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Grass Roots Development May Hold Promise in the Muslim World

I would actually hope that it holds promise for everyone: There is, Khan averred, a “dominant player fallacy” or the tendency to place “too much reliance in national governments and other institutions which may have relatively superficial connections to life at the grass-roots level.” Thus, “urban-based outsiders often look at these situations from the perspective of the city center looking out to a distant countryside, searching for quick and convenient levers of influence.” The secret, then, is to work “from the bottom up” and not from the top down, as is so often the case. As he told the dinner…

State of Formation – I am ي، ن، ر

State of Formation – I am ي، ن، ر. It is obvious that most Muslims across the world find the actions of the so-called “Islamic State” abhorrent; from condemnation in the US and UK, to satire in the Middle East, there is no point in elaborating my own personal opposition to them. However, while they may denigrate the name of the religion, and spitting on the declaration of faith they sewed into their flag, I will not give them the power to define my faith in relation to them. So, I am not ISIS, let me tell you who I…

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…