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Portraits of Uighurs, China's Embattled Muslim Minority...

Photographer Eleanor Moseman shows the daily lives of a people native the Xinjiang region, whom the country's majority population tends to treat with suspicion.

A woman takes a break from her afternoon work in the fields to pray.(Eleanor Moseman)

China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region is the country's largest province, a vast land mass bordering seven countries that is almost as large as Mongolia. The region is the traditional home of the Uighur people, one of China's 55 official ethnic minority groups and one, along with the Tibetans to the south, whose relations with China's majority Han are most strained. Most media portrayals of the Uighur people have a negative edge; mentions of terrorism, unrest, and discrimination abound.

The Shanghai-based photographer Eleanor Moseman became fascinated with the Uighurs during a visit to Xinjiang. In these portraits, she portrays a people going about their daily lives, showcasing a people with a rich cultural and culinary tradition wholly unique in the People's Republic.

A Tuesday afternoon at the weekly bazaar in a small town south of Kashgar. Uighur men traditionally have beards, although among younger men,mustaches are more fashionable. Shaves in Xinjiang typically consist of a face massage and straight razor.

A Uighur couple rides an electric scooter through the rubble of Kashgar's Old Town. One of Xinjiang's most historic cities, Kashgar has been subject to extensive infrastructure development in recent years, a process that has pushed out many local residences and shops.

A Uighur mother rocking her newborn to sleep. Because they are one of China's 55 officially recognized ethnic minority groups, Uighur women are exempt from the one-child policy.

 

An afternoon tea in the countryside concludes with gifts of bread, naan, lamb, and dried fruit for the guests. The youngest woman residing at the home will prepare the gifts, beginning with the highest ranking man.

A typical Uighur breakfast of naan and milk.


A traditional Sufi burial ground in the Taklamakan desert roughly 120 miles south of the South Silk Road. Burial grounds can range from one shrine to nearly two dozen, and are found in the desert away from villages and cities. They are decorated with flags, embroidery, animal bones, small wooden cribs, and hand written notes and poetry.

I Want From Love Only The Beginning...

I want from love only the beginning, the pigeons darn

this day’s dress over my Granada squares.
There’s a lot of wine in the jars for a feast after us.
There are enough windows in the songs for pomegranate blossoms to explode

I leave the Arabian jasmine in the vase, I leave my little heart
in my mother’s closet, I leave my dream laughing in water.
I leave the dawn in the honey of figs, I leave my day and my yesterday
in the alleyway to the orange plaza where the pigeons fly

Was I the one who descended to your feet, for speech to rise
as a white moon in your nights’ milk…Stomp the air
for me to see the street of the flute blue…Stomp the evening
for me to see how marble falls ill between me and you

The windows are empty of your shawl’s gardens. In a different time
I used to know a lot about you, and pick gardenia
off your ten fingers. In a different time, I had pearls
around your neck, and a name on a ring illuminating darkness

I want from love only the beginning, the pigeons flew
over the sky’s last ceiling, the pigeons flew and flew.
A lot of wine will remain, after us, in the jars
and a bit of land is enough for us to meet, and for peace to arrive

- Mahmoud Darwish , translated by Fady Joudah

Islam Is Not A Monolith

     

In 2007, six years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, I was travelling through Europe and North America. I had just published a novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and as I travelled I was struck by the large number of interviewers and of audience members at Q&As who spoke of Islam as a monolithic thing, as if Islam referred to a self-contained and clearly defined world, a sort of Microsoft Windows, obviously different from, and considerably incompatible with, the Apple OS X-like operating system of "the west".

I recall one reading in Germany in particular. Again and again, people posed queries relating to how "we Europeans" see things, in contrast to how "you Muslims" do. Eventually I was so exasperated that I pulled my British passport out of my jacket and started waving it around my head. "While it's true the UK hasn't yet joined the eurozone," I said, " I hope we can all agree the country is in fact in Europe.

