By Aly Kamadia, Editor-In-Chief, iDose
Dear Readers,
Where on earth has iDose been?!
To everyone sending us an avalanche of emails wondering where we were (thank you all!), in addition to the broader iDose Magazine community, the answer is simple: we’ve been on vacation.
An excessively long vacation?
Yes, completely guilty.
But any such guilt vanishes rather quickly when we consider a clear fact: for skeptics like myself to retain their sanity, vacationing from the absurd, and sometimes downright psychotic nature of politics that defines our time is of the utmost importance.
That said, with November’s US presidential election around the corner, my calm, soothing and fun break must conclude. And before iDose Magazine’s September issue is released in a few weeks, I have two notes to make.
First, despite the successful rebranding of Kamala Harris (‘successful’ thus far), insofar as polling in American swing states permits us to take the pulse of November’s election (‘swing states’ are US states that will likely determine who the next US president will be), Harris and Trump are in a virtual tie.
In addition to other intellectuals who will offer their commentary on iDose, yours truly will certainly offer some remarks about the state of the American presidential election.
And while it’s true that my mind partially retreated from politics during these past few months, there has been a question that has been poking away at me lately more than ever: Is the religion that I was born into facing rapid decline in Western countries – most notably Canada, the US and the UK?
The religion in question is a relatively tiny branch of Shia Islam (itself a minority within Islam), known as Ismailism. And the question of whether it is facing rapid decline in the West is timely, for reasons that I will address in the commentary that I plan to author.
In the interim, each and every single iDose reader is more than welcome to send me comments directly as always. And as a proponent of free speech and free inquiry, I welcome any and all broad comments/analysis about religion, and/or more specifically, any comments/analysis about Ismailism (if you happen to know what it is).
You are more than welcome to send those comments from an anonymous email if that suits you better.
Cheers,
Aly Kamadia, BA, MA
Editor-in-Chief, iDose Magazine
