Public Breastfeeding

Seattle Council recently passed a bill that would make it a crime to ask a nursing mom to stop, to cover up or to move to another location. I don’t understand why a law like this is needed. Are the people, who are opposed to public breastfeeding, opposed to it because of the exposed breast or are they opposed to it because they do not just like the concept of it, at all? Because let’s say if they are opposed to it because of the exposed body part, shouldn’t just covering up be a good option instead of specifically creating laws that would allow public breastfeeding? I have mash’Allah nursed my children in public in the USA for the past many years on many different occasions. It’s not that I was always trying to achieve that on purpose but it has happened a few times when I was in a park or a departmental store or someplace where there would be other people but the baby had to be fed. I would go to a discreet place where the chances of meeting people were minimal, get some sort of a covering cloth and feed the baby. In fact, one time I was using the rocking chair in the babies section in Toys R Us while other customers walked by. They wouldn’t even have noticed that I had a baby under my shawl. I am not alone in this attitude. In the place, I originate from i.e. the South Asia it’s pretty common for women to breastfeed in public. But let there be a disclaimer – our body parts are never exposed. Of course breastfeeding is natural and important but at the same time, respecting other people and respecting you is important as well. I am not sure if there are a lot of mothers who like exposing themselves when they nurse – my expectation is that most women like to be discreet. A blanket, a dupatta, a chador, an extra hijab – they all do a good enough job. The baby gets fed whereas the mom’s body parts stay hidden. Now on the other hand if the American public hates nursing mothers even when they are all covered up although I have not experienced it; such a law would be needed.

Black and White

I am happy to report that Zimmerman will be tried for 2nd-degree murder. Change.org that hosted the petition for Zimmerman to be arrested received 2.2 million signatures. Yours truly signed it as well. It is reported to be one of the petitions that received the highest number of signatures in the shortest amount of time.

It’s time we end the racism for good. As our Prophet (PBUH) has said in his last sermon, “All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over a black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action“. It is one of my favorite quotes from our Prophet (PBUH). Although, we Muslims don’t suffer from the racial bigotry that exists amongst the Christian population in the USA where a white guy can kill a black guy and be protected by the white police – we have a subtle type. We will pray along blacks and we will be friends with blacks but we will usually not marry blacks. I mean God forbid if it happened, one could end up with a child having a skin color much darker than one’s own. Even the thought is horrifying.

I guess what one finds attractive is encoded in the genes or the color of skin one has looked at growing up and all that stuff but the societal pressure is huge too. I guess Indians and Pakistanis have the fair skin complex because the British ruled them too but it exists all over the world. Perhaps the reason is that the whites have always been richer and more dominating – I don’t know. In the west, people lie on beaches to tan themselves up. In Pakistan and India, people use “fair and lovely” creams to lighten themselves up. If a Pakistani guy brought home a white blue eyed girl, that would be considered a big score but if he were to bring home a black lady with quite strong black features, people would be like, “what’s wrong with you?”

I once read an article about how the black women live at the bottom of the food chain errr dating chain and the white ones live at the top. The white guys, the black guys, the Asian guys, the Hispanics – everyone would like to date a white woman but the black women only get the leftover black guys or the ones that do want to date and marry within their race. I find it unfortunate. Then again, the black women who emulate the white women i.e. have their hair straightened or have a lighter skin would be considered pretty but if not, they don’t make the mark at least in the white community. A white woman usually always scores with anyone. I guess God had some purpose in this but I do think that God wanted us to challenge that as well.

My dear Muhammad (PBUH), here’s my promise to you! I will always remember what you said in your last sermon. I can’t talk for my children but insh’Allah for me, race will never be an option when we pick their spouses.

