Category: Books

Young Writer Tackles Race, Religion, American Identity – The Takeaway. Every year, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards honor the best high school and middle school students in a variety of categories, including painting, journalism and fiction. Past winners include leaders and luminaries in their respective fields, including Joyce Carol Oates, Andy Warhol and Truman Capote. Some 185,000 pieces of art and writing submitted this year, and eighteen-year-old Haris Durrani was one of seven high school seniors to win a gold medal for a portfolio of writing, out of 3,000 portfolio entries.

Back in March I contributed to Center for Amerian Progress’ report on “Sharia Law.” The report can be found here. But by defining Sharia itself as the problem, and then asserting the authenticity of only the most extreme interpretations of Sharia, the authors are effectively arguing that the internecine struggle within Islam should be ceded to extremists. They also cast suspicion upon all observant Muslims. It’s important to understand that adopting such a flawed analysis would direct limited resources away from actual threats to the United States and bolster an anti-Muslim narrative that Islamist extremist groups find useful in recruiting.…

International Women’s Day: They Speak for Themselves, in America and Egypt – City of Brass. Readers of I Speak for Myself are presented with a kaleidoscope of stories, woven together around the central idea of limitlessness and individuality. A common theme linking these intimate self-portraits is the way each woman uniquely defies labeling, simply by defining for herself what it means to be American and Muslim and female.

This is awesome. The National Library of Medicine has a virtual library of rare books, where you can actually turn the pages. Turning The Pages Online: Book Menu. The Kitab Aja’ib al-makhluqat wa Gharaib al-Mawjudat, usually known as “The Cosmography” or “The Wonders of Creation,” was compiled in the middle 1200s in what is now Iran or Iraq and is considered one of the most important natural history texts of the medieval Islamic world.  The author Abu Yahya Zakariya ibn Muhammad ibn Mahmud-al-Qazwini (ca. 1203-1283 C.E.), known simply as al-Qazwini,  was one of the most noted natural historians, geographers and…

Middle-earth according to Mordor – Laura Miller – Salon.com. Because Gandalf refers to Mordor as the “Evil Empire” and is accused of crafting a “Final Solution to the Mordorian problem” by rival wizard Saruman, he obviously serves as an avatar for Russia’s 20th-century foes. But the juxtaposition of the willfully feudal and backward “West,” happy with “picking lice in its log ‘castles’” while Mordor cultivates learning and embraces change, also recalls the clash between Europe in the early Middle Ages and the more sophisticated and learned Muslim empires to the east and south. Sauron passes a “universal literacy law,” while…

The Domestic Crusaders is available for pre-order. Hooray! This link takes you to a super-secret discount price. The McSweeney’s Store. The Domestic Crusaders focuses on a day in the life of a modern Muslim Pakistani-American family of six eclectic, unique members, who convene at the family house to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of the youngest child.  With a background of 9-11 and the scapegoating of Muslim Americans, the tensions and sparks fly among the three generations, culminating in an intense family battle as each “crusader” struggles to assert and impose their respective voices and opinions, while still attempting to maintain and…