Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 01-28-2010 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Leaders/Stories
By RACHEL ZOLL
The Associated Press
Wednesday, January 20, 2010; 11:39 PM
NEW YORK—Americans are more than twice as likely to express prejudice against Muslims than they are against Christians, Jews or Buddhists, a new survey found. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they have little or no knowledge of Islam. Still, a majority dislike the faith.
The analysis, for release Thursday, is from the Gallup World Religion Survey and is part of a project on finding ways to increase understanding between Americans and Muslims.
President Barack Obama and his administration want to improve America’s image in the Muslim world. Many analysts who study extremism also say that U.S. Muslims who feel alienated from broader society resist integrating, potentially becoming more vulnerable to radical ideas.
In the poll, just over half of Americans said they felt no prejudice against Muslims. However, 43 percent acknowledged at least “a little” prejudice against Muslims, a significantly higher percentage than for the other four faiths in the survey. About 18 percent of respondents said they had some level of prejudice against Christians, while the figure was 15 percent toward Jews and 14 percent toward Buddhists.
Asked about knowledge of Islam, 63 percent of Americans say they have “very little” or “none at all.” A large majority of respondents believe most Muslims want peace. Yet, 53 percent of Americans say their opinion of the faith is “not too favorable” or “not favorable at all.” By comparison, 25 percent of Americans say they have unfavorable views of Judaism, while 7 percent say they have “some” or “a great deal” of prejudice toward Jews.
Personally knowing a Muslim is not linked to a lower level of prejudice, although not knowing a Muslim is related to the greatest level of bias. The authors of the report say this finding underscores the need for better education on what Islam teaches. “What really seems to impact one’s perception of a group much more than knowing an individual is having a positive opinion of that group’s distinguishing characteristic, which in this case is their faith,” said Dalia Mogahed, senior analyst and executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. “That one person being nice enough could simply be explained as that person being an exception.”
Respondents who say they attend religious services more than once a week are significantly more likely to have a favorable view of Muslims. Mogahed said people who are more religious generally consider prejudice a moral evil and often have respect for the devout of other faiths. Researchers also found a link between prejudice against Jews and Muslims. Americans who acknowledged “a great deal” of bias toward Jews were much more likely to feel the same about Muslims. The survey results could not explain why the two prejudices are linked. Mogahed said bias against both groups should be tracked and studied together to understand the dynamic.
“Groups working against the two types of prejudices should perhaps form a closer alliance,” she said.
The report, from the Muslim West Facts Project, a partnership of Gallup and the Coexist Foundation, is based on a random telephone survey of more than 1,000 adults, conducted from Oct. 31 to Nov. 13 of last year. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
Tags: gallup world religion survey, bias in u.s. against muslims, muslim west facts project
Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 12-23-2009 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Leaders/Stories
Attorney, activist, entrepreneur, and also my sister. Mariam Nawabi’s interview on CBS News:
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 11-09-2009 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Leaders/Stories
Ebrahim “Eboo” Patel, founder of Interfaith Youth Core and author of Acts of Faith: Interfaith Cooperation in a Time of Religious Conflict is bringing young people from diverse religious backgrounds together to work on social projects that can foster cooperation rather than conflict, leading to religious pluralism.
He completed his doctorate at Oxford University in the sociology of religion on a Rhodes Scholarship. In 1999, he founded Interfaith Youth Core in Chicago to bring young people of different faiths together. Patel was appointed by President Obama to the Advisory Council of The White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Initiatives, and was recently named one of the 2009 “America’s Best Leaders” by U.S. News & World Report.
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 10-30-2009 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Leaders/Stories, Art/Books
On Wednesday night, The Daily Show with John Stewart featured pro-Palestinian activists Anna Baltzer and Mustafa Bargouti. Unfortunately, the show was overwhelmed with angry emails and phone calls prior to the appearance, and up until the last minute it seemed like they might cancel. During the taping, the first heckler in Daily Show’s 11 years interrupted the interview several times. Many have stated that the entire staff were very nervous and may come to regret the monumental decision (and not make it again) as they will surely be inundated now that the show has aired.
