Category Archives: Islam in America

Obsession: Potent, Powerful, Provocative

Danish Cartoon Controversy, Election 2008, Film and Video, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islamophobia, Journalism and Media

Potent, powerful, and provocative. That’s what Nordstrom department stores have to say about Obsession, Calvin Klein’s cologne for men. These qualities are shared, no doubt, by another Obsession, a DVD currently being distributed by the Clarion Fund (http://clarionfund.org/), a nonprofit shell organization devoted to propagandizing against Islam. Subtitled “Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” copies of Obsession have been distributed as “paid advertising” in dozens of American newspapers, including the Charlotte Observer and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Desperate for cash, traditional print media are not very fussy about their advertisers these days. Ann Caulkins, the publisher of the Charlotte Observer, told the paper’s religion reporter that the DVD met the newspaper’s criteria for ads: “We’re all for freedom of expression, freedom of speech. This is in no way reflecting our opinions, but it is something we allow,” she said, adding that the newspaper would not allow material that is racist, profane, or “offers graphic images of body parts,” which at least distinguishes the paper from anything in the CSI television franchise. Continue reading Obsession: Potent, Powerful, Provocative →

Pro-McCain Group Dumping 28 Million Terror Scare DVDs in Swing States

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Election 2008, Film and Video, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia, Israel, Terrorism Issue


Sally Lopez of Lemoyne, PA displays a copy of the DVD that came in the mail.

by Erik Ose, The Latest Outrage, September 12, 2008

This week, 28 million copies of a right-wing, terror propaganda DVD are being mailed and bundled in newspaper deliveries to voters in swing states. The 60-minute DVDs, titled “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” are landing on doorsteps in a campaign coinciding with the 7th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Funding is coming from a New York-based group called the Clarion Fund, a shadowy outfit whose financial backers are The program was originally shown on Fox News in the days leading up to the 2006 mid-term elections, and right-wing activist David Horowitz toured the country screening the film on college campuses during 2007. Mainstream religious groups have called Obsession biased and divisive. It cuts between scenes of Nazi rallies and footage of Muslim children being encouraged to become suicide bombers. Continue reading Pro-McCain Group Dumping 28 Million Terror Scare DVDs in Swing States →

The World’s Top Intellectual is …

CyberOrient, Islam in America, Journalism and Media

In a world dominated by media celebrities little space is left for intellectuals. Undergraduate students multiple-choice their way through the great lights of the academic past: Freud, Marx, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and the list goes on. But who among the living tops the list of brain savy heroes? Foreign Policy held a referendum for four weeks earlier this year in which 500,000 people responded. The idea was to create a list of the world’s top 100 intellectuals. But surprise, the list would seem more a result of who was motivated to respond than anything else. Write down your top three (or at least think about three prominent living intellectuals) and compare to the Foreign Policy list. Continue reading The World’s Top Intellectual is … →

Can the Umm al Qura calendar serve as a global Islamic calendar?

Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islamic Rituals, Islamic Sciences, Saudi Arabia

by Khalid Chraibi

Over the past 50 years, the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and other similar bodies presented their member States with over a half-dozen proposals aiming at the establishment of a common Islamic calendar. Although none of these proposals was adopted, efforts in search of a solution that could be satisfactory to all interested parties continue to this day. For its part, the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) was also regularly confronted with the responsibility of telling its Muslim American audience when to start fasting, when to celebrate «eid al-Fitr», «eid al-Adha», etc. After several years of study of the legal issues involved, it reached a decision, which it announced in August 2006, to use henceforth a pre-calculated Islamic calendar, taking into consideration the sightability of the new moon anywhere on Earth. (1)

First, it retains the well-known principle of unicity of horizons (matâli’) which states that it is sufficient to observe the new moon anywhere on Earth, in order to declare the beginning of a new lunar month, applicable in all areas in which the information is received. Second, it uses the International date line (IDL) or Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as its conventional point of reference to conduct its analysis. Continue reading Can the Umm al Qura calendar serve as a global Islamic calendar? →

Move Over, You Tube

Film and Video, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Islam: Introduction, Qur'an, YouTube Watch

You Tube boasts one of the largest audiences on the web. There are plenty of videos put up by Muslims and many of these are in languages other than English. On July 11 there were 643,000 hits for the search “Islam” on You Tube. But move over, You Tube, and make room for Islamic tube, which has carefully selected videos on Islamic themes. You can find Quranic recitation, debates, numerous sermons and lectures and some rather raw anti-Zionist (and decidedly anti-Semitic) diatribes. This is a significant resource, but like all websites, should be consulted with caution.

Muslim Metal

Books You Should Read, Immigration Issues, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Music and Dance

Muslim Metal
Bands crank up multiculturalism in the Islamic world

By MARK LEVINE, The Chronicle Review, July 4, 2008

The first time I heard the words “heavy metal” and “Islam” in the same sentence, I was confused, to say the least. It was around 5 p.m. on a hot July day in the city of Fez, Morocco. I was at the bar of a five-star hotel with a group of friends having a drink — at $25 a piece, only one — to celebrate a birthday. The person sitting across from me described a punk performance he had seen in Rabat not long before we had met.

The idea of a young Moroccan with a Mohawk and a Scottish kilt almost caused me to spill my drink. That the possibility of a Muslim heavy-metal scene came as a total surprise to me only underscored how much I still had to learn about Morocco, and the Muslim world more broadly, even after a dozen years studying it, and traveling and living across it. If there could be such a thing as a heavy-metal Islam, I thought, then perhaps the future was far brighter than most observers of the Muslim world imagined less than a year after September 11, 2001. Continue reading Muslim Metal →