Religion Dispatches
…ent permitted Chavez to use him for a photo op. The President bowed to the Saudi king. The President made concessions to Fidel Castro with absolutely nothing to show for it. North Korea fires a rocket illegally and the President does nothing. In short, Newt Gingrich argues that President Obama’s foreign policy has been reduced to a laughable display of American weakness. He contrasts this to Ronald Reagan’s foreign posture which boasted American s…
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…musicians in Pakistan? Unfortunately, very little effort has been made to promote Pashto music in the past. Now that popular Pashto music and culture are diminishing, it’s high time to work seriously for its preservation and promotion. We can consider the following steps in this regard. *Create awareness regarding the plight of Pashtun artists in international media. *Organize cultural exchange programs, wherein Pashtun artists could get opportun…
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…happen. The assumption of a Jewish conspiracy is all that’s required to decode the attacker’s rationale. Violence stemming from this logic has a long history in the US and around the world. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018 was an effort to stop the “migrant caravan” because, according to the shooter, Jews are responsible for orchestrating non-White immigration to replace native-born Whites. In 2006, a Moroccan-Jewish man named Ilan Halim…
Read More…for the hajj. I feel impatient. I can’t wait for the confirmation from the Saudi embassy in the form of a visa. That is the last hurdle, the technical stumbling block that keeps me from jumping headlong out of the plane of expectation and adventure. I haven’t felt this much impatience and uncertainty since the last few days before delivery of my children. I never wanted to know the sex beforehand, and for the most part managed to avoid ultrasounds…
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…l-Ubaydah. There was a door named bab al-’Umrah, and of course a few other Saudi Kings, Islamic historical male figures, like bab Umar, and important cites, like bab al-Madinah. The thing is, as far as I could tell, women are hustled out of every place on the first floor, but especially as salat time approaches. Sometimes if it gets late enough and there is a large enough unyielding cluster, they may eke out a space behind some men. But the rudene…
Read More…, whatever little shopping I did in Makkah. The shopkeepers are mostly not Saudi, so they detect an accent, but usually think I’m Egyptian, the dialect I use the most. My roommate said many of the shopkeepers are Urdu-speaking, but she got better service when she spoke English, especially in the jewelry shop. Anyway, by now I hope you see that it helps always to have a plan. Today, I encountered something I was hoping at all costs to never have to…
Read More…part from us. Shias and Ahmadis might find themselves praying at the local Saudi Wahhabi mosque (I swear I’ve seen this happen, and have been one of those to depart in tears). When we depart from the mosque after prayers, we have taught ourselves to keep our remembrances and invocations within the “heart” instead of whispering or chanting them aloud. We taught ourselves to cork up the bottle of intoxication that we could quaff on Fridays, or durin…
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…have “veil” in it. How do you feel about the cover? I was very lucky that Saudi-born artist Hend al-Mansour consented to use of images from her calligraphic painting of passages from the Qur’an, specifically from the part of Surat Yusuf that tells the story of the attempted seduction of the Prophet Joseph by his master’s wife. Fedwa Malti-Douglas called that story the literary foundation for misogyny in the Islamic tradition, but it’s a bit more…
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…Travel to other places in the world, like the Persian Gulf, Turkey, China, India, Brazil, and so on and so forth, and people are hungry with ambition, eager to embrace the economic opportunities that our country’s desire for globalization enabled and sustained in the first place. Now, we are turning away; we are scared of monsters whose shadows stretch across the planet. But let me end with a note of hope. Consider that, for most Americans, Shari’…
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…nce increase the spread of HIV/AIDS. More than two million are infected in India alone. While the United Nations and the Organization of American States condemn violence against sexual minorities, the Commonwealth remains silent on the issue, with many of its members opposed to any concessions. A key vote, he writes, will be in June, when the Board of Governors will meet and could decide to give accreditation to the NGOI the Commonwealth Equality…
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