Religion Dispatches
…ic. And I don’t want to be standing near you when you confuse Persian for Arab. If anything, the late Ottomans faced rebellions by Arab nationalists in the 19th and 20th century because they stressed Turkish as a vehicle for modern education. How the Ottomans could be fairly characterized a force for Arabization escapes me, reality, history, and peer review. There is so much more such nonsense and it fills up hundreds of pages. If you ever com…
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…ght such destruction at hypersensitive urban nodes in the rapidly changing Arab Muslim world. What seems more and more likely is that the video itself was simply the pretext for a pre-planned attack, likely by al-Qaeda operatives or sympathizers. But that still raises the question: how did a B movie get rendered into Arabic, then used to justify an attack on American sites overseas? The two principles—freedom of speech and protection of American d…
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…m shifts. In this regard, comparisons to the Arab Spring are mistaken; the Arab Spring had clear demands (step down!) and focused on the key issues which united diverse constituencies (constituencies which, as in Egypt, are now busy fighting one another). Here, in contrast, there are no clear demands. And while there are some threads that unite everybody, there are also lots of split ends, digressions into issues which divide us. Working Americans…
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…: Independent justice reform group criticizes Aceh’s harsh anti-LGBT legal code The Jakarta Post reported on April 1 that the Institute for Criminal Justice Reform “has lambasted the Aceh administration’s Islamic criminal code bylaw, or Qanun Jinayat, saying it could potentially provoke discrimination and over-criminalization of LGBT communities and other vulnerable groups.” The Aceh province is governed by the conservative Islamist legal code. No…
Read More…of the convention, it was still illegal in Australia, the UK, most of the United States, and most of Europe—in Australia and other former British colonies, these laws were a legacy of British colonial rule. When the United States began accepting gay and lesbian asylum seekers in 1990, some states still had anti-sodomy laws on the books. (The Supreme Court ultimately declared these laws unconstitutional in 2003 with its decision in Lawrence v. Tex…
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…ab world deserve to hear in response to their uprisings. Indeed, since the Arab Spring began, we’ve offered tepid encouragement and uncertain commitment; mostly we’ve been reduced to a bystander. How can it be that Russia and Iran and France have clearer positions than we do? Have these countries become more powerful than us? Yes, America’s proportionate influence in the world has fallen, but not enough to explain away what can be laid at the Pre…
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…like most Dinka, he is also tired of the Khartoum government’s attempts to Arabize and Islamize all of Sudan. With the SPLM now focused on governing an independent Southern Sudan, Christians and animists living in the North are especially vulnerable to the National Islamic Front (NIF), which dominates the Sudanese government. Anglican Bishop Andudu Elnail, a Christian leader in South Kordofan whose cathedral and home were recently burned, came to…
Read More…“dishonoring” of Muslims around the world. It is true that the so-called “Arab Spring” has been a significant setback for al Qaeda and its affiliates, though much will depend on how the US and European governments respond. The continued violence and turmoil in Libya, Syria, Yemen and to a lesser extent Bahrain also plays into al Qaeda’s claim that violence is the answer. Non-Arab jihadi groups, and al Qaeda’s regional affiliates in North Africa,…
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…egin Monday morning’s plenary, “was a watershed year in the history of the United States [and] in the history of the democratic world…a change in [the] political paradigm, in the basic framework that guides public life in the United States, and in Britain, and across Europe.” What caused this world-historical civilizational shift? Well, Hazony explains, the New York Times fired a few employees for platforming racist op-eds in the midst of the Geor…
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…ramifications for the upcoming presidential elections. At the beginning of 2024, mention of a report on Russian persecution of Ukrainian Christians started showing up in some evangelical publications, mostly notably in a February 6 story in Christianity Today. The report, “Faith Under Fire: Navigating Religious Freedom Amidst the War in Ukraine,” was published in November 2023 by Mission Eurasia (an evangelical mission agency founded when the Sov…
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