themes in the art and drag performances of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto / Faluda Islam

 Artist and memory activist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Jr. created a drag persona to address issues of Islamophobia and homophobia in the world. Drag is ​​a performance

of gender that parody gender norms could shatter the illusion that there are only two genders – man and woman – and lead to a proliferation of genders; or rather to a recognition of, and ability to speak about, the already existing great diversity of genders, sexualities, bodies and pleasures (Evans and Williams, 2013).

 

In an interview, Zulfikar, also known as Zulfi, discussed his drag persona “Faluda Islam”: “She is a zombie, she was resurrected through Wi-Fi technology and the way she died was in the future queer revolution,” Zulfi explained. “She’s sort of an oracle… she’s able to give an insight into [the] past, present and future” (Burke, 2018). Faluda disrupts the binaries of organic-machine, male-female, even life-death with each performance as a queer Muslim icon.

Zulfikar Jr. is named after his late ancestor Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who was a prominent politician and leader of the People’s Party in Pakistan. In a way that subverts heteronormative expectations of Zulfi, he bravely entered the international art world with pieces that address his cultural background and extended the limits of the name in creating a drag persona. Zulfi recalled his father, Murtaza Bhutto’s assasination, when discussing this persona, and the themes he wishes to explore: “I talk about injustice, who gets the right to live or die, who is the decider of that,” says Zulfi. “War comes up, aspects of martyrdom come up, Islamophobia comes up.” (Burke, 2018) In my understanding, he is addressing the existential weight of being born a male in a Shi’a family and the expectations of martyrdom of such a gender identity. This responsibility was heightened during the Iran-Iraq war that started in the late 1980s when mostly Shi’a men as well as children in Iran fought their enemy combatants in Iraq.

Zulfi explained his ideas in an interview with Reconstructed Mag in May, 2020:

Why are we forced to make our children and families martyrs? What are the forces against us that make us go into these spaces that end in death? The drag character Faluda Islam questions this. The character is my attempt to look at revolution through a high femme lens (Bhutto, 2020).

 

Digitisation allows for “humans to mobilise memories that cut across the individual and the collective, the institutional and the corporate, the local and the global in ways that disrupt conventional binaries of the public and private, of the body and other” (Reading, 2016). Faluda exists digitally and in performances, disrupting the idea that a “man” protects “his women.” Faluda’s martyrdom and reincarnation as a Zombie may have been for all queer individuals, rather than for prolonging a heterosexual mode of reprdocution. Faluda as a Zombie, in Zulfi’s intention, also remembers the anti-imperialist slave rebellions in Haiti, where Zombies were an esoteric instrument to defeat the white settler-enslavers.

As a multidisciplinary artist, Zulfi’s other conventional artworks likewise explore the Shi’a Muslim’s conundrum of remembering assaults in Islamic history through lamenting the past, while other events celebrate masculinity as strength. As an artist, Zulfi highlights the inherent queerness of such an identity, despite the state’s priority to limit the identity as straight and one-dimensional. In critiquing the national imagery of a strong man, Zulfi said in an interview, in the context of his textile artwork series “Mussalman Muscleman”: “What for me is masculinity? It's softness” (Bhutto, 2017). In his works of a fictitious queer rebellion, he uses imageries of “brown and black body by creating glamorous queered future guerrilla fighters who do not fit neatly into categories of gender, race, faith, threat or desirable subject.” The works sought “to challenge the shifting borders between terrorist and freedom fighter as seen and named by the Anglo-Saxon world” (Bhutto, 2019). Memory, gender and technology are the themes explored by Bhutto’s works and the tools which allow him to express his ideas to a largely heteronormative public.

 

 

 

One of his exhibits

In “Future Faithful: Islamic Experiments in Space Exploration and Posthumanism” in 2021 at the Bass & Reiner gallery in San Francisco, U.S., Zulfi's artworks incorporate imagery of the calf as a reference to the second chapter in the Holy Quran, “The Heifer.”

 

 

“mustaq-bel 2,” 2019. By Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

Zulfi’s artworks reference traditional architecture and mythology. The calf has appeared prior as a sacrificial motif in Abrahamic traditions. This metaphoric practice has been substituted by the sheep or lamb in some ritual instances out of respect for others who found the sacrifice of the cow offensive, such as in India and Pakistan. In Sher Shah, Pakistan, a Shi’a saint’s shrine has been used by pious locals both as a shrine for fulfilling human prayers and a cow sanctuary, which demonstrates the power of cultural syncretism in the subcontinent (Khalid, 2016).  The popular press and general population in South Asia interpret spaces like shrines (dargah) as examples of tolerance, since both Hindus and Muslims participate in worship and place requests to the saint of the shrine. They burn incense (loban) and consequently experience therapeutic convulsions against evil spirits that possess them (haziri) (Bellamy, 2011). Sometimes they are places of refuge and sources of cures to illnesses and evil spirits, while other times they are Gedächtnisraum (memory spaces). The usages of these spaces have been altered by modernity, as witnessed by the declining numbers of cows at the Sher Shah shrine.

