Ramadan 2019: Day 19-21

Day 19 Friday

Walid visited me but we did not arrive at the same understanding. I lost my temper and said "STFU." He left my place in anger.
In the afternoon, he asked after my wellbeing. I still was not ready for reconciliation, especially given his adamant refusal to clean some areas of his living space. I went to my university and cleared some of my class materials. I met Michael and he complained about his visa application for Russia. A lot of his frustration seemed to stem from his idea that all plans are connected; in my experience, I learned that "real life" hardships imposed by others did not necessarily hinder my scholarly achievements. But perhaps Micheal will only find that part out through his own experience.

Similarly, academic support is only one aspect of success. Academic book acknowledgments sometimes over-do the whole "naming those who have supported me;" it is important to remember that even people who have little or no support from other scholars have also written stellar scholarship. Perhaps a page in a book called "those who have trolled or backstabbed me" would be an even more indicative sign of academic tenacity.

In the evening, I shared some of the electoral successes from Dalit politicians in India on faceb00k, as well as a nice Nipsey Hussle song. The post-production happened after his untimely death.

Day 20 Saturday

I finished Zumba--the first time I went to exercise in the morning, probably since I left India. I felt lightheaded afterward. On my way back, I still had to fight with Walid over when he will clean his living space. He finally conceded to clean it. He also visited me in the evening.


In between our fight, I also snapped and retweeted the following uplifting message:

@Kylo_Reine May 25

Today, May 25th, marks 19 years since the Israeli Defense forces withdrew from Lebanese land after 15 years of terrorising it, marking the end of the South Lebanon conflict (1985-2000), when South Lebanon was finally liberated. Happy Liberation Day!

N, a colleague from my university, visited the big mosque with her friend and recognized Walid from my snaps. Walid joked that he became famous because of me. I was not happy with the new prospects that might involve too much of his energy, but I have gradually realized that his new opportunities are good for both of us.

Day 21 Sunday

Our signs

I called Chiansan in the morning and discussed my concern with my role in America's society. He discussed how to view the legal profession in America anthropologically, which I found to be useful. He also told me about his discussions about property ownership with his colleagues. He found the statement "Rent is theft" not radical enough, since, in his opinion, all property is organized around the right to use violence to defend it. I was encouraged by him to attend a vigil for ICE detainees and started to make signs for both Walid and me.


Walid and I met up at Downtown Crossing. We arrived at Andrew station and walked to the crowd that led the others to protest against ICE detention. During our walk to the site where we could see the non-adult detainees, we talked to a peace activist, Glenda, who asked which church did we belong. I fumbled over the words and finally settled on something like "Muslim organization." I did not find an equivalent vocabulary for "ummah" in English at the time. She then tried to make a freedom song with the Arabic word for freedom, "hurriya," which was nice. When we arrived at the place where we could see the detainees, we made eye contact with them as well as some friendly, non-verbal gestures. We chanted some slogans and posed for some photos. I realized that I had met one of the participants, Zeba, at a previous Taha Collective event.

After the protest ended, Omar, Zeba, Walid and I visited a homeless shelter, probably one of the biggest in Boston. Walid and I had passed by this place on the way; it smelled like piss but many people seemed to like hanging out there. Such presence would have otherwise been seen as loitering by private police, such as mall security. I felt uneasy because, like Foucault said, many modern institutions resemble a prison. We were chaperoned by public health officials, who guarded us with silent amusement. Omar did his best to befriend the guards and maintained social distance from the homeless.

Upon leaving, we met Majid. He exclaimed that the timing was wrong. Omar said it is good that you showed up. We went back to the parking lot and took more pictures. Then we parted ways. Zeba was kind enough to drop us off at the South end Whole Foods. We browsed the large selection of fancy things and I ate sample cheese. Other people soon followed my footsteps in eating the samples. When we exited the store, we realized that we had also fought near this site. Yet this day we were in high spirits.

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6pm, Walid, Michael and I were on the same green line train headed for Riverside. Our classmate S  invited us to dinner at her suburban home. Despite the quiet look, she shared with us some harrowing stories of being surveilled and disturbed by unknown people. After some conversation in the living room, Walid broke his fast with tea and dates in the kitchen. We started watching S prepare dinner in the backyard.

