Human Trustees

This is the last blog (1 of 2) on one of the books discussed in our public library within the “Muslim Journeys: American Stories” series: Leila Ahmed’s A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America. First it was the Christian and Jewish women of Egypt and the Levant who cast aside their traditional head coverings in…

I have now finished leading the five (well attended) public library discussions in the series “Muslim Journeys: American Stories” sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association. I devoted blogs to the first two books (Prince Among Slaves and Eboo Patel’s Acts of Faith) I now turn to the last two, and here, The Butterfly…

  My first blog dealt with the interpretive assumptions and methods of the Salafis (the “Neo-Traditionalists” in Adis Duderija’s book, Constructing a Religiously Ideal “Believer” and “Woman” in Islam). So who are these “progressive Muslims” who stand in such contrast to the ultraconservative Salafis? In his Introduction, Duderija announces that for the second half of the book he will be…

This is the first of two blogs based on my review of Adis Duderija’s book, Constructing a Religiously Ideal “Believer” and “Woman” in Islam: Neo-Traditional Salafi and Progressive Muslims’ Methods of Interpretation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Duderija picked two Islamic movements that are polar opposites. OK, so the jihadis are more extreme than the Salafis, but only because of their recourse…

This concludes my blogs on the justice lectures I delivered in Singapore in January 2013. We started with some of the best theoreticians of secular justice in the political arena and then dealt with Jesus’ teaching on justice. Last time we looked at the centrality of justice both in the Qur’an and in Muslim practice. We continue and conclude with…

I now come to my last Singapore lecture on justice – the first was a secular version through the lens of philosophers John Rawls and Agnes Heller; the second on Jesus and justice with the help of Yale’s Nicholas Wolterstorff; and now I end with a two-part peek into some debates Muslims are having with one another on justice, human…