#muslim diaspora

[thisgingerhasnosoul]

The more I think about what’s happening, the more I start worrying about the effect everything is going to have on the Muslim diaspora, especially in western countries. So look, I know we’re all really raw and horrified and scared right now, but check in on your Muslim friends, because odds are, they’re scared, too.

[sheltiechicago]

Shahed Saleem creates mosque pavilion as a "reconstruction of migrant histories"

London-based architect Shahed Saleem has created a colourful pavilion in the shape of a mosque, which has been erected at the V&A museum as part of this year's Ramadan Festival.

Saleem, who is of Indian heritage, designed the pavilion for the Ramadan Tent Project's annual festival, which celebrates the holy month of Ramadan.

He drew on his own lived experience as a second-generation immigrant for the design while aiming to capture the collective feelings of distance that are sometimes endured by the wider Muslim diaspora.

[havatabanca]

[secular-jew]

Truth

[dawnscales]

Being Jewish in Europe right now is having to check all the parties you can vote for during the EU elections to see what flavor of antisemitism they come with or if they actually have a damn braincell and then hope that what they stand for actually aligns with your political views.

[welcometotheravenclawcommonroom]

Them: Hamas is a terrorist organization.

Me: okay, you’re right, fair enough. But what about the IDF? They’re also one, but the fact that they’re state-sanctioned makes them infinitely more dangerous, wouldn’t you agree?

Them: …

Me: 😒

[hollytanaka]

a previous mutual of mine: 'I can grieve jewish life while also not being an imperialist, you're antisemitic for suggesting i'm pro-genocide for centering jewish lives and not wanting to talk about palestinians at this time! you're holding too much standards for a grieving people!'

same mutual: *unfollows me for posting donation links for palestinian children and hospitals and absolutely nothing against jewish people*

if you're only grieving jewish deaths — please ask yourself why some lives are more grievable than others.

[doeeyeddyke]

Marigold

Desi LGBT Fest

Day 10: They Bring Me Flowers

@desi-lgbt-fest​

[khalidistan]

A letter to diasporic Muslims and South Asians

Stop defanging your language at a time when unconditional support is needed for Palestine

To all the Muslims hand-wringing about Hamas, swearing you’re “one of the good ones,” and crafting your Instagram story calling for ceasefire and peace: let’s break this down, shall we? I’ll cover some of the most common liberal refrains that ultimately detract from how monumental this moment is and how revolutionary we need to be. Stop self-censoring and defanging your language pre-emptively in a time when unconditional support is needed for Palestine.

Full text under the cut.

“Why haven’t Palestinians tried non-violent means?”

They have. And they were brutally slaughtered. During the Great March of Return in 2018-2019, non-violent Palestinians protested along the fence separating Gaza from Israel. They were met with Israeli soldiers firing bullets with intent to kill or severely disable Palestinians (if you’re interested in disability politics and Palestine, I highly recommend Right to Maim by Jasbir Puar, who if you know me by now I am a super-fan of her and her work).

Palestinians both mainland and diasporic have also organized for “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” (BDS), a similarly non-violent method of protest, which have been met with doxxing, death threats, and blacklists.

“I stand with Palestinians, not Hamas”

Okay, but Palestinians elected Hamas in 2006. And when they did, Israel and the West used armed force to overthrow the election results.

Hamas’s attacks are not inexplicable or random. The resistance cannot be understood without the preceding decades of Israeli aggression, brutality, and land theft. The violence did not begin on October 7, 2023. It began 75 years before, with the occupation and dispossession of Palestine to Israeli settlers. But Western propaganda will make haste to manufacture consent. They will feed you lies and remind you that those brown people deserve massacring because they are “animals” and “savages” and “terrorists.” Every resistance force that has ever existed has been labeled “terroristic.”

“Revolution is not a dinner party. The resistance fighters in Hamas and other factions will be labeled ‘terrorists’ regardless of what they do. All their lives they have endured the settler-colonial terror that is zionism. When these guerrillas strike back at the foot soldiers of colonialism—the euro-settler masses stealing Palestinian land—they are denounced for targeting ‘innocent civilians.’ Settlers are not innocent, they are invaders.” —Lal Morich Bari and Third World PAISA

Is it not unfettered violence to steal homes that have belonged to Palestinians for generations? Is it not terroristic to hold 2.2 million Palestinians hostage, unable to move freely and without surveillance? Is it not diabolically evil to uproot and burn down native olive trees, cut off water and electricity, and bomb any convoy that attempts to bring food or health aid?

“It’s clear that the international community and the Western world has no problem with violence. Only a problem with the perpetrators of that violence,” says Mohammed el-Kurd.

The same people who want you to call Hamas “terrorists” are the ones for whom violence is quotidian, abetted, and entirely acceptable.

The delegitimization of Hamas comes down to colonial logic. The violence of Hamas will always be illegitimate because the violence of the colonized will always be uncivilized and backwards, while the colonizer can make a claim to “civility”, to “freedom” and “reason” —via onapittance on Twitter

Hamas, and the rest of armed Palestinian resistance, are the only ones keeping Palestine from being obliterated off the face of the earth. And it is not our place to criticize how the oppressed resist their colonizers. Palestinians can and should and will revolt the way they see fit. Where Hamas uses hang-gliders and garage-made rockets, Israel uses its billions of U.S. dollars in military training and weaponry to obliterate Palestinian life as they know it.

