Some articles from the Times....
Jan. 8th, 2006 04:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
First things first, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fugaciouslover has a discussion loosely related to the Holocaust that some of you may be interested in, asking "how much is too much?"
Danish comics anger Muslims, and related conversation.
Denmark Is Unlikely Front in Islam-West Culture War
By DAN BILEFSKY
COPENHAGEN - When the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, including one in which he is shown wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse, it expected a strong reaction in this country of 5.4 million people.
But the paper was unprepared for the global furor that ensued, including demonstrations in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, death threats against the artists, condemnation from 11 Muslim countries and a rebuke from the United Nations.
"The cartoons did nothing that transcends the cultural norms of secular Denmark, and this was not a provocation to insult Muslims," said Flemming Rose, cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's largest newspaper, which has declined to apologize for the drawings.
"But if we talk of freedom of speech, even if it was a provocation, that does not make our right to do it any less legitimate before the law," he added in an interview from Miami. He spent months living under police protection in Denmark.
As countries across Europe grapple with how to assimilate their growing Muslim populations in the post-9/11 world, Denmark has become an unlikely flashpoint in the escalating culture wars between Islam and the West. The publication of the cartoons in late September has provoked a fierce national debate over whether Denmark's famously liberal laws on free speech have gone too far.
It also has tested the patience of Denmark's 200,000 Muslims. Many of them say the cartoons reflect an intensifying anti-immigrant climate that is stigmatizing minorities and radicalizing young Muslims.
In Norrebro, an ethnically mixed neighborhood of Copenhagen where the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard is buried and where kebab stands dot the tree-lined streets, Imam Ahmed Abu-Laban, a leader among Denmark's Muslims, bristles at what he calls the "Islam phobia" gripping the country. He asserted that the cartoons had been calculated to incite Muslims because it was well known that in Islam depictions of the prophet were considered blasphemy.
"We are being mentally tortured," Imam Ahmed said at his mosque, an anonymous building that looks more like an apartment complex than a house of worship. "The cartoons are an insult against Islam, an attempt by right-wing forces in this country to get a rise out of the Muslim community and so portray us as against Danish values."
Mr. Rose, once a journalist in Iran, said he decided to commission the cartoons for Jyllands-Posten when he heard that Danish cartoonists were too scared of Muslim fundamentalists to illustrate a new children's biography of Muhammad.
Annoyed at the self-censorship he said had overtaken Europe since the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered last year by a Muslim radical for criticizing Islam's treatment of women, Mr. Rose said he decided to test Denmark's free speech norms.
The cartoons were published amid the growth of an anti-immigrant sentiment in Denmark, reflected in the rise of the far-right Danish People's Party. The party, which holds 13 percent of the seats in the Danish Parliament, has helped to push through the toughest anti-immigration rules on the Continent, including a rule preventing Danish citizens age 24 or younger from bringing in spouses from outside Denmark.
Soren Krarup, a retired priest and leading voice in the party, said the Muslim response to the cartoons showed that Islam was not compatible with Danish customs. He said Jesus had been satirized in Danish literature and popular culture for centuries - including a recent much-publicized Danish painting of Jesus with an erection - so why not Muhammad? He also argues that Muslims must learn to integrate.
"Muslims who come here reject our culture," he said. "Muslim immigration is a way for Muslims to conquer us, just as they have done for the past 1,400 years."
Muslim leaders say that such talk helped create the atmosphere that allowed the cartoons to be published. And they contend that it is alienating the people the Danish People's Party says it wants to assimilate.
In a sign that some Muslims are becoming radicalized, Danish counterterrorism officials say more young Danish Muslims are being drawn to Hizb ut-Tahrir, or the Party of Liberation, which seeks the unification of all Muslim countries under one leader and Shariah, the Islamic legal code. The group, which distributes literature at mosques and on the Internet, is banned in most of the Muslim world, as well as in Russia and Germany.
But because its main weapon is ideology rather than explosives, Danish officials say, it is allowed to operate in Denmark under the same permissive rules that allowed the publication of the cartoons. Under Danish law, inciting someone to commit an act of terror is illegal, but spouting vitriol against the West or satirizing Muhammad is not. The State Prosecutor's Office investigated the group in spring 2004 and decided not to ban it because it had not broken the law.
