Iran's secular shift: new survey reveals huge changes in religious beliefs
Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Utrecht University and Ammar Maleki, Assistant Professor, Public Law and Governance, Tilburg University
The Conversation September 10, 2020, 6:14 AM CDT
Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution was a defining event that changed how we think about the relationship between religion and modernity. Ayatollah Khomeini’s mass mobilisation of Islam showed that modernisation by no means implies a linear process of religious decline.
Reliable large-scale data on Iranians’ post-revolutionary religious beliefs, however, has always been lacking. Over the years, research and waves of protests and crackdowns indicated massive disappointment among Iranians with their political system. This steadily turned into a deeply felt disillusionment with institutional religion.
In June 2020, our research institute, the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in IRAN (GAMAAN), conducted an online survey with the collaboration of Ladan Boroumand, co-founder of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran.
The results verify Iranian society’s unprecedented secularisation.
Reaching Iranians online
Iran’s census claims that 99.5% of the population are Muslim, a figure that hides the state’s active hostility toward irreligiosity, conversion and unrecognised religious minorities.
Iranians live with an ever-present fear of retribution for speaking against the state. In Iran, one cannot simply call people or knock on doors seeking answers to politically sensitive questions. That’s why the anonymity of digital surveys offers an opportunity to capture what Iranians really think about religion.
Since the revolution, literacy rates have risen sharply and the urban population has grown substantially. Levels of internet penetration in Iran are comparable to those in Italy, with around 60 million users and the number grows relentlessly: 70% of adults are members of at least one social media platform.
For our survey on religious belief in Iran, we targeted diverse digital channels after analysing which groups showed lower participation rates in our previous large-scale surveys. The link to the survey was shared by Kurdish, Arab, Sufi and other networks. And our research assistant successfully convinced Shia pro-regime channels to spread it among their followers, too. We reached mass audiences by sharing the survey on Instagram pages and Telegram channels, some of which had a few million followers.
After cleaning our data, we were left with a sample of almost 40,000 Iranians living in Iran. The sample was weighted and balanced to the target population of literate Iranians aged above 19, using five demographic variables and voting behaviour in the 2017 presidential elections.
A secular and diverse Iran
Our results reveal dramatic changes in Iranian religiosity, with an increase in secularisation and a diversity of faiths and beliefs. Compared with Iran’s 99.5% census figure, we found that only 40% identified as Muslim.
In contrast with state propaganda that portrays Iran as a Shia nation, only 32% explicitly identified as such, while 5% said they were Sunni Muslim and 3% Sufi Muslim. Another 9% said they were atheists, along with 7% who prefer the label of spirituality. Among the other selected religions, 8% said they were Zoroastrians – which we interpret as a reflection of Persian nationalism and a desire for an alternative to Islam, rather than strict adherence to the Zoroastrian faith – while 1.5% said they were Christian.
Most Iranians, 78%, believe in God, but only 37% believe in life after death and only 30% believe in heaven and hell. In line with other anthropological research, a quarter of our respondents said they believed in jinns or genies. Around 20% said they did not believe in any of the options, including God.
These numbers demonstrate that a general process of secularisation, known to encourage religious diversity, is taking place in Iran. An overwhelming majority, 90%, described themselves as hailing from believing or practising religious families. Yet 47% reported losing their religion in their lifetime, and 6% said they changed from one religious orientation to another. Younger people reported higher levels of irreligiosity and conversion to Christianity than older respondents.
A third said they occasionally drank alcohol in a country that legally enforces temperance. Over 60% said they did not perform the obligatory Muslim daily prayers, synchronous with a 2020 state-backed poll in which 60% reported not observing the fast during Ramadan (the majority due to being “sick”). In comparison, in a comprehensive survey conducted in 1975 before the Islamic Revolution, over 80% said they always prayed and observed the fast.
Religion and legislation
We found that societal secularisation was also linked to a critical view of the religious governance system: 68% agreed that religious prescriptions should be excluded from legislation, even if believers hold a parliamentary majority, and 72% opposed the law mandating all women wear the hijab, the Islamic veil.
Iranians also harbour illiberal secularist opinions regarding religious diversity: 43% said that no religions should have the right to proselytise in public. However, 41% believed that every religion should be able to manifest in public.
Four decades ago, the Islamic Revolution taught sociologists that European-style secularisation is not followed universally around the world. The subsequent secularisation of Iran confirmed by our survey demonstrates that Europe is not exceptional either, but rather part of complex, global interactions between religious and secular forces.
Other research on population growth, whose decline has been linked to higher levels of secularisation, also suggests a decline in religiosity in Iran. In 2020, Iran recorded its lowest population growth, below 1%.
Greater access to the world via the internet, but also through interactions with the global Iranian diaspora in the past 50 years, has generated new communities and forms of religious experience inside the country. A future disentangling of state power and religious authority would likely exacerbate these societal transformations. Iran as we think we know it is changing, in fundamental ways.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Pooyan Tamimi Arab is the secretary of the non-profit research institute GAMAAN.
Ammar Maleki is the director of the non-profit research institute GAMAAN. GAMAAN (gamaan.org) collaborated with and received funding for this research from Ladan Boroumand.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ir ... 17092.html
Perception of Islam
Nobel laureate’s discovery revealed the patterns behind breathtaking works of Islamic art
Sheema Khan is the author of Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman.
This year’s Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel for their research on black holes. Dr. Penrose, a mathematician, proved the existence of black holes from Einstein’s theory of relativity; Dr. Ghez and Dr. Genzel spent decades gathering evidence of a black hole in our own galaxy.
Dr. Penrose also discovered “non-periodic tiling” in 1974, known as Penrose tiling. Think of your kitchen floor: It is completely covered by a repeating pattern of tiles. One simple arrangement is a set of identical square tiles, placed side by side. You can do the same with a set of triangles or a set of hexagons. However, if you try it with a set of identical pentagons, a problem arises. The pentagons will not fit snugly next to each other – in contrast to squares, triangles or hexagons. Dr. Penrose was able to formulate a tiling formation, in which a number of basic tile shapes are used to fully cover a flat surface, such that the resulting tiling pattern does not actually repeat. However, if you were to take a floor covered with Penrose tiling, you could rotate it in multiples of 72 degrees, clockwise or counterclockwise, and obtain the same pattern – an example of five-fold symmetry. The foyer of Texas A&M University’s Mitchell Institute is covered with Penrose tiling.
The tiling stood as a unique mathematical breakthrough – until 2005, when Harvard graduate student Peter Lu discovered variations of the same non-periodic tiling patterns on a 17th-century madrassah in Uzbekistan. With his keen mathematical eye, Dr. Lu was able to distinguish between this unique non-periodic tiling, and the equally breathtaking periodic tiling patterns found in Islamic architecture and artwork throughout history. In the latter, simple circles and squares were transformed into stars and overlapping lattices to form intricate symmetric patterns. The 13th century Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, provides many beautiful examples of these geometric lattices.
Open this photo in gallery
Harvard University Peter Lu, left, and his cousin Christina Tam in Bukhara, Uzbekistan on Feb. 21, 2007.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY VIA AP
Upon further investigation, Dr. Lu and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University discovered further examples of non-periodic tiling dating from the 10th to the 15th century, in varied locations such as Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, India and Uzbekistan. They were astounded to find a near-perfect example of Penrose tiling on the façade of the 15th century Darb-I Imam shrine in Iran, created five centuries before Dr. Penrose’s discovery. They also found that a set of five basic tile shapes, called “girih” tiles, were used by craftsmen to create these exquisite patterns. While it is not known exactly how artisans created these patterns on site, the 15th-century Topkapi scroll (housed in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul) provides a template of 114 different patterns of girih tiles. The patterns crafted by the artisans are not the actual tiles, but outlines thereof, thus giving the impression of an intricate latticework (or “girih,” which means “knot”). These Islamic non-periodic tiling patterns also have five-fold symmetry.
What is unknown is how these Muslim artisans and mathematicians discovered girih tiles and their alignment. These unique patterns are also found in naturally occurring quasicrystals, a form of matter with atom patterns that don’t repeat, like normal crystals.
What is known is that the “Golden Age” of Islam flourished from about the 8th century to the 14th, during which time Muslim scientists made advancements in the fields of algebra, geometry, calculus, chemistry, biology, medicine and astronomy. It began with the Abbasid caliphate, which built Baghdad from scratch as its capital, located strategically along many trade routes. The caliphs put a premium on the pursuit of knowledge. They established the House of Wisdom in Baghdad where scholars of different faiths collaborated. They also undertook a massive effort to translate Greek scholarship into Arabic, which was disseminated widely. Scholars built on this information to forge new advances. The Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam provides a comprehensive look of that era.
What stands out is an era where faith, science and reason worked in harmony. Unlike the Western approach, where science and faith are deemed irreconcilable, the history of Islam is replete with the opposite.
The first verses revealed in the Koran included the command “Read,” reflections of our humble origins (“created from a clot”) and a reminder that God teaches individuals “what they knew not.” Islam’s holy book contains exhortations to study the natural world as a means to know God and a means of worship. Scientists of other faiths, such as Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel and Thomas Bayes, have charted a similar path.
Whether it is the intricate pattern on a leaf, the sonar system of bats, or the fabric of the universe – all reflect the signs of a Creator within the Islamic paradigm. The key is that knowledge should lead to humility.
Which brings us back to the girih tiles. However they were discovered, it is no surprise that art and mathematics combined to adorn Islamic houses of worship, given that in Islam, the pursuit of knowledge is in harmony with spirituality.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
Sheema Khan is the author of Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman.
This year’s Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel for their research on black holes. Dr. Penrose, a mathematician, proved the existence of black holes from Einstein’s theory of relativity; Dr. Ghez and Dr. Genzel spent decades gathering evidence of a black hole in our own galaxy.
Dr. Penrose also discovered “non-periodic tiling” in 1974, known as Penrose tiling. Think of your kitchen floor: It is completely covered by a repeating pattern of tiles. One simple arrangement is a set of identical square tiles, placed side by side. You can do the same with a set of triangles or a set of hexagons. However, if you try it with a set of identical pentagons, a problem arises. The pentagons will not fit snugly next to each other – in contrast to squares, triangles or hexagons. Dr. Penrose was able to formulate a tiling formation, in which a number of basic tile shapes are used to fully cover a flat surface, such that the resulting tiling pattern does not actually repeat. However, if you were to take a floor covered with Penrose tiling, you could rotate it in multiples of 72 degrees, clockwise or counterclockwise, and obtain the same pattern – an example of five-fold symmetry. The foyer of Texas A&M University’s Mitchell Institute is covered with Penrose tiling.
The tiling stood as a unique mathematical breakthrough – until 2005, when Harvard graduate student Peter Lu discovered variations of the same non-periodic tiling patterns on a 17th-century madrassah in Uzbekistan. With his keen mathematical eye, Dr. Lu was able to distinguish between this unique non-periodic tiling, and the equally breathtaking periodic tiling patterns found in Islamic architecture and artwork throughout history. In the latter, simple circles and squares were transformed into stars and overlapping lattices to form intricate symmetric patterns. The 13th century Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, provides many beautiful examples of these geometric lattices.
Open this photo in gallery
Harvard University Peter Lu, left, and his cousin Christina Tam in Bukhara, Uzbekistan on Feb. 21, 2007.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY VIA AP
Upon further investigation, Dr. Lu and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University discovered further examples of non-periodic tiling dating from the 10th to the 15th century, in varied locations such as Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, India and Uzbekistan. They were astounded to find a near-perfect example of Penrose tiling on the façade of the 15th century Darb-I Imam shrine in Iran, created five centuries before Dr. Penrose’s discovery. They also found that a set of five basic tile shapes, called “girih” tiles, were used by craftsmen to create these exquisite patterns. While it is not known exactly how artisans created these patterns on site, the 15th-century Topkapi scroll (housed in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul) provides a template of 114 different patterns of girih tiles. The patterns crafted by the artisans are not the actual tiles, but outlines thereof, thus giving the impression of an intricate latticework (or “girih,” which means “knot”). These Islamic non-periodic tiling patterns also have five-fold symmetry.
What is unknown is how these Muslim artisans and mathematicians discovered girih tiles and their alignment. These unique patterns are also found in naturally occurring quasicrystals, a form of matter with atom patterns that don’t repeat, like normal crystals.
What is known is that the “Golden Age” of Islam flourished from about the 8th century to the 14th, during which time Muslim scientists made advancements in the fields of algebra, geometry, calculus, chemistry, biology, medicine and astronomy. It began with the Abbasid caliphate, which built Baghdad from scratch as its capital, located strategically along many trade routes. The caliphs put a premium on the pursuit of knowledge. They established the House of Wisdom in Baghdad where scholars of different faiths collaborated. They also undertook a massive effort to translate Greek scholarship into Arabic, which was disseminated widely. Scholars built on this information to forge new advances. The Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam provides a comprehensive look of that era.
What stands out is an era where faith, science and reason worked in harmony. Unlike the Western approach, where science and faith are deemed irreconcilable, the history of Islam is replete with the opposite.
The first verses revealed in the Koran included the command “Read,” reflections of our humble origins (“created from a clot”) and a reminder that God teaches individuals “what they knew not.” Islam’s holy book contains exhortations to study the natural world as a means to know God and a means of worship. Scientists of other faiths, such as Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel and Thomas Bayes, have charted a similar path.
Whether it is the intricate pattern on a leaf, the sonar system of bats, or the fabric of the universe – all reflect the signs of a Creator within the Islamic paradigm. The key is that knowledge should lead to humility.
