On a phone call the other day with a new friend, Zay, we ended up on the topic of religion. “Did you attend madrasah?” I asked her, referring to the Arabic schools that offer primary and secondary education where subjects like the linguistic characteristics of Arabic and Islamic theology and jurisprudence are taught.

She responded yes, but that she no longer remembers most of the things she was taught there. “I can still write my name in Arabic, I can still write Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem, and oh, yeah, I can still write some of the 99 names of Allah,” Zay said.

Zay’s experience is reflective of people of my generation in the southwestern part of Nigeria, where I’m from. Most only attended madrasah when they were young, before dumping it when they emerged more fully into life. Some, like Zay, told me they ran away from madrasah because their teachers, or ustadhs, flogged them too fiercely. But others told me that they dropped out to focus on their Western education, which they knew was the more economically sound path.

For me, balancing these two schools of knowledge has always seemed normal and natural. Growing up, I attended Western school Monday through Friday and attended madrasah on Saturdays and Sundays. The reason my experience was different was thanks to my father, who spent his life promoting Arabic and Islamic learning in Nigeria. The more I’ve learned about his efforts, the more I’ve realized why it meant so much for him to encourage Nigerians to be proud to speak Arabic, and study at madrasah, rather than let this education fall by the wayside in a country where there is little profitable motivation to pursue it.

In the 1960s, the author’s father established the Arabic studies school at the family house in Iwo. Courtesy of author.

Growing up, I knew, even as much as my mother tried to conceal it from me, that my father had died when I was still in her stomach. As I got older, I started to ask for more information. When I was 10, she pointed at an old landscape photo that hung above the window of our living room. In the picture, my father, a Black, plump man, is standing amid Arab men, smiling. Later, when I was 15, I came across an undated, self-published book my father wrote, titled “The Presence of Arabic Language and the Religion of Islam in Southwest Nigeria.” In the introduction, he observed that Christian missionaries were “snatching the children of Muslims into their English schools in order to get them to abandon their religion and take up their religion or believe in any other religion.”

To understand what he meant by this, it’s important to understand the history of Islam and Christianity in Nigeria. Both are understood to be colonialist ideologies because Nigeria, before it became Nigeria, had its own traditions. But both belief systems have permeated Nigeria thoroughly (today approximately 51% of the country identifies as Muslim and 47% identifies as Christians).

My father was likely writing in the 1950s, at a time when more students began to leave Arabic schools for English schools. The Christian missionaries, my father posited, were able to sell them on a Western education because it promised them more opportunities for advancement. Arabic studies, at the time, only promised to teach a better understanding of how to worship God—seemingly at odds with a growing and modernizing economy. He recognized that if something didn’t change, it would put the study of Arabic and Islam on a path of gradual erasure in the Nigerian educational system. So, he thought: Let me establish something similar in Arabic so as to attract back the Muslim children.

In the 1960s, he began this work, establishing his own Arabic school, which originally started at the family house in Iwo, before it took on a modern classroom-based learning setting in 1962. He called the school, which I later attended, Markaz Shabaab–l–Islam, or the Islamic Youth Center. Other scholars in the region, like Sheikh Adam Al-Ilory, created similar educational programs to build standards and structure around Arabic studies at the time.

The author’s father (middle) with the students of his school. Courtesy of author.

Despite their work, the present structure of the Nigerian education system offers fewer and fewer opportunities for advancement for those who attend madrasah. That’s why, though the number of Arabic students produced every year in its junior schools equals, if not exceeds, the number of students produced in Western schools, the drop-off point that follows for secondary school is steep. Unlike madrasah, Western schooling offers students an opportunity to dream of, for instance, attaining government or white-collar jobs. When students finish madrasah, there should be something equivalent in the system which guarantees them an application to higher institutions, for instance, without sitting for external examinations, to incentivize further Arabic study.

I think about what it would look like if Nigeria valued Arabic education more and rewarded the efforts of those who are still passionate about learning the language. It is not about Islam, the religion, but Arabic itself, because faith is different from knowledge, just as a Western education is different from Christianity. The way I see it, for the Arabic language to have permeated our culture so thoroughly since its introduction in the 11th century through the northern part of the country, disseminating through trade and migration with North African countries like Egypt and Sudan, makes it even more deserving of study. This is especially the case in a complicated region like the southwest, where our Indigenous language—Yoruba—does not share similar phonemes with Arabic.

Though my father’s struggle was a long time ago, his determination inspires me today; he started his Arabic studies at a young age, learning the rudiments of the Qur’an from his paternal grandfather, Sheikh Bukhari. To learn modern Arabic, he traveled to different Arabic-speaking countries. His first trip, to Saudi Arabia in 1942, came at a time when such a trip necessitated taking camels and horses. When such transportation was not possible, he trekked on foot. What made it worth the struggle? I think the answer is that faith and a thirst for knowledge can be chronic.

Before I read my father’s book, I was unconsciously starting to throw myself wholly into Western education, because that’s understood to be the path to thrive in the country. But his writing has helped me recognize how important it is to not throw away his work, and this legacy of being a student of two schools of knowledge.

