Islam | Praxis

Arab Rulers Have No Use for Their Young Adults

Arab countries are full of young people frustrated by a lack of jobs; questioning traditional authority; bittersweet about the West, its liberties and its power; and plugged-in enough to know that their lot is worse than that of many of their peers around the world. “Young people just want to live and not make trouble, but they are unable to break into the political, social, economic systems of their countries,” says Rami Khouri of the American University of Beirut. “They have to create parallel universes…

Among Whites, There’s a Strong Correlation Between Racial Antagonism and Trump Support

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign effectively bucked what the political scientists Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders adroitly termed the Republican Party’s electoral temptation of race — using implicit racial appeals to win over racially conservative voters without appearing overtly racist. Trump’s play instead was to make several explicitly hostile statements about minority groups. Trump has been willing to go where most Republican presidential candidates haven’t. That might have made anti-minority sentiments a more potent force in the 2016 GOP primaries than in primaries past. That’s plausible, because campaign appeals…

What Does ISIS Want? The Group Has Released a Manifesto to the West

Editor’s note: The following essay was released by the self-described Islamic State in its English-language online magazine, Dabiq, around July 25, 2016. As it is not available in text form, we are reprinting it for educational purposes. Shortly following the blessed attack on a sodomite, Crusader nightclub by the mujahid Omar Mateen, American politicians were quick to jump into the spotlight and denounce the shooting, declaring it a hate crime, an act of terrorism, and an act of senseless violence. A hate crime? Yes. Muslims…

Khizr Khan, Father of Fallen Soldier, Rebukes Trump’s Anti-Muslim Rhetoric

Given that Hillary Clinton’s Senate vote, on October 11, 2002, to authorize the invasion of Iraq might have been what cost her the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2008, it was remarkable that the most powerful speech on her behalf on Thursday night in Philadelphia came from the father of an American soldier who was killed in that war. However, the words of Khizr Khan — a Pakistani Muslim immigrant, whose son, Capt. Humayun S.M. Khan, was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and Purple…

To Stop Aspiring Muslim Terrorists, Help Their Families Stop Them

Yet for all his faults and demagoguery, Trump has repeatedly emphasized a point which many of his rivals and critics are perhaps a little too eager to gloss over—namely that in many instances, a would-be terrorist’s family, friends or religious advisors know that their loved one is heading down a dark path, but fail to report it. Trump’s insinuation, of course, is that friends and family fail to contact law enforcement because they are, themselves, sympathetic to ISIS or al-Qaeda and want to see terror…

The Beginning of the End for House Saud

Between the crash in the price of oil and the Kingdom’s flailing war with the neighboring Houthis, the Saudi’s fortunes have taken a precipitous turn for the worse. Both crises have been handled with the impressive ineptitude, long trademarked by the House of Saud. Their scheme to bankrupt their geopolitical and economic rivals, Russia and the U.S. fracking industry respectively, via flooding the oil market with cheap crude, has backfired gloriously. The war in Yemen has likewise become an unmitigated disaster, an enormous economic drain on…

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