Which brings us back to the girih tiles. However they were discovered, it is no surprise that art and mathematics combined to adorn Islamic houses of worship, given that in Islam, the pursuit of knowledge is in harmony with spirituality.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
Contributions of Muslims to Scientific Progress at Present
The Husband-and-Wife Team Behind the Leading Vaccine to Solve Covid-19
Two years ago, Dr. Ugur Sahin took the stage at a conference in Berlin and made a bold prediction. Speaking to a roomful of infectious disease experts, he said his company might be able to use its so-called messenger RNA technology to rapidly develop a vaccine in the event of a global pandemic.
At the time, Dr. Sahin and his company, BioNTech, were little known outside the small world of European biotechnology start-ups. BioNTech, which Dr. Sahin founded with his wife, Dr. Özlem Türeci, was mostly focused on cancer treatments. It had never brought a product to market. Covid-19 did not yet exist.
But his words proved prophetic.
On Monday, BioNTech and Pfizer announced that a vaccine for the coronavirus developed by Dr. Sahin and his team was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of having previously been infected. The stunning results vaulted BioNTech and Pfizer to the front of the race to find a cure for a disease that has killed more than 1.2 million people worldwide.
“It could be the beginning of the end of the Covid era,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview on Tuesday.
BioNTech began work on the vaccine in January, after Dr. Sahin read an article in the medical journal The Lancet that left him convinced that the coronavirus, at the time spreading quickly in parts of China, would explode into a full-blown pandemic. Scientists at the company, based in Mainz, Germany, canceled vacations and set to work on what they called Project Lightspeed.
“There are not too many companies on the planet which have the capacity and the competence to do it so fast as we can do it,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview last month. “So it felt not like an opportunity, but a duty to do it, because I realized we could be among the first coming up with a vaccine.”
After BioNTech had identified several promising vaccine candidates, Dr. Sahin concluded that the company would need help to rapidly test them, win approval from regulators and bring the best candidate to market. BioNTech and Pfizer had been working together on a flu vaccine since 2018, and in March, they agreed to collaborate on a coronavirus vaccine.
Since then, Dr. Sahin, who is Turkish, has developed a friendship with Albert Bourla, the Greek chief executive of Pfizer. The pair said in recent interviews that they had bonded over their shared backgrounds as scientists and immigrants.
“We realized that he is from Greece, and that I’m from Turkey,” Dr. Sahin said, without mentioning their native countries’ long-running antagonism. “It was very personal from the very beginning.”
Dr. Sahin, 55, was born in Iskenderun, Turkey. When he was 4, his family moved to Cologne, Germany, where his parents worked at a Ford factory. He grew up wanting to be a doctor, and became a physician at the University of Cologne. In 1993, he earned a doctorate from the university for his work on immunotherapy in tumor cells.
Early in his career, he met Dr. Türeci. She had early hopes to become a nun and ultimately wound up studying medicine. Dr. Türeci, now 53 and the chief medical officer of BioNTech, was born in Germany, the daughter of a Turkish physician who immigrated from Istanbul. On the day they were married, Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci returned to the lab after the ceremony.
The pair were initially focused on research and teaching, including at the University of Zurich, where Dr. Sahin worked in the lab of Rolf Zinkernagel, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in medicine.
In 2001, Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, which developed drugs to treat cancer using monoclonal antibodies.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/busi ... ccine.html
The Husband-and-Wife Team Behind the Leading Vaccine to Solve Covid-19
Two years ago, Dr. Ugur Sahin took the stage at a conference in Berlin and made a bold prediction. Speaking to a roomful of infectious disease experts, he said his company might be able to use its so-called messenger RNA technology to rapidly develop a vaccine in the event of a global pandemic.
At the time, Dr. Sahin and his company, BioNTech, were little known outside the small world of European biotechnology start-ups. BioNTech, which Dr. Sahin founded with his wife, Dr. Özlem Türeci, was mostly focused on cancer treatments. It had never brought a product to market. Covid-19 did not yet exist.
But his words proved prophetic.
On Monday, BioNTech and Pfizer announced that a vaccine for the coronavirus developed by Dr. Sahin and his team was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of having previously been infected. The stunning results vaulted BioNTech and Pfizer to the front of the race to find a cure for a disease that has killed more than 1.2 million people worldwide.
“It could be the beginning of the end of the Covid era,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview on Tuesday.
BioNTech began work on the vaccine in January, after Dr. Sahin read an article in the medical journal The Lancet that left him convinced that the coronavirus, at the time spreading quickly in parts of China, would explode into a full-blown pandemic. Scientists at the company, based in Mainz, Germany, canceled vacations and set to work on what they called Project Lightspeed.
“There are not too many companies on the planet which have the capacity and the competence to do it so fast as we can do it,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview last month. “So it felt not like an opportunity, but a duty to do it, because I realized we could be among the first coming up with a vaccine.”
After BioNTech had identified several promising vaccine candidates, Dr. Sahin concluded that the company would need help to rapidly test them, win approval from regulators and bring the best candidate to market. BioNTech and Pfizer had been working together on a flu vaccine since 2018, and in March, they agreed to collaborate on a coronavirus vaccine.
Since then, Dr. Sahin, who is Turkish, has developed a friendship with Albert Bourla, the Greek chief executive of Pfizer. The pair said in recent interviews that they had bonded over their shared backgrounds as scientists and immigrants.
“We realized that he is from Greece, and that I’m from Turkey,” Dr. Sahin said, without mentioning their native countries’ long-running antagonism. “It was very personal from the very beginning.”
Dr. Sahin, 55, was born in Iskenderun, Turkey. When he was 4, his family moved to Cologne, Germany, where his parents worked at a Ford factory. He grew up wanting to be a doctor, and became a physician at the University of Cologne. In 1993, he earned a doctorate from the university for his work on immunotherapy in tumor cells.
Early in his career, he met Dr. Türeci. She had early hopes to become a nun and ultimately wound up studying medicine. Dr. Türeci, now 53 and the chief medical officer of BioNTech, was born in Germany, the daughter of a Turkish physician who immigrated from Istanbul. On the day they were married, Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci returned to the lab after the ceremony.
The pair were initially focused on research and teaching, including at the University of Zurich, where Dr. Sahin worked in the lab of Rolf Zinkernagel, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in medicine.
In 2001, Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, which developed drugs to treat cancer using monoclonal antibodies.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/busi ... ccine.html
TODAY'S PAPER | NOVEMBER 22, 2020
Shockwaves out of UAE
Pervez Hoodbhoy Updated 21 Nov 2020
UNMARRIED men and women may live together, alcohol restrictions are gone, and honor killings will be judged a crime just as any other. This official decree took effect last week in the United Arab Emirates, a country whose social-political matters are declaredly driven by Sharia law. These new rules apply equally to expatriates (88 per cent) and UAE citizens (12pc), the latter being mostly Sunni Muslims.
Morality has apparently been ripped to shreds. In a frankly patriarchal desert culture where local women wear the niqab, what was unthinkable has happened. Still, no internal protest has been reported and neighboring countries don’t care. Other GCC countries — and even normally hostile Turkey — have not commented. Saudi Arabia, once a bastion of Sunni conservatism, is following a similar path. Theocratic Iran semi-officially admits its alcohol problem and seems resigned. Billboards in Tehran warn against drinking and driving.
No Arab Spring movement is driving this cultural liberalization nor is popular democracy on the cards. Unless something happens, dynastic rulers and clerics will continue to rule. Various new top-down changes simply aim at making Arab countries more Western tourist and business friendly. The recent opening up to Israel undoubtedly plays some part.
Pakistan seeks to lead the Muslim world but civil society in the Middle East is evolving much faster.
But the new legislative changes freeing cultural behavior are likely to impact society far more than political changes. They bring with them many key questions: what is sinful and improper and what does Islam forbid or permit? Which values are truly permanent and absolute and which must inevitably change with time?
Notions of right and wrong are being turned upside down everywhere. There is, for example, complete acceptance now of television across the Muslim world. Even in Pakistan — among the most conservative Islamic countries — families spend evenings glued to the drawing room TV set. Men with beards and women from Al Huda casually snap selfies and WhatsApp them around. Yet older citizens cannot forget admonitions that Islam prohibits photography and the strident denunciations of TV as a ‘shaitani ala’ (devil’s tool).
Aniconism, or a prohibition of depicting images of all living beings, was considered immutable and absolute by almost all early Islamic religious authorities. Scholars and clerics took as axiomatic that the creation and depiction of living forms is God’s prerogative, not to be trespassed upon by artists and painters. So, although Muslims can rightfully boast of magnificent Islamic architecture such as Taj Mahal and Dome of the Rock, Islamic art was narrowly restricted to decorative figural designs.
Aniconism was taken so seriously that — although he later relented — a thoroughly liberal and scientific-minded man like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan refused to be photographed. The Afghan Taliban founder, Mullah Omar, never relented and so no known photo of him exists. The 2005 earthquake in Pakistan’s northern areas was widely attributed to watching television and, two days later, local clerics organized a mass smashing of TV sets in the town of Kaghan.
The march of technology, however, made clerics realize they were missing a huge opportunity. Thus began the age of religious TV channels. Although limited initially to audio recitations and images of floating clouds and heavens, talking heads followed. Thereafter televised sermons and religious gatherings became popular and today’s clerical screen personalities have millions of devotees. Asked about earlier restrictions, one such megastar replied in a complicated way that Islam prohibits drawings and photos but not videos.
Such adaptive changes are not unique to Islam or Pakistan. Fundamental transformations of thought and action have happened everywhere. Take slavery. From the 15th century onwards, European colonialists stole manpower for developing Europe by depopulating Africa. But slavery began phasing out after the European Enlightenment. The British Empire formally outlawed it in 1833. For the United States to follow suit took a civil war and an additional 32 years.
Banning slavery from Muslim countries took much longer. Since the Quran discourages but does not forbid slavery, for nearly 13 centuries the possession of slaves was not condemned as sinful or illegal by any religious authority.
In 1909, anti-slavery Young Turks, inspired by the Westernized Kemal Ataturk, forced Sultan Abdul Hamid II to free his personal slaves. Ataturk dismissed the last Ottoman caliph in 1924 and so ended slavery. Turkey formally ratified the 1926 League of Nations convention abolishing slavery in 1933. Though Western driven, it was surely a good thing.
Whether good or bad, the changes in the UAE’s laws are also Western driven. How the country’s authorities will explain them to the world and their people remains to be seen. Quite possibly no explanation will be forthcoming since UAE is a sovereign country where ruling dynasties exercise total control. Its people don’t have a voice.
On the other hand, UAE could try to get endorsements for the new dispensation from pliant muftis and shaikh-ul-Islam. This won’t be the first time. Muslim rulers are thoroughly familiar with using friendly clerics for blessing bank interest disguised to avoid its condemnation as riba. UAE has supported various militant Salafist groups overseas and is said to have considerable control over the authorities of Egypt’s Jamia al-Azhar. This wide outreach could be useful for suppressing possible criticism.
UAE’s rulers could also try a more straightforward explanation. The West thrives and prospers in spite of its evolving values — what was immoral yesterday is now simply the new normal. Until the 1960s, cohabitation was fiercely frowned upon in much of Europe and the US. But religious opposition has since softened and, in fact, most religions are following the trend.
UAE’s rulers might try arguing that Islam, suitably interpreted, can do so as well. As with child marriage, widow remarriage and polygamy, cohabitation will doubtless lead to furious disputes. But, like it or not, the arrow of time is unidirectional and irreversible.
Pakistan could learn much from recent cultural developments and liberalization of social values in the rest of the Muslim world — a world which it had once aspired to lead. But now in a state of confusion, and dragged willy-nilly by global forces towards an uncertain future, it prefers to keep its eyes fixed firmly upon the past while praying for old times to return.
The writer is an Islamabad-based physicist and writer.
Published in Dawn, November 21st, 2020
https://www.dawn.com/news/1591558/shockwaves-out-of-uae
Shockwaves out of UAE
Pervez Hoodbhoy Updated 21 Nov 2020
UNMARRIED men and women may live together, alcohol restrictions are gone, and honor killings will be judged a crime just as any other. This official decree took effect last week in the United Arab Emirates, a country whose social-political matters are declaredly driven by Sharia law. These new rules apply equally to expatriates (88 per cent) and UAE citizens (12pc), the latter being mostly Sunni Muslims.
Morality has apparently been ripped to shreds. In a frankly patriarchal desert culture where local women wear the niqab, what was unthinkable has happened. Still, no internal protest has been reported and neighboring countries don’t care. Other GCC countries — and even normally hostile Turkey — have not commented. Saudi Arabia, once a bastion of Sunni conservatism, is following a similar path. Theocratic Iran semi-officially admits its alcohol problem and seems resigned. Billboards in Tehran warn against drinking and driving.
No Arab Spring movement is driving this cultural liberalization nor is popular democracy on the cards. Unless something happens, dynastic rulers and clerics will continue to rule. Various new top-down changes simply aim at making Arab countries more Western tourist and business friendly. The recent opening up to Israel undoubtedly plays some part.
Pakistan seeks to lead the Muslim world but civil society in the Middle East is evolving much faster.
But the new legislative changes freeing cultural behavior are likely to impact society far more than political changes. They bring with them many key questions: what is sinful and improper and what does Islam forbid or permit? Which values are truly permanent and absolute and which must inevitably change with time?
Notions of right and wrong are being turned upside down everywhere. There is, for example, complete acceptance now of television across the Muslim world. Even in Pakistan — among the most conservative Islamic countries — families spend evenings glued to the drawing room TV set. Men with beards and women from Al Huda casually snap selfies and WhatsApp them around. Yet older citizens cannot forget admonitions that Islam prohibits photography and the strident denunciations of TV as a ‘shaitani ala’ (devil’s tool).
Aniconism, or a prohibition of depicting images of all living beings, was considered immutable and absolute by almost all early Islamic religious authorities. Scholars and clerics took as axiomatic that the creation and depiction of living forms is God’s prerogative, not to be trespassed upon by artists and painters. So, although Muslims can rightfully boast of magnificent Islamic architecture such as Taj Mahal and Dome of the Rock, Islamic art was narrowly restricted to decorative figural designs.