"Six years on, a film inspired by the novel is in the process of appearing on screens around the world, and I am pleased to report that those sorts of questions are a little rarer now than they were in 2007. This represents progress. But it is modest progress, for the sense of Islam as a monolith lingers, in places both expected and unexpected.Recently I was told by a well-travelled acquaintance in London that while Muslims can be aggressive, they are united by a sense of deep hospitality. I replied that I remembered being in Riyadh airport, standing in line, when a Saudi immigration officer threw the passport of a Pakistani labourer right into his face. If that was hospitality, I wasn't sure we had the same definition.

Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics. Most Muslims do not "choose" Islam in the way that they choose to become doctors or lawyers, nor even in the way that they choose to become fans of Coldplay or Radiohead. Most Muslims, like people of any faith, are born into their religion. They then evolve their own relationship with it, their own, individual, view of life, their own micro-religion, so to speak.

There are more than a billion variations of lived belief among people who define themselves as Muslim – one for each human being, just as there are among those who describe themselves as Christian, or Buddhist, or Hindu. Islamophobia represents a refusal to acknowledge these variations, to acknowledge individual humanities, a desire to paint members of a perceived group with the same brush. In that sense, it is indeed like racism. It simultaneously credits Muslims with too much and too little agency: too much agency in choosing their religion, and too little in choosing what to make of it.

Islamophobia can be found proudly raising its head in militaristic American thinktanks, xenophobic European political parties, and even in atheistic discourse, where somehow "Islam" can be characterised as "more bad" than religion generally, in the way one might say that a mugger is bad, but a black mugger is worse, because black people are held to be more innately violent.

Islamophobia crops up repeatedly in public debate, such as over the proposed Islamic cultural centre in downtown Manhattan (the so-called "Ground Zero mosque") or the ban on minarets in Switzerland. And it crops up in private interactions as well.

In my early 20s, I remember being seated next to a pretty at a friend's birthday dinner in Manila. Shortly after we were introduced, and seemingly unconnected with any pre-existing strand of conversation, she proclaimed to the table: "I'd never marry a Muslim man." "It's a little soon for us to be discussing marriage," I joked. But I was annoyed. (Perhaps even disappointed, it occurs to me now, since I still recall the incident almost two decades later.) In the cosmopolitan bit of pre-9/11 America where I then lived, local norms of politeness meant that I'd never before heard such a remark, however widely held the woman's sentiments might have been.

Yet our instinctive stance ought to be one of suspicion towards such endeavours. For individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion. Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimise the importance of the individual and maximise the importance of the group. 

We ought therefore to look more closely at the supposed monolith to which we apply the word Islam. It is said that Muslims believe in female genital mutilation, the surgical removal of all or part of a girl's clitoris. Yet I have never, in my 41 years, had a conversation with someone who described themselves as Muslim and believed this practice to be anything other than a despicably inhuman abomination. Until I first read about it in a newspaper, probably in my 20s, I would have thought it impossible that such a ritual could even exist.

Similarly, many millions of Muslims apparently believe that women should have no role in politics. But many millions more have had no qualms electing women prime ministers in Muslim-majority countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh. Indeed, this month's Pakistani elections witnessed a record 448 women running for seats in the national and provincial assemblies.

Two of my great-grandparents sent all of their daughters to university. One of them, my grandmother, was the chairperson of the All Pakistan Women's Association and dedicated her life to the advancement of women's rights in the country. But among those descended from the same line are women who do not work and who refuse to meet men who are not their blood relatives. I have female relatives my age who cover their heads, others who wear mini-skirts, some who are university professors or run businesses, others who choose rarely to leave their homes. I suspect if you were to ask them their religion, all would say "Islam". But if you were to use that term to define their politics, careers, or social values, you would struggle to come up with a coherent, unified view.

Lived religion is a very different thing from strict textual analysis. Very few people of any faith live their lives as literalist interpretations of scripture. Many people have little or no knowledge of scripture at all. Many others who have more knowledge choose to interpret what they know in ways that are convenient, or that fit their own moral sense of what is good. Still others view their religion as a kind of self-accepted ethnicity, but live lives utterly divorced from any sense of faith.