Shafia Murders and the Muslim Community

Non-Muslims are scared of the Muslims. During these times, everything scary is imaginable of the Muslims, thanks to the actual scary Muslims like the Imams that pledge jihad against the west or the terrorists, regular stereotyping by the media and a few false flag operations carried in the name of Muslims. Muslims can be imagined flying planes into buildings, detonating bombs in busy crowded places, scheming plans to impose their religious orders on unsuspecting non-Muslims and honor killing their daughters. When tragedies like the Shafia murders happen where Muslims have committed heinous crimes – all of their coreligionists turn into personae non gratae. That’s another thing that there are perhaps 7-10 million Muslims in North America and all of them are not killing their daughters but ONLY ONE bad Muslim is enough to wash away the good deeds of the rest of his Ummah.

The Shafia murders do not spell a good omen for Muslims. As I have addressed this issue once before (here, here and here), the Muslim teenagers in America and their parents face tremendous challenges. Muslim parents DO NOT want their kids to either a) dress provocatively or b) have sex before marriage. If you ask ANY Muslim family in America that is facing challenges raising their kids –their number one concern is that the kids are shedding their modesty, clothes wise and behavior wise and entering into very self-destructive behaviors. Now as Islamophobes would like to tell you that Muslim families have a distorted status quo system for females and would like to suppress them or mutilate their genitals or get them married off to older men or all the other RUBBISH that they can imagine. Let me tell you this! Muslim families move to Europe or America to have better opportunities for their offspring – male and female, to get away from the corruptness that exists in some of their societies. If THEY WERE planning to honor kill their girls or to keep them illiterate or to get them married to older guys or whatever, they could have stayed in Afghanistan or Pakistan or all the other places in the world they came from. Muslim families on the average have better educated women. In our families, we are told to become either a doctor or an engineer – perhaps that’s why we don’t have enough lawyers to prosecute all the companies that destroy the civil rights of Muslims or journalists that could write against the Islamophobic agenda of most of the media. When I was a graduate student in my department in Ohio, USA, there were a total of three PhD students in engineering – one Chinese, one Indian and one me (i.e. a Pakistani). There was no American female that was studying for PhD in engineering in my field in my department. And I am not the anomaly. Females from Asia or countries like Egypt are amongst the highest educated females in America. So yeah, our families didn’t immigrate here to make it easy to kill us.

But we didn’t move here for sexual liberation either – to shed our virginities before marriage. Now if it is a part of the US or Canadian constitution that an unmarried female must lose her virginity before marriage – then I guess commenters in Canadian newspapers shrieking that the Muslims have not adopted values of the land would sound okay. As far as I know sexual experiences related to must haves and must nots are not part of the constitution. Thus American Muslims and Canadian Muslims are free to expect of their kids to not have sex. Of course they can’t murder them if they do. But if they try to enforce the rules upon their children to a) dress modestly and 2) to not engage in premarital sex – it is the Muslim parent’s legal right as long as they are legal guardians responsible for the well-being of the child.

Now coming back to the point on why the Shafia murders spell a bad omen is that it makes the Muslim parents extremely vulnerable to false claims and blackmail. Muslim kids know how to move their parents around like a string puppet. Two words – 911 and honor killing! Being a parent who has been there and done that, I know what a nightmare it can be when a kid turns against you. The kid may be completetly self-destructive but if you live in a district with an Islamophobic and inept Social Services Department, Police Department or school administration – well you have had it. It’s the kid’s word against yours.  Your kid doesn’t get help – instead your family gets persecuted.  We have been lucky, it was the virtue of patience taught to us by our God, the belief that every bad is always followed by good and that Allah doesn’t task you more than you can bear that our family came out of this, stronger than before. My daughter is one of the brightest girls that could exist with a full tuition scholarship in one of the best colleges in USA (by the grace of God) on her way, insh’Allah, to become a lawyer. Looking back, she would probably realize that we always had her back even when she didn’t trust that we did.

Islamophobes will tell you that our religion makes us murder our daughters. Let me tell you, our belief in Allah kept our hope alive when we hit the darkest spot in our history being a parent.

