Related Posts

A Quote from Rushdie

In light of my earlier post: “But members of the new colony have only one real problem, and that problem is white people. British racism, of course, is not our problem. It’s yours. We simply suffer from the effects of your problem.” p. 138 “But it is often argued that those old days, those old ideas are long dead, [racism which resulted in slavery and colonialism] and play no significant parts in the events of contemporary Britain. If only that were true. If only history worked so cleanly, erasing itself as it went forward.” pg. 145 From: “Imaginary Homelands” (Salman…

Reading the Qur’an – part 3 – Translations and Secondary Sources [updated][2x]

[I’ve jumped a head to part 3 since several commentors have asked about translations and secondary material.] I’ve done one post already on the vagaries of Qur’anic Arabic. Learning Arabic does not really help in learning to read the Qur’an in the sense of its interpretive history, but it does help you appreciate the large semantic range of each word in the Qur’an. (A really good secondary source for this discussion, although somewhat technical, is The Qur’an’s Self-Image.) As a result, when I look up passages, I don’t rely on just one translation, but rather several. I also use languages…

Interfaith reading

Inspired by this post at MoorishGirl, I thought I would suggest a couple of good books about matters of faith and the inter. Unlike Daughters of Abraham, which talks about commonalities, I’m recommending two novels that show commonality of the lived experience, not always pleasant though. The first is Granada by Radwan Ashur It’s a wonderful story of Granada in the year 1499, and while it focuses mostly on Muslims, you can see the impact the reconquista had on Jews and Christians as well. The other book is Children of the Alley by Naguib Mahfouz. This book is a wonderful…