A fascinating exhibit at the New York Hall of Science

     Jerin and I celebrated Easter yesterday by hitching the Flushing bound bus to the New York Hall of Science, where a mobile exhibition, entitled “10001 Inventions – Discover the Muslim Heritage in Our World,” was closing out its New York run.  Aimed at challenging the prevailing myth that the fifth through fifteenth centuries were a “Dark Age,” and to offer a counterpoint to the abject barbarism of European society that gave rise to said belief, the exhibition showcased the enthralling spectrum of innovations that Muslim civilization brought into the world – technological, academic, medicinal, astrological, cartographical, and so forth.
     The windmill, it turns out, originated in Afghanistan, and consisted initially of vertical sails standing perpendicular to the ground, as opposed to the horizontal sails that Europe would later make famous.
     15th century Chinese-Muslim admiral Zheng He commanded a fleet of the largest wooden vessels ever built, at least five times larger than other ships of its day.
     Ibn al-Hayam’s Book of Optics, written between 1011 and 1021, laid out fundamentally original ideas about light and vision, breaking from the idea that our eyes see by sending out invisible rays, and instead arguing in favor of the current understanding that light rays emitted from visible objects enter the space of the eyes.
     Equally incredible, the famous traveler Evliya Celebi recorded that the first person to take a rocket-powered flight was his brother, Lagari Hasan Celebi, in 17th century Turkey, utilizing gunpowder to blast himself into the sky, where he spread out wings and glided down to safety.
     Four hundred years earlier, Al-Jazari brought to fruition a huge constellation of gadgets and mechanisms, the most significant being a crank and connecting-rod system, one that transferred circular motion into linear motions, and remains to this day a crucial component of pumps and engines.
     To its credit, the exhibit made certain not to limit its focus to the mere testosterone-driven innovations of history.
     Merriam Al-Ijliya, an extraordinary woman of the 10th Century, excelled in instrument-making, and broke from the patterns of many of her female contemporaries by taking up a trade. She settled in northern Syria, where she specialized in astrolabes, meticulously constructed devices for land navigation and time telling.
     The exhibit also showcased Fatima al-Fihri of Fez, Morocco. Al-Fihri received a sizable fortune from her businessman father, and, determined to improve the quality of life in her community, constructed in 841 a colossal mosque and college complex dubbed Al-Qarawiyin, known today as the world’s oldest university.
     In addition to being a fascinating study in its own right, the exhibit served the added function of combating Islamophobia, attacking the construction of Islam as something alien and hostile to the West by effectively showing how the West as we know it would not have existed without the work of Muslims.
     Finally, on a related note, 1001 Inventions made a decisive point to show that much of the Golden Ages (a far more apt title than its “Dark” counterpart) featured cooperation among faiths, with Christians, Jews, and Muslims all working together to further the evolution of science and human initiative.
     At the end of our three-hour stint there, when at last we exited the building, I found myself hoping to pass Peter King or Newt Gingrich on their way into the exhibit. My whimsical side hopes that it might have altered their perspectives, but if past behavior is any predictor, they would most likely have left the museum defending the historical contributions of Europe’s barons and genocidal warlords.

