Entries from July 2006 ↓

Less than an hour until the World Cup Final!  I’ve been taking shots around town today…here are some of the highlights (you can see more on my Flickr page).  People are basically drinking like fish and going nuts, at least downtown.  I’ve seen far more Italian fans than French ones, but there are plenty of [...]

When I interviewed the imam from my neighborhood mosque on Thursday I asked him about the sermon he delivered two weeks ago.  If you recall, it was a sermon partially about gossiping, and the preacher’s point was that gossiping about an honorable woman was a Big Sin because it could ruin her life.  I wondered [...]

Pew has released a new report summarizing more findings from the recent Pew Global Attitudes Project that I wrote about last month.  The current report focuses on survey responses from the European Muslims who were oversampled in France, Germany, Spain, and Great Britain. 
I haven’t had time to read the full report in detail, but [...]

I’m having trouble imagining another situation like the one I faced yesterday where the same sentence could mean two totally different things.  The imam I was interviewing hollered something out to the mosque’s barber about either circumcising me and making me a Muslim or finishing off a carton of strawberries.  Considering the statement came from [...]

I walked out of a bank yesterday after paying my rent and saw an interesting banner on a street corner that seemed to be telling me to blog about something.  As I got closer I realized that the banner actually swivels around in the wind and that I was looking at the backside of it [...]

Today I had my first meeting with a German politician.  Ekin Deligöz has been a member of parliament for the Green Party since 1998 and has focused on child and family policies.  On top of that, she is originally from Turkey, so this interview was especially insightful because she knows immigration issues inside and out.
One [...]

I had a good hour-long interview today with Harun Bulut, imam of Sehitlik Mosque, the mosque I wrote about earlier.  We met in his office next to the mosque, and the first thing I noticed was a huge coffee table book on his desk called America 24/7.  He explained that it was a gift of [...]