How to understand Salafism in America: The Economist

2018/10/25 Leave a comment

Expect similar differences in Canada:

THE word “Salafism” is often used loosely, especially in continental Europe. When the relationship between Islam and jihadist violence is discussed in, say, France or Germany, the assumption is often made that the problem begins and ends with the Salafis—who put overwhelming emphasis on the first three generations of Muslims and who are thought to have professed the faith at its purest. This Franco-German sloppiness can be bewildering to Islam-watchers in Britain where Salafis have at times been encouraged to play a part in countering terrorism.

In fact, as anyone who studies the Salafi phenomenon quickly realises, things are far from simple. Scholars generally distinguish three strands of Salafism. First, there is the apolitical, quietist sort which favours intense conservatism in dress and personal life and eschews most kinds of involvement with the modern world. Then there are more activist Salafis who share the impatience of the Muslim Brotherhood to see the replacement of relatively secular governments in Islam’s heartland by religiously inspired regimes. They are not quite as energetic, or as pragmatic, as the Brotherhood’s members but they are influenced by Brotherhood thinking. And thirdly, there are jihadist Salafis who think the only appropriate response to the decadence of the modern era, and to a lack of zeal in the historically Muslim world, is violence. All three strains share a suspicion of democratic institutions that confer on fallible human beings an authority that, as they see things, should belong only to God.

In a new report, published under the Programme on Extremism at America’s George Washington University, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens shows that all three forms of Salafism have flourished, albeit with considerable ebbs and flows in their fortunes, on American soil in recent decades. He agrees that the distinction between the three forms of Salafism should be maintained, but also stresses they are not hermetically sealed categories, and that important individuals have moved between them.

Confusingly, the author notes, Salafist thinking (whose hallmarks include deep suspicion of the modern, secular world) has been disseminated by some people who do not themselves accept the label of Salafi. One such person is Muhammad Syed Adly, an influential imam based in South Carolina who urges Muslims to focus on Islamic education and avoid secular education and worldly politics. He has encouraged American Muslims to consider alternatives to regular public schools where their children might pick up liberal ideas about gender and sexuality.

As an example of quietist Salafism, Mr Meleagrou-Hitchens cites the Quran and Sunnah Society (QSS) which flourished across the United States both before and immediately after its formal incorporation in Ohio in 1995. Its back-to-basics message, driven home with tapes from Saudi clerics, appealed both to Arab students in America and to African-Americans who had embraced Islam in a spirit of black power and wanted to hew close to the faith’s fundamentals. As the author points out, Salafism’s utter rejection of secular institutions appealed to some African-Americans who felt the American system had nothing to offer them. Although the QSS eventually went into terminal decline, its legacies apparently include a contingent of American Muslims who are fiercely protective of Saudi Arabia and its clerics.

To show how jihadist Salafism can be generated on American soil, the report looks at some notorious individuals such as Ali al-Timimi (pictured), who was born in Washington, DC, spent part of his teens in Saudi Arabia and later returned to the United States where he gained a doctorate in computational biology. In 2005 he was jailed on ten charges including enlisting people to wage war against America and helping the Taliban. His case, according to the new report, “is a fascinating case study due to his steady progression across the wider American Salafi milieu: from student of the traditional quietist Saudi sheikhs…to an open promoter of Salafi jihadism.”

But of course, quietist Salafism doesn’t always lead in an extremist direction, as the author also stresses. As an example of that point, he cites a school of “post-Salafis” who “have contributed to the development of Americanised version of Salafism” that combines conservative theology with a constructive engagement with national and international issues.

In other words, American Salafism (for all its professed emphasis on simplicity) is irreducibly prolix. Given how many lives could depend on getting things right, it is worthwhile engaging with that complexity.

Source: How to understand Salafism in America

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

Deep In The Desert, A Case Pits Immigration Crackdown Against Religious Freedom

2018/10/20 Leave a comment

Interesting test case regarding a positive exercise in religious freedom unlike Hobby Lobby, which was more about restricting rights:

In January, Border Patrol agents walked up to a ramshackle old building on the outskirts of a small town in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. They found three men.

Two were Central Americans who had crossed the border illegally. The third was an American — a university lecturer and humanitarian activist named Scott Warren.

Warren was arrested and ultimately charged with two federal criminal counts of harboring illegal migrants and one count of conspiracy to harbor and transport them. Warren has pleaded not guilty.

Warren’s arrest briefly flickered across the national news amid the partisan tug-of-war over the administration’s immigration policy before fading into the background.

