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Is the Bible more Violent than the Qur’an?

NPR does the story. I am uncomfortable with this sort of comparison because it still buys into a paradigm of one religion being better than the other. Interestingly, I think the most intelligent comment comes from the critic of Islam who argues that the Qur’an is not about history, but the present. It is, in many ways, about always defining the present, which means it’s reading cannot be fixed in the past either. He does not take the argument to the logical conclusion. If the guidance is meant to be read for the present, than we as Muslims must struggle…

Book Review: A Muslim American Slave – WSJ.com

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…

Curbing

May God rest the souls of Jack Armstrong and Jack Hensley, the two Americans recently beheaded by Zarqawi, the slave of Satan. May give God give succor to the families of the two men. What constitutes the proper response to such violence? My first response was that Abd us-Shaytan and his men need to be curbed – in both senses of the word. However, the perennial question is does violence stop violence? For a very brief moment, I thought perhaps I was becoming like them, they have taken something from me – my religion – and I am powerless to…