in epic pugilistic contests against Joe Frazier and George Foreman. His Islamic faith survived the onset of Parkinson’s disease, and probable brain damage from boxing. His presence at Tyson’s ceremony confirmed his willingness to go on proselytising, almost silently, without the eloquence that had so dazzled his boxing audiences before words were taken away from him. At the mosque in Indiana, Tyson was met by a plaque which read: “Let there be no compulsion in religion. Truth stands out clear from error; whoever rejects evil and believes in Allah has grasped the most trustworthy handhold, that never breaks. And Allah hears and knows all things.” In the turmoil that followed, Tyson was imprisoned again, after a road rage incident, bit a chunk off Evander Holyfield’s ear in a bout in Las Vegas and returned to substance abuse. For all Muslims in America, the attacks of September 11, 2001 was about to contort the relationship between citizenship and faith. As military fly-pasts over major sporting events such as the Super Bowl

became more thunderous and intensely patriotic, the Ali generation condemned the assaults on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon as un-Islamic. In one surreal soliloquy, Tyson, who could see the twin towers from the housing project where he was raised, lectured British boxing writers that they had no knowledge of what it felt like to be bombed. “We did have the Blitz, you know,” one piped up. American athletes converting to Islam entered a new and more complicated phase of forced self-justification. But the tensions had been there all along. In 1996, Abdul-Rauf, born Chris Wayne Jackson, was suspended for one game by the National Basketball Association for refusing to stand for the national anthem, which, along with the stars and stripes, he said, stood for tyranny. A compromise was worked out. AbdulRauf would stand for the anthem but with his eyes closed and his head bowed. He could recite a Muslim prayer. Though he played three more NBA seasons, he appeared in only 62 more games. (A single regular NBA season is 82 games.) His basketball career went into a sharp decline. “In his boxing career, Mike will be more humane, more compassionate, more understanding,” said Tyson’s new mentor, Sayyid Syeed, on the day of his release in Indiana. This was not a straightforward hope. Tyson had been trained and conditioned not to be

humane, compassionate or understanding in a boxing ring. With Ali in the mosque, clerics searched for a way to reconcile Tyson’s nature with the demands of his new faith. It was a quirk of history that boxing, chiefly through Ali, should be at the forefront of a much bigger collision of beliefs. Paul Hayward writes on sport for the Guardian and the Observer

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THE TRUTH ABOUT CONVERSION

The first recorded case of conversion to Islam by a Briton was that of John Nelson in 1583 (who is referred to in Voyages, Richard Hakluyt’s famous history) and conversion may well have been taking place before then. It’s only in recent decades, however, that conversion to Islam has become numerically significant. In most cases, the conversions go unnoticed and unremarked by the public, unless of course a celebrity converts to Islam, which will always inflame media interest. So, when the journalist Lauren Booth (sister-in-law to Tony Blair), announced in October 2010 that she had converted to Islam, there was significant (mostly negative) coverage. A couple of months after Booth’s conversion, my report “A Minority within a Minority: a report on converts to Islam in the United Kingdom”, was released. The report sought to dispel some of the myths around conversion to Islam by providing evidence-based answers to a number of key questions: how many converts to Islam are there in the UK, what problems do they face as a result of their conversion and what role can they play within the Muslim community and within the wider community? The release of the report sparked a flurry of media activity; articles appeared in almost all UK national newspapers, there was coverage on radio and television and the inevitable web148

based debate, which probed the more extreme views in either direction. I was inundated with requests for interviews and soundbites from journalists and commentators, almost none of whom seemed to have actually read the report, but had heard about it through the media grapevine. The report presents the findings from three pieces of research. The relative importance of each piece of research is summed up by the number of pages in the report dedicated to it: estimating the number of converts, six pages; media representation of converts since 2001, four pages; survey of converts to Islam in the United Kingdom, 19 pages. The first two pieces of research were presented very much to contextualise what I saw as the major piece of research – the survey of converts. But it was the first piece of research that most interested the media, and almost all of coverage seemed to latch on to the figure of 100,000 converts presented in the report. Even though I explained that it was only an estimate and that it did not represent the number of current practising converts, the media made hay with it. A lot of the coverage erroneously stated that “up to 100,000 converts to Islam are living in UK” and displayed some dubious mathematical skills in claiming that the figure had “doubled” since 2001 (the figure quoted in the report for 2001 is

