Muslim Teen’s Arrest In Texas Over Homemade Clock Sparks Outrage | Long Island News from the Long Island Press

Anti-Muslim Rhetoric in the 2012 Primary – The Takeaway. While political mud-slinging is de riguer in primary races, 2012 has brought several not-so-thinly-veiled anti-Muslim soundbytes from its frontrunning candidates. Last week, Newt Gingrich said that he would not support a Muslim president unless they would “commit in public to giv[ing] up Sharia.” Rick Santorum also expressed his thoughts on Islam, saying that the concept of equality “doesn’t come from Islam” or “Eastern Religions.” Instead, he said, “it comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

The Power of Names – Sacred Matters Magazine. In many popular media reports, the default often seems to be Sunni Islam. It is unclear why this has become the baseline for what Islam is. Some academics have suggested, going back to the origins of the discipline of Religion, that Sunni Islam most closely resembled Protestant Christianity, which was constructed as the truest of religious groupings. As a result, structures that mirrored Protestant Christianity were elevated to true expressions of those traditions. Perhaps it has to do with the tyranny of the majority, so that by virtue of being the most…

Enforced disappearance: Why a whole community is going missing – Home – Herald. Gatherings such as the one at Baitul Huda are common for Ahmadi communities living in various parts of the United States. According to Professor Hussein Rashid of the department of religion at Columbia University, they are more a manifestation of a shared insecurity than of anything else. “Staying together does not tell anything about the community except the fact that they are a minority, and a besieged minority,” he says. “This is often the case with immigrant groups and those who are persecuted in their home countries…