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Muslims and the Book (of the comic and graphic variety)

Oh so many moons ago, I read a post on Dove’s Eye View on a new series of comic books coming out Egypt. There are more details on her site, but the salient point is that the author/illustrator has Muslims fighting for the City of All Faiths; religious harmony is still an aspiration in the Arab Middle East. He grew up reading DC comics, and my personal take is that Marvel was always better at allegory and moral ambiguity (see, for example, these descriptions of the X-Men graphic novel, “God Love, Man Kills”), and DC better at black/white, right/wrong stories.…

My Secret Thoughts of America to Zanzibar at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan — Ummah Wide — Medium

My Secret Thoughts of America to Zanzibar at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan — Ummah Wide — Medium. For the last few years, I got paid to play with toys. I was able to put a philosophy of Star Trek’s Vulcans into practice, and live as a Jedi. Comics littered my work space, and Dr. Who’s TARDIS traveled with me through space and time. All I was missing was a Buffy or Firefly fix. All of this was possible because I was working on religious literacy and global citizenship.

What is Shi’ism?

In the contemporary period Shi’ah is the standard short form for Shi’ah Ali, the Partisans of Ali. The Shi’ah have a history that goes back as far as the time of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and form one of the two main schools of thought in Islam; the other group being the Sunni, short for Ahl us-Sunnah wa Jama’ah, the People of Tradition and Consensus. The main division between these two groups relates to questions of religious authority, and who has that authority. In this post I want to give a brief outline of Shi’ah understandings of authority. Rather than cover…