Month: May 2018

Media Appearances

Islam scholar Bernard Lewis left unfair legacy of disdain for Muslims – Religion News ServiceReligion News Service

islamoyankee

Islam scholar Bernard Lewis left unfair legacy of disdain for Muslims – Religion News ServiceReligion News Service. Lewis’ transformation from scholar to neo-imperialist was not sudden, but there is a hint to be found in “The Assassins.” Originally published in 1967, it is an erudite work that sought to correct the record on the Nizari Isma’ilis, a Shiite Muslim community that had long been maligned as consumers of hashish, known in Arabic as “hashashin,” which transformed into the word “assassin.” The book fascinated me because it was a scholarly book at a time when scholarship was rarely applied to such topics.…

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Events

The Sarah Play – 14th Street Y

islamoyankee

I’ll be participating in a talkback after this performance. The Sarah Play – 14th Street Y. Three actors struggle with how to tell the ancient, sacred story of Sarah and Hagar, the mothers of Isaac and Ishmael, through a modern lens. Drawing from the Muslim, Christian and Jewish traditions, and trying various iterations to determine which religion’s version of the narrative gets told, the actors wrestle with how to tell a tale when there are multiple accounts of what happened.

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Conferences

Are the Arts Essential?

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Are the Arts Essential?. Specialists will take the customary deliberations about arts and culture into new, substantive, and shaping discussion. Beyond “leisure” or “entertainment,” beyond art’s personal impacts, beyond contributions to tourism, community building, or the classroom, do the arts and culture power progress? This convening will ask if (and how) the arts provide structures and strategies for social change, how they help define peoples and nations, how they deal with actual matters of life and death. Are the arts essential in ways that economics and medicine and politics are? If so, how is this manifest? What are the theoretical…

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Religion

Tweeting the Qur’an #Quran #ttQuran #Ramadan 2018/1439

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Traditionally, Muslims read the Qur'an in its entirety over this time, in a section a day. The Qur'an is split into thirty sections, called juz', and one section is read each night.  This year is the 10th year I am inviting people to tweet the Qur’an for Ramadan. I will be tweeting @islamoyankee. To see how the call has (not) evolved, here are the six call outs: 2009 Windsor Star Article 2010 (despite the title, which says 2011) 2011 USA Today Article 2012 2013 Storify (including press stories) 2014 A piece I did on Immanent Frame   The Background [from the…

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