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The contributions of Muslim civilisations

Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, launched a trenchant attack on Islamic culture, saying it was authoritarian, inflexible and under-achieving. The report was carried on the front page of the Daily Telegraph newspaper in the United Kingdom. [Read the article] . I was going to comment on Carey’s statement, but then I came across a response to the same article in the Muslims Under Progress blog. The section is entitled “Is Carey right?”. In fact all of the postings here are quite good except for the fact that the poster[?] seems to think that suicide bombers are martyrs if…

Wajahat Ali and the Doha Debates

While we were in Doha for the MLT Conference, we were able to attend a special session of the Doha Debates. The topic was “Motion: This House believes that political Islam is a threat to the West.” Wajahat Ali, of AltMuslim and Goat Milk, has done a nice write-up of the issues discussed. He was also gracious enough to make me sound intelligent. I have his permission to include his original questions, and my responses, below. 1) How would you personally define “political Islam” and “the West?” Do you think the debates adequately defined these two terms? The problem with…

Upcoming

The next few weeks promise to be very exciting here at islamicate. This weekend is the Islam in America Conference at Harvard. I’ll be there and trying to do daily updates on the proceedings of the conference. I’m also going to see if I can get some of the panelists to sit down with me and share some more detailed thoughts, if not guest-post with us. I’ve also been conspiring with Haroon of Avari-Nameh fame to see if we can discuss some topics in the open between our blogs. I’m a big fan of the old school way of Islamic…