On Being Blog

Poetic Pilgrimage's Sukina Abdul Noor and Muneera Rashida (photo by Södra Teatern)

A recent parliamentary report in the United Kingdom reveals that some Muslim women are removing their headscarves and anglicizing their names to improve their chances in the job market. Two best friends featured in the upcoming documentary film Hip Hop Hijabis did the exact opposite.

Born in Bristol to Jamaican parents, they converted to Islam in 2005, started wearing the hijab, and changed their names to Sukina Abdul Noor and Muneera Rashida. Together they are known as the hip hop duo Poetic Pilgrimage and have toured internationally to critical acclaim.

It is estimated there are a total of 100,000 British converts to Islam, a majority of them are women and a growing number are black youth from the inner cities. Combined with immigration, this has made Islam the second largest religion in the UK at around five percent of the population according to the latest census data.

Polls indicate that roughly half of all Britons think that is too many and that “Muslims create problems in the UK” reports an Evening Standard article. Yet evidence compiled by Islamophobia author Chris Allen shows that two-thirds admit to knowing "nothing or next to nothing about Islam" and get most of their knowledge from the media, which the Leveson Report on British press culture recently described to be biased in their coverage of Muslim stories.

By gaining insight into the mindset and daily lives of two outspoken female Muslim converts, Hip Hop Hijabis aims to dispel some of the misconceptions that cause such polarized views, especially around the issue of gender equality, which was a major concern for Ms. Abdul Noor and Ms. Rashida when they initially felt drawn to the religion.

Researching the question further, they found that in historical terms Islam was radically egalitarian — condemning the common practice of female infanticide and introducing rights of inheritance, divorce, and education for women at a time when they were generally considered their husband's property. They also learnt that customs such as female genital cutting and honor killings predate Islam and are not sanctioned by the Quran.

By speaking out against these cultural traditions from within an Islamic framework, Poetic Pilgrimage is part of a growing number of Muslim artists, activists, and intellectuals reclaiming their religion.

Doing so through the language of hip hop has unintentionally become a statement in itself, as some interpretations of Islam consider music and female performance to be forbidden.

The advantage is that through their skilful rhymes, catchy beats, and positive energy, Poetic Pilgrimage can reach a wide audience — both European Muslim youth, who may be feeling trapped between cultures, and non-Muslims, whose stereotypes are efficiently challenged by two hijab-wearing rappers.

Though hip hop and religion may initially seem like unlikely partners, they both stem from a strong desire for social justice, and there have always been a large number of Muslim artists within the genre. A wide network of educational initiatives has developed around it, encouraging creative expression through hip hop as an alternative to violence, drugs, and other destructive behavior.

Extremism has been dominating the public debate around Islam for too long. There are many highly educated and outspoken Muslims who think that justifying misogyny and violence in the name of Islam is a gross misinterpretation of their faith, but their voices are rarely heard.

Conflict and tragedy simply make for better headlines but also breed fear and hate on both sides of the divide with potentially fatal consequences.

The Hip Hop Hijabis project is an attempt to redress the balance and contribute to a more nuanced debate. It will include creative workshops, lectures, and public debates to encourage constructive dialogue and counter religious extremism as well as Islamophobia.

Mette Reitzel is a Danish-born London-based documentary filmmaker.

A version of this article was published by the Common Ground News Service on January 8, 2013. Copyright permission is granted for publication.

Andrew Solomon with his spouse and son. (Photo by M. Sharkey)

National Book Award winner Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree has the feel of a book that opens up a new way of looking at something so usual, one sees it for the first time.

People who bear children have told me (a woman whose biological clock ticked only once for about five minutes when I was 35) that being a parent is the definitive event of their lives, forever changing and shaping their destiny and sense of self. Far From the Tree, through interviews with over 300 families, explores the nature of the familial bond between parents and children whose identities render them different — both from the parental lineage, and from the culture at large. Chapters on autism, schizophrenia, deafness, dwarfism, disability, and prodigies detail how parents and families have coped with the fall-out of what Mr. Solomon calls "horizontal" identities.

Readers will be familiar with the idea of deaf culture perhaps — the phenomenon in which a medical diagnosis is embraced as a vibrant and worthy aspect of one's being, and not endured as a condition of impairment. What happens when one applies that sensibility to mental illness, autism, gender, even the tendency toward crime?

Like others, I was at first cowed by the 700-page text, with its additional 200 pages of meticulous notes. But those experiencing similar awe should know that each of the book's 12 chapters can be read individually, as manageable courses one can digest while making a long meal of the book itself. It’s a surprisingly rapid read, both because of Solomon’s variously droll, insightful, and heart-breaking prose, and because the writing encodes the deep and respectful — even loving — relationships he seems to have developed with the book's sources, the parents of children who are different, and the children they love.

