On Wednesday, protesters stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad, setting part of it on fire. This was in retaliation for the burning of the Quran during protests in Sweden. In response, the UN Human Rights Council called for restrictions on "anti-religious...
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Emperor Bahadur Shah IISource: Wikimedia CommonsThe din of the Great Rebellion of 1857 will continue to echo into our era, marred as it is by ongoing wars and insurgencies in Muslim lands. I believe...
A new report was released yesterday, ‘Suspect Communities’, comparing how UK media and government have framed Irish and Muslim communities since the 1970s. The authors find that the ideas...
I attended the Harvard Social Studies concentration’s 50th anniversary celebration on September 25, well aware of the controversy over the University's naming an undergraduate research scholarship in honor of New Republic editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz. Generating the conflict were Peretz’s long history of contemptuous writings about Muslims and other groups and especially his recent, disgraceful statement: “I wonder whether I need . . . pretend that [Muslims] are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” Peretz later retracted...
Wordle version of President Barack Obama's Cairo speech, June 4, 2009.
Over at Foreign Policy Passport, Preeti Aroon repeats--not once, but twice--the invidious comparison between contemporary Islam and pre-Reformation Latin Christiandom. Now, I've written on the general silliness of this line of comparison before, but Aroon asks an important question:Yesterday's program mentioned that the Protestant Reformation was accompanied by its share of violence, which took place over centuries. (Bloody Mary and Catholic violence against Huguenots in France come to my mind.) Does that mean that a reformation of Islam would be accompanied by violence? If so, would it be...
I'd like to call a moratorium on the genre of "Islam needs a Reformation" arguments.Contra Andrew Sullivan, the Protestant Reformation did not lead Christians to realize that "their best interests" lay "in forgoing the bromides of fundamentalist certainties for the messy, secular, banal success of liberal democracy." It left Europe filled with autocratic rulers, many of whom got to enjoy the additional benefits of controlling established churches.Sullivan's hand wringing about the coming sectarian storm in the Middle East also gives him an excuse to trot out the now-fashionable...