No You Can’t

My first piece up at The Revealer. The Problem of Equating Shari’ah with Law « The Revealer. Every time I hear someone on TV mention “shari’ah,” I think of the movie The Princess Bride and the line “I do not think it means what you think it means.” I am amused that shari’ah has come to mean “law” as a canonical system for how Muslims are to behave and act. Weak states use the term shari’ah in lieu of “law,” un-inquisitive press use the term the same way, and Muslims ignorant of their own history adopt that understanding, reinforcing the…

The audiotape of Malcolm X’s 1961 address in Providence might never have surfaced at all if 22-year-old Brown University student Malcolm Burnley hadn’t stumbled across a reference to it in an old student newspaper. He found the recording of the little-remembered visit gathering dust in the university archives.