Requesting a 29-hour day

     I was on the phone with mom the other night, talking about the so-called Arab Spring – the flight of the dictators in Tunisia and Egypt and my refusal to let the media end the story there, and my even stronger refusal to give up on the people of Syria and Yemen and Bahrain (thank you, ladies and gentleman of the press, for completely abandoning that last one) – and I asked her if she thought 2011 might be the new 1968.
     “To be honest,” she said, “I still don’t feel like I was really there in 1968. I wasn’t involved enough, and I didn’t follow through.”
     I’m not sure how much justice she does herself there, but that matter aside, it got me thinking, as I do more and more these days, just how one should go about avoiding that; that is, how one gets involved, and how one follows through.
     I like to consider myself at least something of an activist, but the sheer enormity of the planet’s potential for revolution right now, if not the revolutions taking place already, make a somewhat intimidating prospect of where to best direct one’s energy.
     Spending my evenings peddling to massively overworked literary agents a manuscript concerning Islamophobia and gender conflict, two of the biggest problems facing our country right now, I can’t avoid the fantasy that I’m somehow acting to further a cause or two. Unfortunately, novels have a sporadic track record for effecting change, and when they do, in fact, manage to do so, it’s not the kind of change that lends itself to easy measurement. (Not to mention the fact that, in all fairness, I’m not sure I qualify as a novelist until one of these agents sees fit for my query letter a destination other than the recycling bin.)
     The implication, then, is that the real revolutionary work must rally from somewhere between my publishing ventures, my fifty hour work week, and the six hours of sleep I try to allow myself nightly, and the numbers leave little room to breathe.
     The capacity for mathematics to defeat one’s enthusiasm for changing the world is all too potent, but as history shows, the world doesn’t wait.
     To the revolutionaries of the planet: I’m applying for some extra hours.

Book Talk: a revised synopsis of my novel

     Again, this blog is intended more to discuss the themes of my book than the book itself, but for kicks, here's the latest draft of my synopsis. Feedback is welcome!

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COMPANIONS OF THE GARDEN
Micah R. Bochart


     Two wayfaring New Yorkers. A long road South. A nation on fire with God, the Blues, and the mass flailing for identity.

     DIG CARSON, 27, an age renowned for the destruction of volatile thinkers, has abandoned in the same gesture his apartment in Brooklyn and the medication that kept his manic depression at bay. ABIDA KAHLEEL, 25, prays five times daily and wears her hijab with pride, but has come to question fundamental aspects of her faith and culture.   

     The two cross paths for the first time in a New Jersey gas station, her stranded by a breakdown on an ill-fated bus trip to Baltimore, him driving for driving’s sake, headed south to New Orleans. Dig offers to give her a ride, an offer she accepts, the direness of her situation trumping her cultural inhibition about traveling alone with a strange man.

     Within an hour of sharing the road, their explosively kindred natures catch both by surprise. Both hunger for a form of liberation, both long to experience a nation they barely know, and – as we discover in short order – both suffer from the same species of mental illness, which rollicks them from intermittent states of despair to fits of genuine reverence.

     Two days later, the two of them arriving in Washington by separate roads, Abida calls him and asks if she can accompany him to New Orleans. In love already, and a novel away from admitting it, Dig says yes.

     They make their way south, an improvised, back-road pilgrimage to a Mecca of their choosing. Their progress is episodic, a string of unlikely encounters, each in some way speaking to the eruptive character of a nation whose search for direction mirrors their own.

     An artist in Virginia paints a dynamic array of American freeze frames on an assortment of fungus. A young Muslim poet in Birmingham rants on her American right to cover her hair.  A brutal car crash in rural Alabama throws into fleeting unity Abida and two Baptist women, who pray jointly for the souls of two trapped passengers, while Dig founders in the helpless sensation of having nothing to pray to. Two Mississippi highway patrolmen detain them on false charges, but crack under pressure when Abida, vehemently defending her rights as a citizen to go wherever she chooses without harassment, threatens to call down the press.

     Themes of decline run tandem with the prevailing theme of ardor.

     The road winds down toward the Mississippi Delta. The two slide further into madness. Dig falls deeper into love.

     He watches in awe as Abida strides defiantly through a small Virginia hamlet, daring the locals to stare at her.  He watches again in the Blue Ridge Mountains while she kneels in prayer to the sunset, her rug spread open on the cooling asphalt of the parkway. The two trade rides on a makeshift plank swing near the Tennessee border, and Dig is caught off guard when Abida puts her hand on his back, pushing him upward in spectacular arcs. After a week of resistance, in a dive hotel in Jackson, Mississippi, he binge-drinks to the point of wreckage and collapses in the shower, resigned at last to the awkward truth that an unattainable girl has snatched up his heart.

