A Muslim at the Catholic Worker

Mercury News editorial: Silicon Valley Reads courageously tackles prejudice against Muslims – San Jose Mercury News. Everyone in this multicultural valley would get something out of this year’s works by American Muslim women: “The Butterfly Mosque,” a lyrical memoir by G. Willow Wilson, and “The Muslim Next Door: The Qur’an, the Media, and That Veil Thing,” by native Californian Sumbul Ali-Karamali. Even if you don’t read them, come to a discussion.

Copy of Quran only book saved from Union’s 1865 burning of UA | TuscaloosaNews.com. A copy of the Quran dating from 1853, its spine missing, its pages browning and its front cover almost detached, sits today in a library at the University of Alabama.  While Islam’s holy book now appears safe from a Florida pastor’s plan for a bonfire, the Quran at UA had its own dramatic rescue from the flames. It was the only book saved from burning of the university library at the hands of Union troops in 1865.

This is awesome. The National Library of Medicine has a virtual library of rare books, where you can actually turn the pages. Turning The Pages Online: Book Menu. The Kitab Aja’ib al-makhluqat wa Gharaib al-Mawjudat, usually known as “The Cosmography” or “The Wonders of Creation,” was compiled in the middle 1200s in what is now Iran or Iraq and is considered one of the most important natural history texts of the medieval Islamic world.  The author Abu Yahya Zakariya ibn Muhammad ibn Mahmud-al-Qazwini (ca. 1203-1283 C.E.), known simply as al-Qazwini,  was one of the most noted natural historians, geographers and…