The free speech debate and the concerns over Hizb ut-Tahrir swept through Denmark's public schools last month when the imam's 17-year-old son, Taim, was expelled from Vester Borgerdyd School, after teachers overheard him giving sermons calling for the destruction of Israel and assailing Danish democracy during Friday Prayer at the school. The imam said his son became radicalized after being recruited by Hizb ut-Tahrir.
He said he opposed his son's sermons and had told his son to leave the house for defying him. But he also criticized the ruling that followed: a committee of mostly Christian rectors banned Friday Prayer at public schools across Denmark.
"They are trying to turn Denmark into a banana republic," said Imam Ahmed. "How is it O.K. to publish the cartoons, yet my son is portrayed as an ayatollah?"
At Vester Borgerdyd School, where the walls are lined with photographs of smiling students in Muslim dress, the headmistress, Anne Birgitte Rasmussen, said that Taim Abu-Laban had attracted a following and that she had feared his sermons would raise tensions among the school's more moderate Muslims.
"The tone of the political debate in this country, the talk about Muslims and immigrants, is making it very difficult for us," she said.
Mr. Rose, the editor, said free speech, no matter how radical, should be allowed to flourish, from all varieties of perspectives.
"Muslims should be allowed to burn the Danish flag in a public square if that's within the boundaries of the law," he said. "Though I think this would be a strange signal to the Danish people who have hosted them."
And on a Muslim funeral home.
For Muslim New Yorkers, Final Rites That Fit
By ALIA MALEK
ERHAN YILDIRIM is singing in Arabic. His voice barely rises above the sound of the water that falls onto ceramic tiles after it spills over the lifeless body in front of him.
In mournful tones, Mr. Yildirim celebrates God - "He is great, and there is no God but God" - as he prepares yet another immigrant for a proper Muslim burial, one that will bring the man closer to his homeland than he has been in years.
On this late November day, Mr. Yildirim, who is trained to be an imam, then performs the man's last ablution. It is the same ritual that every Muslim performs in life before prayer: washing the feet, hands and face. Mr. Yildirim then washes the entire body with olive oil soap before fetching a pure cotton shroud and wrapping it around the naked body like a cocoon.
"This is his clothes," Mr. Yildirim said. "His final clothes."
In Islam, the dead are traditionally buried with neither pomp nor casket, placed into the ground wearing only a white shroud. This practice is in keeping with the belief that in death, all are equal despite any possessions or wealth accumulated in life. The practice is also a parable for the living.
"You came without anything," Mr. Yildirim said, "you going back without anything."
The dead man, a 51-year-old immigrant from Serbia and Montenegro, was like many of the imam's charges. He lived and worked in New York for years; his children are American-born. But like many of his fellow 600,000 Muslims in New York City, as estimated by the Middle East Institute of Columbia University, he wanted an Islamic way of death, even if he was far distant from the heart of the Muslim world.
Mr. Yildirim was able to fulfill the man's wish through a company he founded called Islamic Funeral Services. Located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the venture is one of the first incorporated funeral homes and funeral service providers in the city and the state that cater exclusively to Muslims. New York's Muslims cannot conduct all the rituals of their religion locally; for instance, many Muslims make pilgrimages to Mecca that conclude with Id al-Adha, the Islamic Feast of Sacrifice, which begins Tuesday. But no such limits apply to the kind of funeral rites that Mr. Yildirim conducts.
"It's something less that we are missing," said Imam Kemal Bektesevic, of the Ali Pasha Mosque in Astoria, Queens, speaking of New York's Muslims.
Like other funeral services in the city, Mr. Yildirim's company also ships the bodies of Muslims to their native lands, as it did with the man from Serbia and Montenegro. For people who did not fully belong to mainstream America, they are, at least in death, no longer among strangers.
Mr. Yildirim, who wears square-toed shoes and Prada sunglasses and dresses in hip Turkish-made clothes with labels like Zara and Mavi, was born to Turkish parents in Frankfurt and educated in Turkey, and he arrived in New York at age 21. For five years he lived and worked at the Fatih Mosque in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where he also learned about Islamic funeral rituals.
At age 26, he began working at a funeral parlor, doing everything from driving a hearse to fixing hair and makeup. Just as he was deciding whether to stay in New York or return to Turkey, Richard Costa, the manager of the funeral parlor, began to notice how much the city's Muslim community was growing.
