The earlier date is only 16 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and falls in the reign of the third Commander of the Faithful, `Uthman b. `Affan.

The later range of possible dates stretch into the Umayyad kingdom (traditionally dated 661-750), when the early Muslim empire was ruled from Damascus.

David reports that the archeologists view their discoveries as upending myths about this era. They find evidence that the small 8-man crew was made up of a mixture of Christians and Muslims, who clearly worked closely with one another.

He writes,

“Clues to their identity have been left in the dozens of inscriptions painted or carved both on the amphorae of the cargo and the timbers of the ship itself. These writings include Greek and Arabic letters, as well as Christian crosses and Muslim invocations, such as bismillah – “in the name of God.”

The archeologists believe that the Arabic invocations to God and the Christian crosses and Greek phrases were carved by the crew in hopes of protecting the ship.

David quotes Deborah Cvikel, a professor of nautical archaeology at the University of Haifa, the leader of the excavation, as saying of these mixed religious symbols,

“One of the biggest takeaways from this shipwreck is that, in the past as in the present, normal people are more connected and united in working together than the history books would have you believe, based on geopolitical narratives of wars and battles . . .These are just regular people trying to make a living, selling things that they bought along the way.”

So I would go further. The find is support for the Donner thesis that early Islam was ecumenical. University of Chicago Professor Fred Donner argued in his 2010 Muhammad and the Believers that in the time of the Prophet and for some decades afterward, the community of Muhammad was made up not only of believers in the Qur’an but also of Christians and Jews who accepted the Prophet’s political and ethical leadership while keeping their own religious beliefs.

I accepted the Donner thesis in my own 2018 book:

There is a lot of textual evidence for the Donner thesis in the Islamic scripture, the Qur’an, and in documents we think are early, such as the Constitution of Medina and some reports about the four Commanders of the Faithful, later termed caliphs, who ruled after Muhammad’s death and about the first decades of the Umayyad kingdom.

Finnish scholar of early Islam, Ilkke Lindstedt found that the rock inscriptions from the first Muslim century also give some support to the notion of an ecumenical identity early on that only hardened later.

Israeli archeologists from Hebrew University working in Tiberias also found evidence of ecumenical Muslim rule in the 600s, such that the Christian cathedral continued to be the largest religious edifice in the city until the mid-800s.

There are also Syriac witnesses to this ecumenism from writers such as Yohannan (John) bar Penkaye, a monk in what is now northern Iraq writing in the late 600s.

He complained that Christians in the era of Mu’awiya, the first Umayyad king, were affected by the tolerance of the state in ways of which he disapproved, blasting his coreligionists for “trade with unbelievers, union with the perverse, relationships with heretics, friendship with the Jews.”

Bar Penkaye explained of Muslim rule,

“A man among them named Mu`awiya, took the reins of government of the two empires: Persian and Roman. Justice flourished under his reign, and a great peace was established in the countries that were under his government, and allowed everyone to live as they wished. They had received, as I said, from the man who was their guide, an order in favor of the Christians and the monks.”

He was referring to passages in the Qur’an that praised Christians and their holy men.

He said of freedom of conscience under the early Umayyads,

“From every man they required only the tribute, and left him free to hold any belief, and there were even some Christians among them: some belonged to the heretics and others to us. While Mu`awiya reigned there was such a great peace in the world as was never heard of, according to our fathers and our fathers’ fathers.”

That is, the Muslim rulers in the second half of the seventh century did not care what religious beliefs people held as long as they were loyal subjects and paid their taxes. The Muslims were a small minority, even if they were the ruling stratum, and so in their Western regions they needed Christian bureaucrats and even soldiers. Bar Penkaye a follower of the Church of the East, some members of which in that period had a somewhat Nestorian tendency. He said that some of his fellow members were with the Umayyads, presumably serving in the government, while Chalcedonian Christians worked with the Muslims, as well.

Bar Penkaye’s description is supported by an inscription published by Younis al-Shdaifat, Ahmad Al-Jallad, Zeyad al-Salameen, and Rafe Harahsheh. It says, “May God be mindful of Yazīd-w the king.” The inscription spells “God” in Arabic as al-Ilah, ‘the God’ which is how the Christians of greater Syria seem to have written it in that era, whereas the Muslims wrote Allah, with the two ‘l’s elided together. The inscription has a cross near the words. So the authors conclude that it was likely written by a Christian soldier in the service of Yazid I, the second Umayyad king (r. 680-683). And, this Christian soldier was loyal to the Muslim king.

