Human Trustees

A wonderful Christmas to all of you around the world, to Christians and Muslims, especially! Last year I emphasized how much Christians and Muslims have in common as they celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, or Isa bnu Maryam, the great prophet the Qur’an honors as “Jesus, son of Mary.” Haroon Moghul has left us this Christmas with a wonderful…

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”…

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…

[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…