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Humantrustees.org aims to foster understanding and cooperation between Muslims and Christians so as to empower them to live up to their God-given calling as “trustees of the earth.” This Christian initiative seeks to accomplish this goal through scholarship, teaching, news commentary, and networking between scholars, members of both communities, and with anyone else who is passionate about peace and human flourishing.
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13 December 2012

Qatar the Bridge-Builder

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The first lady of Qatar, Sheika Mozah bint Nasser, left, and the emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, attended the World Innovation Summit for Education in Doha
This is a collage of information on Qatar, following up on my previous blog, “Qatar Goes Green.” Shortly before his untimely death, Anthony Shadid, winner of two Pulitzer prizes, wrote about Qatar: “This thumb-shaped spit of sand on the Persian Gulf has emerged as the most dynamic Arab country in the tumult realigning the region.” What about this “outsize influence”…
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26 November 2012

Religion and Patriarchy (2): Problematizing the Connection

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Egyptian women protest against the army's use of violence against them in Cairo in 2011 after images of women who had been brutally beaten were circulated. Photograph: Mohamed Omar/EPA
In my first installment on this theme, I argued that there is a problematic relation between religion and the status of women. But as we looked at this nexus in Egypt and Israel in particular, plainly what’s involved is a traditionalist and textualist (taking texts literally and applying them to the letter) kind of religion, hard to distinguish from the…
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12 November 2012

Shari'a and Homegrown Terrorism

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While the Quran instructs Muslims not to create disorder in the earth, Nafis planned to “destroy America” and take innocent lives, including those of women and children. By preferring to follow bin Laden’s ideology rather than the Quranic instructions, Nafis has clearly indicated that he is not a true Muslim.
[I first posted this on the PCI website in November 2012] Especially since the 9/11 attacks on US soil, we Americans have struggled to come to terms with the concept of Shari’a. One of the (secondary) justifications for our invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of those murderous attacks was to “liberate” their women from the clutches of “this medieval…
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06 November 2012

Religion and Patriarchy (1)

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Female soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces
I hope you’re breathing a sigh of relief: no picture of a woman in hijab! Seriously, while I have written on “the many meanings of hijab,” and the question of religion and gender equality, I come back to the issue from a different angle: the secular-religious clash in Israel is symptomatic of social dynamics all over the world (though perhaps…
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