Welcome to Community!
Community is a social and political blog focused mainly on challenges to meaningful life in communities.
Humans have always lived in religious, ethnic, tribal, regional and national communities in which they have nurtured their relationships, fostered their dreams and pursued the priorities of their lives.
Communities, too, have bred hatred and fought one another. After of onset of the Age of Nationalism, nations became the most violent of communities, and nationalist warfare climaxed in World War II. But while nations have all but stopped shooting at one another, conflicts between subnational communities (e.g. the Shiite and Sunni Arabs in Iraq, Kurds and Arabs in Syria) have heightened precipitously. In some of those conflicts, states are siding with certain communities (e.g. Syria, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar).
Today ethnic and religious strife poses the gravest challenges to life, liberty and happiness, especially in haphazardly created post-colonial states such as Syria, Iraq, Rwanda, Nigeria, Burundi, South Sudan, and so on. In fact, you can hardly find a postcolonial state in which ethnic and religious communities are at peace with one another.
We don’t have magic solutions to these human tragedies. We would just like to explore strategies and models to help overcome this challenge. Community is a forum through which we will continually engage in that exploration.
The Navigation Bar tabs direct you to the blog site’s features.
The Home tab brings up the blog itself.
About outlines the context and main focus of the blog.
Host introduces you to the blog’s host and editor, Mustafa Malik.
Posts is an archive of Malik’s blog posts, many of them from his previous blogs.
In Morgue is saved a collection of newspaper op-eds, commentaries, journal articles, and book chapters, published by Mustafa Malik during his 40-plus-year career as a journalist and researcher.
Materials from these collections can be pulled up through the Search box, by using relevant keywords.
The Contact tab welcomes readers to offer their critiques of the blog and its posts and suggestions for their improvement. An e-mail address is provided there to send them to the host.
You are also encouraged to share their thoughts on particular posts through the Comment box under each post.
Thank you for visiting Community and sharing your thoughts on the blog, posts and other material.
