A posting from the vacationing Lance!
Ibrahim’s Uncle believes he has found the best of both worlds--a balance between his traditional beliefs--a good life in the Faith--and the modest luxuries of the modern world. He views Ibrahim and his friends as selfish, lazy, and politically naïve. He asks them: “Isn’t it enough to have your car and cellphone and TV. What else is really worth having out there in the world of false gods.” (p. 189)
But the answer to this question came thirteen pages earlier. “These young men want change, not the rewards of Heaven.” (p. 176) Ibrahim and his coffee shop friends want to “bring the modern world to Islam” (p. 176) and to “cross-fertilize Islam with the world” (p. 177) Here are the voices of the Islamic moderates that we and our government so desperately want to hear in Iraq and Gaza and elsewhere. Here are young men who are not satisfied with the status quo. Young men dissatisfied with their economic and political status--the inequalities of the world--and young men who reject the fundamentalist message of jihad.
Ibrahim’s Uncle lumps him in with these malcontents, but Ibrahim’s rejection is much more personal: “this place the world tried to confine him to was not his place in that world.” (p. 179)
Perhaps we should be discussing the Minaret AND the Internet, because cross-cultural understanding is a work in progress and an ongoing process. Listen to the NPR review of a Venice exhibit that traces the migration of culture or read this week’s New York Times article on the library in the desert at Timbuktu to get a sense of how much our different cultures have to learn from one another.

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