Aniconism was taken so seriously that — although he later relented — a thoroughly liberal and scientific-minded man like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan refused to be photographed. The Afghan Taliban founder, Mullah Omar, never relented and so no known photo of him exists. The 2005 earthquake in Pakistan’s northern areas was widely attributed to watching television and, two days later, local clerics organized a mass smashing of TV sets in the town of Kaghan.
The march of technology, however, made clerics realize they were missing a huge opportunity. Thus began the age of religious TV channels. Although limited initially to audio recitations and images of floating clouds and heavens, talking heads followed. Thereafter televised sermons and religious gatherings became popular and today’s clerical screen personalities have millions of devotees. Asked about earlier restrictions, one such megastar replied in a complicated way that Islam prohibits drawings and photos but not videos.
Such adaptive changes are not unique to Islam or Pakistan. Fundamental transformations of thought and action have happened everywhere. Take slavery. From the 15th century onwards, European colonialists stole manpower for developing Europe by depopulating Africa. But slavery began phasing out after the European Enlightenment. The British Empire formally outlawed it in 1833. For the United States to follow suit took a civil war and an additional 32 years.
Banning slavery from Muslim countries took much longer. Since the Quran discourages but does not forbid slavery, for nearly 13 centuries the possession of slaves was not condemned as sinful or illegal by any religious authority.
In 1909, anti-slavery Young Turks, inspired by the Westernized Kemal Ataturk, forced Sultan Abdul Hamid II to free his personal slaves. Ataturk dismissed the last Ottoman caliph in 1924 and so ended slavery. Turkey formally ratified the 1926 League of Nations convention abolishing slavery in 1933. Though Western driven, it was surely a good thing.
Whether good or bad, the changes in the UAE’s laws are also Western driven. How the country’s authorities will explain them to the world and their people remains to be seen. Quite possibly no explanation will be forthcoming since UAE is a sovereign country where ruling dynasties exercise total control. Its people don’t have a voice.
On the other hand, UAE could try to get endorsements for the new dispensation from pliant muftis and shaikh-ul-Islam. This won’t be the first time. Muslim rulers are thoroughly familiar with using friendly clerics for blessing bank interest disguised to avoid its condemnation as riba. UAE has supported various militant Salafist groups overseas and is said to have considerable control over the authorities of Egypt’s Jamia al-Azhar. This wide outreach could be useful for suppressing possible criticism.
UAE’s rulers could also try a more straightforward explanation. The West thrives and prospers in spite of its evolving values — what was immoral yesterday is now simply the new normal. Until the 1960s, cohabitation was fiercely frowned upon in much of Europe and the US. But religious opposition has since softened and, in fact, most religions are following the trend.
UAE’s rulers might try arguing that Islam, suitably interpreted, can do so as well. As with child marriage, widow remarriage and polygamy, cohabitation will doubtless lead to furious disputes. But, like it or not, the arrow of time is unidirectional and irreversible.
Pakistan could learn much from recent cultural developments and liberalization of social values in the rest of the Muslim world — a world which it had once aspired to lead. But now in a state of confusion, and dragged willy-nilly by global forces towards an uncertain future, it prefers to keep its eyes fixed firmly upon the past while praying for old times to return.
The writer is an Islamabad-based physicist and writer.
Published in Dawn, November 21st, 2020
https://www.dawn.com/news/1591558/shockwaves-out-of-uae
How modern mathematics emerged from a lost Islamic library
Centuries ago, a prestigious Islamic library brought Arabic numerals to the world. Though the library long since disappeared, its mathematical revolution changed our world.
The House of Wisdom sounds a bit like make believe: no trace remains of this ancient library, destroyed in the 13th Century, so we cannot be sure exactly where it was located or what it looked like.
But this prestigious academy was in fact a major intellectual powerhouse in Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age, and the birthplace of mathematical concepts as transformative as the common zero and our modern-day “Arabic” numerals.
Founded as a private collection for caliph Harun Al-Rashid in the late 8th Century then converted to a public academy some 30 years later, the House of Wisdom appears to have pulled scientists from all over the world towards Baghdad, drawn as they were by the city’s vibrant intellectual curiosity and freedom of expression (Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars were all allowed to study there).
An archive as formidable in size as the present-day British Library in London or the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, the House of Wisdom eventually became an unrivalled centre for the study of humanities and sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, geography, philosophy, literature and the arts – as well as some more dubious subjects such as alchemy and astrology.
To conjure this great monument thus requires a leap of imagination (think the Citadel in Westeros, or the library at Hogwarts), but one thing is certain: the academy ushered in a cultural Renaissance that would entirely alter the course of mathematics.
The House of Wisdom was destroyed in the Mongol Siege of Baghdad in 1258 (according to legend, so many manuscripts were tossed into the River Tigris that its waters turned black from ink), but the discoveries made there introduced a powerful, abstract mathematical language that would later be adopted by the Islamic empire, Europe, and ultimately, the entire world.
“What should matter to us is not the precise details of where or when the House of Wisdom was created,” says Jim Al-Khalili, a professor of physics at the University of Surrey. “Far more interesting is the history of the scientific ideas themselves, and how they developed as a result of it.”
Tracing the House of Wisdom’s mathematical legacy involves a bit of time travel back to the future, as it were. For hundreds of years until the ebb of the Italian Renaissance, one name was synonymous with mathematics in Europe: Leonardo da Pisa, known posthumously as Fibonacci. Born in Pisa in 1170, the Italian mathematician received his primary instruction in Bugia, a trading enclave located on the Barbary coast of Africa (coastal North Africa). In his early 20s, Fibonacci traveled to the Middle East, captivated by ideas that had come west from India through Persia. When he returned to Italy, Fibonacci published Liber Abbaci, one of the first Western works to describe the Hindu-Arabic numeric system.
More...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2020 ... rary-maths
Centuries ago, a prestigious Islamic library brought Arabic numerals to the world. Though the library long since disappeared, its mathematical revolution changed our world.
The House of Wisdom sounds a bit like make believe: no trace remains of this ancient library, destroyed in the 13th Century, so we cannot be sure exactly where it was located or what it looked like.
But this prestigious academy was in fact a major intellectual powerhouse in Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age, and the birthplace of mathematical concepts as transformative as the common zero and our modern-day “Arabic” numerals.
Founded as a private collection for caliph Harun Al-Rashid in the late 8th Century then converted to a public academy some 30 years later, the House of Wisdom appears to have pulled scientists from all over the world towards Baghdad, drawn as they were by the city’s vibrant intellectual curiosity and freedom of expression (Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars were all allowed to study there).
An archive as formidable in size as the present-day British Library in London or the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, the House of Wisdom eventually became an unrivalled centre for the study of humanities and sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, geography, philosophy, literature and the arts – as well as some more dubious subjects such as alchemy and astrology.
To conjure this great monument thus requires a leap of imagination (think the Citadel in Westeros, or the library at Hogwarts), but one thing is certain: the academy ushered in a cultural Renaissance that would entirely alter the course of mathematics.
The House of Wisdom was destroyed in the Mongol Siege of Baghdad in 1258 (according to legend, so many manuscripts were tossed into the River Tigris that its waters turned black from ink), but the discoveries made there introduced a powerful, abstract mathematical language that would later be adopted by the Islamic empire, Europe, and ultimately, the entire world.
“What should matter to us is not the precise details of where or when the House of Wisdom was created,” says Jim Al-Khalili, a professor of physics at the University of Surrey. “Far more interesting is the history of the scientific ideas themselves, and how they developed as a result of it.”
Tracing the House of Wisdom’s mathematical legacy involves a bit of time travel back to the future, as it were. For hundreds of years until the ebb of the Italian Renaissance, one name was synonymous with mathematics in Europe: Leonardo da Pisa, known posthumously as Fibonacci. Born in Pisa in 1170, the Italian mathematician received his primary instruction in Bugia, a trading enclave located on the Barbary coast of Africa (coastal North Africa). In his early 20s, Fibonacci traveled to the Middle East, captivated by ideas that had come west from India through Persia. When he returned to Italy, Fibonacci published Liber Abbaci, one of the first Western works to describe the Hindu-Arabic numeric system.
More...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2020 ... rary-maths
The Muslims Who Inspired Spinoza, Locke and Defoe
A novel written by a 12th-century Arab writer about a boy alone on an island influenced the Daniel Defoe classic ‘Robinson Crusoe.’
In this age of anxiety, anger and contestations between the West and the Islamic world, many epoch-shaping stories of intellectual exchanges between our cultures are often forgotten.
A powerful example comes from literature. Millions of Christian, Jewish and Muslim readers across the world have read that famed tale of the man stranded alone on an island: “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe, the 18th-century British pamphleteer, political activist and novelist.
Few know that in 1708, 11 years before Defoe wrote his celebrated novel, Simon Ockley, an Orientalist scholar at Cambridge University, translated and published a 12th-century Arabic novel, “Hayy ibn Yaqzan,” or “Alive, the Son of Awake,” by Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl, an Andalusian-Arab polymath. Writing about the influence of Ibn Tufayl’s novel on Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” Martin Wainwright, a former Guardian editor, remarked, “Tufayl’s footprints mark the great classic.”
Ibn Tufayl’s novel tells the tale of Hayy, a boy growing up alone on a deserted island, with animals. As he grows up, Hayy uses his senses and reason to understand the workings of the natural world. He explores the laws of nature, devises a rational theology and entertains theories about the origin of the universe. He develops a sense of ethics: Out of mercy for animals, he turns vegetarian, and out of care for plants, he preserves their seeds.
Hayy then leaves his island and visits a religious society. He finds that the teachings of reason and religion are compatible and complementary. Yet he notices that some religious people may be crude, even hypocritical. He returns to his island, where he had found God and developed his concepts of truth, morality and ethics by relying on observation and reasoning.
Ibn Tufayl’s message was clear — and for its times, quite bold: Religion was a path to truth, but it was not the only path. Man was blessed with divine revelation, and with reason and conscience from within. People could be wise and virtuous without religion or a different religion.
The translations of “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” in early modern Europe — by Edward Pococke Jr. into Latin in 1671, by George Keith into English in 1674, by Simon Ockley into English in 1708 — sold widely. Among the admirers of Ibn Tufayl’s work were the Enlightenment philosophers Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and John Locke, who were trying to advance a sense of human dignity in a Christendom long tormented by religious wars and sectarian persecutions.
Fans of the novel also included a new Protestant sect: Quakers. Mr. Keith, a leading Quaker minister, who translated the novel into English, helped publicize it in European intellectuals circles. He admired the novel, for it echoed the Quaker doctrine that every human being had an “inward light” — regardless of faith, gender or race. That humanist theology would have profound political consequences, making Quakers, in a few centuries, leaders in world-changing campaigns: abolition of slavery, emancipation of women, and other worthy causes.
The insights in Ibn Tufayl’s work that inspired the Quakers also shined in the works of Abul-Walid Muhammad Ibn Rushd, also known as Averroes. Ibn Tufayl, who served as a minister in the court of an Almohad caliph of Islamic Spain, commissioned Ibn Rushd, to write commentaries on ancient Greek philosophy, which became the main source for the European rediscovery of the Greeks, earning him great reverence in Western intellectual history.
What is less known is that Ibn Rushd also sought to harmonize his philosophical insights with Islamic law — the Shariah. At the core of Ibn Rushd’s effort was the vision of Ibn Tufayl’s philosophical novel: Religion and reason were both independent sources of wisdom. Religion had its written laws, while reason had its unwritten laws, the universal principles of justice, mercy or thankfulness. When there was a conflict between these two, Ibn Rushd argued, written laws of religion should be reinterpreted as they were inevitably bound with context.
Ibn Rushd applied this vision to the debate on jihad, criticizing the militant Muslims of his time who called for jihad “until they uproot and destroy entirely whoever disagrees with them.” He saw that position as reflecting “ignorance on their part of the intention of the legislator,” or God, who could not have reasonably willed “the great harm” of war.
He used the same perspective to critique the enfeebling of women in medieval Muslim society, which was a result of the denial of their intellectual capacity. He did his best to advance the most women-friendly views in Islamic jurisprudence: Women had the right to refuse polygamy, enjoy equal right to divorce, avoid the face veil, or to become judges.
Ibn Rushd’s other key contribution to modern Europe was his call for open debate, where views are freely expressed and rationally measured. “You should always, when presenting a philosophical argument, cite the views of your opponents,” he wrote. “Failure to do so is an implicit acknowledgment of the weakness of your own case.” The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, a towering intellectual we lost last year, had traced how Ibn Rushd’s insight was picked up by the 17th-century Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, John Milton and John Stuart Mill.
Yet conservatives in Islamic Spain abhorred Ibn Rushd’s indulgence in philosophy and accused him of being a polytheist after he cited a Greek philosopher who was a worshiper of Venus. He was publicly humiliated, exiled and forced into house imprisonment. His books on philosophy were burned. They survived in Hebrew or Latin translations in Europe, but most of the Arabic originals were lost.
This loss has had grim consequences for Muslims. Powerful orthodoxies in the Islamic world — although parochialism and bigotry have proliferated in other communities as well — are still denying values distilled from the “unwritten laws” of humanity: human rights, religious liberty, or gender equality. They rather preach blind obedience to old verdicts, without asking “why and how,” and without deploying reason and conscience. The result is a troubling religiosity that relies on coercion instead of freedom, and generates moralism instead of morality.
The way forward for the Islamic world lies in reconciling faith and reason. A good first step would be to reconsider what Ibn Tufayl’s “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” and the works of Ibn Rushd were trying to tell us.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
A novel written by a 12th-century Arab writer about a boy alone on an island influenced the Daniel Defoe classic ‘Robinson Crusoe.’