"I thought, 'They need a place,' " Mr. Costa said. "If you look back at history, every neighborhood had a different nationality that lived in it, and everybody had their own funeral home."
The two men joined forces and, five years ago, formed Islamic Funeral Services, at Vanderbilt Street and DeKalb Avenue.
Since then the business has grown, from about 60 funerals a year to 225 to 230 a year, according to Mr. Yildirim, who added that he received calls from people as far away as Texas and Florida. Although Muslims are often isolated into specific national and linguistic groups, Mr. Yildirim said that his service helped to span those differences, with clients that include Muslims who are African-American, Bosnian, Albanian, Chinese, Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Turkish.
At the funeral in late November, Mr. Yildirim arranged the body of the man from Serbia and Montenegro in an all-wood coffin held together by wooden fasteners; wood is permissible because, like flesh, it will return to the soil. In order to accommodate cemetery rules in the United States, Muslims are buried in simple pine boxes or wooden coffins, not only in shrouds. Because this family wanted something more ceremonial, Mr. Yildirim obtained the more elaborate coffin, still in keeping with Islamic practice, from a line of coffins used by Orthodox Jews.
Before sliding the coffin into the hearse, Mr. Yildirim draped the casket with a cover of green velvet - the color of Islam. The Arabic script, embroidered in gold thread, reads: "Every person will taste death."
Outside the Ali Pasha Mosque, where the man's widow waited, 30 men stood ready. They greeted Mr. Yildirim with attentive silence; many put out cigarettes. He asked some of the men to remove their shoes and stand inside the entrance of the mosque to receive the casket.
Several rushed up the stairs and clumsily fussed with laces. It took seconds to carry the casket into the mosque, a time punctuated by the widow's wail.
A relative of the dead man, Enver Mujaj, saw to it that Mr. Yildirim was offered coffee and sweets. Mr. Mujaj had met Mr. Yildirim when Mr. Mujaj's father died last year. "With his help," Mr. Mujaj said, "we did everything my father wanted, including to be buried next to his father in Yugoslavia."
As for his own death, Mr. Yildirim said he wanted to be buried in his hometown, Denizli, Turkey. Of course, he wants to be buried the Islamic way. His only request? That whoever prepares his body not do "rush work."
An editorial on the Wilmington coup in 1898
When Democracy Died in Wilmington, N.C.
By BRENT STAPLES
The United States abolished the practice of owning and selling human beings when the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865. But the commercial component of slavery was in some ways the easiest to dispense with. The systems of black powerlessness and white supremacy that supported the enterprise proved to be far more pernicious. They persisted for another 100 years in the Deep South, enforced by lynching, disenfranchisement and state-sanctioned racial terror.
By the rise of the civil rights movement, many black Southerners had been so thoroughly conditioned to be subservient that they dared not look white people in the eye, much less seek the right to vote. This posture was understandable in the Deep South, where racial violence had been a kind of blood sport. But it seemed out of place in states like North Carolina, which was not as closely associated with hard-core brutality as were states like Mississippi and Alabama.
This rosy version of Carolina history turns out to have its bloody side. A draft of a voluminous report commissioned by the North Carolina legislature has recently outlined a grotesquely violent and stridently racist version of state history that rivals anything ever seen in the most troubled parts of the Deep South. The report, by the Wilmington Race Riot Commission, has thrown a klieg light onto a coup and riot that were staged in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898 - and that still have an evident impact on the political landscape of the state.
The uprising was engineered by white supremacists who unseated a government that had been elected by an alliance that included black citizens and white progressives. Scores of black citizens were killed during the uprising - no one yet knows how many - and prominent blacks and whites were banished from the city under threat of death. White supremacists hijacked the state government, stripped black citizens of the right to vote and brought black political participation to a close.
The events outlined in the report provide a ready explanation for why black people in North Carolina remained politically docile for so long and why the civil rights movement was so slow to reach them. The speed with which the coup and the accompanying riot were papered over and swept from public awareness reminds us what a powerful force cultural amnesia can be in shaping how we see history.
