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I am going to kick off my blogging here with something perhaps unusual for a Muslim site. I'm not going to talk about anything explicitly Muslim at all.

The Jesus Seminar was founded in the mid-80s by scholars of religion to make a first stab at understanding the Gospels from a scientific perspective: that is to say, as a text, how could it be teased out? As a person who rejected the divinity of Jesus, I was fasinated over the years as they teased out of the Gospels those things that were likely the words of the mad rabbi (as I think of him) as opposed to those of his later followers of varied socio-religious persuasions. Under the Jamesite, Pauline and other accretions were pithy teachings that were unlike anything encountered in texts of the time, truly revolutionary and often counterintuitive things that reached down and touched me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/world/europe/14turkey.html?_r=2&hp&ore...

NY Times Article on Turkey

Excerpt:

Turkey is now run by a party of observant Muslims, but its reigning ideology and law are strictly secular, dating from the authoritarian rule in the 1920s of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a former army general who pushed Turkey toward the West and cut its roots with the Ottoman East. For some young people today, freedom means the right to practice Islam, and self-expression means covering their hair.

They are redrawing lines between freedom and devotion, modernization and tradition, and blurring some prevailing distinctions between East and West.

So, my husband has turned out to be an abusive, manipulative, unfaithful bastard. He's divorcing me, something that I am both grateful for and deeply saddened by. The brilliant dream I had of a God-conscious, loving family has shattered around me, and I contemplate a future of bearing and raising a child alone, a child who will grow up with half a heritage without a father.
Lord knows I wasn't the perfect wife. I could be quite the harridan at times. That said, I did everything I could to edify and preserve my marriage, even while my soon to be former spouse steadily demolished it. He does deserve credit, however, for the originality of his ideas: not content to merely be controlling, abusive, and fool around with heterosexual women on a social basis, pretending to be a lesbian and selling sex online does smack of imagination, if not morality. I wonder what the guys at the mosque that so admire him would think if they knew.

Daljit Daliwal, http://foreignexchange.tv, interviewed this Iranian author.
Fareed Zakaria, former host, once commented that Iran has a young vibrant population who should not be confused with the ruling clergy and government, who are less open minded in their view of things Western.

http://iranwrites.blogspot.com/2008/08/hooman-majd-ayatollah-begs-to-dif...

(beginning of blog excerpt)
“This stylish, witty, and enlightening portrait of contemporary Iran brilliantly captures the too-often-misunderstood character of the people and their complex, paradoxical, and changing nation.” So says one of the book’s blurbs.

I'm in need of du'a right now; I'm making big moves in my life at a scary time. Me and Schenectady need all the love you can spare right now. And if I can ever find a scanner, I'll post an ultrasound pic.

I am not sure I completely agree with, or endorse the thought, but this bears quoting. It's something Nowsherwan Yasin said on a mailing list this morning about the whole Zardari hits on Palin brouhaha (in case you've not followed it, check out the post and discussion Teeth Maestro's blog here.):

SAJA BRIEFING: The South Asian Blogosphere and How Its Changing the Media 8:35pm
Website: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/saja/2008/09/26/desiblogs

It just now occurred to me that some scholars must point to the West's troubled economy as a lesson regarding the imprudence of lending on interest. How are various Muslim majority nations affected by these economic woes?

In a speech to Muslim scholars late Tuesday, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said terrorists are "enemies of Islam with no faith" and vowed to get tough on militants sheltering in the border region.

"We will not allow them to challenge the writ of the government and create a law of the jungle and a life of the stone age," he told a gathering of Muslim scholars in the capital, Islamabad.

I apologise for the hit-and-run post, and though I have great respect for the man, I am not a Gandhian. But following everything over the weekend, I am left with a thought this morning that channels Gandhi; A War on Terror would be a great idea--if either the West or Muslims choose to take up the idea.

Technorati tags applicable to this post: War on Terror