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I do run, run, run; I do run, run, run

Name the country with the following traits: A female Olympian with medal hopes in marksmanship. Queen – the band with an openly gay lead singer – is highly popular. Has a very successful family planning program. Allows abortion – albeit in limited circumstances. Transsexuals are accepted as part of society. Hopefully the first thought that came to your mind was an Islamic state described as fundamentalist. A state where women are supposed to wear hijab and the state is theocratic. Perhaps a state that is part of the Axis of Evil, and has had no diplomatic relations with the US…

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.…

Young Russians in search of faith are turning to Islam

Young Russians in search of faith are turning to Islam. But Sarachev’s forebears didn’t practice Islam the way he understands it today. Over a millennium, Tatars had developed a rich and complicated theology, comfortable with rational thought and mindful of the need to coexist with the Christian Russians. In Kazan, Tatarstan’s capital, the religious establishment endeavors to carry on that tradition today. But Soviet hostility to religion left most Tatars with only a perfunctory sense of their own Muslim inheritance. Growing up, Sarachev remembers, religion meant grandparents and holidays, and little else. Yet even then, just after the collapse of…