Re-Opening of Penn Museum's Middle East Galleries

The November/December 2018 issue of Islamic Horizons has an article by Kenneth Wahrenberger describing some of the contents of the newly reopened Penn Museum's Middle East Galleries. (click to enlarge)

The Penn Museum is located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Plan your visit!

Suggested Reading List from "Girls of the Crescent"

Habeeba Husain profiled Girls of the Crescent in the 2018 November/December issue of Islamic Horizons. Sisters Zena & Mena Nasiri founded Girls of the Crescent in 2018 to promote materials in public libraries which represent the variety of experiences of Muslim girls and women. On December 7, 2018, I downloaded its suggested books and searched for them in the online Georgia public library system PINES. I created a public list for the books Girls of the Crescent recommended which are available in the PINES-participating public libraries. I used worldcat.org to create a list for the books I couldn't find in Georgia's PINES. A few books are not in either list.

I hope library users in my state of Georgia would request these materials. Remember, if your branch library doesn't have a book you want, you can request the branch library to retrieve the book from other participating libraries. You can do this online with a PINES account or at the circulation desk. Also note that some public libraries don't participate in PINES, particularly those in Atlanta.

I've reviewed children's books on this blog.

New York Islamic Arts Collective at Bernardsville, NJ Al-Hamra Art Center

New York Islamic Arts invites you to the opening of the “Peace and Mercy” exhibition on December 2nd 4-6pm at the Alhamra Art Center. Works of illumination, paper cutting, marbling, calligraphy, and miniature paintings from NYIA artists will be on display from Dec 2nd-Jan 20th. . . . . . #exhibition #exhibits #artevents #tazhib #tezhip #fineart #islamicart #traditionalart #sacredart #illumination #gilding #turkish #calligraphy #thuluth #arabiccalligraphy #khat #islamicdesign #islam #gold #manuscript #quran #instamuslim #turkishart #persianart #mashallah #islamic #ebru #marbling

A post shared by New York Islamic Arts (@nyislamicarts) on Nov 13, 2018 at 10:31am PST

The web site of the New York Islamic Arts Collective is https://www.nyislamicarts.com/. The exhibit is scheduled to run at the Al-Hamra Art Center through January 20, 2019. Here's a map.

Favorite Quotes: Carlos Ruiz Zafón on War in "The Shadow of the Wind"

Lucia Graves translated Carlos Ruiz Zafón's La Sombra del Viento as The Shadow of the Wind.

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind. (p. 428)

I don't know Spanish, but I think I've found the passage in the original text:

"Negroland: A Memoir" by Margo Jefferson

I'm sharing a few thoughts on Margo Jefferson's Negroland: A Memoir.

An idea which struck me was her insistence that contemplation of suicide is a civil right or privilege which blacks in America should seek to earn:

But one white female privilege had always been withheld from the girls of Negroland. Aside from the privilege of actually being white, they had been denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity. A privilege that was glorified in the literature of white female suffering and resistance. A privilege Good Negro Girls had been denied by our history of duty, obligation, and discipline. Because our people had endured horrors and prevailed, even triumphed, their descendants should be too strong and too proud for such behavior. We were to be ladies, responsible Negro women, and indomitable Black Women. We were not to be depressed or unduly high-strung; we were not to have nervous collapses. We had a legacy. We were too strong for that. I craved the right to turn my face to the wall, to create a death commensurate with bourgeois achievement, political awareness, and aesthetically compelling feminine despair. (pp. 171-2)

I've never been very good dealing with people with depression, and I criticized Jay Asher's Th1rteen R3asons Why.

Here's a passage on housing segregation in Hyde Park, the home of University of Chicago, in the 1960s (p. 147):

Here's a passage about the mental price Margo Jefferson paid as a child trying to navigate the rules of race, gender and class which had been imposed on her and how her adult life has been an attempt to become "a person of inner consequence." (p. 156)

Favorite Quote: F Scott Fitzgerald, "The Last Tycoon" - "learned tolerance, kindness, forebearance, and even affection like lessons"

F. Scott Fitzgerald never finished the novel The Last Tycoon. Elia Kazan directed a 1976 movie based on the novel. Amazon produced one season of a series based on the novel.

