islam

It is patronizing to reduce religion to “ethics” or “values.”

RD bloggers have rightly asked the question of the depth of the “piety” of the Tsarnaevs. That too misses a vital point. I do not for a moment discount the sincerity of the feelings for Islam by the Tsarnaev brothers. But, what Islam was the object of those feelings? I would offer that it was for an “Internet Islam”—for an abstract, compact, easily rendered Islam, fed by the representations flowing from out of the ether!

A bloggingheads discussion.

As soon as it became clear that the older of the two suspects in the Boston bombing had become a more fervent Muslim in recent years, commentators began to point to religion as the culprit. But is it?

This book is my own effort to equip myself to talk about and engage with the nation’s fastest growing religion, to offer a snapshot of one of its most influential institutions, and to tell the stories of the students and scholars who have taken up the challenge of this experiment in American education.

Did you hear the one about Margaret Thatcher’s funeral?

In a book geared toward the general reader, scholar Anne Norton confronts Islamophobia in the West and argues against the persistent notion that Islam and the West are locked in a cosmic battle.

A tale of two FEMENisms.

With the power vested in us by ourselves, we have chosen ten candidates in the hopes that one of them will win popular acclaim and restore glory to a throne too long left empty.

Ten years on, as the experts who pushed for a disastrous war remain experts, it remains unclear why it ever happened. Was it just racism? Who, after all, does not plan for the day after a war? I plan out what I am going to do when I drive up to New York to see friends and family. Maybe the rest of the world decided to move on while we floundered about, amazed that just because we dreamed something, it could not come to pass.