The Wilmington coup was unique in its scope and planning. But in general terms, it provided the template for how white communities in many parts of the country would respond when faced with the sudden rise of a black professional class that owned property and competed openly with white businesses. In the early 20th century, fear of black independence and self-determination would lead to white vigilante actions in communities like Tulsa, Okla., followed by expulsions of influential black people.
Like their counterparts elsewhere, white supremacists in Wilmington found themselves faced with an economically vibrant community, where a strong black professional class was publicly asserting itself in very visible ways. In addition to owning impressive businesses, black citizens had joined forces with like-minded whites to bring a progressive government to power both in the city and at the state level.
White racists were particularly outraged at the large black political presence in Wilmington, where black people could be found at just about all levels of government. Among the more visible black figures at the time was John Campbell Dancy, collector of customs at the Port of Wilmington, who was appointed by the Republican president, William McKinley. That Dancy was very well paid - and that he replaced a white Democrat - was an endless source of irritation among whites in the city. Dancy was ridiculed by some in the white press, who referred to him as "Sambo of the Customs House."
The proponents of the insurrection found ready allies in the press - most notably The News and Observer - which inflamed the public through editorials and political cartoons that depicted white manhood being trod upon by mere Negroes, who were, it was said, better suited to be slaves. The plotters and their minions in the press were further angered by a famously incendiary editorial written by the black journalist Alexander Manly of The Daily Record of Wilmington. Manly, descended from a white former governor and a black slave, knew a great deal about sexual hypocrisy in North Carolina society. He brought that knowledge to bear in an editorial attacking a speaker who had urged the lynching of black men to prevent them from seeking sex with white women.
Manly escaped Wilmington before he could be caught and lynched. But his newspaper's office was burned, heralding a long period of voicelessness for the black community in both the city and the state. As the full scope of what the plotters had in mind became clear, black people by the hundreds left the city, taking their ideas and commercial energies elsewhere. The city has yet to recover from the exodus.
The riot commission is circulating a draft version of its report (which has also been posted on the Web at www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us), and hopes to find descendants of blacks and whites who fled Wilmington for places like Washington and New York. The draft report has already begun to pull back the covers on a brutal but little-known episode in Southern history. If the commission's progress so far is any measure of things to come, the final report will make an even more impressive contribution to public understanding of this period.
fugaciouslover has a discussion loosely related to the Holocaust that some of you may be interested in, asking "how much is too much?"Danish comics anger Muslims, and related conversation.
Denmark Is Unlikely Front in Islam-West Culture War
By DAN BILEFSKY
COPENHAGEN - When the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, including one in which he is shown wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse, it expected a strong reaction in this country of 5.4 million people.
But the paper was unprepared for the global furor that ensued, including demonstrations in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, death threats against the artists, condemnation from 11 Muslim countries and a rebuke from the United Nations.
"The cartoons did nothing that transcends the cultural norms of secular Denmark, and this was not a provocation to insult Muslims," said Flemming Rose, cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's largest newspaper, which has declined to apologize for the drawings.
"But if we talk of freedom of speech, even if it was a provocation, that does not make our right to do it any less legitimate before the law," he added in an interview from Miami. He spent months living under police protection in Denmark.
As countries across Europe grapple with how to assimilate their growing Muslim populations in the post-9/11 world, Denmark has become an unlikely flashpoint in the escalating culture wars between Islam and the West. The publication of the cartoons in late September has provoked a fierce national debate over whether Denmark's famously liberal laws on free speech have gone too far.
It also has tested the patience of Denmark's 200,000 Muslims. Many of them say the cartoons reflect an intensifying anti-immigrant climate that is stigmatizing minorities and radicalizing young Muslims.
In Norrebro, an ethnically mixed neighborhood of Copenhagen where the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard is buried and where kebab stands dot the tree-lined streets, Imam Ahmed Abu-Laban, a leader among Denmark's Muslims, bristles at what he calls the "Islam phobia" gripping the country. He asserted that the cartoons had been calculated to incite Muslims because it was well known that in Islam depictions of the prophet were considered blasphemy.
"We are being mentally tortured," Imam Ahmed said at his mosque, an anonymous building that looks more like an apartment complex than a house of worship. "The cartoons are an insult against Islam, an attempt by right-wing forces in this country to get a rise out of the Muslim community and so portray us as against Danish values."
