The current turmoil in the Muslim world that has unfolded over the YouTube video clip Innocence of Muslims offers the U.S. what educators call a “teachable moment:” an opportunity provided by circumstance to explain an idea that the audience might otherwise find abstract and irrelevant. The idea is freedom of expression. Several months ago, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a California producer posing as Israeli citizen Sam Bacile, produced, then posted on YouTube, a movie trailer meant to offend Muslims. Very likely, additional goals were to elicit violent reactions in the Middle East, ... Read More
Happy(ish) World Veil Day
September 4, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
It's International Hijab Day. The event began in 2004 to protest the French government's ban on wearing the Muslim headscarf in public schools. It gained momentum in 2009 after the Marwa el Sherbini case in Germany. Sherbini, an Egyptian living in Dresden, was murdered inside a courtroom while testifying against Alex Wiens, a Russian also living in Germany, who had insulted Sherbini for wearing the veil. Wiens, who had smuggled a knife into the trial, crossed the courtroom and stabbed Sherbini 16 times. Sherbini's husband was then mistaken for the assailant, and a police officer shot him as ... Read More
A Twist of Faiths: Claremont’s Mission to Desegregate Religion
June 22, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
“Have you seen our prayer room?” Mahmoud Harmoush bolts up a stairway on the campus of Claremont School of Theology, the tails of his navy sports coat flying. He’s a stocky man of 52, quick on his feet, with a beard flecked salt and pepper. On the first day of spring semester, just a few students have returned to the United Methodist graduate school in this Southern California college town. Harmoush, a master’s candidate, had hustled from his home in Temecula—an hour south—to an 8:30 class that morning on interfaith counseling, driven home, and then returned. He was ready to ... Read More
The Fear of a Sharia Planet
October 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The “supremacy clause” of the U.S. Constitution is one of the first things taught in many first-year law school courses. Article VI, Clause 2 states quite clearly that the “Constitution and the laws of the United States … shall be the supreme law of the land” and that no other law (foreign or domestic) can pre-empt or supersede it. While that seems pretty clear, some national conservative political figures have convinced more than a dozen American states that “Sharia,” or Islamic law, is somehow on the verge of toppling the American way of law. While that’s unlikely, some ... Read More
A Spotlight on the 9/11 Anti-Muslim Backlash
September 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In the days following Sept. 11, 2001, reactions to the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and inside United Flight 93 ranged from grief to rage. As it became clear the culprits were a band of 19 fundamentalist Muslims working for a terrorist group that draped itself in a violent version of Islam, some Americans blamed all Muslims. Within days, several individuals were killed in the U.S. solely because of they were Muslim or perceived to be Muslim. One Sikh man died apparently for the suspect activity of wearing a turban; a Coptic Christian storekeeper died because he was Egyptian. ... Read More
Welcome to Shelbyville: Loving, Fearing Thy Neighbors
May 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In news headlines and broadcast bulletins, the word "Somali" is inevitably followed by a dread-inducing plural noun: "pirates" or "warlords" or "terrorists." So it's no surprise that natives of the war-ravaged East African country of Somalia are viewed with fear and suspicion by many, if not most, Americans. When significant numbers of Somali refugees moved to Shelbyville, Tenn., (population 16,000) to work at the nearby Tyson Foods processing plant, the town's residents reacted with deep suspicion. "We don't know what diseases they have," a former mayor frets in the opening minutes of the ... Read More
Why Are the World’s Muslims So Mad at America?
May 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
As the U.S. tries to reset relations (yet again) with a Muslim world now reshaped by revolution — a theme President Barack Obama pushed in a major speech Thursday on American policy in the region — officials would be wise to first better understand one of the most fundamental questions about U.S. involvement there. Why are Muslims, by and large, so mad at America? The answer is not so simple — not just about invasions, or religious offense or oil greed. A new book, reflecting five years of research on the ground and public opinion polling by political psychologist Steven Kull, ... Read More
Burqa Ban a Boundary to Multicultural Impulse?
April 11, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Arrests have already been made — albeit the stylized arrests that accompany much protest in the West — as France enacted its long-discussed ban on face coverings in public. French authorities cite dignity and curtailing patriarchy in its law, while opponents cite religious freedom. Objections so far, in France and beyond, have been measured, especially given reactions to say, umm, cartoons. A reasonable take was offered by a Saudi housewife opining from Jeddah: "If women are made to dress a different way and wear their hijab in Saudi Arabia and we respect it, then we should respect the ... Read More
Muslim-American Terrorism Down in 2010
March 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The number of Muslim Americans involved in terrorist threats declined in 2010 from the previous year, although you wouldn’t know that from the tone of a congressional hearing scheduled for Thursday on “the extent of radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Committee chairman Rep. Peter King, a Republican from New York, has been planning the hearing for months, partly as a response, he says, to the lack of cooperation some law enforcement officials have complained of within the Muslim-American community. Civil liberties groups and Muslim leaders, meanwhile, are decrying what ... Read More