So the finding that Christians and Muslims worked alongside each other and carved religious graffiti from their own religion into their ship should not be surprising.

David also quotes the archeologists as being impressed with the variety and origin of the goods being transported, apparently between Egypt, the Levant and Cyprus, though they find it possible that the ship also traded to Malta, a Christian-ruled island. The old notion of a seventh-century Dark Ages once Islam took over the southern half of the old Roman Empire, which had been put forward by the Belgian economic historian Henri Pirenne, has long since been refuted. This shipwreck further disproves Pirenne’s thesis, which never had any proof to back it up.

(Special to Informed Comment) – St.Patrick’s Purgatory at Lough Derg was first written about in the 11th century as one of the most rigorous pilgrimages in Europe. Our small family went there for a three-day retreat and given only bread and water while having to walk in bare feet throughout the three-day retreat.

According to an ancient legend there was a battle that Patrick had to fight against a monster that inhabited the lake. He was compelled to fight this giant lake creature so he entered naked into its great mouth with his pointed crozier and managed to slay the monster from the inside out. This is why the lake is called Lough Derg (the red lake).

Older legends maintained that St. Patrick responded to the doubts of his converts, who told him they would not accept his teachings until they had substantial proof. He went to the island of Lough Derg and on Station Islnd a large cave was revealed to him which eventually became to known as “purgatory”.

By the 12th century a basilica was built to replicate the cave, and instead of a quest for visions, the emphasis was placed on penitence. The name “purgatorium” in Latin, meant a place for cleansing and purging. The idea of “purgatory” as a place for punishment in the afterlife did not come into use until the thirteenth century, being adopted by Dante Alighieri in the early 14th century as the name for an after-life existence between heaven and hell. The famous poem was “The Divine Comedy”.

By the twelfth century pilgrims came from continental Europe, landing at Dublin or Drogheda. From those ports they made their way by foot, stopping at monasteries along the way on a fourteen day pilgrimage across the countryside. At that time many sinners and criminals were sent on pilgrimage to atone for their misdeeds and to seek forgiveness. Lough Derg was one of the chief destinations for such penitential pilgrims, since communities of anchorites (hermits) living there were believed to have special powers to absolve afflictions and sins.

The monastery on Saints Island offered hospitality to pilgrims, who visited in a spirit of penance and prayer. It also served as a place where pilgrims prepared themselves to visit the Purgatorial cell. They spent fifteen days on Saints Island, fasting and praying to prepare themselves for the visit to Station Island. At the end of the fifteen days they confessed their sins and underwent final rituals before being locked in the cave for twenty-four hours. The day following that the abbot brought the pilgrim back to Saints Island for another fifteen days.

Due to its penitential nature Irish poets, such as Seamus Heaney, attended the retreat and wrote about it in“Station Island”. This was his way of reflections on the “troubles” taking place in Northern Ireland.

That eternal fountain, hidden away, I know its haven and its secrecy …,which is all sources’ source and origin …

Patrick Kavanagh also wrote extensively about his retreat:

Lough Derg, St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Donegal, …The twentieth century blows across it now But deeply it has kept an ancient vow.

WB Yeats wrote “The Pilgrim”, referring to Lough Derg:

”I fasted for some forty days on bread and buttermilk…

Round Lough Derg’s holy island I went upon the stones”

By the 20th century the retreat duration had become contracted into several days and no longer required preliminary preparations. My father made two retreats to Lough Derg before coming to the decision to immigrate from Ireland to North America with his large family and seek his fortune in gold mining and working in the Arctic, although there was no fortune to be had and there was more than enough misfortune.

St. Patrick’s Purgatory at Lough Derg continues to be a place for making decisions with many thousands coming each year to pray for good results in their school exams or how best to lead their lives, whether to immigrate or not, and among the elderly, to find some degree of solace in the besetting problems of illness and age.

Each year the Lough Derg retreat season begins in late May and ends in mid-August and is open to anyone from any religious tradition with retreatants expected to be at least fifteen years of age and in good health. Our son was fourteen at the time but an exception had been made since he was accompanied by his parents.

In earlier days, as in Dante’s Purgatorio, the main purpose of going to St.Patrick’s Purgatory at Lough Derg was to overcome the vices of envy, greed, anger, indolence, lust and gluttony and aspire to the virtues of humility, generosity, charity, moderation, patience, temperance and kindness. There is little doubt that many pilgrims felt they had achieved some equanimity and peace by the time they returned home.

