History

Under the guidance of Pope John Paul II the Catholic Church provided significant leadership in promoting peace, justice and harmony among religions. Now the new Pope, the most revered figure in the Catholic world, infallible to his followers and the representative of God to his co-religionist is choosing a path of dialogue with Muslims that seems disturbing. In a recent …

Ankara (IINA) – A Turkish citizen, named Jorlar Youghal, from Selim, a town of Kars Province in the Eastern Anatolia region of Turkey, has found 7 pieces of ancient silver coins with Arabic inscriptions, dating back to the reign of Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab. Turkey's Ikhlas News Agency reported that Youghal, 53, who works as a shepherd, said he discovered …

When thousands of “patriotic Europeans” took to the streets once again in Dresden to protest “the Islamisation of the West,” their actions were the result not only of resentment and fear, but also of ignorance. Luckily for us, our central European culture has benefited from Islamic influences for thousands of years. If, on Monday evening in Dresden, one of the …

An unfortunate misconception among today’s American Muslim community is that Islam has only been present in America for less than 100 years. Many American Muslims are children of immigrants who came to the United States from the Middle East and South Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, and thus wrongly assume that the first Muslims in America were those immigrants. The …

Precision and Observation: Refining the Works of Ptolemy After the age of the Ancient Greeks and the end of the Roman Empire, the science of astronomy went into decline in Western Europe. Barbarian incursions and empire building meant that little attention was paid to science and learning, and any such pursuits were limited to monasteries and the homes of nobles. …

The Cedid Atlas (The New Atlas in Ottoman Turkish) was one of the first printed atlases in the Muslim world. It was commissioned by the Ottoman government in 1803 as part of its 19th century reforms to bring the empire up to par with other European powers. All of the maps in the atlas were thus adapted from an earlier …