


Nicki Minaj, a female rapper known for her vulgar lyrics and semi-nude dresses will be performing in Jeddah on July 18. The primitive regime made the announcement on July 3 as part of its drive to what it calls “easing restrictions on entertainment”.
Al-mu'min mir'atu akhihi (“a committed Muslim is the mirror of his brother”). In other words, we Muslims should be building on our perceptions of each other. One should be able to identify one's own characteristics as a Muslim through the character andbehavior of another Muslim.
Among the topics discussed at the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) meeting in Kuwait in December was that of textbook revision...
Culture is nothing more than the way we live our lives, and it can be informed by religion or not. If you are asking about a more monolithic entity like "civilization" then maybe we can say that Muslim civilization has declined, but that is nothing new. All civilizations rise and fall, including the Western civilization. It is somehow natural, and civilization is what we make it. Culture, on the other hand, is more local and regional, more amorphous and less linked to material objects like monuments and cities, which are what we usually use to judge civilization.
Generally speaking, there can be no single culture, since culture, as understood by social scientists today, refers to the way of life of a particular people at a particular time and place. Culture also has two dimensions, the material dimension and the symbolic dimension.
Understanding mental illness in the modern world entails grasping two issues: 1) how mental illness is defined over time and across cultures and who does the defining, and 2) accepting the recent evidence that the causes of many mental problems lie outside a person's head, e.g. in the realm of culture and society.
TV has provided a way for people to consume images and ideas that the ordinary person would not have access to in the course of a typical life. However, while this might sound like a benefit -- and we are constantly reminded of this alleged benefit by the industries themselves -- TV is not simply about seeing new things. It is primarily about selling.
What makes a particular sound art "Islamic." I have to say that any comments I make on this are indebted to the late scholar of music, Lois Lamya al-Faruqi, who really helped to define an Islamic epistemology of music. Rather than using Western categories of analysis, she developed categories that were descriptive of the sound arts based on Islamic principles and proceeding from the Quran.