islam

Despite a media blackout on the killing of Shaykh Emad, who refused to see the protests as illegitimate rebellion, Twitter and Facebook were on fire with expressions of sadness and outrage.

This year has marked, I believe, the beginning of the end of the war between science and religion. Creationism cannot last. The New Atheists are now old (or departed). And between these camps the middle ground continues to expand. Indeed, many folks have been hard at it, doing a new kind of peace work. Some have done it intentionally, some have not. Outliers, both atheist and religious hardliners, continue to wage battle but they look increasingly irrelevant.

Can a single reality TV show represent all Muslims? Should it?

The biggest misconception about the crusades is the belief that everyone understood them as religious wars between Christianity and Islam. Latin Christians understood it in that fashion, but for Greek Christians, the crusaders were essentially mercenaries employed against a rival empire. Both the Sunni Turks and the Shi‘i Egyptians probably understood the crusades in similar terms. It would take the Muslims several decades to learn to think of the battles against the Franks as religious wars rather than as conflicts over the control of frontier settlements.

Even with all its imperfections “All-American Muslim” will open a conversation. The question is: what kind of conversation and where will it take us?

This summer, the world’s largest clock began to tick in Mecca—Islam’s holiest city—marking the beginning of Ramadan, the month of fasting for Muslims. After the inauguration of the clock, there were calls from many Muslims to replace Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)—the world standard for 125 years—with Mecca Time.

Just as the Arab spring has upended conventional understanding of Arab and Muslim societies, so a new report on the issues faced by LGBT Muslims challenges the stereotype of Muslim communities in the U.S. and abroad as monolithically closed to conversations about sexuality.

It’s far more meaningful to ask who is interpreting Shari’ah; think of the argument over ‘what the bible says’ and you begin to get an idea.

If we read the Arab Spring as a zero-sum game between Islamists and secularists, we’re going to miss what’s happening; if we imagine Arab democracy will look like secular Western democracy, we will likely be disappointed. And if we assume reference to Islam and democracy reveals only hypocrisy, insincerity, or ideological confusion, we’re likely to be surprised.

Seeing what happened to Qaddafi, it is hard to deny there is not an epic arc of evil rising and consuming itself. Still, those who rage at dictators should also tremble at any tendency in their direction.