Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

In the 1890’s, the huge, majestic cliffs in New York State and New Jersey, known as the Palisades, were being dismantled and turned into railroad ballast.  Ballast is the stones that form the trackbed around and underneath railroad ties. These great cliffs, made millions of years ago, were considered disposable, to be sacrificed on the altar of modern industrialization. Through the efforts and generous donations of individuals and groups who worked to have the land turned into a park, finally in 1947, the Palisades Interstate Parkway was established, and the Palisades were saved.

On August 22, 2012, History Channel Two aired an episode of  “How the Earth Was Made” featuring the geology of the Palisades and the New York City area.

The natural history of the Palisades and the whole region is a remarkable tale.

The Palisades run for forty miles along the Hudson River. During the last Ice Age…

An essay on the refurbished “Islamic art” galleries of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (published inthe National)

During the past decade of fulminating and fretting, those of us who live in Europe and North America have become quite familiar with the term “the Islamic world”. Rarely do a few words try to say so much. The phrase scrapes by as a kind of shorthand, an easy way of fusing geography and sociology.

It allows us to speak in the singular about a great profusion of peoples and places. The “Islamic world” is not simply a space where 1.5 billion Muslims happen to live, but a space that can be understood in generalisations. We hear of the Islamic world almost always in reference to its political and social problems: the plight of democracy in the Islamic world, the crisis of women’s rights in the Islamic world, the rise…