In this age of anxiety, anger and contestations between the West and the Islamic world, many epoch-shaping stories of intellectual exchanges between our cultures are often forgotten.
A powerful example comes from literature. Millions of Christian, Jewish and Muslim readers across the world have read that famed tale of the man stranded alone on an island: “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe, the 18th-century British pamphleteer, political activist and novelist.
Few know that in 1708, 11 years before Defoe wrote his celebrated novel, Simon Ockley, an Orientalist scholar at Cambridge University, translated and published a 12th-century Arabic novel, “Hayy ibn Yaqzan,” or “Alive, the Son of Awake,” by Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl, an Andalusian-Arab polymath. Writing about the influence of Ibn Tufayl’s novel on Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” Martin Wainwright, a former Guardian editor, remarked, “Tufayl’s footprints mark the great classic.”
Ibn Tufayl’s novel tells the tale of Hayy, a boy growing up alone on a deserted island, with animals. As he grows up, Hayy uses his senses and reason to understand the workings of the natural world. He explores the laws of nature, devises a rational theology and entertains theories about the origin of the universe. He develops a sense of ethics: Out of mercy for animals, he turns vegetarian, and out of care for plants, he preserves their seeds.
Hayy then leaves his island and visits a religious society. He finds that the teachings of reason and religion are compatible and complementary. Yet he notices that some religious people may be crude, even hypocritical. He returns to his island, where he had found God and developed his concepts of truth, morality and ethics by relying on observation and reasoning.
Ibn Tufayl’s message was clear — and for its times, quite bold: Religion was a path to truth, but it was not the only path. Man was blessed with divine revelation, and with reason and conscience from within. People could be wise and virtuous without religion or a different religion.
The translations of “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” in early modern Europe — by Edward Pococke Jr. into Latin in 1671, by George Keith into English in 1674, by Simon Ockley into English in 1708 — sold widely. Among the admirers of Ibn Tufayl’s work were the Enlightenment philosophers Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and John Locke, who were trying to advance a sense of human dignity in a Christendom long tormented by religious wars and sectarian persecutions.
Fans of the novel also included a new Protestant sect: Quakers. Mr. Keith, a leading Quaker minister, who translated the novel into English, helped publicize it in European intellectuals circles. He admired the novel, for it echoed the Quaker doctrine that every human being had an “inward light” — regardless of faith, gender or race. That humanist theology would have profound political consequences, making Quakers, in a few centuries, leaders in world-changing campaigns: abolition of slavery, emancipation of women, and other worthy causes.
The insights in Ibn Tufayl’s work that inspired the Quakers also shined in the works of Abul-Walid Muhammad Ibn Rushd, also known as Averroes. Ibn Tufayl, who served as a minister in the court of an Almohad caliph of Islamic Spain, commissioned Ibn Rushd, to write commentaries on ancient Greek philosophy, which became the main source for the European rediscovery of the Greeks, earning him great reverence in Western intellectual history.
What is less known is that Ibn Rushd also sought to harmonize his philosophical insights with Islamic law — the Shariah. At the core of Ibn Rushd’s effort was the vision of Ibn Tufayl’s philosophical novel: Religion and reason were both independent sources of wisdom. Religion had its written laws, while reason had its unwritten laws, the universal principles of justice, mercy or thankfulness. When there was a conflict between these two, Ibn Rushd argued, written laws of religion should be reinterpreted as they were inevitably bound with context.
Ibn Rushd applied this vision to the debate on jihad, criticizing the militant Muslims of his time who called for jihad “until they uproot and destroy entirely whoever disagrees with them.” He saw that position as reflecting “ignorance on their part of the intention of the legislator,” or God, who could not have reasonably willed “the great harm” of war.
He used the same perspective to critique the enfeebling of women in medieval Muslim society, which was a result of the denial of their intellectual capacity. He did his best to advance the most women-friendly views in Islamic jurisprudence: Women had the right to refuse polygamy, enjoy equal right to divorce, avoid the face veil, or to become judges.
Ibn Rushd’s other key contribution to modern Europe was his call for open debate, where views are freely expressed and rationally measured. “You should always, when presenting a philosophical argument, cite the views of your opponents,” he wrote. “Failure to do so is an implicit acknowledgment of the weakness of your own case.” The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, a towering intellectual we lost last year, had traced how Ibn Rushd’s insight was picked up by the 17th-century Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, John Milton and John Stuart Mill.
Yet conservatives in Islamic Spain abhorred Ibn Rushd’s indulgence in philosophy and accused him of being a polytheist after he cited a Greek philosopher who was a worshiper of Venus. He was publicly humiliated, exiled and forced into house imprisonment. His books on philosophy were burned. They survived in Hebrew or Latin translations in Europe, but most of the Arabic originals were lost.
This loss has had grim consequences for Muslims. Powerful orthodoxies in the Islamic world — although parochialism and bigotry have proliferated in other communities as well — are still denying values distilled from the “unwritten laws” of humanity: human rights, religious liberty, or gender equality. They rather preach blind obedience to old verdicts, without asking “why and how,” and without deploying reason and conscience. The result is a troubling religiosity that relies on coercion instead of freedom, and generates moralism instead of morality.
The way forward for the Islamic world lies in reconciling faith and reason. A good first step would be to reconsider what Ibn Tufayl’s “Hayy ibn Yaqzan” and the works of Ibn Rushd were trying to tell us.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
PM Imran Khan's Speech That Surprised The Turkish President | TE2L
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvFQDJplIoo
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvFQDJplIoo
Suleyman Dost, Assistant Professor of Classical Islam, Brandeis University
Sun, May 30, 2021, 9:44 AM
Hilye, or calligraphic panel containing a physical description of the Prophet Muhammad made in 1718 in the Galata Palace, Istanbul. Dihya Salim al-Fahim, (1718), via Wikimedia Commons
The republication of caricatures depicting the Prophet Muhammad by French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in September 2020 led to protests in several Muslim-majority countries. It also resulted in disturbing acts of violence: In the weeks that followed, two people were stabbed near the former headquarters of the magazine and a teacher was beheaded after he showed the cartoons during a classroom lesson.
Visual depiction of Muhammad is a sensitive issue for a number of reasons: Islam’s early stance against idolatry led to a general disapproval for images of living beings throughout Islamic history. Muslims seldom produced or circulated images of Muhammad or other notable early Muslims. The recent caricatures have offended many Muslims around the world.
This focus on the reactions to the images of Muhammad drowns out an important question: How did Muslims imagine him for centuries in the near total absence of icons and images?
Picturing Muhammad without images
In my courses on early Islam and the life of Muhammad, I teach to the amazement of my students that there are few pre-modern historical figures that we know more about than we do about Muhammad.
The respect and devotion that the first generations of Muslims accorded to him led to an abundance of textual materials that provided rich details about every aspect of his life.
The prophet’s earliest surviving biography, written a century after his death, runs into hundreds of pages in English. His final 10 years are so well-documented that some episodes of his life during this period can be tracked day by day.
Even more detailed are books from the early Islamic period dedicated specifically to the description of Muhammad’s body, character and manners. From a very popular ninth-century book on the subject titled “Shama'il al-Muhammadiyya” or The Sublime Qualities of Muhammad, Muslims learned everything from Muhammad’s height and body hair to his sleep habits, clothing preferences and favorite food.
No single piece of information was seen too mundane or irrelevant when it concerned the prophet. The way he walked and sat is recorded in this book alongside the approximate amount of white hair on his temples in old age.
These meticulous textual descriptions have functioned for Muslims throughout centuries as an alternative for visual representations.
Most Muslims pictured Muhammad as described by his cousin and son-in-law Ali in a famous passage contained in the Shama'il al-Muhammadiyya: a broad-shouldered man of medium height, with black, wavy hair and a rosy complexion, walking with a slight downward lean. The second half of the description focused on his character: a humble man that inspired awe and respect in everyone that met him.
That said, figurative portrayals of Muhammad were not entirely unheard of in the Islamic world. In fact, manuscripts from the 13th century onward did contain scenes from the prophet’s life, showing him in full figure initially and with a veiled face later on.
The majority of Muslims, however, would not have access to the manuscripts that contained these images of the prophet. For those who wanted to visualize Muhammad, there were nonpictorial, textual alternatives.
There was an artistic tradition that was particularly popular among Turkish- and Persian-speaking Muslims.
Ornamented and gilded edgings on a single page were filled with a masterfully calligraphed text of Muhammad’s description by Ali in the Shama'il. The center of the page featured a famous verse from the Quran: “We only sent you (Muhammad) as a mercy to the worlds.”
These textual portraits, called “hilya” in Arabic, were the closest that one would get to an “image” of Muhammad in most of the Muslim world. Some hilyas were strictly without any figural representation, while others contained a drawing of the Kaaba, the holy shrine in Mecca, or a rose that symbolized the beauty of the prophet.
Framed hilyas graced mosques and private houses well into the 20th century. Smaller specimens were carried in bottles or the pockets of those who believed in the spiritual power of the prophet’s description for good health and against evil. Hilyas kept the memory of Muhammad fresh for those who wanted to imagine him from mere words.
Different interpretations
The Islamic legal basis for banning images, including Muhammad’s, is less than straightforward and there are variations across denominations and legal schools.
It appears, for instance, that Shiite communities have been more accepting of visual representations for devotional purposes than Sunni ones. Pictures of Muhammad, Ali and other family members of the prophet have some circulation in the popular religious culture of Shiite-majority countries, such as Iran. Sunni Islam, on the other hand, has largely shunned religious iconography.
Outside the Islamic world, Muhammad was regularly fictionalized in literature and was depicted in images in medieval and early modern Christendom. But this was often in less than sympathetic forms. Dante’s “Inferno,” most famously, had the prophet and Ali suffering in hell, and the scene inspired many drawings.
These depictions, however, hardly ever received any attention from the Muslim world, as they were produced for and consumed within the Christian world.
Offensive caricatures and colonial past
Providing historical precedents for the visual depictions of Muhammad adds much-needed nuance to a complex and potentially incendiary issue, but it helps explain only part of the picture.
Equally important for understanding the reactions to the images of Muhammad are developments from more recent history. Europe now has a large Muslim minority, and fictionalized depictions of Muhammad, visual or otherwise, do not go unnoticed.
With advances in mass communication and social media, the spread of the images is swift, and so is the mobilization for reactions to them.
Most importantly, many Muslims find the caricatures offensive for its Islamophobic content. Some of the caricatures draw a coarse equation of Islam with violence or debauchery through Muhammad’s image, a pervasive theme in the colonial European scholarship on Muhammad.
Anthropologist Saba Mahmood has argued that such depictions can cause “moral injury” for Muslims, an emotional pain due to the special relation that they have with the prophet. Political scientist Andrew March sees the caricatures as “a political act” that could cause harm to the efforts of creating a “public space where Muslims feel safe, valued, and equal.”
Even without images, Muslims have cultivated a vivid mental picture of Muhammad, not just of his appearance but of his entire persona. The crudeness of some of the caricatures of Muhammad is worth a moment of thought.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Suleyman Dost, Brandeis University.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mu ... 0743796.ht
Sun, May 30, 2021, 9:44 AM
Hilye, or calligraphic panel containing a physical description of the Prophet Muhammad made in 1718 in the Galata Palace, Istanbul. Dihya Salim al-Fahim, (1718), via Wikimedia Commons
The republication of caricatures depicting the Prophet Muhammad by French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in September 2020 led to protests in several Muslim-majority countries. It also resulted in disturbing acts of violence: In the weeks that followed, two people were stabbed near the former headquarters of the magazine and a teacher was beheaded after he showed the cartoons during a classroom lesson.
Visual depiction of Muhammad is a sensitive issue for a number of reasons: Islam’s early stance against idolatry led to a general disapproval for images of living beings throughout Islamic history. Muslims seldom produced or circulated images of Muhammad or other notable early Muslims. The recent caricatures have offended many Muslims around the world.
This focus on the reactions to the images of Muhammad drowns out an important question: How did Muslims imagine him for centuries in the near total absence of icons and images?
Picturing Muhammad without images
In my courses on early Islam and the life of Muhammad, I teach to the amazement of my students that there are few pre-modern historical figures that we know more about than we do about Muhammad.
The respect and devotion that the first generations of Muslims accorded to him led to an abundance of textual materials that provided rich details about every aspect of his life.
The prophet’s earliest surviving biography, written a century after his death, runs into hundreds of pages in English. His final 10 years are so well-documented that some episodes of his life during this period can be tracked day by day.
Even more detailed are books from the early Islamic period dedicated specifically to the description of Muhammad’s body, character and manners. From a very popular ninth-century book on the subject titled “Shama'il al-Muhammadiyya” or The Sublime Qualities of Muhammad, Muslims learned everything from Muhammad’s height and body hair to his sleep habits, clothing preferences and favorite food.
No single piece of information was seen too mundane or irrelevant when it concerned the prophet. The way he walked and sat is recorded in this book alongside the approximate amount of white hair on his temples in old age.
These meticulous textual descriptions have functioned for Muslims throughout centuries as an alternative for visual representations.
Most Muslims pictured Muhammad as described by his cousin and son-in-law Ali in a famous passage contained in the Shama'il al-Muhammadiyya: a broad-shouldered man of medium height, with black, wavy hair and a rosy complexion, walking with a slight downward lean. The second half of the description focused on his character: a humble man that inspired awe and respect in everyone that met him.
That said, figurative portrayals of Muhammad were not entirely unheard of in the Islamic world. In fact, manuscripts from the 13th century onward did contain scenes from the prophet’s life, showing him in full figure initially and with a veiled face later on.
The majority of Muslims, however, would not have access to the manuscripts that contained these images of the prophet. For those who wanted to visualize Muhammad, there were nonpictorial, textual alternatives.
