Bill Gates Applauds Khan Academy’s Ingenuity...
Weeks ago at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Bill Gates applauded the educational efforts of Salman Khan in front of a 2,000-man audience. Khan, the only teacher of the online Khan Academy, produces videos and tutorials that have made his website one of the most popular educational sites on the internet. Khan’s ten to fifteen minute free tutorials, on subjects including math and science, are now viewed almost 70,000 times a day. Commenting on the tutorials, which both Gates and his 11-year old son Rory consume, the second richest man in the world says, “I’d say we moved about 160 IQ points from the hedge fund category to the teaching-many-people-in-a-leveraged way category. It was a good day his wife...
HijabFest Explores Muslim Fashion in New Jersey...
NEW BRUNSWICK — On Sept.22, the New Brunswick Islamic Center (NBIC) hosted the first ever HijabFest at the Hyatt Regency in New Brunswick. The word hijab can be defined as a veil or a scarf that mainly Muslim women use to cover their heads, but it can have a much broader meaning which is to have modesty in how one dresses, behaves and interacts. Approximately 400 Muslim women of all ages and diverse ethnic backgrounds participated in this ladies-only event. The theme of the event was, “What does Hijab mean to you? A celebration of the empowerment that hijab brings.” The event included various demonstrations and workshops on hijab, inspirational talks, a fashion show, and shopping, which brought...
Christians Not Islam’s Enemies, Says Malaysian Minister of Islamic Affairs...
Islam does not have any enmity towards Christians, said Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom, in response to a parliamentary question today. Jamil, who is the minister in charge of Islamic affairs, said while Islam is the religion of the federation, other religions are free to be practised. Jamil said this in response to a supplementary question from DAP’s Beruas Member of Parliament Datuk Ngeh Koo Ham. Ngeh querried if there was any truth in a report on the Friday sermon prepared by the Department of Islamic Development Malaysia (Jakim) at a mosque on August 30, in which Christians were labelled as enemies of Islam. Jamil however sidestepped Ngeh’s question on the Friday...
Terrorism has no place in Islam: Turkey’s top imam...
The president of the Directorate General for Religious Affairs (Diyanet), Mehmet Görmez, has dismissed suggestions that Islam could be used to justify recent attacks on civilians in Kenya and Pakistan, saying terrorism had no place in Islam. It is impossible to find references in Islam that permit any attacks on people of different religious faiths across the breadth of the Islamic world, he said. “These things are totally outside of Islam and are things Islam rejects and never accepts,” Görmez said Oct.1, referring to recent attacks in Kenya and Pakistan, at a meeting in Istanbul. More than three dozen people still remain unaccounted for almost a week after the end of the four-day terrorist attack on Nairobi’s Westgate...
Working Women and Islam
Whoever thinks that women should be confided to the comforts of their homes, ‘like before’, obviously has no idea about the good old days. This second installment in the series of articles on Women and Islam focuses on working women. The presented excerpt, from a study titled The Urban Economic Life of Women in Islamic Egypt, was first published in 2007 by the Women and Memory Forum — founded in 1995 by a group of women academics, researchers and activists aiming to highlight, and revive, the role of Arab women in history as a means of empowerment. The study explores the presence of women in the economic and mercantile life of Islamic Egypt up to the end of the Fatimid Caliphate....
The problem in the Middle East is authoritarianism, not Islam...
August 20, 2013 12:15 AMBy Dani Rodrik Is Islam fundamentally incompatible with democracy? Time and again events compel us to ask this question. And yet it is a question that obscures more than it illuminates. Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia are very different countries, but one thing that they share are Islamist governments (at least until recently in Egypt’s case). To varying degrees, these governments have undermined their democratic credentials by failing to protect civil and human rights and employing heavy-handed tactics against their opponents. Despite repeated assurances, Islamist leaders have shown little interest in democracy beyond winning at the ballot box. So those who believe that the removal of Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi’s government was justified have a point. As the Muslim Brotherhood’s...
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