The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ramadan
Musandam is Arabic for ‘the Hamptons.’
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Don’t Call it a Turkish Spring
Much of the coverage of Turkey can be politely described as ‘trampoline journalism’—bounce into Taksim and bounce out. What I saw in Istanbul didn’t match the feverish descriptions that made it even onto the BBC or that clogged up my Twitter feed. More relevant to me, almost no one was interested in hearing from religious Turks. So I went ahead and talked to them.
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Watching Man of Steel in Istanbul
Once you produce garbage, by your own logic we have the right to recycle what you have wasted all humanity’s energy to produce (in Man of Steel, Krypton goes to hell literally because they fracked their planet to death); you could say, then, that they turned their planet into a bomb and blew themselves up. How do we make sense of this otherwise? So I suggest Man of Steel as an exercise in the language of racism, the politics of dispossession, and the danger of too much power.
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Forget History Channel’s The Bible, Meet Omar
In the US half the books on Islam are devoted to telling you what’s wrong with it. Where is the serious literature by thoughtful Muslims engaging their faith? That may take some time, but for now, take a gander at a 30-part series on the Prophet Muhammad’s father-in-law.
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An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai
On a recent trip through the region, via Istanbul, I took some pictures to capture some of the spirit of the place for lack of a better term. When you bring that many people together, chasing after money and the chance to strike it big—again, think American Wild West, for better and worse—you get… things that surprise you.
Read MoreBig Love, Saudi-Style
In my years of travel throughout the Muslim world, I’ve literally never met a person with a second spouse. And I’ve met a lot of people.
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Forget the Pope—We Need a New Caliph!
With the power vested in us by ourselves, we have chosen ten candidates in the hopes that one of them will win popular acclaim and restore glory to a throne too long left empty.
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10 Years Later: An American Muslim Looks Back at Iraq
Ten years on, as the experts who pushed for a disastrous war remain experts, it remains unclear why it ever happened. Was it just racism? Who, after all, does not plan for the day after a war? I plan out what I am going to do when I drive up to New York to see friends and family. Maybe the rest of the world decided to move on while we floundered about, amazed that just because we dreamed something, it could not come to pass.
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If Muslims Stop Drinking Will They Become Violent?
A recent article in the Washington Post recycles well-worn myths about religiosity and Islam. Is this the best we can do?
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What’s Islamophobia, and Do I Have It?
I’m not arguing that Islamophobia is racist, or that Islamophobes are racists, because that’s not quite what’s happening. For one thing, Islamophobes embrace ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and racists wouldn’t (indeed couldn’t) do the same. But consider the similarities: the Islamophobe must assume Muslims suffer some sort of pre-Islamic inferiority, sufficient to explain how some (largely non-white) people—actually, a lot of people—not only fell for Islam in the first place, but then stayed down. How long do enforced ideologies last? Nazism: twelve years. Communism: some decades. Islam: Fourteen centuries and counting.
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