“If history is our guide, it clearly records that nothing of any great value has ever changed hands without a struggle, or at least a show of, or threat of, violence. Men simply don’t surrender what they think of as their privilege and property except by force. History itself is economically motivated class struggle.” —George Jackson

“But if I endorse these things, I’ll be subject to violence.”

Israel itself does not discriminate between Hamas and Palestinians in its ruthless bloodshed. Israel has targeted children’s hospitals, vehicles traveling along “safe routes” supposedly “protected” by Israel, and has self-proclaimed that they have no intents of precision, only mass destruction.

“the ‘condemning hamas’ ‘distinguishing hamas from palestinians’ is actually politically useless when the zionist state apparatus, for the past week, made no attempt to discriminate when mass spreading the most white supremacist tropes to manufacture consent for genocide.” —Joshua Briond

Your mild, tempered words will not save you from the indiscriminate, sweeping violence of your nation-state. We are already witnessing post-9/11 levels of mass hysteria and unbridled violence.

We bear witness to the violent, tragic murder of Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old boy in Chicago, and the critical injury of his mother Hanaan Shahin, at the hands of their landlord in Chicago. He stabbed Al-Fayoume to death, screaming “you Muslims must die!” In Michigan, a man was intercepted for a threat of terrorism, asking on social media if anyone wants to “go to Dearborn & hunt Palestinians.”

These threats are not exclusive to those who are visibly Muslim and Palestinian. The beating of America’s war-drum necessitates a nebulous definition of the enemy, which means all people who are politically brown are subject to violence. This means South Asians, Sikhs, Hindus, Arabs, and anyone who is perceived to fit that schema. On October 15, a Sikh teenager was assaulted on a New York City bus, in which the assailant attempted to tear off the young man’s turban and punched him repeatedly.

“Fine, Khalid. I get it. So now what? I’m feeling hopeless. Nothing I say or do matters.”

As non-Palestinians, it is not our place to lose hope, when Palestinians stand against the Israeli killing machine with unshakeable, unwavering love for their land and their people. They sustain hope against every odd. We must stand in solidarity with them, in our faith, in our actions, in our engagement with the movable masses.

Actionable solidarity can look like many things. Organizations like Democratic Socialists of America are running virtual phone-banks to call U.S. representatives urging them to halt funding to Israel. Cities across the world are organizing protests, teach-ins, seminars, and relevant film screenings. Consider reading websites like Decolonize Palestine and following Subhi Taha and Mohammed el-Kurd for succinct geopolitical analyses in video format. Connect with like-minded friends and family to organize locally, whether that looks like a debrief session, a vigil, a reading group. The information is overwhelming, yes, but so is the suffocating genocide of Palestinians. The least we can do to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our siblings is to swallow our pride and approach learning with curiosity and humility.

By giving in to despair, we’d reject the immeasurable gift Palestinians remind us of every day: that in the face of overwhelming, unfathomable odds, if we struggle, we might just win. The Palestinian people are unbreakable, and their resistance inspires me every single day. They continue forward, surviving, with a fraction of comfort and necessities that we have. It is our revolutionary, moral responsibility to embrace hope and not succumb to nihilism.

[strawberryflavoredsapphic]

In Search of Self: a Study of Queer Arab Women

In the United States Post Migration by Lexi Haddad

[grimmshood]

i have thought that maybe my creative endeavors would go well if i did more autobiographical stuff but my life feels just kind of sad and pathetic overall so like -_- bc the more i think about my relationship wrt my identities + culture its like wow . i'm in a kinda shitty middle ground

[papirouge]

@unhonestlymirror

You know what's funny with arguments like that? it's that you're using the very same arguments actual antisemites are using against Jews à la "jews are problematic vermin ! they've been regularly kicked out Europeans countries for centuries for a reason!!" "nobody wants jews in their countries"

There's a reason there's been an objective allyship between Nazi and Zionists because both ends are seeking to find a place for Jewish people : antisemites because they hate Jews and want them as far as possible, and Jewish Zionists to fulfill their fanatical religious agenda. Hitler was technically a Zionist for that reason.

[navramanan]

sorry but i'm so delighted over how diaspora arabs have been realizing that turkey is very hostile towards them which is why many of them thought twice about going on vacation there and decided not to. take this as a lesson to NOT idealize a country to absurd amounts like the muslim diaspora loves doing with turkey

[bitegore]

serious question for non-native english speakers who have any sort of religious beliefs (or people who have a language they speak for liturgical reasons and not in their day to day life, ie praying in arabic or hebrew)

when you say "god" in colloquial english, does it feel like you're saying a word that actually means your deity that you actually believe in or pray to in whatever degree?

personally: nope, unless i'm specifically trying to talk about mine, in which case I usually use the hebrew term i'm used to (hashem, translates to "the name") or "g-d" (written as such for religious purposes) but "god" as used in english to me is sort of just like "the christian god" and it's off to the side. de-religion'd and de-importance'd for me. hence the question, because it makes me curious

[secular-jew]

The faux Palestinians are always appropriating someone else's history, because theirs began in 1967, with an assist from the KGB.

Here, they plagiarize the cover of a book on Armenians, and claim it's a Palestinian family in Israel.

[corepaedianews]

Humza Yousaf: Scotland gets a Muslim leader in a moment of extraordinary change for British politics

Parveen Akhtar, Aston University and Timothy Peace, University of Glasgow Humza Yousaf’s appointment as first minister of Scotland is a historic moment for the UK. It means that, for the first time in history, the country has a Hindu prime minister in Westminster (Rishi Sunak) and a Muslim first minister in Scotland. In his victory speech, Yousaf said: We should all take pride in the fact that…