Exit ISIS, stage left: fighting for laughs in Mosul and beyond
The State of Myth has lowered its curtains. The state-sponsored Iraqi television series, which introduced itself to the world with a musical trailer featuring the marriage of the devil to an Israeli bride whose offspring hatched in the form of a miniature Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, took audiences by storm when it launched its first episode in the fall of 2014. Its theme song went viral. Actors received death threats. In the communicative battle to counter the message of the Islamic State, few efforts went so far as Dawlat al-Khurafa.
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Arab-Americans, including 'Watan' newspaper, endorse Bernie Sanders
Many Arab-Americans want the Jewish candidate to be president. The prominent Arabic-language newspaper for that community in Southern California, Watan (“A Nation”), has endorsed Bernie Sanders.
This outcome is not as strange as it might appear. Arab-Americans (who include Christians and Muslims) had been split between the Democratic and Republican Parties until roughly 2003, when the Bush administration decided to invade and occupy a major Arab country. Then in 2006, the Republican Party decided to demonize Muslims by taking the religion of Islam with ‘fascism’ and ‘terrorism.’
Continue reading on Informed Comment
Too much Islam?
In 2010, Samuli Schielke, an anthropologist working at Zentrum Morderner Orient in Berlin, wrote a paper concerning the anthropological study of Muslim societies that contained the following provocative assertion:
“There is too much Islam in the anthropology of Islam.”
According to Schielke, our studies of Muslim societies—anthropological or not—have often privileged the role of Islam so much that other facets of life become obscured. Indeed, when we premise our studies with titles such as “Muslims in …” or “The role of Islam in …,” we may inadvertently prioritize piety and tradition in our analytical foci—everything becomes all about Islam.
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