At a burial shrine set in the rolling farmland of Pennsylvania, a group of Sufi devotees swayed in prayer, chanting the many names of God. The women, heads covered in loose shawls, sat on one side; the men, some clutching prayer beads, on the other. One woman, overcome with emotion, wept openly. At the center…
In 1971 a mysterious Sufi mystic arrived in America from Sri Lanka to spread a message of religious and racial unity. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen was his name and he amassed a following — in a country reeling from the social, political and religious upheaval of the 1970s, his message resonated. All along, Bawa’s inner circle of…
You’ve heard of Jewish Buddhists — “Jewbus” — and secular Jews. You likely know Jews who favor yoga over synagogue — there are even Jews for Jesus. But Jewish Muslims? With a grim deadlock between the Israelis and Palestinians, which often takes on a religious dimension — and a rise in both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism…
In the first few days after the Boston bombings, liberal pundits (like David Sirota, Cenk Uygur and Michael Shure) were hoping aloud that the perpetrators would turn out to be “white” rather than Muslim or Middle Eastern, so that the incident wouldn’t further inflame grass-roots anti-Muslim passions. Well, it looks like this was a twofer…
Man Seeks God: My Flirtations With the Divine By Eric Weiner Twelve, 368 pages, $26.99 I’ll be honest: I normally hate books like this — memoirs of spiritual tourism, jauntily retold by trustworthy but neurotic narrators who are careful never to be more knowledgeable than the reader. I have read about two dozen of these…
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