S did not know I was pescatarian so I ended up eating some unwanted meat. Over dinner, Michael bemoaned the state of affairs of the American public, to which I usually found to be elitist. He also said that South Koreans would not grow as tall as they do now if they did not have milk introduced by the American people. I found such imperialist statements nauseating. Otherwise, the night was lovely and we chatted up till 11pm.

Both Walid and Michael appreciated her energetic dog. We had an interesting conversation on women's virtues and dress codes. Michael and S discussed the lack of funding in our department. He tried to dismiss my participation against ICE protests as "activism" that would interfere with "scholarship," a binary that only those with white privilege invoked to discredit others whose life is at risk for not speaking in defense. ("Your silence will not protect you." - Audre Lorde)
Michael also wanted to make a point about Buddhism and its reliance on "magic," which I found to be very self-centered. (His "rational" "secularism" could not explain "magic," and therefore something had to be categorized as "Buddhism" vis-a-vis "magic.") I tried to argue another point, but he found it irrelevant to his concern. After we left, Michael attempted to share impressions about S, to which I found to be a tiring and distrustful exercise. I tried my best to divert such conversations since some infighting between S and others had already occurred prior to Michael's arrival. Yet he somehow wanted to be "in," without even knowing what it means. Walid and I parted with Michael at Park St.

Ramadan 2019: Day 10-11

Day 10 Wednesday

Walid and I reflected before on the first instances when people called us "uncle" and "aunty." I was called aunty when attending college. Walid's nephew, Asar, called him "ammu Walid," which made Walid conscious about his age.

I went to the hairdresser in the afternoon. She was quite dressed up, in all black clothing and sharp cream-colored gel-nails, which helped me feel that I was also going for a "makeover." She was also quite focused on making this trip an "experience," asking a lot of well-meaning questions, and showing the end product through a dramatic build-up. She offered a lot about herself as well: unmarried (despite wearing a ring), easygoing, likes to travel to Europe and the Caribbean, of Italian descent...

I felt uncomfortable when she kept praising my straight hair in front of two other ladies of African descent and mused about the origins of this interracial hair salon. She also noticed my frequent yawning and asked if I partied last night. I felt slightly obliged to educate her on the idea of Ramadan. Instead, I gave up and offered a sheepish smile.

I waited for a bus transfer for forty minutes without cellphone service while Walid waited for me at Malden Center. The rushing cars, suburban decay, and the manicured, external facade left me feeling apocalyptic. The habitus of the well-tended gardens and individual houses can render immigrant existence as largely ahistorical and destined for such depressing, parochial pastures.

I reunited with Walid and complained about the foreignness of the aging suburban community and my out-of-place-ness. Walid was quite understanding although he was tired of waiting at the station. We recharged at the Indian take-out restaurant while I ate spicy palak paneer with a mango lassi. The restaurant played a punjabi playlist, including Punjabi Mast, which swept some of the blues away. Other days the TV played teledramas or Hindu and Sikh bhajans. I wondered if internet connectivity was more essential to diasporic people than non-diasporic people in the U.S. I realized that the cook/cashier man lost a lot of his hair over the short time I had met him. Walid thought it could be from stress.

A picture of maqlooba from Fauzia's Kitchen fun

We bought groceries and Walid helped carry it all the way back. He was excited over the $2 / pound mackerel that would be perfect for his baking plans. He broke his fast with the remaining lassi, while uttering the words prior to iftar. He made a vegetarian version of maqlooba and we both enjoyed it.


I felt ill in the evening and Walid read surat al-jumaa for me. I found the message about Jewish people eye-opening and somewhat disturbing as well. One version of the explanation is that the passage meant that if certain people think they are favored by God, they can "prove it" by desiring death since that is a sign that they are sure that they will enter heaven (jannah). But this life is attractive in its own ways, and among all the people I have met, only a few who I have seen in Asia have truly achieved that level of consciousness.


Day 11 Thursday 

The sun finally appeared after days of rain and clouds. I chatted with Amina in the morning, which helped me wake up my brain. I learned more about updates in her life while offering some of my wisdom on how love affects one's spirit, without using those words as such. Later, she messaged me and said that she finally realized that over-rationalizing prevents other sweet aspects of life.

