Sufism

by Hamza Mekouar | – Moulay Driss Zerhoun (Morocco) (AFP) – It’s dubbed the “pilgrimage of the poor” — every summer, tens of thousands of people flood this small central Moroccan town to honour a Sufi saint buried here 12 centuries ago. Moulay Driss Zerhoun, nestled between two hills covered in olive groves, is where […]

Music

Pakistan’s Sufi music fights to be heard after singer’s Killing

AFP

Extremist Muslims cast a pall on spiritual tradition

Bashar al-Assad

Syria’s forgotten pluralism and why it matters today

contributors

By Andrea Williams | (The Conversation) | – – The Syrian Civil War has been raging for six years. It has killed nearly half a million people and left over 12 million, about half of Syria’s total population, without a home. A few weeks ago, a devastating chemical attack brought this conflict back into the […]

Islam

Why ISIL is Targeting Tolerant Sufi Islam

contributors

By Peter Gottschalk | (The Conversation) | – – On Feb. 16, 2017, a bomb ripped through a crowd assembled at the tomb of a Sufi saint, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, in southeastern Pakistan. Soon thereafter, the so-called Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack. In recent times, such attacks have targeted a variety of cherished […]

art and photography

Image of the Day: “Jonah and the Whale” (Persian Miniature)

contributors

Metropolitan Museum of Art | (Persian Miniature Painting) | – – “Jonah and the Whale”, Folio from a Jami al-Tavarikh (Compendium of Chronicles [A medieval World History]) Inscription: In Persian, on the arms of Jonah: “The sun’s disk went into darkness, Jonah went into the mouth of the fish.” The story of Jonah and the […]

Alawites

Is Religion really Driving Middle East Violence?

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Pew Research has released a report saying that “As a whole, the region continued to have the highest levels of religious hostilities in the world. In 2014, the median level of religious hostilities in the Middle East and North Africa reached a level four times that […]

al-Qaeda

Top 5 things that Make Bangladesh a natural Target for Extremists

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Bangladesh has been plagued by extremist violence for years, but the violence and hostage-taking in Dhaka on Friday and on Saturday morning was a whole new level of disruption. Why Bangladesh? Here are some reasons: 1. Bangladesh is a multicultural state, where some 9 percent of […]

Sufism

Who Was the mystic Jalaluddin Rumi, and Whose Rumi Is He?

contributors

By Bismellah Alizada | (GlobalVoices.org) | – – As all the countries that call the work of Jalaluddin Rumi their own rise up against the idea of Leonardo Di Caprio playing the poet and scholar in a Hollywood epic, social media users in Afghanistan are pushing back against Iran and Turkey's reported joint claim to […]

Bashar al-Assad

US Air Force Absent as Daesh/ ISIL advances on North Aleppo against Sunni Rebels

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – Daesh (ISIL, ISIS), the murderous terrorist organization that has taken over the eastern desert of Syria and the western desert of Iraq, along with perhaps 3 million townspeople, is now making a move on Syria’s largest city, Aleppo. For the past five days, Daesh has been fighting […]