     In a trance, euphoric but weakening, they drift through the forests of Mississippi, arriving at the banks of its namesake river, the cathartic peak of their journey. Dig’s spirits sustain him into southern Louisiana, then crash for the final time.

     They roll into New Orleans on a tide of confession, Dig admitting first his resignation to suicide and then his attraction to Abida. Abida, at wits end, retreats into her hotel room. Pushed over the edge by the perceived rejection, he tumbles through rain-pummeled Bourbon Street, drinks into blackout, and attempts to drown himself in the river. Abida saves his life.

     They speak for the last time in the cozy aesthetic of a hospital room, Dig recovering from alcohol poisoning, Abida struggling to come to terms with just what their relationship has meant for her. With the implication that she in fact loves him back, she agrees that it’s in the best interest of both her faith and her future if they refrain from meeting again. They hug each other goodbye, and Dig is left to wander the streets of the city, to reign in the enormity of their odyssey – the scattered splinters of faith, love, illness, and national identity all united by the common thread of reverence  – and to glimpse in the wreckage of his near-death experience something akin to the wiping of the slate, from which something fresh can begin. 

Malalai Joya - "A Woman Among Warlords"

     I always forget how pastoral the bus ride to Albany is.
    Jerin I took the Greyhound up there on Saturday to attend a council meeting for New York NOW. En route, admiring the miles of unbroken forest, the sudden gorges and the creeks far below, I engrossed myself in the memoir of Malalai Joya - A Woman Among Warlords.
    We’d seen her appear the night before at the CUNY Graduate Center in Midtown Manhattan, in conversation with Eve Ensler. Lauded by BBC News as “the bravest woman in Afghanistan,” and named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2010, Joya is a devoted human rights activist, an uncompromising advocate for women, and a former member of Afghanistan’s parliament, to which she was the youngest individual ever elected.
     Though of course familiar with the work of Ensler, I knew shamefully little about Joya prior to the discussion, as has been the case with the majority of the presentations and lectures I’ve attended recently. It didn’t take long for her to make a fan of me, in the text of her book, if not the incredible presence she carried on stage.
     Twenty-five years old and 5 feet tall, she stood up to speak at a constitutional assembly in Kabul in 2003 and without skipping a beat denounced, to their faces, the mass-murdering warlords and regional dictators whom NATO had managed, incredibly, to install in the legislature. She’s survived five assassination attempts and travels under guard. A progeny of the refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan, she operated as a teacher in secret girl’s schools, hiding her books under her burqa to avoid detection by the Taliban, and later established a free medical clinic and orphanage in her home province of Farah. Last month, when our genius government attempted to deny her an entry visa on the grounds that she “lived underground” and was thus “unemployed,” Joya became the centerpiece of a massive public campaign that ultimately succeeded in getting the decision rescinded, hence her appearance in Manhattan Friday night.
     Giving thanks to the people who’d assisted her, Joya expressed her gratitude to the American people, who once again had forbidden their government to speak for them.
     Reflecting on her words as the scenery of central New York slid past the slimy, Greyhound window, I found myself drifting back to October of 2001, when, as a 19-year-old kid fresh out of high school, I watched the words “America Strikes Back!” explode across the screen of whatever Southeast Alaskan television set I happened to be staring at and felt like my nation had sold its collective soul to hell.
    To have known at the time that a hero such as Joya could have stepped from the wreckage and thrown that hell back in my government’s face, while at the same time empowering my fellow citizens with the knowledge that our leaders’ inferno-bound path wasn’t one we were forced to follow, might have given me a small margin of comfort.
     Failing that, she certainly gave me a lot to think about right now. 