The textile works by Zulfi were “created to honor real and imagined queer guerrilla fighters from Shiite Muslim traditions of martyr and saint veneration” (Bass & Reiner, 2021). More than just remembering a scar from a millennium-old feud, Muharram rituals as well as Zulfi’s artworks both symbolize a rejection of illegitimate state authority, which many Shi‘as also regard as a key feature of their faith (Freitag, 1989). In Zulfi’s praxis, he is directly addressing wealth inequality of the present.

The evolution of Muharram rituals in South Asia from a religious ritual to an “urban ritual” can be observed from the level of urban negotiation among the multi religious participants (Nejad, 2015). The processions are not limited to one sect or codified in one practice and often have multiple meanings. Different communities establish their own tazia, (also spelled as ta‘ziyah and ta‘ziyeh) which symbolically represents martyrs’ tombs, and carry it to the area that symbolizes the battlefield of Karbala. Zulfi’s work of “Mercy 258 رحیم ۲۵۸” paid tribute to such a practice; his symbolic Karbala was the art gallery of his exhibition.

 

 

 

Mercy 258 رحیم ۲۵۸. by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Screen print on muslin, chiffon and raw silk, inkjet print on silk, various trimming and plastic sequins. 2020, 148 x 28 in

 

In conclusion, this essay has explored the drag persona Faluda Islam, along with other works by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to demonstrate the potency of memory in his artwork. As an activist addressing Islamophobia and homophobia, Zulfi uses both embodied performances, audiovisual recordings, as well as hand sewn textiles in his ongoing works. Memory both informs the work and energizes the viewers who share part of the knowledge systems and geographies as Zulfikar’s upbringing. The drag zombie Faluda Islam interrogated on the idea that gender is a learned memory that is hard to alter or evolve; rather, the gender practices may or may not survive a future apocalypse. Memory is both the medium and the message.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Bass & Reiner. 2021. Future Faithful — Bass & Reiner. [online] Available at: <https://bassandreiner.com/zulfi> [Accessed 21 December 2021].

 

Bellamy, C., 2011. The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place. University of California Press. 33.

 

Bhutto, Z., 2020. Live Interview with Reconstructed Mag.

 

—----------., 2019. [online] Praxis Center. Available at: <https://kzoo.edu/praxis/artists/zulfikar-ali-bhutto/> [Accessed 21 December 2021].

 

—----------. 2017. [online] The Tumeric Project. Available at: <youtube.com/watch?v=bc8VtrHA8QE> [Accessed 21 December 2021].

 

Burke, S., 2018. Meet Faluda Islam, the Muslim Drag Queen From the Future. [online] Vice.com. Available at: <https://www.vice.com/en/article/7xjbgb/muslim-drag-queen-faluda-islam-zulfikar-ali-bhutto-queerly-beloved> [Accessed 21 December 2021].

 

Evans, M. and Williams, C., 2013. Gender. Routledge.

 

Freitag, S., 1989. Collective Action and Community. Berkeley: University of California Press. 251.

 

Khalid, H., 2016. The changing fate of a Muslim shrine where cows are sacred. [online] The Caravan. Available at: <https://caravanmagazine.in/lede/thinning-the-herd> [Accessed 21 December 2021].

 

Nejad, R. M. 2015. "Urban Margins, A Refuge For Muharram Processions In Bombay: Towards An Idea Of Cultural Resilience". Südasien-Chronik 5. 341.

 

Reading, A. 2016. Gender and Memory in the Globital Age. Palgrave MacMillan.

Slavery and Patriarchy in South Asian Islam and Beyond

 The book Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi engages with important aspects of intercultural relations, both horizontally and vertically in the current day-and-age. The significant sites of South Asia are visited through ethnographies. Human-jinn relations at popular ruins such as Firoz Shah Kotla tell us of “Islam as an ethical inheritance and not a religious identity, the inheritance of a premodern past shared by Muslims and non-Muslims.” Yet this inheritance also involves kinship, which has been profoundly shaped by religious identity and the more unsavory aspects of humanity, such as slavery.

Sometimes the textual evidence is a bit scant, which leads to strenuous conclusions, such as the uncritical citation of the work of Dr. Asma Barlas (2002). Barlas claimed that the Qur'an is egalitarian and anti-patriarchal. Dr. Taneja also entertains this notion by quoting the parts where Barlas notes that the Prophet Muhammad was not the father to any men but a daughter. The life of the Prophet happened as such, and some Muslims use the narratives to productively help them understand the text in their own times. (The gender question has again taken the mainstream news with the Taliban preventing women from attending schools in 2021.)

