Pakistan is facing a polio crisis from unvaccinated children, because health workers are viewed with distrust — if not outright targeted by the Taliban. (Why? In 2013, it was revealed that the CIA ran a fake vaccination campaign as cover to hunt for Bin Laden.) This moving short film is part of a campaign to help rebuild trust, […]
With Rosh Hashanah fast approaching, Sara Beth Berman of the Davis Academy in Atlanta, Georgia, wanted to create a lesson for the school’s middle school students around the ideas of empathy and forgiveness. “In the month preceding the Jewish New Year, we talk a lot about how to forgive, how to accept forgiveness, and how […]
Masarat Daud wears the burka — but she didn’t always. As a younger woman at university in Dubai, she thought: “People would think I was so religious, no one would want to be friends with me!” She wore western clothes, to the amusement of her parents. But her mother began suggesting she wear the burka, […]
Negin Farsad’s new documentary, The Muslims Are Coming!, churns hilarity out of a not-so-funny subject: Islamophobia. The film follows Farsad, a TED Fellow, and a group fellow Muslim-American comedians (Dean Obeidallah, Aron Kader, Preacher Moss, Kareem Omary, Maysoon Zayid and Omar Elba) as they tour the United States and hold comedic interventions to show conservatives, […]
A few years ago, Lesley Hazleton, self-described “accidental theologist,” found herself waking each morning with the same question: What happened to Muhammad the night he received the revelation of the Koran? An agnostic Jew, Hazleton was writing a biography of the man who stood in the desert outside of Mecca in the year 610 at […]
TIME Editor-at-Large Bobby Ghosh covers global affairs and the Middle East. For five years he served as the magazine’s Baghdad bureau chief and, by the end of his tenure, was the longest serving print journalist in Iraq. Most recently Ghosh wrote a cover story on Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, arguably the most important man in […]
The core mystical moment of Islam took place in the year 610, or “half the world and almost half of history away,” as Lesley Hazleton, biographer of Muhammad, puts it. On a hot desert night, this previously ordinary man received the first revelation of the Koran on a mountain outside Mecca. “What struck me even […]