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Tag Archives: Islam

The fear of ‘dangerous religions’

DR FAWAD KAISER In the nineteenth century it was widely believed that 'excessive' religious devotion or 'enthusiasm' as it was then called might lead to insanity. This was held to be the case not only by psychiatrists, but also by conventional believers. From it sprang the legend, for example, the millennialists who accepted William Miller's predictions of the Second Coming in the early 1840s ended up in asylums.While we tend to smile patronisingly at such ideas today, imputations of fundamentalist violence are often scarcely more sophisticated. A second and more powerful, stigmatising factor has been the identification of fundamentalist religion with terrorism. This connection was made well before the attacks of 11 September 2001...

August 12, 2014 at 3:28 am | News Desk

Islam: Gestalt and Palimpsest

Tammy Swofford It took five years before I felt comfortable enough within the world of Islam to formulate a conceptual definition of the word. In 2009, within both private corridor writing and public discourse I began to refer to Islam as a gestalt.  Gestalt: A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts. The Islamic gestalt encompasses the cultural expression and pattern of behaviors which are exhibited with degrees of variation within Muslim-majority regions and her micro-communities. But in an era of digital communication this gestalt has become energized. My definition of Islam now r...

July 12, 2014 at 11:41 pm | News Desk

Yemen: 8 year old girl dies on wedding night

An eight year old bride in Yemen died from internal injuries on her wedding night, bleeding to death after deep vaginal tearing caused by sex with her 40 year old husband. The girl, identified only by the name Rawan, died in Hardh in the governorate of Hajjah in northwestern Yemen, according to a report issued by UPI on Sunday, Sept. 8.   Activists in the region want to put an end to the practice of marrying young girls, and have called for police to arrest the girl's husband and family. Nevertheless, the forced marriage of child brides in Yemen remains a socially accepted custom in many rural areas. Indeed, the practice has deep cultural and religious roots, and is widespread in Yemen. A February 2009 law set the minimum age fo...

September 20, 2013 at 12:04 pm | News Desk