Michael Muhammad Knight is the author of 9 books, including Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing.
Iraqi Shiite militia fighters hold the Islamic State flag as they celebrate after breaking the siege of Amerli by Islamic State militants. (Youssef Boudlal/Reuters)
The Islamic State just released a gruesome new beheading video, again helmed by a western-bred Jihadist. As often happens, I received messages asking for explanation.
You see, I’m the jihadi who never was.
Twenty years ago, I ditched my Catholic high school in upstate New York to study at a Saudi-funded madrassa in Pakistan. A fresh convert, I jumped at the chance to live at a mosque and study Qur’an all day.
This was in the mid-1990s, during an escalation of the Chechen resistance against Russian rule. After class, we’d turn on the television and watch feeds of destruction and suffering. The videos were upsetting. So upsetting that soon I found myself thinking about abandoning my religious education to pick up a gun and fight for Chechen freedom.
It wasn’t a verse I’d read in our Qur’an study circles that made me want to fight, but rather my American values. I had grown up in the Reagan ’80s. I learned from G.I. Joe cartoons to (in the words of the theme song) “fight for freedom, wherever there’s trouble.” I assumed that individuals had the right — and the duty — to intervene anywhere on the planet where they perceived threats to freedom, justice and equality.
For me, wanting to go to Chechnya wasn’t reducible to my “Muslim rage” or “hatred for the West.” This may be hard to believe, but I thought about the war in terms of compassion. Like so many Americans moved by their love of country to serve in the armed forces, I yearned to fight oppression and protect the safety and dignity of others. I believed that this world was in bad shape. I placed my faith in somewhat magical solutions claiming that the world could be fixed by a renewal of authentic Islam and a truly Islamic system of government. But I also believed that working toward justice was more valuable than my own life.
Eventually, I decided to stay in Islamabad. And the people who eventually convinced me not to fight weren’t the kinds of Muslims propped up in the media as liberal, West-friendly reformers. They were deeply conservative; some would call them “intolerant.” In the same learning environment in which I was told that my non-Muslim mother would burn in eternal hellfire, I was also told that I could achieve more good in the world as a scholar than as a soldier, and that I should strive to be more than a body in a ditch. These traditionalists reminded me of Muhammad’s statement that the ink of scholars was holier than the blood of martyrs.
The media often draw a clear line between our imagined categories of “good” and “bad” Muslims. My brothers in Pakistan would have made that division much more complicated than some could imagine.These men whom I perceived as superheroes of piety, speaking to me as the authorized voice of the tradition itself, said that violence was not the best that I could offer.
Some kids in my situation seem to have received different advice.
It’s easy to assume that religious people, particularly Muslims, simply do things because their religions tell them to. But when I think about my impulse at age 17 to run away and become a fighter for the Chechen rebels, I consider more than religious factors. My imagined scenario of liberating Chechnya and turning it into an Islamic state was a purely American fantasy, grounded in American ideals and values. Whenever I hear of an American who flies across the globe to throw himself into freedom struggles that are not his own, I think, What a very, very American thing to do.
And that’s the problem. We are raised to love violence and view military conquest as a benevolent act. The American kid who wants to intervene in another nation’s civil war owes his worldview as much to American exceptionalism as to jihadist interpretations of scripture. I grew up in a country that glorifies military sacrifice and feels entitled to rebuild other societies according to its own vision. I internalized these values before ever thinking about religion. Before I even knew what a Muslim was, let alone concepts such as “jihad” or an “Islamic state,” my American life had taught me that that’s what brave men do.
Denver woman accused of trying to go to Syria to help ISIS plans to plead guilty
Shannon Conley, who was arrested at Denver International Airport while trying to go to Syria to help ISIS, plans to plead guilty in the case, according to federal documents filed on Friday.
FACEBOOKShannon Maureen Conley, a 19-year-old also known as Halima Conley, was arrested at Denver International Airport in April as she tried to board a plane to Turkey.
