Posts Tagged ‘society’
Sufism
The central concept of Sufism is love. It was a reform movement, and believed in mysticism and preached the worship of God through devotional singing. In Sufism, music, dance, meditation and are seen as the spiritual guides in attaining unity with God. At Sufi shrines music help lift the devotees into a state of spiritual ecstasy. The 14th century Muslim mystic Hazrat Nizamudduin Auliya, IndiaÕs most revered Sufi saint, preached the values of prayer, love and unity. He told his followers that love was omnipresent and the route to the divine. The unorthodox methods of worship has divided Sufis from those following more puritanical ways of Islam. Muslims have claimed that the practices followed in Sufism were taken from Christianity and Hinduism.
America on the Greyhound
After I immigrated to the United States in October 2006, one of the first things we did was take a bus trip across the country. My wife and I traveled on a Greyhound bus from New York to Los Angeles, taking larger stops at Washington DC, St. Louis, Denver, Grand Canyon and Las Vegas and numerous other pit-stops enroute. The month-long trip was my way of knowing the country before we settled down to work.
My journey and observations was published as a two-part series in SPAN magazine. The articles can be read here and here.
Edison’s Little India
From indoor cricket to a Hindu temple, pan shops, dosa and biryani stalls, and saris in the store windows, this eastern U.S. suburban area could be an Indian municipality.
Driving down Oak Tree Road in Edison, New Jersey, is like going through Lajpat Nagar market in New Delhi-albeit with some key differences. Chock-a-block with sari showrooms, grocery stores selling curry pata, and Bollywood music shops…even the mannequins have the same plastic hair.
This is “Little India,” and like the Chinatowns and Little Italy’s that came before it, it is the expression of an immigrant culture that is finally establishing itself in the melting pot of America. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Edison’s population of about a 100,000 was 17.5 percent Indian American. That is the highest percentage of any municipality in the United States, and growing.
Read article here