By writing this piece, around the 16th anniversary of Kosovo’s independence, I aim to motivate others to think more critically about Kosovo’s history and to expand our collective understanding of educational resistance movements.
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This is the American in me, brought up on Disney arcs and promises of individual exceptionalism. Americanized modernity has rendered the bathroom arguably the most essential room in a modern household, but it was not always so.
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I finally found a thread that leads from the land she came from to the bristled leaves that sprouted from it, to the grazing flocks of sheep that my grandmother tended and whose wool she shore, from there to the yarn she spun, and finally to a story told and recorded.
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When it comes to the construction of race in today’s discourse, is it merely based on phenotype without considerations to cultural and/or genetic heritage? What if one’s “look” does not match their “race”? Is “Blackness” or “Whiteness” merely on the basis of skin tone or do socio-cultural aspects also exist?
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Jadi Rana sent the Zoroastrians a full glass of milk, to indicate that his kingdom was filled to the brim. In response, the Zoroastrians poured sugar into the milk and gave it back, without spilling a single drop.
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As for my identity in Turkey well, for the Moros I am a Filipino, for the Filipinos I’m an American, and for the Americans, I finally get to be a fucking American. At least the Turks were consistent in labelling me a yabancı.
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If I had felt my own confusion about identity as a knot in my stomach, somebody else could have felt it as a compression in their chest, another as an ache on their shoulder.
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Jahriyya followers continue to hold the view that it is their particularly loud and melodious chanting that sets them apart from other Sufi and non-Sufi Muslims in China. At times the significance of sound even surpasses that of textual learning in assessing the position of a Sufi in the spiritual hierarchy.
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Regarding those meetings with other organizations, quite often I would head to a meeting and find a foreigner, usually from a Western nation who had just arrived in the West Bank, but would be the “knowledgeable” resource person I was supposed to look for to gain insight into the current situation. I sat with one expert lauded by a previous team for her knowledge on local communities only to be told by those in said local communities that she barely interacted with them and kept a ‘healthy’ distance when it came to village visits. Yet these “gatekeepers” are deemed better resource persons than the people they supposedly represent.
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Stories of jinn and especially possession by jinn serve to quell spiritual and social aberration amongst believers by reinforcing authority of religious doctrine.
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Although major media outlets tend to portray Islam as a hindrance to women’s emancipation, to these women, Islam offers them agency that their local culture denies.
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Every few years I find myself in a spell of being unable to read fiction. A lot of the time I think it’s all frivolous, self-indulgent bullshit, anyway, trying at once to create worlds while most often disengaging from the one we live in.
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