Month: March 2011

How We Train Our Cops to Fear Islam – Meg Stalcup and Joshua Craze. There is only one problem with the Alligator Alley case—a problem Kharoba never mentioned to the class. The incident was a false alarm. The “terrorists” turned out to be medical students on their way to a conference in Miami. They were innocent. After thirteen hours of interrogation, the police released them. Kharoba, however, taught the class that Ayman Gheith was a “textbook case” of Islamic fanaticism.

Unfit for Democracy? – NYTimes.com. We Americans spout bromides about freedom. Democracy campaigners in the Middle East have been enduring unimaginable tortures as the price of their struggle — at the hands of dictators who are our allies — yet they persist. In Bahrain, former political prisoners have said that their wives were taken into the jail in front of them. And then the men were told that unless they confessed, their wives would promptly be raped. That, or more conventional tortures, usually elicited temporary confessions, yet for years or decades those activists persisted in struggling for democracy. And we…

Islam and the Lagging Economies of the Arab World : The New Yorker. But, before consigning a fifth of humanity to the dustbin of economic history, one might consider, more broadly, whether it makes sense to place such an emphasis on religion in explaining the underdevelopment of so many Muslim countries. To start with, it’s worth noting—and Kuran and Lewis, to their credit, do note it—that Islam, at least in its original formulation, was far from hostile to business. As the centuries passed, many Muslim regions fell badly behind the West, but the most immediate explanation involves not Islam but…