Related Posts

PAMF

Stands for Punk A$$ Mo Fo. I think a better term than hoodlums in this case. Martijn always has such interesting posts. However, on the issue of counter-identity, isn’t that essentially OBL’s point? He hates women, so he’s a man. He hates the “West,” so he’s an Arab. He hates Christians and Jews, so he’s a “Muslim.” A little more seriously, hasn’t he simply adopted Islam as an oppositional identity? Isn’t he more aligned with Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam than with the Hanbali school? For OBL, it seems Islam is what others are not, and his association with Taliban,…

Muslims and the Book (of the comic and graphic variety)

Oh so many moons ago, I read a post on Dove’s Eye View on a new series of comic books coming out Egypt. There are more details on her site, but the salient point is that the author/illustrator has Muslims fighting for the City of All Faiths; religious harmony is still an aspiration in the Arab Middle East. He grew up reading DC comics, and my personal take is that Marvel was always better at allegory and moral ambiguity (see, for example, these descriptions of the X-Men graphic novel, “God Love, Man Kills”), and DC better at black/white, right/wrong stories.…

On Talking About Traditions

Via Faith Gambler, I found this interesting piece on talking about Jesus to Muslims. It seems like a good way to recognize and talk about difference while remaining true to one’s own beliefs. This conversation wasn’t about conversion, and it wasn’t about watering down the traditions to make them palatable. Rather, it was a respectful discourse on a serious point of contention between the two traditions. Much respect. Rachel has a post about a missing dot and Jerusalem. One of the joys about writing is that one can always ignore authorial intent, which pretty clearly laid out her post, and…