The final pages of my father’s book include three photographs. The first is a group picture of my father and his first set of students at the Islamic Youth Center. Tiny in the picture, he looks way younger than the photo my mother first showed me of him. The second picture is of him, flanked by older men, robed in Agbada, embroidered, traditional Yoruba attire. All of them wear caps and firmly-knotted turbans. The caption under this picture reads, “a picture taken by friends and well-wishers as send-off for Al-Hadj Ahmad Muhaly Al-Bukhary on his trip to Mecca and some Arab countries.” The third picture is an isolated picture of the first building in the school my father established. A wooden signpost rests against the wall of the building, the door and the windows shut. The caption below the picture reads, “Here is the picture of Islamic Youth Center in Iwo.”

Staring at these pictures, I wonder if my father knew that all his hard work would make a difference. But the more I look, the more I am certain he knew that the school he built would. It was his way of ensuring that he could share his wisdom and teachings with generations to come—offering inspiration to me and others who continue to matriculate through that door captured in the photograph.

The post My Father, the Madrasah, and Me appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The result is that approximately one million Muslims, most of them Uyghurs—an ethnic group of around 11 million who are concentrated in Xinjiang, a vast western region of China—are currently held in what many sober, cautious people, with little inclination to hyperbole, are calling concentration camps. Though authorities denied the existence of these camps throughout 2017 and most of 2018, this became unsustainable in the face of testimony from former detainees and evidence from satellite imagery and official documents authorizing the camps’ construction.

One can only conclude, as a United Nations human rights panel did in August 2018, that Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are “being treated as enemies of the state based on nothing more than their ethno-religious identity.”

From interviews with people who’ve been released, it’s become clear that detainees in these camps (who also include Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other minorities from the region) have been charged with no crime and are from no particular age, class, or professional demographic. The young and the elderly, farmers and teachers, the secular and the devout: All are being held in newly built or repurposed structures surrounded by barbed wire, reinforced walls, and watchtowers. Every moment of their day is controlled by the authorities. Former detainees have spoken of cramped conditions, sleep deprivation, interrogation, torture, and a sustained campaign of political indoctrination that requires them to denigrate religion, recite political slogans, and sing patriotic songs like “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” Though some detainees have been released after a few months, many have been held for a year or more.

The Chinese state has justified the camps by claiming that they are not what they seem. In October 2018, Shohrat Zakir, the Xinjiang governor, described the camps as vocational training centers whose purpose is “to get rid of the environment and soil that breeds terrorism and religious extremism.”

The government says that the camps are the latest installment in what the Chinese authorities have called a “People’s War on Terror.” Since September 11, 2001, China has claimed to be fighting a domestic Islamist terrorist threat in Xinjiang, which it has tried to link with al-Qaida, the Taliban, and the Islamic State. In the name of combating this threat, it has built up an extensive security network that combines surveillance technology, digital censorship, and an intrusive police and military presence across the region.

Throughout my 10 years of reporting on Xinjiang, I have attempted to pick apart this tangled claim. While the details certainly matter, my overall conclusion is that the threat has been grossly exaggerated. Sporadic outbursts of violence against the state have taken place over the last three decades, but the overwhelming majority of these incidents are better understood as local, desperate responses to cultural and economic inequalities produced by government policy rather than “terrorist” acts. Even the most violent events in which Uyghurs were involved—the riots in Urumqi in 2009 that left at least 200 dead, the killings at a train station in Kunming in 2014, and the attack on a market in Urumqi the same year—had disparate causes and motivations. Both the West’s war on terror and the consequent rise in Islamophobia have facilitated the Chinese government’s policies in Xinjiang.

In fact, these repressive policies are an attempt to find a long-term solution to a “problem” that has nothing to do with terrorism or religious extremism, but stems from the history of the region and its peoples. The geographic boundaries of the area now called “Xinjiang,” or “New Territory,” only took shape in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the Qing dynasty conquered the area—albeit partially at first. (It had been only loosely part of earlier dynasties.)

Even after the Qing took control, the area remained culturally and economically oriented toward the Ottoman and Russian Empires. Only with the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 did Xinjiang become fully incorporated into China. Officially sanctioned Chinese histories today deny this by stating that, “Xinjiang has since ancient times been an inseparable part of the motherland,” a position that few Chinese historians held before the early 20th century.

Though the term “Uyghur” has a long history dating back to the sixth century, it’s been used to designate different groups of people whose attributes and fortunes have shifted with the flux of kingdoms and empires. In its current sense, “Uyghur” is generally agreed to be the result of political and intellectual debates within the region in the late 19th and early 20th century—what historian David Brophy calls a “palimpsest of Islamic, Turkic, and Soviet notions of national history and identity.” The term found purchase with the people in Xinjiang a century ago because it reflected a sense of shared identity based on common religious beliefs, social traditions, language and culture, and some degree of physical resemblance.

