Religion Dispatches
…ry. There is a legend that 72 translators produced the Greek Septuagint in Egypt in the third century BCE, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t multiple Greek versions floating around during John and Paul’s time in the first century CE. Another possibility is that John and Paul may have been working from memory rather than a printed text in front of them. Ancient Mediterranean culture was a much more oral culture than we experience today. Book…
Read More…me for the best television around the Muslim world. A television serial in Egypt has stirred controversy: The Group explores the world of the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s largest opposition movement. Similarly, a Syrian serial, What Your Right Hand Possess (it sounds better in Arabic) has drawn furious criticism for allegedly distorting Islam. A Malaysian TV station has axed a commercial wishing Muslims a happy Eid al-Fitr because viewers com…
Read More
…he Muslim community on campus, I’d just come back from a summer program in Egypt studying Arabic, and I was majoring in Middle Eastern Studies. I had no reason to be afraid, other than this detail: a longstanding panic in the face of attention, a strong preference for dry-heaving over public speaking. Crowds have moods, but this one wasn’t hateful, wasn’t vengeful. Just New Yorkers trying to figure out why we’d been attacked. A far cry from the cr…
Read More
…the X-rated Egyptian myth of Set and Horus. As that story goes, Horus—the Egyptian sky god—contends with Set, god of chaos and the desert, for control of all of Egypt. The rivalry between the two gods, who are sometimes depicted as brothers, entails seduction, revenge, betrayal and a blush-inducing debate over who left his semen in whom to be settled by the other gods, including Isis, their mother. More recently in the “Angels and Monsters” episo…
Read More
…ealous brothers plan to murder him, but end up selling him into slavery in Egypt. In case you don’t remember how that turned out, Joseph does some prison time until his flair for dream interpretation is recognized by the Pharaoh, who appoints him Viceroy in thanks. It’s a decades-spanning, riches to rags to worse rags to riches story fraught with tribulation, self-doubt, and ultimately, salvation. “The easy parallel,” says Audience of One director…
Read More
Inspired by protests over the summer organized through social media in Egypt and Madrid, upwards of a thousand demonstrators gathered on September 17 to “Occupy Wall Street” in a rally loosely coordinated by the activist media organization Adbusters. Hundreds lingered through the weekend and continued the protest as the New York Stock Exchange opened low on Monday, September 19 over worries about the wider impact of the Greek debt crisis. Demonst…
Read More
…would have taken time and money I did not possess. Traveling from India to Egypt seemed to offer a fairly simple way of linking my south Asian heritage with the history of the regions where Islamic jurisprudence came of age. A less tangible motive also helps explain the book’s trajectory. Although it is no bad thing to recognize the diversity and benign qualities of Muslim life—and I hope my book does that throughout—I thought it crucial to focus…
Read More
…d, in fact, was in favor of returning the West Bank and Gaza to Jordon and Egypt after 1967. Menachem Begin was a member of a terror organization and a firm believer in Greater Israel. Yet he made peace with Sadat (Sadat was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood yet he made peace with Israel). Yizhak Rabin said of the Palestinians, “we will break their bones,” yet shook Arafat’s hand and implemented Oslo. Ehud Barak was part of a clandestine army uni…
Read More
…Pole; under the Mediterranean near Crete; in Sweden, the Persian Gulf, and Egypt.” What Paradise Lust makes clear is that the rhetorical power of words like “Eden” far transcends the actuality of any one place. Go to top Radical Reinvention: An Unlikely Return to the Catholic Church Kaya Oakes Counterpoint 2012 Radical Reinvention: An Unlikely Return to the Catholic Church (2012) by Kaya Oakes – Few religious phenomena of the last decade have been…
Read More
…Qur’an from the 8th century, and a visually striking red velvet tent from Egypt known as the Mahmal. While the portrayal of the history of Hajj balances the spiritual with the material challenges met by the organizers and pilgrims, the same cannot be said for the contemporary accounts of the Hajj. During the launch of the exhibition, Director Neil MacGreggor, speaking of the contemporary pilgrimage, noted flatly that the “Hajj is one of the great…
Read More