When the Pakistani Taliban were filmed flogging a young woman in Swatas punishment for her allegedly "amoral" behaviour, there was such popular revulsion in Pakistan that the army launched a military campaign to retake the region. As my parents' driver told me, "They say they beat her because of Islam. This isn't Islam. Islam says to do good things. So how can this be Islam?" He offered no complex hermeneutics in support of his position. His Islamic moral compass was not textual; it was internal, his own notion of right and wrong.

I often hear it said, at readings or talks ranging from Lahore to Louisiana, that The Reluctant Fundamentalist is about a man who becomes an Islamic fundamentalist. I'm not sure what that term means, exactly, but I have a reasonable idea about the sentences and paragraphs that are actually present in the book. Changez, the main character, is a Pakistani student at Princeton. When he gets his dream job at a high-paying valuation firm in New York, he exclaims, "Thank you, God!"

That's it. Other than that exclamation (a common figure of speech), there's no real evidence that Changez is religious. He doesn't quote from scripture. He never asks himself about heaven or hell or the divine. He drinks. He has sex out of marriage. His beliefs could quite plausibly be those of a secular humanist. And yet he calls himself a Muslim, and is angry with US foreign policy, and grows a beard – and that seems to be enough. Changez may well be an agnostic, or even an atheist. Nonetheless he is somehow, and seemingly quite naturally, read by many people as a character who is an Islamic fundamentalist.

Why? The novel carefully separates the politics of self-identification from any underlying religious faith or spirituality. It sets out to show that the former can exist in the absence of the latter. Yet we tend to read the world otherwise, to imagine computer-software-like religious operating systems where perhaps none exist.

And in so doing, it is we who create the monolith. If we look at religion as practised in the world outside, we see multiplicity. It is from inside us that the urge to unify arises. A dozen years after 2001, we are perhaps getting better at resisting this impulse. But we still have a long, long way to go.

*http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2013/may/19/mohsin-hamid-islam-not-monolith

Mohsin Hamid, The Guardian, Sunday 19 May 2013

Newsha Tavakolian's Lens...

Newsha Tavakolian is based in Tehran. Her work debuted at the Thomas Erben Gallery in New York on April 11. Tavakolian served as the secretary of the 2013 Sheed Awards, a prize awarded for Iranian Social Documentary photography. 


More @ www.newshatavakolian.com

Five Reasons Why Hawking Is Right To Boycott Israel...

As announced by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) and subsequently covered by The Guardian, Reuters and others, world-renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist Professor Stephen Hawking has decided to heed the Palestinian call for boycott, and pull out of an Israeli conference hosted by President Shimon Peres in June. After initial confusion, this was confirmed - Hawking is staying away on political grounds. 

Here are five reasons why Professor Hawking is right to boycott: 

1. Whitewashing apartheid 

The Israeli government and various lobby groups use events such as the "Presidential Conference" to whitewash Israel's crimes past and present, a tactic sometimes referred to as "rebranding". As a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official put it after the 2009 Gaza massacre, it is the kind of approach that means sending "well-known novelists and writers overseas, theatre companies, [and] exhibits" in order to "show Israel's prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war". "Brand Israel" is all about creating a positive image for a country that is the target of human rights campaigners the world over - as if technological innovations or high-profile conferences can hide the reality of occupation and ethnic cleansing. 

2. Shimon Peres 

Despite his reputation in the West as a "dove", Peres' career to date includes war crimes in Lebanon,support for collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza, and, in private discussions, incitementagainst non-Jewish citizens. Anyone would do well to avoid a conference hosted by such a hypocrite. Simply not being Ariel Sharon does not really cut it; Peres should be scheduled for a trip to The Hague, not welcoming foreign dignitaries and celebrities. 

