Religion Dispatches
…In the audio clip from State of Belief above Haroon Moghul, RD contributor and Executive Director of The Maydan Institute, discusses fears over the use of shari’ah in Egypt (they’ve been using it all along and have remained secular), and how US intervention may be playing in Libya. …
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…would encourage interaction among the participants ahead of the forum and promote Egypt as a safe tourist destination. Instead, the activists posted images of security forces assaulting and arresting youths at protest sites and shared portraits of jailed journalists, activists and others who have allegedly been tortured or forcibly disappeared. … Hours after it was launched, the hashtag became the top trending topic on Twitter in Egypt, unleashin…
Read More…n and women praying side-by-side, definitely not in any definition of Islamist government. In other words, the people are ahead of the state and the religious opposition. Second, the nominal head of the opposition now is Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the IAEA. When he returned to Egypt to lead the opposition to Mubarak, photos were leaked of his daughter in a swimsuit. The speculation was that the Mubarak regime was trying to drive a wedge bet…
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…cultural conservatism in the United States. The foundation of this source code (the motherlode of the code, as it were) is Catholic natural law moral philosophy. Natural law is the 800-year-old Thomist tradition that absorbs (from revelation and scripture) and communicates (into public discourse and legal practice) a quite specific understanding of the human individual as the summit of God’s creation. First Things has hosted some of the most impo…
Read More…the end of it, Mubarak would retire as the first retired leader of modern Egypt. The rest of the day threw all of that into question. The anti-Mubarak protestors have been set upon, and now, increasingly, there are voices around Egypt making themselves heard against the protestors. I even heard, as I was walking around Cairo’s streets, people essentially blaming the violence in Tahrir on the anti-government protestors themselves—not because they…
Read More…he Azhar University and the religious leaders of all in Egypt. But that changed in recent years, and in this protest, the Church came heavily out in favor of Mubarak’s continued rule. In so doing, it made clear that they were in favor of a status quo that the overwhelming majority of Egyptians were seeking to change, including Christian Egyptians. A rather foolish decision: a dignified silence might have been more appropriate. At some point, there…
Read More…mahram. This was a question I asked my travel agent before I submitted my deposit. At my age there is no restriction, but for all you young and fine ladies, there are ways to get around it— including what they did in Egypt but I did not learn about in time, and that is that the hosting travel agent can act as mahram. Still I think it is a stupid rule especially for hajj. At some other point I might tell you what my Saudi friend does in order to t…
Read More…l. With regard to hajj or umrah, the tour agencies worldwide, including in Egypt, can sort of become the mahram. So even that year I was denied, a female friend of mine (another American woman) made umrah a alone because she worked it out with the tour agency. This year, I am just plain old old. (Double OLD intended.) I am old enough to travel without a mahram. So actually I am not as nervous about that as I am about the second extenuating circums…
Read More…e. We are not up against large numbers of people trying to make it—like in Egypt, Indonesia, or Iran. As it happened, not long after I had settled back in the U.S., I came across an ad from a colleague offering a special hajj package, at 30% more than the other companies. When I sent this offer to the friend who was also planning to make hajj, she decided she could not afford to go this year. I thought about going with someone I knew as a way to g…
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…particular to African Americans. King’s tweet referenced the “Flight into Egypt” (Matthew 2:13) when the holy family were called to flee to Egypt to avoid the “massacre of the innocents” by King Herod. This scriptural reference has served as a prooftext that Jesus and his family were going to hide amongst “Black” people in Africa away from the fury of an infanticidal despot, hence King’s emphasis on “EGYPT” not Denmark (Europe). King is relying o…
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