islam doesn't speak, muslims do | "the ink of the scholar is worth more than the blood of the martyr" – Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)
How the Logic of Law Enforcement Leads to Spying on Muslims | Religion Dispatches. With all the talk of the NYPD and its relationship to New York’s huge Muslim community, of which I am a part, we deserve a sustained and public conversation.
I am a contributor to the volume All-American: 45 American Men on Being Muslim, and we’ve been getting some great press. … Superb.” – Junot Diaz “The incredible variety of voices here will combat the pervasive and bigoted idea that all Muslim men share monolithic values and worldviews.
Dilshad’s writing is just painfully beautiful in this piece. The (unexpected) struggles we all have can so easily shake our faith. Bursting My Daughter’s Belief Bubble | Muslimah Next Door. Part of me never wants her to give up on her beliefs for what she hopes and prays for herself, for her brother, for her family. I don’t want her to be like me – praying, but always struggling to buttress that prayer with belief. But another part of me wants her understand the reality of our life.
I’m slide #4. NYPD Muslim Surveillance Lampooned On Twitter With #myNYPDfile. Others took to Twitter, turning their frustration at the NYPD into humor
NYPD’s Religious Profiling – Ta-Nehisi Coates – National – The Atlantic. This where you see the really long-term effects of terrorism. It’s not simply the number of people you murder, it’s how the smallest can alter the character of a country. Some incompetent asshole straps a bomb to his underwear, and now we have to get full body scans. The free exchange of ideas is one of democracy’s greatest benefits. Universities, ostensibly, are supposed to showcase that more than anywhere else. But for want of conjured evil, we’re willing to part with that asset.
I was honored to be invited to Middle Collegiate Church to pray on Martin Luther King, Jr. … During that time, they made a short video of the power of faith to change things that I participated in.
The audiotape of Malcolm X’s 1961 address in Providence might never have surfaced at all if 22-year-old Brown University student Malcolm Burnley hadn’t stumbled across a reference to it in an old student newspaper. He found the recording of the little-remembered visit gathering dust in the university archives.
Go Haroon. I really don’t understand how people take Ferguson’s opinion seriously. His basic argument is that reasons for not going to war are bad, therefore we must go to war. Maybe we’ll all get ponies and unicorns this time. In The Daily Beast, Niall Ferguson Says: Bomb Iran | Politics | Religion Dispatches. Iran’s government has much to answer for. But the people who judged Iraq so badly, and so inhumanely, do not have the moral right to preside over that trial. That someone could so blandly suggest that we are on the “eve of creative destruction,” and that…
It was this Muhammad — the cosmic Muhammad who served as the cause of creation, the Muhammad that God so loved that were it not for him creation would not have been (according to the Sacred Hadith “Wa law laaka…” )— that was the object of Muslim devotion. … The above Mevlud poem continues to be recited in Turkish homes down to today as it was in Ottoman times, a remarkable longevity in devotional life of Muslims.
Nice review of the state of architecture for Muslims (not necessarily Islamic architecture) in the US. I particularly like the point Maryam makes, let’s go back to praying together, instead of this modern notion of segregating the sexes. BBC News – Muslim America moves away from the minaret. Architect Maryam Eskandari, former associate director of the American Institute of Architects, is touring the US with a photo exhibition illustrating the transition of American mosques from traditional to postmodern design. She says Islamic architecture has long been subject to personal interpretation and set in a cultural and historical context.