Religion Dispatches
…ted to my obsessive diehard suhur regimen. These I will pass along to you, free of charge. A few others I learned while traveling extensively for my consultancy on Islam and gender. I have fasted in strange and wonderful places, without the ability to control most of these secrets I will share, thus confirming their benefit. Before you go to bed each night, figure out exactly what you want to eat in the morning. It is impossible to get the non-suh…
Read More…ether we should give to non-Muslims is up for dispute by some jurists. But today’s realities make it quite clear: we can no longer consider the need of a Muslim as greater than the need of a non-Muslim. This is like the tendency in some international circles to consider the blood of non-Muslim combatants more important than Muslim civilians and combatants with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have a very different sense of the shared human com…
Read More…me for the best television around the Muslim world. A television serial in Egypt has stirred controversy: The Group explores the world of the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s largest opposition movement. Similarly, a Syrian serial, What Your Right Hand Possess (it sounds better in Arabic) has drawn furious criticism for allegedly distorting Islam. A Malaysian TV station has axed a commercial wishing Muslims a happy Eid al-Fitr because viewers com…
Read More…ut of churches and mosques. Secularism is on the way out in Bangladesh. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has expelled a senior member for his plans to run for president. Some Methodist clergy are saying they’ll officiate gay marriages whether the denomination’s leaders like it or not. This comes as the United Methodist Church found Rev. Amy DeLong guilty of marrying a lesbian couple in 2009. Progressive Christians are throwing a camp meeting with…
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…ll skip the theology and instead go for the more politically expedient. In today’s anthropology, Muslim women participate at every level of society and in every role, somewhere. In addition, in every Muslim context, minority or majority, in every class from the very poor or basic to the very wealthy and affluent, Muslim women are active in the promotion of their own well being as well as the well being of others. Everywhere. Certainly the scope of…
Read More…ked, ‘Why did you not finish the required quantity of bricks yesterday and today, as you did before?’ Then the Israelite supervisors came to Pharaoh and cried, ‘Why do you treat your servants like this? No straw is given to your servants, yet they say to us, “Make bricks!” Look how your servants are beaten! You are unjust to your own people.’ He said, ‘You are lazy, lazy; that is why you say, “Let us go and sacrifice to the Lord.” Go now, and work…
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…reading the Qur’an. For some time after that, all I read was Qur’an. Still today if things get freaky I return to just reading the Qur’an. Knowing it was originally in Arabic, I began studying Arabic through the local mosques until I could register for a course at my undergraduate University of Pennsylvania. In fact, the study of Arabic would go on actively for the next three years until I moved to an Arabic speaking country. It would resume with…
Read More…n interfaith coalition of religious groups held a “pray-in” at the Capitol today in support of the DREAM Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country by their parents as children. The bill passed the House of Representatives last week, and the Senate is expected to vote on it before the end of the lame duck session. Rabbi David Saperstein, Director and Counsel of the Religious Action C…
Read More…e conference, I met Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, the Apostolic Nuncio in Egypt, who has done much work on interfaith dialogue between Catholics and Muslims. I do hope that Al-Azhar resumes its dialogue with the Vatican, precisely because difficult times are when dialogue is most needed. As William Blake wrote, “It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity”. It is much more difficult to stay together when things are tough. And the sa…
Read More…d on Saturday, and now Media Matters has a clip of Glenn Beck’s radio show today, in which he throws together Nazis, communists, Islamists, and — naturally — the Muslim Brotherhood. “We have evidence of the uber-left . . . sowing the seeds and helping those in Egypt,” said Beck. “You need to know the connections,” Beck warned. “This is about our survival.” “They’re operating like ACORN,” Beck said of the Muslim Brotherhood, because they provide f…
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