I also accepted the genealogy of Muhammad--noble father to a noble daughter-- as suitably prescriptive in modern times for many years, until I read David S. Powers' book Muḥammad Is Not the Father of Any of Your Men: The Making of the Last Prophet. In the book, Powers showed that the Muhammad's adopted son, Zayd, was disowned. Zayd's recorded response to Muhammad's renunciation that he is not his son was affirmative: 

"I am Zayd bin Haritha (زَيْد ٱبْن حَارِثَة)‎," 

"Haritha" being his birth father's name. Readers also learn in Powers' book that Zayd was a former slave. It is interesting that the question of paternity continue to haunt the lives of ex-slaves even to this day. If Zayd was born during Malcom X's time, perhaps he would have renamed himself as Zayd X. And perhaps his response to the renunciation would have been different if his circumstances were different. But Zayd still had several progeny from his marriages with many wives. So the patriarchal genealogy continues through bin Haritha--despite the fact that Zayd chose to recover his name before enslavement after his adopted father Muhammad renounced their relationship, which was crucial to freeing him from slavery. Luckily for Zayd, the renunciation did not subjugate him to slavery again. If I did not read Powers' book, I would continue to grapple with Barlas' argument and the baffling extent to which patriarchal relations exist throughout the Muslim world. While some men are choosing to use their kunya with their daughters' names as a progressive move now, daughters continue to be identified within their patriline, as a person of a Muslim background noted in her essay for Sumou mag. https://www.sumoumag.com/read/names

"Last year, I decided to get my maternal lineage tattooed on my right arm—and through that, I will carry with me four generations of strong women who have given life to that tree but whose names, voices, and histories have been brushed away and made invisible. But I see you, now everyone sees you, and you will never be forgotten." 

- Mneera

It is also interesting that in South Asia where caste is usually identifiable with one's last name, the practice of using one's father's name as a last name can replace the caste hierarchy of last names with a gendered hierarchy. This is usually done by some South Asian Muslims who converted in the past two hundred years. "Khan," once a marker of Mongol heritage, has been sufficiently localized into a South Asian patriarchal and casteist identity.

According to the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization, this is the first Mongol Khanate coin that bears the name of Allah, a significant step for the Islamization of Asia--

Dirham - "Ilkhan" Hulagu Khan

© Altaycoin

Obverse

La ilah illa allah

muhammad rasul allah

salla allah 'alayhi

Reverse

Qaan
al-a'zam
mongke qaan
hulagu
khan

 In conclusion, I am slightly disappointed with the sweeping idealizations in this otherwise rich book by Dr. Taneja. If we are to inherit the rich past, it must be done with caution since much of the past is entangled with relations of slavery.

Alia Bhatt in Raazi, Kalank, and Nationhood Anxieties in Bollywood, 2020

Alia Bhatt, the Bollywood actress and “It Girl” known for her ingénue face and dashing style is known for portraying the current struggles of middle class South Asian women. She does not shy away from potentially controversial social issues such as inter-caste dating in 2 States (2014) and seeking treatment for one’s mental illness in Dear Zindagi (2016). She has recently taken upon more historical roles in two well-known films, Raazi (2018) and Kalank (2019); the former became the highest grossing Bollywood film to feature a female protagonist. Both films highlighted the importance of an Indian woman’s contribution towards a collective sense of Indian nationhood. The plots of the films demarcated the gender as well as social boundaries between “Indians” and “others.” While her characters do not explicitly refer to present Indian politics, the structure of the female lead’s love interest in these two Bollywood films successfully addressed anxieties surrounding the nation-state from the 1930s to 1970s.

The two films’ plot revolved around different junctures in South Asian history, one from 1930s to the 1950s, the other covering the period from the mid-1960s to 1971, yet allude to the same anxieties surrounding the “foreign Muslim” of the present. I will discuss the two films chronologically and then move on to comparing both films. Both films have female-centric narratives, which invites audiences to participate in complicated performances of heterosexuality. While moments of the film expose the inner workings of heterosexuality, the endings inevitably affirm the heterosexual female as well as her life choices. In both instances, Alia Bhatt’s characters explorations of her gender roles coincide with the image of the liberal Indian nation-state.

In Kalank (2019), Alia Bhatt plays the newly-wed wife as both a favor for her father’s family friend as well as her family interests in a pre-Partition city. The first wife of a family heir asked Alia Bhatt’s character to be the new wife, due to the first wife’s terminal disease. The film titled which means “blemish,” focused on Alia Bhatt’s character’s purity despite being denied conjugal love (both in as well as outside the bedroom) by her husband, who focused on his first wife. 

Alia Bhatt’s character narrates this story decades later for a historian who wants to recover Partition stories, which has become a recent genre within historical research. The function of print is integral to reconstructing her romantic and “innocent” self, since she also explores the city’s public space as an educated daughter-in-law working for her family’s newspaper. Her gendered innocence is crucial to vindicate “India” from responsibility for partition as well as the newspaper’s uncommitted stance to the politics of their content. An all-male and religiously diverse boardroom discussed heatedly the ads, including those that advertised alcohol, which at times aroused religious sentiments. Alia Bhatt’s character argued from the boardroom’s doorstep that female products could potentially save the day, adding her voice to the newspaper’s future, without showing any explicit “communal” agenda.