Uyghurs’ awareness of their deep roots in the region drives a strong sense of identification that takes precedence over contemporary notions of the “Chinese nation,” or “Zhonghua minzu.” Uyghur culture, traditions, and identity are the manifestation of this separate history.

It is this history which has now become problematic for the Chinese Communist Party. Even Uyghurs’ long attachment to the region, which the full name of the region acknowledges—the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region—has come under attack. Yasheng Sidike, the mayor of the regional capital Urumqi, wrote in a newspaper article that Xinjiang wasn’t the home of Uyghurs, but of all ethnicities, and opined that “the Uyghur people are members of the Chinese family, not descendants of the Turks, let alone anything to do with Turkish people.”

Across Xinjiang, particularly in the south, a sense of distinctness from the rest of China used to be both palpable and immediate. The blend of Uzbek and Turkish-influenced pop songs playing in shops, the smoke from lamb kebabs, and the painted adobe walls and ornate shutters of the older houses all evoked Central Asia.

It has thus been unsurprising that in recent years, as Uyghurs themselves have been subjected to more intrusive forms of monitoring and control by the state, their old residential and commercial districts have been demolished. The destruction of the tangible history of the region, coupled with the continuing influx of Han migrants from other regions of China, has been yet another way in which the state has sought to weaken Uyghur identity. As one Uyghur in Kashgar put it, “[j]ust look all around you. You’ve seen it yourself. We’re a people destroyed.”

Before the current campaign, the Chinese state paid lip service to the idea that some aspects of Uyghur culture were worth appreciating and preserving, though they remained suspicious of anything they perceived to have nationalistic or religious elements.

The Chinese Communist Party’s need for total control has grown far worse since Xi Jinping took control in late 2012. The official rationale behind the camps and other repressive policies in Xinjiang is that ethnic minority identity itself represents a threat to national unity and stability. Their aim is to “break lineage, break roots, break connections, and break origins,” so as to “strengthen interethnic contact, exchange, and mingling.” The ultimate goal is thus the assimilation of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other minorities into one “Chinese nation.” This concept has a long history in Chinese Communist Party discourse. The camps are arguably only the most drastic part of a long process of marginalizing Uyghur culture and identity, perhaps the most explicit of which has been the removal of Uyghur language instruction from the education system.

One of the most revealing aspects of the latest detentions is the large number of prominent Uyghur intellectuals, artists, and athletes who have been targeted, many of whom had previously been endorsed and supported by the state. The Chinese Communist Party is now so determined to eradicate Uyghur identity that promoting Uyghur literature or folklore is politically suspect. One impetus for this is certainly Xi Jinping’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, a program of infrastructure development and investment in Europe, Asia, and Africa, of which Xinjiang is “a core region.” Stability, or at least the appearance of it, is thus vital in Xinjiang.

Though there have been many waves of repression against the Muslim peoples of Xinjiang since the Communists took power, the pervasiveness and expense of the current campaign suggests it is intended to prevent the return of even the precarious (and often terrible) normality that existed before. While many of the current detainees are likely to be released at some point, the detentions won’t stop. The climate of fear, trauma, and suspicion created in Xinjiang isn’t going to dissipate.

Yet there’s also something naïvely ahistorical about the campaign. Previous targeting of minority culture during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) arguably only strengthened people’s sense of identity in the region, as did the banning of some Uyghur cultural practices in the 1990s. Beyond China, such colonial-scale oppression has often promoted cohesion and acts of resistance among the colonized.

The government’s approach does not seem like a blueprint for stability and national unity because the vast scale of this government persecution only underlines the differences between the Uyghurs and the state as a whole. The more likely outcome is that it will lead to the kind of violent opposition the government claims the camps combat, to which the authorities will respond in even more draconian fashion. They may well end up creating the monster they claim to be fighting already. And if they are willing to take such extreme measures now, the world should wonder how much worse their tactics may become when faced with the real thing.

The post One Out of Eleven Chinese Uyghurs Is in a Concentration Camp appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mr. Vayeghan is an Iranian man who had arrived at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) the night before; he was planning to start a new life with his brother in the United States. Like thousands of others with valid immigration status, he was being detained and was set to be deported as a result of President Trump’s ill-conceived travel ban.

Desperate family members scrambled behind me and protesters gathered outside. I presented a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officer with a habeas petition I had rushed to assemble with other civil rights lawyers. The officer was unmoved. The plane took off.

“This is America,” the officer impatiently explained.

This was not an America I recognized.

I have been an immigrants’ rights lawyer for nearly a decade. During that time, the primary focus of my work has been serving those caught up in our nation’s broken immigration detention system: asylum seekers, long-time lawful permanent residents, victims of domestic violence and human trafficking, individuals with serious mental disabilities. I am not unfamiliar with the dark side of America’s immigration system. But, like so many others, I was caught off guard by the scope of the executive order, and the swift damage—both personal and political—that it caused.

Legal services offered to immigrants at Los Angeles International Airport on January 29, 2017. Photo courtesy of Cindy Chu/Flickr.

