Related Posts

On “The Jewel of Medina”

There’s a controversy over the historical novel called “Jewel of Medina,” about one of the Prophet Muhammad’s wife, Aisha. If you are unfamiliar with the controversy, the links below provide good background. I believe that Sherry Jones should publish the work. We should have people like Gordon Newby knocking it down. It’s bad history and bad writing. That’s the marketplace of ideas. More importantly we should have better people writing. Muslim or non-Muslim, it doesn’t matter, they just have to be good. I would never recommend Martin Lings’ excellent biography of the Prophet as a casual read, but I would…

Reading the Qur’an – Part 2 – Interpreting and Translating

Finally, I’m getting around to writing the second part of my three part post on Reading the Qur’an. (Parts 1 and 3) The catalyst for this event was this post by Abu Dilbert (yes, that Scott Adams). Part one of the series talked about the Arabic of the Qur’an and scholarly apparatus of the Sunni community that developed to deal with interpreting the word of God. The idea that God’s word is not necessarily clear to humans should come as no surprise, and when you introduce translations, the problem is further compounded. Most Muslims view any translation as actually an…

Newsday on America to Zanzibar

Here is a Newsday article on the exhibit America to Zanzibar: Muslim Cultures Near and Far, at The Children’s Museum of Manhattan, for which I was the lead academic advisor. It’s a good chance to shout out my friends from high school. “Our goal is to have children deal with differences in a healthy, positive way and encourage them to be inquisitive while exploring the world instead of running away from its differences,” Rashid said, an experience not so different from his years growing up in Elmont.