TRANSCRIPT 🔗
ali: Bismillahi-Rahman Raheem Asalamu Alaikum, everyone. This is Ali with a new episode of the Texas Muslims Podcast. This is a little bit different of an episode in the sense that there's no video. And really, this is a recording of a performance that I did at an event here in Austin last week. This is an event that was a combination, it was a co-production between two organizations: Gathering All Muslim Artists, which is a local nonprofit. and Isan Collective, which is a group I have co-founded with a couple of folks that I'm gonna who I'm gonna introduce here in an upcoming episode. both of these organizations are dedicated to promoting arts in the Muslim community and bringing artists together. The event that I went to was a poetry night followed by a jamming session. And It was an incredible event. Met a lot of really interesting people shared some beautiful poetry. And the jam session was a lot of fun. It eventually went into Kabalis and songs from all these different languages. And I just can't describe how how much I like this kind of activity and how lucky I feel to be in a community where we have folks who are similarly inclined and interested and that we can build this sort of community together. What I'm sharing over here is something that I I do outside the podcast, which is a lot of performance art. I've I've done this for a long time. I locally here in Austin, I was part of a couple of different improvisational groups. And I also did sketch comedy for a while with a group called Floor Is Lava, which is the longest running sketch comedy group in Austin. I only took a step back from that because my family responsibilities increased, much like we had another kid, and that required me to be home more and I couldn't quite make the weekly rehearsals work. But I I like performing. something I get a lot of energy out of. And I and I also believe that it's closely associated with our role as as as Muslims. Islam is a very artistic religion that lends itself to all sorts of art that comes across from all all over the world, art is more than just something indulgent. art is essential. So much of the world around us is shaped by art. The more that I learn about the art that we consume here in the US and the role that the government and other authorities play in creating this art. For example, so many American movies are sponsored by the Department of Defense. All Marvel movies are. Any any movie that the US makes that features the military. If you show the US military in a good light, they will give you essentially free access to any military assets that one needs. on top of that, there's just a lot that folks in power have done to try to make art that promotes very specific kind of views. that to me just speaks to the power of art. There's a reason why so many authoritarian regimes around the world will target art artists and also work with artists to promote their their viewpoints. It's a very, very common theme across global history and and
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across even even now, where artists are used by regimes, including here in the United States to promote particular government or other viewpoints that that the authorities in power want people to be more. amenable to. That demonstrates the power of art. And it makes it more important for us as folks who are conscientious to use art to help expand folks' minds, expose them to ideas that they may not otherwise think of, help them critically think, and help them think of the issues that we deal with on a daily basis in a in a different light. And in this particular piece, I'm I'm using one of my favorite poets, his name is Fez Ahmed Fez. For anyone who's from the subcontinent and is speaks Urdu or Hindi, you'll be familiar with him, even if you don't know his name, you have heard his poetry. It's been used and continues to be used actively in Bollywood movies, and it's used a lot in the Ghazals that you would know and recognize. The most famous one being Hamde Kenge, which is a classic by Igbal Bano, which was used even even now, it's used actively in protests in both India and Pakistan. And even now, People are arrested and put in jail for citing his poetry. Bottom line, he's a very fascinating individual. I hope to give another talk about him on this podcast another time. But I I perform one of his poems and I wanted to share that performance and I hope to share more of this type of this type of thing as well on my podcast. So take a listen. you learn a little bit about Fez, and you'll get to hear one of my favorite poems of his, Lehuka Surah. And Thank you for tuning into this podcast episode and I will catch y'all next time soon. Assalamuikum.
علی: My six-year-old daughter came to me the other day and she's in first grade and it's surprising, like there's something really unique when kids go to school because you're learning all these things that you're not sure what the background of that is and she came to me on Friday, she's like, Babajan, Babajan, do you know what 9-11 is? And I was like. Yeah, I heard of it. And I was so curious. I wonder if they're teaching kids about 9-11 these days, especially first graders. And as kids do, it was framed as a tragedy, which I think is appropriate. I didn't get an impression of too much like rah-rah, America the best and all that. But it was interesting going through that kind of thing, because every day she comes back with something new, and I don't know how to react to it. Like, she did the Pledge of Allegiance the other day, which I didn't even know that was still a thing. But people still did the Pledge of Allegiance, which sounds so weird in the modern kind of landscape we're in. Whatever the case, going back to 9-11, I remember I was a college freshman when it happened. And one statistic I read that day that's always stuck with me, it was from the UN Food Program. And it was, It was the number 35,615. Because the UN Food Program estimated that the same day that 9-11 took place, when 3,000 Americans died in that unfortunate tragedy, 35,615 children are estimated to have starved to death across the globe. Right? And it's such a sobering statistic because look at what, know, Omar, you spoke a little bit about all the stuff America did in response to that. There's estimates of five plus trillion dollars that have been spent on these, you know, senseless wars and things. when a tiny sliver of that money could solve this problem of children not having enough food. And we don't have look far for it. In the US, we have one in five children who live in food insecurity. And it's one of those problems that all of us have some level of complicity in. It's a choice we're making as a society. And there's people to blame, but it's always hard to find who is responsible for this. And there's a Pakistani socialist poet, Urdu language poet named Fez Ahmed Fez. He wrote a lot of really powerful poetry about a lot of social issues. And a poem he wrote that kind of talks about this issue is what I'm gonna recite now. I'm gonna recite it in Urdu, then I'm not gonna translate the whole thing. I'll just give you kind of an explication of it. No there, no one is there, no one Pukarita raha yateem lahoo. Kisi ko behre samat na vakta na dimag na muddai na shahadat hesa paak hua. Na muddai na shahadat hesa paak hua yeh khun-e-khaq na shinan tha. Rizq-e-khaq hua. No one needs a translation, right? You all got that? You know, it's in this poem, it's called Luhuka Sirag, which is like a trace of blood. And it's almost like he's taking an investigation. He's saying, in the first stanza, like, I don't see any blood on anyone's fingernails. There's no blood on anyone's clothes, nothing on the ground. In the second stanza, he talks about how this is blood that hasn't been spilled in service of government. It hasn't been spilled in service of an emperor. or of religion that we celebrate and we kind of commemorate as martyrdom. In the last stanza, he talks about like, can kind of, if you really, really pay attention, I can kind of hear the cry of this kind of innocent blood that's being spilled. But man, I don't have time, I got so much in my mind. And then he ends with saying that, this blood, there's a concept in Islam called risk, is like we all, everything we consume has been preordained by God. And then he says, rizq-e-khawq-waq. You see, this blood was always just meant to be, it was created just to be absorbed back into the ground. So it's a very powerful poem. It kind of goes to everyone's, a lot of our complicity and the sorts of systems we live in, and the fact that we make choices that result in the sort of injustices that go on in process. Now, he was a very optimistic poet. He always had a kind of thing, we all have an individual role to change what we see. But this is a poem that's always stuck with me, because there's always something missed when we talk about tragedies like 9-11. And that'll pass it on. Anyone else?