blogs

Just got back from the Islamic Circle of North America conference in Hartford. CAIR speaker Ahmed Rehab advocates for Muslims to get out there and make blogs in order to combat Islamophobia. He's right on. There are 7 million muslims in this country. Making our humanity accessible will be the best tonic to counter misinformation in the broader American community that reduces us to cardboard cutouts.

One of the usually unspoken strains of thought in the "Islamist" noise nowadays is that nationhood, as manifested by today's nation-states, is just plain unIslamic. And that was one of the critiques levelled against the movement towards the creation of the first Nation-State of the modern era specifically carved out to provide a safe haven for a Muslim-majority community--or any religious community, really. But then, at the time, Maududism and Qutbism were also incipient movements. Maududism most locally.

And it is in this context that I'd like to introduce an interesting web-based project that might best be described as an exercise in "public history"--or, more relevant to the audience of this site, a conversation in Muslim Nationhood.