Posted by Nabil Echchaibi on January 28, 2010 at 11:05:47:
I've been listening for the last few months to an extremely interesting series on Islam from Wisconsin Public Radio in Madison. Inside Islam, a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin at Madison and WPR's program, Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders, has featured great guests rarely invited by traditional media, including secular and religious artists, novelists, scholars, comedians, bloggers, journalists, and activists. They have certainly set an excellent example for how the discussion of Islam can go beyond the security issue. This week they're featuring Qantara.de, a dynamic web portal that allows Muslim and non-Muslim Germans to have a frank dialogue about Islam from a diversity of perspectives. The radio series' upcoming broadcasts include a variety of topics: Islam and science, Muslim women artists and writers, images of the Prophet Muhammad, and faith conversion stories. Here at the University of Colorado at Boulder, we're working to emulate this worthy effort by creating a radio series on Muslim issues in the Mountain West. If you can help in any way make this happen, please get in touch with me. The media in the region think the number of Muslims here is not significant enough to warrant such special treatment, but why can't the Denver Post or Colorado Public Radio for instance do a series on Islam in Colorado or the Mountain West? Official estimates put the number of Muslims in the Denver Metropolitan area alone at 20,000, and our research is revealing some interesting historical connections between Islam and the American West. It's simply a matter of will; the compelling material is abundant.