Human Trustees

  Mofed, an Iraqi Christian now a refugee in Amman, Jordan, tells of Muslim gunmen barging into his photo shop in Baghdad and giving him an ultimatum: convert to Islam, or pay a $70,000 tax (jizya), or be killed. It was then that he and his wife packed up and fled. More than sixty percent of Iraq’s million plus Christians…

  Addressing a conference on Christian Arabs he had convened in September 2013, King Abdullah of Jordan emphasized how well established Christians were in the area long before the arrival of Islam and that over thirteen centuries had now passed with almost seamless Muslim-Christian relations. Yet now Christian Arabs are in crisis. On the same occasion, prominent Jordanian columnist, Jawad…

I understand your puzzlement in reading my title. Why would I link the illustrious (principal) author of the US Declaration of Independence and its third president with 38-year-old Indian Muslim immigrant Eboo Patel, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core? The answer is that Jefferson consciously paved the way for Muslims to be citizens of the country he helped to found,…

70 percent of Jews agree with 92 percent of Muslims that American Muslims have no sympathy for the jihadists – that was one of the findings from a 2011 Gallup Poll report called, “American Muslims: Faith, Freedom and the Future.” What is more, large majorities of American Jews and Muslims (roughly both six million) agree on the necessity of finding…

An extensive Gallup Poll published in 2011 (download it here) reported that “though they continue to experience some perceived bias, both in their interactions with other Americans and in their exchanges with law enforcement, Muslim Americans are satisfied with their current lives and are more optimistic than other faith groups that things are getting better.” Findings also show that they…

When thousands upon thousands of Europeans were slaughtered during the Thirty Year War in the 17th century was it about the theological differences between Catholics and Protestants? Or more recently, when these two Christian sects were bombing each other in Northern Ireland, was it really about “religion”? Theology did have a bearing on the conflicts somewhere in the very beginning,…