There was an artistic tradition that was particularly popular among Turkish- and Persian-speaking Muslims.
Ornamented and gilded edgings on a single page were filled with a masterfully calligraphed text of Muhammad’s description by Ali in the Shama'il. The center of the page featured a famous verse from the Quran: “We only sent you (Muhammad) as a mercy to the worlds.”
These textual portraits, called “hilya” in Arabic, were the closest that one would get to an “image” of Muhammad in most of the Muslim world. Some hilyas were strictly without any figural representation, while others contained a drawing of the Kaaba, the holy shrine in Mecca, or a rose that symbolized the beauty of the prophet.
Framed hilyas graced mosques and private houses well into the 20th century. Smaller specimens were carried in bottles or the pockets of those who believed in the spiritual power of the prophet’s description for good health and against evil. Hilyas kept the memory of Muhammad fresh for those who wanted to imagine him from mere words.
Different interpretations
The Islamic legal basis for banning images, including Muhammad’s, is less than straightforward and there are variations across denominations and legal schools.
It appears, for instance, that Shiite communities have been more accepting of visual representations for devotional purposes than Sunni ones. Pictures of Muhammad, Ali and other family members of the prophet have some circulation in the popular religious culture of Shiite-majority countries, such as Iran. Sunni Islam, on the other hand, has largely shunned religious iconography.
Outside the Islamic world, Muhammad was regularly fictionalized in literature and was depicted in images in medieval and early modern Christendom. But this was often in less than sympathetic forms. Dante’s “Inferno,” most famously, had the prophet and Ali suffering in hell, and the scene inspired many drawings.
These depictions, however, hardly ever received any attention from the Muslim world, as they were produced for and consumed within the Christian world.
Offensive caricatures and colonial past
Providing historical precedents for the visual depictions of Muhammad adds much-needed nuance to a complex and potentially incendiary issue, but it helps explain only part of the picture.
Equally important for understanding the reactions to the images of Muhammad are developments from more recent history. Europe now has a large Muslim minority, and fictionalized depictions of Muhammad, visual or otherwise, do not go unnoticed.
With advances in mass communication and social media, the spread of the images is swift, and so is the mobilization for reactions to them.
Most importantly, many Muslims find the caricatures offensive for its Islamophobic content. Some of the caricatures draw a coarse equation of Islam with violence or debauchery through Muhammad’s image, a pervasive theme in the colonial European scholarship on Muhammad.
Anthropologist Saba Mahmood has argued that such depictions can cause “moral injury” for Muslims, an emotional pain due to the special relation that they have with the prophet. Political scientist Andrew March sees the caricatures as “a political act” that could cause harm to the efforts of creating a “public space where Muslims feel safe, valued, and equal.”
Even without images, Muslims have cultivated a vivid mental picture of Muhammad, not just of his appearance but of his entire persona. The crudeness of some of the caricatures of Muhammad is worth a moment of thought.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Suleyman Dost, Brandeis University.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mu ... 0743796.ht
The London attack reaffirms why Muslims often feel unsafe in their own country
SHEEMA KHAN
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED JUNE 8, 2021
Every few years, I feel very vulnerable and unsafe. This is one of those times.
On Sunday, five members – three generations – of a Muslim family went out for a walk on a summer’s evening in London, Ont., an opportunity relished by many Canadians during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this family, it was regular activity before returning home to offer the sunset prayer, according to a neighbour.
Yet this simple act of enjoying nature with one’s family is no more because of an act of pure, unadulterated hatred.
While waiting at a stoplight, Madiha Salman, her husband Salman Afzaal, 15-year-old daughter Yumna, nine-year-old son Fayez, and 74-year-old mother-in-law were allegedly rammed by a 20-year-old driver who, according to police and witnesses, deliberately accelerated his pickup toward the family, targeting them because they were Muslim.
Initially, police said the extended family requested to keep the victims’ names private, but the family identified them in a statement Monday. Only Fayez survived. Now an orphan, he is recuperating in hospital.
What kind of world are we living in?
For Muslims, it is unfortunately one where the slow drumbeat of hate-filled violence has become louder. The 2017 Quebec City massacre, in which worshippers were gunned down at a mosque – a place of spiritual refuge – shook all of us to the core.
As a nation, we vowed to fight the scourge of Islamophobia. Muslims wondered if a visit to their local mosque might be their last. Such was, and is, the fear. Enhanced safety features – including screened entries and guards – became the uneasy norm.
Yet this was still not enough back in September, when 58-year-old Mohamed-Aslim Zafis was killed outside an Etobicoke, Ont., mosque by an apparent white supremacist. Mr. Zafis was a volunteer caretaker of the mosque he cherished. On that fateful evening, he sat outside, controlling entry to the mosque in compliance with COVID-19 protocols. The accused perpetrator slipped behind Mr. Zafis, slashed his throat and fled.
Violence is happening all over the country. This year alone, there have been multiple reported assaults in Edmonton, where strangers have threatened Muslim women. In at least five cases, women were pushed, kicked and/or punched in public.
Calgary has similarly witnessed numerous cases of assault against Muslims; three involved women physically attacked in broad daylight because of their hijab. Understandably, the women have been emotionally and physically traumatized.
And now, a family has been killed in London. Is it any wonder why Muslims – especially women – don’t feel safe?
Yet this nation is far greater than the hate-filled zealots who seek to intimidate, sow fear and spread the bigotry that fuels them. The outpouring of grief and support from Canadians has been a balm to the shock felt by Muslims across the land.
Since the news came out about the attack, I have received heartfelt messages of support, including the following from my friend and colleague Myriam Davidson: “It breaks my heart,” she wrote. “The best I have is we are here standing with you. There is no place for Islamophobia in our communities – it is despicable. Whenever a synagogue gets attacked – what brings me comfort is when non-Jews speak up, call it out and reaffirm that we are an inclusive society where this is not tolerated. So I’m modelling the best I know how.”
And that is the key: reaching out the best way each of us can. Our society will be stronger for it. While Muslims will rely on their faith for spiritual succour, we will need emotional support from others to overcome our fears and to know that we are valued members of the Canadian family.
There are many ways to help. Some Muslims are fearful to go for a simple walk, so offer to accompany them. Donate to a fund for nine-year-old Fayez. Attend a vigil. Perhaps the most powerful gesture is to simply say, “I am here for you.”
Last week, I was mesmerized by the haunting, powerful rendition of “O Canada” by Winnipeg folk singer-songwriter Don Amero, accompanied by Elders Wally and Karen Swain, prior to a Habs-Jets playoff game. While Mr. Amero sang, I asked myself: “How does he have the fortitude to sing an anthem of a country whose government, for 150 years, committed cultural genocide against the Indigenous peoples of this land?”
I know I could not. Yet Mr. Amero taught me something that resonates today, which is that the power of love, of resilience, of dignity always conquers bitterness.
We will come together – whether it is to address deep-rooted historical prejudices against Indigenous communities, or contemporary hatred against minority communities. Let us dig deep into the well of human compassion to continuously build a more just, inclusive society.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... their-own/
SHEEMA KHAN
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED JUNE 8, 2021
Every few years, I feel very vulnerable and unsafe. This is one of those times.
On Sunday, five members – three generations – of a Muslim family went out for a walk on a summer’s evening in London, Ont., an opportunity relished by many Canadians during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this family, it was regular activity before returning home to offer the sunset prayer, according to a neighbour.
Yet this simple act of enjoying nature with one’s family is no more because of an act of pure, unadulterated hatred.
While waiting at a stoplight, Madiha Salman, her husband Salman Afzaal, 15-year-old daughter Yumna, nine-year-old son Fayez, and 74-year-old mother-in-law were allegedly rammed by a 20-year-old driver who, according to police and witnesses, deliberately accelerated his pickup toward the family, targeting them because they were Muslim.
Initially, police said the extended family requested to keep the victims’ names private, but the family identified them in a statement Monday. Only Fayez survived. Now an orphan, he is recuperating in hospital.
What kind of world are we living in?
For Muslims, it is unfortunately one where the slow drumbeat of hate-filled violence has become louder. The 2017 Quebec City massacre, in which worshippers were gunned down at a mosque – a place of spiritual refuge – shook all of us to the core.
As a nation, we vowed to fight the scourge of Islamophobia. Muslims wondered if a visit to their local mosque might be their last. Such was, and is, the fear. Enhanced safety features – including screened entries and guards – became the uneasy norm.
Yet this was still not enough back in September, when 58-year-old Mohamed-Aslim Zafis was killed outside an Etobicoke, Ont., mosque by an apparent white supremacist. Mr. Zafis was a volunteer caretaker of the mosque he cherished. On that fateful evening, he sat outside, controlling entry to the mosque in compliance with COVID-19 protocols. The accused perpetrator slipped behind Mr. Zafis, slashed his throat and fled.
Violence is happening all over the country. This year alone, there have been multiple reported assaults in Edmonton, where strangers have threatened Muslim women. In at least five cases, women were pushed, kicked and/or punched in public.
Calgary has similarly witnessed numerous cases of assault against Muslims; three involved women physically attacked in broad daylight because of their hijab. Understandably, the women have been emotionally and physically traumatized.
And now, a family has been killed in London. Is it any wonder why Muslims – especially women – don’t feel safe?
Yet this nation is far greater than the hate-filled zealots who seek to intimidate, sow fear and spread the bigotry that fuels them. The outpouring of grief and support from Canadians has been a balm to the shock felt by Muslims across the land.
Since the news came out about the attack, I have received heartfelt messages of support, including the following from my friend and colleague Myriam Davidson: “It breaks my heart,” she wrote. “The best I have is we are here standing with you. There is no place for Islamophobia in our communities – it is despicable. Whenever a synagogue gets attacked – what brings me comfort is when non-Jews speak up, call it out and reaffirm that we are an inclusive society where this is not tolerated. So I’m modelling the best I know how.”
And that is the key: reaching out the best way each of us can. Our society will be stronger for it. While Muslims will rely on their faith for spiritual succour, we will need emotional support from others to overcome our fears and to know that we are valued members of the Canadian family.
There are many ways to help. Some Muslims are fearful to go for a simple walk, so offer to accompany them. Donate to a fund for nine-year-old Fayez. Attend a vigil. Perhaps the most powerful gesture is to simply say, “I am here for you.”
Last week, I was mesmerized by the haunting, powerful rendition of “O Canada” by Winnipeg folk singer-songwriter Don Amero, accompanied by Elders Wally and Karen Swain, prior to a Habs-Jets playoff game. While Mr. Amero sang, I asked myself: “How does he have the fortitude to sing an anthem of a country whose government, for 150 years, committed cultural genocide against the Indigenous peoples of this land?”
I know I could not. Yet Mr. Amero taught me something that resonates today, which is that the power of love, of resilience, of dignity always conquers bitterness.
We will come together – whether it is to address deep-rooted historical prejudices against Indigenous communities, or contemporary hatred against minority communities. Let us dig deep into the well of human compassion to continuously build a more just, inclusive society.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... their-own/
The Fear of Islam: A Conversation with Todd Green
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2i8M7DmaJ8
Todd Green, author of The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West (Fortress Press 2015), discusses his reasons for writing the book, the basis for the West's fear of Islam, and the most common misconceptions about the study of Islamophobia.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2i8M7DmaJ8
Todd Green, author of The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West (Fortress Press 2015), discusses his reasons for writing the book, the basis for the West's fear of Islam, and the most common misconceptions about the study of Islamophobia.
SAT Aug 7 • 11am PT | 2pm ET • Webinar
Thought Leader Series: Celebrating Muslim Excellence
The Aga Khan Council for Canada, the Ismaili Centres (Vancouver, Toronto) and the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, in collaboration with The Muslim Awards for Excellence and the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, have launched a new series which aims to:
• Provide a platform for Muslims who are thought leaders in their areas of expertise/professions from across Canada to enhance and showcase their contributions to Canadian society.
• Promote discussion on topics of relevance to Canadian society, with a particular emphasis on emerging issues.
• Bring Muslims of diverse backgrounds together to share knowledge and ideas.
The inaugural program in the series will be launched on Saturday, August 7 at 11am PT | 12pm MT | 2pm ET with the theme of “Muslims in Science and Medicine: Navigating the Currents of COVID-19”.
Register
https://iicanada.org/form/thought-leade ... cellence-0
Daily Diamond
"The great British scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, remarked that if he was able to see further than his predecessors, it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Among those giants, who made possible the scientific revolution in Europe, were Ibn Sina, whose ‘Canon of Medicine’ was a standard text for 500 years; Al-Idrisi, the geographer; Ibn Rushd, the philosopher, and a host of other Muslim scientists who had produced the notion of specific gravity, refined Euclid’s theories, perfected solid geometry, evolved trigonometry and algebra, and made modern mathematics possible by developing Indian numerals and the concept of the zero as a numeral of no place , an invention crucial to every aspect of technology from that time onwards to the present day."
Mawlana Hazar Imam, Karachi, Pakistan, March 1983
Thought Leader Series: Celebrating Muslim Excellence
The Aga Khan Council for Canada, the Ismaili Centres (Vancouver, Toronto) and the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, in collaboration with The Muslim Awards for Excellence and the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, have launched a new series which aims to:
• Provide a platform for Muslims who are thought leaders in their areas of expertise/professions from across Canada to enhance and showcase their contributions to Canadian society.
• Promote discussion on topics of relevance to Canadian society, with a particular emphasis on emerging issues.
• Bring Muslims of diverse backgrounds together to share knowledge and ideas.
The inaugural program in the series will be launched on Saturday, August 7 at 11am PT | 12pm MT | 2pm ET with the theme of “Muslims in Science and Medicine: Navigating the Currents of COVID-19”.
