What Makes People Tick?

I would like to tell you the story of a girl who was one of my best friends when I was a teenager. I'll call her Anon (anonymous) and keep the details vague to protect her privacy. Anon was born in the part of Kurdistan that lies in Iraq in the days when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq. After several family members and friends were taken captive and/or murdered by Hussein's regime, Anon and her family fled Kurdistan before they too would be murdered. The initial flight to safety took several weeks if not months while it would take years before they found a new home in the city where we met. My friend was a young girl when she left Kurdistan, yet when she talked about her childhood it was clear to see that the memories still haunted her. She'd get this far-away look in her eyes, as if she was looking at a movie of her own life, replaying images from her childhood on a screen only she could see. Anon is one of the kindest and gentlest people I've ever met, someone always ther...

A women's clothing store in the United Kingdom named after an Egyptian mythological figure becomes the target of hate mail and harassment, as the UK's  Daily Mail reports . Source:  Isis Boutique  Facebook page Jill Campbell is the owner of women's clothing store Isis Boutique in Malvern    (Worcestershire). Her store is named after the Egyptian goddess Isis. Ms Campbell came up with the name after leaving Oxford in 2007, explaining "The river in Oxford is named locally as ISIS and it is also the Egyptian goddess of magic, mystique, beauty and femininity which is everything the shop is all about." The boutique has been in business for seven years. The past few months, as the western world has been getting to know the terrorists and murderers in Iraq and Syria known as "ISIS", Ms. Campbell's store has been coming under threat. Not because she supports ISIS or anything like that but because the name of her boutique sounds similar to one of th...

ISIS, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood, Boko Haram, the al-Nusra front... No doubt there are groups just as bloodthirsty that are not on this list because I can't think of them off the top of my head. These are all names of organisations I wish I'd never heard of. Because these names belong to terrorist groups that seem to find it necessary to kill, hurt, harm and maim; to execute people, to enslave and rape women, to terrorise and kill and cause destruction in an effort to further their own cause.  The cause they are attempting to further (to impose / to enforce) is Islam. Or rather - their own radical and violent interpretation of Islam with current actions seemingly geared entirely toward the spread of (their version of) Islam through any means. While I am a student of the world's peoples and religions and consider myself someone who attempts to walk in another's shoes to understand them and learn what it'...

In October 2001, almost thirteen years ago, Robert Worth published an article in the New York Times entitled "The Deep Intellectual Roots of Islamic Terror." In the article, he quotes Princeton professor of Near Eastern Studies Michael Doran who talks about terrorist group Al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden. Remember, this article was published only a month after the horrible events of September 11, 2001. ''Many Americans seem to think that bin Laden is just a violent cult leader,'' said Michael Doran. ... ''But the truth is that he is tapping into a minority Islamic tradition with a wide following and a deep history.''  Although many Muslims are horrified at the notion that their faith is being used to justify terrorism, Mr. bin Laden's advocacy of jihad, or holy war, against the West is a natural extension of what some radical Islamists have been saying and doing since the 1930's. These radicals were jailed, tortured and oft...

The University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research has conducted an extensive survey in seven Muslim-majority countries -- Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey -- looking at Tunisia as the birthplace of the Arab Spring and how happenings in Tunisia effect other Arab countries. The study itself is very interesting - read it as a PDF here  - however what caught my eye was a January 2014 article by the Pew Research Center (using UoM's data)  looking at the way MEN prefer women to dress in public places in the above-mentioned countries.