A recent exchange at Toronto Sun

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/01/30/youngest-shafia-files-notice-to-appeal#disqus_thread

I had a recent exchange at Toronto Sun. The news was about the Shafia son who is starting an appeal process for the murder conviction he was recently handed out. These were the usual:

1. The Zionist cyber warriors from the Army of Geller and Spencer (pretending to be ordinary Canadian citizens) with their ready to copy and paste “tasteful” (but doubtful) hadiths from Bukhari, Muslim etcetera. Initially there will be the low level warriors but the moment they notice that they need backup, the bigwigs will appear with their full arsenal of Quranic quotes. Notice that the moment I start defending the Quran, mdkn appears. Now unsuspecting readers will perhaps think that these are regular people but if you notice the timing in which these warriors paste quotes – it’s at a lightning speed. That proves that these warriors have this plethora of copied and pasted stuff ready to use. Who does that? I don’t keep quotes from the Old or the New Testaments or from Hindu scriptures ready to be used. These are the Islamophobic cyber warriors and they get paid to do this stuff.
2. The regular Islamophobes (like the bigbadbug) that would be ready to blame anything and everything done wrong by a Muslim on his religion and as a command from Allah. One of these Islamophobes suggested feeding pork to the Shafias in the Canadian prison for 25 years or they suggest throwing all Muslims out.

But I noticed some good people too. Notice the person Allysa. She was routinely asking people who were hell bent on proving that “honor killing” was from the Quran to provide evidence. Also, there are the people on the fence like Michael. They don’t quite understand Islam but are very puzzled by the fact that a religion could instruct a person to kill their child.

Here is some food for thought on why people “honor kill”. People from all cultures and religions have been killing for honor for centuries. Pick up a Canadian or a US newspaper any day and you will see at least one news where a husband has murdered his wife or a boyfriend has murdered his girlfriend because the women had other paramours. THAT IS AN HONOR KILLING – a western honor killing; the guy’s honor was destroyed and he went ballistic. Now when courts decide cases like these, they give out the sentences that the killers deserve without making heroines of the women who were killed or mentioning why the husband had a “twisted sense of honor” as the Shafia judge said.

For Muslims, as I have said before, it’s a step further. Christians or Jews don’t want their wives or girlfriends to have sex with other guys. Muslims don’t want their girls to have sex with men before marriage. Mathematically for us,

PREMARITAL SEX IS AS BAD AS EXTRAMARITAL SEX

When some girls do have sex, their parents will kill them (WITH NO INSTRUCTION FROM THE QURAN which prescribes 100 lashes for this behaviour). The rage, the fury or the insult that these fathers feel is the same as what the Christian husband sees when he sees his wife in bed with another man. In fact, the Bible instructs to kill the wife for adultery, the Quran doesn’t so if anything has to be called a religious honor killing – it has to be the Christian guy that killed his wife for adultery. How judicially these supposed honor killings should be decided is the same way as a Christian husband’s murder of his adulterous wife is decided. Am I condoning the Muslim parents who killed their daughters who had premarital sex? NO. I am explaining the psyche behind it. Now would we be feeding the Christian husband that killed; urine or something he considers equivalent to his excretion in a Canadian prison? Probably not! Why are we then talking about feeding pork to the Shafias?

Now would I kill my child if they had sex outside marriage? NO.

BUT I would not kill my husband either if he had sex with another woman.

I do not possess a killing gene but for the people who do, for the sake of God, Jesus, Ganesh, Muhammad, Ram, Sita – please judge their case as you would ordinarily decide murder cases without blaming religion for it.

One daughter leaves home and the other comes home

So I left Peshawar leaving my parents alone but M1 has come home to Riyadh for her winter break. It feels good to have, mash’Allah, all the children under one roof. At the same time, I feel bad for my parents that they are alone. My dad, who was initially, a little annoyed and uncomfortable about me leaving my children at home in Riyadh and not bringing them with me to Peshawar was later on joking with me if I really had to go back to Riyadh. But that’s life – kids grow up and move away. In my case, my eldest moved out quite early (at age 17) as opposed to me that moved out after completing college and marriage.