Register
https://iicanada.org/form/thought-leade ... cellence-0
Daily Diamond
"The great British scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, remarked that if he was able to see further than his predecessors, it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Among those giants, who made possible the scientific revolution in Europe, were Ibn Sina, whose ‘Canon of Medicine’ was a standard text for 500 years; Al-Idrisi, the geographer; Ibn Rushd, the philosopher, and a host of other Muslim scientists who had produced the notion of specific gravity, refined Euclid’s theories, perfected solid geometry, evolved trigonometry and algebra, and made modern mathematics possible by developing Indian numerals and the concept of the zero as a numeral of no place , an invention crucial to every aspect of technology from that time onwards to the present day."
Mawlana Hazar Imam, Karachi, Pakistan, March 1983
Sifan Hassan of Netherlands won gold medals in 5000m and 10000m and bronze in 1500m in Olympic Games in Tokyo. 3 medals in one Olympics!
Muslims are indeed making remarkable contributions to their societies in Europe.
Tokyo Olympics: Sifan Hassan wins 10,000m gold for third medal of Games
The Netherlands' Sifan Hassan won the 10,000m to seal her second gold and third medal of the Tokyo Olympics.
The 28-year-old, who had been seeking an unprecedented golden treble, had missed out on that feat when she took bronze in the 1500m but still takes home a hat-trick of medals after adding Saturday's gold to her 5,000m title.
Despite running three races in Tokyo's heat in the last few days, Hassan found an extra gear in the last lap.
She won in 29 minutes 55.32 seconds.
https://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/58128859
We Want to Hear From Muslim Americans Who Grew Up in the Shadow of Sept. 11
Ask millennial Americans what they remember about the Sept. 11 attacks and many might tell you where they were when the planes hit. Some might recount the American flags that went up in their neighborhoods afterward or the discussions they had in school in the weeks that followed.
Millennial Muslim Americans could tell you about those things, too — but they might also tell you about being interrogated by school principals and the police or being routinely stopped at the airport, even as teenagers.
We want to hear from Muslim Americans who came of age in the wake of Sept. 11. We’re looking to understand more about how navigating the aftermath of the attacks affected their identities and whether that experience changed their relationships with their faith and with America.
Muslim Americans ages 28 to 38, tell us about your experience on and after Sept. 11, 2001
We may publish a selection of your responses in an upcoming article.
Survey questions at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Ask millennial Americans what they remember about the Sept. 11 attacks and many might tell you where they were when the planes hit. Some might recount the American flags that went up in their neighborhoods afterward or the discussions they had in school in the weeks that followed.
Millennial Muslim Americans could tell you about those things, too — but they might also tell you about being interrogated by school principals and the police or being routinely stopped at the airport, even as teenagers.
We want to hear from Muslim Americans who came of age in the wake of Sept. 11. We’re looking to understand more about how navigating the aftermath of the attacks affected their identities and whether that experience changed their relationships with their faith and with America.
Muslim Americans ages 28 to 38, tell us about your experience on and after Sept. 11, 2001
We may publish a selection of your responses in an upcoming article.
Survey questions at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Perception of Islam
Joe Rogan Podcast: Mel Gibson Breaks Down Islam’s Impact on the Future of Faith
Joe Rogan sits down to dive deep into a mind-blowing discussion about Islam’s impact on the future of faith with insights inspired by Mel Gibson. This powerful breakdown explores how Islam’s discipline, spirituality, and unshakable values may become the anchor for humanity in an age of chaos, technology, and moral collapse. Get ready for one of the most eye-opening conversations on religion, spirituality, and the future of mankind.
This is not just about religion — it’s about the survival of meaning, the search for truth, and the role of Islam in shaping the next chapter of human history. Don’t miss it!
#JoeRogan #MelGibson #Islam #FutureOfFaith #Spirituality #PodcastClips #IslamicWisdom #ReligionAndFuture #DeepTalks #FaithAndHumanity
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7ssX5zlOtY
Joe Rogan sits down to dive deep into a mind-blowing discussion about Islam’s impact on the future of faith with insights inspired by Mel Gibson. This powerful breakdown explores how Islam’s discipline, spirituality, and unshakable values may become the anchor for humanity in an age of chaos, technology, and moral collapse. Get ready for one of the most eye-opening conversations on religion, spirituality, and the future of mankind.
This is not just about religion — it’s about the survival of meaning, the search for truth, and the role of Islam in shaping the next chapter of human history. Don’t miss it!
#JoeRogan #MelGibson #Islam #FutureOfFaith #Spirituality #PodcastClips #IslamicWisdom #ReligionAndFuture #DeepTalks #FaithAndHumanity
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7ssX5zlOtY
Re: Perception of Islam
WITH MAMDANI LEADING NYC MAYORAL RACE OPPONENTS OF BOTH PARTIES REACH FOR ISLAMOPHOBIA
In an AI-generated ad called “Criminals for Zohran Mamdani” (posted and quickly deleted by the Cuomo campaign) an image of a woman declares that Mamdani would decriminalize drunk driving. (https://x.com/prem_thakker/status/1981150231174746370)
In a few days Zohran Mamdani is poised to become the first South Asian Muslim mayor of New York. Helped by ranked choice voting and a platform laser-focused on affordability, Mamdani’s unlikely political ascendancy is throwing the establishment for a loop. In recent weeks, when a Mamdani victory seems like it’s in the bag, one seemingly sure-fire strategy being employed by his opponents to bring his spectacular candidacy crashing down to earth is Islamophobia.
Whether it’s the Republican or Democratic Party or the elites, nobody seems ready, willing, or able to accept a Brown Muslim man as mayor of New York. So the only disqualifier they can find and lean into is Islamophobia. After 24 years, can New York, the city deliberately targeted by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, shed that trauma and embrace a Muslim man as its leader? The anti-Muslim opposition resoundingly screams NO.
As a scholar of the long history of Islamophobia, I recognize the signs of its uses and abuses. Over the last two weeks, as we head into election day, and after Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous performance during the mayoral debates, Republican senator Ted Cruz and Florida governor Ron De Santis have accused Mamdani of being a “jihadist.” Of course, neither man can tell the public what that means, but that’s immaterial. The point is to link Mamdani to religious extremism and violence. It’s easy to do in the minds of bigots and Islamophobes because he’s a Muslim and therefore, as their logic goes, predisposed to violence.
The word jihadist entered the English lexicon in the late 1960s, while jihad and jihadi have an earlier etymology, although only dating to the mid nineteenth and early twentieth century respectively. This brief foray into philology is simply meant to illustrate that these words are linked to a very contemporary political history and are not, as Cruz and De Santis xenophobically blather, some kind of timeless violent Muslim essence.
The racist and Orientalist turn by these Republican politicos is unsurprising. After all, the current Defense—or rather—War Secretary has a tattoo of the word infidel or kafir in Arabic on his arm, because Muslims live rent-free in the space between his ears. But Democrats aren’t much better. While not as nakedly Islamophobic, they’ve discredited Mamdani’s position on Palestinian liberation by linking him to violent uprising, which they claim is underpinning the phrase “globalize the Intifada.” The point is to suggest that Mamdani is a danger to Jewish New Yorkers.
Never mind that Mamdani has not used those words. But even if he had, the slogan simply calls for a global uprising against settler colonial occupation, brutality, and ethnic cleansing. In the hands of Mamdani’s critics, however, intifada is transformed into a call for anti-Jewish violence. At the root of this, again, is their ability to position themselves as authorities over the Arabic language, and to consequently control its meaning. Putting words in Mamdani’s mouth accomplishes the same thing. They can make him say what they want, regardless of whether or not he’s said those things. This is Orientalism 101.
For the leaders of the Democratic party and its surrogates, Mamdani’s advocacy for Palestine, his insistence on following international law, and his refusal to kowtow to the Israel lobby seem to be disqualifying. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries deigned to endorse Mamdani a little less than two weeks shy of election day. His delay and word-salad answers when pressed make this endorsement irrelevant. The majority of voters have already decided at this point, so it’s unlikely to move the needle. As of this writing, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer is still “talking” to Mamdani. Schumer’s hesitancy says more about him and the corporate and political interests he’s beholden to than it does about Mamdani.
The fact that neither one of these men has addressed the disgusting Islamophobia that’s been slung at Mamdani shows just how little the national leaders of the Democratic Party, and therefore Democrats in general, care about religious prejudice, bigotry, and violence—when it’s directed as Muslims. In recent days, Andrew Cuomo has gone on the record attributing extremist violence to Mamdani by laughing and agreeing when the host of “Sid & Friends in the Morning,” proclaimed that Mamdani would cheer another terrorist attack.
Just today, on ABC News, Cuomo said that Mamdani doesn’t understand New York “values,” another dog-whistle to imply that Mamdani’s background, religion, and race are incompatible with the city he seeks to lead. Add to that Cuomo’s compulsive and colossal inability to say Mamdani’s name correctly, which further betrays his Orientalism and xenophobia.
The deafening silence of those in Mamdani’s party is a polite, genteel, and liberal brand of anti-Muslim bigotry. Regardless of its form, the Islamophobia of the Left, Right, and Center shows just how central anti-Muslim racism is to American politics. Indeed, left on his own to condemn these racist attacks against himself and other American Muslims, Mamdani made it clear that Islamophobia has broad bipartisan support among the American political and elite class.
https://religiondispatches.org/with-mam ... aign=daily
In an AI-generated ad called “Criminals for Zohran Mamdani” (posted and quickly deleted by the Cuomo campaign) an image of a woman declares that Mamdani would decriminalize drunk driving. (https://x.com/prem_thakker/status/1981150231174746370)
In a few days Zohran Mamdani is poised to become the first South Asian Muslim mayor of New York. Helped by ranked choice voting and a platform laser-focused on affordability, Mamdani’s unlikely political ascendancy is throwing the establishment for a loop. In recent weeks, when a Mamdani victory seems like it’s in the bag, one seemingly sure-fire strategy being employed by his opponents to bring his spectacular candidacy crashing down to earth is Islamophobia.
Whether it’s the Republican or Democratic Party or the elites, nobody seems ready, willing, or able to accept a Brown Muslim man as mayor of New York. So the only disqualifier they can find and lean into is Islamophobia. After 24 years, can New York, the city deliberately targeted by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, shed that trauma and embrace a Muslim man as its leader? The anti-Muslim opposition resoundingly screams NO.
As a scholar of the long history of Islamophobia, I recognize the signs of its uses and abuses. Over the last two weeks, as we head into election day, and after Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous performance during the mayoral debates, Republican senator Ted Cruz and Florida governor Ron De Santis have accused Mamdani of being a “jihadist.” Of course, neither man can tell the public what that means, but that’s immaterial. The point is to link Mamdani to religious extremism and violence. It’s easy to do in the minds of bigots and Islamophobes because he’s a Muslim and therefore, as their logic goes, predisposed to violence.
The word jihadist entered the English lexicon in the late 1960s, while jihad and jihadi have an earlier etymology, although only dating to the mid nineteenth and early twentieth century respectively. This brief foray into philology is simply meant to illustrate that these words are linked to a very contemporary political history and are not, as Cruz and De Santis xenophobically blather, some kind of timeless violent Muslim essence.
The racist and Orientalist turn by these Republican politicos is unsurprising. After all, the current Defense—or rather—War Secretary has a tattoo of the word infidel or kafir in Arabic on his arm, because Muslims live rent-free in the space between his ears. But Democrats aren’t much better. While not as nakedly Islamophobic, they’ve discredited Mamdani’s position on Palestinian liberation by linking him to violent uprising, which they claim is underpinning the phrase “globalize the Intifada.” The point is to suggest that Mamdani is a danger to Jewish New Yorkers.
Never mind that Mamdani has not used those words. But even if he had, the slogan simply calls for a global uprising against settler colonial occupation, brutality, and ethnic cleansing. In the hands of Mamdani’s critics, however, intifada is transformed into a call for anti-Jewish violence. At the root of this, again, is their ability to position themselves as authorities over the Arabic language, and to consequently control its meaning. Putting words in Mamdani’s mouth accomplishes the same thing. They can make him say what they want, regardless of whether or not he’s said those things. This is Orientalism 101.
For the leaders of the Democratic party and its surrogates, Mamdani’s advocacy for Palestine, his insistence on following international law, and his refusal to kowtow to the Israel lobby seem to be disqualifying. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries deigned to endorse Mamdani a little less than two weeks shy of election day. His delay and word-salad answers when pressed make this endorsement irrelevant. The majority of voters have already decided at this point, so it’s unlikely to move the needle. As of this writing, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer is still “talking” to Mamdani. Schumer’s hesitancy says more about him and the corporate and political interests he’s beholden to than it does about Mamdani.
The fact that neither one of these men has addressed the disgusting Islamophobia that’s been slung at Mamdani shows just how little the national leaders of the Democratic Party, and therefore Democrats in general, care about religious prejudice, bigotry, and violence—when it’s directed as Muslims. In recent days, Andrew Cuomo has gone on the record attributing extremist violence to Mamdani by laughing and agreeing when the host of “Sid & Friends in the Morning,” proclaimed that Mamdani would cheer another terrorist attack.
Just today, on ABC News, Cuomo said that Mamdani doesn’t understand New York “values,” another dog-whistle to imply that Mamdani’s background, religion, and race are incompatible with the city he seeks to lead. Add to that Cuomo’s compulsive and colossal inability to say Mamdani’s name correctly, which further betrays his Orientalism and xenophobia.
The deafening silence of those in Mamdani’s party is a polite, genteel, and liberal brand of anti-Muslim bigotry. Regardless of its form, the Islamophobia of the Left, Right, and Center shows just how central anti-Muslim racism is to American politics. Indeed, left on his own to condemn these racist attacks against himself and other American Muslims, Mamdani made it clear that Islamophobia has broad bipartisan support among the American political and elite class.
https://religiondispatches.org/with-mam ... aign=daily
Re: Perception of Islam
Mamdani Delivers a Breakthrough Win for Muslim Americans
His mayoral election shattered a barrier that seemed insurmountable since the Sept. 11 attacks changed what it meant to be Muslim in the city.
