Jamillah Karim: Terence Crutcher, May God grant him the highest level of Paradise

http://race-gender-faith.blogspot.com/2016/09/terence-crutcher-may-god-grant-him.html?m=1

The Goldziher Prize is an award for excellence in the coverage of American Muslims by an individual or team of U.S. journalists.

http://www.goldziher.org/#home

The Goldziher Prize was created in response to the rising fear and hateful actions toward American Muslims. The Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations at Merrimack College, an independent college in the Catholic Augustinian tradition, and the William and Mary Greve Foundation seek to publicly recognize and stimulate stories or opinion pieces about Muslims in the U.S. 

via Hussein

England’s Forgotten Muslim History (NYT, 9/17/2016).

It turns out that Islam, in all its manifestations — imperial, military and commercial — played an important part in the story of England. Today, when anti-Muslim rhetoric inflames political discourse, it is useful to remember that our pasts are more entangled than is often appreciated. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/englands-forgotten-muslim-history.html

Jerry Brotton, a professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London, is the author of The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam.

An Essential Human Respect: Reading Walt Whitman During Troubled Times

http://www.themillions.com/2016/09/an-essential-human-respect-reading-walt-whitman-during-troubled-times.html

Walid Saleh on the centrality of the tafsir tradition in Islamic intellectual history

What should be clear from this summary is that Ibn 'Āshūr was writing a history of tafsīr as an intellectual history — tafsīr as part of the religious history of Islam — not as a string of biographies of exegetes. The attention given to the teaching and transmission of tafsīr was for him central. The gloss here becomes a major part of this history; after the 13th century the gloss became the main vehicle for scholarly creativity in tafsīr. These insights into the history and development of the genre are simply unmatched in the field. Ibn 'Āshūr’s analysis once and for all resolves the problem of assessing the cultural significance of the genre of Qur'ān commentary in Islam. It proves that tafsīr was central to the concerns of the scholarly elite, central to the educational system, and central in the formation of the worldview of Muslim intellectuals. The Qur'ān as a hermeneutical concern was central to Islamic culture, and this hermeneutical concern, this intellectual obsession, was independent of any apparent utilitarian function. The Qur'ān as a text was

the abiding concern of the educational system.

-Saleh, Walid. "Marginalia and peripheries: a Tunisian historian and the history of Quránic exegesis." Numen 58, no. 2-3 (January 1, 2011): 284-313, 308.