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New Book Stokes Fear of a Muslim Europe

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…a Muslim, and that is what fills Caldwell with glee: “More than any other Westerner,” he crows, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali has made the case for the superiority of the Western conception of women’s rights over the Muslim one.” Sadly, this journalist-turned-polemicist is hailed by Faoud Ajami in the New York Times as a clarion voice who “has written the most sustained and thoughtful treatment of the subject (immigration, Islam, and the West) to date.” Pace…

The Shari’ah Spring: Media Gets It Backwards

By Haroon Moghul

…ive, nearly fully Muslim country, whose recently deposed tyrant frequently promoted Islamic practices and pieties. If we read the Arab Spring as a zero-sum game between Islamists and secularists, we’re going to miss what’s happening; if we imagine Arab democracy will look like secular Western democracy, we will likely be disappointed. And if we assume reference to Islam and democracy reveals only hypocrisy, insincerity, or ideological confusion, w…

Ian Buruma on the Political Excesses of Religion

By Lisa Webster

…17th century.) There are other differences but they run through the entire Western world. Which is why I compared, for example, the Calvinist politics in 19th century Holland with Christian politics in the U.S. So I think it’s easy to exaggerate differences. That’s the thing—once a story gets told it calcifies… What Europeans don’t quite get about Americans is the nature of Christianity here. In Europe, people (whether they’re believers or not) st…

Is ISIS Islamic? Is it a State?

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…timidate both its enemies and its own population. The savage beheadings of Western journalists and aid workers that were posted on the Internet were matched by dozens, perhaps hundreds, of beheadings of recalcitrant Sunnis under ISIS’ control who refused to go along with its demands or who dared to be identified as Christians, Yazidis and other minorities—or even as modern people who liked to dress in a Western style. For ISIS, terror has been an…

Magic in the Air: How Intellectuals Invented the Myth of a Mythless Society

By Jason Josephson Storm

…spirits, and moreover I was doubly skeptical of the notion that the modern Western world had lost its magic. I found myself shifting gears and looking at America and Europe through the eyes of an outsider—with the same sort of gaze often leveled at non-Europeans. When I did so I discovered that the sociological data suggested that the majority of Americans believe in ghosts or demons. Indeed, a surprising 73% of Americans have at least one paranor…

Rage or Courage?: YouTube Terrorism Take Two

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…the first, fundamental, basis of democracy, and that the West, as also the Western way of life, and Western civilization, depends on untrammeled freedom. But what about hate speech? Is hate speech not a category that impinges on, and limits, the practice of free speech? Must Jews ‘tolerate’ neo-Nazis? Must Catholics tolerate one who suggests that the birth of Jesus was not immaculate, that he was instead conceived by ordinary human means, outside…

LGBT and Muslim? A New Report Busts Stereotypes

By Peter Montgomery

…uality, and make it hard to simply transfer the rhetoric and strategies of Western LGBT-rights movements to Muslim countries. Considering the identity-practice divide also allows for understanding as something more than simple buffoonery the statement by Iranian President Ahmadinejad that Iran has no homosexuals—the category itself is seen as a Western invention. In her article, Aisha Geissinger explores a more fluid understanding of gender and an…

The Jersey Shores of Tripoli: MTV and Arab Revolution

By Haroon Moghul

…e same folks learned a) they have no ability to change unless it’s through Western civilization or b) they are incapable of modernization because of who and what they are. This worldview, namely that the Westerner, coextensive with a certain type of Christianity and a certain type of whiteness, creates the progress of history is so shockingly pervasive that persons who do not fit within this privileged category can find themselves negatively dispo…

Tariq Ramadan in Montreal: Defining Ethics in Terms of Religion

By Spencer Dew

…ot only wrong, it relies upon a racist division of the Muslim from modern, Western civilization; as if the “Muslim” automatically denotes something backward and threatening while “modern” and “Western” signify a purely secular politics, unmotivated by religion, or, at worst, affiliated with a liberal, universalist theology anathema to the “fundamentalist” claims of other, non-Western faiths. This is silly, but also dangerous. Ramadan is a committe…

Jewish “Women of the Wall” Defy Law to Pray

By Kelly Hartog

…demonstrations of violence at one of Judaism’s holiest shrines—the Kotel (Western Wall)—on a bleak December morning in 1988. What had happened? Rivka Haut, an Orthodox Jewish woman from Borough Park, Brooklyn, had decided to organize the first women’s Rosh Chodesh (welcoming of the new month) Torah reading at the Western Wall, complete with a Torah scroll and wearing tallitot (prayer shawls). Calling themselves “The Women of the Wall,” the group…