But his legal team’s decision to stake out part of his defense on religious liberty grounds has made the case a clash between two of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ top priorities: cracking down on illegal immigration and defending religious liberty.

A law written to shield faith

One aspect of Warren’s defense is based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, also known as RFRA. At root, Warren is saying that his faith compels him to offer assistance to people in dire need, including immigrants.

Congress passed RFRA in 1993 with an eye toward protecting the exercise of religious beliefs, particularly of religious minorities, by providing narrow exceptions to neutral laws that apply to everyone.

The law would allow, for example, a religious group to use an otherwise illegal drug, such as peyote, in religious observances. In recent years, Christian evangelical groups have used the law to advance their causes.

In one prominent case, Hobby Lobby Inc., a for-profit chain of arts and crafts stores, opposed — on religious grounds — providing its employees with health insurance that includes contraceptive services, as required under the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in Hobby Lobby’s favor.

Warren’s lawyer declined to make him available to talk with NPR for this report. But Warren’s parents and others familiar with his work spoke about the case.

Sessions and religious freedom

As attorney general, Jeff Sessions has taken up the banner of religious liberty for the Trump administration.

Last year, Sessions issued a memo with guidance on protections for religious liberty in federal law.

And in a July speech, he called religious liberty America’s “first freedom” and vowed to aggressively protect it. He also announced the creation of a task force to help the Justice Department accomplish that goal.

One of its jobs, he said, would be to ensure that the cases that DOJ attorneys bring and defend — and the arguments they make in court — are in line with federal protections for religious freedom.

“That includes making sure that our employees know their duties to accommodate people of faith,” Sessions told the crowd. “As the people in this room know, you have to practice what you preach.”

But some critics say the Justice Department is failing to do just that. Instead, they say the DOJ is selectively supporting religious liberty.

“There’s a public face of this government, which is very protective of religious liberty, and then the real work they’re doing is only protecting the religious liberty rights of those who are religious conservatives, not of religious progressives,” said Columbia Law School’s Katherine Franke, director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project at Columbia Law School.

Franke was one of several law professors who filed a friend of the court brief in Warren’s case to help explain the statute.

The American Civil Liberties Union also has accused the Trump administration of uneven support for religious freedom.

“The Trump administration’s view of religious liberty is both selective and distorted,” said Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU’s program on freedom of religion and belief.

“It supports an unfounded, unprecedented religious license to discriminate; and at the same, the administration is indifferent or outright hostile to faiths and religious individuals with which it disagrees.”

The Justice Department declined to respond on the record to those allegations.

Many conservative groups and faith leaders have lauded the Trump administration for its efforts to protect religious freedom and people of faith.

One of the most prominent examples of that support was the Justice Department’s decision to file a brief in support of a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

United States v. Warren

Warren, who worked as an instructor at Arizona State University, volunteered with a humanitarian organization called No More Deaths. The group aims to save lives in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, where people frequently die as they try to cross the desert on the journey north.

To that end, volunteers for the group hike into the scrubland and leave food, water and other supplies. They also provide emergency first aid to people they find in distress.

No More Deaths and other humanitarian groups use a private residence they call “the barn” on the outskirts of the small town of Ajo, Arizona, as a base of operations.

That’s where Warren discovered Kristian Perez-Villanueva and Jose Arnaldo Sacaria-Goday in January, according to court papers.

Warren found the two men hiding in the barn’s bathroom, the government says. He gave them food, water and clothes, and allowed them to stay for three days.

On Jan. 17, Border Patrol agents and local law enforcement officers conducting surveillance on the barn saw Warren talking with “two subjects that matched a description given of two lost illegal aliens,” court papers say.

The agents approached the barn on foot and spoke with Warren, who told them to leave, prosecutors said.

The agents then conducted a “knock and talk,” during which they identified Perez-Villanueva and Sacaria-Goday and determined they were in the country illegally. Warren was arrested, while the two undocumented men were detained as material witnesses, deposed and then deported.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona declined to comment on Warren’s case.

It’s unclear whether national political dynamics played any role. But the group No More Deaths believes it is connected to the Trump administration’s broader crackdown on illegal immigration.

“What we see under DOJ now is that they’re going after the activists,” said No More Deaths volunteer Catherine Gaffney. “But unfortunately when you go after activists, they’re going to raise their voices and fight back and not be deterred.”

Gaffney also raised questions about the timing of Warren’s arrest.

She said it came hours after No More Deaths released a report that accused Border Patrol agents of slashing water jugs that the group had left out in the desert. The report included videos of Border Patrol agents destroying plastic water containers.