I found the stories deeply reassuring. They offer a kind of moral lesson for all of us at sea in a world of confusing and sometimes alarming diversity: that is, even extreme difference does not require us to sacrifice connectedness. As we confront our own warring subjectivities about what is normal, what is unnatural or unnatural, and even what values inform those concepts, Mr. Solomon shows us that we can and do still belong to each other. He agreed to take a few questions via email:

You write about your own difference as one of the reasons you undertook this book. As a gay man, who is now a father yourself, were there things you learned about yourself as a result of this work?

I’ve often heard people give a date when they came out of the closet — when they turned what had been secret into public information. And I used to say that I had come out in my twenties, giving the process a full decade. There was admitting it to myself, admitting it to the people I slept with, admitting it to my parents, admitting it to friends.

I moved in with my first serious boyfriend when I was 24, and then I thought the information was out, but when I published a novel that dealt with my sexuality and began doing readings, I found that I hadn’t yet reckoned with what it meant to be full open with the world, and the process was part of what knocked me down into depression. I come out of the closet every day. I go to a doctor’s office and tick the “married” box on some medical form and brace myself for the possibility that the nursing staff holds prejudices against people like me; I sit next to someone on an airplane who asks whether I have children and find myself having to explain; I get to know a bunch of gang members in researching Far From the Tree and have to tell them at some point about who I am and what my life looks like.

I’d hoped that this book would take care of the coming out forever, that I wouldn’t have to do it any more. What it taught me instead is that we are all constantly coming out about one thing or another, that my experience of coming out as a gay man is part of a vast web of people negotiating the tension between their acknowledged and unacknowledged selves. Understanding that made me less self-pitying, and perhaps less self-aggrandizing, and certainly less sad. I felt that I was part of a human fabric of struggle, that my highly personal experience was part of a larger collective experience. Knowing that made it much easier to tolerate.

I think, also, that the book made me more forgiving. One tends to be most forgiving of the things for which one needs forgiveness oneself, and unforgiving of what is foreign and strange, and now almost nothing is foreign and strange to me. If that doesn’t make me a better father, I don’t know what will.

Your chapter on autism, with its exploration of the controversial neurodiversity movement, was able to present all sides of that issue — that autism is an identity which the world should welcome and adapt to, and that it is a diagnosis that entails suffering, impairment, and loss. Where did your personal views of this end up after all of the research?

I know this sounds like a cop-out, but my personal view ended up being that this is a very complicated area and that one person’s affliction is another person’s identity. I definitely came to believe in the deep worth of the autistic experience, and I think we would impoverish the world if we were to eliminate it. I also met many people with autism in whom it seemed to engender (or at least be accompanied by) suffering. I do think there’s a difference between having some capacity for communication and having none, and that people without communication have difficult lives.

Autism isn’t my way of thinking; I am not neurodiverse in that sense. But I ended up thinking that much as I am happy with my own life despite the characteristic of being gay, which seems alienating to many straight people, many people with autism are content in who they are and how they think. And I think we have an obligation to respond to those people’s self-esteem with respect.

The chapters on children of rape and criminality seemed different to me in nature from the other chapters. I find it harder to describe that part of the book, and harder to think about it. How did you decide to include those chapters? And, do you think they raise somewhat different questions?

Part of my objective in writing this book was to say that these impediments to love, these forms of difference, reflected not only the child’s unusual genome, but also that child’s point of origin or type of behavior. I wanted to ensure that people understand the true complexity of this idea of a child who is “different” — that the difference can take many forms. Additionally, I wanted to look from the perspective of the child. While we have a social impetus to treat criminality as an illness, we are dishonest if we don’t acknowledge it as an identity as well. And for children conceived in rape, the difficulty is often that they experience themselves as different without understanding the nature of that difference — that they cannot seek community because their identity goes unacknowledged.

Of the many ways these stories instruct us (how to be brave, how to be steadfast, how to surrender, how to accept limitation, how to give up) were there particular instructions you took to heart, or that you would recommend to others?

I needed the span of the book fully to answer that question, but the essential messages are that people dealing with all these situations are less alone than they imagine — less alone insofar as there is community around each of these topics, and less alone in that each of these individual topics has so much in common with the others. Community is an essential part of healing. Any aspect of any person can be seen as an illness (negatively) or as an identity (positively). Holding onto that reality, even in the moments of shock when it seems implausible, is a key way of coping with problems that may look very intimidating.

At the presentation you gave in St. Paul, Minnesota, which I attended, the crowd sat forward on their chairs. There is a sense for many of us who read it that you are telling our stories. You are bringing certain things out of the closet we have been unable to say for ourselves. Do you see that also? And, what is that like for you?

It’s the most gratifying thing in the world. I hope the book will serve in its tiny way to make a kinder and more tolerant world. If I can help people to experience their own lives anew, to see meanings they had not previously noted, then I’ll feel like I have been doing my job. I lived with a big secret — my sexuality — for years, and casting off that burden of secrecy was the great liberation of my adulthood. I hope that others, in reading the book, will feel empowered to redirect the enormous energy that keeping secrets requires, and will be able to use that energy to build rich and productive lives.

