Yesterday morning, this country lost one of its finest. Ms. Willie Knight died at the age of 107. She was my friend. In our nearly three years of visits together, I saw lots of people come to see her. They always asked the same question, what's your secret? She told me on many occasion that her long life was undoubtedly the result of one of two things. Either I did something good to please the Lord or he's still got something for me to do. I met Ms. Knight on her 105th birthday and began visiting her nearly every week.
Read MoreKLIATT: War on Error Review (Review by Claire Rosser)
I am starring this review, knowing full well it is an unusual book that will infuriate many readers, because I am fascinated by Moezzi's interviews, telling the life stories and faith stories of 12 American Muslims. They will change forever the way most readers understand Islam. The 12 are young professionals, most in their 20s, very bright and articulate. Many are COFOB (children of immigrants fresh off the boat, as Melody calls them, including herself, whose parents are from Iran); two are white American converts to Islam--Michael, Melody's husband, and Sarah, an American living in Cairo. I had heard one of the interviewees on NPR, Asra Q. Nomani, author of Standing Alone in Mecca. A young woman who worked as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal for years, she returned from the horror of her friend Daniel Pearl's death in Pakistan to give birth to her son as an unmarried woman, sheltered by her family in West Virginia. Asra is a feminist activist determined to change practices such as the separation of men and women during prayers in mosques.
Moezzi believes it is possible that an Islamic renaissance could happen in America, among educated American Muslims, accustomed to reason and the pursuit of justice. She herself is a lawyer in Atlanta, and her mentor at the law school at Emory is Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, who has written the foreword to Moezzi's book.
Moezzi writes, "It is a basic teaching of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism that only God is fit to judge us, but somehow this teaching has escaped the minds of so many Muslims, Christians, and Jews, especially when it comes to issues relating to sexuality." In fact, Faisal A., one of her interviewees, is openly gay, the founder of the world's largest Muslim GLBTIQ organization, whose members frequently get death threats. Falsal says he believes God would not have created him as he is only to repudiate him. Each of the 12 is unique, and it is impossible to make generalizations about them--except that all identify themselves as American and Muslim. For all of them, their faith is central to their lives. They each are appalled by the events of 9/11 and wish to separate themselves from the current American media portrayal of Islam as a religion of fanatical terrorists.
This unusual book will make all readers, whether Muslim, from another faith, or skeptics, reconsider their own understanding of Islam. It will especially speak to readers from immigrant families who are trying to reconcile what they have learned and experienced in America with the traditions of their parents. -- Claire Rosser, KLIATT
Dayton Daily News: Centerville grad writes about Muslims (By Jim DeBrosse)
Melody Moezzi, a Muslim of Iranian descent who grew up in the Dayton area, would like the world to know she doesn't know any terrorists. That's one reason her new book, The War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims, doesn't feature any.
Read MorePublishers Weekly: Melody Moezzi, Author of War on Error (Profile by Kimberly Winston) →
Melody Moezzi is dismayed by the portraits of Islam and her fellow Muslims she sees in the American press. Where are the people like herself and the people she knows -- the people who lead workaday lives and follow a religion that is far removed from terrorism?
Read MoreParabola: Coming Clean (War on Error excerpt) →
I was eating an empanada and waiting for my clothes to dry at a local laundromat not far from my apartment shortly after the owners of the nearby convenience store had chosen to temporarily shut it down when María, who had worked at the laundromat since I’d been there and with whom I’d developed a camaraderie, started talking about how happy she was that the two brothers who owned that convenience store had been forced to shut down. She told me that she should have known better than to have ever bought even a stick of gum from those disgusting Arabs. Then she told me that we were lucky that we had a glorious, civilized, Catholic culture that helped us stick together and succeed. I told her that I liked the brothers and that I used to watch soccer games in the back of the store with them because they had satellite. Then she asked me why the hell I did that given all they ever watched were all the Middle Eastern countries’ matches. I had told her twice before that I was Iranian, and it now became clear to me that she either had no idea where Iran was or that she wasn’t listening to me. “María,” I told her, with tears running down my face by that point, “Soy iraní. Soy casi árabe, y soy musulmana.” I threw the remainder of my empanada at her and I ran home, leaving my laundry to fend for itself.
Read MoreThe Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine: Half a Pancreas Later, Some Things are Still Hard to Digest
Lying in a sterile hospital bed, complete with wheels on the bottom and metal bars on the sides,
I could no longer disregard the pressing demands of my relentlessly contracting and expanding
bowels. The term “evacuation” once conjured images of large masses fleeing fires or hurricanes
or nuclear disasters, blocking exits and major roadways. No longer. Now, images of the most
messy and unavoidable consequences of human life have come to replace them. Images of
excretion, humiliation and death.