I’ve come across two weblogs by American muslim expats that are wonderful complements to each other, Nzingha’s Soapbox from Saudi Arabia, and Life in Exile from the Gulf nation of Qatar, best known as home to the indispensable Al-Jazeerah network. Side by side, they are a great introduction to a part of the world I […]
Tag Archives: muslim
Books Lost and Found
If I have one piece of advice for my sister who is in college right now, it is “Don’t Sell Your Books!” I regret selling off my books. I regret that in a general way; I wish I still had every book I once had, if only to have a library that resembles the libraries […]
Islam in Detroit
The University of Michigan Graduate School has a project on the web called Building Islam in Detroit: An Interdisciplinary Study of Muslim Institutions & Collective Spaces. The site is not fully developed yet, but it sounds like a great project, with case studies planned for a number of masajid around town including Muath bin Jabal […]
Mawlid ar-Rasul: Surau Darul Rahman
Prophet Muhammad’s birth was commemorated last wednesday night throughout the muslim world. The tiny corner of it that I inhabit was no exception. Surau Darul Rahman held an evening of learning and celebration. I feel extremely fortunate to live two blocks from our neighborhood surau. A surau is a prayer hall just like a […]
Naming conventions pt. 3
One last thing about names here is the “bin”. Bin is Arabic for “son of”. Binti is “daughter of”. Although it does not appear on the birth cert itself, it is inserted between the first and last names of muslims, or more accurately, between the child’s name and the father’s name. (So in case you […]
More AIDS and Islam
Muslim Wake Up has a followup to the AIDS conference and the Dr. Wadud controversy, pointing out the dreadful condition of women in Pakistan. Of course there are many other muslim countries the author could have named too. Times are rough all over. At one point, the author says this: “When she gets married, and […]
Catching Up
There’s been some great posts among the websites I regularly read as well as some noteworthy stuff elsewhere as well. Here’s a quick round-up for you: Thebit discusses in his very learned way an essay about the genre of Islamic apologetics that produce evidences from the Quran for modern scientific discoveries. The logic behind the […]
Kuching in History
I picked up a great little book, a 50-year-old report done by two peninsular Malays as an undergraduate honors project. The reprinting, produced by UNIMAS, is titled “Life in the Malay Kampongs of Kuching, Fifty Years Ago”. It’s a real gem. The students were geographers, and so payed special attention to the landscape of the […]