Category: Dr. Ahmad’s blog

[On January 6, 2022, the Council on Foreign Relations held an on-the-record discussion of the relationship between religion and populism, and how this relationship is affecting the politics of Europe and the United States, featuring Jocelyne Cesari, chair of religion and politics at the University of Birmingham, and Tobias Cremer, junior research fellow in religion…

Among the remarkable Muslims who passed away in 2021 were three who, in different ways, supported the Minaret of Freedom Institute. Dr. Mahmoud Ayoub, one of the most outstanding scholars of his time, was knowledgeable in both Islamic jurisprudence and in Sufism.  We were honored to work with him on a number of occasions and…

[These are my notes from the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy program on “Tunisia’s Democracy Under Threat: What is at Stake for the MENA region?” held on October 26, 2021, moderated by Khalil Jahshan (Executive Director of the Arab Center in Washington DC). These notes summarize my impression of selected highlights of…

It seems everyone is asking some version of the question “What happened in Afghanistan?” Of course, what happened is exactly what many predicted from the moment the invasion of that country was announced almost twenty years ago.  While not everyone can be expected to understand the reasons why America’s defeat was a foregone conclusion, everyone,…

The original HAMAS charter, written in 1987 by a single person and adopted in the crush of the first intifada in 1988 without critical scrutiny, has been an embarrassment to HAMAS to the extent that it is still cited by Zionist propagandists years after its replacement in 2017.  The new and official HAMAS charter is…

You have heard reports of an upswing in anti-Semitic (i.e., anti-Jewish) incidents lately, and in any case anti-Semitism was already a serious problem with over half of the religiously based hate crimes in the U.S. being directed against Jews. A concern has been expressed that at a time of rising opposition to Israeli aggression, the…

Manufacturing Counter-mythology [This is a preprint of a book review scheduled for publication in the Molinari Review in May 2021] The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain by Darío Fernández-Morera, Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2017, 358 pp., US$29.95. ISBN 161017095-4 (hb). Myths are important. Actual myths…

“THE MEANING OF JERUSALEM THROUGH MY MOTHER’S MEMORIES AND MY FAITH” Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Ph.D. Minaret of Freedom Institute Adapted from WHAT JERUSALEM MEANS TO US: MUSLIM PERSPECTIVES AND REFLECTIONS I am a Palestinian-American Muslim. Although I was taken away from it while still in my mother’s womb, Palestine is my motherland in a multi-dimensional sense. My mother…

Jörg Matthias Determann’s Islam, Science Fiction, and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021). 270pp. Reviewed by Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Ph.D. Minaret of Freedom Institute www.minaret.org Anyone susceptible to believing stereotypes depicting the religious views of Muslims as violent variations of Christian fundamentalism would expect a book…

[These are my notes from the National Interest Foundation discussion on Libya’s transitional government and the prospects for December’s elections. These notes summarize my impression of selected highlights of the presentations and are not an attempted transcription. I have paraphrased in the first-person for convenience.] Federica Saini Fasanotti, Brookings Institution. We have good movement on…