99 Names Exhibit at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center

(This is the first of a five part series by the artist introducing the project – an artistic endeavor focused on bringing to light the essence of the Islamic 99 “names” [attributes] of God)

99 Names Project Introduction (Part 1)

When 9/11 happened, I was in something of a mental fog attending an art history class at BYU.  My mother had passed away a few months earlier and I was her executor–with all the good vibes that position brings with it in a family of four strong-willed brothers and their equally strong-willed wives–and I was realizing I had to actually graduate.  The realities of what happened in New York and elsewhere had a difficult time breaking into the net of the mundane filling my mind.

I had been taking a couple classes each term as I was slowly approaching my thesis project; because stained glass is not an official emphasis in the art program, I had worked out with the Powers That Be to take the one repeatable stained glass class over and over, and support my academic efforts with special projects in my job working full time at a stained glass studio.  With my mother’s passing, I had to finish up and graduate as per her last request and I was busily mentally adjusting to the full time student mindset.

It was startling how quickly that receded into the background as the magnitude of what had happened unfolded onto the American conscious.  It was also startling how quickly someone–a surviving someone–had to be blamed.  I fully supported military efforts to punish the guilty, and joined my fellow Americans on the lookout for any and all who acted suspiciously.

Then something started nagging at my conscience.  It wasn’t a group of evil people being blamed, it was an entire religion.  A quarter of the world’s population, I was regularly told, wanted me hurting and dead.  This was becoming socially sanctioned, media-driven religious persecution–something against which this country was originally formed.  And it bothered me greatly.

People who are different can be frightening, and many times we react to fear through aggression.  If we can warn off, threaten, or terrify the object of our fear, the situation (we think) is resolved.  But the fear itself remains.

When fear is attached to a group of people, this aggressive reaction can quickly become the ugly realization of prejudice.  When people in a neighborhood are afraid of losing jobs folks can become antagonistic towards immigrants, for example, and this behavior may become extended towards any group perceived as being unusual, different, or in any other way threatening.

FULL ARTICLE (WITH PHOTOS) FROM THE GHOST RIVER STUDIOS BLOG 

 

American Army Suspends anti-Islam Training Course

Pauline Jelinek and Robert Burns – The Associated Press
Posted : Thursday May 10, 2012 18:27:17 EDT

WASHINGTON — A course for U.S. military officers has been teaching that America’s enemy is Islam in general, not just terrorists, and suggesting that the country might ultimately have to obliterate the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina without regard for civilian deaths, following World War II precedents of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima or the allied firebombing of Dresden.

The Pentagon suspended the course in late April when a student objected to the material. The FBI also changed some agent training last year after discovering that it, too, was critical of Islam.

 The teaching in the military course was counter to repeated assertions by U.S. officials over the last decade that the U.S. is at war against Islamic extremists — not the religion.

“They hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit,” the instructor, Army. Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley, said in a presentation last July for the course at Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va. The college, for professional military members, teaches midlevel officers and government civilians on subjects related to planning and executing war.

Dooley also presumed, for the purposes of his theoretical war plan, that the Geneva Conventions that set standards of armed conflict, are “no longer relevant.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM ARMYTIMES.COM

RELATED READING

Class suspended over anti-Islam concerns (April 25)

American Muslims Ten Years After 9/11 (A View from India)

By ABDUS SATTAR GHAZALI

On the second anniversary of the ghastly tragedy of 9/11 I wrote:

“Two years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Muslim community in America, victim of guilt by association, remains under siege. Profiled, harassed, reviled, attacked, peeped at by the CIA and the FBI, interrogated and permanently controlled at airports, the whole community felt excluded of American society. After the Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast were imprisoned in 10 relocation camps in the United States. But after 9/11 2001, the whole country is converted into a virtual detention camp for the Muslims by abridging their civil rights.”

Ten years later, this is true today as the seven-million American Muslims remained besieged  through reconfiguration of US laws, policies and priorities in the post-9/11 era. Alarmingly, the post-911 America has become less friendly to Muslims to the extent that they have probably replaced other minorities – Hispanics, Native Americans and Afro Americans – as targets of discrimination, hate and prejudice. Many American Muslims have a story of discriminative treatment ranging from physical attacks, a nasty gaze, casual comments to workplace harassment, burning mosques and the Qur’ān. Muslims have witnessed the ever-growing marginalisation of their communities.

According to a PEW survey released on August 30, 2011, forty-three per cent had personally experienced harassment in the past year. The survey also said that 52 per cent of Muslim Americans complained that their community is singled out by government for surveillance.

