The $30 stoves help keep Darfur’s women safe
by reducing their time away from the refugee camps.
Stoves help keep Darfur’s women out of harm’s way
Larry Lazo, CNN
In Sudan’s Darfur region, where violence and genocide are rampant, women risk their lives every day performing tasks as seemingly mundane as seeking out firewood.
But, from his suburban home, one Maryland teen has dedicated himself to making life a little safer for those women. Continue reading Stoves for Darfur
A Difference in Language
By Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, Asharq Alawsat, November 11, 2008
I can not imagine what Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al Bashir had for dinner the evening when he made his fervent speech in Darfur where he proclaimed ‘America, Britain, and France are all underneath my shoes’. I hope that the President’s shoes remain in good condition because he will surely need them over the coming days.
That said, it is Bashir’s good fortune that the metaphor of being underneath one’s shoes is lost in translation and is not such an insult in the West, as it is in our culture, for surely such a remark made by the President about an Arab country would have led to war. Continue reading The shoe is on the other fit
Freshly displaced Darfuris await the arrival of the UN relief coordinator Jan Egeland in the rebel held town of Gereida in southern Darfur, 07 May 2006.
AFP/Getty
The Washington Post has an informative and easy to use web presentation on the crisis in Darfur. Click here to start the tour.
Prof. an-Naim speaking at Harvard in October, 2007
The Christian Science Monitor recently published an article about Emory law professor Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim and the “Muslims Heretics Conference” held in Atlanta a week ago. Here is a brief excerpt, but click here for the whole article.
Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim has seen what can happen to an Islamic reformer: His mentor was executed in 1985 in Sudan; he himself had to flee the country. Still, the self-described “Muslim heretic” has no trouble traveling the Islamic world spreading his controversial message:
There is no such thing as an Islamic state.
A secular state and human rights are essential for all societies so that Muslims and others can practice their faith freely, he tells his co-religionists.
“My motivation is in fact about being an honest, true-to-myself Muslim, rather than someone complying with state dictates,” says Mr. Naim, a professor of law at Emory University in Atlanta since 1999. “I need the state to be neutral about religious doctrine so that I can be the Muslim I choose to be.”
So committed is this scholar to opening the door to free debate within his faith that he helped organize the first “Muslim Heretics Conference” in Atlanta over the weekend. Some 75 Muslims, engaged in various reform projects, gathered to discuss issues related to sharia (Islamic law), democracy, and women’s rights – and how to cope with dissent and its consequences.
“We celebrate heresy simply to promote innovative thinking,” he says. “Every orthodoxy was at one time a heresy.”
Following a link on the website www.korans.com can take you to the website www.teddybearmuhammad.com, which hawks the cute and cuddly namesake of Islam’s prophet. As the site explains, the bear commemorates the Sudanese government recently accusing 54-year old British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons of blasphemy for “allowing” her class of 7-year old students at Khartoum’s Unity High School to choose what some considered the wrong name for the class stuffed animal. (The children named the bear after a popular classmate, not directly for the Prophet). The incident provided Sudanese politicians with an opportunity for local pandering, geopolitical bluster and a demonstration of sovereignty in reaction to international condemnation of the genocide in Darfur.
Cultural sensitivities about divine names and images are real, even when in particular instances they are feigned, exaggerated, or used as weapons in military or political conflicts. This reality is what gives their manipulation its potential power, although it also lays such manipulations open to exposure, derision, and failure. Continue reading Muhammad the Profit: Commerce, Play, and Entertainment in the Neoliberal Imperium
I am a Canadian Muslim who has been living and teaching in Los Angeles for the past decade. My recent book, Oil and Water: Two Faiths, One God is an introduction to Islam for a North American audience. As a Muslim, I am deeply concerned about violence committed by Muslims, especially when it is done in the name of Islam. Muslims around the world have condemned the recent cases in Sudan and Saudi Arabia. For example, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) wrote this in response to the jailing of the teacher in Sudan: “‘Jailing Ms. Gibbons is the real insult to Islam in this case,’ said MPAC Communications Director Edina Lekovic. ‘Invoking Islamic law to jail and deport her for this insignificant class project is absurd and appalling.'” Their full response can be found on their web page and is reproduced here:
MPAC Appalled by Sudanese Jailing of Teacher for Naming Teddy Bear
November 30, 2007The Muslim Public Affairs Council today expressed its disgust with the Sudanese court decision to jail and beat a British teacher who allowed her students to name a class teddy bear “Muhammad.”
SEE: “Calls in Sudan for Execution of British Teacher” (New York Times, 11/30/07)
The hundreds of protesters, some waving ceremonial swords, outside the presidential palace denouncing the teacher and calling for her execution are falling into a pathetic trap by making a story out of nothing. The leaflets condemned Gibbons as an “infidel” and accused her of “the pollution of children’s mentality” by her actions.
“Jailing Ms. Gibbons is the real insult to Islam in this case,” said MPAC Communications Director Edina Lekovic. “Invoking Islamic law to jail and deport her for this insignificant class project is absurd and appalling.” Continue reading MPAC and the Bad News Bear Story
[Illustration: Ayaan Hirsi in the Theo Van Goghin film, left;alleged preparation of woman for stoning, right.]
In a New York Times op-ed published yesterday by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a controversial Dutch Somali, a relevant and timely question is asked: Where are Muslim moderates when misogynist renderings of Islam sweep the media? She has a point in noting the relative absence of condemnation of three recent tabloid news items. There is the Shi’a woman in Qatif, raped by several Shi’a men, and herself branded (to the barbaric tune of 200 lashes) guilty by a Sunni Wahhabi court for “mingling” with a man not her husband. Then the hug-my-teddy-bear-but-don’t-mention the-prophet’s-name fiasco over a naive British teacher in Sudan, and finally the case of Taslima Nasreen, a Bangladeshi writer vilified for her feminist writings that approach the controversial barzakh of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. So where are the moderates? For Ms. Ali they are phantom progressives, too blinded by their loyalty to the faith and fearful of telling truth to Muslim power. Here is her assessment:
It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked†by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates. Continue reading Where are the Moderates?