Non Muslims and Koran

Robert Wright makes an interesting point about interpretation of scriptures;

All the Abrahamic scriptures have all kinds of meanings — good and bad — and the question is which meanings will be activated and which will be inert. It all depends on what attitude believers bring to the text. So whenever we do things that influence the attitudes of believers, we shape the living meaning of their scriptures. In this sense, it’s actually within the power of non-Muslim Americans to help determine the meaning of the Koran. If we want its meaning to be as benign as possible, I recommend that we not talk about burning it. And if we want imams to fill mosques with messages of brotherly love, I recommend that we not tell them where they can and can’t build their mosques.

Of course, the street runs both ways. Muslims can influence the attitudes of Christians and Jews and hence the meanings of their texts. The less threatening that Muslims seem, the more welcoming Christians and Jews will be, and the more benign Christianity and Judaism will be. (A good first step would be to bring more Americans into contact with some of the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are in fact not threatening.)

You can even imagine a kind of virtuous circle: the less menacing each side seems, the less menacing the other side becomes — which in turn makes the first side less menacing still, and so on; the meaning of the Abrahamic scriptures would, in a real sense, get better and better and better.

-The Meaning of the Koran

Contemplating the Meaning of Life

The Big Picture on Ramadan

Grey areas abound in religion

Something to think about for the young Muslim.

Life is all about the grey area. When I was growing up I wasn't sure where I belonged in the world of religion. The way religion was taught in the Arab world was always in absolutes. While I didn't know much when I was young, I knew that I could not live in a black or white, either-or world. This was made most clear through a sermon delivered by a young imam who was studying for his doctorate at the Harvard Divinity School.

Speaking to a group of Muslim students, Imam Talal Eid said, "If you ask me whether charging interest is haram (forbidden) in Islam, I would say yes and I would quote chapter and verse from the Qur'an for you."

After a long pause, he went on to say, "But if I didn't pay for my car with an installment loan, I wouldn't be able to come here to talk to you about Islam."

With that simple, expressive example between the absolute and the relative, the imam carved out a place of tolerance and compromise for me. He made it safe for me to be the judge of my own actions, to set my own course, to walk to the beat of my own drum. He made it safe to make my own rules using the lessons I learned with the heart and mind that God gave me. No one could force me to walk away from my duty as a Muslim, by insisting there was only one way to live my life and practice my faith.

-Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa

Why Arabs love Turkish soaps?

If this seems like a triumph of Western values by proxy, the Muslim context remains the crucial bridge. “Ultimately, it’s all about local culture,” said Irfan Sahin, the chief executive of Dogan TV Holding, Turkey’s largest media company, which owns Kanal D. “People respond to what’s familiar.” By which he meant that regionalism, not globalism, sells, as demonstrated by the finale of “Noor” last summer on MBC, the Saudi-owned, Dubai-based, pan-Arab network that bought rebroadcast rights from Mr. Sahin. A record 85 million Arab viewers tuned in.

That said, during the last 20 years or so Turkey has ingested so much American culture that it has experienced a sexual revolution that most of the Arab world hasn’t, which accounts for why “Noor” triumphed in the Middle East but was considered too tame for most Turks. Even Mr. Sahin wonders, by contrast, whether the racier “Ask-i Memnu,” a smash with young Turks, threatens to offend Arabs unless it is heavily edited.

“You have to understand that there are people still living even in this city who say they only learned how to kiss or learned there is kissing involved in lovemaking by watching ‘Noor,’ explained Sengul Ozerkan, a professor of television here who conducts surveys of such things. “So you can imagine why the impact of that show was so great in the Arab world and why ‘Ask-i Memnu’ may be too much.

“But then, Turkey always acts like a kind of intermediary between the West and the Middle East,” she added.

-Turks Put Twist in Racy Soaps

One Author to read 2010- Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk’s appeal has not been lost on politicians. Daniel Cohn-Bendit has credited Pamuk with helping him to ‘understand the importance of Turkey joining the European Union’...

One woman in The Black Book fears that, having spent half her life trying to be someone else, she is now condemned to spend the next half ‘being someone else who regretted all those years she had not spent being herself’. The hero of that novel, a lawyer called Galip (after the 18th-century mystic poet Sheikh Galip), shaken by the disappearance of his wife, Rüya (‘dream’), manages to piece himself together, but only after assuming the identity of the newspaper columnist his wife seems to have run away with; as he loses himself in the back alleys of Istanbul, he begins to suspect that the journalist, the enigmatic Celâl (after the Sufi poet Jelal ud-Din Rumi), is the secret author of his fate. Galip is one of the luckier characters in Pamuk, transported to the shores of a stable identity by a mystical journey; most are left hanging, swinging between East and West, between the mosque and the mall. To the characters in Snow, Islamism is a powerful, almost erotic temptation, since it promises to eradicate this vertiginous sense of dislocation: it’s no accident that one of the Islamist leaders in that novel is a dashing, charismatic seducer of his female followers, beguiling them with his blue eyes and his fiery vision of a cleansed and virtuous Muslim society.

