Related Posts

Murder is better than divorce?

So thinketh the Dumass. Considering one of the Ten Commandment is “Thou shalt not kill,” I would have thought murder would be a bigger sin. Perhaps it’s what happens when you de-sacralize the word of God and simply make it a monument that has no religious meaning. BTW, did you know that Muslim women have the right to divorce? I did. Most Muslim women don’t. It’s a shame. I wonder if homicide rates in the Muslim world would go up if women knew their rights?

PFBC – Thanks

Well, the first Progressive Faith Blog Con is over. Unfortunately I couldn’t make the last day, but the reports are good. I want to thank the good organizers of the Con for making it a success. The group was a large enough size that it felt like we could do something real, but small enough to be intimate. It was diverse enough to avoid us sounding like an echo chamber, but respectful enough to always have something in common. I know in an event like this there are numerous people, named and nameless, faced and faceless, to make individual thanks…

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…