Trying to get a copy of the open letter to world leaders to post. In the meantime, here’s a brief write up.
Related Posts
Book Review – Holy Ignorance – By Olivier Roy – NYTimes.com
Book Review – Holy Ignorance – By Olivier Roy – NYTimes.com. Yule as we celebrate it today owes more to Charles Dickens than to Thomas Aquinas. Our major solstice holiday is what Roy calls a “cultural construct” rather than a sectarian ceremony, which explains why Muslims buy halal turkeys and Jews transformed Hanukkah into a gift-giving occasion. Mistakenly believing that Christmas is sacred, those who defend it find themselves propping up the profane. The Christ they want in Christmas is a product not of Nazareth but of Madison Avenue.
Muslims for Secular Democracy [updated]
Update: The original post has been recovered here. Comments on this post are now closed. This post was originally sent in by Ghostdog. However, TypePad managed to lose all our posts from yesterday, so I had to re-post, and it’s now tagged with me as the author. To be clear, I am not.
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…