Haroon Moghul

There was a time when just saying “Merry Christmas” would provoke fire and brimstone sermons from Muslims around me. I wasn’t exempt: I also believed Muslims shouldn’t celebrate holidays that weren’t explicitly Islamic, least of all arguably the biggest Christian holiday of the year.

It was 70º in our nation’s capital this weekend. I’m sure lots of Washingtonians had plans. Eddie Spiker and Brandie Seagrove did, too.

Trump can’t win, it may be true. But that doesn’t mean the things he says don’t matter.

Whenever news reports circulate of a violent crime that could be labeled terrorism, Muslims around the world hope and pray that the suspect was not someone of their faith. I’ve found that many Americans can’t understand this trepidation, deeming the response inappropriate at best in the face of a terrible tragedy that’s still unfolding. But those who cannot understand our apprehension have never faced the prospect of collective blame.

For days, tensions between Turkey and Russia appeared to be nearing a boiling point. Yet it still struck many in the international community by surprise when Turks claimed they had shot down a Russian fighter jet on jet on Nov. 24. While the flight path of the downed aircraft remains in dispute, at least one of the downed pilots was killed by Syrian rebels and another was rescued.

What would doom ordinary women and men only makes the Donald stronger. When Megyn Kelly called him out for describing women in vulgar language, Trump implied she was menstruating. He kicked Jorge Ramos out of a press conference, who was upset Trump had called Mexicans “rapists” and “drug dealers.” (Some of them, he condescendingly suggested, might be good people.) He’s casually discussed deporting millions of people, ripping apart families or kicking people out who’ve lived here all their lives.

A lot of Republicans think Islam should be illegal. Can you blame them?

Despite what conservative political leaders want you to think, the reason the Muslim world hasn’t done more to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) isn’t because it secretly sympathizes with the terror movement. No, the Muslim world has remained maddeningly ineffective against ISIL because it can’t agree on a unified definition of the Islamic faith.

Even before the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks in Paris, I knew what they would say. They would claim that France is a “crusader nation”; that France’s Muslims are oppressed; that France participates in operations against ISIL and has deep historical ties to the Muslim world.

At eleven o’clock in the morning on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, guns across Europe fell silent. An assassination in Sarajevo that had turned into a grinding, grueling conflict was coming to a diplomatic close—but it was not over.

I really liked Dubai. Which is why I’m so worried by the path its government has chosen. No, I’m not predicting another financial crash, or even pointing out a looming environmental catastrophe. I’m worried Dubai will destroy itself. A city heavily dependent on foreign capital and labor, Dubai thrives because of the safety and security it provides—in marked contrast to the region around it. Dubai as we know it would likely be unable to survive even a single serious terrorist attack.

America is often described as an outlier among industrialized democracies, especially when it comes to gun violence and religiosity. Here’s another way we’re outliers: We elected the son of a Kenyan Muslim, and are becoming an increasingly progressive country. Meanwhile it could be argued that our fellow Western democracies are actually moving in the opposite direction, indulging and even rewarding anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiment.

Given its location, resources and religious significance, Saudi Arabia should have developed into one of the world’s great powers: a Norway in the Middle East, perhaps, or a South Korea on the Arabian Peninsula. At the very least, someone at the top should’ve realized the good times wouldn’t last—eventually the oil would run out, superpowers would move on, and the country would have to stand on its own.

Twenty years ago, Beijing hosted a landmark international summit on women’s rights. This weekend, China’s president Xi Jinping reiterated his country’s “commitment to gender equality and women’s development.”

Petroleum and the pilgrimage. The two combined give Saudi Arabia the chance to punch well above its weight, affording one of the world’s most regressive regimes the chance to exercise an outrageous influence on Islam. It’s time to think of alternative arrangements.

I’m now old enough to run for president of the United States. A few days ago, however, Ben Carson told me I wasn’t qualified. I hadn’t been planning on running, but it would have been nice to know my options were still open.

“Xenophobic and anti-Muslim” was how the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights described Hungary’s treatment of Syrian and other refugees, desperate for safe harbor. Yet Hungary appears unmoved by the fierce international criticism. Prime minister Viktor Orbán has insisted his country doesn’t want Muslims, and a sentiment echoed by members of his party. “We want to decide ourselves how many Muslims we want to live with,” a parliamentarian for the nationalist-conservative Fidesz party declared.

You can’t solve a problem if you don’t know you have a problem. But how do you know you have a problem if you don’t have a word for it?

It’s hard to imagine a more devastating foreign policy move than the Iraq War. The bill’s not even in yet, and it already comes to tens of thousands of lives lost, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, plus the emergence of ISIL. Future generations may well look back and remember it as the greatest error of judgment of the millennium, a nearly fatal blow to the hope that this, too, would be an American century.

Last week, recently-retired supermodel Gisele Bündchen was in Paris, allegedly for some plastic surgery. Trying to avoid paparazzi attention, she seems to have donned a burqa—illegal in France—but her ploy for anonymity backfired spectacularly.

This Saturday, July 11, is the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, when Serbian nationalists overran a United Nations-declared “safe area” around the town of Srebrenica and murdered some 8,000 Muslim boys and men.

Monied American Muslims are more and more inclined to travel eastwards for the holy month of Ramadan. Mecca and Medina are fabulous this time of year, though hotel rates are skyrocketing through some very high roofs. Some have chosen Istanbul, with its awesome Ottoman patrimony, or Malaysia, which is green, clean and—well, I don’t know. I’ve never been. I’m not even in that income bracket. But I bet I know why they go.

Radical Buddhists? Violent monks? Ethnic cleansing? Concentration camps? And now, mass graves? What’s happening in Myanmar is terrible, but it should be impossible. At least, so far as Islamophobes would have it.