Video of Christmas in Afghanistan

The New Yorker has a very good article entitled “The Moderate Martyr: A radically peaceful vision of Islam”, by George Packer. The article is about Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, a, Sudanese scholar who put forward a vision of Islam in its original, uncorrupted form, in which women and people of other faiths were accorded equal status and which the Quranic concepts of compassion, mercy, justice, and beauty, supersede some of the less tolerant passages of the Sunna. The Pope’s statements on Islam . The statement provoked the usual reaction of: How dare he call us intolerant. We must kill him. “Anyone…

Good for the Iraqis. Newsday.com is reporting that an estimated 1000 people have marched through the streets of Najaf urging Sadr and his army to leave town. A story on King Abdullah of Jordan on Slate reports other good news. “…On April 29 in Amman, Jordan’s capital, Abdullah’s wife Queen Rania led a march against terrorism. The Pan-Arab daily Al Hayat reported that close to 150,000 people turned out, some of them burning photographs of Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida associate Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian national who had allegedly plotted a chemical attack against several targets in Amman. Jordanians…