DENVER — A 19-year-old suburban Denver woman accused of trying to go to Syria to help ISIS plans to plead guilty in the case.
Federal documents filed Friday say an agreement has been reached in the case against Shannon Conley, who was arrested at Denver International Airport in April while boarding a flight she hoped would ultimately get her to Syria.
Details of the agreement were not part of the court filing, but Conley’s public defender Robert Pepin asked to schedule a change of plea hearing. Pepin declined to comment Monday.
The details of such deals cannot be disclosed until a change of plea hearing, said Jeff Dorschner, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Denver.
FBI agents say Conley, a licensed nurse’s aide who lived with her parents in Arvada, Colorado, was intent on waging jihad in the Middle East, despite their repeated efforts to stop her.
In several overt meetings over eight months, Conley, a convert to Islam, told members of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force that she was planning to travel overseas and marry a man she met online, who she believed was a Tunisian fighting for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaida splinter group also known as ISIL or ISIS that has overrun parts of Iraq and Syria.
Conley said she planned to fly to Turkey and then travel to Syria. According to court documents, she told agents she wanted to fight, but if she couldn’t, she would use her nursing skills to help jihadi warriors.
AMANDA KOST/DENVERCHANNEL.COMShannon Maureen Conley, 19, was arrested while trying to board a filght on her way to Syria, where she was allegedly planning to meet with the terrorist group ISIS.
Her parents, Ana and John Conley, told investigators that there were several firearms in their ranch home at the end of a cul-de-sac and that their daughter had recently taken one of the rifles to practice at a shooting range, according to the documents.
FBI agents encouraged her parents to talk to Conley about finding more moderate beliefs. But just days after her father refused to let her marry her suitor, whom she apparently met online, he found a one-way plane ticket to Turkey with her name on it. Authorities have said they are still investigating the man, identified in court documents only as Y.M.
Even four days before her arrest, she continued to tell the agents there was nothing they could do to change her mind, the documents say.
FBI agents became aware of Conley’s growing interest in extremism in November after she alarmed employees of a suburban Denver church by wandering around with a backpack and taking notes on the layout of the campus, according to the court documents. The church, Faith Bible Chapel in Arvada, was the scene of a 2007 shooting in which a man killed two missionary workers.
Few people who went to high school with Conley knew her personally, but some recalled her wearing a headscarf in gym class and requesting a special room for daily prayer.
Black Women Find a Growing Business Opportunity: Care for Their Hair
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Kadeian Brown, left, and Judian Brown own Black Girls Divine Beauty Supply and Salon, off Church Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn.CreditKirsten Luce for The New York Times
Not much seems unusual about Judian and Kadeian Brown’s storefront in a tidy plaza off Church Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn, a neighborhood where every block seems to have its own African hair-braiding salon.
Posters of African-American women with long, sleek hair fill the window. Round jars of shea butter belly up to slender boxes of hair dye on the shelves. Wigs perch on mannequin heads.
What makes Black Girls Divine Beauty Supply and Salon’s visitors do a double-take is the skin color of the proprietors. “I go, ‘Look at all the faces on the boxes,’ ” said Judian Brown, recalling other shopkeepers’ and customers’ surprise when they realize she is not an employee, but the owner. “Who should be owning these stores?”
The Brown sisters’ is one small shop in a multibillion-dollar industry, centered on something that is both a point of pride and a political flash point for black women: their hair. But the Browns are among only a few hundred black owners of the roughly 10,000 stores that sell hair products like relaxers, curl creams, wigs and hair weaves to black women, not just in New York but across the country. The vast majority have Korean-American owners, a phenomenon dating back to the 1970s that has stoked tensions between black consumers and Korean businesspeople over what some black people see as one ethnic group profiting from, yet shutting out, another.
