{"id":44890,"date":"2017-11-14T22:53:01","date_gmt":"2017-11-15T05:53:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=44890"},"modified":"2017-11-14T22:53:01","modified_gmt":"2017-11-15T05:53:01","slug":"notes-related-middle-east-broader-islamic-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2017\/11\/notes-related-middle-east-broader-islamic-world.html","title":{"rendered":"Notes related to the Middle East and the broader Islamic world"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Taj Mahal at Agra, India \u2014 one of the glories not merely of Islamic architecture but of world civilization altogether \u2014 was built during the first half of the seventeenth century by order of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. \u00a0\u00a0(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

On Tuesday night, we had a great Indian dinner at the\u00a0Kohinoor<\/a>\u00a0restaurant in Orem. \u00a0Then we attended a really strong performance of Hello, Dolly!<\/em> at the Hale Center Theater<\/a>, not too terribly far away.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The ensemble was excellent, and Ashley Gardner Carlson made a fine\u00a0Dolly Levi.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a useful little article from clear back in 2010:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFive myths about mosques in America\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHow the Muslim World Lost the Freedom to Choose:\u00a0A brave new book describes how Pakistan unraveled \u2014 and provides a blueprint for understanding declining pluralism across the Middle East.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

For the \u201cNile Scribes\u201d blog, Stephen O. Smoot reports on\u00a0the 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):<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAegyptus: Egypt under Roman Rule Symposium\u00a0Highlights\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

A disproportionate number of the presenters at the conference \u2014 \u00a0Dr. Gregory Dundas, Dr. Kerry Muhlestein, Dr. John Gee, Stephen Smoot, and Dr. Lincoln Blumell \u2014 are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a>. \u00a0I can only assume, since such Latter-day Saint scholars are (I\u2019m reliably informed by critics on the internet) both utterly ignored by\u00a0the world and yet somehow, simultaneously, international laughingstocks, that they were invited as comic relief.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Finally, from something that I wrote a number of\u00a0years ago while announcing the publication of a book\u00a0by BYU\u2019s\u00a0Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, a note about religion in the Middle East \u2014 too elementary for many, I\u2019m sure, but offering some ideas\u00a0that, I\u2019m confident, aren\u2019t well known to everybody<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the misconceptions that many Westerners have is that all Arabs are Muslims, and that Muslims are all Arabs.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Christianity is a Near Eastern religion, not a European one, and it is has been in the Near East since its origin.\u00a0 (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.\u00a0 His ancestors, he pointed out, had been converted by Mark, the writer of the second Gospel, in the first century AD.\u00a0 My own forebears, in Scandinavia, didn\u2019t accept Christianity until roughly a millennium later.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Another misconception that many of us have is that Christendom can essentially be divided between Protestants and Catholics.\u00a0 In fact, though, Protestantism is a fairly recent religious minority in the Christian world.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 On Tuesday night, we had a great Indian dinner at the\u00a0Kohinoor\u00a0restaurant in Orem. \u00a0Then we attended a really strong performance of Hello, Dolly! at the Hale Center Theater, not too terribly far away. \u00a0 The ensemble was excellent, and Ashley Gardner Carlson made a fine\u00a0Dolly Levi. \u00a0 *** \u00a0 Here\u2019s a useful little […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nNotes related to the Middle East and the broader Islamic world<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"    On Tuesday night, we had a great Indian dinner at the\u00a0Kohinoor\u00a0restaurant in Orem. \u00a0Then we attended a really strong performance of Hello,\" \/>\n<meta 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