In contrast, the film showed that the angry Muslim laborers are first and foremost key to locating “communal” attitudes, a popular trope in history and reports on Partition from post-Partition India. The Muslim illegitimate son, who has little interest in organized politics, attempts to establish a liaison with her to revenge the father who did not give him his due respect. The mother, courtesan, provides a queer space for Alia Bhatt’s character to experience pleasure beyond the domestic realm and train her singing voice. There is a moment of homosocial intimacy between her two love interests at a similarly queer space: the river bank. Under the moonlight, they open up to the perceived stranger about family and love matters, both of immense consequence. Beyond the “serious” boardroom, another kind of inter-religious bonhomie can be established over affections suppressed during the day. 

In the climatic ending, while attempting to board the train to “India” under the heat of the moment, her illicit love interest unfortunately died under the hands of the “communal” Muslims. Alia Bhatt’s character’s innocence in regards to the political aspect of the affair continued over the recorded oral testimonies which will live beyond her own lifetime. While she focused on her personal romantic sentiments, the liberal destination of the India free of “communal Muslims” as a political state is ensured, especially given that her loyalty to her Hindu husband is also preserved. Both endings were crucial to her success as a wife in post-Partition India: she could not be redeemed as an innocent citizen of the new Republic if she either succumbed to the consummation of extramarital love or to communal enmity. The pity of partition was resolved by her ability to articulate through the new state’s language and account for her fallen love’s death, metaphorically and literally. She focused mainly on interpreting her own acts of wifehood-transgressions rather than the broader political anxieties of the 1940s town (qasbah). Yet notably, the patriarch of her family, her husband, is absent during her recounts with the journalist, ensuring a sense of “objectivity” from the female subject. Yet even though the setting is intimate and understanding, Alia Bhatt’s character is aware of the public judgment in the ending’s conclusion, an off-screen voice asked that the people (audience included) can judge whether her story involved a blemish (kalank) or not. But clearly, the question and stake of her purity became connected to the idea of India’s liberalism of the 21st century through the film’s narrative arc.

In the film Raazi, Alia Bhatt’s character is more complex, given her multiple loyalties to the Indian state, to Kashmir’s future, and to her own religious piety. She succeeds her father’s role as a spy for India’s mission, which is poorly defined, but still sustained through spy-centric plot twists. Like her character in Kalank, Alia Bhatt’s character in Raazi similarly outlined the weight of respectability for any daughter-in-law in any middle class South Asian household. The gendered innocence helped her evade most suspicions of espionage, yet it could be argued that this requirement for authenticity and piety on screen is a uniquely post-9/11 phenomena for Indian Muslims. The muhajir servant of the Pakistani military family is the only one suspicious of her “innocence,” since she often usurped his responsibilities while demonstrating loyalty and usefulness within the domestic sphere. It is significant that she ends his life when he discovered her spy identity outside the domestic sphere. 

Soon after Alia Bhatt’s character’s exceptional and murderous act, she frantically searched for her own cover; the thrill of the audience overlaps with the gendered anxiety that the wife of a respectable should not ventures outside her domestic realm. Interestingly, nationalist leader Mohandas Gandhi once argued that ‘Western Civilization’ and capital displace women from their homes into the productive sphere. Alia Bhatt’s character in Raazi similarly has been displaced through her commitment to India’s intelligence gathering. Yet this revolting act by Alia Bhatt’s character of murdering of fellow Muslim could be read as nationalist and thus exorable to prevent imminent war between India and Pakistan. It is interesting to think about how the American TV series Homeland, which also starred a female lead might have influenced the plotline and character development of Raazi.

Alia Bhatt’s character’s acceptance (which is also the meaning of the title, Raazi) as a daughter-in-law is connected to Pakistan elite’s efforts to project their image of themselves as upper-caste sharif persons with respectable families. The Pakistani’s state project consists of promoting their pious self-image at times, which often occurred at the expense of religious minorities and non-sharif citizens. Yet the cinematic subversion of such a publicity project occurred when Alia Bhatt’s character used her Islamic duties, such as prayer, as her cover during her espionage-related activities. She often prayed and completed household tasks during her outings for communicating with her Indian intelligence superiors at the bazaar. Such acts also remind the audience of the potentially unfaithful wife of Kalank who used female-specific tasks as a “cover” to seek out her lover towards the middle of the film. Both films seem to leave the question to their audience: does Alia Bhatt’s loyalty as a wife matter more or does the commitment to the national cause trump “domestic” obligations? Such questions posed by the films are very poignant given the contemporary context: in India, certain Hindutva groups have initiated movements such as ghar wapsi in which women married to non-Hindus are encouraged to “return home” to the fold of Hinduism. The agency demonstrated by Alia Bhatt’s character Sehmat in Raazi contrasts to the thousands of repressed voices of sexual violence survivors against crimes that occurred during the War of 1971, incidentally where the film ends. The editing and promotional process of the film in its Youtube trailer that highlighted the agony of Alia Bhatt lying on the bed, seemed to acknowledge the tensions of sexuality and consent South Asian women face from the beginnings of nationhood to this day.

