Reading Iran

The Qur'an and Mysticism: A Review of Craig Thompson's "Habibi". It is this esoteric use of language to reveal hidden truths that has captured Craig Thompson's imagination in his long-awaited graphic novel, Habibi. An ambitious, surreal tale of the love between a young Arab girl sold into marriage and the orphan boy she adopts, Habibi spans multiple eras of conflict and change, stretching the lifetimes of its two protagonists over many centuries. The Qur'an is central to Thompson's narrative, though oddly enough the religion of Islam is not.  Instead of retreading the usual unpleasant arguments over Islamic law, Thompson ventures…

A friend of mine wanted to know what I thought of Asma Gull Hasan’s Why I Am a Muslim. I was honest and said I hadn’t read it. While I enjoyed her first book – American Muslims – as an individual and personal voice of being Muslim and American, it did have some factual inaccuracies that I thought weakened it. However, I believe her misperceptions and misunderstandings are common enough in the Muslim community that she can’t be faulted for them. In addition, her first book was her personal experience, not a description of the Muslim American community. I did…

Velveteen Rabbi: The voices of American Muslim men. Because I've been blessed to know Hussein for years, I paid special attention to his essay. He writes eloquently about growing up "painfully normal" in Queens, New York. His grandmother and his grade school were both located in Forest Hills, Queens, "one of the most diverse Jewish communities at the time." He writes about how he developed racial identity consciousness first, and religious identity consciousness later. (Indeed: as a good second-generation American teenager, he rebelled against his parents, which naturally meant steering away from religiousness. For a while.)