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Time to heed the call up

I was watching CNN last night and came across a Lou Dobbs interview with Fouad Ajami, Director, Middle East Studies Program, John Hopkins University. Dr. Ajami made a lot of sense to me. To get a sense of where he is coming from, here is a list of articles by or about Dr. Ajami: Iraq and the Arabs Future Rude Arab Awakening What the Arab World Is Watching [critique of Al-Jezeera] Lebanon Star [critique of Ajami’s attack on Al-Jezerra] During the interview, in which he was speaking about the Abu Ghuraib scandal and the brutal beheading of Nick Berg, Ajami…

The world was created by magic

I was intrigued by this article in CNN on the Kansas Board of Education. It seems that the faulty logic that ID people are trying to put forward actually puts them at a disadvantage in terms of curriculum design. If their wording goes through, it should be fine to suggest that a grand wizard (not the KKK kind, but the Gandalf kind) brought the world into existence. We are, in fact, nothing more than a magic school exercise. Or, how about that life on Earth is not unique, but we were seeded here by aliens to see how we would…

He doesn’t get it

The article starts out so very promising on the varieties of interpretation that we call shari’ah. Then it so quickly devolves into conflating constitutional law with religious law, without really explaining how such conflations take place. The article also talks about the religious Shi’ah and the secular Kurds and Sunnis. What about the secular Shi’ah and the religious Kurds and Sunnis? There are huge varieties of interpretation even within the traditions. Finally, page 2 is mostly about cultural practices that the author makes sound like shari’ah. This is a blog, I can say things and pre-suppose knowledge, and get into…