Ramadan 2019: Day 8-9

Day 8, Monday

We spent the morning browsing at potential domestic appliances for our future house, such as blenders. Walid knows the bougie knowledge of making $10 acai bowls and I am quite intrigued.

picture from allevents.in

Browsing consumer goods is a very nice nesting activity. Walid is very careful when it comes to such matters, whereas I am more impulsive. He also wanted to engage in sketches of the future, possibly because of the rather disappointing present. He lives with four other roommates and they have formed their social circle already. They share a rice cooker. Walid pondered whether the Chinese landowner owned the cooker, which would mean that he could also use it. I reasoned that the rice cooker is jointly owned by the roommates since the landlord could not possibly anticipate what the ("ethnic") dietary needs of his future tenants would be. Walid concurred, yet he still wanted to use the cooker. I said it is much easier if he would just buy his own. (But these are just theories since our information is not very complete.)

He also thought about the possible redundant microwave. I reasoned that the microwave might be useful when we babysit for other future friends. While such concerns of the future have yet to materialize in real life, the theme of diets and health enter again and again in our food-conscious world. My further interest is also whether intercaste "pollutions" also apply to microwaved food... (Because if a lower caste prepares a certain food and the upper caste eats, some upper castes consider that food to be polluting.... but I learned about the version that presumes an India without a microwave. So I wonder what if a lower caste prepared food with the microwave? This is also theorizing because I also know upper caste men who eat at any outside eatery.)

At this juncture, American Islamic discourse is also keen on pivoting Ramadan as a diet-conscious regimen. "It is healthy to fast," so the talking points go. I complained to Ahmad the other day that I found such blatantly market-oriented packaging quite contrary to the point. He agreed with me. A future academic paper can write on this subject.

After meditation, I realized we ran low on time. I scanned some noted pages from my books. We proceeded hurriedly to my school for book returns. We carried around 15 books and dumped them unceremoniously. I haven't finished the extraction of information (on Arab modernism) from these books. Still, I was relieved to hide them from my sight until I am ready to revisit them again. I sat lackluster at the 1000-piece puzzle station while the last remaining finals warriors slaved entered the library to finish their work. I joked that I could destroy the puzzle with end-of-semester rage. Graduating students posed next to the blossoming flowers and benches that no one sat on usually. I jibed that no wonder those benches were built...

We both went to Assembly for my second spa session. The concept of aging has formally entered my mind, perhaps exacerbated by the (ableist) academic timeline. Afterward, the rain began to fall. Walid left for iftar at the neighborhood mosque. This evening, the imam led a curing session for a young boy, possibly suffering from the manifestation of a physical/mental illness. The rest of the (all-male) congregation read surahs from the Holy Quran, since the jinn could leave from the boy's body and enter anyone else's.

In the evening, I chatted briefly with my friend Subhash, who has arrived in China for the first time. He posted some beautiful pictures of his yoga practice in the heart of Shenzhen. Still, he seems to be experiencing culture shock and seeks to alleviate it by talking with me. I am myself suffering from culture shock and the dizzying effects of racial animosity in Boston in my second year, and I have very little to offer him in terms of how to ground oneself in a foreign land.

I also chatted with Amina over Wechat about my recent interest in the Chinese classic Rulin Waizhuan and how it related to current politics. Amina was more keen on sharing her new thoughts based on her romantic encounter with a person from the past. She feels very nostalgic yet tends to over-rationalize her romantic decisions. I, on the other hand, feel no compulsion to rationalize unless I have to explain to often undeserving interlocuters curious about my life.


Day 9, Tuesday, Walid's birthday

Walid's friend Ahmed drove him around the Boston area for jobs. An owner of a pizzeria worried if Walid would learn all the techniques and leave. I joked that a lot of Egyptian food, which Walid has experience in making, requires more techniques than a mere pizza. The making of fateer, for example, requires much more intricate handling. Walid's job interviewers also tested his religiosity by offering him food. After finding out that Walid is fasting, the would wish him Ramadan kareem.

We met up at Wellington and headed to C0stco for the first time. Walid's progress in Hindustani is improving, as he watched more language videos provided by a hijabi Youtube teacher. He enjoyed the prospect of sharing our expenses since it signals a move toward a shared household. I also felt excited over this trip for the whole day. I asked if he wanted to pose next to the C0stco flowers for his birthday. He just took a selfie with me and said that I am more beautiful than the flowers.

On the way back, our Lyft driver played beautiful Nigerian music. I shared some in my music group as well. I ate a bowl of the instant shrimp wonton and added some capers. Walid snapped a photo of me and sent it to my mom, joking about himself about how he can only watch me eat.

