Religion Dispatches
…of Islam and change all the time. I retired early from US academia not because I wanted to keep myself away from Islamic thought or Islamic studies, but more because I had come to the end of my capacity to do so within the constraints of our academic system. At some point I hope to discuss this matter specifically as it relates to Islam and gender studies—if for no other reason than that I was at a similar progressive workshop last weekend focused…
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…making the offering said that entering Israel was entering the heart, because for an Egyptian, the modern-day politics cannot erase the marred history carrying the name of Israel. It’s like seeing the swastika on the Buddhist temples in Malaysia. I had to remind myself that before Hitler took the same symbol and reversed it, it was used by indigenous peoples and Buddhists as a positive sign, affirming the presence of the sacred in all four direct…
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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…their discriminatory work permits. These “guest” workers, who today number between 250,000 and 400,000 (half of whom are illegal) did not only toil. They fell in love and established families and had children, probably more than 2,000 children, who were sent to state-run schools like Tel Aviv’s Bialik-Rogozin to learn with young Israelis their age to read, to write and to add and subtract—in Hebrew. They also were taught about the miraculous creat…
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…y, in fact a stream of effective strategy. The UFW was able to do this because the motivation of its leaders was greater than that of their rivals; they had better access to salient knowledge; and their deliberations became venues for learning. These are the three elements of what I call strategic capacity—the ability to devise good strategy. While I do not claim that strategic capacity guarantees success, I do argue that it makes success more pro…
Read More…hy am I doing this?’ I think of the conversation that took place in Cairo, Egypt, between an Egyptian Christian pastor who has been severely persecuted by Islam and a man named Lou Engle” (Engle is the theocracy-minded founder of The Call, a fundamentalist youth movement, who is leading a 40-day fast to pass Proposition 8.) “When Lou was in Cairo, Egypt, this pastor said to him, as a pastor that suffers at the hands of radical Islam, he said, ‘The…
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…
Read More…ut I’m totally at a loss when it comes to the story of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt and return to the Promised Land. With Passover coming so soon, I’m in the market for a Jewish ritual expert. A wise child, if you will. And apparently you’ve got it covered. I very much enjoyed the video of you explaining the story of Joseph to a group of Talmudic scholars. I keep coming back to this one statement of yours about Joseph: “They threw him in that ditch,…
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…that there is a time for peace and a time for war. … Today, we draw a line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism… May God Bless Israel.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMVs7akyMh0 The widespread assumption that Netanyahu’s religious rhetoric is a cynical appeal to his right-wing base isn’t incorrect, but it isn’t the only explanation—and it may not even be the primary one. The success of his military campaign (and perhaps…
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…have failed them, it is also true that they are—and I hope you’ll pardon the cliché—the very leaders they have been waiting for. And that if they were slowed, stopped or reversed, it was not just because those arrayed against them had superior force, but because they failed to build the kind of coalitions that could actually win. The Arab Spring may have only just begun….
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