Religion Dispatches
…In their paper, Ho and his coauthors write that “visitors may decrease the number of incense sticks burned and period of stay at temples.” In my travels, I did visit temples that tried to suggest limits on how many incense sticks people should burn. Some temples have tried to deal with this problem by extinguishing incense sticks after they have been burning for a while. Particularly in Hong Kong, I sometimes saw large buckets of water standing ne…
Read More…much of their business comes from countries such as Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen that have very different notions of free speech and the separation between church and state. It was thoughtless for the library to check the box marked “occult” when planning their Internet filtering policy, but what’s even more disturbing here is that something as central to a democratic society as which sites can be accessed in a public library have be…
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…lgeria, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, and Bahrain. That’s 15 countries, including the most populous, Egypt. And while I’m not sure about The Sudan, there are of course strong restrictions around women’s dress in Saudi Arabia. That’s possibly 2 countries for the other side. (In fact, in the whole Muslim world, only two other countries legally mandate the veil: Iran and Afghanistan….
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…n, Egypt, the Netherlands, Germany, Chile, Turkey, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Qatar, Portugal, Canada, Mexico, the Russian province of north Ossetia, Indonesia, South Africa, Morocco, Japan, Israel, Jordan, Italy, and Spain. They took us into their virtual communities, houses, and mosques, invited us to fatwas, took us on a virtual Hajj to Mecca, and discussed their perceptions of extremism, integration, creative collaboration, an…
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…get a bill far larger than you expected. (In that case, wars are like cell phones.) We have a right to know just how much can be spent on uncertain military objectives, and it would be nice to know whether that much money could be spent, without consulting Congress, on the betterment of the condition of the American people. The roads around my apartment need repair. Can we get NATO to send some army engineers in? New York City also desperately nee…
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…ural tensions when living in an “Islamic” context, that of the United Arab Emirates. I’ve spent over a year hanging out and talking to people at a social club for Westerners and conducted interviews of mostly white British and American expatriates. Central themes emerging in this project so far include how white migrants from Europe and America construct and maintain a pan-Western white identity within a highly multicultural Arab society, as well…
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…” Guessoum, a professor at the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, is one of the few devout Muslims who are actively advocating the full-fledged acceptance of modern science. In January I.B. Tauris published his book, Islam’s Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science. It has helped shape the debate in powerful ways. Hameed writes of the book, There are very few good books out there that tackle the issue of…
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…l donors pledged $854 million in aid to the United States. The United Arab Emirates promised cash and oil. Cuba offered to send 1,100 doctors. Italy sent medical supplies. So far so good. The United States did not accept the vast majority of the aid offered, however. Although New Orleans faced huge infrastructure rebuilding costs, officials did not use many of the offered funds because of bureaucratic hurdles and general inefficiency and confusion…
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…Last night I was having dinner with a young oil millionaire from the Arab Emirates. And he came to me afterward, and he said I would like to get this accepted in the Middle East. And he has access to the top leadership to do so. And so the ruler of his own emirate, Sharjah, has endorsed the Charter as has his Head of Education. He wants me to make a state visit to Sharjah and to Doha where there’s also interest. In Abu Dabi and Jordan there’s als…
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…legation whose itinerary includes Germany, Turkey, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Niger. As Jeff Sharlet has reported, Inhofe has long been the liaison between the secretive evangelical group the Family (aka the Fellowship), and Museveni. Sharlet has also reported that Inhofe ushered David Bahati, author of the anti-gay bill, into the group. Is this a U.S. taxpayer-funded mission trip for Inhofe? Lavers reports, by the way, that the U.S. law…
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