Middle age is a difficult age to be at. You see your kids growing up and leaving the nest and you see your parents growing older and being at the forefront (where once the grandparents were) of the passage to the other life. You worry about both. I look at the videos of our family before M1 moved out and can’t fathom where that time went when M1 used to be at home. I look at my parents photos hanging in their home and can’t fathom how they became so aged so quickly and where did all the time disappear. In the end, it’s Islam and the belief that in some other life time and age will not matter that makes all worries go away.

More on the unruly Muslim teens

So as I talked about in my previous post, there is a growing problem in the Muslim community where parents and children may have different expectations about how the children may need to conduct themselves. This could lead to authority involvement if not tackled properly.

In most cases, the scenario plays out like this. Mom Doe and Dad Doe immigrate from a Muslim country and come here for either job or studies. In some cases, Muslim men get married to Christian women for green cards or perhaps for other reasons without having any ground rules set for how their child will be raised. Child Doe is born and raised here and gets educated in the mostly white suburban schools or in some cases in predominantly black city schools depending upon how much money the parents have. These schools do not have much diversity and very few Muslims if any. Around middle school Child Doe starts showing signs of a little rebellion; trying to show a little more skin, asking to stay out more late, spends increasing time on Facebook or other social networking sites and start excessive use of his/her cell phone. Lo and Behold, sometime around this the parents discover that Child Doe may also be involved in a physical relationship and the world of some parents comes crashing down.

What happens next depends really upon what sort of a culture/religion is practiced in the home. For some Muslim parents that are “Americanized” and have dated and drank themselves, this type of behavior is quite expected. They don’t mind. For parents that are a little conservative themselves but lack the willpower to get involved and if Child Doe is male, they pretend they don’t know what’s going on. They ignore it hoping at some point in time the children would be done with whatever they are experimenting with and will be normal. For some parents that are the “ostrich with their heads in the sand” type, this behavior may never be noticed and the mothers and fathers are actually very impressed with the amount of time the child spends on the computer. In fact, a mother from this group often boasted that her daughter studies until the wee hours in the morning. The mom didn’t realize that in this day of Facebook and friends networks, the moms of the friends in her group are aware of her daughter’s “academic endeavors”. Then there are the parents who have great difficulty compromising on their principles and those are the people that I will address in my post here. Now before addressing that, I want to talk a little bit about honor killings and their relationship with the Muslim religion since these are often the fears on the basis of which the authorities may get involved.

I am a Pathan by ancestry. Pathans perhaps have the strictest code of conduct for men and women in the South East Asia. Women will cover themselves and extramarital relationships are shunned. It is a given that if someone will engage in it, they could be killed. With that said, with my 22 years in Pakistan I have never known of a single instance where any one was killed. Is that because no one engaged in premarital or extramarital sex? I don’t know. I do know that I never heard of any affair in my village in Charsadda or if someone ever got killed. I would hear of some honor killings in the state of Punjab off and on through newspapers. Now I was also aware of the fact that there was a law in Pakistan where a “crime of passion” would be treated differently than a premeditated murder. Abbu would often comment in many cases of these “honor killings”, the man who would often get murdered (along with the wife of the accused murderer) would be a guy who had feudal property disputes going on with the accused. So a convenient manner to get rid of the person that would be disputing with you on your property lines (a very common problem in Pakistan) was to kill him, place your dead wife at his door and then go to the police to say that you discovered them in a state of dishonor and that you killed them both. In most cases, the murderer would get a reduced sentence and would be free in a year’s time. So basically the honor killings were not too honorable.

I have heard about a few honor killings cases in USA. All I can say is that for every Muslim that kills his daughter there are at least a hundred more non-Muslim men that kill their girlfriends and wives when they discover their affairs. So perhaps the non-Muslim killer doesn’t feel outraged when his daughter has sex with a man outside their marriage and perhaps is more outraged when his wife or girlfriend does it. Does that mean that it is Islam that is making a Muslim man kill his daughter but not the religion if a non-Muslim murders his wife? I don’t think so. It’s the psycho brain cells involved in both cases.

