Reel Bad Arabs

My friend Zeba Khan is up for “America’s Next Great Pundit.” She is also founder of Muslim Americans for Obama. Absolutely lovely and charming person, but more importantly for this process, a good writer. Please see her email below, and while I’d prefer you vote for her, feel free to vote your conscience. I won’t know. Salaams Friends, Last week, I was selected as one of ten contestants in the Washington Post’s “America’s Next Great Pundit” competition. Nearly 5,000 entries were submitted. The Post is holding an online voting weekend starting today and ending Monday, Nov 9th at 3pm EST…

Explaining Islam to the public « The Immanent Frame. The expectation that Islamic studies scholars were prepared to “cover” the Islamic tradition and speak to its beliefs and practices on a normative, global basis was stressful for many of us. The idea that we could speak with authority about the practices of 1.4 billion people who speak dozens of languages and have inhabited the planet for the last 1400 years is absurd, of course. Like other academics, Islamic studies scholars are trained in certain fields of knowledge; in the best of programs, they are trained to be exceedingly careful about…