Religion Dispatches
Last night I returned to my own bed after four nights on the east coast; first to attend a closed workshop on women, Islam, and ethics, and then to meet new friends and see family. Since I gave up on the idea that I would ever sleep something like 8 hours (or even 6 or 7), I was pleased to wake up after almost five hours around 4:30. I was still hours away from the fajr prayer and from sunrise, but could not get back to sleep immediately, because…
Read More…oon on the 8th day of Zul-Hijjah, when we will all go about 5-6 kilometers east of Makkah, to a place called Mina. There we stay performing the five daily prayers starting with the mid-day or zhuhr prayer, but these will be shortened. Usually for travel prayers are shortened to two raka’at instead of 4, and zhuhr and ‘asr (mid-day and afternoon) prayers are combined. Here, they will be shortened but not combined. We stay in Mina, in a kind of mode…
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…senior pastor of Hope Christian Church in Bellville Maryland, (yes, on the East Coast) and a figure on the religious right scene, weighs in from the black church pulpit on the other side of the country to express his outrage about “the implicit comparison Judge Walker Vaughn made between racism and opposition to same-sex marriage is particularly offensive to me and all who remember the reality of Jim Crow.” Please. Here’s the problem: long before…
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…time of my first years in college, I was studying traditions from the Far East. Eventually I lived as a Buddhist in an ashram and practiced meditation each morning and evening. I was already a vegetarian, part of my transforming consciousness about toxins and waste for the body and the spirit. Entering Islam was partially an accident. I was still reading about traditions other than the one of my birth. Likewise I began to read about Islam. I knew…
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…lence did not “melt the stoniest heart,” as Gandhi predicted it would; at least not yet. But they, and the filmmakers who framed their efforts, seem to have melted the knee-jerk opposition that sympathy for the Palestinian cause usually evokes on the American political right. The positive reception of Budrus in the U.S. says a lot about the political climate today. The right-wing “pro-Israel” movement (I prefer to call it the “Israel right or wron…
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…ly the true “center of the world.” This line of reasoning has been heavily promoted and popularized by a prominent Egyptian cleric, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawy, who claims that, unlike other longitudes, Mecca is in perfect alignment with the north magnetic pole. Some Arab scientists have also lent their authority to these claims. For example, Abdel-Baset al-Sayeed of the Egyptian National Research Centre claims that Mecca is a “zero-magnetism zone….
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…lement with the Palestinians. Which way he will go now remains unclear. Mideast policymakers in the Obama administration must be spending much of their time these days trying to figure out how to satisfy the 90-year-old rabbi. Ovadia is delaying because he’s stymied by his own political conundrum. Over the years his movement has moved religiously to the right, bringing it closer to ultra-orthodox right-wing nationalism and reaping the political be…
Read More…ounty, California, a lightly-populated, largely agricultural desert county east of San Diego, appeared as the only governmental entity in the state of California to seek standing as a proponent in the case to overturn Proposition 8. Whether or not the County has the standing to participate in the appeal is up to the panel of judges to determine. (Attorney Robert Tyler, appearing on behalf of Imperial County deputy clerk Isabel Vargas, proved himse…
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…lamic caliphate of al-Andalus. In the caliph’s library in Cordoba were at least 40,000 books (some said as many 400,000); Gerbert’s French monastery owned less than 400. Many of the caliph’s books came from Baghdad, known for its House of Wisdom, where for 200 years works of mathematics, astronomy, physics, and medicine had been translated from Greek and Persian and Hindu and further developed by Islamic scholars under their caliph’s patronage. In…
Read More…e away from long-suffering EuroAmerica, and focuses his gaze on the Middle East instead, a very different picture comes into view. In a year where religious tolerance and peaceful pluralism have been major papal themes, the Pope now declares that “Christians are the most oppressed and tormented minority” in present circumstances, worldwide. This is a stunning conclusion, and we have not one word about what metric Benedict has used to draw it. He c…
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