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The Hair Shop is one of many beauty stores on Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn.CreditKirsten Luce for The New York Times
A growing awareness of this imbalance has spurred more black people to hang out their own shingles. The people producing the products have changed, too: As “going natural” — abandoning artificially smoothed hair in favor of naturally textured curls and braids — has become more popular and the Internet has expanded, black entrepreneurs, most of them women, are claiming a bigger share of the shelves in women’s medicine cabinets.
“We’re aware of where our dollars are going, we’re aware of the power of our dollars, we’re aware of the cultural significance of the way that we choose to wear our hair,” said Patrice Grell Yursik, the founder of Afrobella, a popular natural-hair blog. “There’s been a lot of taking back the power, and a lot of that is from the Internet.”
Dozens of bloggers flock to industry shows to test new products, review them for their readers and spread the word on social media. Hundreds of thousands of women watch natural hairstyle tutorials on YouTube. Rochelle Graham-Campbell’s line, Alikay Naturals, which she has marketed through her YouTube videos, is among the most successful of the homegrown brands, including Curls and Oyin Handmade, that have gained traction online and earned a spot on retail shelves.
Still, nothing beats brick-and-mortar stores for convenience, and the chance to touch and sniff the creams, which has prompted groups like the Beauty Supply Institute, in Atlanta, to start training blacks to open their own stores.
The ownership question has been fraught for years. Some black customers complain that Korean managers follow them around their stores as if suspecting they will steal. Some black shopkeepers accuse wholesalers and wig manufacturers, most of which are owned by Koreans, of refusing to do business with anyone but other Koreans.
A 2006 documentary about Koreans’ dominance of the industry by Aron Ranen spurred some black women to join boycotts of Korean-owned stores. Mr. Ranen has chronicled one case in Pittsburg, Calif., in which a black store owner was accused of setting fire to a nearby Korean-owned store.
Korean immigrants began entering the American hair business in the 1960s, when wigs were among South Korea’s top exports. Hair-care retail was not much of a leap.
And competition was scant: Until midcentury, many black women bought products from door-to-door saleswomen. Few stores were devoted to hair products. White flight closed many white-owned storefronts, clearing the way for Korean shops.
“A lot of people think these people were taking it away from black owners, but that’s not the case,” said Lori Tharps, a co-author of the book “Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America.”
“They were creating new businesses,” she said. “And they were doing it in places where nobody else wanted to open a store.”
A saying among Korean immigrants has it that “whoever picks you up at the airport is the one who will give you a job,” whether in beauty supplies or in other Korean-dominated businesses like greengroceries or nail salons.
That proved true for Tony Park, 45, who owns Sugar Beauty Supply on Flatbush Avenue in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn. Like many other Korean shopkeepers, he got his start in the industry working for a friend’s store after moving to the United States. He saved up to open his own store around four years ago: The American dream, Mr. Park called it.
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Takeya Daniels shopped at Neoh Beauty Supplies on Flatbush in Brooklyn.CreditKirsten Luce for The New York Times
He explained the Korean connection to the industry simply: “Most wholesalers are Korean. They can speak Korean; I can speak Korean.” (As labor costs rose in South Korea, wig production moved to China and settled more recently elsewhere in Asia, where labor is cheap. Koreans still own many manufacturers.)
Kaysong Lee, the publisher of Beauty Times, an industry publication written in both Korean and English, said he was shocked by the simmering anger directed at Korean owners, many of whom turned to the business after they were shut out of traditional career paths because of the language barrier. He argued in a Beauty Times column in March that the competition between Korean-run stores had driven down prices for black consumers.
“Despite many challenges, Korean-Americans opened their businesses in the heart of African-American communities and made available quality beauty-related products at low prices,” he wrote. “It does not make any sense to treat these hardworking Korean-American business owners as a band of criminals.”
Black people running their own stores say that securing accounts with the major Korean wholesalers can be tough, because they require retailers to buy in bulk to qualify for discounts. For first-time Korean owners, who can join forces with established owners or split costs with other retailers, the way is often smoother, not the least because the wholesalers sometimes offer easier terms to other Koreans.