“So we see a clear pattern of political attack here and of weaponizing these immigration statues to go after the activists,” Gaffney said.

Warren and RFRA

Warren, whom neighbors called an active citizen within the town of Ajo, filed a motion earlier this year to have two of the charges dismissed on RFRA grounds.

Under the law, he has to show three things to make his case: that his beliefs are religious in nature; that they are sincerely held; and that they are substantially burdened by a law that applies to everyone.

If he can do that, the burden of proof then shifts to the government.

Prosecutors have to show that the government has a powerful reason to apply the law in Warren’s specific case. They also have to show that the government is using the least restrictive way possible to accomplish that.

At a court hearing in May, Warren testified about his beliefs. He described a life force that permeates all things — animate and inanimate. And his faith, he said, compels him to act when someone is in need.

“For me, we most definitely do unto others as we would want to have done unto us,” he told the court.

The government opposed the motion, saying the prosecution does not substantially burden Warren’s beliefs. DOJ lawyers said Warren “is not required by his beliefs to aid in the evasion of law enforcement. Nor were the people associated with these charges ‘in distress.’ ”

The district judge presiding over the case denied Warren’s motion to dismiss it. But the judge left the door open to Warren to try again when he’s scheduled to go to trial in November.

Source: Deep In The Desert, A Case Pits Immigration Crackdown Against Religious Freedom

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25 Years Later, Norway Files Charges in Shooting of ‘Satanic Verses’ Publisher

2018/10/12 Leave a comment

About time:

William Nygaard, publisher of the Norwegian edition of Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses,” was shot three times and left for dead outside his home in a quiet suburb of Oslo on the morning of Oct. 11, 1993.

Twenty-five years later, just two days before a deadline that would have foreclosed prosecution, the Norwegian police have at last filed charges in the shooting of Mr. Nygaard, who recovered from his wounds. And the authorities stated what many people had always taken for granted: that the attack had to do with Mr. Rushdie’s book, which infuriated Muslims around the world — a theory that the police played down a generation ago.

“We have no reason to believe there is any other motive for the attempted killing than the publication of ‘The Satanic Verses,’ ” said Ida Dahl Nilssen, a spokeswoman for Norway’s National Criminal Investigation Service. The shooting was about more than an attack on one man, she said, it was a violent attempt to shut down free speech.

But the charges, announced on Tuesday, remain steeped in uncertainty, leaving it unclear how close the authorities really are to holding anyone responsible for one of Norway’s most notorious unsolved crimes. Officials have refused to say publicly what evidence they have or how many people have been charged, or to disclose the suspects’ names, nationalities or current locations.

In 1989, shortly after the book’s initial publication in English, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, declared it offensive to Islam and called on Muslims to kill Mr. Rushdie and anyone involved in publication of the book. But Mr. Nygaard, then the chief of the publishing house Aschehoug, which his family controls, went ahead with publication of a Norwegian-language edition, two months after the ayatollah’s edict.

The Iranian threat, followed by protests and attacks on bookstores in other countries, was not an idle one, and Mr. Rushdie went into hiding for several years.

In 1991, Ettore Capriolo, who had translated the book into Italian, was stabbed in Milan by a man who tried — and failed — to get him to disclose Mr. Rushdie’s location. Mr. Capriolo survived, but days later, Hitoshi Igarashi, the novel’s Japanese translator, was fatally stabbed in Tokyo.

Ayatollah Khomeini died within months of declaring the death sentence. Iran’s government said in 1998 that the threat had been dropped, but religious authorities there have said it still stands, and there is a bounty on Mr. Rushdie’s head.

In the attack on Mr. Nygaard, Norwegian authorities filed charges under a rarely used article of the criminal code, protecting fundamental societal values from attack. Under Norwegian law, if they had not filed by Thursday, they would have been required to drop the case.

“As a consequence of the charges, the investigation may now go on,” Ms. Nilssen said. “We have a strong desire to solve this case.”

On Wednesday, Norwegian news organizations, citing unnamed sources, said there were at least two suspects, one from Iran and the other a former resident of Norway with ties to Lebanon.

In a statement provided by his agent, Mr. Rushdie said: “This is good news, and one can hope that this 25-year-old case will now finally advance.” He has long criticized the investigation, and in his statement, he questioned “why the names and nationalities of the indicted persons have been withheld.”

The announcement also came as a relief to Mr. Nygaard, who is retired from publishing and is the chairman of the Norwegian chapter of PEN, a worldwide association of writers that fights for freedom of expression.

