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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.  

Kill all the Infidels

Via Atrios we have a Republican Rep. from Texas saying he wants to nuke Syria. I think we now have more than an inkling that there is a fifth column in the US, people who agree with Osama Bin Laden and are trying to further his agenda. Rep. Johnson seems like a prime person to fit that bill. He wants to nuke a country that has a type of Islam that OBL can’t stand, Shi’ah sympathetic (although not primarily Shi’ah), and he wants to kill Christian minorities in Muslim majority countries. Isn’t this part of the Al-Qaeda platform? Texas Democrats,…

Hope in Mecca

This article in IHT provides some encouraging news about the open debates taking place in Mecca during Hajj: The two-hour presentation "Mecca: The Cultural Capital of Islam" was dry, but things got rolling in the question and answer session in a way quintessentially Meccan. One by one, audience members – a surprising number of them women – came to the microphone with questions that few others would dare ask publicly. .ism," asked one woman. . "Why do we look only into the past and not to the future," another woman demanded. . The session soon grew into a raucous series…