Archive for the ‘Engage Minnesota’ Category
KFAI airs ‘Meeting Minnesota Muslims’
Filed under: Engage Minnesota | Tags: KFAI, Muslim burial, Muslim immigrants, Muslim Tees, Muslim women, Muslims and hip hop, Muslims in Minnesota
Leave a Comment KFAI FM and the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Global Studies are presenting a special series of stories on Muslims in Minnesota. The stories aim to illuminate the lives of Minnesota’s Muslims and provide listeners greater understanding of the state’s wide variety of Muslim residents. The installments include Faith in Hip Hop, One Strike And You’re Out, Wearing Faith On Their Sleeves, Empowered Muslim Women, In Search of the Minnesota Muslim, Muslim Immigrants Learn English, Music and Sufi Islam in the Twin Cities, and Muslim Burial Traditions.
To Our Readers
As people of conscience, the editors of Engage Minnesota deplore the violence consuming the Gaza Strip.
We denounce violence by the Israeli government and its military, as well as that perpetrated or allowed by Hamas.
However, a factual accounting shows that the retaliation carried out by the former party far outweighs, by a massive magnitude, the deaths from missiles and mortar fire by the latter party that was the stated reason for the current military onslaught.
We are disappointed at the dominant chorus in the U.S. media and body politic that obscures that lack of proportion.
We are hopeful that the new U.S. presidential administration will lead a re-accounting by Americans and their elected leaders, one that demands that Israel try much harder to find a peaceful and lasting resolution to its crisis and one that no longer permits the excessive use of force against a captive population that we now witness.
Thanking the Twin Cities Daily Planet
Filed under: Engage Minnesota | Tags: Engage Minnesota, Minnesota media, multiculturalism, Twin Cities Daily Planet
Leave a Comment A brief note:
We at Engage Minnesota would like to express our gratitude to the Twin Cities Daily Planet (which regularly reposts columns from Engage Minnesota) for being committed to fair journalism and serving as a true mirror for the views of the communities living in the Twin Cities.
Kudos, TC Daily Planet!
Support the Same Standards for All
Filed under: Engage Minnesota, Islamophobia | Tags: Asad Zaman, church and state, Engage Minnesota, Islamophobia, Katherine Kersten, Minnesota media, Tariq ibn Ziyad Academy, TIZA
Comments(2) 
Since Katherine Kersten’s column regarding Tariq ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA) in yesterday’s Star Tribune, the Minnesota Department of Education has been inundated with negative calls.
Kersten’s column claims that TIZA is violating its charter and the “church and state” separation. She bases this largely on the observations of one short-time substitute teacher who was immersed in a different school culture, and could easily have been mistaken in her impressions and interpretations.
However, whether or not TIZA has violated the strictest interpretation of religion-state separation is not the issue. What school in Minnesota has not? Indeed, last December, the Minneapolis public schools launched a large faith-based initiative weighted almost entirely to Protestant congregations. Read about it here.
If we are going to examine TIZA’s practices with a fine-toothed comb, then surely all faith-based initiatives, Easter pageants, Christmas trees, and even our choice of holiday vacations should come under strict scrutiny.
If you would like to urge the Minnesota Department of Education to be fair in its scrutiny of Tariq ibn Ziyad Academy, and to be wary of Islamophobic motivations, the department is steering all calls to this number: 651-582 8570.
MN Writer’s New Children’s Book Inspired by Hadith
Filed under: Corey Habbas, Engage Minnesota | Tags: children's book, Corey Habbas, Engage Minnesota, EngageMN, hadith, Hidalgo, Islamic, muslim, picture book
Comments(2) 
The Runaway Scarf, a new book by Twin Cities-based writer Corey Habbas, is a story about human justice and freedom inspired by an Islamic hadith. The 52-page illustrated children’s book is set to be available at the end of February.
Habbas is also a regular contributor to EngageMN.com.
“I was mad after watching that movie Hidalgo,” Habbas said, “because it was such a distortion about Muslims, and that is what inspired this book. I wrote it in 2004 [after the movie was released], and it took me a long time to get it published!”
The book follows an African slave, named Ibsitu, who finds compassion and freedom once she escapes to the first Muslim community established by Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in the city of Madinah.
“It’s important that Muslim children learn about who they are by taking from Islamic sources, not from an entertainment industry that feeds on a climate of misunderstandings,” Habbas said in a release.
The book, issued by Muslim Writers Publishing, is now available through the publisher and Amazon.com and is scheduled to be available on IslamicBookstore.com. Look for more about the book, and its journey to publication.
Read more:
New partnership with Twin Cities Daily Planet
Engage Minnesota is now a content partner with the Twin Cities Daily Planet, a pioneering web portal that brings together a wide array of Minnesota’s community and neighborhood news publications. The Daily Planet invited us to contribute columns from our web site to theirs in exchange for them linking back to us. We felt it was a natural match, since the Daily Planet shares our mission of highlighting Minnesota’s diversity — that’s why we have linked to them ever since we launched this site.
We are delighted for the chance to share Minnesotan Muslim voices with a broader audience, and we’re grateful for the greater exposure that the Daily Planet is providing us.
Engage Minnesota also has been invited to join the Blogburst network that provides content to the web sites of USA Today, Reuters news service, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and others.
