Barack Obama’s background is quintessentially neo-American: mixed race, multiethnic and multicultural, with deep personal religious beliefs. He has had a Muslim and a Catholic education. His Luo grandfather was one of the first Muslim converts in his village. But neither Obama’s African Luo father nor his white Midwestern mother were religious. (He has said his […]
Articles I cited in blog entries below about women scientists in the Muslim world mention, among other things, that even if women do manage to get an education as a scientist, their career prospects after graduation are dismal. Women face social, cultural and religious pressure to marry, become housewives, raise children, and remain distant from […]
Fawza Falih, an illiterate Saudi woman, was beaten and forced to fingerprint a confession that she could not read and that was not read out to her. A Saudi court has condemned her to be executed, probably beheaded. Her crime: witchcraft. Among her accusers is a man who claims she has made him impotent. (Note […]
A creationist group has out-witted peer-review at the journal Proteomics and gotten a paper published that, among other things, claims that mass spectrometric analysis of mitochondria has resulted in evidence for the existence of God. The paper also appears to have plagiarized entire paragraphs from other papers. Proteomics has retracted the paper. However, the editor-in-chief […]
posted by Jenny White on The Immanent Frame (Click here for link)
Turkey’s ban of the headscarf on university campuses — rather than the headscarf itself — has become a serious impediment to women’s participation in economic and professional life. Three-quarters of Turkey’s female population covers in some fashion.
The ruling Muslim-inflected Justice and Development Party […]
See also Feride Acar’s article, “Women in Academic Science Careers in Turkey”, in Women in Science: Token Women or Gender Equality?, edited by Veronica Stolte, Heiskanen, F. Acar, N. Ananieva, D. Gaudart, and R. Furst-Dilic (eds.). SSC/UNESCO Publication, Berg Publishers, Oxford,1991. The book has articles about women in science in a number of European […]
“Islamic Women in Science” in Science 6 October 2000: Vol. 290. no. 5489, pp. 55 - 56. (click here for full text)
Farkhonda Hassan is Professor of Geology at the American University of Cairo, a Member of the Shoura Assembly of Egypt, and was co-chair of the Gender Advisory Board of the United Nations Commission on […]
Turkey’s ruling AKP needed the votes of the nationalist MHP in parliament to lift a ban on headscarves. Now is payback time. In return, AKP is backing down from its minorities bill that would have, among other things, returned property and assets that had been confiscated from Christian, Jewish and other minority religious groups by […]
Article in The New York Times (click here)
I’ve been traveling about the United States holding readings of my new novel, The Abyssinian Proof. In the discussions afterwards, people often comment that this and my previous novel, The Sultan’s Seal, can also be read as parables for the modern era. The background for The Abyssinian Proof, set in 1887, is the loss of […]