Zohran Mamdani standing on a basketball court that was used as a polling site, surrounded by voting booths.
Zohran Mamdani casting his vote on Tuesday in Astoria, Queens.Credit...Amir Hamja for The New York Times
Elizabeth Dias
By Elizabeth Dias
Nov. 5, 2025
Updated 2:43 p.m. ET
It was one of the first unconventional things Zohran Mamdani did campaigning for mayor of New York: jumping inside the halal carts.
Standing in his suit by the grills, as vendors chopped chicken and fried falafel, he interviewed them about the problem of “halal-flation,” as he called it — why plates of rice and meat now cost $10 instead of $8 — and asked how he could help.
At first, many Muslims wondered, “Would New York City elect a Muslim mayor?” said Mohamed Attia, the managing director of the Street Vendor Project who helped connect the candidate with the carts. But, Mr. Attia added, the vendors were inspired, and praise of Mr. Mamdani spread to their customers and to the mosques.
On Tuesday, the city for the first time answered the question with a resounding yes.
With his election, Mr. Mamdani, a 34-year-old Democrat, has defied anti-Muslim backlash to his candidacy and shattered a barrier that seemed insurmountable since the Sept. 11 terror attacks transformed what it meant to be Muslim in the city. While there are four Muslims in Congress and a few Muslim mayors of smaller Americans cities, Mr. Mamdani, as mayor of America’s financial center, will become the country’s highest-level Muslim executive.
He won while fully embracing his Muslim faith on the campaign trail, even as divisions over antisemitism, Islamophobia and the war in Gaza dominated the election, including within New York’s large Muslim and Jewish communities.
Image
Zohran Mamdani reaching through the open window of a halal cart to shake hands.
Mr. Mamdani greeting halal cart workers in Brooklyn on Sunday.Credit...Amir Hamja for The New York Times
Image
Mr. Mamdani, kneeling on the floor with others, at the Bronx Muslim Center in March.
Mr. Mamdani at the Bronx Muslim Center in March.Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times
Questions about Mr. Mamdani’s religious beliefs, perhaps conflated with his political intentions, were frequently raised by his critics throughout the campaign. In a TV interview last month, Mr. Mamdani, a critic of Israel, wouldn’t give a direct answer when asked whether Hamas should lay down arms and step aside in Gaza, which spurred vitriolic attacks and suggestions that he was a terrorist sympathizer.
In another interview, in June, he declined to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which is considered a rallying cry for liberation among Palestinians. Many Jews, however, consider it a call to violence. He later said he would no longer use the phrase and would discourage others from using it.
Despite the backlash, Keith Ellison, a Democrat who is the attorney general of Minnesota, said Mr. Mamdani’s election showed “dramatic improvement” from his own election in 2006, when he became the first Muslim to be elected to Congress.
“It speaks well to our country,” Mr. Ellison said, “because at a moment when arguably the president won election by appealing to people’s desire to exclude, Americans are trying still to include.”
Also on Tuesday night, voters in Virginia elected Ghazala Hashmi, a Democrat, as lieutenant governor, making her the first Muslim woman to win statewide office there.
Democrats have for years struggled to organize religious voters, but in just a few months Mr. Mamdani activated a new base of Muslim voters and attracted a progressive cross-identity coalition that supported his goals, like making New York affordable and opposing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, often on moral grounds. Now, the most prominent face of progressive religion in the Democratic Party is not a liberal Christian but a Muslim who practices his faith while also creating space for interfaith and secular morality.
Many of Mr. Mamdani’s political views are not necessarily tied to his religion. But he has also unabashedly centered his faith, reaching out to the nearly one million Muslims in New York who, as he put it, had for too long been taught to live “in the shadows.”
Image
Mr. Mamdani speaking onstage in front of dozens of supporters holding signs.
Mr. Mamdani at a rally at United Palace, a cultural center in Washington Heights in Manhattan.Credit...Vincent Alban/The New York Times
As of June, about a third of New York’s Muslims were registered to vote, but only about one in 10 voted in the last mayoral election, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Muslims make up about 1 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Pew Research Center.
Muslims in America historically have affiliated more with the Democratic Party. But in the past couple years Muslims have emerged as a more fluid group. Notably, in Michigan last year, Arab-American voters helped deliver the state for President Trump, some directly citing frustration with the Biden administration’s support for Israel. Mr. Mamdani’s rise has shown how Muslim voters are demanding more engagement and recognition of their voice.
Mr. Mamdani visited more than 50 mosques during the campaign, regularly going to different ones on Fridays for jummah prayers. He campaigned while fasting for Ramadan and had a Muslim wedding ceremony, known as a nikkah, in Dubai, where his wife’s family lives. When he visited the family of a police officer who was killed in a Midtown Manhattan shooting in July, they told him that he and the slain officer had crossed paths at Eid prayers.
“There is a constant effort to try and draw a small barrier around who can be American,” said Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat and former public health director running for Senate in Michigan. “That is what makes this moment so special.”
Like Mr. Mamdani, Mr. El-Sayed has also drawn on the values of his Muslim faith as he seeks the responsibility of public office. “There’s a beautiful tradition in our faith that if you were to eat a full meal, and your neighbor could smell your meal and didn’t have, then you would be committing a sin,” he said.
“For all of us, ask yourself: What is wrong with sharing your food? What is wrong with sharing your resources?” he added.
Mr. Mamdani’s religious values, and the policies that flow from them, also stand in contrast to the conservative brand of Christianity that has been elevated within the Republican Party.
“We are in a moment of the pluralists versus the anti-pluralists,” said Zeenat Rahman, executive director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. Anti-pluralists currently have a lot of state support, but most Americans function as pluralists in their day-to-day lives, she said.
“The fact that he could win in this climate says something to me about how Americans are craving leadership that reflects pluralism, not just tolerance but a real belief that our diversity strengthens our democracy,” she said.
Image
Mr. Mamdani smiling as he walks amid several people.
Mr. Mamdani after voting on Tuesday in Astoria, Queens.Credit...Amir Hamja for The New York Times
Image
Mr. Mamdani, in a suit and tie, raising his arms with other elected officials at a canvassing event.
Mr. Mamdani alongside other elected officials at a canvassing event in Jamaica, Queens. Credit...Vincent Alban/The New York Times
Mr. Mamdani “has been allowed to be seen in the complexity of who he is,” Ms. Rahman said, defined not simply by his faith but by his policies and leadership. “To me that is the progress in the story,” she added.
After Sept. 11, when Mr. Mamdani was about 13, his father, a political scientist at Columbia, wrote a book called “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,” dispelling the stereotypical binary of Muslim political identities.
He dedicated the book to “Zohran and his mates” in Uganda, Cape Town, New York and New Delhi, in hopes that “together, they will no doubt remake the world they inherit from us.”
Even as Mr. Mamdani broke barriers for Muslims, his campaign particularly roiled Jews across the country. New York’s mayoral race came to symbolize the broader debates over antisemitism and anti-Zionism that have intensified since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel.
Muslims watched his campaign with pride but also with fear, as his opponents were accused of inciting hatred against Muslims. Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, falsely accused Mr. Mamdani of supporting “global jihad,” and Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent, participated in an exchange suggesting that Mr. Mamdani would celebrate another Sept. 11-like terrorist attack.
Mr. Mamdani responded with an emotional speech about his experiences of bigotry and Islamophobia. It was another way he elevated the daily experiences of Muslims in the city.
When Little Flower Cafe, a halal eatery in Queens, opened in 2022, the owner, Ali Zaman, said Mr. Mamdani started popping by regularly to order his favorite drink: a pink chai made with green tea mixed with baking soda, as well as cardamom, rose water and milk.
Initially, Mr. Zaman, 29, was hesitant about Mr. Mamdani, wondering if he was like other politicians who he felt sold out over time. But during Ramadan last year, months before announcing his candidacy, Mr. Mamdani reached out to host an iftar dinner at Mr. Zaman’s father’s restaurant, Sami’s Kabab House.
They prayed across traditions — “I was raised Sunni, he was raised Shia” — and Mr. Mamdani said he wanted to mourn together what he called the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, Mr. Zaman recalled.
“That was the night I was like, Oh, I have no doubt about what kind of person he is,” Mr. Zaman said. “He was like a really cool Muslim brother. He was a brown brother.”
Elizabeth Dias is The Times’s national religion correspondent, covering faith, politics and values.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/us/p ... e9677ea768
His mayoral election shattered a barrier that seemed insurmountable since the Sept. 11 attacks changed what it meant to be Muslim in the city.
Zohran Mamdani standing on a basketball court that was used as a polling site, surrounded by voting booths.
Zohran Mamdani casting his vote on Tuesday in Astoria, Queens.Credit...Amir Hamja for The New York Times
Elizabeth Dias
By Elizabeth Dias
Nov. 5, 2025
Updated 2:43 p.m. ET
It was one of the first unconventional things Zohran Mamdani did campaigning for mayor of New York: jumping inside the halal carts.
Standing in his suit by the grills, as vendors chopped chicken and fried falafel, he interviewed them about the problem of “halal-flation,” as he called it — why plates of rice and meat now cost $10 instead of $8 — and asked how he could help.
At first, many Muslims wondered, “Would New York City elect a Muslim mayor?” said Mohamed Attia, the managing director of the Street Vendor Project who helped connect the candidate with the carts. But, Mr. Attia added, the vendors were inspired, and praise of Mr. Mamdani spread to their customers and to the mosques.
On Tuesday, the city for the first time answered the question with a resounding yes.
With his election, Mr. Mamdani, a 34-year-old Democrat, has defied anti-Muslim backlash to his candidacy and shattered a barrier that seemed insurmountable since the Sept. 11 terror attacks transformed what it meant to be Muslim in the city. While there are four Muslims in Congress and a few Muslim mayors of smaller Americans cities, Mr. Mamdani, as mayor of America’s financial center, will become the country’s highest-level Muslim executive.
He won while fully embracing his Muslim faith on the campaign trail, even as divisions over antisemitism, Islamophobia and the war in Gaza dominated the election, including within New York’s large Muslim and Jewish communities.
Image
Zohran Mamdani reaching through the open window of a halal cart to shake hands.
Mr. Mamdani greeting halal cart workers in Brooklyn on Sunday.Credit...Amir Hamja for The New York Times
Image
Mr. Mamdani, kneeling on the floor with others, at the Bronx Muslim Center in March.
Mr. Mamdani at the Bronx Muslim Center in March.Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times
Questions about Mr. Mamdani’s religious beliefs, perhaps conflated with his political intentions, were frequently raised by his critics throughout the campaign. In a TV interview last month, Mr. Mamdani, a critic of Israel, wouldn’t give a direct answer when asked whether Hamas should lay down arms and step aside in Gaza, which spurred vitriolic attacks and suggestions that he was a terrorist sympathizer.
In another interview, in June, he declined to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which is considered a rallying cry for liberation among Palestinians. Many Jews, however, consider it a call to violence. He later said he would no longer use the phrase and would discourage others from using it.
Despite the backlash, Keith Ellison, a Democrat who is the attorney general of Minnesota, said Mr. Mamdani’s election showed “dramatic improvement” from his own election in 2006, when he became the first Muslim to be elected to Congress.
“It speaks well to our country,” Mr. Ellison said, “because at a moment when arguably the president won election by appealing to people’s desire to exclude, Americans are trying still to include.”
Also on Tuesday night, voters in Virginia elected Ghazala Hashmi, a Democrat, as lieutenant governor, making her the first Muslim woman to win statewide office there.
Democrats have for years struggled to organize religious voters, but in just a few months Mr. Mamdani activated a new base of Muslim voters and attracted a progressive cross-identity coalition that supported his goals, like making New York affordable and opposing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, often on moral grounds. Now, the most prominent face of progressive religion in the Democratic Party is not a liberal Christian but a Muslim who practices his faith while also creating space for interfaith and secular morality.
Many of Mr. Mamdani’s political views are not necessarily tied to his religion. But he has also unabashedly centered his faith, reaching out to the nearly one million Muslims in New York who, as he put it, had for too long been taught to live “in the shadows.”
Image
Mr. Mamdani speaking onstage in front of dozens of supporters holding signs.
Mr. Mamdani at a rally at United Palace, a cultural center in Washington Heights in Manhattan.Credit...Vincent Alban/The New York Times
As of June, about a third of New York’s Muslims were registered to vote, but only about one in 10 voted in the last mayoral election, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Muslims make up about 1 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Pew Research Center.
Muslims in America historically have affiliated more with the Democratic Party. But in the past couple years Muslims have emerged as a more fluid group. Notably, in Michigan last year, Arab-American voters helped deliver the state for President Trump, some directly citing frustration with the Biden administration’s support for Israel. Mr. Mamdani’s rise has shown how Muslim voters are demanding more engagement and recognition of their voice.
Mr. Mamdani visited more than 50 mosques during the campaign, regularly going to different ones on Fridays for jummah prayers. He campaigned while fasting for Ramadan and had a Muslim wedding ceremony, known as a nikkah, in Dubai, where his wife’s family lives. When he visited the family of a police officer who was killed in a Midtown Manhattan shooting in July, they told him that he and the slain officer had crossed paths at Eid prayers.
“There is a constant effort to try and draw a small barrier around who can be American,” said Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat and former public health director running for Senate in Michigan. “That is what makes this moment so special.”
Like Mr. Mamdani, Mr. El-Sayed has also drawn on the values of his Muslim faith as he seeks the responsibility of public office. “There’s a beautiful tradition in our faith that if you were to eat a full meal, and your neighbor could smell your meal and didn’t have, then you would be committing a sin,” he said.
