Author: Katie Zavadski

by Katie Zavadski

Laila Alawa is tired of talking about it:

Ultimately, the issue at hand is not the discussion of being Muslim in America. The problem is the thought surrounding the discussion, an idea that it is not possible to consolidate the two identities – Muslim and American – in our community today. Although it might have been integral to confront in the community initially, it has reached a point where we are continuing still to overemphasize the topic, a decision that overshadows the real issues our community faces, point blank. The overshadowing serves, then, to validate the premise of mutual exclusivity between the two identities, throwing the Muslim American identity of many today into paralysis and confusion, as they suddenly are faced with the need for reconciliation between the two. We push ourselves two steps back by throwing identity into the way of oncoming traffic, and it only serves to harm rather than help us as a community.

Iram Ali disagrees, arguing that the issue is more complicated:

The notion of being Muslim in America is … inherently different from being a Muslim American, not because they identify two different groups of Muslims but because they are simply two different linguistic formations of a similar idea.

Sidelining “Muslim in America” as being problematic only decreases the lexicon for developing our Muslim American narrative. I am a Muslim American, but I can also face issues of being a Muslim in America, which is distinct from a Muslim anywhere else in the world. Acknowledging that Muslims in America have different circumstances from Muslims in other regions will also pave the necessary groundwork for us in other important matters that Alawa mentions, such as mental health or arts development. Muslims in America do not need one cultural identity or a single-mindedness about where to settle down in this globalized world in order for us to be a collective community. Our identity issues, accumulating in this melting pot of different cultures and ideas, are an integral dimension of our Americanness.

(Photo: Muslim-American men greet each other at the annual Eid al-Adha prayer held at the Teaneck Armory in Teaneck, New Jersey. Eid al-Adha, also known as the Feast of the Sacrifice, commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience to God, who in accordance with tradition then provided a lamb in the boy’s place. By Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

by Katie Zavadski

On Monday, in order to reduce smog, Paris tried ban half of its cars from driving that day. Emily Badger warns that these types of bans can backfire:

From an environmental standpoint, there are at least two ways to try to rein in pollution from vehicles: We can either improve the technology itself (getting cleaner, more efficient cars on the road), or we can try to reduce how much people use it. Unfortunately, evidence suggests that attempts at the second strategy often undercut the first one.

Research out of Beijing has found that the ongoing one-day-a-week ban has reduced particulate matter there by about nine percent. But a study out of Mexico City found no positive environmental benefits from the regular ban there, for a fascinating reason.

People really like to drive, and they’ll come up with some seriously inventive ways around restrictions. In Mexico City, it appears that many people bought cheap, used second cars (you’ve got your odd car and your even car) to get around the license plate rule. In effect, it appears as if the ban caused an increase in the total number of cars on Mexico City’s roads, tilting the makeup of the entire fleet toward less fuel-efficient vehicles.

Zachary Shan considers what Paris did wrong and right:

The positive move taken in Paris, in my opinion, is that the ban excluded electric cars, hybrids, and people who carpooled (3 or more people to a car). So, rather than being encouraged to buy more cars of lower quality, such a policy would encourage people to buy electric cars and hybrids. But the concern mentioned above still seems valid. So far, studies on such bans have reportedly come to mixed conclusions.

Is there a better solution? It seems there are a couple of solutions that have been shown to work better: low emission zones (LEZs) and congestion charges. They go about the matter in different ways, so can actually offer better results when combined.

The first Viking exhibition in three decades at the British Museum in London seeks to set the record straight on these seafaring warriors:

Nico Hines explores how the Vikings got such a bad reputation:

It seems this was a rare era in which history was not written by the victors; mostly because the victors couldn’t write. It was left to monks and Christian churchmen to craft the only contemporary accounts of many of the Vikings’ raids, and Vikings did attack churches, which held no sacred mystique for them. They were simply seen as easy, wealthy targets, confounding local conventions of the time.

“These accounts are dressed up in the language of religious polemic,” [British Museum curator Gareth] Williams said. “Many [of the stories] were borrowed from earlier accounts—from classical antiquity. The violent reputation and particularly the reputation for atrocities was created then, but the Vikings were probably no worse than anyone else.”

Mark Hudson is captivated by the Viking ship in the final room of the exhibit:

Only about a quarter of the original dark timbers are present, fitted into a modern metal frame, but the sheer scale of the craft and the dynamic sweep of its curving bows are immensely impressive. For the Vikings, we are reminded, the sea was a route rather than a barrier. Theirs was a culture that resided in waterborne movement rather than in the monuments that come with settled culture. If that’s a difficult idea to get across in an exhibition, which will inevitably be all about objects, the thought of this magnificent ship slicing through the freezing northern Atlantic waves – seen in a looping film at the end of the room – gives a shiver-inducing sense of what Viking travel must have been like.

But Jonathan Jones found the exhibit dry:

Why not weave their tales and the histories written by their enemies into the mix of archaeological stuff to give it warmth and context? The refusal to do so cannot be an oversight. It looks like an archaeological dogma: only material objects painstakingly excavated are to be relied upon as evidence. The rest is romantic twaddle, apparently.

For instance, where are the gods? The picture stone showing a ship arriving at Valhalla is one of just a handful of images of mythology in this exhibition. There’s more about bowls and bracelets than about Thor.

Jones might like the following promotional video more than the substantive one seen above:

by Katie Zavadski

About a decade ago, members of the Raëlian religion began raising funds for a so-called Pleasure Hospital in Burkina Faso, which would restore the clitorises of women who had undergone female genital mutilation. The hospital had been slated to open in early March, but it was blocked by the local government. Sue Lloyd-Roberts reports that the American surgeons, led by gender-confirmation surgery expert Marci Bowers, moved their operating room to a local doctor’s clinic:

Bebe, a 24-year-old, is among the first. Is she scared? “No, I am not scared,” she says. “I am just angry. They cut me when I was four and it still hurts. Whenever my husband approaches, I just don’t want him.”

Bebe is given a local anaesthetic for the procedure which is a surprisingly simple one. Bowers investigates to see how badly Bebe has been mutilated. “No matter how severe it is,” Bowers explains, “we can always find the clitoris.” Although the visible part of the clitoris is cut off during FGM, it remains below the surface. “Voilà,” Bowers says as she finds it and pulls it up. “The clitoris now looks amazingly normal, part of an unaltered female anatomy.”

By the end of the first day, the team have “restored” eight women. The word is getting out, beyond the borders of Burkina Faso. By day three, women from Senegal, Mali and even Kenya come to the clinic to ask for the operation.

But the government swiftly canceled the licenses of the foreign doctors:

An official at the Health Ministry tells me that the opening was cancelled because Clitoraid [the organization behind the Pleasure Hospital] had not provided essential documents. All of which sounds reasonable until the Health Minister tells another journalist that “medical organisations should be focused on saving lives and not advertising their religion in an attempt to convert vulnerable people.”

Wendy Syfret talks to Clitoraid spokeswoman Nadine Gary:

How central is orgasm to Raëlian philosophy?

Pleasure is the most important part of the Raëlian philosophy, but the central part is simply explaining that life on planet Earth was created scientifically by people like us. Ladies like us and men who were created in their image. When you enjoy your clitoris, you can think that women creators have a clitoris just like you and have created you in their image, so you can enjoy yourself like they enjoy themselves. So is orgasm central to the Raëlian philosophy? Yes. You know we don’t masturbate every second of the day, but we don’t shy from it.

Previous Dish coverage of FGM here.