Category: Books

Patheos was kind enough to let me into their book club on God is not One, by Stephen Prothero. An excerpt is below. Please go to Patheos to read the whole, and submissions by other authors. Prothero takes the time to respond to all of us. Muslim Blogger Hussein Rashid on “God Is Not One” | {Take & Read}. Stephen Prothero’s new book, God is not One, expands on the themes of earlier book Religious Literacy. In particular, as the title suggests, he attacks the notion that all religions are one as being “a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous,…

Copy of Quran only book saved from Union’s 1865 burning of UA | TuscaloosaNews.com. A copy of the Quran dating from 1853, its spine missing, its pages browning and its front cover almost detached, sits today in a library at the University of Alabama.  While Islam’s holy book now appears safe from a Florida pastor’s plan for a bonfire, the Quran at UA had its own dramatic rescue from the flames. It was the only book saved from burning of the university library at the hands of Union troops in 1865.

For those who care, my dissertation is finally online at UMI (if you are at a subscribing institution, I’m sure you know the link to use). Search under “Rashid” for name and “dust” for the title. You should hopefully get my dissertation. It is available via Open Access, so free PDF downloads for all. UMI butchered the illustrations and tables in the scans, so if those things are important to you, drop me a line and I’ll send you a clean copy. Rashid, Hussein. “A Handful of Dust: Reading South Asian (Im)migrant Identity in Islamicate Literatures.” PhD, Harvard University, 2010.  

Interview: ‘Many Americans Love Rumi…But They Prefer He Not Be Muslim’ – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty © 2010. Many Americans love Rumi for his ecstatic spirituality about divine love, but they prefer that he not be a Muslim, or at least no more than minimally. Therefore, most Rumi books are marketed to satisfy the wish for maximum mysticism and minimal Islam. Americans have little interest or sympathy for political Islam, but by reading even the most popularized Rumi books, Americans are learning about many traditional Muslim values and wisdom teachings. h/t Bibi

Islam and Buddhism. On May 12, 2010, in Bloomington, USA, the Dalai Lama, joined by a panel of select scholars, officially launched the Common Ground project, which he and HRH Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad of Jordan had planned over the course of several years of personal conversations. The project is based on the book ‘Common Ground between Islam and Buddhism’, which was commissioned by HRH Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad. It is hoped, with the publication of this work that the spiritual relationship between the two traditions will flower in many ways, including the promotion of a new realm of scholarship…

My friend G. Willow Wilson has her new book, Butterfly Mosque, excerpted in the NY Times. Lives – Engagement in Cairo – NYTimes.com. Marwa, a woman a year or two older than I, began reciting a prayer for her grandfather’s soul. The other girls cupped their hands in front of their faces. I did the same. It’s a strange feeling, praying into your hands, filling the air between them with words. We think of divinity as something infinitely big, but it is also infinitely small — the condensation of your breath on your palms, the ridges in your fingertips, the…

Rearrange Your Head: An Interview with American Muslim Convert and Memoirist G. Willow Wilson | RDBook | ReligionDispatches. Sheikhas and alimas [female spiritual and religious authorities], if you can find any — and you have to look pretty hard — will totally change the way you think about Islam and gender. There is a long and revered tradition of female scholarship in this religion, but it’s dying out. Most of the female scholarship we have now is part of a new tradition—postmodern academia—not a continuation of the old. Old school sheikhas, educated the traditional way, will rearrange your head. In…

The husband of a dear friend has just published a book called Home Boy. The New York Times seems to love it. Naqvi’s smart and sorrowful debut is at once immigrant narrative, bildungs roman and New York City novel, with a dash of the picaresque. Immigrant stories are often appealing not only because they dramatize the longing to trade oppression for freedom and prosperity, but also because they have the perfect antagonist: America itself. Set in Manhattan just after Sept. 11, 2001, this novel follows three bright and likable college- age Pakistani men — AC, Jimbo and Chuck. Before 9/11,…