It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem. –Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable“
Over the course of the past few weeks, I’ve been busy writing my article for ISNA’s Islamic Horizons magazine, looking at the Muslim community of Montreal. I have a few smaller focus pieces to finish up, but the main article is out of my hands now. It will be appearing in the November-December issue of [...]
I’m in the middle of writing and researching my article on the Muslim community of Montreal. It’s going well, but just as the wider conversation about modern Islam has become infected with politics (or, rather, politicized), I find that in conversations I’ve had so far, the same issues inevitably come up without my having to [...]
First off, I must wish Eid mubarak to everyone celebrating Eid today! Eid-ul-Fitr is the major festival at the end of the month of Ramadan. It’s officially a three-day festival. The analogy would be to compare Eid to a kind of mash-up between Christmas and Thanksgiving. There’s a second Eid, Eid-ul-Adha, that takes place two [...]
Ugh… I’ve spent the better part of the last few days being utterly exhausted by this whole cartoon controversy. I was pissed at the beginning. I was offended by the cartoons, by their use of stereotypes and the political insinuations being made. So I wrote about it. This weekend, when I lay in bed feeling [...]
I finished Orientalism some time last week. I knew for some time, at least somewhere in the back of my mind, that Orientalism was a major book. It seemed to be one of those books that got referred to here and there in other books that I read. The book, Orientalism, is a critique of [...]