It is CRUCIAL that the show receive letters of support from anyone who appreciated the interview. PLEASE take a moment to give a quick thank you to the Daily Show. They will likely be affected by numbers rather than length, so it’s OK to make it short, but spread the word to others! Be sure to put “Thank you for Dr. Barghouti & Anna Baltzer on your show” in the subject followed by a quick thank you.
You can fill out the form here: http://www.comedycentral.com/help/questionsCC.jhtml (make sure to choose The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as your topic). You can also try calling 212-468-1700.
This isn’t about politics…it’s about working together to influence more positive portrayals of Muslims in mainstream media. Action brings change!
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Exclusive - Anna Baltzer & Mustafa Barghouti Extended Interview Pt. 1 | ||||
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| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Exclusive - Anna Baltzer & Mustafa Barghouti Extended Interview Pt. 2 | ||||
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 10-16-2009 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Music, Comedy, Film/TV, Leaders/Stories, Travel, Art/Books, Fashion-Eastas, Fashion, Beauty, Episodes
Got talent? Beauty and the East TV is looking for emerging Muslim musicians, comedians, actors, film-makers, designers, dancers, and hosts to feature in our new episodes! For details, watch this video:
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 10-08-2009 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Leaders/Stories
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/10/07/muslim.world.population/index.html
(CNN) —Nearly one in four people worldwide is Muslim—and they are not necessarily where you might think, according to an extensive new study that aims to map the global Muslim population.
India, a majority-Hindu country, has more Muslims than any country except for Indonesia and Pakistan, and more than twice as many as Egypt. China has more Muslims than Syria. Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon. And Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya put together. Nearly two out of three of the world’s Muslims are in Asia, stretching from Turkey to Indonesia. The Middle East and north Africa, which together are home to about one in five of the world’s Muslims, trail a very distant second. There are about 1.57 billion Muslims in the world, according to the report, “Mapping the Global Muslim Population,” by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. That represents about 23 percent of the total global population of 6.8 billion. There are about 2.25 billion Christians, based on projections from the 2005 World Religions Database.
Brian Grim, the senior researcher on the Pew Forum project, was slightly surprised at the number of Muslims in the world, he told CNN. “Overall, the number is higher than I expected,” he said, noting that earlier estimates of the global Muslim population have ranged from 1 billion to 1.8 billion. The report can—and should—have implications for United States policy, said Reza Aslan, the best-selling Iranian-American author of “No God but God.” “Increasingly, the people of the Middle East are making up a smaller and smaller percentage of the worldwide Muslim community,” he told CNN by phone. “When it comes to issues of outreach to the Muslim world, these numbers will indicate that outreach cannot be focused so narrowly on the Middle East,” he said. “If the goal is to create better understanding between the United States and the Muslim world, our focus should be on south and southeast Asia, not the Middle East,” he said. He spoke to CNN before the report was published and without having seen its contents, but was familiar with the general trends the report identified.
The team at the Pew Forum spent nearly three years analyzing “the best available data” from 232 countries and territories, Grim said. Their aim was to get the most comprehensive snapshot ever assembled of the world’s Muslim population at a given moment in time. So they took the data they gathered from national censuses and surveys, and projected it forward based on what they knew about population growth in each country. They describe the resulting report as “the largest project of its kind to date.” It’s full of details that even the researchers found surprising.
“There are these countries that we don’t think of as Muslim at all, and yet they have very sizable numbers of Muslims,” said Alan Cooperman, the associate director of research for the Pew Forum, naming India, Russia and China. One in five of the world’s Muslims lives in a country where Muslims are a minority. And while most people think of the Muslim population of Europe is being composed of immigrants, that’s only true in western Europe, Cooperman said. “In the rest of Europe—Russia, Albania, Kosovo, those places—Muslims are an indigenous population,” he said. “More than half of the Muslims in Europe are indigenous.” The researchers also were surprised to find the Muslim population of sub-Saharan Africa to be as low as they concluded, Cooperman said. It has only about 240 million Muslims—about 15 percent of all the world’s Muslims. Islam is thought to be growing fast in the region, with countries such as Nigeria, which has large populations of both Christians and Muslims, seeing violence between the two groups. The Pew researchers concluded that Nigeria is just over half Muslim, making it the sixth most populous Muslim country in the world. Roughly nine out of 10 Muslims worldwide are Sunni, and about one in 10 is Shiite, they estimated. They warned they were less confident of those numbers than of the general population figures because sectarian data is harder to come by. “Only one or two censuses in the world ... have ever asked the sectarian question,” said Grim. “Among Muslims it’s a very sensitive question. If asked, large numbers will say I am just a Muslim—not that they don’t know, but it is a sensitive question in many places,” he said. One in three of the world’s Shiite Muslims lives in Iran, which is one of only four countries with a Shiite majority, he said. The others are Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain.