With that clear, I will throw around some strategies for preventing some teen catastrophes from happening, further down the road.

1. Try to steer away from public schools. I have heard this line numerous times where people say that if you have provided a strong foundation at home, nothing in school can affect a child. That’s a myth and a fallacy. The kids spend 8-9 hours at school and 4-5 hours at home. Out of those 4-5 hours, perhaps the child spends barely 15 minutes of their time doing anything Muslim or religious. In their 8-9 hours of school they spend all that time with individuals that do not adhere to the policy of modest coverings, remembering God or making prayers, not having sex before marriage, not drinking, eating Zabihah, and treating their parents with respect and obedience besides many other things. So how did anyone think that their child will come out okay from the public school? Here is an interesting article about public schools versus Islamic schools. I agree with the fact mentioned in this article that I have seen parents spend $10,000 or more on their international trips home. The same parents cannot imagine spending that much money on an Islamic school. In a questionnaire sent out a year ago, only 3 families including us wanted an Islamic school in Charlottesville. In another instance, when the online teacher for Quran for my son asked me a few months ago to refer him to other people there were quite a few people that found the $100-150 a month (for teaching Quran five times a week, an hour per lesson) too exorbitant. Parents of Muslim children over estimate the quality of education other than Islamic while at the same time underestimating the value of Islamic education. If Islamic education is not an option, I strongly suggest homeschooling or online schooling for kids at least from 8^th grade to 10^th grade.
2. Increase your visibility. This is perhaps true for any Muslim family other than for keeping your kids under control but it is especially true for parents of middle to high school students that could be problematic. You want to let your child know that the community around you; including the teachers in high school, in the library, in the neighborhood, in anything connected to the child recognize you as normal sane parent. So volunteer in the school your students studies in or volunteer at the local fire station to create close relationships with the fire crew and cops. Better yet, volunteer at the juvenile shelters for runaway teens or at the Social Services department. If your teen ever does go haywire with peer pressure around them, they would think long and hard before projecting you as the psycho Muslim parent to get their way.
3. Create social programs within your Muslim community to help with domestic problems. We need to have more of Muslim counselors working not only in mainstream professions but also working specially with the Muslim community to help in various domestic cases such as unruly teens or when couples might need therapy. The needs for a Muslim family cannot be met by non-Muslim counselors since they do not understand the intricacies of Islamic behavior or expectations. The local mosque could perhaps designate volunteer arbitrators in cases of domestic problems. Muslim families should also help other Muslim families in perhaps taking the teen that is trying to run away or needs a place to cool off. We should be more proactive to help each other.
4. Take your kids to countries that you immigrated from for summers. Let them create better relationships with their grandparents, experience their Muslim culture and let them get away from some of the toxic influences of the American teen culture.
5. Start your duties to your God meaning modest coverings/hijab, daily prayers, Zakat, Hajj, fasting and such when the child is little. I often see Muslim moms not paying close attention to what they are wearing when their daughters are little. It’s when the daughters have started high school and have started acting out when Moms realize that maybe they shouldn’t have worn certain clothes. So yes, it does matter what foundation you provide your children but it’s not the only thing.
6. Keep your kids occupied in good stuff and activities. Put them in your local recreational leagues for soccer, baseball, basketball and the rest. As they say: “an idle man’s mind is a devil’s workshop”. Keep your teen busy and keep them away from cell phones and online activities.

In the end, know your rights as a parent. You have the right to enforce your religion including a dress code and a no sex policy on your under 18 teen without any pleading. Your child needs to follow your rules. Read the statues of your state. Institutes such as Rutherford Institute will help parents if the school ever tries to step on their religious rights. Never take law in your hands and always have Allah (and the local cops J) as your best friends. Your teen will think twice before crossing you.

