Although I am an avowed Ohio State Buckeyes fan for life, the Penn State football child sex abuse case shook me to the core. As many pundits, bloggers and avid Facebook users are finally beginning to point out, this case is not about a college football legacy – this is about a system wide failure to protect children from the lifelong damage of sexual abuse.
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Teen dating: What demented dunce invented it? Aunty Mohja wants to know. What possesses U.S. consumerist culture to promote it as the norm? Let’s send a boy and a girl, their horniness joyfully newfound but woefully untamed, into the dark of a theater or the back of a car, unsupervised. Let’s urge them to contort their emerging personalities around what makes them pleasing to the other they wish to attract.
We need to go beyond the surface level of what terrorists want us to believe about themselves and delve instead, to the extent possible, into the deepest levels of their actual lived reality. Last week a federal grand jury indicted Army soldier Naser Jason Abdo, age 21, on three charges related to a plot to attack soldiers near Fort Hood, Texas. Much of the attention on this case so far has focused on Abdo’s religion- Islam. Any effort to make sense of this troubled young man will need to include an understanding of how he chose to approach and interpret his religion.
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More often than not, when we hear lectures around gender roles and responsibilities in Islam, these pertain to women. In the very few instances that we hear a lecture dealing with men or male responsibility, it’s done in a way where there is criticism, but no discussion of solution. We’re really good at pointing out the problem, but not so good at dealing with it.
Read MoreOur culture is one of procreation; children are regarded as blessings from God, and we are told our progeny will spread Islam. Delaying marriage, waiting to begin a family, or experiencing infertility each amount to disregarding this sacred duty. While it is considered taboo in many cultures to remain childless- and the Muslim culture is no exception- what viable options exist for couples who are unable to conceive naturally, or choose not to adopt? What space does our culture provide for women who are either unable or unwilling to marry, choose to remain married without children or suffer from infertility?
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Since the capture of Anders Behring Breivik, the Oslo terrorist and murderer, at least two critical issues have emerged. The first is his sanity, or lack thereof. The second is that Breivik’s assaults may have been ideologically motivated. According to Breivik’s logic, the murder of 76 people was necessary to challenge the Muslim takeover of the West. It was also an act directed at some of the people who, in his mind, were making the conquest possible: liberals or, more specifically, the Labor Party.
Read MoreUmm Reem, the author of the article “The Reality of Sex Education in Public Schools,” contends that Muslim parents should be wary of the sex education curriculum in the American public school system, and claims that it is not merely biology lessons, but rather, a value-laden program correlated with an increase in promiscuity, teen pregnancies and STIs, and homosexuality in society. She contends that sex-ed curricula in the US are based on three organizations: Advocates for Youth, SIECUS, and Planned Parenthood.
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A recent article on altmuslimah.com entitled “Searching for Khadijah: A boy’s perspective” by Sajid Hassan garnered quite a bit of attention as evidenced by the long string of passionate comments it received, far more than most other articles on Altmuslimah. The article described the pressure that professional Muslim American women face from their families and their social circles to get married in their early twenties, because it becomes much more difficult to find a partner once they hit their thirties.
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Even in these modern times, our community does not support the older generation of unmarried Muslim women who are struggling to find compatible spouses. These women are calling the community to account for this problem, and as a young man who sympathizes with them and seeks to marry one of them, I have encountered the same extremely negative attitude from the community.
Read MoreAs I sit writing this, I look back at the past days, and have come to a conclusion: the Egyptian revolution has made a better man of me. Every stage I spent, from sitting at home watching the news and discussing the revolution, to guarding my neighborhood then actually participating in the protests, have taught me real-life lessons in being a better man.
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