I read Dr. Kecia Ali's interview of scholar amina wadud, and was comforted by the fact that Buddhism helped dr. wadud realize that God's form is not limited to an old white man in the clouds. She also said the following quote about her lived engagement with theology: “I don’t believe in a dead God; I believe in Al-Hayy, the Living God, and I don’t practice a dead religion.” The following passage is also quite illuminating:

I think in becoming a Muslim I intuitively knew, as did Africans who were brought here and enslaved who had Islamic backgrounds, that you are connected to the entire planet. You are not separated from Divine truth just because you’re separated from your origins. The reality of the sacred is manifest everywhere, in every religion, and even in nonreligions. I see that manifestation, so I’m no longer so estranged by the mandate to define a territory as exclusively mine, as a Muslim, as a woman, as an African American.

I felt rather hyper and full of energy. My roommates discussed their graduation plans and incoming relatives. One roommate's deadbeat boyfriend possibly cannot attend her graduation. I felt sorry for her.

I listened to a podcast about a study on migrant laborers in Beirut. In between, I called Ahmad and wondered if any successful Syrian ever wrote about his or her account of life as a businessperson in Lebanon. I finished the podcast, wrote down some thoughts, and ventured to school. I drank a cup of coffee and saw a few fellow students, some of whom were still grading tests before their graduation.

I read the "Repression in the Fieldwork" chapter in anthropologist Pascal Menoret's Joyriding in Riyadh and learned a lot of useful information. I liked his description of his as well as his bedouin informants' tufshan (emptiness and repressed life).  The level of social suspicion described by Menoret reminded me of the telfaz11 short that depicted a thief who tried to enter a shilla and pretended to be related to one of the absent friends of an all-male gathering.

I found anthropology quite personal: if you don't like the researcher, it is hard to relate to the moods described in the ethnography. In contrast, the data in history is impersonal. During that time, my friend CP texted me about the death of I. M. Pei. I told him that I also visited places of his works, and felt the loss of this great Chinese American architect. CP found it impressive that I had traveled to such places.

The Arabic translation's book cover

I returned my professor's book and printed some reading. I printed and began reading Baudrillard's Forget Foucault on the way back to Malden. I would not have been susceptible to such a title prior to this summer break, possibly because I have realized the limitations of working with the archive, truth, and genealogy. The first section discusses how capitalism has destroyed our understanding of sexuality, with finer words. He discusses how liberation can also be part of repression, which is interesting to think in terms of the social conditions of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and China.

I also found relief in the sensibilities both Walid and I share, to some extent, in regards to how to discuss taboos. While taboos are generalizable, different cultures have different reasons and manners to observe those taboos. Luckily for us, we can come to the same habitus and understanding in regards to sexual taboos. When I was young, I liked generalizable information on such subjects, since they can help navigate the terrain. Now, after marriage, the practice is about what Walid and I share as truth and does not matter what works for others. Science tries to be generalizable, but ethics are specific and interpersonal. I have yet to read works on a queer modernity's vision of ethics, that would be as informative to me as Bedouin ethics of manhood, described by Menoret.

I once lamented to Walid that there are fewer and fewer people who can think with me. Many people can think against me (as is often seen in trite academic debates). But that is perhaps I have matured and found comfort in my own thinking patterns.

I met up with Walid at Oak Grove. He just finished his first day at a pizza place. There were Iraqi kurdish coworkers, one of whom worked at the same place for seven years. The Egyptian owner found Walid's skills to be quite good. Walid did not find the food suitable for himself there and waited to eat his own maqlooba. We listened to the music of the carnatic violin. I was surprised that he could appreciate the music, which my mother cannot. He joked that he cannot change this type of suffering, so he might as well enjoy it. Then he played Black Thema's song fi bilad ay hagga, which was quite depressing.

I quoted to him a version of this quote: “A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. you’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.” - Murakami

We walked around the neighborhood around 11pm pretending to smoke. We saw the moon and Walid remembered how a sahaba said that the Prophet Muhammad was more beautiful than the moon.

On the way back, we discovered a skunk. Walid remembered my grandpa's cautionary tale of the skunk. We translated its name in Google and found out that skunks are unique to North America. Animals truly humble our ways of knowing and bring attention to our limited existence.

Walid wrote a very beautiful poem for me in our collective journal. We drank a can of soda, ate a lot of pepper jack cheese and slept. 

