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Two Women and a Mosque: A Convert Community Grows in Panama City

By Aliyya Swaby

…ery year, a group of black Muslims in Colón hosts an event to celebrate Eid-ul-Udha, a holiday that marks the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.They invite all the children in the neighborhood, regardless of religion. This year, dozens of children circled around a hired clown, who tied together balloons to entertain them. Several children took turns reciting the first several verses of the Quran in Arabic. Not all of them came from Muslim fami…

LGBT in Africa: Persecution and Persistence

By Peter Montgomery

…igeria for years where the group has, among other things, promoted its anti-abortion and anti-gay values under the guise of “character education.” Okafor appeared at the 2013 World Congress of Families where she repeated the current conservative talking point that the push for LGBT equality is a sign of cultural imperialism and moral decay in the West. According to one report: Ms Okafor described the family basis in Africa in comparison to the Wes…

Discovering “Little Syria”—New York’s Long-Lost Arab Neighborhood

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…o led a years-long campaign to commemorate the centennial of the first Arab-American novel, The Book of Khalid, by Ameen Rihani, culminating in its successful reissue by Melville House Press in 2011. Rihani wrote the book in Little Syria, a member of the “Pen Group” of Syrian-Lebanese writers that also included the much-more-famous Kahlil Gibran. For Fine, the Save Washington Street project is part of the same effort. “We are persistent,” he told…

Robert Jeffress Has a Lot of Nerve

By Sarah Posner

…ey are not true Christians.” As Warren Throckmorton has reported, the Perry-boosting American Family Association has strong-armed radio hosts who were allied with Brannon Howse, head of the arch-conservative Worldview Weekend ministry, who, like West, was critical of Perry’s apostolic prayer allies. (To be clear, these conservative critics of the many strains of neo-Pentecostalism, believe, as does Jeffress, that Mormonism is outside orthodox Chri…

RDBook: Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa

By Luke Ssemakula

…evangelicals interpret Paul’s exhortation to submit to authority in Romans 13:1-7 literally, resulting in their submission to political authority as ordained by God. Others are reluctant to participate in the secular democratic process because of their claim that it distracts them from their true pursuit, salvation. The others who lack international connections are reluctant to advocate political reform because they have nowhere to turn for help…

Democratic Egypt Tests a Divided Israel

By Shaul Magid

…lly the whole region will move toward. It deserves to be encouraged by the West. The commitment to democracy of the Israeli religious far-right, frequently associated with the settler movement, exists only insofar as it doesn’t threaten the goal of Jewish hegemony in Greater Israel. Its theological ideology focuses more on territory than politics. The position of the government (right, but not far-right), represented by Prime Minister Benjamin Net…

The Heresies of Christopher Hitchens

By Austin Dacey

…protest too much, it dawned on me just what kind of predicament is a ‘Hitch-22’: you find yourself in a Hitch-22 when, in order to surround yourself with people more interesting than you are, you have to be at least as interesting as they are. Christopher Hitchens has more than succeeded at that. Hitch-22 is above all, a story about loyalty, both to friends and to causes, and about the testing and shifting of loyalties. We learn how a former Trots…

Rage or Courage?: YouTube Terrorism Take Two

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…focus on rage/outrage as the key term for describing this moment in Muslim-Western relations. Why does the doublet—rage/outrage—appear as the dominant image to reflect Muslim responses to what seems to be provocation at best and blasphemy at worst, from an Islamic perspective? Neither cover story attempts to provide the genealogy of rage/outrage, which needs to be traced; its source tells much about its original, durative power. It comes not from…

As Transition Looms, Jewish Studies is Mired in Controversy

By Shaul Magid

…udience was as much the German academy as it was Jews. Whatever the case in 19th-century Germany, Greenberg argues that in late 20th-century America, “the problems of Jewish identity and Jewish survival are bound to emerge and haunt Judaic scholars with great intensity. This is because the crisis of modernization is entering a new level of intensity in the Jewish community…Thus the question of its survival becomes more of a question.” Much of this…

Has American Conservatism Abandoned the Christian Right?

By Bradley Onishi

…f American Republicans anchored by “non-college-educated, middle- and lower-middle-class white people,” who “unapologetically place citizens over foreigners, majorities over minorities, the native-born over recent immigrants, the normal over the transgressive and fidelity to a homeland over cosmopolitan ideals.” Hochman concludes that declines in church attendance mean that the influence of the Christian Right has been waning since the end of Geor…