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PORTLAND, Maine

Anouar Majid’s letter to editor published in ‘New York Times’

Anouar Majid, Ph.D., vice president for Global Affairs and director of the Center for Global Humanities, wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review that was published on December 28, 2014.

Majid’s letter was a response to the publication’s review of Karen Armstrong’s book Fields of Blood, in which she argued that religion in the West has been wrongly blamed for the violence created by nationalism.

Majid disagreed with Armstrong’s premise. He wrote, "Religion did not descend from heaven and become entangled in human foibles and follies; it is a human creation devised to justify ethnic supremacist attitudes… So rather than seeing religion as something apart from nationalism, we are better off reading it as a purely political expression, sublimated to the heavens to give it metaphysical authority."

 

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