BY SOLON SIMMONS
There is no part of the world more crucial to the strategic interests of the United States as is the Middle East. While the traditional problems of the regulation of international affairs are at play there, Arab language satellite channels have created a new force in the region, and Al Jazeera is one [...]
BY PETER MANDAVILLE
This is real life, engraved on my pages: families dying from starvation whilst the government’s worried about immigration.
— Blind Alphabetz, ‘Concrete Landz’
Like everyone today, Young British Muslims are carrying around iPods full of the latest tunes. Despite the recent phenomenal popularity of a pop-oriented variant of nasheed devotional music—a key artist would be [...]
BY TOM C. OWENS
As the United States stood poised to take a more prominent political and cultural role as a world power at the turn of the twentieth century, debate raged over the formation and character of distinctively American artistic forms and traditions. Within the art or classical music tradition, this conversation was particularly intense [...]
BY RICK DAVIS
In some sort of ideal world, language would not be a barrier to cultural understanding. Literature, scholarship, sacred texts, jokes, journalism, nuance and even subtext would flow across actual and virtual borders. Difference would be celebrated without being flattened out. Access to rhythms of words (and life), patterns of thought, hopes, dreams, and [...]
BY ALAN CHEUSE
Here’s an obscure moment, that when it first happened, seemed to me to be an example of I didn’t know what, but now shines through the fog as a precursor of some news to come: about ten years ago I served on a jury that decided one of the largest international literary prizes [...]