Hugh Curran, Peace & Reconciliation Studies, University of Maine

⁸ Remember the name of your Lord and devote yourself to Him wholeheartedly–
⁹ the Lord of the East and the West. There is no god save He, so take Him as your defender.
¹⁰ Be patient with what they say and take your leave of them graciously.
¹¹ Leave the affluent who impugn you to Me, giving them a respite.

Muhammad ibn Abdullah of the Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe was born, according to my calculations, around 567 CE (AD), i.e. during the reign of the Roman emperor Justin II (r. 565–574) of Constantinople.

A long distance merchant, he experienced a prophetic call in 610, while meditating on retreat at the grotto of Hira’ outside Mecca in western Arabia.

In this chapter of the Qur’an, God is depicted as addressing Muhammad as the “robed one.” Professor Uri Rubin has a detailed article on what the later commentators took this epithet to mean.

My own guess is that Meccans who went on a spiritual retreat signaled their estate by wearing a cloak.

This chapter makes an analogy (verses 15-16) between Moses’ mission to Pharaoh and Muhammad’s to the wealthy Meccan pagan elite. Both Pharaoh and the merchants of Mecca rejected their Messenger from God.

Moreover, the Meccans taunted and insulted Muhammad, according to the Qur’an, as a mere magician or fraudster.

How were the early Believers in Muhammad’s message, and the prophet himself, to deal with such attempts at belittlement?

73:10 says, “Be patient with what they say and take your leave of them graciously.”

For the verb to “take your leave” or depart, emigrate (hajara), see Ahmad al-Jallad’s blog.

“Graciously” here is literally “beautifully.” Obviously, you have to absent yourself from the company of people putting you down unmercifully. But the Qur’an wants the objects of derision to depart without rancor. Just excuse yourself, leaving a comely impression behind.

The sentiment here is very similar to Matthew 5:39, where Jesus says, “But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”

It is worth saying something about the Qur’an’s use of “patience” (al-ṣabr) in this context. It is used in several distinct senses in the book, including to “suffer with.” But here it clearly means to show forbearance.

While it is not a direct context, in the late Roman empire, the Latin patiencia was used to mean tolerance and forbearance by thinkers such as Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius (c. 250-c. 325), a Christian teacher of rhetoric at Nicomedia who survived the great persecution of the early fourth century and then went on to advise the first Christian emperor, Constantine. Since the Hejaz where the Qur’an was recited was a frontier of the eastern Roman Empire, and since Muhammad may have spent a good deal of his life trading up to Roman Damascus and perhaps even residing there for months at a time, Christian Roman ideas like “patience” are not irrelevant to the Qur’an. While Latin receded in the east, some of the Latin authors’ ideas were taken up in Syriac and Greek.

As Pamela Sharp explains, in discussing Lactantius’ Institutes, Elizabeth Digeser in her The Making of a Christian Empire elucidated a difference between tolerance and concord: “Both toleration and concord involve forbearance, or an attitude of patience toward practices that one finds disagreeable, but they differ in the expected outcome. Toleration anticipates no change in the status quo; concord works toward ultimate conversion and unity.” Sharp says that Digeser thinks Lactantius was more about concord, that he urged freedom of religion but did so in anticipation that it would help people ultimately adopt Christianity.

The Qur’an verse here also recalls Paul’s Romans 12:19, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God;for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.'”

The Qur’an 73:11-13 instructs Muhammad concerning the rich playboys of Mecca who were questioning his sincerity, “Leave the affluent who impugn you to Me, giving them a respite. For We possess shackles and a conflagration, and food that chokes, and a painful torment.” They are in danger of hellfire anyway.

That is, Muhammad and his followers can show forbearance toward their tormentors and even treat them “beautifully” as they depart their company, in part because they have left issues like personal honor or right and wrong doctrine in the hands of God to judge in the afterlife.

These passages are in the same moral universe as the essay of the early bishop of Carthage (today’s Tunis), Cyprian (c. 210-258 CE) on the virtue of patience:

“Let us, beloved brethren, consider His [Jesus’s] patience in our persecutions and sufferings; let us give an obedience full of expectation to His advent; and let us not hasten, servants as we are, to be defended before our Lord with irreligious and immodest eagerness . . . so that when that day of anger and vengeance shall come, we may not be punished with the impious and sinners, but may be honoured with the righteous and those that fear God.”

