Updates from muse RSS
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04:32:01 pm on July 20, 2008 |
Why are Muslims divorcing? Some interesting comments at Suhaib Webb’s blog. I personally don’t think its necessarily a bad thing - sometimes divorce is the best option and divorcees shouldn’t be stigmatized.
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12:37:33 am on July 16, 2008 |
Emirates find new and improved ways to do dawah.
A 32-year-old London businessman in the emirate on a working trip said: “This is the wildest city on Earth – I’ve never seen so many birds and so much booze. “If this is what goes on in a Muslim country, I’m converting to Islam.”
h/t Achelois.
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09:19:18 pm on July 13, 2008 |
O gave a wide-ranging foreign policy interview to Fareed Zakaria. I liked his response to Z’s query about how he views the “problem within Islam” regarding terrorism. I think after hearing asinine comments from the administration for so long, a common sense response like this seems downright brilliant.
…what we also want to do is to shrink the pool of potential recruits. And that involves engaging the Islamic world rather than vilifying it, and making sure that we understand that not only are those in Islam who would resort to violence a tiny fraction of the Islamic world, but that also, the Islamic world itself is diverse.
And that lumping together Shia extremists with Sunni extremists, assuming that Persian culture is the same as Arab culture, that those kinds of errors in lumping Islam together result in us not only being less effective in hunting down and isolating terrorists, but also in alienating what need to be our long-term allies on a whole host of issues.
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03:28:55 pm on July 8, 2008 |
Speaking of honor killing, front page on CNN right now. Sigh.
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10:49:31 pm on July 7, 2008 |
How many of you underline or otherwise mark-up the books you read? I just got a nice fresh batch of books and I dread marking them up, though I’m sure I won’t be able to help myself as I read them. Also, there’s always something intriguing about buying used books and reading other people’s thoughts written in the margins.
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12:03:51 pm on July 2, 2008 |
MTV Cribs. Visits the home of Mohamad, an Arab-American living in Dearborn, Michigan. Hilarity ensues.
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02:31:57 pm on June 27, 2008 |
A call for Muslims to better understand the struggle of Native Hawaiians. There are 45 tourists for every person of Hawaiian heritage on the islands. That’s incredible. But seems about right from what I remember from my visit.
Haunani-Kay Trask’s From a Native Daughter: Colonialism & Sovereignty in Hawai’ describes tourism as “cultural prostitution.” What do you guys think about that? I think its a harsh description, but accurate. I remember feeling suffocated by the tourist culture in Luxor, Egypt, making it my least favorite place there.
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12:53:26 am on June 27, 2008 |
Few links about Muslim women in art. I can’t promise bikini shots in my links, but they’re interesting nonetheless.
Pakistani director Mehreen Jabar’s film Ramchand Pakistani is the only Pakistani movie featured in NY’s Tribeca Film Festival. (I’m excited to see Pakistani movies moving past depictions of rotund women gyrating their hips - not that there’s anything wrong with that…)
Clinton’s library in Arkansas is hosting an art show containing artwork by women from the Muslim world. It is called, what else, Breaking the Veil.
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02:45:55 pm on June 26, 2008 |
Kristof has an op-ed in NYT today about the importance of educating Iraqi refugees. I worked with a couple of Iraqi families seeking refugee status from UNHCR in Egypt, and their anger and frustration is not something I’m likely to forget. This situation is a huge disaster thats only going to get worse, since it doesn’t seem to be anyone’s concern in the US.
Leaving Iraq is a great blog that tries to keep this issue alive by compiling various news items. Check it out.
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03:15:45 pm on June 25, 2008 |
The article contains this gem:
Shari’a law does not hold a company responsible for the actions of employees performed within the course of their work.
What “Shari’a law” holds this view? Where is this coming from?
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12:56:04 am on June 24, 2008 |
Being a Disabled Muslim Woman. An open and honest voice that should be heard by everyone.
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12:48:11 am on June 24, 2008 |
Midnight poll.
If you don’t live with your parents, how often do you talk to them? Do you call them everyday? Every other day? Every week? I talk to my father maybe once every week (if that), and with my mom maybe twice a week. I have this sneaking suspicion that I should call more often, so I’m trying to gauge what’s “normal.”
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04:37:11 pm on June 23, 2008 |
In Algeria, a Tug of War for Young Minds
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03:53:41 pm on June 23, 2008 |
The Fight for Turkey. An op-ed by Roger Cohen in the NYT. He argues that a dose of “secular fascism” is healthy for the bout between the AKP and the secular establishment. Am I the only one finds this ludicrous? Does “Islamofascism” get the same courtesy?
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06:01:33 pm on June 22, 2008 |
The Objectification of Women in Graphic Novels. I’d like to hear Willow’s take on this - what considerations went into depicting the characters in Cairo, specifically the women?
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10:57:04 am on June 18, 2008 |
Who’s afraid of the big bad headscarf? Apparently, Obama volunteers. How a couple of my friends were treated at the O rally in Detroit.
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08:23:39 pm on June 13, 2008 |
When the state is more rational than men.
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09:22:06 pm on June 12, 2008 |
I think this guy may be on to something. Its a comment to Godless.
I’m always just a tad bemused by this particular idea about religion–it’s my private affair and doesn’t have anything to do with anyone else in the world. This poses religion as either monumentally egocentric or ridiculously inconsequential. Egocentric: “Hey I’ve got a God with a meaning to a universe that is all my own; aren’t I lucky! Oh, and by the way, the rest of ya’ll aren’t worth thinking about as I sit here and commune with myself and my God about my own deep truths.” Or ridiculously trivial: “Hey, I have a relationship with the God of the universe, but it doesn’t really make any difference to anything outside myself or how I live my life and the way I think society ought to be organized.” Fundamentally this is a fantasy that won’t work. We have visions, secular or religious, of how the world is organized, our place in it, and the ideals that we ought to seek. A better program might be to have the humility to admit that we don’t really know the whole truth, and that we can’t see everything, and that we need to listen to other people who believe in other gods or no gods to see where we can agree, disagree, or compromise. The idea of humility, of admitting the smallness of our own vision in the face of the deepest truths, is an idea shared by most religions. That political preachers and religious politicians forget that says something about them, not about whether our religious faith should inform our politics. What could would a religion be if it didn’t suggest to me how I ought to live with other people, the basic political question. And what would it be but dishonesty to hide the fact that it is my religion that helps shape my ideas about politics.
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09:15:42 pm on June 12, 2008 |
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then you have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. - Milan Kundera, The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting
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03:24:43 pm on June 12, 2008 |
Scanners that see through clothing being installed at U.S. airports. With rising gas prices and now this, staying at home never looked so good. I’m hoarding supplies, barricading myself indoors, and waiting till the insanity blows over.
