Both are open 24 hours a day, and serve as a "mecca" to their respective worshipers. One was ordained by Allah as a place of worship on Earth to reflect the house in Jannah called al-Baytu l-Maˤmur. The other was built by the house of Jobs to showcase Macs and iPods. Is
Apple's Fifth Avenue Cube (QTVR) mocking the
Kaaba? Some Islamic website
thinks it's a new insult to Islam.
posted by jaimev
on Oct 11, 2006 -
97 comments
The age of horrorism. On the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Martin Amis analyses - and abhors - the rise of extreme Islamism. In a penetrating and wide-ranging essay he offers a trenchant critique of the grotesque creed and questions the West's faltering response to this eruption of evil.
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese
on Sep 19, 2006 -
66 comments
"
My cancers are so bad that I think I've arrived at the
end of the road. What a pity. I would like to
live not only because I love life so much, but because I'd like to see the result of the
trial. I do think I will be found
guilty."
-Oriana Fallaci
posted by felix betachat
on Sep 15, 2006 -
47 comments
The new GOP buzzword: Fascism. President Bush in recent days has recast the global war on terror into a "
war against Islamic fascism." Fascism, in fact, seems to be the new buzz word for Republicans in an election season dominated by an unpopular war in Iraq. Donald H. Rumsfeld in a speech to an American Legion convention in Salt Lake City said [of his critics, they are] trying to appease "a new type of fascism."
Before it was
"
cut and run", which was tested using a focus group. On the Senate floor, Sen Hagel earlier decried the tactic: "Focus Group-Tested Buzz Words…Like ‘Cut and Run’…Debase the Seriousness of War." What will they come up with next?
posted by ArunK
on Aug 30, 2006 -
138 comments
Ayten Ahmet is a 16 year old girl who wants to win the
Miss Teen Australia Beauty pageant [some links here possibly NSFW]. The problem is some of Australia's Muslim leaders, such as Melbourne cleric Sheik Mohammed Omran, have branded her entry into the competition as a "
slur on Islam". Ayten doesn't know what all the fuss is about,
saying "As long as you present yourself well, respect yourself and respect others, that's what's important. Religion's not an issue." [more inside]
posted by Effigy2000
on Aug 27, 2006 -
39 comments
Esfahan is home to the
Blue Mosque and other buildings with their unique
blue tiles which are beautifully shown in
photographs
by flickr's
horizon.
Esfahan is a world heritage site and is home to many examples of traditional Persian Architecture which is made up of
eight traditional forms which taken together form the foundation on which it was based in the same way that
music
was once based on a finite number of notes.
posted by adamvasco
on Aug 10, 2006 -
19 comments
Colors of Islam. "Islam 1,400 years ago gave women the right to choose her own husband, have her own business and finances, the right to ask for divorce and control her own body."
posted by semmi
on Jul 16, 2006 -
69 comments
Keep your balls in check: The Saved Sect Website calls for Muslims to stop supporting The World Cup, as "[...]soccer plants the seeds of nationalism, and is therefore part of a 'colonial crusader scheme' to divide Muslims and cause them to stray from the vision of a unified Islamic identity."
posted by naxosaxur
on Jul 3, 2006 -
47 comments
"
Killing the Buddha is about finding a way to be religious when we're all so self-conscious and self-absorbed. Knowing more than ever about ourselves and the way the world works, we gain nothing through nostalgia for a time when belief was simple, and even less from insisting that now is such a time.
Killing the Buddha will ask, How can we be religious without leaving part of ourselves at the church or temple door? How can we love God when we know it doesn't matter if we do? Call it God for the godless. Call it the search for a God we can believe in: A God that will not be an embarrassment in twelve-thousand years. A God we can talk about without qualifications." I particularly enjoyed
The Temptation of Belief, by a Buddhist exploring evangelical Christianity, and
My Holy Ghost People, by an unbelieving daughter in a praying-in-tongues family.
posted by heatherann
on Apr 24, 2006 -
21 comments
Gay and Muslim groups getting together in the UK? plans are
to look at homophobia in the Muslim community and Islamophobia in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. The Muslim Council of Britain is also admitting that
if you have nothing positive to say keep your mouth shut, which is a very good first step. Can two groups often on the receiving end of hatred work together ?
