salman rushdie

Several years ago I happened to sit next to Salman Rushdie at dinner when he was at UC-Santa Barbara to give a talk. I asked him why he didn’t have any security guards around him. “I have to live my…

When it was published in 1988, The Satanic Verses wasn’t immediately controversial. But the charged politics of Islam and the West meant some kind of blowback to Salman Rushdie’s novel was likely: The…

To call Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series Master of None “peak TV” is not to do it justice. It has a lightness to it that makes it a relief from the overwrought self-importance of shows that define the…

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

But it’s politics, not religion, at stake here.

Kadivar’s condemnation of all fatwas that call for the death of a “blasphemer” or “apostate” is in the spirit of his general approach to Islamic law. In his opinion as a legal scholar, an interpretation of Islam is fully compatible with the provisions of the UN declaration of Human Rights. When I asked him if he was optimistic about the possibility of reform in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a reform that would bring Islam into congruence with Human Rights ideas, he answered affirmatively and assertively. “Yes,” he said, “I am optimistic. That is why I am writing.”

Christopher Hitchens cannot be accused of being a name-dropper. The names come positively flinging off the pages of his newly-released memoir, Hitch-22, but can he be blamed for befriending some of the most interesting and influential figures of his time, like Salman Rushdie, Edward…

While the rioting over the Danish cartoons seems to be well behind us, Yale University Press recently removed the images from a new scholarly work on the topic. Do Muslim extremists need a scholarly book as pretext with two wars being fought in Muslim nations and an ongoing crisis in Gaza? The problem isn’t with these images, but with the ubiquitous Islamophobia in the United States.