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“I heard your footsteps in front of me in Paradise.” Slavery is America’s original sin. It was there from the beginning. While the civil war eventually abolished it, what remains is an insidious, institutionalized and pervasive racism that has persisted in spite of the triumph of...

  The holy month of Ramadan is once again upon us and those Muslims who are fortunate to witness it are obligated to fast for the entire month, unless, they are old, traveling, ill or unable. Fasting is one of the five pillars of Islam; the other four are witnessing the Oneness...

“Whoever starts a good practice in Islam he will be rewarded for it and whoever starts evil practice in Islam he will be burdened with it.” (Prophet Muhammad pbuh from Sahih Muslim) The concomitant usage of the two terms Islam and Reform constitutes a major trope in the discourse...

Are Religion and Politics Separable? The twenty first century began with two major religious crises that have horrified the world — the sexual extremism in the Catholic Church and the violent extremism of Islamic groups. Together they have helped place religion in a very...

Power is a function of knowledge.   Say: Are those equal, those who know and those who do not know? [Quran 39:9] The Ummah is powerless because those who they consider as knowledgeable have failed for over 500 years to provide us with an empowering vision. The success of...

Muslim lands and Muslim communities are in a state of violent and intense political transformations across the Muslim heartland. States are destabilized, national identities are being deconstructed, sectarian and ideological fault lines are getting exacerbated and radicalism,...

The Presidential election campaigns in the U.S. have begun. Major candidates like former secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Ted Cruz from Texas have thrown their hats into the fray. Once again we confront the challenge, what role can American Muslims play in American...

The recent discursive assault on Islam and Muslims by the so-called “new atheists” is another moment in the sequence of never ending vilifications of Islam that Western culture seems to have an insatiable appetite for. There is a perverse quality to this culture and discourse of...

One of the problems the Middle East and the broader Muslim World has faced since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire is the absence of a major power that can guarantee international security. In the absence of such a power, Muslim nations have had to rely on super powers like the...

Islamic intellectual culture suffers from a philosophy deficit. While there are a few philosophical thinkers in the Muslim World today none of them enjoys the rock star status that many pedestrian preachers and YouTube stalwarts enjoy. What this tells us is that people are...