Kate Moos is a public media producer, writer, and a person possessed of multiple horizontal identities. She is currently Executive Producer of National News at APM and the former executive producer of On Being with Krista Tippett.

I grew up with Evil Knievel and the Flying Wallendas. Thrilling as their stunts were, it was always a noisy spectacle. It seemed to be more about man conquering the Grand Canyon or the Tallulah Gorge than interacting with nature. The backdrop was a prop.

In this video, though, Michael Schaefer and Dean Potter create a scene as thrilling in its composition as in the act itself of walking the highline at Cathedral Peak. As the sun sets and descends, the moon rises and looms large — the orb cradling the dyad of rock towers turned burnt-red. As the National Geographic filmmakers say, it is "the ultimate full moon shot" — captured from over a mile away with a serious telephoto lens.

As Mr. Potterbegins his unaided walk, you hear the camera operator take deep, calm but anxious, meditative breaths. And you breathe with him. Oh, if we all could witness such panoramic beauty like this each day...

Of Mexican heritage, Marta Khadija, president of LALMA, La Asociación Latino Musulmana de América (The Latino Muslim Association of America - LALMA), converted to Islam in 1983. She had been unhappy with her spiritual life and when she moved to the United States, her Muslim friends began sending her Islamic texts and she visited a mosque. Emotional and powerful, this experience gave her peace.

Another Latino American, writer, innovator and self-identified indigenous Muslim, Mark Gonzales, bases much of his work on the issue of identity. Gonzales, who is of Mexican and French Canadian descent and was raised Catholic, began to explore Islam after practicing Christianity in a very deep way. He says, “In that process, I realized I didn't like the idea of a gate keeper.” At that time he was also working on restorative justice with families who were deported after 9/11. He began building relationships with people practicing Islam and converted.

America has always been recognized for its diversity, and is seen as a country composed of minorities who intersect with one another on a regular basis.

As a result, the steadily growing number of Latino Muslims in the United States is inevitable. According to Reuters, 2.6 million people practice Islam, one of the fastest growing religions in our country, and Hispanics, another rapidly growing group, currently comprise 17 percent of the total U.S. population. Of course these two populations would eventually begin to intersect, and what may at first feel like an uncommon link, seems almost natural.

When asked about her Mexican family's reaction to her conversion, Khadija says, “My mother thought I had joined some sort of cult.” But she soon came around after speaking to her priest who reassured her that her daughter was on the right path. Ms. Khadija says she generally doesn't feel judged by other Latinos and that she is able to live with both identities without any challenges. She thinks that part of it may be because she is still very connected to her Mexican roots and doesn't cover her hair. “I kept my culture,” she says. “I didn't adopt any dress from the Middle East.” Her organization, LALMA, also maintains a good relationship with the Catholic Church in Los Angeles.

Mr. Gonzales’s experience is similar. “Specifically, my work is about reshaping people's idea of identity,” he says. And as a poet and scholar, he travels around the world to spread his message. When asked about navigating the Latino Muslim identity he says that identity only becomes a problem when his heritage and spirituality don’t fit other people’s expectations.

There are no definitive statistics on the number of Latino Muslims in the United States, but estimates range from 100,000 to 200,000, depending on the organization. Attorney and chaplain, Wilfredo Amr Ruiz says that his organization, the American Muslim Association of North America, has seen an exponential increase in requests for Spanish language Qur'ans in the last 10 years. They also receive hundreds of requests for Islamic texts from prisons every week, indicating that some converts come from the prison system.

Not a homogenous group, Latinos find Islam in myriad ways. Some convert as a result of romantic relationships. Others want to reconnect with religion or are academically interested. For Wilfredo Amr Ruiz, it was curiosity that led him to Islam. He was looking to reconnect to religion when he saw an Islamic center being built in San Juan, Puerto Rico and decided to explore.

Mr. Ruiz says that some Latinos initially reject Islam because of the unfavorable images formed by the media, but some come to find that they share many of the same moral values as Muslims. He also points out that some Latinos with a connection to Spain are attracted to the religion because of the long history of Muslims in Spain.

Latino Muslims like Mr. Gonzales, Mr. Ruiz and Ms. Khadija are creating a unique American identity. “Islam is a religion that, at its core, has to be culturally relevant to those who practice it,” Mr. Gonzales says. “Latinos are forming a culturally relevant form of Islam.” As Americans, we need to make space in our minds for these new communities.

Erika L. Sánchez is a poet and freelance writer living in Chicago. She is currently the sex and love advice columnist for Cosmopolitan for Latinas and a contributor to the Huffington Post, NBC Latino, and others.

A version of this article was published by the Common Ground News Service on December 11, 2012. Copyright permission is granted for publication.