Islam | Islam
Apr.28.2012
Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
image via straitjacketsmagazine.com
I recently found this book on the living room bookshelves, one I soon learned the missus had read for her book discussion group. I was familiar with this woman’s role in Dutch Parliament, her stand against the worst acts...
|
Apr.26.2012
This article currently appears in the Huffington Post:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-mcswain/when-there-is-peace-among-religions_b_1443667.html
Slightly over a year ago, I picked up my iPad one morning and began drawing the image you see in this post. I named it the Unity pendant. I designed...
|
Jan.30.2012
Judging by the picture of ruins of a 2000-year-old citadel, ancient Syria was gorgeous. And sounds like Syria still possess much beauty along its coast. Imagine Mediterranean blue skies, date palms and orchards of grapes, oranges, lemons and olives and a history of silk production. Syria's...
|
Jan.16.2012
It is not people of the faith that are fearful of their belief being damaged but the purveyors of phobia who are scared stiff that their little world is not as large as they’d like it to be.
The timing could not have been more serendipitous and ironic. Around the time when the Deoband Darul...
|
Jan.01.2012
Night of the Golden Butterfly is the fifth volume in Tariq Ali's Islam Quintet, so I will have to confess right away that it's the first of the five I have read. Does this matter? Probably....but probably not very much.
This novel is a coherent work within itself that raises all...
|
Nov.23.2011
You’ve got the bird home, dressed it in its best Thanksgiving suit, and placed it in the warmth of the oven or the stove, the heat causing the flesh to melt softly inside and the juices to spill out and settle over its body. You will bring it out for the family dinner – an event so positive, so...
|
|
Oct.16.2011
A Gift For The Sultan, by Geoffrey Fox
image via betterworldbooks.com
I had expected this book to be a depiction of the historic Islamic siege of Constantinople - or Byzantium, if you will. Instead, it's an erudite look at the Christian and Islamic cultures that met in head to head...
|
Sep.27.2011
Busted! A vandal broke off the nose of the Virgin Mary in Michelangelo's Pietà.
Imagine the U.S. government or a major religion taking a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pietà as a madman did in 1972 while shouting, “I am Jesus Christ—Risen from the dead!”
Variations on that horrific scenario have been...
|
Sep.11.2011
Ten years ago, I spent most of the September 11, scratching my head and trying to figure out how the assassination of the "Lion of Panjshir," Ahmad Shah Massoud would impact Afghanistan, and by extension, India. Massoud had been assassinated two days before, and suddenly it seemed that...
|
Aug.19.2011
When you turn on the news today, often a segment is dedicated to headline: Islam or headline: Muslims in America. The reporter reports on some ill-explained concept in Islam that he hypothesizes as the reason for the current state of world wide Muslim unrest and...
|