Rally to Oppose War, Condemn Terrorism, & Fight Islamophobia, 4/9/11

     Saturday’s rally, organized by the United National Antiwar Committee and the Muslim Peace Coalition, had at least two things going for it.
     First, it was the most multi-dimensional of any of the protests I’ve attended, officially directed at ending the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya, and the Islamophobia that comes with them, but providing also a conduit for dozens of different focus groups to pool their energies, frustrations, and their commitment to action, from labor activists to feminists to teachers to environmentalists, and so forth.
     Second, and most important, it was warm outside
     This was not only a distinctive feature in my recent history of rallying (as earlier blog posts can attest) but also the first convincing proof that this God’s Own winter is ever going to end. To walk down Broadway short-sleeved, my sweatshirt tied around my waist, felt like an exercise in the impossible, and to do so in the midst of a teeming crowd, comprising activists from all over the country, Maine and Philadelphia not withstanding, made it that much better of a bargain.       
     The rally amassed at Union Square in Manhattan, then wove down Broadway to City Hall, where speeches continued for over an hour.
     Jerin and I arrived at the point of origin just as the crowd was mobilizing, arriving in time to catch the classically Big Apple juxtaposition of a black, dreadlocked rapper on the main stage providing an unintended soundtrack to a long line of Arab and South Asian Muslim men bowing their heads to Mecca. As if to give voice to the very bedfellows my novel seeks to conjoin, the rapper, ranting in defense of oppressed geographies, rallied the crowd to shout first “Palestine” then “New Orleans.”
     Striking, for both Jerin and me, was the sheer number of women who participated in the march, and how many of them proudly sported hijabs. Like Mona Eltahawy pointing to the face of Tawakul Karman (subject of an earlier blog post) and calling it the death of all preconceived notions of the complacent Muslim woman, so the abundance of young female activists marching the streets of New York to protest agendas of hate was a sight to behold, and to bookmark for future citation.
     For some photos that Jerin and I took of the event, click here.

On whether or not my work qualifies as "feminist"

     I think I’ve done a decent job so far of not flat-out discussing my book on this blog, but I’m book-dropping now, in part because it fits with the predominantly feminist train of thought I’ve been on lately, and also because, to be honest, it’s what’s foremost on my mind right now.
     A friend called me from Los Angeles last night, having read the book, and wanting to offer me suggestions. Among other useful criticisms, he said he had difficulty accepting the kick-off to the story, or, to use my less preferred but formal terminology, the “inciting incident.” At least one other reader had similar reservations.
     Needless to say, a weak inciting incident is a bad bit of business, but in addition to whatever trouble it creates for the plot and the plausibility thereof, I worry that it undermines the book’s feminist credentials.
     I call my book a feminist text for the simple reason that it deals extensively with the challenges women face, and one strong woman who dares to be challenged, yet the whole of the plot hinges on that woman’s rather dangerous decision to get into the vehicle of a strange man, a man whom she’s just met at a roadside gas station a few minutes earlier. Would she actually have done so?
     Readers who were skeptical of this moment may not have said this directly, but from an objective standpoint, it’s hard not to see this as a classic case of male privilege clouding an author’s ability to write an authentic female character.
     A few words in my defense.
     First, I try to put Abida in a desperate situation, where the need to catch a ride is pressing enough for her to risk a choice that she might not have risked otherwise.
    Second, I give her character a rebellious and more than a little reckless streak, and I place her at an angry point in her life, such that the very renunciation of caution has a certain appeal for her.
    Finally, I try to make it clear that at the time of accepting Dig’s offer of a ride to Baltimore, Abida’s doing just that, and nothing more.  The decision to travel with him to New Orleans is arrived at much later in the game, when she has a clearer sense of who he is, and a greater basis for trusting him.
     In short, I tried to write Abida with utmost sensitivity to the risks she faced as a woman in a man-rigged society, not to mention a woman of color and a Muslim, but the very fact that I was comfortable with my end-product while readers continue to be cautious leaves me wondering if perhaps my metaphorical phallus were getting caught in my face.
     Is all this a shameless, backhanded plug to get more people to read the book, or the beginning of the book, and offer feedback?
    Most certainly, but until this book goes to press, feedback will continue to be cherished!

