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Interview with G. Willow Wilson

Rearrange Your Head: An Interview with American Muslim Convert and Memoirist G. Willow Wilson | RDBook | ReligionDispatches. Sheikhas and alimas [female spiritual and religious authorities], if you can find any — and you have to look pretty hard — will totally change the way you think about Islam and gender. There is a long and revered tradition of female scholarship in this religion, but it’s dying out. Most of the female scholarship we have now is part of a new tradition—postmodern academia—not a continuation of the old. Old school sheikhas, educated the traditional way, will rearrange your head. In…

On “The Jewel of Medina”

There’s a controversy over the historical novel called “Jewel of Medina,” about one of the Prophet Muhammad’s wife, Aisha. If you are unfamiliar with the controversy, the links below provide good background. I believe that Sherry Jones should publish the work. We should have people like Gordon Newby knocking it down. It’s bad history and bad writing. That’s the marketplace of ideas. More importantly we should have better people writing. Muslim or non-Muslim, it doesn’t matter, they just have to be good. I would never recommend Martin Lings’ excellent biography of the Prophet as a casual read, but I would…

Middle-earth according to Mordor – Laura Miller – Salon.com

Middle-earth according to Mordor – Laura Miller – Salon.com. Because Gandalf refers to Mordor as the “Evil Empire” and is accused of crafting a “Final Solution to the Mordorian problem” by rival wizard Saruman, he obviously serves as an avatar for Russia’s 20th-century foes. But the juxtaposition of the willfully feudal and backward “West,” happy with “picking lice in its log ‘castles’” while Mordor cultivates learning and embraces change, also recalls the clash between Europe in the early Middle Ages and the more sophisticated and learned Muslim empires to the east and south. Sauron passes a “universal literacy law,” while…