FULL ARTICLE FROM RADIANCE VIEWS WEEKLY 

“Mixed bag” for U.S. Muslims since 9/11

(CBS News)

It was a Tuesday evening in August 2010 when a 21-year-old art student from suburban New York hailed a taxi cab on a Manhattan street, carrying a couple of notebooks, an empty bottle of scotch and a folding knife. After asking the cabbie if he was a Muslim, the student, Michael Enright, muttered “consider this a checkpoint” before slashing at the driver’s neck and eventually fleeing through the car window.

The driver, Ahmed H. Sharif, survived with relatively minor injuries. Enright, who had actually visited Afghanistan earlier that year as part of a group aiming to promote interfaith dialogue, was arrested and charged with a hate crime.

The attack may well have been the most acute example of anti-Islamic sentiment last summer, but it was hardly the only one. For months, a debate raged over the plan to build an Islamic center within several blocks of the World Trade Center site – with critics weighing in from around the country, including some family members of 9/11 victims. In Florida, the Rev. Terry Jones threatened to burn a Quran if the proposed site wasn’t moved. (Efforts to block the center’s approval failed and Jones, though he backed away from his initial threat, went through with a Quran-burning in March after finding the Muslim holy book guilty of crimes against humanity in a televised “trial.”)

FULL ARTICLE FROM CBS NEWS

Why Muslims are Still Mad at America

 

Editor’s Note: Steven Kull is director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes and author of the recently released book, Feeling Betrayed: The Roots of Muslim Anger at America.

By Steven Kull, Special to CNN

On the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, many Americans are wondering whether the risk of a terrorist attack against America has been reduced.  The picture is mixed. With the death of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda is weaker.  With revolutions in several Arab countries, frustrations with unpopular autocratic governments – a recruiting theme for terrorist groups – have been mitigated.  But one important contributing factor has not improved – widespread anger at America in the Muslim world.  While views have improved in Indonesia, throughout the Middle East and South Asia, hostility toward the United States persists unabated.

This does not mean that most Muslims support terrorist attacks on America. On the contrary, overwhelming majorities reject terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks, as morally wrong.  Al Qaeda is quite unpopular.

FULL ARTICLE FROM CNN 

For Muslim family, faith complicates grief for loved one lost on 9/11

Edmond, Oklahoma (CNN) – His smiling image has been cut out of a snapshot and carefully added to a photo of his father, so it looks as if he is standing beside the man. It smacks of a bad Photoshop job, but it gives the two a shared moment, even though they never met.

The boy’s sister, Fahina, is 15 and clings to scant memories and aging photographs. But Farqad, almost 10, has nothing.

She remembers sitting beside their father on amusement park rides, his words — “Look at my daughter; she’s so brave” — soothing her nerves; she still thinks of him whenever she’s on a rollercoaster. She leaned on his legs when he watched basketball on TV and imagined him cheering her on when she played the sport after he was gone. She recalls being driven to see Harvard University, before she even started elementary school, and dreams of attending an Ivy League school to make him proud.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, she woke up extra early on her own. After her father and mother finished saying morning prayers, the young girl took his face in her small hands and enlisted the promise of a Chuck E. Cheese visit. Father and daughter then kissed and said goodbye.

Farqad was born two days later, after terrorists hijacked planes and killed nearly 3,000 — including 38-year-old Mohammad Salahuddin Chowdhury, who worked atop the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

FULL ARTICLE FROM CNN

Texas Inmate Set to Die for Hate Crimes: Muslim Victim Pleads for His Life

Washington (CNN) – “I cannot tell you that I am an innocent man. I am not asking you to feel sorry for me, and I won’t hide the truth,” Mark Anthony Stroman said from Texas death row at the Polunsky Correctional Unit in Livingston. “I am a human being and made a terrible mistake out of love, grief and anger, and believe me, I am paying for it every single minute of the day.”

The 41-year-old prisoner is scheduled to be executed Wednesday for a murder he once said was fueled by “patriotism,” but which the state argued was motivated by pure hatred.

The admitted white supremacist was convicted in the deadly shooting of an Indian man, part of a killing spree that began just after the September 11 terror attacks. His target: those he believed were of Middle Eastern background, in revenge and retaliation for the worst domestic terror incident in U.S. history. . . .

One of Stroman’s biggest supporters is the man who survived his ordeal and testified against the defendant. Rais Bhuiyan is a devout Muslim who came to the United States to pursue his education. A decade ago, he was about to be married and was working an extra job. . .

Bhuiyan believes that his attacker does not deserve to die and has created a website, worldwithouthate.org, to urge Texas to spare Stroman’s life.

“In order to live in a better and peaceful world, we need to break the cycle of hate and violence. I believe forgiveness is the best policy, which helps to break this cycle,” he said, calling himself a victim of a hate crime. “I forgave Mark Stroman many years ago. I believe he was ignorant and not capable of distinguishing between right and wrong. Otherwise he wouldn’t have done what he did.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM CNN