XPost: ba.politics, dc.media, soc.penpals   
   XPost: alt.burningman   
   From: war@diversity.com   
      
   CHICAGO — Rami Nashashibi drove down the tattered corridor of   
   West 63rd Street, passing the occasional church or auto-repair   
   shop or check-cashing spot, mostly skirting blocks that had been   
   vacant so long they had dirt trails cutting through the high   
   weeds. Near the corner of Racine, he pulled to the curb outside   
   the grocery calling itself A Lot To Save.   
      
   The place had a gaudy billboard showing jugs of Tide and bottles   
   of V8, and its front windows were encased by metal bars. The   
   shelves inside held everything from T-shirts to incense to   
   canned beans, a jumble made necessary by the dearth of   
   supermarkets or big-box retailers on this beleaguered stretch of   
   the South Side.   
      
   Such a forlorn street corner might seem an unlikely setting for   
   Dr. Nashashibi — son of a diplomat, Ph.D. from the University of   
   Chicago, professor at Chicago Theological Seminary. Yet it was   
   exactly where he wanted to plant his spiritual flag, mediating   
   the complicated borderline where American Muslims and African-   
   Americans coalesce and collide.   
      
   “This is the intersection,” Dr. Nashashibi said, speaking in   
   both literal and metaphorical ways, “of faith and vice and   
   conflict and alliance.”   
      
   His immediate purpose on this recent Saturday morning consisted   
   of bringing a large window sign to the shop’s owner, a Jordanian   
   immigrant named Ibrahim Kayad. The placard announced that A Lot   
   To Save was a “Muslim-Run Partner Store” and that it adhered to   
   a code of best practices rooted in Islamic teaching. The program   
   was meant to build better relations between the Muslim   
   immigrants who operate many such ghetto stores in Chicago and   
   the black customers who rely upon them.   
      
   Over the previous months, Dr. Nashashibi, 42, and his nonprofit   
   group, the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, had helped Mr.   
   Kayad with a number of enhancements: installing a cooler so he   
   could stock fresh produce, serving free smoothies during   
   Ramadan, sponsoring a performance by a Muslim percussion   
   ensemble and hosting a voter-registration drive. The next step   
   would be removing those metal window bars, a vivid symbol of   
   reciprocal fear and suspicion.   
      
   Such efforts went beyond one store, or even the 15 stores that   
   have similarly signed onto the “Muslim-Run” compact. The corner   
   stores just happened to be one especially visible example of Dr.   
   Nashashibi’s larger mission of addressing the deeply complex   
   relations between blacks and Muslims, with the countervailing   
   trends of admiring Islam as the religion of Malcolm X and Mos   
   Def and yet resenting Muslim immigrants as mercantile middlemen   
   profiting off the slums.   
      
   This work also represented something more intimate for Dr.   
   Nashashibi. In connecting an upwardly mobile, highly educated   
   population of Arab and South Asian Muslims to the working poor   
   and working-class blacks on the South Side, he was repaying a   
   personal debt to African-American culture for giving him both a   
   scholarly subject and a firm identity.   
      
   Dr. Nashashibi grew up embodying the Palestinian diaspora. Both   
   of his parents came from families displaced by the creation of   
   Israel. With his father in the Jordanian diplomat corps, young   
   Rami grew up variously in Jordan, Spain, Italy and Saudi Arabia.   
   He made it to America in 1990 as a soccer player for a small   
   Catholic college in Chicago.   
      
   By his own recollection, he was an unanchored young man, who had   
   never prayed and rarely opened a Quran. His music was the music   
   of white Westerners — Metallica, U2, guitar rock. Then, passing   
   a store one day, he heard a sonic wave that was the sound of   
   Public Enemy, the most political of hip-hop groups, and he   
   looked up to see the accompanying music video playing on a   
   monitor. It showed historical footage of the civil rights and   
   black nationalist movements, and it also intercut a scene from   
   the Palestinian intifada of the late 1980s. Some kind of insight   
   struck in that moment.   
      
   “The first reflection of the Palestinian narrative that I saw in   
   the American context was hip-hop,” Dr. Nashashibi recalled. “Hip-   
   hop provided me with a connection to rootedness while being   
   globally uprooted. It gave me a sense of community.”   
      
   Transferring to DePaul University to finish his undergraduate   
   degree and then entering the renowned graduate program in   
   sociology at the University of Chicago, Dr. Nashashibi pursued   
   two parallel paths, both inspired by hip-hop.   
      
   In his scholarship, he explored the way black Americans — from   
   activists to rappers to street gangs — sought to incorporate   
   elements of Islam. In his nascent community organizing, he   
   searched for bridges between Muslim immigrants and black   
   Americans, many of them Christian, who often clashed along lines   
   of race, class and religion. Over the same years in the 1990s,   
   Dr. Nashashibi became an observant Muslim for the first time in   
   his life.   
      
   He first ventured into interfaith work by enlisting Muslim   
   volunteers to serve as tutors and mentors to black students on   
   the South Side. Then, in 1997, he officially formed the Inner-   
   City Muslim Action Network, best known by the acronym IMAN,   
   raising about $25,000 from fellow Muslims. Very deliberately,   
   Dr. Nashashibi placed the group’s office in the Chicago Lawn   
   neighborhood.   
      
   Chicago Lawn contained the multicultural mix he sought: Latinos,   
   African-Americans, Kuwaiti refugees from the first gulf war and   
   Palestinians who had fled the intifada and occupation.   
   Historically speaking, this part of the Southwest Side attested   
   to Chicago’s capacity for race hatred. A few blocks from IMAN’s   
   offices stood the former headquarters of the American Nazi   
   Party. When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. brought his   
   civil rights campaign in 1966, a mob met him with bricks,   
   Confederate flags and banners proclaiming “White Power.”   
      
   Even with such confrontations decades in the past, Dr.   
   Nashashibi took risks both inside and outside his community for   
   his collaboration with Latino and African-American Christians.   
   The pivotal moment occurred in 2008, when IMAN held a break-fast   
   dinner during Ramadan at a black Pentecostal church.   
      
   “You had Christians saying to the church, ‘Why are you hosting a   
   Muslim event?’ ” recalled Pastor Ron Taylor, who directs the   
   United Congress of Community and Religious Organizations, a   
   coalition that includes IMAN. “And then, on the other side, was   
   the risk Rami took in bringing Ramadan to a Christian facility.   
   But he takes the risks, deals with the backlash, deals with the   
   naysayers, and through that forges greater unity.”   
      
   Nearly a thousand people attended that Ramadan meal. Now, IMAN   
   has an annual budget of $2.3 million and a dozen paid staff   
   members. The group’s medical clinic saw 3,500 patients last   
   year. Its annual Takin’ It to the Streets festival draws tens of   
   thousands. As part of the United Congress, Dr. Nashashibi   
   lobbies the state legislature on a range of educational,   
   political and social issues.   
      
   The corner-store campaign typified Dr. Nashashibi’s combination   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)