When I arrived at LAX the morning of January 28, chaos was already taking hold. The travel ban, announced the previous evening and put into immediate effect, was being used as pretense to detain hundreds of predominantly Muslim travelers entering the United States with lawful immigration status. Green card holders were turned away, students sent home, grandmothers and children held for hours on end. Lawyers from across the city organized in the airport—and behind their office desks—to advocate for those detained, to document abuses, and to file lawsuits. As the weekend wore on, hundreds of lawyers and thousands of people from across Los Angeles took to the airport terminals, sidewalks, and even parking lots in a massive protest against the president’s hate-driven and unlawful ban.

And we won. The courts deemed the first travel ban unconstitutional. Those wrongfully denied entry were permitted to return, including Mr. Vayeghan. Indeed, the court ordered the government to facilitate his return, and he entered the United States as a lawful permanent resident later that week. But as the protesters headed home and we folded up our makeshift airport law offices, the battle was far from over.

That CBP officer’s vision of America continues to reign. In early March, President Trump issued a revised travel ban grounded in the same anti-Muslim animus as the first. That ban—which suspends the entry of foreign nationals from six Muslim-majority countries without previously-issued valid visas, and stops the admission of refugees for 120 days—was initially halted but ultimately permitted to go into partial effect after a series of court cases that will be resolved by the Supreme Court in its next term. After each turn of events, immigrants’ rights advocates (myself included) headed to the airports to answer travelers’ questions and assist in cases of wrongful detention.

But the nature of the challenge has changed. Because the revised travel ban prevents the issuance of new visas from the six countries (with certain court-ordered exceptions for those with close ties to family or U.S. entities), we are no longer seeing mass detentions at the airports. This is because many people are not able to reach our airports. Instead, the real impact is occurring at consular offices around the world, where government officials—with little to no oversight—are denying visas, and at refugee camps where those who have waited years to resettle safely in the United States are being told their futures will remain in indefinite limbo. It is harder to fight for those whom we cannot see.

To be sure, the airport remains a contested site. The havoc wreaked by the travel ban was spurred in large part by CBP’s existing faults—a culture rife with abuse and lack of accountability—that were only exacerbated by the Trump administration’s green light. A new report issued by the American Immigration Council documents the agency’s past and ongoing indifference to complaints of physical abuse, inhumane detention conditions, and the use of coercion and misinformation. And a recent article by The Nation describes CBP’s targeting of Muslim travelers since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

It’s not surprising, then, that even while the revised ban does not technically apply to those with existing valid visas, we have seen increased scrutiny of Muslim travelers (whether from the six countries or not) as well as other travelers from around the world—students, family members, businessmen—as they attempt to enter the country.

The most egregious case of such scrutiny I have seen is the detention of an Afghan family with three children, including a baby, who was held at LAX for more than 40 hours. They had special immigrant visas granted to them because the father worked for the U.S. military abroad, placing his own life and that of his family at risk. Still they were detained. I was alerted to their case when those waiting to greet the family upon arrival at the airport never saw them emerge from inspection.

A team of attorneys worked through the night to gain access to the family and to ensure that the mother and children were not separated from the father and put on a flight to a detention center in Texas. CBP never offered a justification for why it held them. The case required a lawsuit to win the family’s release from custody and, ultimately, their admission to the United States as lawful permanent residents. We don’t know how many more cases of people being wrongfully held and turned away are out there that we simply never learn about.

To meet the challenges posed by the revised travel ban will require a sustained fight. The lawsuits must continue. Whether it be class actions to challenge the executive order’s constitutionality, or individual lawsuits to vindicate the rights of those like the Afghan family wrongfully turned away, the Trump Administration and CBP must be held accountable for their unlawful actions.

We also need to redouble our efforts to uncover and respond to the stories of those we may be missing at our airports, consular offices, and refugee camps, and to develop both legal and political strategies to address their plight.

But lawyers alone cannot win this fight. For the travel ban is not only an affront to our law and Constitution, it is an assault on our fundamental values. The thousands who showed up at LAX to protest against injustice and welcome the stranger must continue to speak out. Without a strong and sustained groundswell of opposition, we will not be able to turn back the divisive tide of which the travel ban is only one example.

“This is America.” The CBP officer’s words have rung in my ears ever since that January day, as I—and so many others—fight for an America that embraces difference, values liberty, and promotes justice: an America that I recognize.

The post How Airports Became the Battleground for Deciding Who Belongs in America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That reality could be upon us shortly—any time after Donald Trump is inaugurated into the White House. Following the November 2015 Paris attacks, Mr. Trump had called for the registering and tracking of American Muslims. Just after his election in November, the press and internet exploded with news that his transition team was seriously considering a Muslim registry. Then, members of his camp began to cite Japanese internment as precedent for a Muslim registry.

Carl Higbie, a prominent Trump supporter, gave an interview with the New York Times in which he conceded that the internment camps were “horrific,” but insisted that Korematsu serves as “historical, factual precedent to do things that are not politically popular and sometimes not right, in the interest of national security.” For many Americans familiar with Korematsu and the history of Japanese internment, such statements were shocking.

