Category Archives: Afghanistan

Music in the World of Islam

Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Central Asia, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, Music and Dance, Syria, Teaching Resources, Turkey, Yemen

A year ago from August 8-13 an international conference on “Music in the World of Islam” was held in Assilah, Morocco, jointly sponsored by The Assilah Forum Foundation (Assilah, Morocco) and the Maison des Cultures du Monde (Paris, France). The papers from this conference are now available in pdf format online. Music and dance are described for Afghanistan, Algeria, Andalusia, Azerbeijan, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Central Asia, East Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Kuwait, Liberia, Malaysia, Morocco, Russia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey and Yemen.

A description of the conference is described by its main organizer, Pierre Bois: Continue reading Music in the World of Islam →

Not your Daily Bread

Afghanistan, Food and Drink, Iran, Orientalism, Photography


Baking bread in Seyistan on the Afghan Border

[It is hard to find a society in the Middle East without a thriving history of bread preparation. Before the modern loaf and bleached flour assaulted our tastebuds, a variety of flat breads were baked, either in clay overs or other makeshift ovens. Here is a description of both Afghan and Turcoman bread making from a century ago, as reported by Ellsworth Huntington in the National Geographic Magazine in 1909. Webshaykh.]

The method of cooking it was very different from that employed in the oases, where ovens of mud shaped like beehives, with a hole in the top, are heated with a fire of weeds, and the dough is stuck against the inside of the hot oven, where it hangs until it is so far cooked that it falls down into the ashes. The bread of the Afghan caravan was cooked by heating small, round cobblestones in the fire and then poking them out and wrapping dough an inch thick about them. The balls thus formed were again thrown into the fire to be poked out again when cooked. The bread tasted well there in the desert, although in civilized communities the grit and ashes would have seemed unendurable. Continue reading Not your Daily Bread →

A Course on the Collision Course

Afghanistan, Books You Should Read, Iraq War, Osama Bin Laden, Terrorism Issue

[The aftermath of 9/11 has yielded a stream of books on Islam and violence, so much so that it is rare to find a book about Islam that does not tackle the issue one way or the other. Part of this is due to media promotion of books like Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong? and the neocon mantra borrowed from Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis. A refreshing rejoinder to all this clash talk is provided by Gene Heck in his recent When Worlds Collide: Exploring the Ideological and Political Foundations of the Clash of Civilizations. Here is an excerpt from his Introduction. Webshaykh]

What are the Causes of Modern Middle East Terror?

5. That the so-called Wahhabi movement is often unjustly maligned for alleged doctrines and precepts that do not comport with the actual teachings of the movement’s eighteenth-century founder, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, who advocated jihad by peaceful, not militant, means. Continue reading A Course on the Collision Course →

So al-Qa’ida’s defeated, eh? Go tell it to the marines

Afghanistan, Iraq, Iraq War, Journalism and Media

Robert Fisk, The Independent, Sunday, 1 June 2008

So al-Qa’ida is “almost defeated”, is it? Major gains against al-Qa’ida. Essentially defeated. “On balance, we are doing pretty well,” the CIA’s boss, Michael Hayden, tells The Washington Post. “Near strategic defeat of al-Qa’ida in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qa’ida in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qa’ida globally – and here I’m going to use the word ‘ideologically’ – as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam.” Well, you could have fooled me.

Six thousand dead in Afghanistan, tens of thousands dead in Iraq, a suicide bombing a day in Mesopotamia, the highest level of suicides ever in the US military – the Arab press wisely ran this story head to head with Hayden’s boasts – and permanent US bases in Iraq after 31 December. And we’ve won? Continue reading So al-Qa’ida’s defeated, eh? Go tell it to the marines →

Human rights violations in the name of religion

Afghanistan, Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Journalism and Media, Taliban

by Wazhma Frogh, from Persian Mirror

As the world is witness of Afghanistan stepping into development and rehabilitation phase, but experiences have revealed that no country can ever develop without a sound base for human rights issues. Afghans are suffering from a very harsh situation and human values are worthless in many parts of the region. As I am a researcher on women issues in Afghanistan and I travel frequently to different parts of the region to find out the living circumstances of women.

Some three months before I has a visit to an eastern south province of Afghanistan and observed the situation of women and children, their rights have been massacred entirely under the shadow of ignorance those who call themselves Muslims. In this province, in every 10 families , 9 of them have sold their daughters at a value equivalent to 300 US $. Continue reading Human rights violations in the name of religion →

What is There to Study?

Afghanistan, Journalism and Media, Taliban, Terrorism Issue

Tomorrow I am scheduled to teach a class on the political advice of Niccolo Machiavelli, some five centuries removed. If this noted Florentine were alive today, he would probably display an unseemly Italian gesture at the political disarray of his beloved Italy and the ineptness of the world’s remaining superpower’s involvement to his geographic Orient. Can you imagine this advice in an updated edition of The Prince: when in doubt or unwilling to act, form a study group. Just over a year ago we had the highly touted and now conveniently shelved Iraq Study Group. The media touted the prominent bipartisan members, the report was available free to the public, and the sitting President more or less brushed aside any recommendation that did not flatter him. This would no doubt please Machiavelli’s realism. He just surged ahead, sending more troops rather than admitting a flawed policy in the first place.

Each day the news media report suicide bombings, now more commonly in Pakistan and Afghanistan. For some this might mean the surge is working. But what about the surge in violence outside Iraq, especially in Afghanistan, the place it all started. Somebody forgot to form a study group for Afghanistan, but now we have it. Continue reading What is There to Study? →

Apostasy in Islam

Afghanistan, Islam and Christianity, Islamic Law, Islamophobia, Taliban, Wahhabi

In the furor throughout the Islamic world over the publication of negative caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in Danish newspapers, and more recently giving the name Muhammad to a teddy bear, the earlier anger about author Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was rekindled. The critical difference, of course, is that Rushdie was condemned not only for blaspheming the Prophet but for leaving Islam as the faith he was born into. This issue of apostasy — leaving Islam — resurfaced a year ago in the case of an Afghan man named Abdul Rahman, who proudly claimed he had converted to Christianity. Several Islamic nations, including Afghanistan regard apostasy as a crime and impose the death penalty for this.

The issue seems to be simple; it is egregious to any modern notion of human rights and Islamophobes are quick to dredge up a long history of Islamic legal rulings that legitimize such a death penalty. In point of fact no contemporary Islamic nation state follows all the ascribed shari’a penalties to the letter of the law. Even when constitutions state that the laws are based on the shari’a, it is the state itself which takes over many of the functions once given to Islamic judges. What might have worked (and we know that laws were always unevenly applied) at some point in the caliphate is not working today. Continue reading Apostasy in Islam →

“Worse than Salman Rushdie”

Afghanistan, Qur'an

Afghan Koran distributor arrested
By Alix Kroeger
BBC News, Kabul

The distributor of a new translation of the Koran has been arrested after complaints from religious scholars that the new edition was un-Islamic.

Former journalist Ghows Zalmay is also the spokesman for Afghanistan’s attorney general.

He was arrested on the border on Sunday while trying to flee into Pakistan.

Demonstrators protested in two Afghan provinces against the new translation of the Koran into Dari, one of Afghanistan’s two official languages.

Religious scholars are outraged at the new edition of the Muslim holy book.

They say that it is un-Islamic, that it misinterprets verses about alcohol, begging, homosexuality and adultery. Continue reading “Worse than Salman Rushdie” →