image and question

An Interview with Prof. Abdullahi An-Na’im, Islamic Scholar at Emory University « The Future of Islam In the Age of New Media. As the must-read New Yorker article, The Moderate Martyr notes, “In 1967, a law student at the University of Khartoum named Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim was looking for a way to spend a summer evening in his home town, a railway junction on the banks of the Nile in northern Sudan. No good movies were showing at the local cinemas, so he went with a friend to hear a public lecture by Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, an unorthodox Sudanese mystic…

Hussein Rashid: A Gay Mosque?. The recent story of a gay mosque in Paris raises conflicted feelings in me. On one hand, I recognize the need for safe spaces of worship, where people are not constantly being threatened for who they are. However, I also fear that creating a separate mosque perpetuates stigma by allowing other Muslims to avoid having discussions about what a truly devotional space could look like.

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.