Islam

Long Shadows

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 12:00:14 -0400

Hertog: How do we disentangle anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism?

Magid: I certainly don’t think that anti-Semitism is the only reason people are out in the streets protesting the war in Gaza. You just have to look at the pictures of the utter devastation in Gaza to see what they are protesting against. They are protesting against the systematic destruction of an entire society, and with TikTok videos—posted by Gazans and Israeli soldiers—we are all watching it in real time. Media censorship no longer works in our era of social media. I don’t think Israel quite understands that. Anti-Semitism exists in some of these protests, for sure, but it’s not the primary impetus. If that was the case, why weren’t there campus protests against Israel for decades? You have to make a distinction between saying, “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” or, “All Jews are implicated in this Zionist genocide,” which is clearly anti-Semitic, and saying, “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians and murdering children.” We can agree or disagree about what constitutes genocide, but opposition to what’s happening is not anti-Semitic. It has a moral justification. In my view, saying it is all anti-Semitism is just using anti-Semitism as an excuse for destroying a society. Yes, Israel had a right and a duty to respond to a horrendous, murderous act. But destroying a society in response is, in my view, a horrific choice we Jews will live with for many years.

Reason To Believe

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 12:00:14 -0400

Cohen: Do you think part of that evil spirit is found in every human?

Sullivan: I don’t think we’re born with it, but we have receptors that can connect to it, and we decide how much attention we give it, how much we turn toward its allure.

Monotheism At Thirty Thousand Feet

Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Below me the world turned slowly through the night, unaware of the multilayered geopolitics my coffee-jangled brain was imposing upon it. I could find reasons to forgive Judaism and Islam their present-day sins. Christianity was another matter.

Notes On Surrender

Sat, 01 Dec 2018 00:00:00 -0500

Over and over I have discovered that my children feel alienated in environments where, at their age, I felt an automatic sense of belonging.

Selected Poems

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0500

— from “To My Husband At The Beginning Of The Holy Month Of Ramadan” | Even though you no longer believe, you wake with me / before dawn. You prepare my breakfast: porridge, sliced banana, / a cup of tea, a glass of water.

The Wrong Imam

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0500

If we could have been inside his heart, if we could have been offered transportation from our Jerusalem to his heaven, this is what we might have absorbed: Abkar was not leading us in prayer. He was talking to God while we happened to be behind him, squeezed in so tightly we could hardly ﬁnd places for our foreheads on ﬂawless plush carpet.

Leaving The Faith

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0500

“You can’t have freedom of religion without free speech. You have to protect all of it: the Bible and the Quran and my right to say, ‘These books are full of fairy tales.’ ”

Biblioclast

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 16:06:00 -0500

My father. He wanted me to become a writer, but when I did, he didn’t like what I wrote.

He hated my first novel and called it pornography: it features lots of teenage sex and masturbation, as well as an unsavory portrayal of a narcissistic and selfish patriarch.

The Water Carrier

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Guru Gobind Singh’s small fort in Anandpur Sahib was besieged by the mighty forces of Emperor Aurangzeb. The emperor, who believed Islam was the only valid, true, and right religion, was forcibly converting Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians. Guru Gobind Singh, however, believed that all humans worshiped in their own unique ways and that all religions, if practiced with love and heart, led to God.

Blues For Allah

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

I was wrong. Ismail did, in fact, have powerful connections to the band, connections called “Africa” and “exile.” He understood what I’d failed to grasp: that when he led Aliya up the narrow stairs of the tour bus, he was leading her back to the deserts of North Africa, where those who have been driven from their homes recognize the longing in one another’s eyes, where unexpected guests are treated like nobility and children like family.

Selected Poems

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

— from “In His Wallet after the Terrorist Bombing” | Three library cards, all tattered — college, city, county. / Driver’s license in which he looks about ten years old. / Grocery-store club membership cards, all bright colors.

Go Fly A Kite

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

I was on a trip back home to northern California — part work, part vacation — and I had a terrible head cold. My research for a magazine article on the wine country north of San Francisco had brought me to a chilly town on the edge of the San Andreas Fault, a place populated by a combination of wealthy tourists, ranch hands, and hippie holdouts.

Sunbeams

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

They buried the hatchet, but in a shallow, well-marked grave.

Dorothy Walworth

The First Cut

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:03:00 -0500

I was raised in a family of four girls. When my sisters and I are together, we speak a private language composed largely of different pitches of laughter that causes our exasperated father to demand to know what’s so funny. I am most at home when I am sharing clothes, secrets, and a bathroom with other women.