3. Boycott is not incompatible with 'dialogue' 

Contrary to the rhetoric of Israeli officials and sympathisers, boycott is not contrary to dialogue. Hawking's decision, for example, will mean people are discussing Israeli policies and strategies for ending occupation. That is not atypical - BDS initiatives often encourage a meaningful exchange of views and perspectives. However, some people abuse the concept of dialogue to defend an asymmetrical status quo, leaving intact a colonial power dynamic where, in the words of South African poet James Matthews, "the oppressor sits seared with his spoils/with no desire to share equality/leaving the oppressed seeking warmth/at the cold fire of/Dialogue". Boycott has nothing to do with having, or not having, conversations - it is about accountability for, and opposing, basic violations of a people's rights. Confronting and resisting the reality of Israeli apartheid begets a dialogue that is fully realised in the context of equality and decolonisation. 

4. Impunity and accountability 

The boycott is grounded firmly in the well documented facts of Israeli policies. The US State Department speaks of "institutional discrimination" faced by Palestinian citizens, while Human Rights Watch says Israel maintains a "two-tier system" in the West Bank. From the "discriminatory" control and distribution of water resources (Amnesty International) to the "forced transfer of the native population" (European Union), it is no wonder that the UN's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has reportedIsrael as violating prohibitions against "racial segregation and apartheid". 

Illegal settlements are used to colonise the West Bank, Palestinians in Gaza are blockaded and bombed, Palestinians in East Jerusalem have their homes demolished - and all the while, of course, expelled Palestinian refugees just a few miles from their properties are still prevented from returning home on the basis they are not Jews. And note that the "But what about China/Myanmar/Syria etc" line misses the point (as well as placing Israel in some rather interesting company). A boycott is a tactic, advisable in some contexts, and not in others. It is not about a scale of injustice or wrongdoing. It is about a strategy targeting systematic human rights abuses and breaches of international law, called for by the colonised. Which brings us to… 

5. The Palestinian call for solidarity 

Palestinians suffering under Israeli apartheid are calling for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) as a strategy in the realisation of their basic rights, a fact that many Zionists choose to ignore when attacking boycott campaigns. The Palestinian civil society call for BDS was officially launched on July 9 2005, a year after the International Court of Justice's advisory opinion on the illegality of Israel's Separation Wall. Signatories to the BDS call come from representatives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinian refugees. Since then, growing numbers of people in the likes of academia, the arts world, trade unions and faith communities have answered the BDS call with initiatives that put the focus firmly on Israel's routine violations of international law and ending complicity in these crimes. Professor Hawking is to be commended for seeking the advice of Palestinian academics, and heeding their request for international solidarity in a decades-long struggle for freedom and justice. 

Ben White is a freelance journalist, writer and activist, specialising in Palestine/Israel. He is a graduate of Cambridge University.

Assata Shakur ...

Saluting Mothers...

To the mothers who have to choose which child to feed when starvation threatens.

To the mothers who are forced to sell their bodies to bring food home.

To the mothers who are beaten, bruised and raped by men of war.

To the mothers who dedicate their lives to fighting oppressive regimes.

To the mothers who live on the banks of rivers of blood.

To mothers who work 3 jobs to keep their children fed and in school.

To mothers who show us everyday, that defeat is not an option and that life continues regardless of the odds stacked against us.

Happy Mother’s Day !

Suu Kyi Spokesman: “There Is No Rohingya”

YANGON, Myanmar — From the depths of obscurity, Myanmar’s highly beleaguered Muslim Rohingya ethnicity has become something of a global cause célèbre.

The United Nations deems the roughly 1 million population group one of the world’s “most persecuted” minorities. In a report last week, Human Right Watch deployed some of the most potent language at its disposal in describing their mistreatment: “ethnic cleansing” and “crimes against humanity.” The online pro-Rohingya call to arms #RohingyaNOW was, for a brief blip in March, Twitter’s highest-trending phrase.

Even US President Barack Obama, in his first and only visit to Myanmar last November, urged the nation to accept that Rohingya “hold within themselves the same dignity as you do.”

