Brass Crescent Time

A Journey From Islam to Same-Sex Marriage – NYTimes.com. Ms. Khan, a Puerto Rican grandmother from Brooklyn, married her longtime girlfriend, Mersedita Sanchez, 45, on Sunday. The moment had particular resonance, Ms. Khan said, as she had converted to Islam more than 20 years ago after marrying a Pakistani man, and had been wearing a hijab and praying several times a day.

A Ramadan State of Mind | Spiritual Appetite. Then, there’s the Muslims. They annoy the hell out of me. Islam would be far more pleasant if it had less Muslims. Really. Sometimes I feel like being Reverend Lovejoy of The Simpsons and suggesting other religions to the Ned Flanders of our communities.

Young Russians in search of faith are turning to Islam. But Sarachev’s forebears didn’t practice Islam the way he understands it today. Over a millennium, Tatars had developed a rich and complicated theology, comfortable with rational thought and mindful of the need to coexist with the Christian Russians. In Kazan, Tatarstan’s capital, the religious establishment endeavors to carry on that tradition today. But Soviet hostility to religion left most Tatars with only a perfunctory sense of their own Muslim inheritance. Growing up, Sarachev remembers, religion meant grandparents and holidays, and little else. Yet even then, just after the collapse of…