I don’t want to be too obvious or presentist in these commentaries on a seventh-century text, but it is worth pointing out that some contemporary followers of Muhammad don’t seem very interested in meeting ridicule of the Prophet with as much graciousness and nonviolence as he himself did.

One other thing: While the later Muslim commentary tradition often sees this chapter as very early in his ministry, I don’t agree unless they are confining themselves to the first few verses and saying that others were added later. The Muslim commentators allege that from 610 to 613 Muhammad preached secretly, making his message public only in the latter year. Since this chapter clearly contains verses referring to his Moses-like mission to the elite, and to his message being rejected and his person ridiculed, it seems to me that it must derive from around 613-614. Since lines 2-19 retain the same rhyme scheme, there is some reason to treat them as a unity. (Verse 20 was clearly added later, in the Medina era, 622-632). Of course, the story about the three-year hiatus between receiving the first revelation and going public could be incorrect; it is from Ibn Hisham/ Ibn Ishaq and much later than the events about which it speaks. But assuming it is correct, this chapter is later than usually placed.

Marchers, on Saturday, displayed signs and banners with various slogans. Some read, “No to Islamophobia,” “The best response: Peace,” and “I’m not afraid.”

Almost half a million people have taken to the streets in the Spanish city of Barcelona to condemn violence following recent terrorist attacks in Spain.

Emergency workers, police officers, firefighters and city officials took to the streets of Spain to promote a message of peace.

Police, in city capital Barcelona, estimates that nearly 500,000 people participated in a march against terrorism on Saturday.

The demonstration follows last week’s car attacks that left more than a dozen people dead and hundreds injured.

A van had rammed into a group of people in Barcelona on August 17, killing at least 13 and injuring more than 120 others. And, one day later, five terrorists drove a car into pedestrians, one of who died and six others injuries.
King Felipe VI joins the protest for peace in Barcelona. Photo: AFP

Marchers, on Saturday, displayed signs and banners with various slogans. Some read, “No to Islamophobia,” “The best response: Peace,” and “I’m not afraid.”

“We have to say we are not afraid, but you obviously feel it can happen to you at any time and that is scary. But fear cannot beat us and we cannot stand still. We have to show that we keep living, that is what we have to do,” one demonstrator explained.

Spain’s King Felipe VI, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, and representatives of all major Spanish political parties also joined the Saturday march.

Smaller rallies were also held in various cities across Spain.

Via TeleSur

——

Related video added by Juan Cole:

Euronews: “Thousands join anti-terror march in Barcelona”

Column » ‘By the Book’ with Joseph Preville

How did the rise of nation-states in the 20th century doom religious diversity and pluralism in the Middle East? And, can pluralism be recovered to heal and transform the Middle East? Veteran journalist Nicolas Pelham considers these questions in his thought-provoking new book, Holy Lands: Reviving Pluralism in the Middle East (Columbia Global Reports, 2016).

Nicolas Pelham is a Middle East correspondent for The Economist and a writer on Arab Afairs for The New York Review Books. For more than twenty years, he has covered the tumultuous events and ideological currents of the Middle East. In addition to The Economist, Pelham has reported on the region for the BBC, the Financial Times, and Middle East Times. Pelham is the author of two books: A New Muslim Order (2008) and, with Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East (2010).

Pelham writes that his new book “is born of the gnawing question of how a region that for half a millennium was a global exemplar of pluralism and religious harmony has become the least tolerant and stable place on the planet.” He looks at the causes of the Middle East’s descent into a fractured league of embattled states with exclusivist claims over land and borders.

Nicolas Pelham discusses his new book in this interview.

You write that your career as a writer and journalist in the Middle East, beginning in the 1990s “was born of the thrill of the region’s diversity.” What do you mean by that and how did you get started as a writer and journalist specializing in the Middle East?
Nicolas Pelham

Nicolas Pelham

From the outside Westerners are raised to conceive of the region as “the other.” The first we learn about its peoples are in our history books through the prism of the Crusades. We study the Middle East as a place of war and conflict, where the present, as relayed in news bulletins, only confirms the past. And yet on the ground, the region I first experienced was so very different. In Damascus, where I learned Arabic, there was no one “other” – just a kaleidoscope of cosmopolitan cultures and sects whose various believers rubbed shoulders in what was seemingly a time-honoured natural order. I was there just as the iron curtain was falling and sweeping aside such autocratic rulers as Nicolae Ceausescu. There were many predictions of what would happen to Syria. The notion that the region’s sects might tear each other apart seemed the most fanciful.