The Korematsu decision has long been widely discounted as precedent in legal circles and taught as a tragic failure of American values in history classes. By now, it is evident that the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans—three-quarters of whom were U.S. citizens, the rest immigrants who were not permitted to become citizens, and all of whom were interned without due process—was based on fear, panic, and racism.

Korematsu is widely acknowledged as a civil rights disaster. Earl Warren, who as Attorney General of California had been a leading proponent of internment, came to deeply regret his role. Scalia—commonly remembered as one of the most influential conservative justices to sit on the nation’s highest court—ranked Korematsu among the most egregious decisions in Supreme Court history, along with Dred Scott, while Justice Stephen Breyer has written that Korematsu has been so thoroughly discredited that it is hard to conceive of any future court referring to it favorably or relying on it.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, issuing an apology and compensation as redress for the wrongful internment of Japanese Americans. And in 2011, the Department of Justice—finally—officially conceded that it committed grave error in the Korematsu case 67 years prior when the government submitted false and incomplete evidence, and suppressed the fact that FBI and military investigations refuted claims of Japanese American disloyalty. This concession obliterated any lingering doubt over Korematsu’s utter lack of value as legal precedent for interning American citizens.

Korematsu, in other words, is a lesson of what not to do.

This is not simply a case of hindsight. When the Korematsu Court decided to uphold the government’s decision to intern Japanese Americans as a “military necessity,” it did so even as the government was dismantling the internment policy. The rounding up and internment of Japanese Americans had begun in May 1942, but before the end of the year, many young Japanese Americans were released from the camps to attend colleges in the Midwest and the East, while others were released to provide much-needed labor, especially in the fields.

Never mind that the government never interned Japanese Americans en masse in Hawaii, which had the highest concentration of Japanese Americans in the country, and which was the physical location of the Pearl Harbor attack that triggered the mass incarceration. Concerned that the removal and exclusion of Japanese residents would cause economic ruin for the territory, officials rejected the idea of wholesale internment on the islands.

Then in early 1943, the government circulated the infamous “Loyalty Questionnaire,” with the hope of recruiting interned Japanese Americans into the military. The irony was not lost on the interned, who had been forced behind wire fences based on racialized notions of ancestry and disloyalty—in other words, suspected as persons incapable of ever fully becoming Americans—and then were asked to fight for the U.S. On February 1, 1943, President Roosevelt announced his decision to let Japanese Americans enlist, and more than 26,000 served in the U.S. Army during the war. On December 17, 1944, Roosevelt issued Public Proclamation No. 21, ordering the internment camps to be closed and all remaining Japanese Americans to be released.

The very next day—December 18, 1944—the Supreme Court released its Korematsu decision, upholding the constitutionality of the government’s internment policy and affirming the conviction of Fred Korematsu, 23-year-old Japanese American welder from San Leandro, California who had defied the government order to move to an internment camp. But that was not all.

On the same day, the Court also released its decision on another lesser-known but arguably more important case dealing with internment: Ex Parte Endo. Mitsuye Endo had lived in the California capital of Sacramento, worked for the California Department of Motor vehicles, was a practicing Christian, could neither speak nor read Japanese, and had a brother in the U.S. Army. Nonetheless she’d been subjected to the extreme discrimination all Japanese Americans were made to endure at the time, and had been forced into an internment camp.

In the Endo case, the Court unanimously ruled that the U.S. government could not continue to detain a citizen who was “concededly loyal” to the United States. It stressed that “[a] citizen who is concededly loyal presents no problem of espionage or sabotage. Loyalty is a matter of the heart and mind, not of race, creed, or color. He who is loyal is, by definition, not a spy or a saboteur.” The Court found that as a loyal citizen, Endo was entitled to unconditional release from the internment camp.

It has never been clear to me why the case of Endo—the case which legally brought the internment camps to a close—has been so overshadowed by Korematsu. But if we are to call upon history to help us make decisions today, we need to look at the whole picture, and not rely upon selective memories. By the time the Supreme Court rendered its decisions, the government’s decision to intern Japanese Americans based on assertions of “military necessity” and wartime exigencies were directly undercut by its own actions.

Indeed, the same Court that seemingly upheld the internment of Japanese Americans in Korematsu affirmed in Endo the right of those very same Japanese Americans to not be detained and interned. One could distinguish the niceties of the different constitutional or legal bases underlying the two cases and varying outcomes, but the very need to make such fine jurisprudential distinctions, I would argue, points to the practical inconsistencies. The history that some are invoking as support for a Muslim registry is not at all what they think it is.

If the next administration tries to pass a Muslim registry, it will test our core values as a nation and as a people. Admittedly, historians have been a bit more wary of narratives about American exceptionalism, but one thing that historians—from the most conservative to the most liberal—have not backed away from is the Constitution, and the idea that America should live up to its foundational ideals. Fear, prejudice, racial and religious antipathy should never be the basis for government policy, at least not in a republic that has worked so hard for nearly two and a half centuries to protect and promote a Constitution cherished for its democratic values and commitment to freedom.

