Aesop's story might be a good one to teach at New York Police Department trainings, instead of infecting unsuspecting officers with a pernicious fear of Islam and Muslims. The active participation of Police Commissioner Kelly and his Public Affairs Officer Paul Browne in the creation and promotion of an anti-Muslim film has led Muslim New Yorkers to deep disappointment, skepticism and mistrust. They are now calling for the two to resign.

Patriotism looks different depending on how you spin it. It can create a fascist, racist monster, or it can be a symbol of justice and independence. The difference, according to a new global study published in Psychological Science, is the source of the pride in question. The study found that people who love their country for its laws and institutions, rather than its lineage, are happier.

Whirling Dervishes, an elaborate feast and a lecture by a prominent Muslim scholar – Musallah Tauhid’s joyous celebration of its move to a new home in 2008 heralded good times ahead for the Sufi Muslim worship group. As a friendly gesture, the group invited its new neighbors for the occasion: members of both Village Lutheran Church, whose Brentwood facility Musallah Tauhid would now be sharing, and Ahavat Torah, a small Jewish congregation that also holds its services at the church.

Anti-Loons of 2011: Profiles in Courage | loonwatch.com.

That time where we recount and reflect upon the events and happenings of the past year is upon us. A review of 2011 is due in short order, but before we post that piece we will consider the anti-Loons of the year. This time around it would only be fair to allow loonwatchers to vote for the Anti-Loon of the Year. As we can’t create a poll, we present those we found deserving of such a consideration.

Did you know that some of the greatest Islamic scholars such as Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Imam Ibn al-Jawzi, Shaykh-ul-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah, Imam al-Dhahabi, Imam Ibn al-Qayyim, Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali and many other great Imams and scholars had female teachers? Even though it is not widely known, thousands of female scholars have enriched the Islamic tradition through out history. Shaykha Fest is intended to honor the legacy of female Islamic scholarship and draw attention to contemporary female scholars. At Shaykha Fest we will embark on an exciting journey into the past and learn from contemporary female scholars, thinkers and activists from around the world in a nurturing, non-cultural and inclusive atmosphere. Shaykha Fest in essence is a celebration of life, love and sisterhood. Come and join with us so we can revive this tradition together.

Long gone are the days that teens would pick up a book and become utterly lost in the London slums and alleys of Dickens or caught up in the schemes and adventures of Twain's Huckleberry Finn on the Mississippi River. Today these playgrounds of the mind have been replaced by video games, texting and the social networks of the internet. Our purpose of organizing this competition is to inculcate love for art and literature. The award ceremony brings together people of different backgrounds to promote arts, understanding and cross-cultural dialogue.

ACLU in Court Today: Government Can't Use Border Checks to Avoid the Bill of Rights » Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Late last year at Chicago's O’Hare airport, while returning from a vacation in Mexico, Mr. House was approached by two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who questioned him about his political beliefs and then seized his computer, USB drive, video camera, and cell phone. The government retained the devices for nearly seven weeks, copying and distributing the information on them to various federal agencies.

While political mud-slinging is de riguer in primary races, 2012 has brought several not-so-thinly-veiled anti-Muslim soundbytes from its frontrunning candidates. Last week, Newt Gingrich said that he would not support a Muslim president unless they would "commit in public to giv[ing] up Sharia." Rick Santorum also expressed his thoughts on Islam, saying that the concept of equality "doesn’t come from Islam" or "Eastern Religions." Instead, he said, "it comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

In a major victory for privacy, today in U.S. v. Jones the Supreme Court unanimously held that, “The Government’s attachment of the GPS device to the vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment.” The Court found that the government violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects American from unreasonable searches, when it placed a GPS device to Antoine Jones’s car and tracked his movements continuously for a month.

Randall Todd Royer, 38, a Missouri-born Muslim convert known as Ismail, is nearly eight years into a 20-year prison sentence for helping friends go to an extremist training camp in Pakistan. In the highest-security prison in the United States, known as the federal Supermax, he wrote about prison life and his views about Islamic extremism in a year-long written correspondence with a New York Times reporter.

To Rockwood, the plot involving targeted assassinations and bombs was a "pure fantasy" created by a government agent he thought was his friend, a common refrain in the nation's burgeoning number of "home-grown" terrorism plots prosecuted since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Fattest Nation on the Face of the Planet

... is a Muslim one...

http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/11/the-richest-fattest-nation-on-earth-its-not-the-united-states/248366/

The poorest and hungriest is probably also a Muslim one too....

May God save us from ourselves.

That about sums it up for me.

