Category Archives: Ethics

Spiritual Malaria?

Ethics, Islamic Law, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Wahhabi


by Nadeem F. Paracha, blog.dawn.com, July 1
 
A recent fatwa from a ‘Saudi Council of Muftis’ has this advice for fellow
Muslims: Do not say [or write] ‘mosque.’ Always say ‘masjid’ because mosque
may mean mosquito. Another myopic case of Saudi malaria perhaps?

Certainly. But that’s not all. The grand fatwa goes on to suggest that
Muslims should not write ‘Mecca’ but Makkah, because Mecca may mean ‘house
of wines.’ I am serious. But then so are the Muftis. They certainly need to
get a life.

But I’m not all that surprised by such fatwas that usually emanate from
Saudi Arabia. While vicious reactionary literature originating in
totalitarian puritanical Muslim states impact and mutate the political
bearings of various religious parties and groups in Pakistan, ‘social
fatwas’ like the one mentioned above also began appearing in the early 1980s
to influence the more apolitical sections of Muslim societies.

Reactionary literature generated by the Saudi propaganda machine started
being distributed in Pakistan from 1979 onwards, mostly in the shape of
pamphlets and books.

Duly translated into Urdu, they glorify and propagate violent action (jihad)
not only against non-Muslims (or infidels) but also against those Muslims
who fail to follow the thorny dictates of a certain puritanical strain of
the faith. Continue reading Spiritual Malaria? →

IMANA Conference at Hofstra University

Conferences and Talks, Ethics, Islam in America


The Islamic Medical Association of North America (IMANA) and the Muslim Chaplain’s Office of Hofstra University invite you to attend the 2010 IMANA-Hofstra Ethics Symposium, September 17-18, 2010. The symposium’s theme is End of Life Issues: Ethical and Religious Perspectives.

Intended audience are physicians, especially those in critical care medicine, emergency medicine, maternal fetal medicine and neonatology, medical bioethicists, chaplains, students in these fields and interested individuals.

Full details, including registration, are available on the conference website. For more information, contact the conference co-director Dr. Hossam E. Fadel.

Hofstra University is located in Hempstead, New York, accessible by the LIRR from Penn Station. All sessions take place in the Multipurpose Room 0101, Student Center.

The conference schedule is provided below: Continue reading IMANA Conference at Hofstra University →

Questioning the Veil

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Teaching Resources


[Editor’s note: Marnia Lazreg’s Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009) is a refreshing unveiling of the long debated arguments on the use of some sort of “veil” in Muslim societies. These letters, concise and impassioned arguments in essay format, are for all to read. Modesty? Protection against sexual harassment? Newly formatted cultural identity? Conviction and Piety? Lazreg draws on her own upbringing in Algeria and research as a sociologist to frame her conviction of why Muslim women should not wear the veil. No one interested in the ongoing discussion should fail to read her important contribution. I provide here a brief excerpt from her Introduction.]

I do not approach veiling from the perspective of the struggle between “tradition” and “modernity,” which purportedly women resolve by opting for the veil, as a number of studies have claimed. New styles of veiling are less confining to a woman’s ability to move about than old ones, and a number of veiled women throughout the Muslim world have been carrying out their professional activities side by side with men in their workplaces. Nor do I consider wearing a veil at work as ushering in a new form of “modernity.” Furthermore, I do not intend to characterize veiling as representing women’s “alienation,” “enslavement,” or “subjugation” to cultural norms. Such characterizations are unhelpful as they can easily be applied to our postmodern condition, marked as it is by a retreat from a meaningfully shared human experience and the flaunting of privatized forms of consciousness, which result in conceptions of women that are as detrimental to women’s integrity as the veil might be. Continue reading Questioning the Veil →

The Empire’s New Clothes

Bible and Holy Land, Ethics, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islamophobia 101


Biblical Job by Gustave Gore, surrounded by his so-called “friends”

In biblical times when an individual mourned, it involved tearing up everyday clothes and putting on coarse sackcloth and ashes. This is what the patriarch Jacob did when told his young son Joseph had been killed. When Job lost his family he sat on a dung pile. Both acts were motivated by humility rather than thoughts of revenge. As fitting as Job’s location might be for some of the memorial scenes yesterday, several of those making the news headlines represented the Empire (it is hard not to think of the United States superpower as anything else but an empire) in what they thought were patriotic “red, white, and blue” cloth, but which even a little child could see were politically naked to the core. The New York Times reports a woman at the 9/11 site holding up a sign that read ““Today is ONLY about my sister and the other innocents killed nine years ago.” Would that were true.

