Something is stirring in Egypt
Autopilot is an amazing thing – that human ability to keep going, to keep existing, numbly, to move on and forget, despite the madness and the chaos unfurling around us.
I returned to the United States this past week after a two-month trip to Egypt. For much of that time, I was on autopilot – trying to get from one place to another, visiting family members, navigating the cities. I am only now processing and making sense of what I saw in the country, both above and below the surface.
Continue reading on Muftah
Aramco brats in the '60's and '70's
Aramco Brats, the expatriate children of employees of Saudi Aramco oil company, (which was estimated in 2005 to be the world’s most valuable company) are a “third culture” group — think military brats, missionary kids — defined by their bi-cultural identity formed by living a not quite suburban American lifestyle in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, a province whose lands are more than half the Rub’ al Khali (Empty Quarter) desert — sand and wind.
Continue reading on Teenage
'Unruly' Latin Americans and the stories of Latinx Muslims
To be Latinx, Latin@ or Latin American is to be an “other.” But a very particular type of other. The nuances of identity are erased (i.e. Afro-Latinxs, Indigenous Latinxs), we are homogenized and made into low-level criminals, illegal immigrants, low-class workers, lazy-siesta takers and hard-core Catholics.
That’s where the stories of Latinx Muslims often start in the media.
Stories of criminalization, marginalization and “illegality” permeate convert narratives. Images of fervent conservative Catholicism are given as reasons for conversion. The sexualization of Latina women by their own communities are said to drive their desire to wear hijab. And the notion of dawah is immediately romanticized.
Continue reading on Identity Crisis
