Current Affairs

Unicycles and Afghanistan

Dear Friends, Salaam aleykum. I hope you’ve been keeping warm and healthy through the winter! This email includes events and updates on the Afghan Mobile Mini Circus for Children (MMCC). BENEFIT PERFORMANCE!! Sat., March 18 — 6:30 pm @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Building 54, Room 100 Map: http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?mapterms=54%2BE34 MIT’s Juggling Club is throwing a Juggle Mania!! benefit performance for the MMCC. Some great entertainment, for a good cause. Club President David Rush brought in Peter Panic, and I’ll do a straight jacket escape while jumping rope. We all must escape from something, a bondage of some sort… If…

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Current Affairs

Happy Gregorian 2006

Happy Gregorian Year 2006! I’m working part-time at a bookstore – a nationally recognized company that shall remain nameless. It’s a good way to keep off the streets and out of trouble, and I figure the surest way to tapped by the NSA is to be an unemployed, overeducated Muslim male who is also an American citizen. In any event, I saw something today that really made me start off the new year right. A young hijabi, perhaps in her 20s, was reading a book on sex acts. I’m happy for her.

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Current Affairs

Haroon Siddiqui Speech

Just read this. Interesting. Three things come to mind: I find it interesting that Mr. Siddiqui has to qualify his statements with the idea that he is not the follow of the Aga Khan, even though he is in front of a “progressive” audience, where being an Ismaili, or Ithna’ashari, or Sunni shouldn’t matter. He critiques the term “extermist” but speaks to a group called “progressive,” which continues to reassert the binary, although from a different direction. He begins talking about how aware Muslims around the world are of prison abuses. I don’t dispute this, but I wonder how the…

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