60,669). A couple of stories even said that “up to 100,000 have converted since 2001”. There was no coverage of the statement that even at the highest figure suggested for 2010, the number of converts is small compared to the total Muslim population (approximately 4 per cent) and almost insignificant when compared to the total population of the UK (less than 0.2 per cent). In the conclusion of the report, I stated that, when the numbers are put into context, there is no evidence of a mass conversion of the population. Despite this, the Daily Mail stated that the report had led to claims that the country is undergoing a process of “Islamification”. No surprise there – but even the Independent chose to cover the report with the headline “The Islamification of Britain: record numbers embrace Muslim faith.” Well, they do share a building these days… The other big story for the media was that the “majority” of converts were 27-year-old white women, with the implication that they had converted mainly for marriage – despite the fact that the report presented evidence to show that conversion purely for the sake of marriage was a myth. While the report did provide a breakdown of converts by ethnicity and gender (56 per cent were white British and 62 per cent were female), the most that can be claimed from these figures is that white British

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I was inundated by journalists, few of whom had actually read the report, but latched onto two things. The figure of ‘100,000 converts’ that led to headlines on the UK’s Islamification. And the ‘fact’ that most converts were 27-year-old white women

women make up 35 per cent of the total – the largest single group perhaps but hardly a majority. And references to average age can also be misleading; in the report the ages at conversion ranged from 16 to 54 (with the conversion occurring between 0 and 37 years ago) – for those of a statistical leaning, the mode and median were both 26 and the standard deviation was 9. Most of the coverage ignored the notes of caution in the report, but instead used its findings to support preexisting stereotypes. On a number of occasions I was asked if I could provide contact details of converts willing to be interviewed – when I enquired if any particular type of person was required, the same answer always came back: “a young female who wears the headscarf”. At this point, I have a confession to make. I am a white British convert to Islam (although not female), who converted over 20 years ago when I was in my early 20s (I did marry a Muslim, but some five years after my conversion). The question which is most frequently asked of a convert to Islam is “Why?”. As the general perception of Islam becomes increasingly negative – more and more associated with harshness and cruelty, a draconian tradition that exhibits little compassion or mercy towards its own people and even less towards non-Muslims – the question is put more and more vehemently: “Why

would anyone want to convert to Islam?” The fact that each individual convert will have a unique and complex set of personal reasons makes this question very difficult to answer. At most it can be said that there will usually be a mixture of intellectual, emotional and spiritual reasons for a person’s conversion which are frequently (although not always) linked to personal contact with a Muslim or Muslims. So it was with me; my own conversion was a complex set of occurrences which started with a sense of unease at the nihilism and solipsism which my studies in philosophy had taught me were the logical outcomes of any view which excluded a theistic element. After completing my degree, I took a year out and visited Indonesia on a backpacking holiday. While there, a Muslim family invited me to stay with them and I enthusiastically took advantage of the opportunity to gain knowledge of what had been until then a totally unknown religion for me. I was intrigued by the way that the family intertwined Islam with their daily lives. I was fascinated by the formalised ritual of prayer, where five times a day one prostrates before God. With the family I was able to share the experience of fasting from dawn to sunset and the unexpected euphoria on breaking the fast with other people. All this contributed to, but by no means fully explains or does justice to, what

was involved in my own conversion. I have been researching and publishing the findings of my research into British Muslims in general and converts to Islam (specifically white British converts) in particular for over five years now. These converts will play an increasingly important role in defining British Islam. The survey in my report shows that the majority of converts see themselves as both British and Muslim. They tend not to support separation of Muslims and non-Muslims and the majority do not want to live in “all-Muslim” neighbourhoods. The vast majority agree with the suggestion that converts can act as a “bridge” between Muslim and non-Muslim communities – pointing out that converts can help explain Islam to non-Muslims and show that Islam need not be seen as “foreign”. Some also recognise that the bridge is a two-way thing, and that they can help correct misconceptions which the Muslim community has about nonMuslims. More research like this can help dispel the myths that have built up around Islam and contribute to building community cohesion within society as a whole. Kevin Brice is based at the University of Wales: Trinity Saint David. He is a member of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists and the Muslims in Britain Research Network 149

