Roots of Prejudice: The Influence that Western Standards of Secularism have on the Perceived (In)compatability of Islam with the Western World

The increase in Muslims entering Western nations in the last few years has sparked a rise in Islamophobia as well as controversy about the role of secularism in the modern nation-state when it is used to justify prejudice and discrimination against Muslims. Most of the literature on Islamophobia focuses on Western Europe. This study examines the relationship between Islamophobia and secularism in the United States. The United States frames secularization as separation of church and state. Analyzing data from the 2011 Pluralism-Immigration-&-Civic-Integration survey that samples 2450 people 18 and older reveals that controlling for age and being Roman Catholic, the more one agrees in the separation of church and state, the more one disagrees that Islam is at odds with American values and culture. Similarly, multiple regression analysis reveals that controlling for age and being Roman Catholic, the more one agrees with the separation of church and state, the more comfortable one is with Muslim women covering their bodies and with a mosque being built near their home. While the multiple regression analysis showed that secular values makes one more comfortable around Muslim women, that does not necessarily match the experiences Muslim women have in the United States. Secularism in the United States is not as prominent as in Western Europe, however, a rethinking of whether the United States supports freedom from religion or freedom of religion, as well as the idea that Islam is incompatible with Western cultures needs to be revisited to prevent discrimination against Muslims

Pinched Lives and Stolen Dreams in Arab Feminist Short Stories

The short fiction of Arab women writers epitomizes their penetrating feminist voices and contributes to our understanding of the diversity of Arab women short-story writing in the second half of the twentieth century. This fiction, which should be read with an open mind and with a nod to the culture and social context in which it is born, cradled and bred, deals with family relations in the Arab world and the ways in which the members of these families show each other love, or perhaps neglect to do so, with social and cultural dominion that emphasizes the collective and downplays the individual, with identity crises, with sexual objectification and with the politics and social/cultural/economic dynamics of gender relations and gendering in the vast Arab world. As evidenced in the selected short stories examined in this paper, Arab women exist in societies which present them with impenetrable boundaries around asserting control over themselves and achieving self-actualization. This dilemma of stifled self-control trumpets a series of dichotomies between which these women are forced to live, straddling inner passions and imposed social obligations, desire and duty as a female. As a result, a population of halved women is produced, women who are neither satisfied nor fulfilled and who are unable to define what satisfaction and fulfillment mean in their own terms. Through reading the lives of Arab women, we come to see the role history and society have given us and a more passionate and meaningful self-fulfilling existence. We come to refuse the silence ingrained in our soul and to reject our fate as discarded women. We come to validate our own deeply-held values and to forge a new future for ourselves, thus creating ourselves anew, a true act of love

Reaching Out to Tribal Communities: Lessons Learned and Approaches to Consider

When transportation safety decision-making is desired, the involvement and engagement with a community is essential. A streamlined delivery of a project or program is more likely to occur when active dialogue and an exchange of ideas occurs in advance and occurs frequently. This is particularly important in tribal communities, who value sustained relationships and represent the focus population of this study. The research team, on six separate occasions, met with local and regional tribal leaders to explore and discuss transportation safety needs within and outside tribal communities, as well as discern the recommended approaches to foster ongoing dialogue about these needs. In all cases these discussions closely correlated with existing research studies or activities; transportation safety and equity is not seen as separate from other tribal foci and community needs. Specific recommendations to consider, in no particular order, included the following: invest respectfully enough time for people to talk; tribes think long-term and consider the impact of any decision from a long-term viewpoint so an iterative process and re-sharing of ideas is critical; the power of decision is in the hands of the tribe and its members; do not lump tribes together as each tribe is sovereign and unique and every community should be expected to think differently; all tribes are unique as is the environmental and social context; to disseminate information widely and iteratively, do so when there is a large group or event; be sure to understand the Tribal governance, decision making, and organizational structure; know who is the tribal Chairman or Chairwoman; and develop an emic and etic understanding of the community

Physics of Extra Dimensions

This article is based on papers discussing different aspects of extra dimensional environments. In addition to the results, we review some of the concepts on which models with large extra dimensions are based.Comment: 120 pages. Based on a PhD thesis submitted as a partial fulfillment for a PhD degree at SISSA (Trieste, Italy

Kayan–Feminist Organization: Sustainable Grassroots Community Activism

This article describes the process by which Kayan (Being) created the model for the Women’s Leadership Development and Sustainable Community Activism Program. The organizational model presented here was developed as a result of activities that began in 1998, during which Kayan worked with approximately 180 Arab women’s groups, with over 3,000 women from around fifty villages and towns across Israel. The model changed and solidified, through repeated evaluations and testing of the program’s goals in general, and through the program’s ongoing feedback specifically with groups of women involved. Evaluations were gathered from women participating in the groups and also through evaluations of its activities conducted by Kayan

Margaret Fuller’s conversations: Speaking as revision and feminist resistance

Conversation as a means to social, intellectual, and spiritual self-culture was advocated during the American Romantic period by members of the Transcendental movement. Margaret Fuller was a transcendental conversationalist who challenged the theoretical setting and practice of selfculture, remedied the gap in it about concepts of womanhood that were imposed by the culture of the time and that attempted to determine women’s place in the symbolic order, and placed an emphasis on self-knowledge, whatever the subject matter. She came to represent a rhetoric whose aim was to foster community, moral truths, ethical actions, and feminist resistance. Fuller fully subscribed to the idea of the revelatory power in conversation and provided women with an opportunity to develop the intellectual rigor necessary to establish their own identities in the world: public or private. Through her weekly conversations for Boston women, held from 1839 through 1844, she used conversation or speaking as revision to explore philosophical, aesthetic, and sociocultural questions and supplied access to education from which women were excluded

From Aloneness to all-Oneness: Evelyn Shakirs Bint Arab as a Site of Settled Places and of Border-Crossings

Evelyn Shakir s Bint Arab 1997 2 which follows the journeys and un homed experiences of three generations of Arab-American women and their search for self identity and voice puts a human face to borrow Taynyss Ludescher s words 3 on Arab-American fiction and presents multiple perspectival narratives and subject positions which depict the stories utterances fractures slippages and exilic consciousness of Arab- American women and their attempts to negotiate an inbetween space for themselves in which a potentially vast number of relations coalesce Shakir s narrative not only seems to echo Bakhtin s heteroglossia as it permits a multiplicity of social voices 4 but it also seems to resonate with recent scholarship on the ethics of literature particularly with Martha Nussbaum s claim that narratives formally construct empathy and compassion in ways highly relevant to citizenship