Posts tagged "Luce Foundation"
How Blasphemy Got Personal
by Austin Dacey Fifty-six years before Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses thrust blasphemy into the spotlight of Western public discourse, the literary debut of a young medical doctor named Rashid Jahan was generating more excitement than she could have imagined.
In the Shadows of Syria: Defusing Sectarian Tensions in Lebanon
by Irina Papkova For two weeks, Lebanon lived on the knife edge of a sectarian civil war. And here the truly interesting part of this story begins to emerge.
More Tea, Vicar? A review of BBC’s “Rev”
by Abhimanyu Das The Church of England inhabits a unique place in this busy trafficking of religious stereotypes. They're the Church that's known for being, well, not that religious.
Sacrilege: an excerpt from Austin Dacey’s The Future of Blasphemy
We do not know what the first blasphemer said. We do know that he was a stranger who came among the Israelites.
Mauritania: Islamic Response to the Sahel Drought
By Alex Thurston 9/11 changed the trajectory of Islamic humanitarian agencies in Africa and around the world...The US government suspected some Islamic charities of not really being charities at all, but rather fronts for transnational terrorist funding.
Calvin’s Geneva? The New International Discourse of Blasphemy
By Austin Dacey The Ad Hoc Committee on the Elaboration of Complementary Standards was meeting to address “gaps” in an international human rights treaty on racism and racial discrimination.
Mass Wedding in Kano
by Alex Thurston A recent story from Nigeria, one that touches on both marriage and shari’a, offers the possibility of a more sophisticated analysis of marriage in Africa as well as shari'a law.
Al Shabaab: Where Do They Go From Here?
Joe McKnight Ever since Somali President Siad Barre’s government was removed from power in 1991, Somalia has lacked an effective central government.
Schooling Muslims in Northern Nigeria: Politics, Policies and Conclusions
by Alex Thurston Government-run Islamic schools, then, are to be a source of “counter-radicalization” as well as a means of moving almajirai into more “productive” schools. But the policy is unlikely to succeed.
Nigerian Universities: Islamic Studies in Secular Universities
By Alex Thurston
Nigeria has around 100 universities, most of them public, and many public and private colleges. Various tertiary institutions in Northern Nigeria offer Islamic Studies, sometimes conjoined with Arabic.
Perverse Mission? Catholic Approaches to Foreign Policy
Reverse Mission: Transnational Religious Communities and the Making of US Foreign Policy
By Timothy Byrnes.
Georgetown University Press, 2001.
216 pp.
by Frances Kissling
Timothy Byrnes is an engaging academic political scientist who has written extensively and wisely on religion and politics, particularly the political role of the institutional Catholic church (see Transnational Catholicism in Postcommunist Europe, Rowman &...
Nigeria’s Islamiyya Schools: Global Project, Local Target
By Alex Thurston
This is the fourth post in a series on Islamic education in Northern Nigeria. The first post gave an overview of the series, the second discussed Qur’anic schools, and the third talked about “traditional” advanced Islamic education, noting that traditions change over time.
This post examines “Islamiyya” schools,...