A couple of years later I was back in Cairo trying to fund my way through a course at Cairo University law faculty. Within days I found myself side-tracked into working for a local English-language paper, the Middle East Times, and law college fell by the wayside. Al-Jihad and al-Gama’a al-Islamiya were just beginning to launch their first low-level insurgency – how innocent the occasional pot-shot at Copts or western tourists seems in comparison to today’s bloodied times. But it was a foretaste of the religious wars that were set to sweep the region.

One reviewer called your book “a sound, accessible argument for why returning to the mixed-faith communities living among each other in the Ottoman model might just save the Middle East.” Explain how the Ottoman millet system — diverse religious communities living side-by-side in shared spaces with collective management — worked and how it promoted religious pluralism.

In hindsight, the Ottoman ability to manage a vast empire extending from the gates of Vienna to the tip of Arabia and from the Atlas mountains to Bahrain seems a phenomenal feat. They had no electronic communications to span the region, and in much of their Empire Muslims were ruling over a Christian majority. And yet for six centuries the Ottomans governed and maintained a remarkably stable, harmonious and prosperous common market that could not be more at odds with todays’ turmoil. They did so by delegating power to religious leaders and to government their respective millets or religious nations. From their seat in Istanbul, Caliphs, patriarchs and chief rabbis ruled their flocks, maintaining order through their own religious courts and raising taxes. But while they ruled over people, they did not rule over land. They governed holy communities, not holy lands. Religious communities shared the same neighborhoods, the same market places, and often — given their own overlapping religious traditions — the same holy places. And because their religious authority spanned the breadth of the Empire itself, the outlook of the multiple faiths was remarkably universal, inclusive and pluralist.

Many would argue that it’s too late to go back to the Ottoman model, with several non-Muslim communities having been driven far from their homes – starting with the post-World War I formation of nation-states and subsequent “unmixing.” More recently, a once-thriving Jewish community in Iraq, for example, has all but disappeared and the Christian communities in Iraq and Syria have been displaced by war. What makes you think it’s possible to return to the way it was during the Ottoman period?

There have been repeated attempts over the past hundred years to carve up the Ottoman Empire into sectarian homelands, but all have failed to resolve conflicts their proponents claimed they would. To the contrary, experiments with partition — be they a Jewish homeland, a “Shiastan” or ISIS- manufactured “Sunnistan” — have displaced tens of millions and only served to deepen and distend the region’s multiple sectarian conflicts.

Often the dislocation seems only to add to the overlap. Jewish communities from Baghdad and across the region were uprooted from one Muslim part of the region and replanted in another. Even today much of, perhaps the majority of, Israel’s territory – the Galilee and the Negev – remains majority Muslim.

Sunnis fleeing Aleppo’s siege gravitated to the Mediterranean coast, which Alawites consider their stronghold. Hundreds of thousands of Sunnis from Anbar and Nineveh provinces have sought refuge in Baghdad and southern Iraq undermining the aspirations of those politicians and militia commanders who sought a “Shiastan.”

Moreover, even if somehow the region’s religious communities could magically congeal into separate enclaves it is questionable whether the region would find peace. The grievances of those dispossessed by partition will remain unaddressed. And the record suggests that turning universal religious communities into land-cults only heightens their xenophobic, chauvinistic tendencies, increases their fear of existential threats and propels them into conflict with their neighbors.

But inclusivity drawing on past values is not only a prerequisite for resolving conflicts. The economic imperative is also a driver. If the region’s leaders are really to transform their realms from rentier states into sustainable and productive economies they will need to trade with and ultimately live with their neighbors, whatever their sect. Finally, across the region sectarian leaders are struggling to maintain popular support for their narratives. The number of Iraqis voting for anti-sectarian parties is increasing exponentially — by millions of voters — with each election. Not least because it has failed to deliver, factionalism is losing its appeal in much of the region.

Would a re-drawing of post-World War I borders, as some have suggested, facilitate more mixed communities or further segregate them? What would you advocate?

Ultimately, it matters less what the borders are than what the policies are holding sway within them. If the Middle East’s many states were led by rulers who ensured religious and sectarian pluralism; divvied up posts and budgets, resources, and development land equitably amongst representatives of all faiths; and ensured equal rights for family reunification and access and movement across and within their borders to all sects, their societies would be more far harmonious.

