Yes, Virginia, there are Muslims in Mexico, too!

I stayed away from blogging anything yesterday because of a nagging suspicion that I might end up ranting about Earth Day.  As much as I am worried about the natural environment in my own way, I am convinced that we misplace our emphasis when we worry more about the plastic bags that are tossed about while ignoring ... see, this is the kind of rant I wanted to avoid!

I am far more interested in the "Muslim" angle of the Boston bombers.  The brothers Tsarnaev.  From my observation deck, it seems more a case of disgruntled losers taking to violence, which is, unfortunately, an all too familiar American happening.  Yet, it is the "Muslim" connection that fascinates many.  Unsuspecting Americans who do not know where Chechnya is can easily be misled into thinking that it is one of "those" Middle Eastern countries.  As I noted here a couple of days ago, "The Islamophobes who now will consider any Muslim with ultra-suspicion might be shocked to know that the brothers are Caucasians. "

Here in the US, we do not seem to be investing any time and effort to understand Islam and Muslims.  Sometime soon after I re-started this blog, I noted about the global Muslim population.  The web and blogging are simply fantastic when it comes to getting updates, discussing policies, ..... Many academics have also taken up blogging big time.  I suspect that in many cases, blogging provides a lot more interactive discussions than a journal article can.  Juan Cole is one of those academics who has blogged a lot--on the Middle East in particular.  Here, he responds to the news item that a quarter of the world's population is Muslim:

I don't think most people in the West realize the implications of the likelihood that one-third of humankind may soon be Muslim. We don't have a real sense of scale in the US. We don't realize that Brazil alone is nearly as big as the US in area, or that the US could be fitted into East Africa. We don't realize how huge Iran is, or what it implies when we call India a subcontinent.

One of the implications is that the US is a little unlikely to thrive as a superpower in the 21st century if its more venal and bloodthirsty politicians go on barking about "Islamo-fascism" (they never said Christo-Fascism even though Gen. Franco in Spain was a good candidate for the label) and denigrating Islam and Muslims and seeking to militarily occupy their countries and siphon off their resources. That kind of behavior may have worked in the 19th century before Muslims were mobilized, but it does not work now.

The Muslim world is the labor pool of the next century, and is also the custodian of much of the world's fuel. New American crusades of the sort favored on the right of the Republican Party may finally induce imperial overstretch and deeply harm the US. Some 5 percent of the population cannot dominate by force 25 percent of the globe and what may eventually be 33% of the globe.

Even from that pragmatic demographic perspective, we need to spend a lot more time understanding Islam.  I am always shocked that it is possible for students at many colleges and universities to graduate from an undergraduate program without learning anything about Islam and Muslims.  Twelve years since 9/11, and how can that be possible, right?  Absolutely bizarre!

It is not as if Muslims live only in certain geographic areas either for us to ignore understanding them.  When I was in the Avis shuttle bus to LAX, a family got in.  Four kids hopped in followed by their hijab-wearing mother and then the father with a scratchy beard on his chin.  The couple looked like they were in their early to mid-thirties.  The bus driver, a Hispanic woman, went to help the couple with their bags and hesitantly spoke in English to them.

She was surprised, and so was I, when the hijab-wearing woman replied in Spanish.  I paid attention to whatever words I could recognize, and I understood the driver telling them that she was from Guadalajara.  The man joined in the conversation and told her that they were from very near Guadalajara.  Then a whole lot of jabbering--the driver even forgot that she had a job to do!

The driver looked at the kids and asked them for their names.  And then asked what their mother's name was.  One kid with glasses said "Fatimah."  A name that Muslims revere.

I am yet to recover from the shock of a Spanish-speaking Muslim family, and hijab-wearing mother in that, from Mexico!

So, the nerd in me, I went to the Pew Survey that I had linked in that old post.  An estimated 110,000 in Mexico are Muslims.  A tiny, tiny, minority, yes.  But, who would have thought that; certainly not I!

If Mexico has about 110,000 Muslims, then any guesses on the Muslim population in Russia, of which Chechnya is a part?  Think of a big number.  Way bigger than 110,000.  Way bigger than the Muslim population here in the US.