English version of the translation

Walid went to break his fast at the Malden Islamic center while I read a book by Qiu Miaojin (邱妙津) from the Public Library. She was the first lesbian author who committed suicide when she was 26, which is also my current age. I enjoyed seeing her handwriting of Chinese characters printed in between the chapters. She suffered from studying abroad and a lot of her ideas of art come from Western forms and definitions. Unfortunately, in my opinion, she did not have the chance to truly experience art forms without a large degree of Western influences, which impeded her ability to create art according to her high expectations. Western definitions of what is "political" also haunt her own identity--she denies that the word "homosexual" has meaning beyond a political identity. Yet does that mean that queer politics did not exist before the arrival of Western science? (which sought to define the homosexual as a medical subject...) Her writings are interesting yet reveal her age and obsessions with the western novel as well, often too vaguely masculinist and dependent on the reader's proper aesthetic engagement, without a clear ethical grounding.

french version of the translation

While I read the book at Dunkin Donuts, a white female "customer" was trying to pick a fight with the Nepali cashiers. Luckily they were very strong and did not heed to the "customer's" aggressive baiting. "I'm going to call customer service and report this Dunkin Donuts!" I focused on the warmth of my small coffee. Soon the tension abated. I joked with Walid on the way back that this is what I got for choosing the "community" coffee spot as opposed to the nearby Chinese coffee establishments, which would have much less commotion. I also told Walid that he can also make great art--the kind that Miaojin aspired to create--and that he just needed more courage and time. He also mused on this subject. On that note, I also shared that Ahmad sent me an Arabic poem recently, and we planned to read it together.

We cooked at home, ate Tiramisu, sang the birthday song in Arabic. During midnight, we watched The Avengers: Infinity war, which caused some unwanted nightmares again...

How to Love an Arab in 2018

"Here is the medicine: That though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also."
- Alice Walker, in the Foreword to Zora Neale Hurston’s Baracoon

Before Jamal Khashoggi's death, before Saudi's involvement with Lebanon's politics and Nasrallah's threat of retaliation, before the surge of #MeToo news alerts, I was in love with an Arab student from Jizan. It happened during one of my first weeks in New England. I already felt like I didn't belong here. His attention and love was one comforting aspect of my otherwise dreary life. We had a brief moment of political solidarity when we drove to his apartment one night. He said that Saudi students rarely used their opportunity in the US to make money on the side, even though there are plenty of other students on F1 visas who work within the gray area. He said that this was also common among Chinese students he knew, and he surmised that it was probably because both governments were very strict and created law-abiding cultures in China and Saudi Arabia. I was envigorated by this observation of love and appreciated this rather somber connection with him.

Soon our differences emerged, particularly on the question of Saudi's involvement with Lebanon's politics, Saudi's disproportionate war with Yemen, as well as our interpretations of Islamic culture. I wrote about this in another earlier post titled Solidarity, Dissimulation, and Making Space. He did not wish to continue to talk with me after a fallout in regards to our differences. Sometimes I would still check his social media. He was home for the summer and once visited the tomb of one former caliph in the desert. It was quite an interesting homecoming for a diasporic Muslim whose identity shifted through time and space.

In wake of Khashoggi's death, I am sure he and I would have differences in our political analysis of the events. But making sense of events "abroad" and away from "home" is always a complicated affair. Especially when the English news media often promotes certain kinds of narratives over others. I was especially moved by the detail that Khashoggi was living in Turkey, which is often viewed by minorities in certain parts of the Arab world as a relatively neutral ground vis-a-vis the "West." Given the Turkish state's incompetency in stopping the Saudi bodyguard from moving Khashoggi's body onto a private plane in Istanbul, the tragedy made me think more about my understandings of Turkey, much more so than Saudi Arabia. I am affected by this tragedy in the way that I also believe in similar values as Jamal Khashoggi and I too wish a better future for Saudi Arabi and the Gulf. While I never knew about his work prior to his gruesome death, I am further connected on a second level to this story--I started as a journalist from the non-West, and often have to struggle against totalizing narratives of the lack of free speech in China. The more I reflect on the matters of the world, the more complex "free speech" becomes. Yet those who do not recognize the complexity often reduce the subjectivities of non-Westerners to either a pro-liberal or anti-liberal. I recognize the humanity of Saudis as well as anyone residing in the Gulf. They inhabit a fertile ground for creativity, and will continue to connect with one another and re-imagine a future beyond what the powerful have dictated for them. I believe in them as I believe in my own potential.

Here are some insighful thoughts on the Khashoggi tragedy I read from Twitter-- 

Kim Ghattas‏Verified account @BBCKimGhattas Oct 21

My thoughts are with the millions of young Saudis for whom Jamal Khashoggi wished a better future and who may be wondering what lies in store for their country, my thoughts are with the millions of Iranians, Syrians, Egyptians... all the people of this region. We deserve better.