From p. 97, a description of  "Hollywood studio manager Monroe Stahr, clearly based on Irving Thalberg (head of the film company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), whom Fitzgerald had encountered several times." (Wikipedia)

Like many brilliant men, he had grown up dead cold. Beginning at about twelve, probably, with the total rejection common to those of extraordinary mental powers, the "See here: this is all wrong -- a mess -- all a lie -- and a sham --," he swept it all away, everything, as men of his type do; and then instead of being a son-of-a-bitch as most of them are, he looked around at the barrenness that was left and said to himself, "This will never do." And so he had learned tolerance, kindness, forebearance, and even affection like lessons. (emphasis in original)

The British Mosque: An Architectural and Social History by Shahed Saleem

Rowan Moore reviewed The British Mosque: An Architectural and Social History by Shahed Saleem in The Guardian on March 13, 2018. 

A mosque is more about process, argues Saleem, than it is about the finished product. It is about the often slow, “iterative” business by which a community defines its needs, finds a site, raises money and commissions a building. 

Mosques, he says, are “vehicles for the dynamic reconstruction of tradition” and their conservatism can be explained as a reaction to both racism and homesickness for countries of origin. 

His own preferences do, however, become clear, in a non-traditional mosque that he has himself designed in Bethnal Green, London. He also likes the abstractly Islamic Cambridge mosque, now being built to the designs of Marks Barfield, architects of the London Eye. And, surely, the future of mosque design should indeed be about finding a British Islamic way of building to stand alongside – rather than copy – those of the Mahgreb, or Turkey, or the subcontinent. Just don’t expect this transformation to happen quickly.

I have not read the book. Find it in a library near you.

The Walking Dead S8E09 "Honor" Portrayed Two Muslim Religious Texts #TWD

[Spoiler Alert] On AMC's The Walking Dead, in Season 8, Episode 9 "Honor," as Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) is burying his son Carl (Chandler Riggs), he repeats the mantra "My mercy prevails over my wrath."


This is a translation of a passage in Sahih al-Bukhari, an important collection of narrations about the deeds and words attributed to the Messenger Muhammad ﷺ:

قال رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم لما قضى الله الخلق كتب في كتابه فهو عنده فوق العرش إن رحمتي غلبت غضبي

Allah's Messenger ﷺ said, "When Allah completed the creation, He wrote in His Book which is with Him on His Throne, "My Mercy overpowers My Anger."

Hey Creative People! Is it the right time for a remake of "The Prisoners of Quai Dong" by Victor Kolpacoff?

My local public library regularly removes books from its shelves for a variety of reasons. I purchased about 15 boxes of books through the Friends of the Library, a volunteer organization which sells these books to fund efforts to support the public libraries in my city. I've sold, exchanged and given away most of the books in those 15 boxes. Recently, I received an order through my Amazon store for The Prisoners of Quai Dong by Victor Kolpacoff. Before fulfilling the order, I read the book. I can't do a proper review of it, but I wanted to give you creative people out there a heads up that this book may be a productive basis for a play or movie or a graphic novel.

Favorite Quote: Oscar Wilde: The Rich & Idle Preach the Values of Thrift & Labor

From Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray:

[Lord Henry Wotton] pictured to himself with silent amusement the tedious luncheon that he had missed by staying so long with Basil Hallward. Had he gone to his aunt's, he would have been sure to have met Lord Goodbody there, and the whole conversation would have been about the feeding of the poor and the necessity for model lodging-houses. Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour. It was charming to have escaped all that!

The full text is available online.

