A Muslim woman ruler before the 20th century. It’s amazing how much we’ve regressed.
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NYT on Turkey’s New Riches
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.
Progressive Scottish Muslims: Islam design tartan unveiled is far from representative. Islam and Muslims are not a monolith.
Progressive Scottish Muslims: Islam design tartan unveiled is far from representative. Islam and Muslims are not a monolith.. My view: But is ‘Islam’ a culture? In the same way that we can talk about our Scottish culture? If so, which Islam? Which ‘Islamic’ country does this tartan represent in terms of all the Muslims in diaspora who live in Scotland? Then this raises the question about whose Islam? Is this a Shi’a, Sunni, Ahmadi, Alawi ‘Islam’ tartan? Muslims are not a monolith and nor is ‘Islam’ — this is certainly not a progressive move
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…