PHOTOGRAPHY PETER FRYER TEXT GUY LANE

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The Arab seamenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s boarding house in South Shields (opening pages) photographed by James Cleet. (Courtesy of South Tyneside Libraries) A Yemeni seamanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s record book (above) A procession of Yemenis in South Shields (left), in the 1950s (Courtesy of the Shields Gazette)

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A Yemeni seaman’s discharge book (above), showing ships served on and conduct on board Yemeni seamen are arrested (right) during the so-called ‘Arab riot’ at the Mill Dam, 2 August 1930, for protesting a discriminatory rota system. (Courtesy of the Shields Gazette)

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A Yemeni seaman’s record book (above) During the ‘Arab riot’ in 1930, 15 Yemeni seamen were arrested and deported (Courtesy of the Shields Gazette)

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The boarding house, Brunswick Street Family photographs (previous pages) courtesy of Mohamed Sayyadi, Tariq Abdullah, Norman and Maureen Kaid and Muhammed Abdul Rani

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According to the records, the first Yemenis to arrive in South Shields stepped ashore in 1894, to be followed by a steady influx of Arabs lured from the British protectorate of Aden and the villages surrounding Taiz by the promise of work on the ships. The first boarding house catering specifically for the itinerant seamen opened in 1909; by 1920, the town boasted eight such establishments, housing up to 600 occupants – their number swollen by the demands of a war economy. South Shields became one of the first Muslim communities established in Britain. For more than 10 years now, local photographer Peter Fryer has worked with South Shields’ Yemeni community to produce a photographic and archival record of its history, development, and – to a degree – its latterday decline. The project is loosely titled Al-Burdun – “the boarding house”. “When they arrived,” Fryer explains, “the men would get off the ship they’d worked on across from Yemen, and in their broken English ask for ‘boarding house’ or ‘boarding,’ which basically got altered to ‘burdun.’ The word has numerous spellings depending on who you speak to, and it can change from one town to another. You can write it in Arabic, but nobody will understand what it is apart from the men living in South Shields and Cardiff. Somebody from Iraq or Palestine, for example, could see it and still say – ‘What is that?’ I think it’s wonderful – it’s like their own language.” The centrality of boarding houses to the Yemenis derived from the vitality of the lodgings’ additional, diverse functions. As community member Ahmed Sadek recalls, “The boarding houses at that time were like community centres, bringing people together in one place when they came back from the sea, so they had somewhere nice and warm to sleep and food prepared for them. It wasn’t just like a bed and breakfast – everything was provided there. They always had somebody in charge, regarded as the elder who everybody respected, listened to and trusted. And the seamen that were married – still the boarding houses were a meeting point for them, where they played cards, dominoes, and entertained themselves, like at a social gathering.” Alongside the comforts of halal food and the familiarity of a mother tongue, the burdun could offer the opportunity of employment, says Fryer. “Some of the

boarding house owners would be the ones who would get the seamen their next job on board ship. They were the ones who would create a link with the shipping owners. So quite a few of these houses were set up in the riverside area, convenient for getting the next job.” Fryer’s project is ongoing, informed by an empathy and respect for his South Shields neighbours, and by a desire to mark the erstwhile distinctiveness of their presence. “In a way I work and live with that community all the time; I sit and I talk, I drink coffee and I eat with these men. You don’t get that access if there isn’t that element of trust. It’s become an acceptance and a friendship that developed from an initial look. AlBurdun aims to give a recognition of the incredible contribution of these men – not only to British shipping but also to the town in general. During the Second World War, for example, about 900 of them died on board British merchant ships – that’s almost a third of the town’s seamen casualties. And the reason that percentage is so high is that they were working at the bottom of the ships, working the engines and stoking the boilers; they were the ones who couldn’t get back to the top when they were torpedoed. So, it’s certainly a recognition of that contribution.” “Also, it’s a recognition of an important element of the Muslim community within South Shields, and the acceptance and integration of that community as well. The work goes on – as a collection and a document of that community’s life within the town.”

