Religion Dispatches
…ructs: “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” Leviticus 19:34 is even more direct: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” 4. Ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So much for “blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9) or Jesus’ admonishment to “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the…
Read More…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…
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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…
Read More…ccording to every empirical indicator. Sexual harassment in a country like Egypt was rare and a far cry from the pandemic it is today with a <90% hijab rate among Muslims. People who know women from these cultures today understand the tremendous pressure all Muslim women can be under to veil. The pressure can be so severe that one does have to problematize notions of “choice” in some contexts. – In view of this last point: something happened to ch…
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…US Undersecretary of State of Public Diplomacy, in conversation with eight Egyptian political bloggers who covered the 2008 US presidential campaign; people from around the world join in a pilgrimage to Mecca and witness a burning synagogue depicting Kristallnacht. These are some of the gatherings and events that Josh Fouts, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and Chief Global Strategist of Dancing Ink Product…
Read More…ggingheads segment on how the American right is spinning the revolution in Egypt, and using it as an opportunity to perpetuate myths about shari’ah law. We not only discussed the situation in Egypt, but how some conservative activists are using this opportunity to raise a panic about the supposed infiltration of shari’ah law in the United States, and how all of this could play out in states where politicians are seeking to ban shari’ah, and in Rep…
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…ecrease. A Dawoodi Bohra woman with children at the Mosque of Ibn Tulun in Egypt. Image via Scott D. Haddow/Flickr. 2. The Year 2070 Means Muslim Plurality For the first time ever (or perhaps just since sometime between 1000 and 1600 CE when The Plague decimated the European Christian population, according to footnote #2 of the report), in 2070 there will be more Muslims in the world than Christians. Between 2010 and 2050 the Muslim population is…
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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…ed. He begins, surprisingly, in ancient Egypt. In the fourth century BCE, Egyptian counter-narratives to Exodus began to appear, in which the Jews were not freed through divine agency but were expelled due to their “nastiness,” as Nirenberg puts it. Many such narratives feature a Moses figure, a rigid leader of a rebellious people; Josephus himself recounts a third-century story about an isolationist group that conquered Egypt, “attacking the tem…
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…romised Land,” but they also start with a parallel us vs. them religiously-coded binary that envisions Native Americans and Arab Muslims in a similar category of the “savage” other. This rhetoric, in fact, serves a dual purpose for Netanyahu. On the one hand, it resonates with the faction of Israelis who see themselves following in the footsteps of those who, in addition to serving as a solution to European antisemitism, imagined Zionism as an ext…
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