Religion Dispatches
…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…
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…politics can be fused.” But how do we get to that point? We have seen, in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria, that Saudi Arabia and Iran are willing to kill large numbers of civilians to defeat democracy. (The very thing, incidentally, Iran complains about—our 1953 role in the return of the monarchy to absolute power—is what Iran has been doing day in and day out in Syria for years now, and at far more brutal cost in lives lost.) But, sadly, Saudi A…
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…s nuclear threat, at the Heritage Foundation, and about how the film being promoted by a former colleague of World Net Daily’s Aaron Klein, who was one of the first conservative writers to jump on the conspiracy train: lest you forget, that line of thinking goes, Mohamed ElBaradei, while head of the IAEA, let Iran off the hook on its nuclear ambitions; ElBaradei’s OK with the Muslim Brotherhood; therefore he must be behind the plot to install a nu…
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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…
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…d that those erecting such boundaries considered, with some justification, Egypt to be a cruel and barbaric empire of hypocritical elites and abhorrent licentiousness, and Canaanite society thoroughly immoral from its forms of sexuality to child-sacrificing religiosity. We don’t have to share these perspectives, or the prohibitions derived from them, but as motivations for a culture they are hardly arbitrary or unique. Pollan ignores what is perha…
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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…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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…n act of protest that toppled the Tunisian regime, captivated and captured Egypt, and from there reached Libya and Bahrain, Yemen and even Syria. The world without was mesmerized, astonished, amazed and inspired. Everything we thought we know about Arabs and Muslims, Middle Easterners and North Africans, was upended. President Obama even gave a speech. He said some nice things, but that was about it. What he brought to this historical moment wasn’…
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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…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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