30 Good Minutes Interview

Muslim New Yorkers Learn to Pick Their Battles – WNYC. “There’s no longer a sense of Muslim and American, but Muslims as Americans,” said Rashid, “and I think that’s a really important part of that political engagement. And I think, looking at France, you still see this isolation, this difference. You’re either French, or you’re Muslim.”

Stop Islamophobia? Know that #BlackLivesMatter — Medium. Islamophobia is yet another ongoing manifestation of our inability as a nation to recognize that Black Lives Matter. We accept that there are, in practice, gradations of being American, and as long as we can easily penalize a people based on the color of their skin, we can do so to anyone we find different than what we perceive as American.

Islam scholar Bernard Lewis left unfair legacy of disdain for Muslims – Religion News ServiceReligion News Service. Lewis’ transformation from scholar to neo-imperialist was not sudden, but there is a hint to be found in “The Assassins.” Originally published in 1967, it is an erudite work that sought to correct the record on the Nizari Isma’ilis, a Shiite Muslim community that had long been maligned as consumers of hashish, known in Arabic as “hashashin,” which transformed into the word “assassin.” The book fascinated me because it was a scholarly book at a time when scholarship was rarely applied to such topics.…