Huge as the project of mapping the world’s Muslim population is, it is only the first step in a Pew Forum undertaking. Next year, the think tank intends to release a report projecting Muslim population growth into the future, and then the researchers intend to do the whole thing over again with Christians, followed by other faith groups. “We don’t care only about Muslims,” Grim said. They’re also digging into what people believe and practice, since the current analysis doesn’t analyze that. “This is no way reflects the religiosity of people, only their self-identification,” Grim said. “We’re trying to get the overall picture of religion in the world.
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 08-20-2009 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Film/TV, Leaders/Stories, Episodes
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 06-02-2009 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Leaders/Stories
Okay, so this has nothing to do with art and entertainment but since “feel good” stories make me feel warm and fuzzy inside, I will share. It’s also refreshing to see the media cover positive stories about Muslims. Can we all say “awwwww”....
NY store owner gives would-be thief $40 and bread
AP - GARDEN CITY, N.Y. – A rifle-toting convenience store owner said he decided to show mercy on a would-be robber after seeing the man collapse into tears and claim he was only committing the crime to support his starving family. The Long Island store owner provided the bat-wielding man with $40 and a loaf of bread and made him promise never to rob again.
“This was a grown man, crying like a baby,” Mohammad Sohail, owner of the Shirley Express convenience store about 65 miles east of New York City, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview on Tuesday.
The man dropped the bat, picked up the bread and tucked the $40 into his waistband before fleeing, said Suffolk County police Sgt. John Best. Sohail, who moved to the United States from Pakistan about 20 years ago, said he was getting ready to close his store shortly after midnight on May 21 when the man in his 40s entered with a bat in his hand. Sohail said he tried to stall for a moment and then grabbed a rifle he keeps behind the counter and ordered the assailant to drop the bat.The would-be thief dropped to his knees and begged for forgiveness, Sohail said.
“He started crying that he was out of work and was trying to feed his hungry family,” he said. “I felt bad for him. I mean, this wasn’t some kid.”
He said he tossed $40 to the man, who then stood up and told Sohail he was inspired by the act of mercy and wanted to become a fellow Muslim. Sohail said he led the man in a profession of Muslim faith and the two ended up shaking hands.
Sohail said he went to the back of the store to get some milk to give to the man, but when he returned the man had fled. He said he called police and reported the attempted robbery, but he doesn’t want to press charges if the man is ever caught. Best said detectives have reviewed a store surveillance video of the attempted holdup, but said it would be difficult for anyone to identify the suspect because he was wearing a mask. Sohail, who said he had never been the victim of a robbery attempt, said he didn’t expect any accolades for what he had done.
“I’m a very little man. I just did a good job,” said the married father of one. “I have a good feeling in my heart. I feel very good.”
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Posted by BeautyandtheEast on 04-17-2009 | Comments | Share | Filed under: Entertainment, Film/TV, Leaders/Stories, Episodes
Beauty and the East TV interviews Dr. Massouda Jalal, a brave and heroic woman who ran for President in Afghanistan’s first democratic elections in 2004. She discusses why she decided to run, the challenges Afghan women face, and why the upcoming elections in Afghanistan are so important for the international community to be concerned about. The interview was conducted in New York City when Dr. Jalal visited the States to promote “FrontRunner”, a documentary about her 2004 campaign.
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Are you a Muslim/Middle-Eastern musician/singer, comedian, designer, film-maker/actor, journalist/host, dancer, or leader? Show us what you got!