But the record suggests that the smaller the territory the harder such pluralism is to achieve. In Holy Lands, I explain how for all their differences, each of the multiple experiments to carve out separate sectarian homelands in the region has exposed the same traits —an ingathering of the adherents of the dominant sect and an expulsion of other sects; a re-landscaping of territory to enhance the historical sites of the dominant sect and erase or rename those of other sects; and the propagation of a primordial myth which depicts the sectarian state as a revival of lost ancient purity and grandeur and salvation from the history of persecution and dispossession that followed. Such fearful, suspicious ideologies lend themselves to the maintenance of security states which, for their very internal cohesion, seeks to enhance external threats and animosities rather than resolve them.

At the same time, sectarian states remain fiercely protective, and tightly guard their borders. In the short-to-medium term, perhaps the most that can be hoped for is that driven by economic necessity they can be encouraged to establish trade ties and facilitate cross-border access and movement. Ultimately conflict resolution will come through a muddying of boundaries not through greater partition.

External powers working for conflict resolution should also do more to heed and include religious leaders. Not only do they wield vast popular mandates which can be deployed either to sanction agreements or spoil them, but they have inherited traditions which, honed over centuries, have a track-record of preserving an inter-faith modus vivendi. Unlike Christendom in Europe which annihilated its sects, Islam preserved them. Indeed that is why so many ancient indigenous sects survive to this day. Above all, religious leaders can be highly effective in propounding the message that the current bloodletting is not a historical aberration but a betrayal of the religious values of tolerance and inclusivity the region has upheld for centuries.

Finally I would pay greater attention to Saudi Arabia. Outside the kingdom is often vilified as a cauldron of religious troubles which frequently boils and bubbles beyond its borders. Yet for all the Wahhabi command of public space, the kingdom has preserved much of its diverse religious mix. If the kingdom could project its reach less by sponsoring one sect against others, but engaging all the multiple sects with which it maintains relations internally, the region would be a happier place.

Are you hopeful that Jews and Muslims can live together again in peace in Israel/Palestine as they did before the Balfour Declaration?

In Holy Lands I write about the city of Safed which used to be a thriving medieval staging post between Damascus and the Mediterranean and is now a dead-end in the Upper Galilee. Until 1948, Safed conformed to the regional norm, that is to say it was a city shared by Muslims and Jews, and was particularly well-known for the medieval mystical and erotic verse of its Jewish and Muslim poets. In 1948 all that disappeared. The mayor proudly showed me the home-made mortar gun that chased the town’s Muslim Palestinians away and still stands on a plinth in the town’s central plaza. But though the mayor calls it a miracle, three generations on it has still left his all-Jewish town feeling half empty. Successive mayors have made various attempts to fill it. They have turned mosques into art galleries, and renamed vacated neighborhoods Artists or Breslev quarters hoping to attract Bohemian, ultra-orthodox and young Diaspora Jews to the town. Only when these fell short of the mark did the mayor reach out to the surrounding Palestinian villages of the Galilee and open vocational colleges for their youth. Today thousands of Israeli Palestinians fill its streets, and something of the spirit of Safed is coming back. Problems and animosities abound particularly when Israel’s leaders launch offensives on the occupied territories. The mayor will still not sanction the opening of the delightful Mamluk Red mosque. But ultimately, Israel’s own zoning restrictions on over-crowded and under-resourced Palestinian towns in Israel are pushing Palestinians to upgrade their living conditions in parts of the country Israel hitherto treated as exclusively Jewish. That mixing is fostering a new and interesting dynamic which one day might start to challenge modern divides.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers and journalists who wish to focus on the Middle East?

Hold true to the Prophet’s aphorism, ultimately the pen is mightier than the sword.

Joseph Richard Preville is Assistant Professor of English at Alfaisal University/Prince Sultan College for Business in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Tikkun, The Jerusalem Post, Muscat Daily, Saudi Gazette, and World Religion News. He is also a regular contributor to ISLAMiCommentary.

Julie Poucher Harbin is Editor of ISLAMiCommentary.

Via ISLAMiCommentary

To the East and to the West

To the East and to the West,
To the man of the Seaside State and of Pennsylvania,
To the Kanadian of the north, to the Southerner I love,
These with perfect trust to depict you as myself, the germs are in all men,
I believe the main purport of these States is to found a superb
       friendship, exalté, previously unknown,
Because I perceive it waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all men.