Mosques in China

I was watching the documentary The Rockstar and the Mullahs, and a particular segment leapt out at me. One of the self-styled mullahs (I say this because his formal education in the religious system seems to have been non-existent) says that the world will be better when we start doing things like cutting off the hands of thieves. He’s quite happy to say only he and his followers know what true Islam is, and all others who call themselves Muslim are “sons of pigs.” I’m sure he and his ilk would be more than happy to decry people like the…

Book Review: A Muslim American Slave – WSJ.com. Amid these unpromising circumstances, members of the American Colonization Society—a group that encouraged owners to free their slaves and organized former slaves to colonize what is today Liberia—asked North Carolina slave Omar Ibn Said to write his autobiography. A literate man of West African extraction who had converted from Islam to Christianity, Ibn Said (ca. 1770–1863) created what today is the only extant example of an American slave narrative written in Arabic. His brief work, under the title "A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said," is now published in…