Religion Dispatches
…Shouldn’t Muslim and Jewish doctors who have different views on the Middle East continue operating on patients together in American hospitals? Shouldn’t conservative Catholic and progressive Protestant preschool teachers who disagree on abortion continue educating their students together? Shouldn’t anti-Iraq War Sunnis and pro-Iraq War Kurds send their kids to the same Little League baseball camps? Participating in civic activities with people you…
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…as home to at least 50 Arabic language newspapers and magazines, dozens of Eastern Christian churches, and bustling restaurants, bakeries, silk-traders, tailors, all living vertically next to the elevated train tracks, in time-honored New York City tenement tradition. Only, in contrast to Chinatown or the Lower East Side, there is nearly nothing left of Little Syria. I walked what remains of Little Syria with Joseph Svehlak, a longtime tour guide…
Read More…Adelson’s recent comments on the Palestinians and the prospects for Middle East peace would be simply laughable if the gazillionaire mogul did not wield so much power. Adelson, who spent millions trying to prevent Barack Obama’s re-election, was feted at a tourism industry lunch in Jerusalem last week. The mayor of Jerusalem also bestowed honorary citizenship on the right-wing philanthropist, acknowledging his longstanding generosity to Israeli cu…
Read More…ure public. As we were meeting on Thursday morning, news was breaking back East about Feinstein’s pitiful and shameful defense of FISA Court-authorized spying. If you suppose that our mutterings of protest about that seemed feeble and feckless under the circumstances, you would be correct. What we should have said, loud and clear, is that state secrecy and state torture are intimately connected, as any reality-tour of terror-laden 20th (and early…
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…out his words, “are our brothers and sisters.” In a time of rising Middle Eastern sectarian tensions and blowback from Turkey’s involvement in a brutal Syrian civil war, this Sufi leader stressed the importance of good neighborly relations and due regard for the other. And not just any other. Alevis are a long-mistreated minority, with uncomfortable relations to the state. Here, and not in shopping malls or business deals, did I find Islam. In th…
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…he very religion-state engagement the State Department initiative seeks to promote. Let me illustrate in relation to Europe. Europe’s historical entanglement with religion is deep and ancient. In fact, the very idea of “Europe” is a product of Christianity’s attempt to bring unity to this region under the auspices of the Holy Roman Empire. Moreover, the rise of European nation states in the early modern period is bound up with the contemporaneous…
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…stan’s Peshawar region, where it created a group called “Faith Friends” to promote “tolerance” and interfaith cooperation. In part, IGE can do things like this because, unlike the many right-wing think tanks focused on “Islam,” it is genuinely interested in dialogue. But what kind of dialogue? Although IGE sounds like a typical (read presumably secular) inside-the-Beltway think tank, it isn’t. The organization was founded by Chris’s father Robert…
Read More…ugees now surfacing. The violence threatens to spread across parts of Southeast Asia, and indeed some incidents in Sri Lanka (a mosque has been attacked) and Indonesia suggest that it already has; the region is a heavily Buddhist, but also significantly Muslim, part of the planet. We can go further back, of course, in the history of religious tension: The Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas, yet another notch in their brutal belt. But Burma’s Mu…
Read More…ked by Iran) make a mockery of simplistic schemas to understand the Middle East. But sometimes, it seems, there is one and one motive alone that trumps all, which unites forces that would otherwise find themselves at opposite ends of global affairs. Consider this excerpt from the Times’ article: After the missiles were shown destroying Syrian military helicopters, the matter took an unusual turn when a state-controlled newspaper in China, apparent…
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…those who work in the streets.” They also claimed, he said, that his blog promoted homosexuality and promiscuity when in fact it defended equal rights. “How can someone just read a blog post and become gay?” he quipped. However, the focus of the charges, he said, was the allegation that he had declared himself God. In fact, he says, he had been reflecting on a notion of the tenth-century Sufi mystic and martyr al-Husain ibn Mansur, or al-Hallaj…
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