Notes related to the Middle East and the broader Islamic world

On Tuesday night, we had a great Indian dinner at the Kohinoor restaurant in Orem.  Then we attended a really strong performance of Hello, Dolly! at the Hale Center Theater, not too terribly far away.

The ensemble was excellent, and Ashley Gardner Carlson made a fine Dolly Levi.

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Here’s a useful little article from clear back in 2010:

“Five myths about mosques in America”

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“How the Muslim World Lost the Freedom to Choose: A brave new book describes how Pakistan unraveled — and provides a blueprint for understanding declining pluralism across the Middle East.”

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For the “Nile Scribes” blog, Stephen O. Smoot reports on the annual conference of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities, which was recently held at the University of Toronto (where he is a graduate student in Egyptology):

“Aegyptus: Egypt under Roman Rule Symposium Highlights”

A disproportionate number of the presenters at the conference —  Dr. Gregory Dundas, Dr. Kerry Muhlestein, Dr. John Gee, Stephen Smoot, and Dr. Lincoln Blumell — are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  I can only assume, since such Latter-day Saint scholars are (I’m reliably informed by critics on the internet) both utterly ignored by the world and yet somehow, simultaneously, international laughingstocks, that they were invited as comic relief.

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Finally, from something that I wrote a number of years ago while announcing the publication of a book by BYU’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, a note about religion in the Middle East — too elementary for many, I’m sure, but offering some ideas that, I’m confident, aren’t well known to everybody:

One of the misconceptions that many Westerners have is that all Arabs are Muslims, and that Muslims are all Arabs.  In fact, of course, many of the major Islamic countries in the world (e.g., Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and the most populous of them all, Indonesia) are not Arab, and large minorities in some Arab countries are not Muslim.  Christianity is a Near Eastern religion, not a European one, and it is has been in the Near East since its origin.  (An Egyptian Christian friend once complained to me about how tired he had become of Americans and Europeans asking him whether his family had been converted by the Germans, the French, or the British.  His ancestors, he pointed out, had been converted by Mark, the writer of the second Gospel, in the first century AD.  My own forebears, in Scandinavia, didn’t accept Christianity until roughly a millennium later.)

Another misconception that many of us have is that Christendom can essentially be divided between Protestants and Catholics.  In fact, though, Protestantism is a fairly recent religious minority in the Christian world.  The much older division is that between western Christianity (essentially the Roman Catholic Church for many centuries) and eastern Christianity (including, but not limited to, such groups as the Greek Orthodox and the Russian Orthodox).  There is, and always has been, an entire world of Christianity, rich and full of variety, beyond the (to us) more familiar realm of Protestants and Catholics.