Related Posts

NEWSPAPER COLUMN: “My Family’s First Trip To A Mosque” | The Crescent Post

NEWSPAPER COLUMN: “My Family’s First Trip To A Mosque” | The Crescent Post. In September 2007 our Honda Odyssey idled in the gravel parking lot of a mosque in Clemson, S.C. As it turned out, the unadorned aluminum structure sat ironically and lonely on Old Stone Church Road in the Deep South. Suddenly my then-2-year-old daughter voiced the words that apparently reverberate in America from time to time: “Mosque … scary.”

Tweeting the Qur’an #Quran #ttQuran #Ramadan 2015/1436

Traditionally, Muslims read the Qur’an in its entirety over this time, in a section a day. The Qur’an is split into thirty sections, called juz’, and one section is read each night.  This year is the 7th year I am inviting people to tweet the Qur’an for Ramadan. I will be tweeting @islamoyankee. To see how the call has (not) evolved, here are the six five call outs: 2009 Windsor Star Article 2010 (despite the title, which says 2011) 2011 USA Today Article 2012 2013 Storify (including press stories) 2014 A piece I did on Immanent Frame   The Background [from…

How the Jews Saved Islam

I was hoping that title would get someone’s attention. More specifically: I was reading The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (And Queens, New York) and learned quite about the relationship between Bukharan Jews and Muslims in Transoxiana (modern day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan). In brief, Muslims started giving up aspects of their musical heritage and the Bukharan (here, basically meaning Central Asian) Jews took up the craft and helped preserve Islamicate music, especially the shash maqām. It’s a good read, and I highly recommend it. While it’s also a bit late for Diaspora Month, the last…