Kathleen Barry, on "Unmaking War, Remaking Men"

     On Monday night, in keeping with my recent streak of attending amazing lecturers, I went to a Chelsea bookstore for a presentation and book-signing by Kathleen Barry, in connection with her recent publication of Unmaking War, Remaking Men: How Empathy Can Reshape Our Politics, Our Soldiers and Ourselves.
     I approached the lecture with a certain reservation. Though I’ll proudly declare myself a feminist even as they drag me thrashing into the quicksand, I have no patience whatsoever for misandry or guy-bashing, and I worried that the themes of the evening might encourage as much. Needless to say, my fears were laid quickly to rest.
     Kathleen Barry, who holds a doctorate in both sociology and education, and has functioned as an unstoppable activist since the 1960s, particularly in the arena of sexual slavery, scored points with me early on by unequivocally denouncing the idea that men are genetically predisposed toward violence, and also the idea that masculinity in itself is a violent entity. Rather, she centered her grievance on what she referred to as “blinding macho,” a socialized phenomenon that is responsible for an entire spectrum of destructive behavior, from sexual assault and domestic abuse to participation in that magnum opus of institutionalized violence – war. *
     Her thoughts about how “blinding macho” develops resonated strongly with my own experiences of masculinity, as conveyed to me by society. She argued that it begins with men being fed an overwhelming compulsion to operate in the role of protector. From the impression that protection is needed comes a perception of danger, and a sense that violence might be needed to meet that danger, and then, from that, the idea that whatever a man is called upon to protect must be inherently more valuable than he is. The end product is expendability, and nothing breeds and exacerbates violence like the feeling of having nothing left to lose.
     Yet Kathleen was careful to stay close to her agenda. Rather than dwell on the more abstract question of who or what fosters these predilections, she focused specifically on how the military takes advantage of them.
     First and most obviously, it makes expendability the keystone of the soldier’s psychology, and subordinates a man’s personal worth to a nebulous, rarely defined patriotism. Second, it creates a situation where men quite literally bond over killing, insofar as the only other way for a soldier to exercise his protector impulse is to “look after his buddy,” a “looking after” that makes killing a necessity. Finally, the idea that a buddy is in turn “looking after you” is the only factor that can counter one’s own fixation on worthlessness, wherein expendability again enters the equation.
     The answer to these ills, in Kathleen’s estimation, is employment of the titular empathy, but here, as is common with solutions, I felt a little more clarity was needed. Obviously, having empathy for your so-called enemies is the first step to undermining the “blinding macho,” but that’s hardly a new claim, and it left some issues unanswered. The question I had – indeed, the question I put to her in the Q & A session that followed – was how to preempt all that; how to help the young men and boys to counter the protector urge at that very sensitive stage when society first feeds it to them.
     To her credit, she didn’t pretend to have any answers, but suggested that among the many things in life we could stop biffing up, we might consider the beauty of nurture – freeing it from its feminine shackles, and allowing both men and women to participate.
     “Nurturing is beautiful,” she said, “and men can be beautiful nurturers.”
     It was good enough for me.




(* “‘Blinding macho,’ is grammatically incorrect,” Kathleen said, shortly after introducing the concept. “It should be ‘blinding machismo’ but I hate to give it that Latin edge.”)

