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Ramadan Mubarak

Fasting, of course, is not simply about the physical abstention from food, but also of controlling one’s lower self, whether in thought or deed. I am desperate need of that sort of re-centering as I hear that the US is considering outsourcing torture; that we are treating our troops with more and more disregard; that people are actively being disenfranchised, and no one seems to care.

Hindu followers of Imam Husayn

Yoginder Sikand, a scholar whose transnational work on Islamist movements is what I’m most familiar with, has an interesting article on Hindu followers of Imam Husayn. The piece is mostly historical, but the last paragraph is interesting: The Hussaini Brahmins, along with other Hindu devotees of the Muslim Imam, are today a rapidly vanishing community. The younger generation abandoning their ancestral heritage, often now seen as embarrassingly deviant. No longer, it seems, can a comfortable liminality be sustained, and ambiguous identities seem crushed under the relentless pressure to conform to the logic of neatly demarcated ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ communities. And…