Inter arma enim silent leges. This was the ancient saying that Scalia frequently invoked to explain how bad history could still repeat itself. “In times of war, the law may fall silent.” But we, the people, can’t. Nunquam iterum–never again.

The post The Supreme Court Ruled Wrong, Then Right, on Japanese American Internment appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I thought it was important to let everyone know about my struggle to rip follicles from the root of my face, armpit, and chest every three weeks at a cost of 50 pounds a go. It was a frivolous routine, but that’s how I liked my comedy then—apolitical and areligious. As a Brit of Pakistani Muslim descent, there was always a pressure to explain “my people”—so occasionally I’d liven it up with a few jokes about suicide bombers or arranged marriage. But mostly I stuck to the superficial, and it went down well enough in British clubs filled with drunk men who thought an arranged marriage was something you organized yourself.

There were exceptions, however. One day after doing a show that I thought was funny, for example, a journalist approached me and asked why I was making jokes about something as trivial as my moustache. There were so many other important issues, he insisted—honor killings, terrorism, Zayn Malik. “What a waste of a good Muslim!” he exclaimed.

I tried to explain to him that I’m really not what would be considered “good.” I stalk men, I tell jokes, I wear a G-string on a Tuesday. This certainly wasn’t the first time someone’s expected me to be a professional full-time representative of my religion and, as always, it was too much. I wanted to joke about what I wanted to joke about. So I continued to seek refuge in my moustache and revert back to the mundane material that anyone—an Asian woman, a black man, a white guy—could use. I was just like everyone else, which is exactly what I wanted.

It went on like this for seven years until last February, when three teenage girls from London packed up their bags during the school holidays and went to join ISIS. The news created a media firestorm across the U.K. Most teenagers were getting drunk, reading Harry Potter, or watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, but these girls decided to join the world’s worst most barbaric terrorist group?

The story, however, rang differently for me. I immediately thought I knew why they had gone, and felt I had to say something. And I did more than say something—I made it an entire comedy routine.

You may not think that young women risking their lives and well-being to go to one of the most dangerous places on earth would make for humorous fodder. But I had known girls like this. As a native Brit, I had been brought up like these young women, and I instinctively realized that their rash decision had nothing to do with religion. This feeling was confirmed as I watched one of the girls’ sisters testify to Parliament. She explained that she couldn’t understand why this happened, “My sister was into normal teenage things,” she said, “She used to watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians.” Yes, I thought, that’s probably exactly why they left.

I wrote a show about the episode—dubbed, of course, “The Kardashians Made Me Do It”—and based my material on actual things the girls said and did. For instance, police investigating the families’ homes found a handwritten checklist one of the girls made of things to buy before she left: makeup, body lotion, bras, new knickers … and an electric hair remover. “Wait, you’re going to join a sixth-century barbaric terrorist organization, and you are thinking of doing your bikini line? They’re not going to let you out of the cave, never mind let you shave your legs. And if you’re doing your bikini line, you’re probably too old for them anyway.”

In this way, my show makes clear that the reason I think these girls have gone is not radicalization; it’s sexualization. They’ve seen these ISIS guys on TV and yes, they’re barbaric. But they’re also macho, they’re hairy, they’ve got guns, they’ve got a rebellious cause—they’re hot! “Yeh I’ll have a bit of that, he’s a bit of all right.” These girls think they’re going to get an AK-toting Muslim version of Brad Pitt or the One Direction of Islam. Oh how wrong they are. There’s nothing new about being attracted to the bad boys, even if they are barbaric men—Rihanna and Chris Brown, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, Punch and Judy. They’re just the latest to join the unfortunate club.

After taking the show public, I expected hate mail, abuse, and threats from people objecting to what I say in my performances. But to my surprise, for a long time I had nothing. Not one negative email, not even from my dad! Come to think of it, I got more abuse for talking about being a hairy woman than joking about jihad.

Instead, the overwhelming response to my show has been audience members telling me things like, “I never saw it that way, you made me see things differently,” or “I was laughing … I didn’t expect to be laughing at this!” Of course, it’s a comedy show not a documentary. I’m a comedian, not CNN.

In fact, the only serious backlash I’ve received for the show has come from the right-wing media. They went after me after I told some of my jokes on a popular daytime talkshow, reprinting some of the more outrageous—and often grammar-challenged—social media posts from “furious” viewers (“Glorifying this woman making jokes about ISIS and terrorism is disgusting!”) and suggesting I was a terrorist sympathizer.

Ironically, it’s the same right-wing mouthpieces that expect “my people” to condemn violence committed by any Muslim-identified terrorist anywhere in the world. Yet when I speak up to belittle and satirize ISIS for the absurdity of the fake jihad-chic lifestyle they sell, I get told to shut up. I’m on their side and they still attack me?

