Crossing the Crescent

Al-Qaeda’s voluble No. 2 figure Ayman Al-Zawahiri took a swipe at Obama in a recent audiotape, deriding him as a “house negro” working at the behest of America’s war machine.

Might conservatives, who spent the entire campaign bathing in foamy paranoid hatred over Obama’s supposedly “Muslim” and “terrorist” background, take this verbal blast as a clear sign → Read More: Islamic Extremist Derides Obama (Will Christian Extremists Take Notice?)

[First published on Wiretapmag.org]

The candidacy – and now election – of Barack Obama has elicited an avalanche of commentary on race across the political and social spectrum.

Some pundits have posited that we now inhabit a “post-racial” society that has transcended racial differences with the victory of an African-American presidential candidate. That a nation which held blacks in bondage, and refused to → Read More: Equality Deferred

In her book, Islam, Karen Armstrong describes the process of Muslim prayer as an effective way of cutting through the hard arrogance of the Arab tribesmen. In his biography, Malcolm X conveys the difficulty he experienced in submitting in humility by bowing as part of prayer as he made his first steps toward Islam.

From an outsider’s perspective, the → Read More: The Compass