I’m sure everyone has heard of them. Just like black Muslims. They are newsworthy because they are not what you expect. Yadda, yadda, yadda. I think it’s interesting that this is in the news now. Growing up in NY everyone knew there were black Jews. Big deal.
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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…
Bene Israel in India
A good article in the NY Times about Indian Jews. It’s a bit short, but the book it discusses, The Girl from Foreign, sounds interesting. Check out the recipe as well.
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…