The Changing World – Being Muslim

Muslims battle to be official voice of U.S. Islam – The Washington Post. The Jasser/Banna family feud offers a window into a long-simmering debate over who gets to speak for American Muslims, who are more diverse — racially, ethnically, ideologically — than many people assume.

An Interview with Prof. Abdullahi An-Na’im, Islamic Scholar at Emory University « The Future of Islam In the Age of New Media. As the must-read New Yorker article, The Moderate Martyr notes, “In 1967, a law student at the University of Khartoum named Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim was looking for a way to spend a summer evening in his home town, a railway junction on the banks of the Nile in northern Sudan. No good movies were showing at the local cinemas, so he went with a friend to hear a public lecture by Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, an unorthodox Sudanese mystic…

Guest Voices: Mosque near Ground Zero? “It’s about the community, stupid” – On Faith at washingtonpost.com. For all their noble intentions, the individuals behind the proposed community center near Ground Zero failed to do one major thing before they presented their plans for their Muslim center, which would include a mosque, to city officials: they did not consult with other American Muslims. In doing so, they effectively cornered American Muslims into taking a position, especially once opposition to Park51 mounted. This was unfair to millions of American Muslims who are bystanders in what has become an attack on our religious…