"In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

Read! in the name of your Lord and Cherisher, who created
created man, out of a mere clot of congealed blood:
Read! And your Lord is Most Bountiful
He Who taught the use of the Pen
taught man that which he knew not!"
Quran 96:1-5

These words, while toward the end of the standard Quran, were actually the ( Read more... )

Part 3: Tying it all together

In my last entry, I discussed a few of the groups associated with terrorism and Islam-inspired violence. For the most part they use religious rhetoric to further goals that are actually political. Most "religious" conflicts are like that. Hamas may call itself an Islamist organization - and it is - but it's main issue ( Read more... )

 Poll finds unhappiness among group, despite economic successes
By Sarah Gantz

Tribune Newspapers

March 3, 2009

WASHINGTON - A study of Muslim Americans released Monday by the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies presents a portrait of an often misunderstood community-socioeconomically integrated but culturally alienated; succeeding in the workforce but ( Read more... )

Part 2: Modern Muslim Terrorism

Medieval Crusades and invasions aside, why do we in the West associate Muslims and Middle Easterners with violence and terrorism? The easy answer is because that's what we see on the news. Most news of violence in the world concerns the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the insurgency in Iraq; and the NATO/Taliban ( Read more... )

Part 1: Background: The "Others"

Islamophobia in the West is based on the idea that the world's 1.5 billion Muslims are somehow more disposed toward violence than the other 3/4 of humanity. The wild-eyed Arab Muslim fanatic is a popular image in our culture. Every time you turn on the news, you see angry young Muslim men burning flags, chanting ( Read more... )

I'm not touching this with a ten-foot pole. Just thought it was an interesting situation that highlights the complexity of the conflict. 

As I write this, Israel and Hamas are fighting each other in the Gaza Strip, to the world's horror. Whenever the Israeli-Palestinian conflict flares up like this, people inevitably say something like, “Those people have been killing each other forever; they're not going to stop any time soon.” The problem with this line of thinking is that not only ( Read more... )

On New Year's Day, Atif Irfan sat on a plane with his family, ready for their flight from Washington, D.C. to Orlando, Florida. Irfan was a normal American citizen, a tax attorney. He and his loved ones were flying that day to attend a religious conference with more family members in Orlando, and as the plane idled, they discussed the safest seats ( Read more... )

Many Americans think of Muslims as intolerant, and it's fair to say there is a certain degree of intolerance in the Muslim world today. But I've also heard people say that it's been like that since the beginning, that Islam was a religion "spread by the sword" through conquest and forced conversions. The real story is much less fearsome.
    Islam's ( Read more... )

The thing I like most about studying Middle East and Islamic history is that it's an area most Americans don't know anything about, and I think it would be good to teach Americans about it as a career. But that is also the most frustrating  thing about studying Mid-East history. On TV, at school, among my friends and family, I am forced to endure ( Read more... )