Vote Against the Agony of Stereotypes & Generalizations

Man! Dude! Session #301

(M)an: Dude! The Houston Chronicle’s Craig Hlavaty reported the story WFAA-TV in Dallas covered about a mother named Vanessa Bailey being told to breastfeed her baby in a restroom stall when she was tending to the sacred business at hand in the lobby of the George W. Bush Presidential Library.

(D)ude: Man! A restroom stall? Really? We’re still having to address the need for comfortable and ergonomically sound public furniture for moms to address the issue of breastfeeding their hungry babies? A restroom stall! That’s cruel! A restroom stall?    

M: Dude! Hlavaty included twenty-three instances around the United States of women being either confronted and questioned or accepted for breastfeeding their children in public. Like when Assistant Professor Adrienne Pine could not make last minute childcare arrangements and ended up nursing her feverishly ill infant before a class of forty at American University in Washington, DC.         

D: Man! You know, Toni Morrison begins her book The Song of Solomon with an instance where a mother nurses her child well onto the age of six. Morrison has the genius to preserve and persevere the innocence of mother and child while contrasting that naturalness with the community’s unnaturally harsh criticisms.   

M: Dude! Unnaturally harsh criticisms have been made about the Yazidi population in Northern Iraq and it reminds me of the Ahmadiyya population in the Dominion of Pakistan following the 1947 Partition of India.     

D: Man! Sense of exclusivity and caste within both these religions is what I think led to the religious strife against the Yazidi and the Ahmadiyya by the surrounding Muslims and Christians. However, I think the Roman Catholic Church’s social work in Pakistan is a showcase of the kind of diplomacy and missionary etiquette that the United States of America’s religious leaders need to adopt in order to create the inclusiveness that the President of the United States and Secretary Kerry are promoting and encouraging.     

M: Dude! Is there a lot of exclusivity amongst the Yazidi and the Ahmadiyya populations?  

D: Man! Yes. The Yazidi population has divided itself into 3 castes: the Murids, the Sheiks, and the Pirs, and intermarriage between them is grounds for punishment by death due to dishonoring the hierarchy. The Ahmadiyya population identifies 3 beliefs concerning Jesus and critics question the latter two, if not all three.    

M: Dude! Three beliefs about Jesus?

D: Man! What are the three beliefs about Jesus? Jesus is one of the Prophets of Islam and He will return on the Last Day?

M: Dude! Yep, that’s the first. Second, there’s the second coming of Him in the form of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad who was born in 1835. And the third’s about their faith being the an Islamic revivalist movement emphasizing a reworking of the concepts of jihad and warfare. According to the Ahmadiyya perspective, jihad is an intrapersonal struggle that people have to contend within throughout their lifetime and violence must be the last resort while encouraging written dialogue instead of military intervention. This is referred to as Jihad-ul-Akbar or The Greater Jihad.

D: Man! The Yazidi people reportedly are grateful for and accept the United States Military’s assistance because, as a marginalized and targeted group by Islamist militants, they are given protections that are otherwise unavailable. But I think the solution to the problem of combating the mind’s exclusivity is for the Iraqi and the Iranian governments to provide an opportunity for the Yazidi to write down their religious practices and personal histories of massacres and survival. The history and the recordings of actual Yazidi people must be taken, like how the University of California’s linguists carry out research of marginalized languages and the people who speak them across the country and globe.  

M: Dude! There’s the issue of Satan that is considerably controversial because of a major misunderstanding between the Muslim and Christian religions and the Yazidi population. You see, there’s a point of contention concerning Satan between the Muslims and the Yazidis that makes the Muslims declare the Yazidis devil worshippers and after which the Christians follow suit. The Yazidis’ Peacock Angel is known as the Melek Taus or Shay-tan in Arabic. Well, in Arabic and, hence, in the Koran, Shay-tan is literally Satan.     

D: Man! You know, I spoke with John-Jahn yesterday and he reportedly has heard Muslim women in the Indo-Pak chide their children for misbehaving by reprimanding them for acting Shay-tan.  

M: Dude! So the name of Satan is used in admonishing misbehaviors?

D: Man! Of course! And the other thing to keep in mind is the agony of simplicities like stereotypes and generalizations.

M: Dude! Certainly! John-Jahn also discussed the technicality between the Kurmanji Melek Taus and the Arabic Shay-tan. Apparently, in Creation, according to the Yazidis, the archangel Melek Taus was the first one God created and the only one to disobey Him when asked to bow down to Adam, crying out the reason being that he, Melek Taus, was the illumination of Him while Adam was only dust. God was so impressed by Melek Taus’s reasoning that He made Melek Taus His representative on Earth.       

D: Man! Don’t forget that some scholars like Tony Lagouranis in his 2008 paperback Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator’s Dark Journey Through Iraq actually have attempted to clarify the misunderstood beliefs of the Yazidis.  

M: Dude! According to an excerpt from Wikipedia, Lagouranis writes… instead, he [Melek Taus] descended, saw the suffering and pain of the world, and cried. His tears, thousands of years' worth, fell on the fires of hell, extinguishing them. If there is evil in the world, it does not come from a fallen angel or from the fires of hell. The evil in this world is man-made. Nevertheless, humans can, like Malak Ta'us, live in this world but still be good.

D: Man! About man-made evil and persecution in the United States as a result of the Republican Tea GOP’s resurgence of voter restrictions and hurdles, I am reminded of a passage out of N. J. Dawood’s paperback translation of the Koran for Penguin Classics alongside the fates of the two African American men, one a teenager named Michael Brown, with his arms raised in surrender and the other a husband and father named John Crawford, purchasing toys, fatally shot by police in Missouri and Ohio: Believers, show discernment when you go to fight for the cause of God, and do not say to those that offer you peace: ‘You are not believers,’ –seeking the chance booty of this world; for with God there are abundant gains. Such was your custom in days gone by, but now God has bestowed on you His grace. Therefore show discernment; God is cognizant of all your actions [page 71].