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Eboo Patel on Mumbai

My friend Eboo writes a piece for NPR on how to reach out to Jews during this most recent Eid al-Adha. I appreciate the sentiment, my daughter and his son are about the same age, and I think it is an important way to bridge the gap. Where I disagree is that this is an opportunity for inter-faith dialogue. In so far as religions share certain basic principles we can reach out, but the loss and horror of Mumbai is far more primal. His story highlights the more basic, human losses we share and support we need. It’s not about…

Is the Bible more Violent than the Qur’an?

NPR does the story. I am uncomfortable with this sort of comparison because it still buys into a paradigm of one religion being better than the other. Interestingly, I think the most intelligent comment comes from the critic of Islam who argues that the Qur’an is not about history, but the present. It is, in many ways, about always defining the present, which means it’s reading cannot be fixed in the past either. He does not take the argument to the logical conclusion. If the guidance is meant to be read for the present, than we as Muslims must struggle…

The Jew Who Helps Run an Important Arab-American Organization in Brooklyn – Tablet Magazine

The Jew Who Helps Run an Important Arab-American Organization in Brooklyn – Tablet Magazine. Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, home to an estimated 35,000 Arabs, is the largest Arab-American community outside of Michigan and California. That number is an estimate because no one in government has been able to count. “The community doesn’t like to fill out forms, and for good reason,” a staffer at the Arab-American Association of New York, in Bay Ridge, told me, referring to the recent revelation that the NYPD targeted Muslims for surveillance. Over the next two months, however, the Arabs of Bay Ridge will submit to…