“British Muslims welcome working with everyone including members of the Lesbian and Gay community against a common enemy, fascism.” I don't know if they have the likes of
Michael Savage there (or the many many others), who rail against (and call for the death of) both Muslims and gays on the airwaves daily, but it seems hopeful, no?
posted by amberglow
on Apr 19, 2006 -
29 comments
The Beauty Academy of Kabul is Liz Mermin's documentary about hairdressers from America teaching young women in Afghanistan how to beautify themselves. Could female self-expression and vanity be an impetus for more pervasive cultural transformation? In a related development, Nike has designed a
sporty hijab for use by Somali volleyball players. Whether it's an improvement over
traditional variations is debatable.
posted by mert
on Mar 20, 2006 -
11 comments
Muslim heritage is an intriguing and rather pretty website detailing contributions of a thousand years. Make sure to see the
timelineand
events sections. Their new "
weblog" seems to be shaping up to be interesting too, have a rummage.
posted by Mossy
on Mar 6, 2006 -
60 comments
An Australian Government Member of Parliament (MP) will be
trying to amend a crucial piece of legislation which, if the amendment is successful, will make it far harder (if not impossible) for Australian women to gain access to abortion drug
RU486 because of fears that making it easier for women to access the drug will lead Australia down a path of Islamisation.
"I've actually read in the Daily Telegraph where a certain imam from the Lakemba mosque actually said that Australia is going to be a Muslim nation in 50 years' time. I didn't believe him at the time but when you actually look at the birthrates... we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence." Liberal MP
Danna Vale said today. Has she been
reading Metafilter?
posted by Effigy2000
on Feb 13, 2006 -
106 comments
paved prophets house, put up a parking lot.. “What makes this demolition worse is the fact that the home of the Prophet is to make way for a parking lot, two 50-storey hotel towers and seven 35-storey apartment blocks; a project known as the Jabal Omar Scheme, all within a stone’s throw of the Grand Mosque. Yet despite this outrage, not a single Muslim country, no ayatollah, no mufti, no king, not even a Muslim Canadian imam has dared utter a word in protest. Such is the power of Saudi influence on the Muslim narrative.”
posted by zog
on Feb 11, 2006 -
36 comments
This great picture was taken in the French Pig-Squealing Championships.
This pic was alleged by Danish imams to be offensive to Muslims, and was included in the recent tour of the Middle East.
The Brussels Journal asks some pointed questions.
The Beeb belatedly explains - and (sorta) apologises.
posted by dash_slot-
on Feb 9, 2006 -
35 comments
Redneck Muslims? Apparently. Strange BBC piece on Christian Texans converting to Islam. I have a hard time believing these people don't eat pork.
posted by mosessmith
on Feb 2, 2006 -
51 comments
...With the end of the cold war and the emergence of global networks in which goods, ideas and people circulate outside the language of citizenship, the fundamentalist fight for ideological states has lost influence... Muslim radicalism, by contrast, has moved beyond the language of citizenship to assume a global countenance, joining movements as different as environmentalism and pacifism in its pursuit of justice on a worldwide scale. Such movements are ethical rather than political in nature: they can neither predict nor control the global consequences of their actions...
Spectral brothers: al-Qaida’s world wide web Snapshots of Faisal Devji's Landscapes of the Jihad are to be seen within
posted by y2karl
on Dec 8, 2005 -
17 comments
The USC-MSA Compendium of Muslim Texts is a very useful compilation of essays on various topics, searchable versions of the
Qur'an (uses three different translations) and
hadith (the sayings and traditions of the Prophet), and a
glossary (which is how I discovered the site, while trying to find a good reference for a comment on Falconetti's excellent Maniac Muslim
post). The first of the
Ten Misconceptions About Islam: "Islam is 'the religion of peace' because the Arabic word
Islam is derived from the Arabic word
Al-Salaam which means peace." Their response:
It might seem strange to think of this as a misconception, but in fact it is. The root word of Islam is al-silm which means "submission" or "surrender." It is understood to mean "submission to Allah." In spite of whatever noble intention has caused many a Muslim to claim that Islam is derived primarily from peace, this is not true.
As you can see, they care about accuracy, not just propaganda.
posted by languagehat
on Dec 6, 2005 -
24 comments
On the night of Feb. 7, 2005, Hatun Surucu, 23,
was killed on her way to a bus stop in Berlin-Tempelhof by several shots to the head and upper body,
fired at point-blank range. The investigation revealed that months before, she reported one of her brothers to the police for threatening her. Now three of her
five brothers are on trial for murder. According to the prosecutor, the oldest of them (25) acquired the weapon, the middle brother (24) lured his sister to the scene of the crime and the youngest (18) shot her.
Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun Surucu's capital crime was that,
living in Germany, she had begun living like a German. In a statement to the Turkish newspaper Zaman, one brother noted that she had stopped wearing her head scarf, that she refused to go back to her family and that she had declared her intent to "seek out her own circle of friends."
posted by The Jesse Helms
on Dec 4, 2005 -
35 comments
Quitting France: French Jews are leaving the country in ever-growing numbers, fleeing a wave of anti-Semitism. They are moving to Israel, the United States, and increasingly, Montreal -- where the mostly English-speaking Jewish community is preparing for its greatest demographic change in decades. An interesting if slightly anecdotal look at the situation for Jewish people in France from Canada's National Post.
