Related Posts

Arab and American revolutions in history « The Immanent Frame

Arab and American revolutions in history « The Immanent Frame. Let me try to explain further, in the hope of minimizing the risk of miscommunication, which is particularly serious when we deal with profound transformations that challenge our deeply held assumptions and prejudices. I personally am opposed to the Muslim Brothers and have struggled to challenge their views of Islam and politics since the 1960s. Their ideological confusion and devious politics have caused horrendous loss and pain in my home country, Sudan. I therefore have no illusions about the serious costs of their coming to power anywhere, especially in a…

A Muharram victory

Oh boy! Was the US so confident of Allawi’s victory that they didn’t think what would happen if the Shi’i religious party won the elections? It’s not so much that they won, I think everyone but this administration saw them winning a plurality if not a majority, but it dawned on me today that they won the elections during Muharram. The first ten-days were when the Prophet’s grandson Husayn was tortured and killed. It’s one of the formative moments of Shi’ah identity and remains incredibly important for the Ithna’ashari, the type of Shi’ah in Iraq. The symbology of Imam Husayn…

Mahmoud Muhammad Taha

The New Yorker has a very good article entitled “The Moderate Martyr: A radically peaceful vision of Islam”, by George Packer. The article is about Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, a, Sudanese scholar who put forward a vision of Islam in its original, uncorrupted form, in which women and people of other faiths were accorded equal status and which the Quranic concepts of compassion, mercy, justice, and beauty, supersede some of the less tolerant passages of the Sunna. The Pope’s statements on Islam . The statement provoked the usual reaction of: How dare he call us intolerant. We must kill him. “Anyone…