Saba Mahmood is an anthropologist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and whose work raises challenging questions about…
Religious liberty, minorities, and Islam: An interview with Saba Mahmood
Islam
Western secularity
We live in a world in which ideas, institutions, artistic styles, and formulas for production and living circulate among societies…
Why I don’t read non-fiction from Barnes and Noble, and why that’s a problem for public scholarship; or, what I learned in third grade about epistemology and essentialization
I have not been interested in the Barnes and Noble non-fiction section for a long time. There might be a…
The suspicious revolution: An interview with Talal Asad
Not long after his return from Cairo, where he was doing fieldwork, I spoke with Talal Asad at the City…
A tale of two flotillas
Given the close relationship, globally, between religious political action and religious charities, it should come as no surprise that there…
Memorizing the Qur’an at age 10
From noted war correspondent-turned filmmaker Greg Barker, a new documentary, Koran by Heart, which premiers August 1.
What federal agents are reading about Islam
Spencer Ackerman, at Wired's Danger Room blog, reports on the recommended reading on Islam provided to incoming FBI agents, as…
The politics of inaccuracy and a case for “Islamic law”
Since the process of understanding divine law is not a uniform or singular one, there are multiple interpretations of what…
Fighting words that are not fought
“Under what conditions does freedom of speech become freedom to hate?” Judith Butler recently asked. Here I will explore these…
Whose foreskin?
Courtney Bender discusses the controversial ballot measure to prohibit circumcision of males under eighteen years of age, which will be…