Asked if he regretted publishing “The Satanic Verses,” Mr. Nygaard, now 75, replied with an emphatic “absolutely not.” He did not publish the work, he said, to be provocative, but “to build dialogue,” and if given a choice, he would do it again in the name of freedom of speech.

He shrugged off his own remarkable survival and recovery from the shooting, which included months of hospitalization, calling it a matter of mental and physical vigor.

“I used to be a very good Norwegian ski jumper,” he said. “And quite a good publisher.”

After the attack, the police focused principally on investigating personal motives, rather than wider political or religious ones, according to a 2008 documentary by Odd Isungset, an investigative journalist who also wrote a book about the case.

That documentary reawakened interest in the shooting, and the police reopened the case in 2009.

Knut Olav Amas, a former deputy culture minister who now runs a free speech advocacy group, said it was a major “scandal” that investigators did not pursue the possibility of terrorism and a religious motive.

“The Nygaard investigation itself should be investigated,” Mr. Amas said.

At a 2012 celebration of “Joseph Anton: A Memoir,” Mr. Rushdie’s book about his time living under a death threat, he described decisions like Mr. Nygaard’s to publish the book, as “one of the greatest defenses of free speech of our time.”

Source: 25 Years Later, Norway Files Charges in Shooting of ‘Satanic Verses’ Publisher

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

The ‘Islam is Not a Religion’ Argument

2018/10/12 Leave a comment

Good points on the hypocrisy of those arguing Islam is not a religion:

Asma Uddin has an op-ed in the New York Times about an argument I’ve heard and engaged with a lot, always coming from the Christian far right. The argument is that Islam is not really a religion, it’s a political ideology masquerading as a religion and therefore it does not qualify for protection under the First Amendment. It’s an absurd and blatantly hypocritical argument.

“But when it comes to religious liberty for Americans, there’s a disturbing trend that has drawn much less attention. In recent years, state lawmakers, lawyers and influential social commentators have been making the case that Muslims are not protected by the First Amendment.

Why? Because, they argue, Islam is not a religion.

This once seemed like an absurd fringe argument. But it has gained momentum. John Bennett, a Republican state legislator in Oklahoma, said in 2014, “Islam is not even a religion; it is a political system that uses a deity to advance its agenda of global conquest.” In 2015, a former assistant United States attorney, Andrew C. McCarthy, wrote in National Review that Islam “should be understood as conveying a belief system that is not merely, or even primarily, religious.” In 2016, Michael Flynn, who the next year was briefly President Trump’s national security adviser, told an ACT for America conference in Dallas that “Islam is a political ideology” that “hides behind the notion of it being a religion.” In a January 2018 news release, Neal Tapio of South Dakota, a Republican state senator who was planning to run for the United States House of Representatives, questioned whether the First Amendment applies to Muslims.

The idea that Islam, which has over 1.6 billion adherents worldwide, is not a religion was even deployed in a 2010 legal challenge of county approval of building plans for a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tenn. The plaintiffs argued that Islam is not a religion but rather a geopolitical system bent on instituting jihadist and Shariah law in America. Because Islam is not a religion, the argument went, the mosque construction plans should not benefit from the county or federal laws that protect religious organizations. The local court ruled against the mosque, but the Tennessee appellate court overturned the ruling and the mosque prevailed.”

The hypocrisy is obvious. This argument is almost always made by people who push aggressively for their version of a Christian nation. They advocate policies based on their fundamentalist Christian beliefs, demand exemptions from generally applicable laws whenever they think their religious beliefs demand it, including the right to discriminate in business if they choose to, and organize primarily on the basis of their Christian views. Their version of Christianity is every bit as aggressively political as they imagine all Muslims are. The difference is that they have actual influence to get their religious views mandated by law, while Muslims in this country don’t have that kind of power and influence.

So by their own reasoning, Christianity is also not a religion and deserves no First Amendment protection. Of course, they won’t follow their argument to its logical conclusion, they just engage in special pleading. Because this is not a serious argument, it’s a pretext for denying the same rights and protections to others that they so loudly demand for themselves.

Source: The ‘Islam is Not a Religion’ Argument

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Unique underwater sculpture in the Maldives destroyed after deemed un-Islamic

2018/10/04 Leave a comment

Sigh:

A unique underwater sculpture exhibit at a Maldives resort was destroyed on order of the country’s president after it was deemed to violate Islamic beliefs.

President Abdulla Yameen said the country’s religious leaders had complained that the sculpture represented idols, which are banned by Islam. Strict Islam bans any manmade depiction of the human form.

The project, called the Coralarium, was created by British artist Jason DeCaires Taylor to bring attention to rising sea levels.