-Wanting to Be Something Else

Sex in the city, Saudi version

In Saudi Arabia and other countries where the genders are rigorously separated, many men have their first sexual experiences with other men, which affects their attitudes toward sex in marriage, Ms. Lootah said.

“Many men who had anal sex with men before marriage want the same thing with their wives, because they don’t know anything else,” Ms. Lootah said. “This is one reason we need sex education in our schools.”

-Challenging Sex Taboos, With Help From the Koran

Understanding and debating Islam

One of the scholars at the Notre Dame conference whom I particularly admire is Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, an Egyptian Muslim who argues eloquently that if the Koran is interpreted sensibly in context then it carries a strong message of social justice and women’s rights.

Dr. Abu Zayd’s own career underscores the challenges that scholars face in the Muslim world. When he declared that keeping slave girls and taxing non-Muslims were contrary to Islam, he infuriated conservative judges. An Egyptian court declared that he couldn’t be a real Muslim and thus divorced him from his wife (who, as a Muslim woman, was not eligible to be married to a non-Muslim). The couple fled to Europe, and Dr. Abu Zayd is helping the LibForAll Foundation, which promotes moderate interpretations throughout the Islamic world.

“The Islamic reformation started as early as the 19th century,” notes Dr. Abu Zayd, and, of course, it has even earlier roots as well. One important school of Koranic scholarship, Mutazilism, held 1,000 years ago that the Koran need not be interpreted literally, and even today Iranian scholars are surprisingly open to critical scholarship and interpretations.

-Islam, Virgins and Grapes

Photo of the Day

Photo by Sigit Pamungkas

via cool photography blog from Reuters

Juan Cole's advise to Obama

Political Islam 101

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Juan Cole
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Mark Sanford

Engaging the Muslim World by Juan Cole Palgrave MacMillan, 282 pages, $26.95

Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East by Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press, 308 pages, $25.95

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East by Robin Wright, Penguin Press, 464 pages, $26.95

What it takes for a girl to go to school in Afghanistan

One morning two months ago, Shamsia Husseini and her sister were walking through the muddy streets to the local girls school when a man pulled alongside them on a motorcycle and posed what seemed like an ordinary question.

“Are you going to school?”

Then the man pulled Shamsia’s burqa from her head and sprayed her face with burning acid. Scars, jagged and discolored, now spread across Shamsia’s eyelids and most of her left cheek. These days, her vision goes blurry, making it hard for her to read...

“My parents told me to keep coming to school even if I am killed,” said Shamsia, 17, in a moment after class. Shamsia’s mother, like nearly all of the adult women in the area, is unable to read or write. “The people who did this to me don’t want women to be educated. They want us to be stupid things.”

-Afghan Schoolgirls Undeterred by Attack

The Corruption of Intentions

Ramadan Overeating Danger

Ramadan Mubarik to all Muslims

Photo: NYT

David Horowitz vs Hussein Ibish

Islam in China

Turkey Fact of the Day

Turkey's gender gap in years of schooling (of women relative to men) has also been consistently lower than other Muslim countries.

via Iyigun Blog

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Turkey Problem

Saudi Arabia's First Goodwill Ambassador

Muna Abu-Sulayman interview with Riz Khan;

'I had a great time in US'

'My role models in my divorce was Demi Moore and Bruce Willis'

Her real secret- she was born and raised in America. So the best thing for Saudi reform- raise more Saudis in US.

Related;
I Am Honored to Be Named as Young Global Leader: Muna Abu Sulayman
Young and Restless

Explainer on Turkey Crisis

So people can wear tank-tops to the universities?

Sure, no problem with that. When we talk about Turkish secularism it's almost a misnomer. It's not the secularism that we enjoy here in the United States, where people can wear whatever religious garb they want. In Turkey, the authorities are directly involved in controlling religion. The state is directly involved in engaging surveillance of the public sphere to ensure that religion doesn't enter the public sphere. And that's the difference. It's state control of religion to enforce this principle that religion shouldn't enter the public sphere.

Related;
Economic survey of Turkey 2008

The Changing Middleast

In Jordan, God's Work on Modernity's Doorstep

Related;
Islam and Economic Development
Religion as the solution to collective action problems

Islam in Contemporary Societies

MA in Islam in Contemporary Societies - an interesting course from Warwick

Related Podcast;
Maqsood Ahmed, the government’s senior advisor on Muslim communities, talks about being the first student on the MA course in Islam in contemporary societies.