Related Posts

Torture is Terror

The passage below is a problem I have been struggling to articulate. From Aziz: What is needed is a generalized principle under which both opposition to terrorism and opposition to torture can be articulated. From a religious perspective, muslims have been arguing (usually defensively) that terrorism (ie, hirabah) goes against Islamic teachings for quite some time – see my own ongoing articles on hirabah here on beliefnet and my earlier hirabah posts. Recently, several muslim organizations issued a joint statement against torture (to which I also signed). Many of the same religious arguments that are made can be applied equally…

Herdict is Live

Herdict is live. What is Herdict you ask? Why, it is the verdict of the herd! It’s a crowd sourced tool for determining if a site is being censored. Their official statement is: Have you ever come across a web site that you could not access and wondered,”Am I the only one?” Herdict Web aggregates reports of inaccessible sites, allowing users to compare data to see if inaccessibility is a shared problem. By crowdsourcing data from around the world, we can document accessibility for any web site, anywhere. Check out the site. If you are a Firefox user, download the…

Akram’s Razor – Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America: “Black Like Me” in Germany

This story is simultaneously sad and funny. A German puts on bad blackface to pretend to be a Somali, to prove Germans are racist. Philipp Lichterbeck, film critic for the Tagesspiegel newspaper, says that Mr Wallraff’s disguise made him look like a clown. The fact that nobody suspected that something was amiss, he says, “does not exactly testify to the worldliness of the Germans”. Akram’s Razor: “Black Like Me” in Germany.