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Yahia Ahmed and Mohammed Sayyadi, the boarding house owner (above) and Al Haj Sabahi (right) at the boarding house

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Abdul Numan Makmahi (above) and Abdo Mohammed Kaid (left)

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Said Muhammed Ghaleb (above) and Al Haj Sabahi (right)

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A BRITISH EXPERIENCE

He chose a Security Conference in Munich to make his denouncement. David Cameron’s attack on “state multiculturalism”, in February this year, was billed as “the Prime Minister’s first speech on radicalisation and the causes of terrorism”. It was to be a clarion call for Europe “to wake up to what is happening in our own countries”. Cameron began with a familiar litany of right-wing accusations against multiculturalism. This “doctrine”, he thundered, “encouraged different cultures to live separate lives”. It produces behaviours that “run completely counter to our values” and allows Islamic militant to promote “extreme ideologies” and radicalise young Muslims. In short, multiculturalism is a disastrous policy and a basic threat to our security. What he had to say about multiculturalism, Cameron told his audience of arms dealers and neoconservative policy wonks, is “drawn from the British experience”. Yet, what he had to say bears little resemblance to my own “British experience”. When I was growing up in Hackney during the 1960s the state policy was “assimilation”. I was required to wipe out my cultural identity and assimilate in some sort of ill-defined “British culture”. Assimilation gave way, during the 1970s and early 1980s, to integration policies, which were designed to 168

transform immigrant groups into indistinguishable “members” of the dominant culture. Racism and race riots were the norm. Multiculturalism came chronologically after the failure of such hegemonic exercises. It opened up spaces for people like me to go where we had never been before – in the media, professions, the arts and the corridors of power. The vibrant cultural diversity of Britain today, and our thriving arts and cultural industry that is envy of the world, are all a product of multiculturalism. It is hardly surprising that the British experience of someone like me, a child of “immigrants” to Britain, who regularly suffered from racist attacks, is radically different from someone like Cameron, a pukka Briton who comes from a highly privileged background. We are bound to have different takes on multiculturalism. While multiculturalism had done a great deal for me, it has perhaps done little for the Prime Minister. However, this is no reason to wrap it in the rhetoric of radicalisation and terrorism. Cameron’s take on multiculturalism is disingenuous and requires a closer look. A number of unsubstantiated assertions and half-truths are strung together to give the appearance of a rational argument. Worse: by focusing solely on Muslims, Cameron has flamed the fires of Islamophobia.

Cameron’s first assertion is that multiculturalism has led to the segregation of Muslim communities. Even if we suppose there may be some truth to that claim, why should only “Muslim segregation” be a problem? Look around Britain, contemplate her history, and you would notice that such spatial segregation is not peculiar to Muslims. There are minority communities long resident in Britain that lead segregated lives. Take the Chinese – a Chinese takeaway probably exists on every high street in Britain. Yet, the Chinese community exists in anonymity maintaining its language and culture, including special classes for its children. We are also quite happy to encourage the emergence of Chinatowns, with their distinctive remaking of the urban landscape, right in the heart of our major cities. So segregation and its visible markers are not necessarily a problem in this case. Nor is it a problem for Jews. Stoke Newington, not too far from where I grew up in Hackney, has had an isolated, segregated Hasidic Jewish community for decades – and they have lived perfectly wonderful lives without any problem. Now I live on the fringes of the Finchley, Golders Green area that has been marked off as an “eruv” to accommodate and ease the Sabbath requirements of the large Orthodox Jewish community. And until a few years

