pakistan & india

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Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice." My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.

Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

via Why My Father Hated India - WSJ.com.

islam & science

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We may think the charged relationship between science and religion is mainly a problem for Christian fundamentalists, but modern science is also under fire in the Muslim world. Islamic creationist movements are gaining momentum, and growing numbers of Muslims now look to the Quran itself for revelations about science. Science in Muslim societies already lags far behind the scientific achievements of the West, but what adds a fair amount of contemporary angst is that Islamic civilization was once the unrivaled center of science and philosophy. What's more, Islam's "golden age" flourished while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages.

This history raises a troubling question: What caused the decline of science in the Muslim world?

Now, a small but emerging group of scholars is taking a new look at the relationship between Islam and science. Many have personal roots in Muslim or Arab cultures. While some are observant Muslims and others are nonbelievers, they share a commitment to speak out—in books, blogs, and public lectures—in defense of science. If they have a common message, it's the conviction that there's no inherent conflict between Islam and science.

via The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Last month, nearly a dozen scholars gathered at a symposium on Islam and science at the University of Cambridge, sponsored by the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Programme in Science & Religion. They discussed a wide range of topics: the science-religion dialogue in the Muslim world, the golden age of Islam, comparisons between Islamic and Christian theology, and current threats to science. The Muslim scholars there also spoke of a personal responsibility to foster a culture of science.

One was Rana Dajani, a molecular biologist at Hashemite University, in Jordan. She received her undergraduate and master's degrees in Jordan, then took time off to raise four children before going to the University of Iowa on a Fulbright grant to earn her Ph.D. Now back in Jordan, she is an outspoken advocate of evolution and modern science. She has also set up a network for mentoring women, and she recently started a read-aloud program for young children at mosques around Jordan.

As if that weren't enough, Dajani helped organize a committee to study the ethics of stem-cell research, bringing together Jordanian scientists, physicians, and Islamic scholars. (The traditional Muslim belief is that the spirit does not enter the body until 40 days after conception, which means many human embryonic stem cells can be harvested for research.)

"Being a Muslim, living in a Muslim world, Islam plays a big role in our everyday lives," she says. "We need to understand the relationship between Islam and science in order to live in harmony without any contradictions."

For these scholars, the relationship between science and Islam is not a dry, academic subject. Many of the hottest topics in science—from the origins of the universe and the evolution of humans to the mind/brain problem—challenge traditional Muslims beliefs about the world.

"Remember, these are human issues," says Nidhal Guessoum, an Algerian-born astrophysicist at the American University of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, who was also at the Cambridge symposium. "It's not an experiment in the lab. I'm talking about my students, my family members, the media discourse that I hear every day on TV, the sermons I hear in the mosque every Friday."

a muslim yogi

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Peggy Rosenthal, in The IMAGE Blog:

Say the word “Muslim” these days, especially “American Muslim,” and many people get jittery. The antidote to this jitteriness, I’m convinced, is to get to know lots of American Muslims, in all their variety, all their individualities.

And there’s no better place to start—or to continue—than by reading Kazim Ali’s new book, Fasting for Ramadan.

Poet and Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College, Ali is as American as apple pie—or as bagels or pizza or curry or hummus.

These food analogies might seem a bit odd for a book with this title. But Fasting for Ramadan isn’t just about fasting. For Ali, the 30-day Ramadan fast draws his attention to the body’s nature in ever-new ways. So the book is about what it means to live in a body, how body-mind-spirit are connected, where our “self” resides, how the practices of Islam and yoga reinforce each other.

Yes, yoga. Ali has taught yoga and has a yoga practice. (What could be more American than that?) “Yoga,” he writes,” is from the same Sanskrit word that gives the word ‘yolk.’ And ‘yoke.’

And, interestingly: ‘religion.’ Which can be both yolk and yoke, fruitfully and restrictively. Yoga is a practice, not unlike fasting, that allows us to link the inside—the private experiences of the body and the mind—with the outside—the pulsing, breathing, actual world.

Say what?