exploring muslim identities in europe & north america

BELGİN AKALTAN - belgin.akaltan@hdn.com.tr The new trend in Istanbul is throwing headscarf donning parties for young girls, as we have learned from a reader’s letter to a conservative daily. Is this some kind of a Turkish touch to the traditions that otherwise represent very little fun and offer very little to the modern woman? It is like the Muslim version of the Jewish coming of age ritual for girls, the Bat Mitzvah. I would not have known about it if columnist Fatma Barbarasoğlu had not written about it. I am quoting from her column dated Oct. 24, 2014, from daily Yeni Şafak. This is very new information for all of us, as I and my colleagues in the office had never heard of it before. Even the writer had not heard of it before.   The news comes from a letter from a reader, who is a career woman. She wrote that headscarf-donning ceremonies were being held in large wedding halls for young girls in rich, conservative neighborhoods of Istanbul. She wrote: “I live in a conse...

American journalist  Liz Smith once said very aptly that gossip is just news in a red satin dress. Although there is indeed an intimate relationship between rumour and news, it is important to note that rumour can often be a form of fiction that dones the cloak of veracity. Over the past couple of weeks a story has been featured in social media and email inboxes about a burqa-clad woman chastising a supermarket cashier for supporting Western bombing of Iraq. The most recent posting that came to my attention reached my facebook timeline from a user based in Israel and situated the alleged incident in a small Canadian town. The story sounded suspicious as, since the eviction of the Iraqi army from Kuwait in the first Iraq war, Canada has not been involved in military operations in Iraq and I therefore did some investigation only to find that the story must have been circulating in the internet since as early as 2003,  during the early days of the second Iraq war. This o...

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Over the past few months the  al-Dawlah al-Islāmīyah fī al-ʻIrāq wa-al-Shām  (ISIS or ISIL) ,  the jihadist militant group active primarily in Syria, swept through the Syrian-Iraqi border and, benefiting from the support and know-how of some of Saddam Hussein's army officers, pressed on for Baghdad virtually through the Mosul and Tikrit highway.  Its unprecedented success was too good not to make maximum use of. ISIS promptly renamed itself  al-Dawlah al-Islāmīyah   - Islamic State - shedding its limiting territorial aspirations of its earlier phase. It did so by proclaiming the end of the territorial demarcation of the Middle East that came to be known as the Sykes-Picot agreement and by designating itself as the modern-day Caliphate. To add to the gravity of this emotionally loaded move, the establishment of this new Caliphate was said to be proclaimed 'one hundred years from the start of the dismantling of the last - Ottoman - caliphate', a claim that, ...

British Palestinian Shadia Mansour began rapping in 2003 and her work has been revolving around the themes of Palestine and the Israeli occupation. She has been maintaining that she considers herself to be part of a "musical intifada" against the occupation of Palestine, conservatism and oppression of women. Mansour has recorded music with producer Johnny "Juice" Rosado and with artists like Iraqi rappers Lowkey and The Narcicyst , and Palestinian hip-hop group DAM . She has toured with Existence is Resistance , an organization supporting hip-hop shows in Palestine, and is part of the "Arab League" of Hip Hop. Her first single, "Al Kufiya Arabiya" (The Kufiya is Arab) was written when Mansour discovered an American made blue-and-white colored Arab scarf with Stars of David on it. Emphasizing the symbolic importance of the  kufiya  in Arab Palestinian struggle,  Mansour introduced her song on stage in New York by saying: "You...

A volume containing the proceedings of a seminar held at Youngstown State University on the theme of 'Public Islam' and the Nordic Welfare State has just come out as a special issue of Studies in Contemporary Islam and the Tidsskrift for Islamforskning .  The contributions in the volume are diverse yet interconnected. The articles that open the volume discuss how the two different welfare and civil society models represented by the Nordic countries and the USA may affect the institutionalization of Islam and Muslims’ public presence and values in these societies. Ulrika Mårtensson does that by providing a historical survey of the Nordic welfare state and its developments, including debates about the impact of neoliberal models and (de)secularization. Rhys Williams reflects on US civil society and its implications for American Muslims, while Tuomas Martikainen, provides a critical commentary on US research that juxtaposes European ‘religion-hostile’ management of rel...