Home-grown Imams Reconcile Islam, American Culture
The News Review:
- Home-grown Imams Reconcile Islam, American Culture
- Ireland: Going against the grain
- Regionalism is driving Europe together Advertising, not autonomy, is…
- 5 Things To Do | PE.com | Southern California News | News for Inland…
- “Fun Home” Alison Bechdel
Home-grown Imams Reconcile Islam, American Culture
إسلام أون لاين – Jun 18, 2006
net
&
Newspapers. CAIRO – With accent-free Arabic and rarefied Qur’anic grammar and being equally at home in Islamic subjects and modern American culture, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shakir are on a mission to reconcile Islam with American culture. “Sheik Hamza and Imam Zaid have grown up here after having studied abroad, and you can really connect with them,” Ebadur Rahman, 19, told the New York Times. “The scholars who come from abroad, they can’t connect with the people. They’re ignorant of life here,” insisted the New Yorker. Rahman, the son of Bangladeshi immigrants, is one of six full-time students in the first Islamic seminary in the United States… CAIRO – With accent-free Arabic and rarefied Qur’anic grammar and being equally at home in Islamic subjects and modern American culture, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shakir are on a mission to reconcile Islam with American culture. “Sheik Hamza and Imam Zaid have grown up here after having studied abroad, and you can really connect with them,” Ebadur Rahman, 19, told the New York Times. “The scholars who come from abroad, they can’t connect with the people. They’re ignorant of life here,” insisted the New Yorker. Rahman, the son of Bangladeshi immigrants, is one of six full-time students in the first Islamic seminary in the United States. Yusuf and Shakir are hoping to train a new generation of imams and scholars who can reconcile Islam and American culture.
Ireland: Going against the grain
Times Online – Jun 18, 2006
Pressed on the film’s negative characterisation of the British forces — which borders on caricature — Loach places his answer in a wider context. “Well, if you were in Falluja, how would you see the Americans? If you were in Baghdad, what would you think of the occupying forces? But in the film one of the British officers says these men had fought at the Somme, they’ve seen their comrades killed, so how do you expect them to behave? You can’t say war brutalises people if you don’t see the effects of the brutality. ” The irony of such comparisons is that, far from being an opportunistic metaphor for the Iraq war, The Wind That Shakes the Barley is a long-cherished project of Loach’s; one which, for all its cinematic licence and broader agendas, paints a truer picture of the intricacies of the independence struggle and its fratricidal aftermath than home-grown films such as Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins.
Regionalism is driving Europe together Advertising, not autonomy, is…
San Francisco Chronicle – Jun 18, 2006
Classical music pipes through speakers as the Eusko Tren whisks past fields of cows and flowering fruit trees, pausing in stations whose names are posted both in Castilian and in the ancient Basque language of Euskera. The journey ends an hour later in the sleepy French border town of Hendaye — marking the first phase of grand ambitions to build a 28-mile light rail system linking Bayonne, in France’s Basque region, to San Sebastian in Spain’s Basque country. Dreams of connecting French and Spanish Basque territories have been around for centuries. They form the bedrock of a bloody, 38-year struggle for an independent nation by the Basque Homeland and Freedom, known more commonly as ETA. But in March, the Basque terrorist group declared a “permanent” cease-fire that underscores a new reality: Infrastructure and idiom, not bombs and bullets, are now shaping the Basque identity… Across Europe, regional independence struggles are dying out, but not regional aspirations. ETA, many in San Sebastian hope, will follow the Irish Republican Army in matching its peace declarations with disarmament. Home-grown terrorist groups in Italy, Britain and Germany are history; Corsica’s fighters remain marginalized and fractured by clan rivalries. Local languages, foods and music are flowering across the 25-member block. Regions are inking collaboration agreements to share health, transportation and education services. They are flexing new lobbying clout in Brussels, where there is a special European Union committee dedicated to their interests. “What does independence mean anymore in this day and age?” asks Desmond Clifford, head of the Welsh government office at the EU.
5 Things To Do | PE.com | Southern California News | News for Inland…
Press-Enterprise – Press-Enterprise (subscription) – Jun 18, 2006
, Paseo Colorado, Pasadena, free, 626-795-9100. Home-grown: The LifeHouse Theatre’s original performance of Mark Twain’s "Tom Sawyer" is scheduled to go onstage in Redlands at 2:15 p. , $6-$17, 909-335-3037. Why? Why? Why? The "Art and the Science of Global Warming (New Works by Sam Huang)" is on display at the Riverside Metropolitan Museum. It attempts to explain the complex scientific phenomena contributing to the rapid warming of the earth.
“Fun Home” Alison Bechdel
St. Louis Post-Dispatch – Jun 18, 2006
" Since 1983, Alison Bechdel has drawn a cast of cartoon characters and put them through the paces of vegetarianism, graduate school, U-Haul moves, couples therapy, Prozac (gasp!), political activism, artificial insemination, home ownership, commitment ceremonies, dating men (gasp!), breast cancer and tenure. With her graphic novel "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic," Bechdel shares her considerable skills with a larger audience. The remarkable drawing and storytelling once lavished only on lesbians now concerns Bechdel’s childhood in the 1960s and 1970s. Exacting details such as Sally Field in "The Flying Nun" will clue you in to the period, if shag hairstyles and wide ties do not. Bechdel grew up in a small Pennsylvania community with two brothers, a beautiful New York actress of a mother and an English-teacher father, who meticulously restored the family’s large Victorian home. Although the house was impeccable, down to its period wallpaper, the inhabitants were not… Icy emotions were a less-than-sunny detail, as was her father’s second job as a third-generation mortician at his family’s funeral ("fun") home. A larger imperfection was her father’s closeted homosexuality and his untimely death. Having grown up with literature and theater, Bechdel convincingly compares her family to that of Proust, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce, not to mention the ghoulish Addams Family. Early reviews rightly compare "Fun Home" to the current autobiographical work of David Sedaris, Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff and Jeanette Winterson. Despite its prurient plot and the pop-cult vehicle of graphic novel, Bechdel’s story reads more like a Russian classic than a page-turning tell-all. Unlike many contemporary memoirs, "Fun Home" grapples with childhood memories, adult hindsight and family secrets with much integrity.