Search Results for:

VIPREG2024 1xbet india promo code Romania

10 Years Later: An American Muslim Looks Back at Iraq

…the war. My mother’s family (which is, immediately speaking, from northern India) is supposedly descended from an Iraqi who left Mesopotamia around 1250. In Indo-Islamic culture, among others, we have shajaras, literally (family) trees. That’s how we know. This fortunate ancestor (being Arab) spoke Arabic, so he found employment in the service of the Delhi Sultans, and the family line was from then on inseparable from Islamic law, arts and letters…

Read More

When Bad Weeks Happen to Good People

…ing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and yet another mind-numbing gang rape in India. The week quickly got even more devastating with the Boston marathon bombing and the US Senate’s vote not to make it even a tiny bit harder for Americans to buy guns. So much high-profile violence in rapid succession prompted The Onion to cry, “Jesus, this week” (while Jezebel went even further). Such events bring to mind age-old questions of “theological anthropology…

Read More

On the Ethics of the Tibetan Self-Immolations

…f great moral courage. Drawing from earlier scriptures, the fourth-century Indian Buddhist master Asaṅga speaks of a threefold classification of “giving” that includes giving material goods, spiritual counsel, and life. Of these three, Asaṅga considers offering up one’s life to be the highest form of giving. That said, Indian and Tibetan texts also set forth stringent conditions that must be met before an individual is allowed to offer up his or h…

Read More

How Robert Bellah (1927-2013) Changed the Study of Religion

…ovements were emerging in other traditions in other parts of the world. In India, for example, bhakti movements of social rebellion were erupting throughout the subcontinent, eschewing Brahmanical authority for the fellowship of devotees of a new breed of eclectic saints and teachers who could be outcastes, blind, female, or partly Muslim. Elsewhere in Asia, what has been called a “Protestant Buddhism” was appealing to the masses in the way that a…

Read More

“Burka Avenger”: Pakistan’s Middle Class Gets a Feminist Cartoon

…mics study (PDF) documented an upswing in gender equality and education in India after the arrival of cable television. “Introducing cable increases the likelihood of current enrollment for girls by 3.5 percentage points,” the authors wrote, describing a shift over four times larger than the 0.83% increase created by the Pakistani government between 2005 and 2011. The show could have the same effect in Pakistan, particularly if public interest sta…

Read More

Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

…mans had become Islam’s historically most powerful civilization. Along the Indian Ocean rim, as Engseng Ho argues in The Graves of Tarim, a new, peaceful, entirely non-militarized trade linked East Africa to China. (He’s at Duke University.) The artistic and aesthetic legacies from these periods speak for themselves. The Alhambra Palace in Granada, which so inspired Washington Irving. The Taj Mahal in Agra. The Blue Mosque in Istanbul. The wonderf…

Read More

Pigging Out: What ‘Radically Unkosher’ Jewish Foodies Like Michael Pollan Are Missing

…Jewish foodies. Kashrut comes within a dense, rich, long-standing culture promoting, ideally, upright, prudent, modest living, including, reverence for and balanced coexistence with the natural world. The final, and perhaps greatest irony to the dismissal of kashrut, is that Jews through the ages have adopted the local cuisines and food cultures of all of their homelands—whether Persia, Greece, Morocco, Poland, or India—and adapted them all quite…

Read More

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

…s. Throughout the twentieth century, Panama received Muslims from Lebanon, India, Pakistan, and West Indian countries such as Jamaica. Each group worked to establish their own religious institutions and the support systems necessary to flourish as religious minorities in a Catholic country. In the 1960s and 70s, Lebanese immigrants collected money from their growing business enterprises to create their own mosque, cemetery and Arabic school in Col…

Read More

Global LGBT Recap: Culture War Claims More Victims

…cussion of the church’s teaching and their reasons for departing from it.” India: Out LGBT people vulnerable under recriminalization BuzzFeed’s Lester Feder reports this week on the violent consequences of the Indian Supreme Court’s decision to recriminalize homosexuality. An anti-gay police raid and beatings that happened before the decision were being investigated by activists as lawless violence by police; now the victims of the raid wait to be…

Read More

Sikh Prof Attacked on Heels of New Study

…only about 20% can identify the country of origin of the Sikh faith (it’s India). 49% of Americans believe “Sikh” is a sect of Islam, and most Americans identify the practice of turban-wearing primarily with the figure of Osama bin Laden, a fact that makes it more believable that in 2008 alone fully 9% of New York City Sikhs said they had been assaulted because of their religion. But it’s not just association with radical Islam and the resulting…

Read More