islam doesn't speak, muslims do | "the ink of the scholar is worth more than the blood of the martyr" – Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)
A friend, who wishes to remain anonymous, sent me the following email: The Fattest Nation on the Face of the Planet … is a Muslim one… http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/11/the-richest-fattest-nation-on-earth-its-not-the-united-states/248366/ The poorest and hungriest is probably also a Muslim one too…. … That about sums it up for me.
An Absurd Rite of Passage – Ta-Nehisi Coates – National – The Atlantic. I wanted to make sure I linked to this excellent op-ed from a young black man, experiencing what all too many of us learn to basically tolerate in New York.
Sept. 11 Memorial Obscures a Police Cadet’s Bravery – NYTimes.com. And Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota, one of two Muslim members of Congress, was brought to tears during a Congressional hearing in March while describing how the man, a Pakistani-American from Queens, had wrongly been suspected of involvement in the attacks, before he was lionized as a young police cadet who had died trying to save lives. Despite this history, Mohammad Salman Hamdani is nowhere to be found in the long list of fallen first responders at the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan.
Good Will to All, With a Side of Soft-Serve – NYTimes.com. Inside, though, this Dairy Queen seems different from the 5,000 others lighting up the country’s summer nights. It has the standard freezer filled with Dilly Bars, and the black-and-white photographs evoking a past that includes the first Dairy Queen, in prison-centric Joliet, Ill., in 1940. But plaques and letters and children’s handwritten notes cover nearly every inch of available wall, all praising someone clearly without Pennsylvania Dutch roots; someone named Hamid.
Just a great NYC story. Isaac Osei, Taxi Driver in New York and Chief in Ghana – NYTimes.com. By 7:30, Ms. Osei had taken her place in her thronelike office chair — she is the president of Napasei Taxi Management Corporation, after all — while Mr. Osei, who is vice president, took a more modest seat nearby. Then they prepared for the next 12 hours of fighting parking tickets, getting taxis inspected and helping drivers who came in to pick up their cash. But the Oseis call this grueling schedule a vacation compared with the real holiday they have ahead.…
Joseph Ward III: A Living Hell: LGBT Iranians and the Islamic State. Like many gay Iranians, Hamid was pressured by his parents to marry a woman based on prevailing traditions in Iran. But knowing he was a gay man, he and his wife divorced, and he was soon kidnapped by local authorities because of his appearance and beaten half to death in his home. “A man with long hair is not a man,” he was told by an officer of the basij, the Iranian security force. “…Of course [your wife] would divorce you.”
Berlusconi and the ‘Mamma the Turks!’ strategy | Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist. As an anthropologist, I find the connection that Berlusconi and his team propose between Muslims and Gypsies very interesting. Italy has been rebuked by the European Union for the intolerable condition in which Gypsies (many of whom have been Italian citizens for centuries) are left, and the lack of religious spaces for minorities in the country, with the paradoxical situation that the Catholic Church supports the construction of mosques. But the similarities end there: Gypsies in Italy tend to be Catholic or are Muslims in they own…
Readers who may not know much about the political situation in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, still know, based on images they see on television, that the situation of women is disastrous. Three Cups of Tea reaffirmed that message, and provided a savior in the form of Mortenson. But what about women’s organizations in Pakistan and Afghanistan? Why are they not part of this picture of empowerment of women? These questions are not directly addressed in these kinds of discussions, because, by definition it seems, Afghan and Pakistani women are victims, and not actors in their own lives; they…
You must visit this site. It’s not the people are invisible, but we are blind. “Have they not traveled over the land so that they may have hearts by which they may apply reason, or ears by which they may hear? Indeed it is not the eyes that turn blind, but the hearts turn blind —those that are in the breasts!” (22:46) About | InvisiblePeople.tv. I once heard a story about a homeless man on Hollywood Blvd who really thought he was invisible. But one day a kid handed the man a Christian pamphlet. The homeless guy was shocked and…
Pamela Geller’s Anti-Islam Org Labelled A ‘Hate Group’. Manhattan blogger Pamela Geller, the fiery and offensive Atlas Shrugs blogger who organizes vehemently anti-Islamic protests, is not just a far right-winger, but is actually now part of a ‘hate group’. That’s coming from the Southern Poverty Law Center, who classified Geller’s organization, Stop the Islamization of America, in the same class as the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists.