Behold, ladies and gentlemen, the new prophet (I will call him Teacher from now on) who has appeared in the province of Alberta, growing up in the frontier town of…
Editorials
Islam and the Future of Europe
To celebrate New Year’s Eve in 2017, German authorities sounded more like the vice cops who roam the streets of a few Muslim-majority nations: They created safety zones for women…
A Dangerous Couple: The Story of Adam and Eve
For the longest time, ever since my early childhood years, I have tried to imagine the lives of Adam and Eve, fashioned, unlike the luminous angels, out of clay. The…
Zineb’s War on Islamic Fascism
In August 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring, Zineb El Rhazoui, a young Moroccan-French woman, stood in a packed forum on human rights in the Arab world and…
A Prophet in His Own Land
I just finished reading an eye-opening book by the Tunisian scholar Hela Ouardi, a professor of French literature who has waded brilliantly into Islam’s canonical texts, written by Sunnis and…
An Offer We Can’t Understand
A long time ago, one of my professors told me a joke that went something like this: “What do you get when the Godfather meets [the deconstructionist] Jacques Derrida? An…
Muslims in the West: Chronicle of a Crisis Foretold
In the 1960s, long before Sudan was blacklisted as a hotbed of terrorism, the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih published a novel that is considered a masterpiece of modern Arab literature….
Trump, Islam and the West
Understandably, Donald Trump’s suggestion that non-US Muslims seeking entry into the United States should be barred until we figure out what is going on with Muslims and the United States…
The Koran Fragments of Birmingham
The recent discovery of fragments of a Koran dating back to the early decades of Islam was major news around the world and a source of great excitement to Muslims…
Religion Against People
I continue to be baffled by the persistence of religions, even when their effects on human beings and our world are nothing short of cataclysmic. In Muslim-majority nations, Islam has…