It made me realize that when media talking heads say “Why aren’t Muslims speaking up?” they don’t really want us to speak up. We ruin their tidy us-versus-them narrative. It’s not that they don’t want to hear jokes about ISIS, either. It’s just that they want to hear them from comics like Louis C.K., Bill Burr, and Daniel Tosh. Safe white guys they can relate to and feel comfortable with. Even Donald Trump can get away with saying things like, “Obama was the founder of ISIS” under the guise of “sarcasm.” I’m a brown Muslim woman who is suggesting other ways to look at these situations—maybe the real reason why young girls go off to marry ISIS fighters is less about religion and more about sex and rebellion—and I get accused of supporting terrorism.

Fortunately, freedom of speech—that valuable touchstone of Western democracy—usually comes around to making room for new voices. This is especially true in comedy. The Jews were able to make fun of the Holocaust. The Irish were able to make fun of the IRA. Now it’s time for Muslims to be funny. Let us fight our own war on terror with laughter—it may work even better than the bombs.

The post Why It’s OK to Laugh About ISIS appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The dome at the Omar ibn Al-Khattab mosque is largely decorative, as most domes are. Inside a large chandelier hangs heavily from a chain attached to the apex of the dome, crystals reflecting shards of light. Windows situated along the rim of the dome collect sunlight and disperse it throughout the hall. When the Imam finally makes the adhan, the call to prayer, it echoes elegantly throughout the room, the sound magnified as it travels along the arch. But as domes go, it is a modest one, its interior painted in white.

The domed structure predates Islam. It became a dominant form of architecture because there was no wood for roofing in the Middle East in the seventh century. Instead, they used clay bricks to build, arranging the blocks in circles to form a dome. Domes soon became hallmarks of royal architecture, adorning the buildings honored, says historian Oleg Grabar, with “princely presence.” The Islamic civilizations that came to pass would adopt the architectural form for their own holy buildings, inheriting the reverence they once conferred to secular palaces.

Omar ibn Al-Khattab mosque in Los Angeles.

Domes acquired a functional use, helping Muslims orient themselves toward Mecca for prayer. But they acquired symbolic meaning as well, as vaults to heaven. “In actual fact,” writes Nebahat Avcioglu in Identity-as-Form: The Mosque in the West, “Neither the Koran nor Traditions—the sayings of the Prophet—dictates a shape for a mosque or its accompanying structures. Few Muslims would even disagree with the idea that there is no need for a mosque to pray.”

And yet mosques all around the world bear domes. In Turkey, domes behave as lighthouses for roving believers in search of quiet places for prayer. Tourists cluster in the back of mosques to take photos of the dome interiors, painted extravagantly with Koranic scripture and geometric design. In Iran, these patterns coat the dome exteriors, rendered in vibrant colors. In Southern California, too, these domes dot the landscape. The King Fahad Mosque in Culver City is topped with a smaller dome, but its interior is painted decadently with red and white inscriptions and overlaid with gold filigree. The Omar Al Farouk Mosque in Anaheim is topped with an extravagant rose gold dome. A green dome sits on the roof of the Islamic Society of Orange County in Garden Grove. Collectively, these mosques constitute a topography of Muslim-American existence in the Los Angeles, each one a center for faith-based community-building.

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey.

I used to go to the mosque with some regularity, and when I did, seeing the dome peek up from the skyline as I approached that corner of Jefferson and Exposition boulevards always evoked in me in singular feeling of belonging. This city is so hostile to so many inhabitants, its extensive sprawl isolating and alienating and its public services meager and allocated selectively. But L.A. had inscribed a place made specifically for me—a Muslim-American—and marked the territory with one of the most recognizable symbols of Islam, the dome, along with its sister symbol, the minaret.

There is power, however minute, in visual representation. Ernst J. Grube, a historian of Islamic art, surmised that this was, in fact, the role domes played in Islamic architecture. “The dome appears to be a general symbol, signifying power, the royal city, the focal point of assembly; it can therefore serve both religious and secular purpose,” he wrote in Architecture of the Islamic World—Its History and Social Meaning.

This is also the case in the contemporary U.S., where domes decorate the tops of government buildings and other secular facilities. I once mistook the domes of the Shrine Auditorium for those of a mosque. Located only a few blocks away from the Omar ibn Al-Khattab mosque, the Shrine, now a popular event venue, has all the signifiers of Islamic architecture—arched doorways, a dome at each corner, ornate geometric etchings. Los Angeles architects John C. Austin and G. Albert Lansburgh wanted the building to emulate a Moorish palace.

The Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

Before a fire ravaged the building and necessitated a renovation in 1920, the Shrine was called the Al Malaikah Temple. It served as a meeting place for members of Shriners International, a masonic fraternity that has borrowed other symbols of Moorish tradition, all the while distancing itself from any Islamic or Middle Eastern connotations. “The Order of Shriners International, so far as the historical record shows, is an American institution,” they write on their site. “Oriental signs, tokens, and costumes were adopted by those who originated the Order for the sake of pageantry. The jeweled costumes, the picturesque Arab and Fez, all appealed to the organizers and the result today is the greatest Fraternal Order the world has ever known.”