@IbnMaghrebi

The Khashgoggi story has a human element that is disturbing and macabre. However it points and illustrates a wider point about Saudi society and culture. I've lived in the Kingdom for many years - not that makes me an authority by any stretch of the imagination》》1:41 AM - 22 Oct 2018

Saudi society and culture in Riyadh is deeply toxic. Anecdotally people will say that the people of the Eastern province and Jeddah are hospitable kind and more open but Riyadh is a different story altogether. Going beyond the govt. Saudi society is hopelessly dysfunctional

More... To throw the Salafi school under the bus for the hopeless state of Saudi society is unfair. The problem is inextricably linked to wealth and the corrosive effects of it on a society that merely a few decades ago was a Bedouin backwater

Muslims in the West have known this for many years. There are bigger, wiser and better people who can point to the mortal danger the Saudis and their allies pose. Our options are simple but difficult to implement - we require financial independence and autonomy

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Source: https://www.thevintagearab.com/post/179330775839

During this year I have also reflected on previous notions of feminine identity. I have had tense relations with many female relatives in my earlier life. I have gradually learned to stop fighting and love women in a different way. While following various people from the Gulf on social media, I realized that when men are the public faces of a community, one learns to see and feel attached to their female relatives regardless of whether or not meeting their relatives in person. Because kinship does not necessarily entail social contact. There are many ways to express and receive love beyond becoming in contact. Affection and care received by men--the public face--can be connected and transferred to the womenfolk through ways other than language or images. Even though it is assumed that everyone who can access internet would create a social media account, these gendered silences are also important for me personally as I grow into my public persona of an academic.

Being part of the diaspora in the U.S., one gains a certain distance from the usual sectarian logics. There can be space for dialogue if one can see how justice is impossible without love. While there is disproportionate amount of violence in the news, I hope for the possibility for reconciliation. Within this context, I also want to share the news with my readers that I am engaged to my future husband, Walid Anbar. We both believe in the values of interfaith dialogue, love, and understanding. Insha'allah we will be part of this ongoing process of creating such spaces in the U.S.

Social Relations and Sexual Assault

Yesterday a scholar came from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst to speak on her research work on sex workers of Bombay. Her main concern is that most legal and policy discourses do not take into account the differences in terms they use and the terms the sex workers use. For example, a daily wage laborer who may have been engaging in sex work as well would use the term majburi to describe her undesirable circumstances. A Dalit man Muku also used the same word majburi for moving after a drought in his Maharastrian village. This term is best translated as having to do something under constraint, but even that for the scholar is unsatisfactory and disempowering. Policymakers would usually use the words like "forced" for majburi, e.g., someone was forced to engage in sex work. She finds that this translation reduces the legitimacy of their means of liveligood, which includes sex work. She also finds issue with the liberal paradigm of sex as individual expression and, rather than something socially mediated. She also proposed that there is a strong overlap of sexual labor and daily wage labor for these lower-classed, lower-caste people. She brings up the issue of caste, such as hijras are not only a community seen in a sexually charged manner, but also through caste lenses; but I found the caste issue to have been more of an auxiliary to the talk as a whole. I would have been more keen on understanding how caste is reflected in such an urban sexual economy. The talk garnered a lot of attention and much discussion. Most questions were thinking about how one could link the ethnography with the center questions. I also asked a question about how to think about these undisciplined sexualities in general, since intercaste marriages in India are also punished for breaching the dominant regulation of a casteist sexual economy. I did not get a satisfactory answer.

This post will be discussing another incident related to the idea of ambiguity and sexual relations bounded by social processes. I was exchanging in Delhi at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2015. I befriended A.S. at the Brahmaputra Hostel, where I went to eat most of the time. Like most people staying at this Hostel, he was a PhD student. Towards the end of the semester, I had the opportunity to travel with him to Gwalior. We stayed overnight in separate accommodations. It was a nice trip overall, with some hiccups in between. We had to wait for several hours due to some planning errors outside of the Gwalior Fort. During this time he mentioned to me about a Lucknow girl who he claimed to be madly in love with. He said that she did not love him as much. We even had beers in a restaurant, which is rather unusual given the relatively conservative environment of the city. At the train station, I bought the memoir Lucknow Boy written by Vinod Mehta, while A.S. continued to reminisce about “his” Lucknow girl. We also played the game of Antakshari (a South Asian spoken parlor game played with song verses) while waiting in the train station. We arrived in Delhi around 5AM, and it was relatively cold. He suggested for me to stay at his hostel for some time, but I refused. We remained on good terms afterwards. I also hosted my birthday party in December in his room, in which he was invited. After the party, he expressed interest in one of my friends who attended as well, to which I downplayed since I thought they would probably not be suitable as a couple. 

A month later I finished my semester. He helped me handle some of my luggage on the last day before I returned to Germany in 2016. He received the opportunity to exchange on scholarship in an Eastern European country, and left for said country in March, but we did not meet. 

