I’m visiting Turkey right now, and two days of my stay will overlap with Ramadan, starting tomorrow. It’s a country where it’s very hard to get away from religion in the best of times. (Plus everyone always assumes everyone else is Muslim.) Now, on the eve of Ramadan, it’s all Islam all the time. I’ve … Ramadan

I occasionally get asked for recommendations about books to read on Islam, particularly if lately I’ve been grumbling about superficial descriptions of the religion. Usually I pull out some intro-to-Islam undergraduate textbooks. There are many good examples. But I wonder if they are really not to the point. After all, especially for skeptics, there may … Books on Islam

Surprising though that may be, I still run into people who think that “Islamophobia” is an illegitimate term. I don’t see how anyone observing right wing politics in the US can seriously say that deep-seated irrational hatred of Islam is not a widespread problem. Mind you, Islamophobia does get used by Muslim groups and Muslim-majority … “Ground Zero” Islamophobia

The McGill Symposium on Islam and Evolution, where I was one of the panelists, is now available as a webcast. The first half-hour lecture is mine. If you want to get a comprehensive picture of the creation/evolution wars in the Muslim world, watch them all.

As with any other religion, there is plenty of material critical of Islam available on the web today. Some of it is even pretty decent as an introduction to problems with Islam. For example, there’s the “Myths of Islam” page, part of the thereligionofpeace.com web site. It aims to get beyond some of the pro-Islamic … Myths of Islam

I’m finishing up writing a book on Islam and science. While working on it, I collected an awful lot of stuff that I can’t use. This quotation, for example, discussing the early conquests of the Islamic Empire: Now they had, by the order of God, to make Islam known to the outside world, but there … Jihad as a misunderstanding

In his speech before the United Nations last fall, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prayed that Allah (God) might usher in the era of the “Hidden Imam.” It was a curious remark that at the time I filed away and resolved to research later. Well, it’s later. The “end times” to be precise, for the Hidden … The Hidden Imam

For all the Religious Right political influence and the cultural weight of the most mindless forms of Christianity in the United States, at least it’s not a Muslim country. After a Danish and a Norwegian newspaper printed a couple of cartoons less-than-fully-respectful of Muhammad, Muslims the world over are indulging their sense of outrage, demanding … Muslims outraged