Mr. Rose, once a journalist in Iran, said he decided to commission the cartoons for Jyllands-Posten when he heard that Danish cartoonists were too scared of Muslim fundamentalists to illustrate a new children's biography of Muhammad.
Annoyed at the self-censorship he said had overtaken Europe since the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered last year by a Muslim radical for criticizing Islam's treatment of women, Mr. Rose said he decided to test Denmark's free speech norms.
The cartoons were published amid the growth of an anti-immigrant sentiment in Denmark, reflected in the rise of the far-right Danish People's Party. The party, which holds 13 percent of the seats in the Danish Parliament, has helped to push through the toughest anti-immigration rules on the Continent, including a rule preventing Danish citizens age 24 or younger from bringing in spouses from outside Denmark.
Soren Krarup, a retired priest and leading voice in the party, said the Muslim response to the cartoons showed that Islam was not compatible with Danish customs. He said Jesus had been satirized in Danish literature and popular culture for centuries - including a recent much-publicized Danish painting of Jesus with an erection - so why not Muhammad? He also argues that Muslims must learn to integrate.
"Muslims who come here reject our culture," he said. "Muslim immigration is a way for Muslims to conquer us, just as they have done for the past 1,400 years."
Muslim leaders say that such talk helped create the atmosphere that allowed the cartoons to be published. And they contend that it is alienating the people the Danish People's Party says it wants to assimilate.
In a sign that some Muslims are becoming radicalized, Danish counterterrorism officials say more young Danish Muslims are being drawn to Hizb ut-Tahrir, or the Party of Liberation, which seeks the unification of all Muslim countries under one leader and Shariah, the Islamic legal code. The group, which distributes literature at mosques and on the Internet, is banned in most of the Muslim world, as well as in Russia and Germany.
But because its main weapon is ideology rather than explosives, Danish officials say, it is allowed to operate in Denmark under the same permissive rules that allowed the publication of the cartoons. Under Danish law, inciting someone to commit an act of terror is illegal, but spouting vitriol against the West or satirizing Muhammad is not. The State Prosecutor's Office investigated the group in spring 2004 and decided not to ban it because it had not broken the law.
The free speech debate and the concerns over Hizb ut-Tahrir swept through Denmark's public schools last month when the imam's 17-year-old son, Taim, was expelled from Vester Borgerdyd School, after teachers overheard him giving sermons calling for the destruction of Israel and assailing Danish democracy during Friday Prayer at the school. The imam said his son became radicalized after being recruited by Hizb ut-Tahrir.
He said he opposed his son's sermons and had told his son to leave the house for defying him. But he also criticized the ruling that followed: a committee of mostly Christian rectors banned Friday Prayer at public schools across Denmark.
"They are trying to turn Denmark into a banana republic," said Imam Ahmed. "How is it O.K. to publish the cartoons, yet my son is portrayed as an ayatollah?"
At Vester Borgerdyd School, where the walls are lined with photographs of smiling students in Muslim dress, the headmistress, Anne Birgitte Rasmussen, said that Taim Abu-Laban had attracted a following and that she had feared his sermons would raise tensions among the school's more moderate Muslims.
"The tone of the political debate in this country, the talk about Muslims and immigrants, is making it very difficult for us," she said.
Mr. Rose, the editor, said free speech, no matter how radical, should be allowed to flourish, from all varieties of perspectives.
"Muslims should be allowed to burn the Danish flag in a public square if that's within the boundaries of the law," he said. "Though I think this would be a strange signal to the Danish people who have hosted them."
And on a Muslim funeral home.
For Muslim New Yorkers, Final Rites That Fit
By ALIA MALEK
ERHAN YILDIRIM is singing in Arabic. His voice barely rises above the sound of the water that falls onto ceramic tiles after it spills over the lifeless body in front of him.
In mournful tones, Mr. Yildirim celebrates God - "He is great, and there is no God but God" - as he prepares yet another immigrant for a proper Muslim burial, one that will bring the man closer to his homeland than he has been in years.
On this late November day, Mr. Yildirim, who is trained to be an imam, then performs the man's last ablution. It is the same ritual that every Muslim performs in life before prayer: washing the feet, hands and face. Mr. Yildirim then washes the entire body with olive oil soap before fetching a pure cotton shroud and wrapping it around the naked body like a cocoon.