On the next Your Call, we'll have conversation with graphic novelists. How do images change the art of story telling? What are your favorite graphic novels? What makes them unique? Join us at 10 or email feedback@yourcallradio.org. More graphic novels have been published in the last 10 years than in the previous 30. What explains the explosion? What can we learn from graphic journalism? It's Your Call, with Rose Aguilar and you.

Exposing Hate, Resisting Victimization: Islamophobia & the Path Forward | Straight Talk Podcast with Dr. Hathout.

What are we doing as a nation to our own? In this conversation taped at the MPAC convention with speaker, author and playwright Wajahat Ali (co-author of “Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network” study), Dr. Maher Hathout examines the small but powerful network fueling hate and its dangerous impact on politics, media and public opinion at home and abroad. As their hateful messages become more and more mainstream, how can we deal with public fear and misconceptions in a way that reinforces our identity and place in the American fabric?

The offices of L.A. Voice, where Umar Hakim is in residency, are on the third floor of the First Baptist Church of Los Angeles. So when it comes time for Hakim to offer his daily prayers, he finds a quiet room, faces Mecca and turns his thoughts to God.

Back in November of 2011, an epic act of state occurred in New York City—the seizure and destruction of the OWS library. More seizures ensued. The library reappeared on the Brooklyn Bridge. Readers and writers all over the world spoke out against the so-called Bloomberg Bibliocide. What’s been happening with our favorite library? KtB recently caught up with People’s Librarian Betsy Fagin via email.

At just 27 years old, Asif Umar is the new imam of Daar-ul-Islam mosque, the largest mosque in the St. Louis area. The son of Indian immigrants is devoted to the city's sports teams, marking the end of Ramadan with a St. Louis Blues hockey game.

In a move to engage young people worldwide, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has named Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a global cultural ambassador.

I am pleased to inform you that my publisher Berg has decided to join the Social Science Open Access Repository and to make my first book, Jihad Beyond Islam(2006) available legally for download with no costs but strictly under the Creative Common License.

via velveteenrabbi.blogs.com

See Rachel's whole post for excellent resources against SOPA and PIPA. We are both on TypePad and can't go black for the day.

The Los Angeles Times today reports on the TSA’s VIPR program, in which roving teams of security agents bring the joys of the airport security experience into bus and train stations, highways, the subway, and other transportation facilities around the country (a Daily Caller story on the program from earlier this year is here). 

This program represents nothing less than a direct assault on the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. It’s also an exceedingly dumb security measure. But never underestimate the mindless force of a government bureaucracy seeking to expand its power, domain, and budget. 

This Wednesday, January 11 marks 10 years since the first prisoners were sent to Guantánamo. Over the last decade, the prison camp has become a symbol of injustice, abuse and disregard for the rule of law.

Merip has a brand new blog, launched today. I intend to contribute posts on a regular basis--but I will not be abandoning hawgblawg by any means. My first was a meditation on how Robin Wright celebrates Arab/Islamic hip-hop in her book, Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World. Read it here.

Prophets don't come to us to make us feel better about ourselves, to tell us to affirm our inner goodness, or to grant us wishes like a Santa-Clause. 

No, prophets come to hold up a mirror to our society and our hearts, and let us see how we have fallen away from God, how we are living unjustly. They tell us that unless we repent now, the judgment of the Lord is upon us.

Cambridge University Library's collection of Islamic manuscripts dates from the origins of Arabic scholarship in Cambridge in the 1630s when the University founded a Professorship in Arabic and William Bedwell donated a Qur'an to the Library. Since that time the collection has grown in size and diversity to over 5,000 works, including the collections of Thomas Erpenius, J.L.Burckhardt, E.H.Palmer and E.G. Browne. These manuscripts shed light on many aspects of the Islamic world, its beliefs and learning.

h/t Gary Bunt

I wanted to make sure I linked to this excellent op-ed from a young black man, experiencing what all too many of us learn to basically tolerate in New York. 

As the 2012 presidential election approaches, it has been difficult for me to listen to the political scapegoating of Muslims and those perceived to be Muslims. A decade ago, as an attorney at the Department of Justice, I worked with colleagues in the civil rights division to address the unprecedented backlash in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. We investigated complaints of brutal hate crimes in neighborhoods, vandalism at places of worship, bullying at schools, and discrimination in the workplace aimed primarily at those who traced their origins to South Asia and the Middle East, or those who practiced Islam, Sikhism and Hinduism.

Prayer that brings a permanent awareness of the Divine Reality is the aim of Sufism first and foremost, which London based Sufi scholar, Reza Shah-Kazemi, believes is the key to its universality. Sufism’s mystical universalism is what interests Hebrew University scholar, Sara Sviri, who reveals the fascinating phenomenon of ‘Jewish Sufism’.