Petition to End Muslim Domestic Violence

At 27, new imam represents a homegrown American Islam – USATODAY.com. At just 27 years old, Asif Umar is the new imam of Daar-ul-Islam mosque, the largest mosque in the St. Louis area. The son of Indian immigrants is devoted to the city’s sports teams, marking the end of Ramadan with a St. Louis Blues hockey game.

Mecca Development Veers to Kitsch – Critic’s Notebook – NYTimes.com. It is an architectural absurdity. Just south of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the Muslim world’s holiest site, a kitsch rendition of London’s Big Ben is nearing completion. Called the Royal Mecca Clock Tower, it will be one of the tallest buildings in the world, the centerpiece of a complex that is housing a gargantuan shopping mall, an 800-room hotel and a prayer hall for several thousand people. Its muscular form, an unabashed knockoff of the original, blown up to a grotesque scale, will be decorated with Arabic inscriptions and…

The Saturday Profile – Ismail Serageldin Seeks an Arab Age of Reason – Biography – NYTimes.com. And one of his core messages, aimed at his own community, is that Muslim societies today need to learn from Muslim leaders of the past, like Ibn al-Nafis, the 13th-century religious scholar, philosopher and scientist who called for tolerance in hearing out opposing views.  “How different these enlightened voices from the past sound compared to the frenetic ranting and condemnations of everything that is new and different that we see and hear everywhere in the Arab and Muslim worlds today,” he wrote in one…