Religion Dispatches
…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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…nt Tibetan history. Thubten Ngodup, a 50-year-old exiled Tibetan living in India, died in the Indian capital, New Delhi, in April 1998 after he burnt himself to protest against the Chinese rule. The radicalization of monks of such youth certainly raises a lot of important questions. Will there be more suicides in the weeks and months to come, and will it spill over into the exile community? Does the trend underscore the view that nonviolence does…
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…guess, the largest Muslim population in the world by 2050 will actually be India. 2008 Summer Olympics – Opening Ceremony – Beijing, China 同一个世界 同一个梦想 – U.S. Army World Class Athlete Program – FMWRC. Photo via U.S. Army/Flickr 3. Because China: That Thing about Muslim Plurality in 2070 Might Not Actually Be True The wild card that could sink item 2: China. Five years ago, China’s Christian population was an estimated 65 million—just 5% of the coun…
Read More…ubject to violence and discrimination in many parts of the world. In 2013, India re-criminalised homosexuality while Nigeria, Uganda, and Gambia have all passed laws that make homosexuality a crime punishable with life imprisonment. In seven countries, homosexuality is punishable by death, the statement said. Philippines: LGBT rights advocates reflect on papal visit We reported last week on the visit by Pope Francis to the Philippines. This week G…
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…sily. By “being based on fiction” I mean not only the “big lie” that QAnon promotes, that the 2020 election was stolen and that Donald Trump is still the president. Associated with this big lie is a quite remarkable alternative reality that proposes that there’s a hidden cabal of manipulators in the government, the media, and in the motion picture industry. These Satan-worshippers are part of the “deep state” that runs the country for its own evil…
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…isible link to colonialism. From the West Indies to Ireland, from Ghana to India, the global North and South reminded people living in rich bubbles that their privilege came at the expense of those around the world whom colonizers viciously and violently trampled. It’s a shame that the world is ending so we won’t be around to see the records of the glorious union between Black Twitter and Irish Twitter which gave Elizabeth the send-off she’d never…
Read More…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…
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…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…
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…ute truth. The loss of farmlands in the Indus River valley in Pakistan and India have led to the displacement of entire generations of young men who have moved to cities like Kurachi where they’re ripe targets for extremism. That group of people who once would have been farming on land they inherited from their grandfather, are not doing that because the land doesn’t exist anymore. So now they’re young men who are lost and without prospects. Clima…
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…rts, for example, that: assimilation policies and land dispossession were “promoted by the governmental authorities of the time”; the Doctrine of Discovery was a specifically political debate, “according to which the discovery of lands by settlers granted an exclusive right to extinguish, either by purchase or conquest, the title to or possession of those lands by indigenous peoples”; and that it was a debate in which these historical/political pa…
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