We had a very enjoyable evening tonight at our place, with our friends Larry and Laura Ainsworth and Steve and Heather Densley, in large part watching a presentation that Steve has developed (and given at least twice) on the ancient Egyptian temple.
Or, to put it in rather different terms, “And talk of poems and prayers and promises and things that we believe in.”
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This is a very interesting piece on a surprisingly large community:
“Brooklyn Muslims document their past and present in new oral history project”
I wish that I were going to be in Chicago so that I could see this:
“A new play, ‘Christmas Mubarak,’ mixes Christian and Muslim stories of Jesus’ birth”
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Going through some of my notes, I found an article to which I had saved a link back when it appeared in early February of 2015:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/03/intl_world/amanpour-didier-francois/index.html
I object when well-meaning people say that atrocities such as the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, and the 9/11 hijackings, and the brutal murder of the Royal Jordanian Air Force pilot Lt. Muath al-Kasasbeh in January 2015, and the various church massacres in Egypt and elsewhere, and other such horrors have “nothing to do with Islam.” Sadly, they do. Murderous organizations like the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (or Daesh, as it’s often called in the Middle East) and “al-Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula” aren’t led by Buddhists. They don’t recruit fighters in the name of secular humanism or in an attempt to spread the Analects of Confucius. They’re not radical Mennonites.
But theirs is a warped version of Islam. Warped and evil. Burning a caged man to death (as they did, on film, to that Jordanian military pilot) should demonstrate that beyond any reasonable doubt.
And, if the account to which I link above is at all reliable and indicative, we can see that there’s a distinct distance between the “Islamic State” and devout Islamic practice.
But we’ve already known this. Or we should have. Several of the 9-11 hijackers, for instance, were apparently avid patrons of strip clubs. ‘Usama b. Ladin, it’s said, had a large collection of pornographic videos in the place where he was located and killed.
There’s something fundamental going on with these people that has little if anything with religion of any kind.
And, please recall, most of the victims of the “Islamic State” have actually been Muslims. Like that Jordanian pilot. This isn’t a matter, simply, of evil Islam versus the Good.
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