Talal Asad on Suicide Bombing

Newfound Riches Come With Spiritual Costs for Turkey’s Religious Merchants – NYTimes.com. There are some choice examples in this article of the rich religious. My favorite is the sofa that lifts up off of the ground during prayer time. I wonder how far they had to dig to find people who saw a strong dichotomy between being wealthy and being religious. I think this quote "The businessmen describe themselves as Muslims with a Protestant work ethic, and say hard work deepens faith," is rather telling. How many Turks are thinking of the Protestant work ethic? The class differentials in Turkish society seem to be the real story. The conflict between the material and the spiritual world seems to be a reach that they shoe-horned into the article.

Keeping Faith: Amaney Jamal – The Daily Princetonian. The following is the first installment of “Keeping Faith,” a six-part series of conversations between politics professor Robert George and University professors of various faiths.  Amaney Jamal is a politics professor and practicing Muslim whose work focuses on Middle Eastern politics, democratization and the politics of civic engagement in the Arab world.