N. Jerin Arifa's post on One Billion Rising

     Congratulations to my ever-inspiring wife, whose excellent post on the pervasiveness of Islamophobia and its intersection with women's rights issues had the prestigious honor of being featured on Eve Ensler's One Billion Rising.
    I'll allow the post to speak for itself.

First deadline met!

     I'm happy to announce that I met my first deadline - three days ahead of schedule!

     The first draft of the chapter-by-chapter outline is now complete. I'll spend a week or two revising it, and then it's time to knuckle down in earnest - re-writing the text itself. 

     To that end, the chapter summary was one of the most useful exercises I've ever pursued, partly in that it forced me to make sense of a story that was often nebulous even for its author. The chief challenge going forward, as I alluded to earlier, is to avoid overcompensating into didacticism, something I loathe as a reader. 

    Lucky thing, then, that challenges are precisely what I need!      

Setting deadlines & holding my feet to the fire

    To prevent the novel's becoming the never-ending project it is beginning to resemble, I've decided to set a series of irrevocable deadlines for myself. If I fail to meet any one deadline, I'm declaring novel-writing a great learning experience and will close the project permanently.
    Yes, that's right - permanently.
    While this might seem harsh, I believe it's the only thing that will keep things moving forward, and, at the end of the day, will shed light on just how much I want Companions to succeed. If I'm unable to rally myself and my resources enough to get X-amount of work done by X-time, then it's safe to say my interests have moved elsewhere.
    At present, based on the excellent feedback I received from my professional editor, I'm in fact rewriting the novel from scratch, keeping the majority of the plot points, but expanding the text to elaborate on the characters' internal monologues, making thoughts, reactions, and motivations more clear. I say "characters" because - in the biggest shift between the last draft and this one - I'm now narrating the story from both Dig and Abida's perspectives, rather than solely that of the former. Insofar as Abida's personal and spiritual journey is, in many ways, more interesting than Dig's, I believe this will make the novel more captivating and well-rounded.
     In proportion to revamping the book, I'm revamping the writing process itself. Rather then delving immediately into rewriting the text, I'm first going chapter by chapter and creating a detailed outline of each, identifying what each character says and does and why they say or do it, thus clearly mapping out motivation for the author. The goal of this, in part, is to prevent myself from focusing on style at the expense of plausibility, a mistake I've made with past work.
      What, then, are the deadlines? Here's what I'm making public:
     
      Thu 2/13/13 - completion of the chapter-by-chapter outline
      Sun 9/29/13 - completion of rough draft of text
      Sun 11/17/13 - completion of revision & submission to readers for feedback
      Sun 1/5/14 - resubmission to editor for final review

     A year to go for the final deadline. If I can't make that . . . forget it!
     Wish me the best! And thanks for your support.      

Torture, Abuse, and the Judicial Abyss: The Treatment of Terrorist Suspects in the U.S.

     A post on the blog TruthDig, written by Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and war correspondent Christ Hedges, expresses outrage over the reality whereby Muslim terrorist suspects "caught up in Article III Courts are denied the opportunity to confront their accusers and to have their religious and political associations protected, and they rarely find a judge courageous enough to protect their rights." Per Hedges, "These violations of fundamental civil liberties will not, in the end, be reserved exclusively for Muslims once the corporate state feels under siege. What is happening to them will happen to the rest of us."
     Hedges goes on to criticize the abhorrent treatment of Muslims in U.S. Federal prisons, which he likens to torture. He quotes Jeanne Theoharis, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, who asserts, quite unambiguously, "torture is legal in the United States in the form of years of solitary confinement and the use of special administrative measures."
     Hedges also quotes Craig Haney, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz who has studied the effects of solitary confinement, who asserts that prolonged isolation eventually includes  "appetite and sleep disturbances, anxiety, panic, rage, loss of control, paranoia, hallucinations and self-mutilations" as well as "cognitive dysfunction ... hopelessness, a sense of emotional breakdown ... and suicidal ideation and behavior." Haney found that "many of the negative effects of solitary confinement are analogous to the acute reactions suffered by torture and trauma victims."     
     As per the title of his post, Hedges takes care to highlight the slippery slope that will soon blur the lines between the treatment of terrorism suspects and suspects more generally, but also points out the depressingly well-known fact (to those who pay attention) that the 25,000 prisoners in Federal prisons "are disproportionately Muslims and people of color."
         The more things change, as the saying goes, the more they stay the same.