"This is his clothes," Mr. Yildirim said. "His final clothes."
In Islam, the dead are traditionally buried with neither pomp nor casket, placed into the ground wearing only a white shroud. This practice is in keeping with the belief that in death, all are equal despite any possessions or wealth accumulated in life. The practice is also a parable for the living.
"You came without anything," Mr. Yildirim said, "you going back without anything."
The dead man, a 51-year-old immigrant from Serbia and Montenegro, was like many of the imam's charges. He lived and worked in New York for years; his children are American-born. But like many of his fellow 600,000 Muslims in New York City, as estimated by the Middle East Institute of Columbia University, he wanted an Islamic way of death, even if he was far distant from the heart of the Muslim world.
Mr. Yildirim was able to fulfill the man's wish through a company he founded called Islamic Funeral Services. Located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the venture is one of the first incorporated funeral homes and funeral service providers in the city and the state that cater exclusively to Muslims. New York's Muslims cannot conduct all the rituals of their religion locally; for instance, many Muslims make pilgrimages to Mecca that conclude with Id al-Adha, the Islamic Feast of Sacrifice, which begins Tuesday. But no such limits apply to the kind of funeral rites that Mr. Yildirim conducts.
"It's something less that we are missing," said Imam Kemal Bektesevic, of the Ali Pasha Mosque in Astoria, Queens, speaking of New York's Muslims.
Like other funeral services in the city, Mr. Yildirim's company also ships the bodies of Muslims to their native lands, as it did with the man from Serbia and Montenegro. For people who did not fully belong to mainstream America, they are, at least in death, no longer among strangers.
Mr. Yildirim, who wears square-toed shoes and Prada sunglasses and dresses in hip Turkish-made clothes with labels like Zara and Mavi, was born to Turkish parents in Frankfurt and educated in Turkey, and he arrived in New York at age 21. For five years he lived and worked at the Fatih Mosque in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where he also learned about Islamic funeral rituals.
At age 26, he began working at a funeral parlor, doing everything from driving a hearse to fixing hair and makeup. Just as he was deciding whether to stay in New York or return to Turkey, Richard Costa, the manager of the funeral parlor, began to notice how much the city's Muslim community was growing.
"I thought, 'They need a place,' " Mr. Costa said. "If you look back at history, every neighborhood had a different nationality that lived in it, and everybody had their own funeral home."
The two men joined forces and, five years ago, formed Islamic Funeral Services, at Vanderbilt Street and DeKalb Avenue.
Since then the business has grown, from about 60 funerals a year to 225 to 230 a year, according to Mr. Yildirim, who added that he received calls from people as far away as Texas and Florida. Although Muslims are often isolated into specific national and linguistic groups, Mr. Yildirim said that his service helped to span those differences, with clients that include Muslims who are African-American, Bosnian, Albanian, Chinese, Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Turkish.
At the funeral in late November, Mr. Yildirim arranged the body of the man from Serbia and Montenegro in an all-wood coffin held together by wooden fasteners; wood is permissible because, like flesh, it will return to the soil. In order to accommodate cemetery rules in the United States, Muslims are buried in simple pine boxes or wooden coffins, not only in shrouds. Because this family wanted something more ceremonial, Mr. Yildirim obtained the more elaborate coffin, still in keeping with Islamic practice, from a line of coffins used by Orthodox Jews.
Before sliding the coffin into the hearse, Mr. Yildirim draped the casket with a cover of green velvet - the color of Islam. The Arabic script, embroidered in gold thread, reads: "Every person will taste death."
Outside the Ali Pasha Mosque, where the man's widow waited, 30 men stood ready. They greeted Mr. Yildirim with attentive silence; many put out cigarettes. He asked some of the men to remove their shoes and stand inside the entrance of the mosque to receive the casket.
Several rushed up the stairs and clumsily fussed with laces. It took seconds to carry the casket into the mosque, a time punctuated by the widow's wail.
A relative of the dead man, Enver Mujaj, saw to it that Mr. Yildirim was offered coffee and sweets. Mr. Mujaj had met Mr. Yildirim when Mr. Mujaj's father died last year. "With his help," Mr. Mujaj said, "we did everything my father wanted, including to be buried next to his father in Yugoslavia."