Mona Eltahawy on Revolution

     I’m notorious for hyperbole, so it probably carries little water for me to say that Mona Eltahawy was perhaps the most energized, passionate, and inspiring speaker I’ve ever seen. Therefore, with the bare minimum of water carried, the Egyptian-born award-winning journalist, social media artisan, and self-identified feminist was perhaps the most energized, passionate, etc.
     I attended a lecture of hers Thursday night at Manhattan’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. I wasn’t familiar with her work prior to arriving, drawn instead by the topic of the evening: the American Muslim woman’s experience, a discussion that I hoped would help me in the ongoing process of better understanding Abida, the female protagonist of my novel. I got what I asked for and then some, though this was as much the product of Mona’s enthusiasm – her vital, frothing, and unapologetic ranting – as anything she said.
     In so many words, she gave me a picture of the world I liked, one where the civil war in Libya and the political deadlocks in Tunisia and Egypt haven’t eclipsed the spirit that gave rise to them; where it’s possible to feel as if something truly unprecedented were taking place in the Muslim world, and the world at large, without getting blasted off the intellectual stage for that capital sin of idealism.
     The kicker, of course, was Mona’s firm acknowledgment of the reality that everything will fizzle to nothing without that magic thing called work.
     Idealists – or at least that obnoxious faction of them that always invite attack – have a tendency to brush work into the margins. Not only did Mona drown us in the overwhelming necessity for work, but she also made the work look beautiful, and, best of all, she bent over backwards (if such an individual can bend backwards at all) to celebrate the work that’s already being done, and the women who are out there doing it.
     A featured freeze-frame on her projector centered on the face Tawakel Karman, a Yemeni journalist, human rights activist, member of Yemen’s main opposition party, and the founder in 2005 of Women Journalists Without Chains, as she led a crowd of protestors calling for the resignation of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s installment of the Mubarek franchise.
     “In that face,” said Mona, pointing at Karman’s photo, “lies the death of all preconceived notions of the Muslim woman.”
     She went on to champion Iman al-Obeidy, the Libyan women who on March 26th broke into the Tripoli Hotel housing Western journalists to blast to the world the horrific story of her gang rape at the hands of pro-Qaddafi forces.  As Qaddafi loyalists struggled to remove her, al-Obeidy shouted to the rolling cameras, “I am not scared of anything.”
     “They heard her,” Mona said, and so did we.
     Though she may have drifted somewhat from the lecture’s nominal focus on the American experience, America itself was by no means denied a prominent place in her talk.
     To speak of our country as a singular hotbed for democratic exploration is by no means a novel observation, nor is it in any way unique to speak of America’s exploits having rippled across the globe, but what did succeed in snagging my passion was Mona’s construction of America as a place of imported rebellion; as much so as a place of export.
     America, she argued, was as much a Mecca as Mecca itself, boasting one of the most diverse congregations of Muslim immigrants on the planet, but where others might have cited the disconnect between these immigrants and their places of origin as a form of liberation, Mona instead stressed that it was precisely the spirit of strength and resistance they brought with them that creates such a strong potential for liberalism here.
     She argued further that the miracle of social media – often heralded, but impossible, in my estimation, to be stressed enough – has created a sense of global community where the spirit of revolution transcends nationalities. She pointed to the Egyptian sympathizers, many of them women, who ordered pizza for the protestors in Wisconsin, a conjoining of revolts that ten years ago would have been completely disparate.    
     Again the word “imported” came to the fore: imported revolution, and imported role models. With another nod to Tawakel Karman, the Yemeni activist, “The role model for America’s Muslims is no longer the suicide bomber: the role model is the revolutionary.”
     And in case there was any doubt about where scripture fit in: “I believe Muhammed was a revolutionary. So was his wife. I want to continue their revolution.”
     Yeah. Good stuff.

My feelings on Terry Jones

     Twelve people died in Kabul yesterday when thousands or rioters overran a UN compound, acting in response to evangelical pastor Terry Jones’ burning of the Qur’an in Florida. In a doubly tragic twist of affairs, the victims consisted of five Nepalese guards and two Europeans – none of them American.
     Of the arguments offered against Mr. Jones’ agenda, I always found it disgusting that concerns about security were voiced so much more often than any condemnation of his malevolent bigotry, but it was still a fair grievance, and now – as predicted – it’s been borne out in truth. (On a related note, I'd challenge my readers to find in the corresponding report in the New York Times any quotations whatsoever of the overwhelming preponderance of Muslims who denounced the attack.)
     For Mr. Jones’ statement on the matter: “We must hold these countries and people accountable for what they have done as well as for any excuses they may use to promote their terrorist activities. Islam is not a religion of peace. It is time that we call these people to accountability.”
     Would it be prohibitively ironic for a secularist like myself to request that this man burn in hell?

Happy Birthday, Mom

You're still my favorite feminist, and, to this day, one of my most inspiring role models. I hope it's a good one for you.