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.
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 [...]
In June, a French court denied citizenship to a Moroccan woman on the grounds that the niqab (”veil”) she chose to wear (a full veil with a narrow slit for the eyes) was inconsistent with French values such as equality of the sexes. The ruling was supported by France’s Urban Affairs Minister, Fadela Amara, herself a [...]
A recent issue of The Economist features an article on important discussions occurring between representatives of the world’s religions.
The Economist, “Islam and the West: When Religions Talk,” June 12, 2008
More on the polemical battles between Muslims and Christians throughout history
On June 22, 2008, legal scholar Noah Feldman wrote about Europe’s insufficient progress on the multicultural front: its problems assimilating and accepting the Muslims in its midst (”The New Pariahs?,” New York Times Magazine, June 22, 2008, 9f.) In one telling passage, Feldman says that, “…even after 60 years of introspection about the anti-Semitism that [...]
The latest installment in the New York Times’ “Generation Faithful” series features a story about education in Algeria, a country where in recent decades the struggle between fundamentalist (and at times extremist) Islam and more modern and secular emphases has been acute. Michael Slackman writes, “Now the government is urgently trying to re-engineer Algerian identity, [...]
BBC Middle East