Religion Dispatches
…drives the money changers from the Temple. For centuries, many temples in India functioned like banks, making interest-bearing loans. Commercialized forms of penance helped inspire the Reformation in Europe. The landscape of American religion is often conceived of as a market in which churches and denominations compete for worshippers. Sales tactics influence evangelists, and companies use religion to push political agendas. Nevertheless, there’s…
Read More…umerous awards including Best Film at the Tri-Continental Film Festival in India and Best Documentary at Turin LGBT Film Festival. The film explores the lives of gay and lesbian Muslims in several different countries, portraying jihad not as a holy war but as a struggle to reconcile one’s faith with one’s sexuality. The film doesn’t feature experts or religious scholars, but rather individual women and men who are trying to find their place in a f…
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…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…
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…) I knew Monsanto sues farmers into oblivion, caused a rash of suicides in India, suppresses negative media coverage, and pays politicians, and scientists to lie on its behalf. But there was one story I didn’t believe, because I knew it wasn’t true: Monsanto hadn’t paid me. So I did what any academic or journalist would do, and started learning more about the company that supposedly had me on its payroll. In the process, I discovered that very lit…
Read More…oses. I witnessed another example of “swastika-phobia” on a trip to Kochi, India, once home to a sizable population of Indian Jews, a part of which is still known as “Jew Town.” I overheard an American tourist exclaim with alarm, “I was in Jew Town, and there were swastikas everywhere!” When her friend tried to explain that in Kochi the swastika is a symbol of Hinduism and not Nazism, she responded, “I know, but still!” Because the swastika inspir…
Read More…when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.” A native of India, Mr. Sen had saved enough money to open a small copy shop. While he had no family in the U.S., he had friends and associates who were part of this new life. While he was a Hindu, Sen had a Muslim roommate with whom he frequently discussed matters of belief. And when they did, Mr. Sen expressed his deep disappointment that there was so much violence in the world on acc…
Read More…maginary fear, that blinds them to the real and immediate danger. As a parent, my immediate concern is that Mattel’s manufacturing process was violated. How did it happen? What is being done to remedy the situation? Almost half the Muslim world lives in the five countries of Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Turkey. All of them have democratically elected a female head of state. MAMAs may find the message offensive—that is their right—bu…
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…sibilities opened up by a more cosmopolitan empire and an enriched Muslim-Hindian synthesis. If he worried about anything, Lévi-Strauss worried about false dichotomies. He was interested in the hyphens that bind, not the selves that divide. Fascinated as he was by the mental structures the human mind imposes on reality as it attempts to make order and sense, he was not as simplistic a dichotomist as some of his critics believed. Binary logic is th…
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…it her analysis of the global implications of the gang rape and murder of Indian medical student Jyoti Singh Pandey, purity culture, whether in India or America, casts “women’s bodies [as]…primarily for procreation or male pleasure… a culture in which women must cover up or be threatened is a rape culture.” [Emphasis mine] If, as Graff writes, purity culture is rape culture, then the submission culture that exists in many conservative evangelical…
Read More…es with women-only mosques, including mu’adhan and imamahs, like China and India. Some countries have fewer restrictions, like Indonesia. It is so good to be in places like this because when it is suppose to be for the worship of Allah then, how is that man can get in the way? But we know the drill. Thanks to all who commented on these and other entries, like Houda, and mairedubhtx. Perhaps when Ramadan is over I can start making my reply on the b…
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