Part 1 - Barricaded in Paris,
Part 2 - Taking leave of 'the fear', Part 3 tomorrow deals with the impact of the influx of French Jews in Montreal.
posted by loquax
on Nov 21, 2005 -
67 comments
Albert Brooks is set to release a movie called
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World . No doubt we'll be hearing more on that, but let us reserve judgement.
Meanwhile, for those who need persuading,
here are
some links concerning
13th century sufi
and funny man
Nasruddin .
His people are understandably proud and you can find a lot more of his stuff, probably better than what I've put up.
(This post prompted in part by Rumi post earlier today- for those who might be put off by the current trendiness of that most excellent poet.)
Enjoy.
posted by IndigoJones
on Nov 5, 2005 -
26 comments
The free spirit of Islam : The popularity in the US of Rumi, a 13th-century Turkish poet, is a tragic irony, as the order of Sufi dervishes he founded is banned at home, via The Guardian. Rumi's brand of Sufism represents "the free spirit of Islam ... the liberal spirit that I think needs to be recognised at a time when Islam has come to be considered almost synonymous with terrorism"
Here are some additional links.
posted by adamvasco
on Nov 5, 2005 -
18 comments
Iranian students
demonstrate outside Italian embassy in Iran.Chanting anti-Zionism slogans, the ralliers called for the withdrawal of the Zionists from the occupied Palestine.
They also called for the Italian government's explanation on the Nov 15, 2000 assassination of the
Eduardo Agnelli suspiciously at the hand of the zionists.
Edoardo Agnelli, born in June 9, 1954 in New York of a Christian father and a Jewish mother, had converted to Islam four years before the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979.
He was the only son of the Italian tycoon Gianni Agnelli -director and the main shareholder of Fiat and Ferrari automaking factories - who died of prostate cancer in January 24, 2003.
Some pictures which prove he was a Moslem.
posted by persia
on Nov 3, 2005 -
103 comments
Osama bin Laden,
littérateur and new-media star. A thought-provoking analysis of bin Laden's adept use of Koranic language and the Internet by Bruce B. Lawrence, an Islamic scholar at Duke who edited a new anthology of bin Laden's public statements called
Messages to the World. The Western media -- says the millionaire mass-murderer
formerly trained as a useful ally by the CIA via
Pakistan's ISI -- "implants fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States. It means that what the enemies of the United States cannot do, its media are doing!" Know thy enemy.
[via Arts and Letters Daily.]
posted by digaman
on Nov 3, 2005 -
57 comments
Since 9/11, the United States has appeared to want to do business only with hand picked and officially approved "good Muslims" – that is, to work with Muslims who fit US requirements as to what Islam should be. The problem, of course, is that the figures and groups who carry Washington's seal of approval often have little to no legitimacy among the constituencies the US wants to influence. Viewed in the big picture and over the longer term, one has to wonder whether US goals and those of the emergent "virtual caliphate" might not overlap more than they diverge. Toward a Virtual Caliphate Via Abu Aardwark
posted by y2karl
on Nov 2, 2005 -
5 comments
Life without Theo - one year on. It's not that Holland's cherished troublemaker wasn't aware of the possibility - he had been threatened more than once. He just sincerely believed that no-one would harm the "
village idiot", as he liked to call himself
(salon link). Today, the skilled polemicist who regarded it his constitutional right to insult anyone but would at the same time engage anyone in reasonable, friendly debate is
remembered in
various ways.
[more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Nov 2, 2005 -
33 comments
Newsfilter: Rioting continues in the suburbs of Paris. In
Clichy-Sous-Bois, a predominantly (80%) North African muslim banlieu of about 28,000 people,
night battles have been raging (video) between youths and the police after two muslim youths died by electrocution while they thought the police were chasing them, a charge the police denies. That was 5 nights ago. Since then, 27 people have been arrested, 3 convicted, numerous cars destroyed and property damaged, and 23 police officers wounded in street battles involving "up to several hundred" participants. The
muslim community now accuses the police of firing tear gas into a mosque, and things look far from calming down. These tensions are hardly confined to Paris, however -
In Lyon, 800 cars have been burned in "low level" violence this year; Across France,
9,000 police cars have been "stoned" this year, and 20-40 cars are destroyed a night (!!!), according to Interior Minister
Nicolas Sarkozy. I knew that relations between "the French" and the "
Beurs" were somewhat less than pleasant, but am I the only one that was unaware that
France has been in a state of low-level but direct civil and religious war for the last few years?
posted by loquax
on Nov 1, 2005 -
80 comments
If You're a Christian, Muslim or Jew - You are Wrong - A rant over at the
Huffington Post.
And let's be clear about this, it IS a rant, and a beaut at that. But it's a sentiment that's run through the head of everyone who isn't a member of the three mentioned groups. No one in the mainstream media says things like this, I wonder why?
The post is made. Let the emphatic agreements, and the vicious denials... begin!
posted by JHarris
on Oct 23, 2005 -
259 comments
