Yesterday the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia announced that the kingdom’s girls are, in the eyes of men and Allah, ready to marry at the age of 10 or 12. Rebuking those who called for the servitude marriage age to be raised, he noted that Islamic law doesn’t oppress women and cited the old ones as [...]
Tags:Egypt·Iran·Islam·Islamic apologetics·Karim Sadjadpour·Max Fisher·Middle East·Mona Eltahawy·Muslim·Pakistan·patriarchy·Saudi Arabia·sex·sexism·women·Zara Jamal
Over at Guernica, Sadakat Kadri has posted the lush prologue to his new book Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari’a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World. For those who have never given sharia much thought or have only caricatured ideas about what it is, Heaven [...]
Tags:American jurisprudence·ancestor worship·Catholic justices·Heaven on Earth·Islam·jinns·Justice Scalia·Muslim·mysticism·originalism·Sadakat Kadri·sharia·Sufi·syncretic Islam·US Supreme Court
One of my favorite books on Mormon history, much despised by Mormons, is Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith. Brodie writes with considerable panache about things Mormons would like to forget. Despite Smith’s many foibles and frauds, he comes off surprisingly well: it’s hard not to admire his audacious [...]
Tags:Abrahamic religions·Christianity·Fawn Brodie·Islam·Joseph Smith·Judaism·Mormon·Mormonism·Muhammad·prophecy·prophets·Revelations
It is fashionable these days to argue that “religion” is an adaptation that evolved through group level selection. There are mathematical models which show this is possible. Whether these models capture or describe anything real is another story.
For it to work, the group level selection story first requires a kind of systematic and organized “religion” [...]
Tags:group level selection·Hamza Kashgari·Islam·modeling·religion as adaptation·Saudi Arabia·Sunni·supernatural surveillance·Wahhabism
In today’s news we learn that Saudi Arabia is on the one hand buying Western academic prestige and on the other beheading a woman accused of practicing “sorcery and witchcraft.”
The state-run Saudi news agency announced that a woman named Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar was publicly beheaded because she claimed to be a healer who could [...]
Tags:Allah·Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar·beheading·faith healing·Islam·King Saud University·Muslim·Neil Robertson·Saudi Arabia·sorcery·Wahhabi·witchcraft
In religious studies and popular usage, the term “universal” is used to describe religions which are open to all and transcend ethnic, geographic, political, and cultural boundaries. Three religions are usually cited as universal: Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Some newer religions, such as Mormonism and Bahá’í, would also qualify. But if we take a longer [...]
Tags:Bahai·Buddhism·Carmen Blacker·Christianity·Islam·Japan·Jason Josephson·Jomon·kami·Lori Meeks·Meiji period·miko·Mormon·neo-shamanism·premodern Japan·Robert Bellah·shamanic·shamanism·superstitition·The Catalpa Bow·Tokugawa·universal religion
Over at Salon the MIT physicist and novelist Alan Lightman recently asked whether God exists, a question he poses in the service of reconciling science with religion and lambasting Richard Dawkins. Although he is an atheist, Lightman’s accomodationist query prompted a predictable response from Daniel Dennett, to which Lightman has responded.
It is a thoughtful exchange [...]
Tags:Abrahamic God·Alan Lightman·atheism·Christianity·Daniel Dennett·deism·existence of God·God·god concept·interventionist God·Islam·Judaism·monotheism·monotheistic God·Richard Dawkins
It is always a sign of war going badly when the US mounts a “winning hearts and minds” campaign to go alongside conventional military operations. It surely is a worse sign when US Marines teach Afghanis to read the Koran so they can “help people understand Islam’s true nature.” When Devil Dogs are tasked with [...]
Tags:Afghanistan·Allah·authenticity error·Brian Mockenhaupt·Devil Dogs·Enlisting Allah·essentializing·hearts and minds·Is There a Text In This Class·Islam·Koran·Marines·Mullah Omar·Muslims·Navy·reader response theory·social construction·Stanley Fish
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Max Weber sought to correct or temper Karl Marx’s view that religion was always a reflection or epiphenomenon of the economic base. Although Marx’s understanding of religion was considerably more complicated and drew heavily on Ludwig Feuerbach’s idealist critique in The Essence of Christianity (1841), [...]
Tags:Calvinism·Christianity·evil·Friedrich Nietzsche·good·history of science·India·Iran·Islam·Judaism·Karl Marx·Ludwig Feuerbach·Max Weber·modernity·monotheism·Muslim·Parsis·Persia·profane·Protestant Ethic·Puritans·Robert Kennedy·Robert Merton·Rodney Stark·sacred·spirit of capitalism·truth·Zoroaster·Zoroastrianism
The German Interior Minister was recently interviewed by Spiegel. It begins with a nice example of the “authenticity” error (i.e., my understanding of the tradition is correct and any other is false):
Interior Minister: But we also have to realize that the abuse of Islam by Islamist extremists has contributed to this.
Spiegel: Anders Breivik claims to [...]
Tags:Anders Breivek·authenticity error·Christianity·essentialism·German identity·Germany·Hans-Peter Friedrich·Islam·Islamists
