Religion Dispatches
…se he preached rebellion against the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt and redeemed you from the land of slavery; he has tried to turn you from the way the LORD your God commanded you to follow. You must purge the evil from among you. 6 If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods that neither you nor your fathers ha…
Read More…t know if it’s any consolation but on my first attempt at making hajj from Egypt in 1981 I was stopped at the gate because I did not have a mahram. This was a question I asked my travel agent before I submitted my deposit. At my age there is no restriction, but for all you young and fine ladies, there are ways to get around it— including what they did in Egypt but I did not learn about in time, and that is that the hosting travel agent can act as…
Read More…t well in advance, two maybe three years. I first tried to go on hajj from Egypt (in 1981-2) because the total airfare was like 250 US dollars. I had my air ticket before I applied for a visa locally. In the end, the quota prevented me from going, despite the “reasons” given. We don’t have a quota in the United States. So when I first went online to get general information (earlier this year while still in Indonesia listening to my friends’ incred…
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…t this did make me think about the phenomenon of interfaith as it is being promoted these days. First of all, this is not an idea promoted by the oppressed to invite others to celebrate their faith. It is something those already in power or with privilege extend to make an opening or orchestrate a collective. This means, those who do get invitations are usually at a disadvantage. If nothing else, it could be from the mere organizational standpoint…
Read More…l. With regard to hajj or umrah, the tour agencies worldwide, including in Egypt, can sort of become the mahram. So even that year I was denied, a female friend of mine (another American woman) made umrah a alone because she worked it out with the tour agency. This year, I am just plain old old. (Double OLD intended.) I am old enough to travel without a mahram. So actually I am not as nervous about that as I am about the second extenuating circums…
Read MoreThe year President Sadat was killed I lived in Cairo. That was 1981. Egypt is just across the water from the Saudi Arabian peninsula so it occurred to me it would be a very easy to make hajj from there. I bought an airline ticket and was in contact with the family of one of my graduate school friends. They would pick me up from the airport and host me during my stay and the days of ritual. Nice plan. So I went to the embassy to get the visa and w…
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…Jewish foodies. Kashrut comes within a dense, rich, long-standing culture promoting, ideally, upright, prudent, modest living, including, reverence for and balanced coexistence with the natural world. The final, and perhaps greatest irony to the dismissal of kashrut, is that Jews through the ages have adopted the local cuisines and food cultures of all of their homelands—whether Persia, Greece, Morocco, Poland, or India—and adapted them all quite…
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…ner in a land that is not his. The Jew must remember his history, first in Egypt and later in other exiles, of being a guest in another people’s land. Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Eli Wiesel pleaded with Israel not to deport the children. “Where is the Jewish spirit, the Jewish heart and the Jewish compassion?” The sides were protagonists in an age-old Jewish dispute. Shas’s Yishai represented the particularistic, parochial protector of J…
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…him to a post as the Playwright in Residence at the Library of Alexandria (Egypt), researching, writing and holding developmental readings of his play A Matter of Fact about the destruction of the Ancient Library. Whilst in Alexandria, he led a State Department program for Egyptian youth to write and perform a site-specific play, Let’s Make a Change, for which they were almost all thrown in a prison where it was said “You never again see birds.” T…
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…ur thumb for decades? It is easy for Americans to forget that we supported Egypt’s dictator for thirty years, and happily welcomed Qaddafi back into ‘civilization’ when he realigned his policies with our own—not in the area of human rights, but ‘counterterrorism’. (And by ‘our’ I mean certain governments.) The next best response to Dawkins will come, if it does at all, with how Muslims deal with a multipolar world, in which the West is not the onl…
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