Seperating the Church and the Candidate (Baltimore Sun)

Posted in Op-Eds on Feb 27th, 2012
Watching Rick Santorum rise in the polls by positioning himself as the real Christian presidential candidate is like watching the sequel of a horror movie — one I literally lived through in the 1980s while growing up in Pakistan. There, another religious zealot, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, played the lead role of the real Muslim. The plot went like this: The clerics called for candidates with “true” Muslim values, the masses demanded a “Muslim candidate for a Muslim state,” the leaders proved their “Muslimness” by quoting scripture and calling others lesser Muslims, and...
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One American Mosque: Two Crazy Acts (Huffington Post)

Posted in Op-Eds, Print on Feb 15th, 2012
Read Original Article People do crazy things for religion. Take for example hundreds of families belonging to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Chantilly, VA, trying to self-fund a mosque for the past decade. In an extremely friendly lending environment, the women from these families sold $500 dresses, their husbands made $5 kabob rolls, and their children cooked $.50 brownies to raise funds. And the Community’s executives, instead of lobbying governments for petrodollars, dug into their checkbooks to donate — urging others to reciprocate. Photo credit: Patch.com / Mary C. Stachyra Well,...
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