viral
Image via RNS/ Screetshot from video
Curtis thought there would be a few still shots taken of their meeting in an otherwise empty City Council chamber. But a video was made instead, showing the two men stretching, twisting, and wrapping a scarlet cloth on the mayor’s head.
At the end, Pandher breaks into Bhangra — a traditional folk dance from the Punjab region — and Curtis gamely follows, despite his portly figure and business suit.
The video ricocheted around Canada and then overseas via BBC News. It has been viewed more than 4.5 million times.
“Young Muslims are caught in between tradition and modernity,” said Ostebo. Photo via kamomeen/shutterstock.
Move over Ice Bucket Challenge. Muslims have a new take on the viral social media phenomenon: the Quran Challenge.
The new campaign seeks to raise awareness and funds for Muslim “da’wah” — a call to propagate the faith — by reciting verses from the Quran on various online platforms.
Issam Bayan, a 26-year-old student and professional Islamic singer, came up with the idea as a way to awaken Muslim piety, just as the Ice Bucket Challenge raised awareness and well over $30 million for ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative condition also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease..
While the #QuranChallenge has no specific cause, Bayan, who lives in Germany, said he wanted to make it available to all Muslims regardless of their financial ability to make a contribution. In an email interview, he said the benefits for this challenge are the rewards that a Muslim receives for reciting the Quran.
Bayan posted his first video to Facebook and YouTube on August 30 with the words, “Let’s collect the rewards and challenge your friends by reciting some verses of the Holy Quran.”
The chalk drawing by Wes Noyes, 17, with his superhero brother, Jonah, 8.
“What I do every day is get a pencil, take a piece of paper, and draw,” Wes Noyes said.
The 17-year-old artist hopes someday to work in animation or as a graphic artist. Wes works for more than an hour a day, takes classes, and to date has made more than 500 pencil drawings.
After Wes playfully collaborated on a chalk drawing made by his mother Rebekah Greer, his work as a cartoonist gained national attention.
Greer, a photographer, musician, and the mother of five, had drawn fanciful backgrounds — a cityscape, an ocean scene among them — on the family’s driveway one evening this past summer and took portraits of her children posing in front of them. Wes added to the drawing she had made for son Jonah, then eight, by adding flames and interjecting himself into the picture as Godzilla.
When Greer posted the photo to Facebook, it quickly went viral.
“It sort of spread around,” Wes said simply.
The picture, titled “Brother of the Year,” has indeed “spread around.”
Joseph Kony, head of the Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army, in a rare public appearance, 2006. Photo by Adam Pletts/Getty Images.
“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
So begins the Invisible Children’s KONY 2012 video that recently went viral. And yet, I would perhaps change this opening quote to say something like, “Nothing is more powerful than the stories by which we construct our identities,” because these stories determine who you believe you are and how you believe you can engage in the world and with others.
Powerful. Potentially dangerous. Always in some way failing in it’s accuracy and exclusive to someone else. Even with our best intentions.
UC Davis student photojournalist Brian Nguyen's iconic photograph via The California Aggie http://bit.ly/t6DP3R
There are photographs that have become part of our iconic memory.
Think of German shepherds straining at their leashes and the water from fire hoses striking students in Birmingham, the young woman at Kent State kneeling in anguish over the body of a student who had just been killed by National Guard bullets, a young girl running naked down the road after a napalm attack on Vietnam.