Archive for May 2009
An Islamic College in Berkeley?
The proposed Zaytuna College would be a first: a four-year, accredited, Islamic college in the United States.
“Part of the process of indigenizing Islam in America is for the community to begin to develop its own leadership from inside the country, develop its own scholars,” said Hatem Bazian, chair of the management board for Zaytuna College and a senior lecturer of Near Eastern studies at the University of California at Berkeley.
“There is a growing need in the Muslim community to provide a variety of trained specialists to fulfill a growing and diverse community infrastructure and institutional framework,” Bazian said — to work as imams, as chaplains, or within the growing network of Islamic non-profit organizations. Currently, Bazian said, American students who seek a high-level Islamic education must study in the Muslim world.
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Netanyahu Clashed With Obama, Congress On Trip
M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum wrote that it was “the first time in memory” that “an Israeli prime minister went up to the Hill only to be bombarded with criticism.”
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“Muslims Talking Sex” Series: Sexual Double Standard – When Women are “Skanks” and Men are “Studs”
GOATMILK continues its original and exclusive month long series entitled “Muslims Talking Sex” featuring diverse Muslim writers from around the world discussing a gamut of topics in their own unique, honest and eclectic voices.
Women are “skanks” and men are “studs”?
Hesham A. Hassaballa is a Chicago physician and writer. He is co-author of The Beliefnet Guide to Islam and deputy director of Illume Magazine.
The stories are almost always the same: a woman, frequently in a Muslim country or within Muslim communities, is brutally slaughtered for “violating the family honor” by being suspected of fornication or adultery. In the notorious Amina Lawal case in Nigeria, she was sentenced to death for adultery, but the father of the child was let go for “lack of evidence.” Sometimes, a woman or young girl is killed by her brother, who himself has a girlfriend. Yet, this double standard exists not only in Muslim or Eastern societies; it exists even here in the United States. Women who sleep around are frequently called “sluts” (or worse), while a man with multiple sexual partners and escapades are “studs.”
Why does this double standard exist? Read the rest of this entry »
“Muslims Talkin Sex” Series: Anti-Teen-Dating Diatribe by Mohja Kahf
GOATMILK continues its original and exclusive month long series entitled “Muslims Talking Sex” featuring diverse Muslim writers from around the world discussing a gamut of topics in their own unique, honest and eclectic voices.
An Anti-Teen-Dating Diatribe
Mohja Kahf
Teen dating: What demented dunce invented it? Aunty Mohja wants to know. What possesses U.S. consumerist culture to promote it as the norm? Let’s send a boy and a girl, their horniness joyfully newfound but woefully untamed, into the dark of a theater or the back of a car, unsupervised. Let’s urge them to contort their emerging personalities around what makes them pleasing to the other they wish to attract. Let’s expect them to go through relationship after relationship in their teens, getting jaded before they’re out of high school. What species of parent permits such perversion? A dayyuth, in Arabic, is a person who gives someone sexual access to a member of the family: a variety of pimp. Aunty Mohja is just innocently pointing out this word. Read the rest of this entry »
“Muslims Talking Sex” Series: Much Ado About Nothing- the Hymen
GOATMILK introduces its original and exclusive month long series entitled “Muslims Talking Sex” featuring diverse Muslim writers from around the world discussing a gamut of topics in their own unique, honest and eclectic voices.
Much Ado About Nothing: the Hymen
Fatemeh Fakhraie
Riddle: If you’ve got this, you can’t share it. If you share it, you haven’t got it.
The actual answer to this riddle is “a secret.” But the case could be made for an alternative answer: the hymen.
Women are taught that our hymens are a secret: a gift representing our virginities that we should never share with anyone but our husbands. Instead of being a gift, however, it really functions more as a curse. Our early lives are often shaped around the hymen and its protection: we may be kept from playing sports, using tampons, having male friends, and riding horses for fear that our hymens may break (or be broken) and our virginities rendered void. Read the rest of this entry »