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ago one never saw Christmas lights on the main shopping thoroughfare of Golders Green; only the large installation at the bus and tube station of the Lubavitch Hanukkah candles, one lit with much fanfare for each day of the holiday. These days you will find both Christmas lights in the main street and the Hanukkah candles. But again this provides signs and symbols of a distinct community maintaining its identity which are not considered a problem. So why should Muslim communities, creating their own city niches, be seen as a problem? The fact is multiculturalism has actually reduced the isolation of Muslims and increased their integration. Research has consistently shown that separation, measured commonly as Index of Dissimilarity, has been decreasing slowly over the last decades for every ethnic group – including Muslims. Where separation still exists, it is often a product not of multiculturalism but of bigotry. There are, of course, numerous hurdles to integration – some emerge from lack of economic opportunities, some are to do with disadvantages in housing and education, some are based on historic patterns of immigration, some with preferences of ethnic minorities themselves, and some are a product of old-fashioned racism. But none of these can be placed at the door of multiculturalism. What about Cameron’s other main contention: that multiculturalism promotes behaviour “counter to our values”? The main value of multiculturalism, as defined in The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000), the Parekh Report that started the whole debate, is to “treat people with due respect for difference”. Apparently this is not a particularly British value, according to the Prime Minister. Respecting difference, he asserts, has led to “hands-off tolerance” that “reinforces the sense that not enough is shared”. We are provided with an example. “When a white person holds objectionable views, racist views for instance, we rightly condemn them”, says Cameron. “But when equally unacceptable views or practices come from someone who isn’t white, we’ve been too cautious frankly – frankly, even fearful – to stand up to them. The failure, for instance, of some to confront the horrors of forced

marriage, the practice where some young girls are bullied and sometimes taken abroad to marry someone when they don’t want to, is a case in point”. He could have gone further and cited honour killings, genital mutilation, or polygamy amongst Muslims as additional examples. But these frequently cited examples of the dark side of multiculturalism are baseless. Multiculturalism has in fact led to their decline. It does not exist in isolation from such concerns as human rights and gender equality. Institutions that promote multiculturalism, such as various Race Relation Councils and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, have been in the forefront of campaigns to outlaw such practices. This is why laws against these practices exist. And these laws were introduced when “state multiculturalism” was a state policy. There is another point worth noting here. Multiculturalism does not suggest that we are total prisoners of our culture. Cultures evolve and change; traditions reinvent themselves. Obnoxious practices exist in all cultures – but this does not mean that these practices cannot be overcome and transcended. The function of multiculturalism is to provide spaces for cultures to transcend their unsavoury practices, and change for the better. This brings us to Cameron’s last, and for him, the most decisive argument: multiculturalism promotes radicalisation amongst Muslim youth. If so, why do we find similar radicalisation amongst Muslim youth in, say, America and Holland where “state multiculturalism” is conspicuous by its total absence? We can confidently say multiculturalism in any form has not touched France. Yet, Muslim youth in France are as radicalised as in Britain. Logic would suggest that it is not multiculturalism but another common thread that is promoting radicalisation. By making multiculturalism a scapegoat, Cameron wants to draw our attention from the real cause of radicalisation amongst Muslims: our – and Western – foreign policy. Just see what we have done in the recent decades. We invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. We have connived in “extraordinary rendition” and torture. We have propped up dictatorships and authoritarian regimes throughout the Muslim world. Our weapons have been used to kill and maim protesters. Isn’t

this enough reason for Muslims to be seriously upset? To suggest that a vision of society that promotes pluralism and dignity for all is responsible for radicalisation of dissatisfied and alienated youth is akin to suggesting that Conservative Party philosophy is responsible for the outlook and behaviour of the National Front. The facile arguments notwithstanding, Cameron is right to fear multiculturalism. For multiculturalism is all about undermining the privileges that produced his “British experience” and “muscular liberalism” that he seeks to perpetuate. It’s very raison d’être is to challenge liberalism’s power to define what it is to be human, different, free, rational or ethnic, what is valuable, worthwhile, successful and proper. Multiculturalism categorically rejects the pathologically arrogant assumption that there is only one – liberal – way to be human. It is all about other, different, ways to be human. It insists on seeing good in other cultures and their enduring values; and is a necessary quest not just for any self-respecting society, but for human social evolution itself. As such, multiculturalism seeks transformation. It seeks to transform the lives of poor inner city blacks, Asians and whites by providing them with economic and educational opportunities. But more than that: it seeks to transform British society itself so we can move forward from the irrational premise that “they” – all the ethnic others – see the errors of their ways and become more like “us” to the humane idea that our own culture is as deeply flawed as all other human cultures. Multiculturalism does not require more commitment to the alleged liberal values of Britain, muscular or otherwise. Rather, it requires a transformation of liberal values to more inclusive forms. There is no such thing as the British experience. Just as there is no single, monolithic notion of what it means to be British. This is what multiculturalism has taught us. And this is what Cameron needs to wake up to. Ziauddin Sardar’s most recent books include Balti Britain: A Provocative Journey Through Asian Britain (Granta Books, 2008) and Reading the Qur’an (C Hurst & Co, 2011)