Last year, September 27th, I was in the U.S. and recounted the memories of traveling in Gwalior to another friend of mine on Wechat. Then coincidentally, some news about A.S. popped up on my facebook timeline. It was a link reporting sexual assault charges against him. The victim said that he promised he would marry her, which he did not. I automatically assumed that this was the Lucknow girl he used to speak so often about (I was wrong. I searched for this news again today, which has been either cleaned from Google or swamped by other more controversial cases of sexual assault that have since been unfolding. But I did manage to find a link to a news report and in that report, it is said that this girl studied at Delhi University. Only then did I realize I had wrongly assumed the identity of the victim for the nine months.). An Eastern European friend of A.S. had shared the link and defended A.S. against the news. The friend personally vouched that A.S. is a good person and would never do such a thing. This was during the time when JNU had experienced much attack from a biased news media, so I was very skeptical of this report and defensive as well. I discussed this issue with my mom in the same manner and stressed that perhaps it was because of his changed circumstances that severely affected his relation with the Lucknow girl, and this claim was being subsequently being made against him.

My mom thought that such incidents often happen under an environment where people become upward mobile in a short period of time. According to her analysis, the woman would want to share some glory with the successful man who had the ability to go abroad. When she does not get what she wants, she resorts to claims of sexual assault or rape. My mother thought that when it comes down to cases of sexual assault, it is a game of he-said, she-said: the outcome largely depends on the clout of each party involved. If the man has more social and legal resources, then the girl would usually “lose,” regardless of what actually happened. 

The matter stayed in my mind for some time and I gradually forgot about it. When I visited JNU again this year in March, I was again confronted with more details about this case. I met up with Sardarji, who is an affable and popular guard at the university and a true friend of mine. He had met A.S. on two separate occasions with me as well. A.S. and I were once invited to eat handmade makki ki roti (unleavened Punjabi bread made from corn flour) at Sardarji’s home across the road from the University. We had a really good time eating and talking about how the University is often a social force of its own that defends its turf against the other corrupt and elite groups of Delhi, including those that have ties with the state. The other time was when Sardarji attended the birthday party hosted in A.S.’s room.



When Sardarji and I met, I felt like there was much to discuss since we do not have very good ways of communication when we are in different countries. We spoke in Hindi. I prefer to talk in Hindu with someone in person rather than on the phone, because there would be more visual cues for me to understand. Sardarji thought that the case of A.S. was one of the important things to be discussed with me, since we were friends. He asked me if I knew about the case. I said yes, I had read about it, and I was very shocked about the situation. He said he was shocked as well, since A.S. seemed to have been such an innocent boy (sada). We both agreed that A.S. seemed innocent. Sardarji gave me more details which he witnessed on the night of the police raid after the FIR was filed: the policemen stormed Brahmaputra hostel and one even slapped A.S. The moral accusations hurled at A.S. that night by various agents of the law seemed to be more emotionally charged than the actual “crime”: he was married at home and was having relations with more than one girl who were not his wife. Sardarji also seemed to be more appalled by the promiscuity rather than the rape. It is very ironic that the last time all three of us bonded, Sardarji, A.S. and I were discussing about the acts that rebelled against the state (in Hindi): JNU students had been defending one JNU female student who had been harassed by a Delhi elite who was the son of some politician. The police came to arrest students and it was a total chaotic clash. This time, for Sardarji, the police now represented moral authority that rightly punished the philanderer. I listened with awe to both cases, since 1) I did not witness or could not have read about it anywhere and 2) my language capabilities restricted me from posing questions that would generate more nuanced details. Sardarji and I talked perhaps for 40 minutes and this case was the most prominent theme.  We said goodbye and I left the campus.
Through facebook, A.S. also learned that I was in Delhi and reached out on facebook to meet up.  I did not know how to make about the whole situation and I did not reply.

Today, I was reading Nivedita Menon’s book Recovering Subversion and the chapter on rape was particularly thought-provoking. “Law’s claim to truth is based on a binary logic which sets up oppositions like truth/untruth, guilt/innocence, consent/non-consent. This binary logic, [Carol Smart] argues, is completely inappropriate to what she calls the ‘ambiguity of rape.’ In criminal law the object is to establish guilt or innocence, and in rape cases, the establishing of either, turns on another pair of opposites: that of consent/non-consent.

The dualism of consent/non-consent is “completely irrelevant to women’s experience of sex. Neither begins to approach the complexity of a woman’s position when she is being sexually propositioned or abused… (T)he ‘telling’ of a story of rape or abuse inevitably reveals ambiguities. Hence a woman may agree to a certain amount of intimacy but not to sexual intercourse. In the legal model however, consent to the former is consent to full intercourse… (I)n legal terms submission fits on the consent side of the dichotomy. The only alternative when non-consent is not established is to presume consent.” (p123)

This story came up again in my mind and I decided to write down what I have learned so far. How to think about an anthropology of sexual assault or sex work that does not fall into the binaries of consent/non-consent or agency and oppression?