I first picked up Howard Zinn’s A People’s History when I was eleven years old. I had been dared to do so by a friend of mine who declared that if I successfully completed it, I’d go down in history as the biggest bookworm that ever walked the halls of our school. 675 pages of…
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a student activist group on campus, recently undertook a unique – and ultimately, successful – endeavor to bring aid to children in refugee camps in the Middle East by attempting to diffuse knowledge through literature. They put together a two day event, co-sponsored by the United Arab Society, promoting…
By Afnan Shukry The “Trees for Life- Planting Peace in Palestine” initiative was launched in the summer of 2006 with a clear goal in mind: to offset destruction caused onto olive groves in Palestine by replanting olive trees, a symbol of peace. Better yet, to replant hope into the hearts of Palestinians who lost it…
It’s not always sunny in California. Few were spared from the Governor’s drastic budget cuts. $6.5 billion slashed from K-14 education. $2 billion from UC and CSU. $1.3 billion from Medi-Cal. $1.8 billion from municipal government funds. $1 billion from social services for the elderly, disabled and uninsured. That, and the Legislature is now trying…
By Maral Ali Al-Talib meets with former UCLA graduate student Zeinab Mousavi to talk about the Mousavi family’s experience of having their father be imprisoned in the Terre Haute, Indiana CMU. Al-Talib: Since his transfer to the Terre Haute CMU, how often has your family been able to visit Mr. Mousavi? Mousavi: A couple times.…
By Maral Ali The Terre Haute CMU contains a mostly Muslim prison population. One such case is Seyed Mahmood Mousavi, a Muslim community leader in Southern California who founded Masjid Al-Nabi in West Covina. He is the father of four children (the youngest is a sophomore at UCLA) and an active member of the local…
By Maral Ali Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have come to symbolize the face of the “War on Terror” and the many abuses that took place in that era, yet even with the end of the Bush Administration, a silent legacy remains in the form of secret illegal prisons in the United States designed to…
By Affan Shaikh In a change of counterterrorism policy and Bush-era ideology, a Federal Court ruled against government ability to freeze the assets of charities according to terror financing laws without a warrant based on probable cause. The ruling, issued by Federal Judge James G. Carr of Ohio faulted the Treasury Department in its actions and…
By Nader Nasr Hundreds of Muslims have emailed Germany’s soccer club, Schalke 04, over its anthem, which makes references to the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). The anthem, which also caused small, temporary protests by Muslims in 1997, states in the third verse “Muhammad was a prophet who understood nothing about football [soccer]. But of all the…
By Zeyad Zaky Three female police officers in South Yorkshire, United Kingdom took dressed in Muslim attire as part of the “In Your Shoes” program, telegraph.co.uk reports. They went shopping in this attire in order to experience what it is like for a Muslim woman to be out in public. The officers and some Muslim…