Democracy depends on the free exchange of ideas. Help sustain it with a tax-deductible donation today.
Video of an Ideas Matter event held at MIT on May 15, 2012
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, author of Moving the Mountain, and Professor John Bowen, author of the new Boston Review Book Blaming Islam, join Boston Review and the MIT Political Science Department for a discussion of the state of Islam in the United States, moderated by Christopher Lydon.
John Bowen is an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. He has traveled the world, from Indonesia to France, exploring Islamic practice and the reception of Muslim immigrants in a wide variety of social contexts. He is the author of the Boston Review Book Blaming Islam.
Feisal Abdul Rauf is a Sufi imam and founder of the Cordoba Initiative, which advocates improved understanding and trust between Muslim and non-Muslim Americans. He experienced the tensions of integration firsthand, at the center of the controversy over plans to build a cultural and community center near the World Trade Center site in Manhattan.
Christopher Lydon is the host of Radio Open Source, a conversation on arts, ideas and politics from Brown University's Watson Institute. Proto-blogger Dave Winer calls Chris Lydon “the original podcaster.”
We rely on readers to keep our pages free and open to all. Help sustain a public space for collective reasoning and imagination: become a supporting reader today.
The best writing on ideas, politics, and culture delivered straight to your inbox.
For Robert Jay Lifton, treating veterans’ trauma was an antiwar tool. How did PTSD, the diagnosis he helped create, come to accommodate state violence?
“If ideas are discarded when no longer modish, could we not do the same with unfashionable words?”
The Israel-India worker deal resembles British indenture.
A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Registered 501(c)(3) organization. Learn more about our mission
For National Poetry Month, sign up for our newsletter and get a digital copy of our out-of-print chapbook Poems for Political Disaster—with work by Jorie Graham, Ilya Kaminsky, Solmaz Sharif, Juan Felipe Herrera, and much more.
Newsletter subscribers get our latest essays, reading lists, and exclusive editorial content (plus 10% off our entire store).
For National Poetry Month, sign up for our newsletter and get a digital copy of our out-of-print chapbook Poems for Political Disaster.