PHOTO: In this handout picture released by the Maldives Police on Sept. 21, 2018, Maldivian authorities demolish sculptures by artist Jason deCaires Taylor near the island resort of Fairmont Maldives Sirru Fen Fushi in Shaviyani Atoll, Maldives.Handout/AFP/Getty Images
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Night visits to the Coralarium, when the sculptures were illuminated with underwater lights, were popular with visitors to the country.“I was extremely shocked and heartbroken to learn that my sculptures have been destroyed by the Maldivian authorities at the Coralarium, despite continued consultations and dialogue,” DeCaires Taylor wrote on Instagram. “The Coralarium was conceived to connect humans to the environment and a nurturing space for marine life to thrive.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BoGqtZJgXvV/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=12&wp=1256&rd=https%3A%2F%2Fabcnews.go.com&rp=%2FInternational%2Funique-underwater-sculpture-maldives-destroyed-deemed-islamic%2Fstory#%7B%22ci%22%3A0%2C%22os%22%3A1472%7D

The Maldives archipelago, a chain of 26 coral atolls and more than 1,000 small islands in the Indian Ocean southwest of India, is under threat of being submerged as ocean levels rise. The country, which has many luxury hotels popular with honeymooners from the West, is the lowest in the world, with its average ground level just over four feet above sea level.

The sculpture project, in addition to being a work of art, was also part of the island nation’s first coral regeneration project. It consisted of human-looking statues that were submerged underwater inside a large stainless steel structure that acted as gallery for visiting snorklers and scuba divers.

PHOTO: Artist and environmental sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor has created a semi-submerged tidal gallery exhibiting a number of artworks designed to evolve over time called Coralarium, Aug. 14, 2018, in the Maldives.Jason deCaires Taylor/Cover Images/Newscom
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The Maldives police published photos of the officers using axes and saws to remove and destroy the sculptures.

President Yameen said there was “significant public sentiment” against the exhibition.

PHOTO: Artist and environmental sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor has created a semi-submerged tidal gallery exhibiting a number of artworks designed to evolve over time called Coralarium, Aug. 14, 2018, in the Maldives.Jason deCaires Taylor/Cover Images/Newscom
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Previous goverments have tried to highlight the threat of rising ocean level to the county. Former President Mohammed Nasheed held an underwater cabinet meeting in 2009 to highlight the threat to the country. He also announced plans to buy land on mainland Asia to move the population in the future if necessary.

Source: Unique underwater sculpture in the Maldives destroyed after deemed un-Islamic

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Church sign meant to spread word of God sparks human rights complaint

2018/09/28 Leave a comment

The Canadian equivalent of the US baker refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple

A United Church minister in west-end Toronto is pitted against a Christian business owner over an outdoor signboard used to spread the word of God.

In a rare complaint filed with the Ontario Human Rights Commission on Wednesday, Rev. Alexa Gilmour, minister of Windermere United Church, alleges Archer Mobile Signs refused to post a message encouraging people to “wish your Muslim neighbours a Ramadan Mubarak (Happy Ramadan)” and another that promoted the celebration of diversity during Pride Week.

“Interfaith dialogue and action is a central part of my faith and ministry,” Gilmour told the Star. “If Windermere United cannot post the messages we choose, then we cannot do the ministry we feel called by God to do.”

According to the human rights complaint, the church had rented a mobile sign from Archer Mobile Signs since 2012 and its owner, Steven Thompson, was responsible for updating the text on the sign every week.

One side of the sign generally displayed announcements about church life and events, while the other displayed a message of faith, entitled “This Week’s Spiritual Exercise,” that was authored by Gilmour as “an expression of my faith and an act of Christian ministry.” Gilmour or her staff would dictate the weekly text to Thompson by phone or email.

In the past, there had been disagreements over some of the messages on the signs, but Gilmour said the two instances flagged in the human rights complaint were the first in which he clearly defined his reasons for objecting to the minister’s choice of words.

In May, Gilmour claimed, church administrator Michelle Maldonado wrote to Thompson and requested the Ramadan message. However, Thompson only updated the announcement on the board and refused to put up the Muslim greeting.

In an email from Thompson dated May 16 that was included in Gilmour’s human rights submission, he said he found himself confused by Gilmour’s spiritual message.

“I am all for befriending Muslims in order to reach them for Christ … There is a sense in which your spiritual exercise goes beyond wishing Muslims well, to actually encouraging them in their ideology. I have no problem with wishing them well, but I would violate my own conscience before God to encourage them in their pursuit of Allah,” according Thompson’s email.

