Tag Archives: Islam

Alexander the Great didn’t leave a mark only in history books; soon after his death he entered the sphere of myth. The first mythical narration of the king’s adventures belongs to pseudo-Callisthenes, a name given to the writer of the manuscript called The Life of Alexander (the real Callisthenes, Alexander’s …

The issue of the French ban on the hijab occupies the international public discourse for years now. Many say that it’s a just law, protecting the French culture against erosion through contact with a deeply foreign civilization in the country with the highest percentage of Muslims in Europe, while others …

“It is highly probable that but for the Arabs, modern European civilization would never have arisen at all; it is absolutely certain that but for them, it would not have assumed that character which has enabled it to transcend all previous phases of evolution.” Robert Briffault Observing the condition in …

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” Salman Rushdie   On Valentine’s Day 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini sent a different kind of love letter to Salman Rushdie through the Radio Tehran station. He issued a fatwa against him calling all Muslims on Earth to …

“There is no god, and we are his prophets” Cormac McCarthy, The Road This story would be funny, if it wasn’t tragic. It’s the story of how a dozen comic cartoons contributed to the deaths of roughly 200 people, while Western leaders, and the Western public at large, failed to …

“There was no such thing as Palestinians… It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, 1969 …

“Nothing is really good or bad in itself—it’s all what a person thinks about it“ Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play “Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.” …

On 7 January 2015, a tragedy befell the capital of France, when two brothers attacked the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing and injuring many of its staff. Cause of the attack were the blasphemous cartoons on its front pages, which depicted Mohamed; a depiction that constitutes a …

The Yazidis (or Yezidis) constitute an ethno-religious group, native in northern Mesopotamia, and speak mostly Kurdish (Kurmanji Kurdish), while few of them speak Arabic. Their origin is unclear, their population reaches 200,000-300,000 people around the world (some say up to 700,000) and their way of life is agrarian. The United …

“The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” Report to Theodor Herzl about the Promised Land ”No people was ever liberated from colonialism because it managed to outclass the suppressor in strength, but because it created those conditions that made the cost of occupation larger than its …