My Accidental Jihad

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

For the next month, nothing will touch my husband’s mouth between sunup and sundown: Not food. Not water. Not my lips. A chart posted on our refrigerator tells him the precise minute when his fast must begin and end each day. I will find him in front of this chart again this evening, staring at his watch, waiting for it to tell him he may eat.

Walking Around In The Heart

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

I’ve always loved that moment when I feel the language coming. Nobody knows what the source of the flow of language is, that inspiring eloquence, but we know it when we feel it. Artists of any kind get addicted to that: “Why can’t I be this way all the time?” We destroy ourselves with ways of faking it, of manufacturing inspiration. Writers are so impatient.

The Two Worlds

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Walking into the temple compound, we walked into another world: quiet, serene, holy. Irregular stepping stones led us through a mossy garden to a steadily dripping little waterfall. Off to one side was a standing figure of Kwan Yin, bodhisattva of compassion, standing on a lotus pedestal.

I Was A Guantánamo Prisoner

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:05:00 -0500

I walked slowly up Mill Hill Road in Woodstock, New York. A rope tied my feet together; another bound my hands. A third rope, around my waist, was attached to the woman in front of me. A black hood covered my face. The rest of my wardrobe was an orange jumpsuit, like the ones worn by prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

The War Within Islam

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

We’ve made it easier for jihadist propagandists to convince the Muslim world that this is a war against Islamic values. . . . You want to know why we’re losing the war on terror? Because they have the better marketing campaign.

We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:05:00 -0500

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, honest self-expression carries a heavy price. Over the last six years, as many as a hundred print publications, including forty-one daily newspapers, have been closed by Iran’s hard-line judiciary. In April 2003 the Islamic Republic became the first government to take direct action against bloggers. Many more bloggers and online journalists have been arrested or intimidated since.

In God’s Name

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500

In the past Muslims understood that the message of Islam is contained in very specific teachings, and that other teachings in the Koran are very Arabian in character. Unfortunately, some present-day Muslims — and they are properly called “fundamentalists” — do not look at the historical context of the Koran’s teachings, and so they want to transplant those Arabian teachings exactly as they are into twenty-first-century society.

Sunbeams

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow the teachings of the New, he would be insane.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Leap Of Faith

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

On one level mystics and pluralists from different faiths have more in common with each other than they do with fundamentalists of their own religion. Sometimes I feel like I belong to two peoples: the Jewish people and a pluralistic people drawn from all faiths.

Resurrecting The Revolutionary Heart Of Judaism

Thu, 01 Apr 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Jews jumped from the burning buildings of Europe and landed, unintentionally, on the backs of the Palestinians. Because our pain was so great from the Holocaust, we didn’t notice the pain we caused them.

The Boy Who Kissed The Soldier

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 00:00:00 -0400

In the ruins of Jenin, an old friend of mine is digging bodies out of the rubble where Israeli bulldozers have flattened houses, burying people alive. She describes the scene to me: Blackened, maggot-ridden corpses are displayed to anguished relatives for identification.

A Month Without Rest

Fri, 01 Feb 2002 03:00:00 -0500

My first night, I am awakened at two in the morning by either a bomb or a gunshot; I can’t tell which. Then at 4 A.M. the Jews start singing their sad song down at the Wailing Wall, followed by the bells from al-Aqsa Mosque at 4:45: the sounds of two great monotheistic religions disturbing a good night’s rest.

The Kingdom, The Kingdom

Thu, 01 Aug 1996 00:15:00 -0400

Deep in the heart of this desert land, rising up out of nowhere amid the sea of sand, is the city: Riyadh! We can drive out of town a bit and see camels wandering about; their owners let them loose to wander for eleven months at a time!

Venice Shimmers

Fri, 01 Oct 1993 00:20:00 -0400

Meanwhile, less than a day’s drive from here, the fighting continues in Bosnia, where tens of thousands have been killed or displaced, where starvation and concentration camps and rape hotels have become weapons in a campaign of ethnic extermination. Yet Washington is by and large indifferent, as Bosnia sits on no oil fields and sends neither Democrats nor Republicans to Congress.

Kusadasi

Wed, 01 Aug 1990 00:15:00 -0400

In summer, cruise ships bring exultant droves of westerners to the town, who, along with extensive drug trafficking, have transformed the region into a wealthy, peaceful appendage to the otherwise bellicose, indigent body of Turkey. Like the thin layer of crude oil on the Mediterranean, affluence stratifies.

This Longing: Versions Of Rumi

Sun, 01 Jan 1989 00:00:00 -0500