One ancient Chinese custom that arose in the tenth century towards the end of the Tang Dynasty was the binding of young girls’ feet with long strips of material so as to restrict their growth to a mere seven centimetres. Standards of beauty of the time viewed the natural size of a woman's foot as something aesthetically undesirable.
In the newspapers in Sudan not long ago it was reported that the imam and preacher of the Al-Nur mosque in Khartoum, Dr ‘Isām Ahmad al-Bashīr, issued a warning in his Friday sermon concerning the peril of the appearance of a group of ‘Sudanese agnostics’ and considered their emergence to constitute a danger threatening the faith of Sudanese society. The press that week also reported other news on the ‘apostasy’ of a young girl in the Al-Hāj Yūsuf district who had embraced Christianity.
This month our dear colleague and enlightenment thinker from Jordan, Shaker al-Nabulsi, passed away. His was a powerful voice in the face of the deviancy that exploits religion to oppose democracy, emancipation and liberalism. He was a critic of extremist currents, and of their thinking and behaviour. He was patron of a great reformist project aimed at changing the Arab world and curing it of its basic intellectual and practical problems that ailed it.
It is a great sadness to report that on January 14th 2014, following a long illness, one of the pivotal Arab liberal thinkers, our great friend Dr. Shaker al-Nabulsi, passed away in the United States. Indeed he was the foremost representative of Arab liberal thinkers and, at the age of 72, was still at the peak of his powers of intellect and enlightenment. Our late friend was a shining star at intellectual conferences and symposia convened across all five continents for the purpose of promoting modernity and liberal thought, and countering ignorance and backwardness in the Arab world.
In the newspapers in Sudan not long ago it was reported that the imam and preacher of the Al-Nur mosque in Khartoum, Dr ‘Isām Ahmad al-Bashīr, issued a warning in his Friday sermon concerning the peril of the appearance of a group of ‘Sudanese agnostics’ and considered their emergence to constitute a danger threatening the faith of Sudanese society. The press that week also reported other news on the ‘apostasy’ of a young girl in the Al-Hāj Yūsuf district who had embraced Christianity.
This month our dear colleague and enlightenment thinker from Jordan, Shaker al-Nabulsi, passed away. His was a powerful voice in the face of the deviancy that exploits religion to oppose democracy, emancipation and liberalism. He was a critic of extremist currents, and of their thinking and behaviour. He was patron of a great reformist project aimed at changing the Arab world and curing it of its basic intellectual and practical problems that ailed it.
It is a great sadness to report that on January 14th 2014, following a long illness, one of the pivotal Arab liberal thinkers, our great friend Dr. Shaker al-Nabulsi, passed away in the United States. Indeed he was the foremost representative of Arab liberal thinkers and, at the age of 72, was still at the peak of his powers of intellect and enlightenment. Our late friend was a shining star at intellectual conferences and symposia convened across all five continents for the purpose of promoting modernity and liberal thought, and countering ignorance and backwardness in the Arab world.
