Related Posts

Panel: Advancing Religious Literacies: Exploring Islam through the Cultural Studies Method

The loud discourse on Islam in the United States today marks Muslims as a threat, embroiled in pre-modern sensibilities, and unable to participate in democratic societies. These articulations are often made by recycling colonial and oriental images of Muslim women as oppressed and Muslim men as violent, with objects such as the hijab and the figure of the terrorist at the center. This rise of Islamophobic commentary has resulted in myriad incidences of bullying, teasing, and direct violence against teachers and students who identify, or are read by others, as Muslims. All this points to the lack of understanding about Islam and…

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…

Imperium – Qur’an Desecration, part 1 [updated]

[update]: I didn’t realize the stories of the Qur’an being flushed are at least a year old. It strikes me that this lends much more credence to the claim, considering within 48 hours government concluded its initial investigation and began to blame Newsweek for poor reporting. Transferance. The recent report that the Qur’an may have been flushed down a toilet in Guantanamo Bay has created two trains of thought in my mind. One external, and the purpose of this post, and one internal, the subject of a second post, hence the title. Although it is looking like the original report…