Religion Dispatches
…cticing what they preach through green projects in affected countries like Pakistan, Indonesia, Tanzania, and Yemen. In India, Goldman Environmental Prize winners Rashida Bee and Champa Devi Shukla are battling the environmental and health effects of the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in their community while also trying to hold the company’s current owner Dow Chemical legally accountable for the devastation. The women’s partnership is all the more r…
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…dmittedly checkered but often positive history. The immigrants from India, Pakistan, Brazil, and Ireland I talked with while writing this book are potential partners on all sides of the political spectrum. They ultimately care much more about the bread and butter issues like family, community, and jobs that most of us care about. Anything you had to leave out? Lots. It’s impossible to capture the complexity of people’s everyday lived religious exp…
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…ed then? Creating an open front, so to speak, a giant security vacuum from Pakistan’s frontier with Kashmir to southern Lebanon. Fantastic. The same extremists who slide in and out of Afghanistan and cause so much damage in that region could then smuggle weapons and material across Iran, through a patchily-governed Iraq, and across an unstable, violent Syria—as is already happening in the aftermath of the redistributive consequences of the Libyan…
Read More…aeda]. That’s not including your own extended family: they are often enemy number one.” McDougall reports that religious police use social media to entrap people, and rely on informants. Knowing who the enemy is has become increasingly difficult for gay people. From the ranks of its own religious police force, Isis is believed to have deployed undercover agents to entrap those who have been accused by others of being gay. Elmo, a doctor now workin…
Read More…would be of concern, so that’s why it’s important to me.” About 15 million Pakistanis and 60 million Indians speak Urdu. Along with English, it is one of the national languages of Pakistan. The AP investigative reporting team won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year for its expose of the spying program. Galati also testified that eavesdropping on conversations in Lebanese cafes could be “useful” (even though it wasn’t) because the NYPD “might be abl…
Read More…society. The Arab world is dominated by autocracies, while Afghanistan and Pakistan have governments that are in various degrees of uselessness. There is a political angle to Obama’s support of Indonesia, as he attempts to set-up rival powers with China; Indonesia’s close relationship with Australia makes them a credible power center. Just as important, Obama recognizes that democracy is messy, painful, and not the same everywhere. Indonesia carve…
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…ajority of the world’s Muslims live in democracies: Mali, Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia, among other countries, with 700 million Muslims; more than half the planetary total. Other millions of Muslims live in majority non-Muslim dictatorships, such as Russia and China. But the best proof of Islam’s allergy to liberty is found in democratic Senegal. Independent in 1960, this 90%-Muslim country proceeded to ele…
Read More…iteracy rates in the Muslim-majority world: Turkey (87%), Egypt (71%), and Pakistan (50%), and of course rates of sale. How does an Islamist pamphlet compare to fiction or poetry in the same region? Finding the man on the street who screams “the West” is the great Satan is great for proving what one person thinks. How about what a billion Muslims might actually think? This smear is predicated on guilt by association and on the assumption that an “…
Read More…ased, openly gay Muslim,” secretly videotaped his journey to Mecca on his iPhone and other small phones. “I was terrified because they reserve the death penalty for people like me,” Sharma said. Several times he had his equipment seized and video files deleted by authorities. But he persevered with both his spiritual journey and his film. “I was there making this pilgrimage for the thousands of gay Muslims who were too scared to go to Saudi Arabia…
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…arguments in favor of ongoing military campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; domestic spying programs; and the adoption of policies like the one that recently invoked to deny Dzhokhar Tsarnaev a reading of his Miranda Rights. Binary formulations, regardless of content, erase complexity. When we cast the Tsarnaev brothers as “the worst elements of our communities” who should be “separated from the rest,” we have desensitized ourselves to th…
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