As for his own death, Mr. Yildirim said he wanted to be buried in his hometown, Denizli, Turkey. Of course, he wants to be buried the Islamic way. His only request? That whoever prepares his body not do "rush work."
An editorial on the Wilmington coup in 1898
When Democracy Died in Wilmington, N.C.
By BRENT STAPLES
The United States abolished the practice of owning and selling human beings when the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865. But the commercial component of slavery was in some ways the easiest to dispense with. The systems of black powerlessness and white supremacy that supported the enterprise proved to be far more pernicious. They persisted for another 100 years in the Deep South, enforced by lynching, disenfranchisement and state-sanctioned racial terror.
By the rise of the civil rights movement, many black Southerners had been so thoroughly conditioned to be subservient that they dared not look white people in the eye, much less seek the right to vote. This posture was understandable in the Deep South, where racial violence had been a kind of blood sport. But it seemed out of place in states like North Carolina, which was not as closely associated with hard-core brutality as were states like Mississippi and Alabama.
This rosy version of Carolina history turns out to have its bloody side. A draft of a voluminous report commissioned by the North Carolina legislature has recently outlined a grotesquely violent and stridently racist version of state history that rivals anything ever seen in the most troubled parts of the Deep South. The report, by the Wilmington Race Riot Commission, has thrown a klieg light onto a coup and riot that were staged in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898 - and that still have an evident impact on the political landscape of the state.
The uprising was engineered by white supremacists who unseated a government that had been elected by an alliance that included black citizens and white progressives. Scores of black citizens were killed during the uprising - no one yet knows how many - and prominent blacks and whites were banished from the city under threat of death. White supremacists hijacked the state government, stripped black citizens of the right to vote and brought black political participation to a close.
The events outlined in the report provide a ready explanation for why black people in North Carolina remained politically docile for so long and why the civil rights movement was so slow to reach them. The speed with which the coup and the accompanying riot were papered over and swept from public awareness reminds us what a powerful force cultural amnesia can be in shaping how we see history.
The Wilmington coup was unique in its scope and planning. But in general terms, it provided the template for how white communities in many parts of the country would respond when faced with the sudden rise of a black professional class that owned property and competed openly with white businesses. In the early 20th century, fear of black independence and self-determination would lead to white vigilante actions in communities like Tulsa, Okla., followed by expulsions of influential black people.
Like their counterparts elsewhere, white supremacists in Wilmington found themselves faced with an economically vibrant community, where a strong black professional class was publicly asserting itself in very visible ways. In addition to owning impressive businesses, black citizens had joined forces with like-minded whites to bring a progressive government to power both in the city and at the state level.
White racists were particularly outraged at the large black political presence in Wilmington, where black people could be found at just about all levels of government. Among the more visible black figures at the time was John Campbell Dancy, collector of customs at the Port of Wilmington, who was appointed by the Republican president, William McKinley. That Dancy was very well paid - and that he replaced a white Democrat - was an endless source of irritation among whites in the city. Dancy was ridiculed by some in the white press, who referred to him as "Sambo of the Customs House."
The proponents of the insurrection found ready allies in the press - most notably The News and Observer - which inflamed the public through editorials and political cartoons that depicted white manhood being trod upon by mere Negroes, who were, it was said, better suited to be slaves. The plotters and their minions in the press were further angered by a famously incendiary editorial written by the black journalist Alexander Manly of The Daily Record of Wilmington. Manly, descended from a white former governor and a black slave, knew a great deal about sexual hypocrisy in North Carolina society. He brought that knowledge to bear in an editorial attacking a speaker who had urged the lynching of black men to prevent them from seeking sex with white women.
Manly escaped Wilmington before he could be caught and lynched. But his newspaper's office was burned, heralding a long period of voicelessness for the black community in both the city and the state. As the full scope of what the plotters had in mind became clear, black people by the hundreds left the city, taking their ideas and commercial energies elsewhere. The city has yet to recover from the exodus.
The riot commission is circulating a draft version of its report (which has also been posted on the Web at www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us), and hopes to find descendants of blacks and whites who fled Wilmington for places like Washington and New York. The draft report has already begun to pull back the covers on a brutal but little-known episode in Southern history. If the commission's progress so far is any measure of things to come, the final report will make an even more impressive contribution to public understanding of this period.
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