Sometimes I still drive by the Shrine Auditorium and feel a Pavlovian heart-tug at the sight of those domes. The building’s outline has the appearance of something that should belong to me. But its architecture is a facile homage to the culture that gave birth to it. Its domes, after all, are not visible on the inside. There is no adhan echoing within its walls. At the prayer hall of the Omar ibn Al-Khattab mosque, our whispered supplications are dispatched up and collected in the hollow of the dome.

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In trying to make sense of these attacks, security analysts have looked at the social profiles of the terrorists in London, Madrid, Paris, and Boston. But there is no clear pattern to be discerned. There is no pattern of poverty, no pattern of being oppressed, no pattern of poor education, no pattern of training in terror camps.

But it’s clear to me, as a historian, that what the murderers have in common is a narrative. It is a story they share in which the West has always oppressed Muslims, in which the West is inherently and uniformly against Muslims, in which the West is the very opposite of Islam. I’ve traveled to the Muslim world every year for the last 25 years. In my travels and conversations with Muslims, I have heard that narrative a thousand times.

Fortunately, not every Muslim who recounts the legend that “the West is against us” or “the West is the opposite of us” regards violence as the answer. Many opt to simply ignore and exclude Western culture from their lives, even if they have to live in Las Vegas. But there are others who see the answer in a call to arms. Like most acts of political violence—from Nazism in the 1930s to Serbian nationalism in the 1990s—Islamist violence claims justification through stories of oppression. The violent paint themselves as the truly oppressed: They are not so much fighting as fighting back.

But it wasn’t always that way. In my research on the earliest Muslim encounters with the West, I discovered a journal written in Persian by a young student who, with five fellow Iranians, came to London in the early 1800s. The diary reveals that Muslims certainly have lived peaceably in the West in the past—they admired the London of Jane Austen, and moreover, were admired there in return. It wasn’t necessarily an easy moment to arrive in England—evangelical Christianity was on the rise at that time. But even as they faced challenges, their story offers a counter-narrative to the founding myth of Muslim (and non-Muslim) neo-cons that Islam and the West are irreconcilable. Finding Mirza Salih’s diary felt like unearthing a lost testament to coexistence.

Salih came to England with the others to learn the advanced sciences—engineering, medicine, and chemistry—that the country was known worldwide for developing. He wanted to bring the knowledge back to his home country. At the time, Iran was trying to defend itself from the Russians, who had invaded. Reaching London in the fall of 1815, Salih and his fellow students first struggled to make sense of the culture they saw around them. Women went unveiled and mixed freely with men; moreover, they received education and wrote books that men both read and admired.

But through their own curiosity and the good will of their hosts, the young Muslims came to understand, and then admire, this strange land where people did things differently. They overcame their alarm at this strangeness through a commitment to understanding. Rather than regarding the Christians as their enemies, the students saw them as people from whom they might learn, morally and politically, as well as scientifically. It was much harder to be a Muslim in England in 1815 than today: Compared to the hundreds of mosques in 2015, back then there was not a single mosque in the whole country. But the students still found a way to get along by focusing on what they had in common with the people they met.

A Much-Admired Woman: The Writer Hannah More

One of the most moving scenes in the diary occurred when the students made a kind of feminist pilgrimage to pay respect to the novelist and social reformer Hannah More, the high-minded rival of Jane Austen. As the author of numerous books—some of them huge bestsellers—she appeared to them the epitome of the England that Salih called the vilayat-i azadi, or “land of freedom.” The students praised her learning and library; she gave them signed copies of her books, which they promised to print when they returned home.

On another occasion, they passionately discussed the parallels between Christianity and Islam with the Unitarian minister Lant Carpenter, whom they begged to found a Sunday School for the poor children of his parish. Far from being from narrow-minded promoters of their own faith alone, they saw the value of a Christian education and of Christian values more generally. England’s charity schools were one of the things that most impressed Salih. Through many such encounters, the young Muslims built a different narrative from the Crusades and colonial wars that are only a part of the encounter of Islam and the West.

The fact is that futures are built out of the past. Political and religious violence is based on stories about the past, stories that prompt “fighting back” as the proper response. The same process is true for political and religious compromise. And yet, for Muslims and the West, there are few narratives from which to build such a peaceable future.

This year we’ve been bombarded by stories about people who have been killed in the name of Islam. Even I have personal stories to share about the violence I have seen firsthand all across the Muslim world, from Morocco to Yemen and Afghanistan. But there are enough books about that. There also need to be books about the friendships that are the other half of the historical record. Salih and his friends are important because their story can reassure Westerners that Muslims are not inherently opposed to their way of life; and no less importantly, it can show Muslims how their learned forebears admired and respected Western norms. As a historian, all I can hope to do is show how such coexistence was, and still is, possible.

The post When Muslims Admired the West and Were Admired Back appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.