Outside Detroit, Princess Hill is opening her second beauty supply store catering to black women in an area where black-owned businesses like hers are scarce, part of what she calls a movement to “take the power back from people who made you powerless.”
She found that she would have to order 10,000 berets to qualify for a 50 percent discount and free shipping — an impossible deal, given that she might sell 100 berets in a year.
As a result, she said, customers may complain that “our products can be a quarter more, or even 50 cents or a dollar, than the Korean stores, and they don’t really understand why.” Other black proprietors face complaints about not stocking enough products.
But younger, natural-haired black consumers — “naturalistas,” as some call them — are more aware than ever of where their dollars go, and what goes in their hair.
They are women like Corinthia Alvarez, 25, a nursing student in Brooklyn, who spends up to a few hours a day scrolling through Instagram, watching YouTube videos and reading reviews to learn about new products and styles, and then trying them herself. Her hair can cost her as much as $80 a month.
“You have your phone bill, you have your cable bill and then you have to buy your hair products,” she said on a recent afternoon outside the Hair Shop on Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn, where mannequin faces peered alluringly from behind their curtains of false hair in a dozen styles and colors. “Melah” wore a swoop of blond-streaked strands, “Jessy” a coppery-red bob; platinum-blond ringlets cascaded down “Yara’s” shoulders.
Ms. Alvarez’s newest acquisition: Curls “crème brule” whipped curl cream. “I take a lot of pride in my hair,” she said. “If my hair doesn’t look nice, I don’t feel like I’m pretty.”
In South Florida, Ms. Graham-Campbell of Alikay Naturals recently made the biggest announcement of her career to her nearly 100,000 YouTube subscribers: Her line of organic hair creams, oils and conditioners for black women, products she had cooked up in her kitchen, was hitting the shelves of Target stores.
Ms. Graham-Campbell, 27, started her business with $100 as a college student, marketing her products on YouTube and selling them on Etsy. Now her videos can draw as many as 200,000 views from fans. “They want to know, who’s the face behind the brand?” she said. “Are you able to relate to my hair, are you able to relate to my struggles and to my journey of being natural?”
Most of all, she said, she loves hearing from women who notice her photo on Alikay bottles. They tell her that they tell their children: “Someone that looks like you makes that product.”
Congratulations Marvin X for receiving the 1st Annual Pillar Award for your Eldership and tireless work and pioneering spirit in the Black Arts and Black Power movement, thank you for introducing Eldridge Cleaver to Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, thank you for sharing your journey and testimonies, thank you for teaching us how to fight institutionalized racism and white supremacy with your strong example of self-determination through Black Bird Press, thank you moving forward to educate the masses through theater and poetry even after you got 'White Listed' from professorship in the UC System because you taught THE TRUTH, thank you for rising from the jaws of Cointelpro like a Phoenix to continue the struggle!!! We Stand Strong on your Legacy. Bless you Baba Marvin X. Ase,
-Toussaint Haki Stewart with the Elder Zone. Pan African Family Festival, Oakland, Labor Day, 2014
Marvin X to be honored at Los Angeles Black Book Expo
September 13, 2014
"Congratulations! Marvin X, you have been nominated to receive the LABBX Spoken Worlds Pavilion Humanitarian Award of the Year, for unlimited service to the community of Poetry and Spoken Word, educating and enlightening seekers of Truth. For your poignant and insightful works benefiting humanity and for your tireless search for Truth, Justice and Clarity of Thought."--Denise Lyles-Cook, Director,
Imagine, Marvin X is called the USA's Rumi, Saadi and Hafiz (Bob Holman); Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland (Ishmael Reed). Marvin has taught at UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Fresno State University, San Francisco State University, Mills College, University of Nevada, Reno.
He has received fellowships from Columbia University, National Endowment for the Arts and planning grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
