Category: Dr. Ahmad’s blog

We were recently interviewed by Reza Saiedi of Fars News about current events in the Middle East. Here are the questions and our answers. Q. It seems that there is a different basis for the unrest faced in Libya, Syria and Iran compared with that faced in the rest of the region. All the situations…

I know that Donald Trump’s speculation that even if President Obama has a birth certificate he might not want people to see it because it lists his religion as Muslim is nothing more than a desperate attempt to find a foothold from which he can jump into the campaign for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination,…

Listening to President Obama’s defense of his policy in Libya, you could tell that he is a lawyer. He carefully crafted a case to justify military intervention in Libya specifically, while appearing to rebut criticisms such as inconsistency in his policy with respect to other countries in which the Arab revolt is taking place, failure…

Amr Moussa was once a hero to the Arab masses for his straight talk, but now he is scrambling to find footing after the Arab League, which he heads, gave the West the green light it sought to intervene into Libya’s internal affairs. According to the Christian Science Monitor, his statement earlier today, “What is happening…

My paper on “Natural Law and Sharia” has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 2009 IIIT Summer Institute on “Contemporary Approaches to Qur’an and Sunnah.’  The Introduction is reprinted below and a preprint of the entire paper is available at http://minaret.org/Natural%20Law%20and%20Shariah.pdf. On Natural Law and Shari`ah a paper delivered August 3, 2009…

The Tunisians uprising that began last month has already forced the country’s president out of office and lead to the formation of an interim government designed to oversee a new election. A panel discussion presented as part of American University’s “Washington Semester” program addressed such questions as:  Will this expression of people power yield the…

In the past government sting operations have too often seemed like cases of entrapment, in which hapless dupes are tricked into illegal acts that they would never take of their own volition. In the recent case of the Somali youth Mohamed Mohamud accused of trying to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland,…

Regarding the discovery of an 18th century English translation of the Qur’an by a Massachusetts church, The Islamic Society of North America has distributed the following e-mail advisory: “Now and then we get news about ancient copies of the ‘Quran’ being discovered. We proudly announced that first Muslim congressman had used one from Jefferson’s collection.…

In his remarks at the State Department on Sept. 2, Benyamin Netanyahu made a joke out of the peace negotiations by urging his counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, to adopt the position that “There is no contradiction between a nation-state that guarantees the national rights of the majority and guaranteeing the civil rights, the full civil equality,…

NOTES FROM THE IIIT CONFERENCE ON APPROACHING THE QUR’AN AND SUNNAH #18 [This is the eighteenth in a series of my notes on the International Institute of Islamic Thought conference on approaching the Qur’an and Sunnah held in Herndon, VA. These notes are raw material for an edited report I will write on the conference…