Manipulations and Muslim kids

So following on my previous post, I was talking with a lady yesterday at the park about how Muslim kids manipulate their parents. She is originally from Canada and she said that it’s quite prevalent over there (and here too, as I have heard many times) that the kids threaten their parents with calling 911 and false allegations of abuse if they don’t get their way. Cases in point:

1. Parents ask their daughter to dress up a little more modestly, the girl refuses.
2. Parents ask their child to not stay out late, the child refuses.
3. Parents ask their child to stop a relationship with a certain person, the child refuses.
4. Parents ask their child to not attend a certain event without a chaperone, the child refuses.
5. Parents ask their child to stop addictive use of their cell phone, the child refuses.

And more….

I am sure these scenarios must have played out some time or the other in a Christian home. What most probably would have happened is that the child lost their privileges and was grounded. When the child apologized, life was back to normal; the reason being that the child couldn’t get anyone involved by crying fake wolf. But what most probably happens in a Muslim home with a rebellious teen is that the teen can refuse to follow the rules, not be grounded and on top of that have his or her parents get a visit from the cops and the Department of Social Services as well. So with the current scare happening about the impending Sharia and all Muslims being terrorists or honor killers what would happen when a couple of white cops enter a Muslim home where the mom is wearing some random cloth over herself and the dad is a foreign looking guy with a suspicious looking beard and the teen is crying abuse, who would you trust? Muslim kids realize that their parents don’t work in the PTOs or volunteer in their communities, may have horrible communication skills, look and dress a little weird and as such could be prime targets for false allegations of abuse. Remember Rifqa Bary? Remember her Sri Lankan mom with her dupatta over her?

So what is the solution for the menacing problem in the current climate where the Muslim kids are getting out of control and instead of getting help from authorities, Muslim parents are being threatened to have their rights revoked? I have some solutions that I will discuss in my next post IA.

Our venture into homeschooling

We homeschool our middle school aged children. In our city we are the only Muslim family that does homeschooling. The highest percentage of homeschooling families in our city and Albemarle county are Christians that would like their kids to learn about their religion which is missing in public schools.

As for us, we did not homeschool always. We had problems with peer pressure with our oldest, with Muslim children in our local mosque (another city) out of control, with a meddlesome teacher on a personal ‘jihad” to liberate our daughter. Her efforts to achieve the liberation…you got to allow the child to be at football game late at night without an adult..you got to allow the child to ditch classes to accompany the drama class on an out-of-town trip even though the child doesn’t take the drama class.

I guess we the parents are to blame too. We were always moving for better jobs, our kids were always the “new kid on the block” and we were always in suburban Blue Ribbon schools with the highest majority of white kids, .02 percentage free lunch ratios and 2 black children and 3 Asian children total to show for diversity. I mean I as an adult sometimes feel isolated and not blended in more so after the Hijab. For a Muslim child its hard. You don’t get to date, you look different, you don’t have that much liberty and freedom as others do and plus the materialism….Oh I hate the materialism. Parents don’t have much time for their children so they compensate by money, latest phones, ipods, ipads, etc etc. And the sexism… the girls have to be barely dressed and be cheerleaders….and the boys have to be fully dressed and get to play sports.

Why can’t it be the opposite..let men wear a uniform showing their thighs and jump on the sidelines and let women play…….its funny that these loons call Hijabi women oppressed…its these types of girls in high school that I call oppressed. Here in Cville I knew parents of classmates of my daughter who were themselves dining at fine restaurants and the Cville Downtown Mall was babysitting their teens.  I didn’t approve much of what went around in high school and I did not want my girls to be materialistic, to be always wanting that newer gadget to be considered cool, to have to wear a $30 Abercrombie simple tee that you could get for $5 in Walmart to be considered cool and to have to shed off their clothes to be able to impress and date that football player in high school to be considered cool.

Needless to say, we are homeschooling.