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.
Yesterday marked the first day in the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, holiest of all months because it was during Ramadan about the year 610 C.E. that Muhammad began receiving the Qur’an, Islam’s sacred text sent down from God in revelations through the Angel Gabriel (Jibril in Arabic) over the course of the following twenty-two [...]
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IME course guide to the Arab-Israeli conflict
Conservative Islamist clerics and tribal chieftains in Yemen, a country where the reach of state power is limited, are pushing for stronger regulation of public morality.
Story from the BBC
The power struggle between Shiite groups in Iraq is highlighted in an article from today’s New York Times Magazine:
Michael R. Gordon, “The Last Battle,” New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2008
More on Iraq
Tensions between Muslims and Christians in Egypt are worsening. Christians (mostly Copts) account for ten percent of Egypt’s population of 80 million. The government is inclined to deny the problem is sectarian.
See: Michael Slackman, “As Tensions Rise for Egypt’s Christians, Officials Call Clashes Secular,” New York Times, August 2, 2008
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 [...]
A new film comedy in Egypt that challenges religous prejudice has the country buzzing.
Story at the BBC
The phrase “inshallah” (”If God has willed it,” or, more simply, “God willing”) has long been a part of sentences virtually every time a speaker of Arabic uses the future tense. These days, with religious piety (genuine as well as affected) on the rise in Egypt, it is being employed when people use the present tense as [...]
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, [...]
Two new installments in the New York Times’ “Generation Faithful” series are running this week, both on the ways of love in Saudi Arabia. The series examines “the lives of the young across the Muslim world at a time of religious revival.”
Follow this link to the entire series
BBC Middle East