“Because I do not see any support in the scriptures to encourage anyone in a false ideology, Islam or otherwise, I must refrain from posting your spiritual exercise. For me, this would be a sin.”

Thompson did not respond to several requests from the Star for comment and waved off a reporter who approached him in person.

The church’s allegations have not been proven. As part of the human rights process, Thompson has 35 days to respond to the complaint. He has not yet filed a response.

Gilmour said she respects Thompson’s right to his opinions and did not ask him to give up his beliefs and embrace hers, but she said he has no right to censor her religious values.

“People may say it’s just a sign,” said Gilmour, “but I use the sign to post my messages of welcome and inclusion.”

Gilmour pointed out to Thompson that he had not objected to prior interfaith messages to the Jewish community (Happy Chanukah) or people of African heritage (Happy Kwanzaa).

In his email reply, Thompson explained he had concerns about his signs being vandalized and that he has the right to refuse to let customers “say what they want’ and to “limit messaging on an Archer Sign where a threat is deemed possible.”

According to Gilmour, Thompson proposed alternatives to her message such as “Wish your Muslim neighbour well,” “befriend a Muslim” or “Invite a Muslim over for dinner” to avoid the “trigger word” Ramadan.

But Gilmour refused the suggestion because “we wish to acknowledge this holy time in the Islamic calendar and believe that treating the faith traditions differently is prejudicial and possibly racist.” Thompson then reportedly said the continued sign rental was contingent on the church accepting his company’s discretion to control its messaging, and mentioned that the placement of the mobile signs at Windermere violated city bylaw.

The minister also asked Thompson if he would post the message “Celebrate God’s diverse LGBTQ2S community with Pride” in June. According to the complaint, Thompson responded: “I think you have an idea as to my view of scripture.”

In mid-June, Thompson emailed the church to say he was removing the sign on the front lawn of the church, at Windermere Ave. and Bloor St. W., in order to comply with municipal code.

City rules on mobile signs specify they cannot be on the public right of way, such as sidewalks or boulevards. Gilmour said she believed the sign was in compliance with the bylaw.

The United Church of Canada is known for championing interfaith relations and gay rights, values that Gilmour said she always stands by.

“It’s not acceptable for a service provider to limit the way I express my Christian ministry,” she said. “I’m taking this step only because many attempts to resolve this issue through dialogue or mediation have failed.”

Source: Church sign meant to spread word of God sparks human rights complaint

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

The Latest Attack on Islam: It’s Not a Religion

2018/09/28 Leave a comment

Please. (Wilful) ignorance knows no bounds:

Religious liberty has become a particularly politicized topic in recent years, and recent months were no different. In a long-awaited June decision, the Supreme Court decided in favor of a Christian baker who refused to make a custom wedding cake for a gay couple. In July, Attorney General Jeff Sessions introduced a “religious liberty task force” that critics saw as a mere cover for anti-gay discrimination. And Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s record has been scoured for evidence of what his appointment to the Supreme Court would mean for future decisions in which Christian beliefs clash with law and policy.

But when it comes to religious liberty for Americans, there’s a disturbing trend that has drawn much less attention. In recent years, state lawmakers, lawyers and influential social commentators have been making the case that Muslims are not protected by the First Amendment.

Why? Because, they argue, Islam is not a religion.

This once seemed like an absurd fringe argument. But it has gained momentum. John Bennett, a Republican state legislator in Oklahoma, said in 2014, “Islam is not even a religion; it is a political system that uses a deity to advance its agenda of global conquest.” In 2015, a former assistant United States attorney, Andrew C. McCarthy, wrote in National Review that Islam “should be understood as conveying a belief system that is not merely, or even primarily, religious.” In 2016, Michael Flynn, who the next year was briefly President Trump’s national security adviser, told an ACT for America conference in Dallas that “Islam is a political ideology” that “hides behind the notion of it being a religion.” In a January 2018 news release, Neal Tapio of South Dakota, a Republican state senator who was planning to run for the United States House of Representatives, questioned whether the First Amendment applies to Muslims.

The idea that Islam, which has over 1.6 billion adherents worldwide, is not a religion was even deployed in a 2010 legal challenge of county approval of building plans for a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tenn. The plaintiffs argued that Islam is not a religion but rather a geopolitical system bent on instituting jihadist and Shariah law in America. Because Islam is not a religion, the argument went, the mosque construction plans should not benefit from the county or federal laws that protect religious organizations. The local court ruled against the mosque, but the Tennessee appellate court overturned the ruling and the mosque prevailed.

