At the end of every year, faith leaders, local organizations and officials gather together to break bread at the Muslim Center of Greater Princeton and further build relationships with one another.

The Muslim Center of Greater Princeton in West Windsor brought local officials, faith leaders, residents and organizations together in the large multi-purpose room at the mosque to learn more about one another in December before the start of this new year.

“If we know each other, we love each other. When we don’t know each other there is the fear of the unknown,” said...

After the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion, Zahra Ayubi started to notice a theme among some critics of the historic shift.

"They'll draw analogies between abortion bans in the United States and Muslim conservatism," Ayubi, a professor of Islamic Ethics at Dartmouth College, said of some of the commentary she saw on TV and on social media. Critiques ranged from attempts at humor to outright Islamophobia.

In some cases, as Ayubi recalled, critics blamed the so-called "Texas Taliban" for new abortion restrictions in that...

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Sunday said some Republicans are “OK with Islamophobia” in response to questions about efforts by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to block her from continuing to sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. 

“You remember Donald Trump coming into my state and saying, ‘Muslims, Somali refugees are infiltrating our country.’ You remember [Rep.] Marjorie Taylor Greene [R-Ga.] coming to Congress after...

Hamline University officials made an about-face on Tuesday in its treatment of a lecturer who showed an image of the Prophet Muhammad in an art history class, walking back one of their most controversial statements — that showing the image was Islamophobic. They also said that respect for Muslim students should not have superseded academic freedom.

University officials changed their stance after the lecturer, who lost her teaching job, sued the small Minnesota school for religious discrimination and defamation.

“Like all organizations, sometimes we misstep,” said a...

The city of Hamtramck voted Tuesday night to change its animal ordinance, which would allow for religious sacrifice as long as it’s done legally and humanely.

The religious slaughtering of certain animals like goats or sheep is practiced among Muslims during the holiday of Eid. The city’s Muslim population has been booming in recent decades, with the city recently becoming the first in the U.S. to have an all-Muslim city council and a Muslim mayor.

In the city council chambers in Hamtramck, residents packed inside talking during public comment for nearly three hours...

 A new Ohio law will provide college students with more flexibility when it comes to observing religious holidays. 

House Bill 353, known as the Testing Your Faith Act, requires higher education institutions to give students a minimum of three days every semester and also provide accommodations in order to observe religious holidays.

The bipartisan-backed bill was signed by Gov. Mike DeWine Tuesday.

Source:...

For the Hazrati family, Christmas Day typically includes a lit-up tree, gifts and a dal lunch. 

But after the wrapping paper remnants were cleared from around the tree, the Punjabi Sikh family living in Jersey City, New Jersey, didn’t always know what the rest of the day should entail for a family like theirs — so a few years ago, they started spending Christmas Day at the local gurdwara, a place of assembly and worship for Sikhs. 

With no extended family nearby nor religious service to attend, and lacking the colorful parades that would flood India’s...

A record number of Muslim women ran for office in 2022 — and they won. The election cycle made history with 153 Muslim candidates on the general ballot, per a report released by Jetpac Resource Center and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Sixty-one percent of Muslim women candidates won, compared with 56 percent of Muslim men....

When queer students at Yeshiva University sued the school for discrimination in spring 2021, critics were quick to question why LGBTQ students would opt for an Orthodox Jewish university in the first place.

But for many LGBTQ Orthodox Jews, as with believers of other faiths, their religious identities are as nonnegotiable as their queer identities.

“A lot of people ask, why would somebody who is queer stay Orthodox? It’s like...

Fear of hate crime looms especially large in the minds of Jews and Muslims, even if they have never been personally targeted, according to a new study from Rice University and West Virginia University.

"Fear of Religious Hate Crime Victimization and the Residual Effects of Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia" appears in a recent edition of Social Forces.

Using data from the 2019 edition of the nationally representative Experiences with Religious Discrimination Study survey, the authors found that among religious groups, Jews and Muslims were most likely to...

Somali residents in the rural northern Wisconsin city of Barron are withdrawing a request to play an amplified Muslim call to prayer from two mosques after the idea drew stiff opposition from some residents at a recent city council meeting. 

Barron is home to a community of around 470 Somali refugees and their families, according to 2020 data from the U.S. Census. That population has grown since the 1990s when refugees living in the Twin Cities moved to...

Muslim, Jewish and interfaith groups, as well as U.S. veterans, are rallying behind three prospective Sikh recruits who earlier this year sued the United States Marine Corps in their push to attend training while maintaining their turbans and beards.

Sikhs who serve in the Marine Corps can keep their beards and unshorn hair — which are articles of their faith — under a turban while on duty, according to the service’s grooming regulations, but are forbidden from doing so during combat deployment and in the course of recruit trainings.

Jaskirat Singh, Aekash Singh and...

When the Georgia General Assembly convenes in January, there will be four Muslim legislators among its ranks, one of the largest Muslim legislative delegations in the nation — and all of them will be from Gwinnett County.

Gwinnett voters re-elected state Sen. Sheikh Rahman, D-Lawrenceville, who became the first Muslim elected to serve in the General Assembly in 2018, but they also made history in three other legislative races.

These include the election of Nabilah Islam, who will join Rahman in the Senate and become the first Muslim woman elected to that chamber, as...

On Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur this year at Temple Emanu-El, a landmark Reform synagogue steps from Manhattan’s Central Park, a 6-by-11-inch flyer was placed at every seat, next to the prayer books, offering instructions on what to do in the event of an attack during one of the High Holiday services.

“If running from the threat is not an option,” the flyer read, “crouch down between the pews or hide behind a pillar. Make yourself as small of a target as possible. Remain quiet and still.” 

A rise in antisemitic...

Politicians across the country are in the last stretch of campaigning as Americans prepare to cast the votes in the midterm elections on Nov. 8.

Several polls show tight races, with Democrats trying to ride momentum from the summer that favored them for abortion rights and gun reform but fell due to rising gas prices. Republican challengers are campaigning on promises to defeat increasing inflation and crime.

Polls show the top issues for voters going into the midterms are by far...