Romantic ideas of the relationship between East and West, which once held the imagination of Western audiences, have by now given way to the notion of an inevitable “Clash of Civilizations” between Islam and the West. In the shadows of these prevailing and misguided discourses, Tayeb Salih was a man who consistently bucked the trend, choosing instead to communicate through his writing a world that was both conflicted and hopeful […]
It would have been unlike Samuel P. Huntington to say “I told you so” after 9/11. He is too austere and serious a man, with a legendary career as arguably the most influential and original political scientist of the last half century – always swimming against the current of prevailing opinion. In the 1990s, first…
Dozens of people were injured on Thursday in a clash between immigrant families and Spanish police trying to bulldoze homes built illegally in the _Canada Real’ shantytown in Madrid. Fighting with sticks and stones, the police fired back with plastic bullets and teargas. The shantytown houses some 30,000 people, mostly of Moroccan and Romanian immigrants.
Pope Benedict XVI on Friday urged intensified dialogue with Islam, saying in a Christmas speech that 2006 will be remembered as a year marked by the danger of a clash between cultures and religions. Benedict compared the situation in the Muslim world to that faced by Christians beginning in the Enlightenment, the 18th-century movement to…
MANCHESTER – Two years after its launch, the country’s first fully Islamic retail bank cannot yet offer traditional products like mortgages, but Muslim clients say they feel more at home there. “You feel you’re putting your money in the right place,” said Kuwaiti-born Mona Aabbassi as she walked into the Islamic Bank of Britain (…