The loss of life nine years ago in a terrorist act deserves reflection for many reasons. For those of us who live in the New York area, there but for the grace of timing go we. Those who died had pulled no triggers, pushed no buttons to drop bombs, made no political decisions to invade another country, burned no Qur’ans. They died because politically motivated extremists so hated the policies of the United States in the Middle East that they were willing to commit an atrocious suicidal act to make a symbolic statement. It did not matter that among those killed were Americans who strongly disagreed with America’s foreign policy or were in fact Muslims. Such is the ethical nothingness that hate sets as a trap, no matter which God is being called upon to condone an evil act. Continue reading The Empire’s New Clothes →

America’s “Good Muslims” Are Being Left Out to Dry

Ethics, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islamophobia 101


by Abbas Barzegar, Huffington Post, August 19, 2010

There were a few things I did and didn’t expect when I first heard about the now controversial Cordoba Initiative’s Muslim community center project in Manhattan. Of course, right wing fringe hysteria and contrived national debate — that was easy to predict. But in truth, I never thought it would get as far as it has. And never did my jaded skepticism expect to see Mayor Bloomberg and other NYC authorities support Muslim rights to religious freedom so unequivocally. But the real shockers for me are 1) the national polls which reveal a deep seeded anti-Muslim bias in American society and 2) the way in which Democrats are balking on one of our country’s greatest values because of a midterm election. That the construction of a “Muslim YMCA” has devolved into a lame discussion of “why there?” is not only insulting to our constitutional principles, it shows how little we have come as a society since 9/11, despite incessant overtures by American Muslims to be fully accepted in our society.

Let there be no mistake. For decades American Muslims have struggled to reconcile a falsely conceived identity crisis which pits their American and Muslim loyalties at odds. Continue reading America’s “Good Muslims” Are Being Left Out to Dry →

Speaking up

Ethics, Humor and Satire, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islamophobia 101, Journalism and Media


The right wing smells blood, perhaps not knowing in the case of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, that it is from a self-inflicted wound. For a passionate rebuttal to the ludicrous Islamophobic comments of Newt and Sarah, listen to Keith Olbermann of MSNBC’s Countdown.

An if you want a more humorous spin that out-foxes Fox News coverage, see the latest by Jon Stewart.

The Obama Blame Game

Bible and Holy Land, Ethics, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islamophobia, Terrorism Issue


On top of inheriting two wars and the worst economic recession in the United States since the Great Depression, President Obama has been gifted something else: a chorus of sore losers fueled by rightwing media mouths. The Birthers carry on in the good ole boy tradition of the John Birchers, trying to find any way to get a Black man out of the White House. The Tea Party is hardly a group of patriots holding their fire until they see the whites (their eyes are set on the blacks to be sure), since their own bloodshot eyes are green with envy. And then there is the great Alaskan wasteland, Sarah Palin, the nit-twitter, Grizzly grinning and over bearing it, who for a mere 100 grand will demonstrate how utterly vapid she is:

• 9/11 mosque=act of fitna, “equivalent to bldg Serbian Orthodox church@Srebrenica killing fields where Muslims were slaughtered” – Raza&Fatah 3:34 PM Aug 14th via Twitter for BlackBerry®

• Mr. President, why are they so set on marking an area w/ mosque steps from what you described, in agreement with many, as “hallowed ground”? 3:06 PM Aug 14th via web Continue reading The Obama Blame Game →

Covering Afghanistan

Afghanistan, Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Islamic Law, Journalism and Media, Photography, Taliban


August 9, 2010 cover of Time Magazine

As usual for the end of the week, my Time arrived yesterday. It seems a bit unusual that I should receive the August 9 issue a week early, but then Time is not always accurate. The cover photograph is startling, haunting, disturbing and an unfortunate example of sensationalized news reporting. I cannot help but compare this to the widely traveled National Geographic photograph of an Afghan woman. I have no objection to covering a human tragedy etched in the face of young Aisha, the 18 year old girl whose nose and ears were cut off by self-righteous extremists who practice a brand of Islam that would make the Prophet Muhammad roll over in his grave. But the cover’s prominent announcement of the article inside by Aryn Baker is in fact not the title of the article, nor the main message of the author. “What happens if we leave Afghanistan” is a lot more sensational than “Afghan Women and the Return of the Taliban,” which is why it graces the cover. Tragedies, like sex scandals, sell. The issue for me is how they should be reported responsibly.


Afghan woman holding 1985 National Geographic issue with her picture on the cover

Continue reading Covering Afghanistan →