Review: Yo Soy Muslim: A Father’s Letter to His Daughter by Mark Gonzales

Check out these adorable readers with the new @SalaamReads picture book, Yo Soy Muslim by @markgonzalesco! pic.twitter.com/AwmwPEH2bm

— SimonKIDS (@SimonKIDS) August 29, 2017

Aishah Abdul Musawwir reviewed Yo Soy Muslim: A Father’s Letter to His Daughter
by Mark Gonzales (illustrated by Mehrdokht Amini) in The Horn Book, September 1, 2017. The publisher is Salaam Reads/Simon.

I have not read the book.

Access Free Arabic Texts from Library of Arabic Literature

You can now get free, Arabic-only PDFs of LAL bilingual books!

I can't link b/c twitter thinks it's spam but you're clever. On our site.

— LibraryofArabicLit (@LibraryArabLit) August 6, 2017

Point your browser to to http://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/books/. The books with free, full-Arabic text will have an icon and a message underneath the ISBN number. Click the image below to enlarge.

Review: How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom by Jacques Berlinerblau

How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom by Jacques Berlinerblau
Mariner Books, Paperback, 9780544105164, 306pp. Publication Date: September 17, 2013

Professor Berlinerblau's book is a "how-to" manual for activists concerned with preserving secularism in the United States. The key to the defense of secularism is building up a large coalition of people. Some will be committed to separationism, one of secularism's variants which "maintains that [order, freedom of religion and freedom from religion] will be achieved in spades if there is, in effect, no relation between government and religion." [p. 125, emphasis in original] Others will be content with accomodationism, which allows government to establish religion, provided it does not privilege one over another. Some will be atheists who promote the abandonment of religion. Some will be believers who interpret their religion to call for distance from the state. Others will be members of religious minorities who fear persecution by the majority. Astute activists will try to gather all of these under the rubric of disestablishmentarianism.

Building Bridges 2017-2018 Grants Program of the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art

Doris Duke Foundation seeks grant proposals for arts programming on Muslims. https://t.co/Rn2i0zAP8N

— Dalia Mogahed (@DMogahed) July 26, 2017

Reading List on Modern and Colonial Science in the Middle East by Nir Shafir

Nir Shafir has compiled, with the help of the Internet hive mind, a reading list on Modern and Colonial Science in the Middle East.

You can hear Professor Nir on episode 124 of the Ottoman History Podcast.

Decolonising Science Reading List by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

I maintain a “Decolonising Science Reading List” that is stuff that I have read &recommend. https://t.co/BQLWX2wLHE #racenstem #blackandstem

— Dr. Chanda 🇧🇧 (@IBJIYONGI) September 8, 2016

Review: "Experience & Education" by John Dewey

John Dewey (1859-1952) wrote Experience and Education in 1938, twenty-two years after his most famous work, Democracy and Education. In Experience and Education, he assumes that the reader has accepted the "new" education model and rejected the "traditional" education model and thus proceeds to warn against mistakes in the implementation of the new education model.

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

I bought the book Th1rteen R3asons Why by Jay Asher because the author is speaking today near my home, and I feel some kind of need to support local library activity. If the hype on the cover about this book's popularity among young adults is true, please protect your children from this crap.

My only caveat is I'm nearing 50 years old, so I'm probably the last person you want telling you what's good in Young Adult fiction, but here are my $0.02.

This review contains spoilers.

Ramadan Readathon: Recommendations #1 – MG, YA & ADULT FICTION

Nadia at Words Beneath the Wings compiled a list of Middle-Grade, Young Adult and Adult Fiction books by Muslim authors. And, if you're too busy during Ramadan to read these books and you, like me, missed the #RamadanReadathon, make it a Shawwal Readathon!

Shabana Mir Tells Story Behind "Umar and the Bully"

From Shabana Mir's blog:

"[Twenty] years later, I assumed [Umar and the Bully] was no longer relevant. Imagine my surprise when I discovered, a few weeks ago, that Umar and the Bully is still being used and recommended for anti-bullying work in schools."

Read about the circumstances in which Professor Shabana wrote that book.