This argument about land use is particularly distressing because not too long ago, a bipartisan coalition in Congress helped enact the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act to prevent discriminatory or burdensome regulations from restricting religious exercise. In 2000, it passed both the House and the Senate by unanimous consent, as lawmakers expressed concern that minority faiths disproportionately faced zoning conflicts, and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. It’s jarring that some would now argue that these protections do not apply to Muslims.

At the root of the push to deny that Islam is a religion is a misguided belief that Muslims are anti-American. An industry of anti-Muslim fearmongering has helped stoke and perpetuate moral panic about Islam taking over America and subverting American values.

A 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center found that almost half of all American adults believed that “at least some” American Muslims are anti-American; this number included 11 percent who think “most” or “almost all” American Muslims are anti-American. Fourteen percent thought that about half of all American Muslims are against America. A 2017 poll found that half of United States adults believed that Islam does not have a place in “mainstream American society,” and almost half (44 percent) thought there was a “natural conflict between Islam and democracy.” The fear is so real that in 2010, when the mosque opponents in Murfreesboro argued against the religious validity of Islam, the Department of Justice filed an amicus brief explaining that “under the United States Constitution and other federal laws, it is uncontroverted that Islam is a religion, and a mosque is a place of religious assembly.”

The fear is not limited to mosque cases. There have been legislative efforts in 43 states to ban the practice of Islamic religious law, or Shariah law; 24 bills were introduced in 2017 alone, according to the Haas Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. This year, Idaho introduced an anti-Shariah bill, bringing the number of measures introduced since 2010 to at least 217. Of those, 20 have been enacted.

The laws’ backers seem to see them as necessary stopgaps to protect against their imagined Muslim takeover of America. When an Idaho state representative, Eric Redman, a Republican, introduced his anti-Shariah bill in January, he said it was needed so that “foreign law” would not “defile our constitutional laws” and to “protect our state and our country.” That’s a similar sentiment to the one expressed by the conservative political activist Pamela Geller, who argued in a 2016 commentary published by Breitbart that Muslim women seeking accommodations to wear a head scarf in the workplace are part of a “Muslim effort to impose Islam on the secular marketplace.”

It’s not hard to imagine what the reaction from these corners would be if Muslims sought other exemptions, including ones routinely sought by Christians — from performing certain medical procedures, providing certain medications or, say, from baking a wedding cake for a gay couple. A June poll by Morning Consult showed that white evangelicals are more likely to support religious business owners refusing services to L.G.B.T. individuals if the business owner is a Christian, Jew or Mormon — but less so if the business owner is a Muslim.

If Islamophobes are successful in their efforts to strip American Muslims of the same protections that Christians enjoy, it’s they — not the Muslims they irrationally fear — who will be responsible for curtailing religious liberty.

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The many meanings of freedom: A new set of essays offers a sobering look at Islam and human-rights discourse

2018/09/17 Leave a comment

Interesting discussion piece on the interface and compatibility of Muslims with liberal democracy and human rights. Some of the same concerns he raises, of course, can be applied to more traditional or fundamentalist strains of all religions.

Try substituting the names of other religions for Islam and Muslims to see some common threads:

MOHAMMAD FADEL, an associate law professor at the University of Toronto, is one of North America’s most thoughtful commentators on the interface between Islam, liberal democracy and Western understandings of the rule of law. He has made an elaborate case for the possibility of Muslims, including theologically conservative ones, finding a comfortable place in a diverse, noisy liberal democracy where many value systems co-exist. He draws on the ideas of John Rawls, perhaps the greatest American political philosopher of the late 20th century, to show that “public reason” can serve as a kind of common denominator between citizens with utterly different world views.

So it is sobering to find that in a newly published set of essays on Islam and the Western understanding of human rights, Mr Fadel puts more emphasis on difference than compatibility. His contribution is the sharpest of the essays, published by the Atlantic Council, an influential think-tank based in Washington, DC, under the title “The Islamic Tradition and the Human Rights Discourse”.

Mr Fadel artfully uses a Western source to show that basic concepts like freedom and happiness have one meaning for a liberal humanist and another for a theist idealist who sees the purpose of human life as devotion to God. For somebody in the latter camp, an addicted gambler is anything but free; but to the secular liberal, that way of life could simply be one way of exercising formal freedom.

