Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind" 
— Jiddu Krishnamurty

" The suicide attacker, as Richard Boothby has written, short-circuits this relationship between master and slave. The uneven dialectic is based on the formula: your freedom or your life. But it is uneven because, if you choose the former, you can't have either. In a suicide attack, the attacker abruptly proves willing to give up her life to end the stand-off; turning her corporeality, her body, into a weapon. Jacqueline Rose made the point, writing about suicide attackers some years ago, that every such attack is "an act of passionate identification -- you take your enemy with you". Which could be interpreted as meaning, you take a bit of their whiteness, their being, with you. You claim a share of being, seemingly always precarious, always endangered, through death. Lone wolf suicide attackers may not kill many people compared to the apparatuses of military full-spectrum dominance, or militarised policing. But they evoke a particular horror because they upend the...

"Can one speak meaning- fully of “Islamic violence”? As long as the Muslim actor is making his act of violence meaningful to himself in terms of Islam—in terms of Pre-Text, Text, or Con-Text of Revelation—then it is appropriate and meaningful to speak of that act of violence as Islamic violence. The point of the designation is not that Islam causes this violence; rather it is that the violence is made meaningful by the actor in terms of Islam—just as the prodigious violence undertaken by soldiers of democratic nation-states is made meaningful for them and by them in terms of the nation-state, and may, therefore, meaningfully be called “democratic violence” or “national violence” (or may meaningfully be designated in terms of the particular nation-state as “American violence” or “Israeli violence”). In the case of violence, as with everything else, one Muslim may disagree with another Muslim over whether his mode of meaning-making is legitimate—th...

Law says, “Go to the Mullā and learn the rules and regulations!”  Love says, “A single word is enough: shut and put away all other  books!” . . . Law says, “Have some shame and decency: put out this light!” Love says, “What is this veil for? Let the visions be open!” Law says, “Come into the mosque and perform the obligatory prayer!”  Love says, “Go to the wine-tavern, and having drunk, peform the  superogatory prayer!” . . . Law says, “O, Believer! go for Ḥajj—for you will have to cross the Ṣirāt  Bridge!” Love says, “ The door of the Beloved is the Kaʿbah, don’t move from  there!” Law says, “We strung Shāh Manṣūr up on the cross!” Love says, “ Ten, you did well; for you sacrificed him at the Beloved’s  door!”  — ( probably not actually authored by) the most widely sung Su poet of the Panjāb, Bullhē Shāh of Ḳaṣūr (1680–1758). Quoted in Shahab Ahmed's What is Islam?

Britain: A report Evidence suggested the biggest cause of the "acute" disadvantage felt by Muslim women is their religion, it said.  "The impact of Islamophobia on Muslim women should not be underestimated," it went on.  "They are 71% more likely than white Christian women to be unemployed, even when they have the same educational level and language skills."  They face particular issues of discrimination when applying for jobs because of the clothes some of them they wear because of their religion or culture, the MPs suggest. Married women in Muslim communities are often expected to be home-makers while their husbands are the breadwinners, the committee heard from expert witnesses.  "The impact of the very real inequality, discrimination and Islamophobia that Muslim women experience is exacerbated by the pressures that some women feel from parts of their communities to fulfil a more traditional role," the committee said. ( source: t...

“If more Englishmen do not come out & unequivocally condemn this violence, people will think those drunk extremists represent all of us.”