But these are lofty expectations from a nation in which the government, much of the general public and even progressive activist circles contend that Rohingya is a contrived ethnicity that does not exist — at least not as the people who call themselves Rohingya and their foreign sympathizers believe they do.

This week, the government released its official account of Myanmar’s most explosive violence in recent years: a 2012 wave of killing, maiming and arson sprees waged in large part by Buddhists bent on ridding their native Rakhine State of the Rohingya. But nowhere in the official English translation does the word “Rohingya” appear. The minority is instead described as “Bengali,” the native people of neighboring Bangladesh.

The report insists the stateless group largely descend from farmers led over during British occupation of Myanmar (then titled Burma) in the early 1800s. They are described as procreating heavily, failing to assimilate and inviting over their kin to the dismay of helpless local Buddhists living under colonial rule. Myanmar’s authorities have since reversed the British empire’s policy: The Rohingya are now considered non-citizens even though their alleged homeland, Bangladesh, does not accept them either.

Treating this native-born population as invaders is roundly condemned around the globe. The Rohingya, like many persecuted groups before them, have pleaded for support from Aung San Suu Kyi. The 67-year-old parliamentarian, beloved for challenging Myanmar’s despotic generals, is traditionally seen as a voice of Myanmar’s oppressed.

But in an interview with GlobalPost, the Nobel Peace Laureate’s spokesman and confidante, Nyan Win, confirmed that Aung San Suu Kyi has no plans to champion the Rohingya cause despite criticism swirling around her silence on the crisis.

“So many people blame The Lady,” said Nyan Win, using a nickname for Aung San Suu Kyi made popular during Myanmar’s police state era, when speaking her name in public could attract unwelcome government attention.

“For example, in the Rakhine case, she very rarely says anything about this. She says she was forced to speak about the Rohingya group,” Nyan Win said. “She believes, in Burma, there is no Rohingya ethnic group. It is a made-up name of the Bengali. So she can’t say anything about Rohingya. But there is international pressure for her to speak about Rohingya. It’s a problem.”

ETHNIC CLEANSING?

Compared to the officials’ previous rhetoric on the Rohingya — a junta-era official publicly called them “ugly as ogres” — the government’s new report strikes a much more empathetic tone. 

In pursuit of “peaceful coexistence,” it recommends expanding psychological counseling, boosting the troop presence, banning hate speech and improving makeshift camps for displaced people in advance of a looming monsoon downpour.  

Some “Bengalis,” according to the report, may even be considered for citizenship if they can prove “knowledge of the country, local customs and language.”

Following explosions of violence last summer and fall, in which entire Muslim-majority quarters were torched and razed, roughly 100,000 people are still huddled in crowded, squalid camps. The official death toll in Rakhine State stands at 194; Rohingya activists claim far more.

The killings, according to the report, were racked up by tit-for-tat attacks fueled by long-simmering cultural feuds: “The earlier hatred and bitterness between the two sides — which had been created because of certain historical events — provided fertile ground for renewed tensions, mistrust and violence.”

Missing from the inquiry are the sickening scenes detailed in the latest Human Rights Watch investigation into the violence: mass graves, trucks piled high with stinking corpses and children hacked to death.

In a sharp departure from the government’s account of “communal violence,” the international watchdog group describes a systematic, organized and partially state-enabled campaign of all-out “ethnic cleansing” against the Rohingya.

“These are not terms Human Rights Watch uses lightly,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Ethnic cleansing is targeting, with a mass attack, a particular ethnic group and driving them out of a geographic area with terror and violent means. That is exactly what happened.”

The architects alleged by Human Rights Watch of mounting this campaign are a patchwork of local Buddhist monastic orders and the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, a political camp that dominates the region’s parliament. 

Both are accused of pamphleteering and speechmaking designed to provoke majority Buddhists with warnings that “Bengalis” intend to eliminate their society through overbreeding and outright violence. One circulated tract directly calls for an “ethnic cleansing program.” 

