islam

The reason we talk about Egypt’s Salafis isn’t because we’re debating theology, at least not primarily—I don’t think we’re actually concerned with the specifics of Islamic thought. We’re more worried about what Salafism and Islamism generally means for our interests, values, and the Muslim world. At bottom, our concerns over Salafis are concerns over what they’ll do when they’re in power.

As Egyptian protests rock the casbah, the U.S. responds with cautious words and a noncommittal position. What are the risks if the Egyptian people don’t feel that America is supportive of their struggle?

The tragedy of a dictatorship is that they so eviscerate their countries that, even after they are gone, it’s hard for people to pick up the pieces and move forward. But I am hopeful in seeing the banner of the pre-Qaddafi monarchy rooted in the Sufi orders that led the resistance to colonialism.

I, like many others, have found myself unable to turn away from the Arab revolutions. As a strong believer in the egalitarian nature of the Muslim religion, and a fervent critic of common assumptions that are held about Arabs and Muslims, these revelations were a welcome confirmation of my…

Along comes Jersey Shore with its cast of self-described Italians. These are not the magical white folks of world-conquering, democracy-building myth-but they’re still “white”. They behave like the Museum assumes only people of my color behaved. The sum total of their television life is a kind of late-capitalist tragic anthropology: doing laundry to go to parties, in order to have sex. For me, it’s been tremendously liberating to know that people of my color and faith are not the only people who are embarrassing to watch on television.

A consciousness change is happening in Syria, a country of twenty-three million that has been brutalized under Martial Law since 1963. My parents left in 1971 with their children, including me, because the repression of civil liberties had already become intolerable. The sense of helpless terror became so ingrained among Syrians that relatives who remained in Syria spoke only in hushed tones and coded words about the brutality of the state—even, incredibly, when they were visiting us in our suburban U.S. home, miles from the reach of any Syrian state police agent.

I have no desire to set off fireworks, jump into a car and yell out the window while waving fists and flags. If I were in New York City, I would light a candle at the memorial and keep vigil. In San Francisco, I pray in a room lit only by a streetlamp, filled with sadness for those who have died in America, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and apprehension at the terrorism-related deaths to come. Our work as Americans and Muslims is far from done.

The assassination of Osama bin Laden has revived the so-called torture debate. Even if it did help in his capture (which it didn’t), torture is still wrong.

The conflation of Geronimo with bin Laden once again illustrates the failure of the U.S. to consider its own history in fighting insurgent wars.

If Anders Behring Breivik isn’t a Christian terrorist, then the same can be said of Osama bin Laden and many other Islamist activists—whose writings show that they were much more interested in Islamic history than theology or scripture and imagined themselves as re-creating glorious moments in Islamic history in their own imagined wars.