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THE FIFTH PILLAR

PHOTOGRAPHY NEWSHA TAVAKOLIAN TEXT MaX HOUGHTON

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On the day Newsha Tavakolian received the press visa to allow her to take photographs of her personal holy pilgrimage to Mecca, she upheld the tradition of asking her family and friends for forgiveness. Less traditionally, perhaps, she sent her plea by text: “Please forgive me if I have done you wrong in any way. I’m going on hajj.” She received over 100 replies, with requests such as “Pray for me” and “Ask God to help me find a nice wife, a house, restore my health.” As she set about preparations, family members brought gifts – prayer beads from an aunt, a white dress made by her nephew – and offered advice: “Don’t push people when it’s busy,” said an uncle. “Don’t talk, just pray and read the Koran”, said the wife of a cousin. For Tavakolian, as for all Muslims, the hajj is the trip of a lifetime. The journey is hallmarked by prayer and ritual, as it has been for millennia, but in 2011 it is also a thoroughly modern experience, in which pilgrims shop for souvenirs, have their pictures taken with camels, and call relatives when they reach the mountain where the Prophet received his revelations. Most Westerners see the annual Muslim pilgrimage represented through images of large crowds and pictures of the holy ka’aba, the black box inside the city’s Grand Mosque. Yet for ordinary pilgrims like Tavakolian, the hajj is the ultimate act of penance where all things are absolved. It is here in the sacred city that Muslims renew their faith in the idea that all Muslims, irrespective of their race or ethnic origin, are equal and deserve the love and sympathy of others.

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8 M A G A Z I N E - T h e P h o t o grap h y B iannua l

Simon Norfolk The Days of Arabia Felix www.simonnorfolk.com Ivor Prickett Uprisings: Egypt Prickett is represented by Panos Pictures. www.panos.co.uk www.ivorprickett.co.uk

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THE ISLAM ISSUE Cover: Simon Norfolk

Newsha Tavakolian The Fifth Pillar A selection from this project will be shown at the British Museum as part of an exhibition on the hajj in 2012. www.newshatavakolian.com

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Munem Wasif Observing Islam This work is produced with the support of Fabrica, Italy. Wasif is represented by Agence VU and Fabrica. www.munemwasif.com

ISSUE 29 - SPRING/SUMMER 2011

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ISSUE 29 - SPRING/SUMMER 2011

Peyman Hooshmandzadeh Licence to Publish Hooshmandzadeh is a member of 135 Photos in Iran.

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8 M A G A Z I N E - T h e P h o t o grap h y B iannua l

Simon Norfolk The Days of Arabia Felix www.simonnorfolk.com Ivor Prickett Uprisings: Egypt Prickett is represented by Panos Pictures. www.panos.co.uk www.ivorprickett.co.uk

8 M A G A Z I N E - T h e P h o t o grap h y B iannua l

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THE ISLAM ISSUE Cover: Simon Norfolk

Newsha Tavakolian The Fifth Pillar A selection from this project will be shown at the British Museum as part of an exhibition on the hajj in 2012. www.newshatavakolian.com

8 Magazine

Munem Wasif Observing Islam This work is produced with the support of Fabrica, Italy. Wasif is represented by Agence VU and Fabrica. www.munemwasif.com

ISSUE 29 - SPRING/SUMMER 2011

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ISSUE 29 - SPRING/SUMMER 2011

Peyman Hooshmandzadeh Licence to Publish Hooshmandzadeh is a member of 135 Photos in Iran.

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