“For all of us, ask yourself: What is wrong with sharing your food? What is wrong with sharing your resources?” he added.
Mr. Mamdani’s religious values, and the policies that flow from them, also stand in contrast to the conservative brand of Christianity that has been elevated within the Republican Party.
“We are in a moment of the pluralists versus the anti-pluralists,” said Zeenat Rahman, executive director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. Anti-pluralists currently have a lot of state support, but most Americans function as pluralists in their day-to-day lives, she said.
“The fact that he could win in this climate says something to me about how Americans are craving leadership that reflects pluralism, not just tolerance but a real belief that our diversity strengthens our democracy,” she said.
Image
Mr. Mamdani smiling as he walks amid several people.
Mr. Mamdani after voting on Tuesday in Astoria, Queens.Credit...Amir Hamja for The New York Times
Image
Mr. Mamdani, in a suit and tie, raising his arms with other elected officials at a canvassing event.
Mr. Mamdani alongside other elected officials at a canvassing event in Jamaica, Queens. Credit...Vincent Alban/The New York Times
Mr. Mamdani “has been allowed to be seen in the complexity of who he is,” Ms. Rahman said, defined not simply by his faith but by his policies and leadership. “To me that is the progress in the story,” she added.
After Sept. 11, when Mr. Mamdani was about 13, his father, a political scientist at Columbia, wrote a book called “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,” dispelling the stereotypical binary of Muslim political identities.
He dedicated the book to “Zohran and his mates” in Uganda, Cape Town, New York and New Delhi, in hopes that “together, they will no doubt remake the world they inherit from us.”
Even as Mr. Mamdani broke barriers for Muslims, his campaign particularly roiled Jews across the country. New York’s mayoral race came to symbolize the broader debates over antisemitism and anti-Zionism that have intensified since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel.
Muslims watched his campaign with pride but also with fear, as his opponents were accused of inciting hatred against Muslims. Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, falsely accused Mr. Mamdani of supporting “global jihad,” and Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent, participated in an exchange suggesting that Mr. Mamdani would celebrate another Sept. 11-like terrorist attack.
Mr. Mamdani responded with an emotional speech about his experiences of bigotry and Islamophobia. It was another way he elevated the daily experiences of Muslims in the city.
When Little Flower Cafe, a halal eatery in Queens, opened in 2022, the owner, Ali Zaman, said Mr. Mamdani started popping by regularly to order his favorite drink: a pink chai made with green tea mixed with baking soda, as well as cardamom, rose water and milk.
Initially, Mr. Zaman, 29, was hesitant about Mr. Mamdani, wondering if he was like other politicians who he felt sold out over time. But during Ramadan last year, months before announcing his candidacy, Mr. Mamdani reached out to host an iftar dinner at Mr. Zaman’s father’s restaurant, Sami’s Kabab House.
They prayed across traditions — “I was raised Sunni, he was raised Shia” — and Mr. Mamdani said he wanted to mourn together what he called the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, Mr. Zaman recalled.
“That was the night I was like, Oh, I have no doubt about what kind of person he is,” Mr. Zaman said. “He was like a really cool Muslim brother. He was a brown brother.”
Elizabeth Dias is The Times’s national religion correspondent, covering faith, politics and values.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/us/p ... e9677ea768
Re: Perception of Islam
BAD MUSLIM, GOOD MAYOR — MAMDANI WINS DECISIVE VICTORY OVER ISLAMOPHOBIC ELECTION TACTICS
The name is Mamdani, M-A-M-D-A-N-I.
You should learn how to say it.
Because he won.
On November 4, 2025, New York City elected Zohran Kwame Mamdani as its first Muslim mayor. Throughout his campaign—from polling at 1% of the vote in January to an all-but-assured victory this week—his opposition consistently and shamelessly leaned into Islamophobia. That bipartisan opposition included the usual suspects, from bigots like Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Florida Congressman Randy Fine to neoliberal white women like failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and unhinged Zioinist actress Debra Messing.
There’s absolutely nothing surprising about the old guard on both sides of the aisle relying on a tactic that’s proved overwhelmingly effective in American politics for nearly three decades. The real upset is that New York City, arguably ground zero for 21st century American Islamophobia, seems to no longer be buying it.
Islamophobia is racism
When a voter told John McCain in 2008 that she couldn’t vote for Obama because she thought the future 44th president was an Arab, McCain corrected her immediately. “No ma’am,” he said, “[Obama] is a decent family man and a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.” This was a layered moment: on the one hand, many Arabs manage to be both decent people and US citizens; on the other, McCain rejected the voter’s Islamophobia (an incredibly and increasingly rare impulse in American politics).
Seventeen years later, no Republicans or establishment Democrats seem willing to condemn the baseless and offensive religio-racial attacks on Mamdani. (Here, as in so many ways, Brad Lander is a notable exception to this kind of venal Democratic cowardice. What a mensch.)
Brad Lander and a curly haired lady wearing "good fucking riddance" tshirts
NYC’s comptroller’s t-shirt says what we’re all thinking
It’s important that we understand Islamophobia for what it truly is: anti-Muslim racism. Islam is, of course, not a race—but it is racialized, or infused with assumptions about core characteristics shared by all Muslims. “Phobia” makes anti-Muslim animus sound like individual fear or distaste. But Islamophobia is so much more than individuals or groups being uncomfortable with or scared of Islam or Muslims. As anti-Muslim racism, Islamophobia shapes and infuses systems and institutions in ways that no other form of religious intolerance does.
American antiZionist Jews have rightly condemned this administration for using allegations of antisemitism to silence and punish critics of Israel’s genocide, but American domestic policy codifies Islamophobia in ways unique to anti-Muslim racism. And to be clear: all forms of religious intolerance are unacceptable (and deeply hypocritical in a country that supposedly celebrates religious freedom and individual liberty).
But state legislatures target and ban “Shariah law,” not Talmudic law. Federal law enforcement surveils mosques in a way it does not surveil synagogues. There is no constitutionally protected immigration or travel ban for Jewish-majority countries or regions, nor federally-funded programs targeting Jewish extremism. Campus crackdowns on “antisemitism” in the form of anti-genocide protests absolutely target antiZionist Jewish students, but also heighten policing, surveilance, and criminalization of Islam and Muslims—in ways that do not protect students, Jewish or otherwise, but do further this country’s white Christian nationalist pro-Israel agenda.
The dawn of a better day?
Assumptions that every Muslim—including the first Muslim mayor of New York City—is necessarily violent, unAmerican, antisemitic, or misogynist are all rooted in Islamophobia, in antiMuslim racism. But even Mamdani supporters have unintentionally reinforced Islamophobic stereotypes.
Some posted pictures of his wife, Rama Duwaji, as evidence that Mamdani wouldn’t institute mandatory burqas for women (as his racist detractors alleged with the convenient use of AI generated images). Ironically, given his dad’s famously scathing critique of this strategy, Mamdani’s advocates were trying to prove that the mayor-elect is a “good Muslim”—modern, safe, Muslim (but not too much!), not like those other sexist, tyrannical Muslim men who make their wives wear the hijab. While undoubtedly well-intentioned, this kind of rebuttal is still rooted in neoliberal white feminist anti-Muslim racism: a worldview that prioritizes western understandings of “liberation” and “freedom” and reproduces Orientalist tropes at the expense of Muslim women’s agency, dignity, and full humanity.
Mamdani’s success hasn’t ended Islamophobia in the city or anywhere else—but this Tuesday, over 50% of New York voters resoundingly rejected the proposition that a man can’t be a Muslim and a good mayor (or a good American). In his powerful victory speech, New York City’s mayor-elect declared that “no more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.”
Video: https://youtu.be/eMuL07jVFsM
May his words ring out far beyond the borders of New York. Insha Allah.
Tags
https://religiondispatches.org/bad-musl ... aign=daily
The name is Mamdani, M-A-M-D-A-N-I.
You should learn how to say it.
Because he won.
On November 4, 2025, New York City elected Zohran Kwame Mamdani as its first Muslim mayor. Throughout his campaign—from polling at 1% of the vote in January to an all-but-assured victory this week—his opposition consistently and shamelessly leaned into Islamophobia. That bipartisan opposition included the usual suspects, from bigots like Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Florida Congressman Randy Fine to neoliberal white women like failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and unhinged Zioinist actress Debra Messing.
There’s absolutely nothing surprising about the old guard on both sides of the aisle relying on a tactic that’s proved overwhelmingly effective in American politics for nearly three decades. The real upset is that New York City, arguably ground zero for 21st century American Islamophobia, seems to no longer be buying it.
Islamophobia is racism
When a voter told John McCain in 2008 that she couldn’t vote for Obama because she thought the future 44th president was an Arab, McCain corrected her immediately. “No ma’am,” he said, “[Obama] is a decent family man and a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.” This was a layered moment: on the one hand, many Arabs manage to be both decent people and US citizens; on the other, McCain rejected the voter’s Islamophobia (an incredibly and increasingly rare impulse in American politics).
Seventeen years later, no Republicans or establishment Democrats seem willing to condemn the baseless and offensive religio-racial attacks on Mamdani. (Here, as in so many ways, Brad Lander is a notable exception to this kind of venal Democratic cowardice. What a mensch.)
Brad Lander and a curly haired lady wearing "good fucking riddance" tshirts
NYC’s comptroller’s t-shirt says what we’re all thinking
It’s important that we understand Islamophobia for what it truly is: anti-Muslim racism. Islam is, of course, not a race—but it is racialized, or infused with assumptions about core characteristics shared by all Muslims. “Phobia” makes anti-Muslim animus sound like individual fear or distaste. But Islamophobia is so much more than individuals or groups being uncomfortable with or scared of Islam or Muslims. As anti-Muslim racism, Islamophobia shapes and infuses systems and institutions in ways that no other form of religious intolerance does.
American antiZionist Jews have rightly condemned this administration for using allegations of antisemitism to silence and punish critics of Israel’s genocide, but American domestic policy codifies Islamophobia in ways unique to anti-Muslim racism. And to be clear: all forms of religious intolerance are unacceptable (and deeply hypocritical in a country that supposedly celebrates religious freedom and individual liberty).
But state legislatures target and ban “Shariah law,” not Talmudic law. Federal law enforcement surveils mosques in a way it does not surveil synagogues. There is no constitutionally protected immigration or travel ban for Jewish-majority countries or regions, nor federally-funded programs targeting Jewish extremism. Campus crackdowns on “antisemitism” in the form of anti-genocide protests absolutely target antiZionist Jewish students, but also heighten policing, surveilance, and criminalization of Islam and Muslims—in ways that do not protect students, Jewish or otherwise, but do further this country’s white Christian nationalist pro-Israel agenda.
The dawn of a better day?
Assumptions that every Muslim—including the first Muslim mayor of New York City—is necessarily violent, unAmerican, antisemitic, or misogynist are all rooted in Islamophobia, in antiMuslim racism. But even Mamdani supporters have unintentionally reinforced Islamophobic stereotypes.
Some posted pictures of his wife, Rama Duwaji, as evidence that Mamdani wouldn’t institute mandatory burqas for women (as his racist detractors alleged with the convenient use of AI generated images). Ironically, given his dad’s famously scathing critique of this strategy, Mamdani’s advocates were trying to prove that the mayor-elect is a “good Muslim”—modern, safe, Muslim (but not too much!), not like those other sexist, tyrannical Muslim men who make their wives wear the hijab. While undoubtedly well-intentioned, this kind of rebuttal is still rooted in neoliberal white feminist anti-Muslim racism: a worldview that prioritizes western understandings of “liberation” and “freedom” and reproduces Orientalist tropes at the expense of Muslim women’s agency, dignity, and full humanity.
Mamdani’s success hasn’t ended Islamophobia in the city or anywhere else—but this Tuesday, over 50% of New York voters resoundingly rejected the proposition that a man can’t be a Muslim and a good mayor (or a good American). In his powerful victory speech, New York City’s mayor-elect declared that “no more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.”
Video: https://youtu.be/eMuL07jVFsM
May his words ring out far beyond the borders of New York. Insha Allah.
Tags
https://religiondispatches.org/bad-musl ... aign=daily
Re: Perception of Islam
The Conversation That Shocked Europe – King Charles & Bernie Sanders on ISLAM
What happens when a monarch and a revolutionary senator sit down to talk about truth, faith, and humanity?
This historic dialogue between King Charles III and Bernie Sanders dives deep into the heart of ISLAM — exploring peace, justice, and the wisdom the modern world has forgotten.
From royal halls to political stages, this powerful conversation exposes what the media never showed: the shared values between Islam and the West — compassion, humility, and the pursuit of truth.
Bernie Sanders speaks from the heart, challenging prejudice and reminding the world that understanding is stronger than fear.
King Charles reflects on decades of study and his respect for Islamic philosophy, ecology, and morality.
Together, they deliver a message that Europe — and the world — could no longer ignore.
“No civilization can rise by hating what it does not understand.” — Bernie Sanders
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XWdbiEyMrQ
What happens when a monarch and a revolutionary senator sit down to talk about truth, faith, and humanity?
This historic dialogue between King Charles III and Bernie Sanders dives deep into the heart of ISLAM — exploring peace, justice, and the wisdom the modern world has forgotten.
From royal halls to political stages, this powerful conversation exposes what the media never showed: the shared values between Islam and the West — compassion, humility, and the pursuit of truth.
Bernie Sanders speaks from the heart, challenging prejudice and reminding the world that understanding is stronger than fear.
King Charles reflects on decades of study and his respect for Islamic philosophy, ecology, and morality.
Together, they deliver a message that Europe — and the world — could no longer ignore.
“No civilization can rise by hating what it does not understand.” — Bernie SandersVideo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XWdbiEyMrQ