The hate campaigns, according to Human Rights Watch, typically preceded eruptions of bloodshed against Muslim neighborhoods. Police and soldiers are accused in the investigation of disarming Rohingya so that mobs could butcher them and, in a few instances, gunning down Rohingya themselves. 

Human Rights Watch stops short of accusing Myanmar’s President Thein Sein of direct complicity in “crimes against humanity” but condemns his office for failing to adequately punish the culprits.

“Some people may argue that these are local authorities taking action and the people in Nay Pyi Daw (Myanmar’s capital) didn’t know. That is the preferred narrative of some of the diplomats who want to continue looking for heroes among the government ranks,” Robertson said. 

“Well, let’s see what actually happened in terms of command responsibility,” he said. “Where does the buck stop in the (Army)? All of these things would come out in a truly independent, impartial investigation of the violence.”

The Human Rights Watch claims have been dismissed as baseless by both the government’s Ministry of Information and a Rakhine Nationalities Development Party lawmaker, who told the Yangon-based Eleven News Group that the clashes sparked off between those “who want to seize the territory and those who want to defend that territory.”

Dueling visions of Myanmar

In the recent past, Western leaders and watchdogs were relatively united in their view of Myanmar: a place tragically mismanaged by ruling generals who must be pressured into better behavior through sanctions, isolation and the championing of Aung San Suu Kyi.

This consensus has shattered. As Human Rights Watch lodged its charges of “ethnic cleansing” last week, another respected civil liberties outfit, International Crisis Group, presented President Thein Sein with its prestigious “In Pursuit of Peace” award. On the same day, the European Union axed almost all of its Myanmar sanctions — most of which were already suspended.

Despite his rise under a secretive and oppressive army cabal, the former general has been credited with shepherding major reforms: freeing political prisoners, relaxing the elite’s chokehold on the economy and liberating Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest. The president’s reaction to the peace award, published in Myanmar’s state media, was self-effacing.

“I receive this honor with gratitude and humility at a time when citizens of Myanmar are engaged in an adventure to build a more democratic, open and inclusive society,” Thein Sein said. “I do not believe I received this award as a person but as a representative of a movement to transform a society ... I am also heartened to know that we have friends in the international community who will keep us diligent and honest but pick us up if we stumble.”

Even former political prisoners, whose pro-democracy causes Human Rights Watch has long defended, have openly fretted that claims of “ethnic cleansing” could enflame the crisis. Though anti-Rohingya violence has cooled — an improvement the government ascribes to forced segregation from majority Buddhists — the nation is also riven by a broader wave of anti-Muslim anger in its central towns and cities. 

Riots against non-Rohingya Muslim enclaves, where inhabitants are unquestionably citizens, have left dozens dead in the last two months. The most recent flare up took place April 30 when hundreds of Buddhists armed with staves and bricks stormed a Muslim neighborhood 70 miles north of Yangon, the nation’s largest city, and torched hundreds of homes.

Even Yangon, heavily defended by police, has been transformed by anti-Muslim campaigning. A Buddhist “969” solidarity movement, its title referring to Buddhist numerology, has spread rapidly in the city of roughly four million. Its adherents attempt to shop only at stores bearing the movement’s emblem in an effort to retain wealth among the Buddhist majority and economically isolate Muslims.

These tensions along Myanmar’s western shores and beyond have stirred fears in the UN’s Office on Genocide Prevention. In late March, Adama Dieng, the office’s special advisor on genocide prevention, offered Myanmar officials a written warning: failing to address the “root causes” of the killing will “have serious future consequences which the international community has solemnly promised to prevent.”

But the specter of genocide — a word already favored by some Rohingya activists — has not fallen on Myanmar’s Rakhine State, Robertson said. 

“Rwanda was genocide. We haven’t reached that level. If tomorrow we had the security forces guarding these internally displaced persons camps turn on people and start killing them, then we’d start moving towards genocide,” he said. “We’re not there yet. But ‘crimes against humanity’ is pretty damn bad.”

Patrick Winn, 2 May 2013

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/myanmar/130501/suu-kyi-no-rohingya

Ode To A Blackwomen...