Ready for that answer on Muslim population in Russia?  Hold on to your seat:

The country with the largest Muslim population in  Europe is Russia, with more than 16 million Muslims, meaning that more than four-in-ten European  Muslims live in Russia

Yet, we choose not to make any effort at understanding Islam and Muslims because ....?

Fatehpur Sikri (India) 2012

Will race disappear once we ID our genetic formula?

Turns out that the Boston bombers were of Chechen origin.   The younger brother, the one who is alive, was a naturalized citizen as well.  The Islamophobes who now will consider any Muslim with ultra-suspicion might be shocked to know that the brothers are Caucasians.

We are a strange people ready to classify fellow humans into various categories simply based on how we look.  White and brown and black and yellow and red.  Whites aren't really white, and there was never any "red" Indian either.  It is all in our imaginations.  Here on the web, nobody knows what color your skin is, and everybody is just a dog.

Source

Even the government systematically collects information on our "race."  I have almost always picked "other" or "white" when responding to those questions.  "Other" because I am usually pissed at the data collection, and "white" because I want to make a point that I, too, am a Caucasian if that is how they define a white.

However, I had no idea, until reading this essay by Amitai Etzioni, that whenever I chose "other" the Census folks were imputing a race for me anyway:

[Never] underestimate our government. The Census Bureau has used a statistical procedure to assign racial categories to those millions of us who sought to butt out of this divisive classification scheme. Federal regulations outlined by the Office of Management and Budget, a White House agency, ruled that the Census must “impute” a specific race to those who do not choose one. For several key public policy purposes, a good deal of social and economic data must be aggregated into five racial groups: white, black, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, and native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. How does the government pick a race for a person who checked the “Other” box? They turn to the answers for other Census questions: for example, income, neighborhood, education level, or last name. The resulting profiles of the U.S. population (referred to as the “age-race modified profile”) are then used by government agencies in allotting public funds and for other official and public purposes.

I wonder what race I was assigned to when I bubbled in "other."  Do I exist as a white, or a black?  How bizarre!

I agree with Etzioni's simple request:

Let us begin with a fairly modest request of the powers that be: Give us a chance. Don’t make me define my children and myself in racial terms; don’t “impute” a race to me or to any of the millions of Americans who feel as I do. Allow us to describe ourselves simply as Americans. I bet my 50 years as a sociologist that we will all be better for it.

Yes.

Simply as "Americans" will be wonderful especially when we are all nothing but a collection of genes underneath.  With an origin in Africa.

Our ancient mother, the mother of us all, lived in Africa some 150,000 years ago. She was one individual in a world population of Homo sapiens—recently evolved out of Homo erectus—amounting to 2,000 individuals at most. There were other females of course, but their lines died out long before historical times. Everyone alive today descends from this one woman, from one of her two daughters. This is the astonishing news revealed by the book of the human genome, the book whose pages we are just beginning to turn.

I noted nearly a year ago, based on the results of my DNA analysis, about my forefather:

The man who gave rise to the first genetic marker in your lineage probably lived in northeast Africa in the region of the Rift Valley, perhaps in present-day Ethiopia, Kenya, or Tanzania, some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago. Scientists put the most likely date for when he lived at around 50,000 years ago. His descendants became the only lineage to survive outside of Africa, making him the common ancestor of every non-African man living today.

We then invented the languages that separate us.  We invented the religions that separate us. Our adaptation to the natural settings helped us develop the color of skin and hair and everything else that separate us.  If we are all given our respective genomes, will we begin to understand that we are not any different at all?

One way to show how contrived racial divisions actually are is to recall that practically all of the DNA in all human beings is the same. Our differences are truly skin deep. Moreover, the notion that most of us are of one race or another has little basis in science. The Human Genome Project informs us not only that 99.9 percent of genetic material is shared by all humans, but also that variation in the remaining 0.1 percent is greater within racial groups than across them. That is, not only are 99.9 percent of the genes of a black person the same as those of a white person, but the genes of a particular black person may be more similar to the genes of a white person than they are to another black person.

We humans are so awful that we will want to focus on the 0.1 percent.  We will then finely dice that into components that will reveal the 0.00000001 percent that makes us different from some group and that 0.00000001 percent will be the basis for discrimination. For stereotyping. "Those people, you know."  Crappy apes we are!