Autonomy and the Hijab

     If I keep making posts of this nature - defending the idea that the wearing of the hijab or burqa can be a function of choice and independence - it's only because I continue to encounter arguments to the contrary, most commonly from within the feminist community.
     Lending credence to my stance, Judith Sunderland, writing for Women's E-News, both defends the right to the veil, and points out how attempts to force Muslim women to "uncover" are in effect the same as the legal mandates in some Muslim countries that the hijab or burqa be worn at all times.   
     My favorite quote:

     "Pro-ban arguments relating to women's rights have the greatest resonance. Yet denying women the right to cover themselves is as wrong as forcing them to do so. Muslim women, like all women, should have the right to dress as they choose and to make decisions about their lives and how to express their faith, identity and moral values. And they should not be forced to choose between their beliefs and their chosen profession.
     "Generalizations about women's oppression do a disservice to one of the basic tenets of gender equality: the right to self-determination and autonomy, the right a woman has to make decisions about her life and her body without interference from the state or others."

Some useful perspectives on the current unrest

     Amidst the chaos of misunderstanding surrounding the riots in the Middle East, I feel compelled to sieze on every refreshing kernel I come across.
     Fareed Zakaria, an author for CNN's Global Public Squares blog, urges readers not to allow the inevitably exacting imagery of the riots to distort their sense of scale. ". . . .keep in mind that these crowds number in the hundreds - perhaps thousands - in countries with tens of millions of people," he says. "They make for vivid images, but they do not tell the whole story."
     He goes on to make an interesting argument on a related point: "In many of these countries - particularly those that have toppled dictatorships - the most important reality is not of bad government but of weak government. In Libya, Yemen and even Egypt, the state has lost its ability to control its public. In a sense this might be progress. Egypt didn't see protests like this before because Hosni Mubarak's regime would arrest or even shoot protesters. Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy is an elected politician, and he is trying to pander, appease, direct and guide people. I wish he were bolder and fought the extremist elements in his society head-on. But let's face it, he's behaving like an elected politician."
     Elsewhere, in an Op-Ed for the New York Times, author Doug Saunders addresses Islamophobia in the U.S., and in particular the assertion that Muslims can't be trusted and pose a threat to national security. He compares this prejudice with a belief popularly held against Catholics in the early half of the 20th Century, one so ingrained that "as late as 1950, 240,000 Americans bought copies of 'American Freedom and Catholic Power,' a New York Times best seller. Its author, Paul Blanshard, a former diplomat and editor at The Nation, made the case that Catholicism was an ideology of conquest, and that its traditions constituted a form of 'medieval authoritarianism that has no rightful place in the democratic American environment.'"
      Seeking to contextualize this prejudice:
   
      "Then, as now, there seemed to be evidence supporting the charge. Majority-Catholic countries like Spain, Italy, Portugal and Austria, had fallen into fascism or extremism. Crime and educational failure were rife among the children of Catholic immigrants. In the years after World War I, Catholic radicals carried out a deadly wave of terrorist attacks in the United States.

       These days, the same dark accusations are being leveled at American Muslims, many of whom are recent immigrants. And many otherwise reasonable Americans have greeted Muslims with fear and suspicion — in part because they came at a bad time. Their emigration to the United States, like that of many Catholics before them, has coincided with turmoil in their native countries and violence from a few extremists in their midst."     

      While Catholics can hardly be argued to be safe from prejudice in all corners of America, a nationally distributed hatred and mistrust of the community seems utterly bizarre, and the fact that it strikes us as such bodes well, I believe, for the future. It implies that future generations might respond with equal surprise to sweeping indictments against the Muslim community, at home and abroad.       

In solidarity with the Muslims of the world

     I'm emerging from my blogging sabbatical to express my unwavering solidarity with Muslims across the world - an overwhelming preponderance of Muslims - who have condemned the violent protests unfolding in the Middle East.
     Nothing really fancy to add.