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Ismailis in Canada

A brief overview of the history of the Ismailis and the Khoja community in Canada. Technorati Tags: Ismailis, Canada

Moses At Sinai

The following quote is a commentary on the nature of God by a major Shi’ah thinker, Imam Jafar as-Sadiq (AS), who is also considered an important mystical figure. Moses (AS) is a major figure in the Muslim tradition, and symbolically is used to reference legalism and law. His interaction with the Divine helps to establish our understanding of God. As far as we can tell, the first major development of the concept of divine speech was the work of the sixth imam of the Shi`ah, Ja`far al-Sadiq (d. 148/765). Respected for his piety and wisdom by all Islamic sects, Ja`far…

Hindu followers of Imam Husayn

Yoginder Sikand, a scholar whose transnational work on Islamist movements is what I’m most familiar with, has an interesting article on Hindu followers of Imam Husayn. The piece is mostly historical, but the last paragraph is interesting: The Hussaini Brahmins, along with other Hindu devotees of the Muslim Imam, are today a rapidly vanishing community. The younger generation abandoning their ancestral heritage, often now seen as embarrassingly deviant. No longer, it seems, can a comfortable liminality be sustained, and ambiguous identities seem crushed under the relentless pressure to conform to the logic of neatly demarcated ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ communities. And…