I have to say, it has been quite some time since I agreed with Bernard Lewis. However, I find myself nodding along with 6 of his 7 answers. Answer to Question 6 is a standard neocon answer and really ignores the broad scope of history that he seems to arguing from everywhere else. For Ottomanist – he’s not an Arabist nor an Islamicist – I’m surprised he doesn’t mention modern Turkey as a democratic state.
Related Posts
On the AKAA
The AKAA (Aga Khan Award for Architecture) has received a lot of press that I’m just beginning to compile here. Also checkout the book for this year’s cycle. Celebrating Beauty Visionary Design Award Giver gets his due Houston Chronicle (favorite line: “even Muslims have to pee”) While not properly about the award, here’s some information about the Central Asian Music Initiative also supported by His Highness.
Farq
Farq, not the Colombian para-military FARC, from Arabic, means difference (فرق). Looking through our log files, I noticed that we’d been getting a lot of hits from search engines where people were asking the difference between “muslim” and “moslem.” Presumably they were interested in “Qur’an” and “Koran” as well, but we wouldn’t have met that criteria until just now. 🙂
On Being a Conservative-Liberal Muslim (or why the progressive label is bad)
Several things began to come together in my thinking at the MLT Conference in Copenhagen. To be clear, it was not a result of the planning of the MLT, but a series of amorphous thoughts that started to click from meeting people at the conference. With the Progressive Faith Blog Con coming straight after, these ideas began gaining more clarity. Coincidentally, both the good folks at Progressive Islam (1, 2, 3) and Von Aurum published pieces that further moved my thoughts forward. I had been planning on this post for some time, but as the adage goes “Man proposes, God…