Towards a Non-State Centric Understanding of Iraqi History

While reading historian Eric Davis's Memories of the State, I came across his description about how the British colonizers favored a compliant chess piece, Faisel II, and his regent, Prince Abdullah among the successors for the Hashemite royal family in the mid-1930s. Davis argued that the compliant Prince saw that the British could help him stay in power, and thus allowed for more British interference in Iraq.

Book cover

This description struck me because it seemed that the state harbors a magical "seat" where the person who manages to sit in that place, would become more invincible than other political actors. Thus generations compete for power at the magical seat, which replicates the preexisting organs and arrangements of the state, including colonialism arrangements such as the British mandate. It does not seem to be that much different from a pre-French revolution "monarchy," even though it is clear that the 20th century Hashemite monarchy was anything but like it. While Davis is aware of the differences and impact of colonial designs on the Hashemite monarchy, he still presumes a rather monolithic, state-centered narrative in the unraveling of the Hashemite monarchy for his readers.


The implicit question seems to be the age-old one: How can a "modern historical account" explain how an "Oriental despotic regime" becomes a "modern state," which has institutions providing checks and balances?

But this frame seems to be exactly the problem. The frame assumes that everyone is power-hungry as rational decision makers, and thus would definitely seize the opportunity to enter the power vacuum when available. In the Iraqi case, the colonialists could presumably offer anyone that magical seat, and anyone would capitulate. Even idealists such as leftists and nationalists might squander the opportunity during the power machination process. At the same time, states are also in competition with each other, and thus, they would all have to maintain internal stability to "get ahead" in the race. In Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, scholar Vijay Prashad has also noted how "regional stability" is also a key code word for U.S. foreign policy decisions in the Middle East. In this sense, one could see how there are people who support a state-centered narrative (including a wide range of people from U.S. foreign policy heads to certain Ba'athists and Communists), and those who would differ.

Rather than state-centered narratives, I find Foucault's conception of power more nuanced in order to understand these processes. He critiques the idea of power as a magical seat in Society Must Be Defended (p13):

In the case of the classic juridical theory of power, power is regarded as a right which can be  possessed in the way one possesses a commodity, and which can therefore be transferred or alienated, either completely or partly, through  a juridical act or  an act that founds a right—it does not matter which,  for the  moment—thanks to the surrender of something or thanks to a contract. Power is the concrete  power that any individual can hold, and which he can surrender, either as  a  whole or in  part, so  as to constitute a power or a political sovereignty. 

Under the Iraqi state's eyes, "Communists," "Shias," "minorities,"and "women" are separate categories. Davis takes cue from Gramsci in his formulation of the state and anti-state resistance. While Davis's book emphasized that there had been functioning political institutions and democratic activity in Iraq in 1954 and complicates a despotic stereotype of pre-1960s Iraq, his state-centric understanding of power is still limiting and replicates these monolithic categories of women, Shias, minorities and communists. Similarly, the good-intentioned policymakers have made and would continue to make the same mistake while navigating through ethnic loyalties and political affiliations of Iraq if they continue to view society from a state-centric vantage point.

Rather than staring at the magical seat, we should pay more attention to where the power projects itself toward and how it is embodied. Foucault also admits that there are not so many methods outside of this model to understand power. One can read more about that in his lectures. While recognizing the Iraqi Left-leaning intellectuals' enormous contribution in historicizing sectarianism, documenting "voices from below" and analyzing class formation in Iraq, I would also like to see more Foucauldian or non-state-centric analyses of Iraqi history.

Overall, the mainland Chinese academia also suffers from obsession with state-centric narratives. They are also using the same paradigms to understand the outside world as well. That is why I find studies on the effects of colonialism so curative to the current academic obsession. As Timothy Mitchell as written in 1991 in the article "The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics," "Political subjects and their modes of resistance are formed as much within the organizational terrain we call the state, rather than in some wholly exterior social space." This understanding would also become beneficial to critiquing and resisting the communist government: currently many dissidents cannot formulate a strong response to the assumption that "without the communist government, China will surely become chaotic." This assumption similarly uses the overempowering ideal of a sovereign that keeps things in check: Without that sovereign, any opportunist will seize the magical seat. To have any meaningful resistance against the increasingly prevelant communist state, dissidents and resisters have to undo this understanding of the magical seat.