This Blog is intended for use by students in the Islamic Middle East course at Northfield Mount Hermon School and guest students and teachers from other participating schools.
This story appeared in the New York Times of October 14, 2008. It speaks directly to those NMH students headed off to Turkey later this fall, to the PA students who have studied Turkey and to everybody inside and outside of Turkey watching the country wrestle with it’s post-Ottoman identity. Turkey contains so many of [...]
From the Weekly Standard
09/19/2008
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/581isjam.asp
The writer Joe Loconte first talks about a new World Public Opinion poll of 17 nations that was conducted between July 15 and August 31 involving over 16000 respondents. He believes that the poll revealed a significant support for the claim that the United States staged the 9/11 terrorist attacks–presumably for [...]
Veil wearing Muslim girls in France are finding Catholic schools more welcoming than French public schools:
Katrin Bennhold, “Spurning Secularism, Many French Muslims Find Haven in Catholic Schools,” New York Times, Sept. 30, 2008, A6
More on Muslims in Europe
A review of Orhan Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul, written in 2005, offers another interesting glimpse into the life and work of the author we have been reading a lot of this semester. The reviewer, Christopher De Bellaigue, writes:
“Pamuk’s achievement in ‘Istanbul’ is to show the human damage done by Ataturk’s revolution without succumbing to the benighted [...]
France, boasting Europe’s largest Muslim population, faces a problem of militant Islam spreading in prisons. It is estimated that over half of French inmates are Muslim, and a large portion of these are considered terrorist threats. The prisons have a small minority of Islamic chaplains and French officials are concerned that these radicals might engage [...]
In the morning of Wednesday, September 17, 2008 there was an attack by militants in Yemen on the U.S. Embassy. 16 were left dead including six of the attackers. There were two forms of attack, the first was armed militants firing at the Embassy guards and the second was a car driving into the building [...]
Tagged http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/world/middleeast/18yemen.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=16%20die%20in%20yemen&st=cse&oref=sloginIslamic law is now official for some types of cases in Great Britain, where Muslims make up nearly 3% of the population.
Story from Times (London) online
More on Islam in Europe
There was a four way summit in Damascus, Syria where the countries Syria, France, Turkey and Qatar met to discuss peace in the Middle East Region. This article from BBC News gathered and translated a group of reactions to this summit made by commentators from Europe and the Middle East. No real results were actually reached [...]
In yesterday’s (Sunday) New York Times Magazine, one will find excerpts from an interview Deborah Solomon conducted with Lebanese born Christian writer Brigitte Gabriel. Gabriel emigrated to the United States. She is a vociferous critic of radical Islam.
Go to Article
Last March in Saudi Arabia, a country where conversion from Islam to another religion could land you the death penalty, where non-Muslim worship is outlawed, and where even some Muslim sects (Sufis and Shiites, for example) are discriminated against, King Abdullah called for dialogue between members of the world’s monotheistic religions. The “World Conference on Dialogue” was held [...]
BBC Middle East