Islamic thought about the family, as Mr Fadel adds, is oriented not only to the short-term happiness of individuals, and also to other perceived desirables such as “a reasonably stable household that produces a new generation of Muslims.” So Muslim thinkers could not be expected to see religiously mixed marriages in the same light as a secular libertarian would. He concludes that:

It is impossible to expect a complete convergence between human rights norms and Islamic norms: human rights norms are almost entirely concerned with securing the autonomy of individuals to make choices for themselves, while Islam is about influencing individuals’ choices about how to live their lives.

Asked if he had become more downbeat about Muslim communities finding a place in Western societies, Mr Fadel told Erasmus that he believed more passionately than ever in the need for such co-existence. But it was an observable fact that in Western societies, that effort was growing harder. Arguments, for example over female attire and the raising of children, suggest that in many Western countries, “liberals don’t trust Muslims, and therefore want to regulate their lives more closely, and Muslims don’t trust liberal society, which means they are less likely to have confidence in a neutral, rules-based political system and more likely to focus on their own communal life,” he says.

All the contributors to the new volume are themselves Muslim, and they bring to the subject of human rights concepts and assumptions that would be unfamiliar to most non-Muslims. Perhaps the most upbeat note is struck by the volume’s editor, H.A. Hellyer, who argues that Islam must rediscover the virtue of “rejuvenation”—new thinking about old texts and concepts—which, contrary to what many people say, is “deeply held within the Islamic tradition”. The oft-repeated proposition that in Islam, the gates of ijtihad (theological reasoning) were slammed shut a millennium ago is simply false, in Mr Hellyer’s view.

Another contributor is Mustafa Ceric, the grand mufti emeritus of Sarajevo, who  makes a pointed rejoinder to Western critics of Islam. It takes the form of a riff on the word “dhimmitude”. Among contemporary Islamo-sceptics, that term has been used in two senses. It refers to the second-class but still protected status which traditional Muslim empires offered to non-Muslim, especially Christian and Jewish, subjects. Today’s sceptics also use the word to denounce Westerners who seem excessively deferential to Islam.

As Mr Ceric notes, the “dhimmi” status in Ottoman times did at least allow religious minorities to remain alive, as long as they were loyal and law-abiding. His co-religionists who suffered genocide in Bosnia did not benefit from any such concession. That is a fair point. But if we are to judge any religion (Islam, Christianity, even Buddhism) or secular creed (Marxism, nationalism, fascism) by the respect shown by its adherents for the right to life over the last couple of centuries, then none fares too well.

Source: The many meanings of freedomA new set of essays offers a sobering look at Islam and human-rights discourse

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Germany’s New Far-Right Campaign Poster Is Unsubtly Racist

2018/09/13 Leave a comment

Indeed. Reminder of messaging and posters under the Nazis regarding Jews:

The far-right Alternative for Germany party released a new campaign poster last week with a slogan promising “Islam-free schools” beneath a photo of smiling white schoolchildren.

Alternative for Germany, also known as AfD, released the posters in the midst of its election campaign in the southern German state of Bavaria. Recent polls show the party is on track to win the third-largest share of the vote as it saps votes from the traditional conservative party aligned with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But as AfD rallies voters ahead of Bavaria’s elections next month, the party is under intense public and political scrutiny for its links to neo-Nazi organizationsand role in encouraging far-right riots in recent weeks.

AfD’s Bavarian anti-Islam posters have added to the backlash against the party. A German teachers’ associations called the posters dangerous, and an Austrian member of the European Parliament accused the party of promoting fascist rhetoric and racially segregated schools. A British hate crime monitoring group also denounced the poster, tweeting, “Welcome to the new face of fascism.”

AFD
Alternative for Germany’s new poster, vowing “Islam-free schools!” and promoting “dominant German culture.”

AfD claims that the posters are not calling for barring Muslim children from schools, Germany’s Der Spiegel reports, but are opposed to Islamic education in schools and face veils. But some Germans on social media criticized the posters for echoing Nazi-era discrimination against Jewish students, HuffPost Germany reported.

The party has a history of anti-Islamic propaganda, and during last year’s national elections it worked with a conservative American ad agency to create a controversial series of posters, including one reading “Burkas? We prefer bikinis” and another with a photo of a pregnant white woman with the tagline “New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves.”

Although AfD is often careful to distance itself from more politically toxic extremist groups and violent rhetoric, it has repeatedly provoked scandals after its officials made statements downplaying the Holocaust or siding with far-right activists. After anti-migrant riots erupted after the killing of a German man in the city of Chenmitz two weeks ago, a prominent AfD official marched with the founder of anti-Islamic extremist group PEGIDA in a demonstration against migration.

While AfD is still shut out of governing in Germany, its success has caused traditional right politicians to swing farther right in hopes of winning back voters, especially prevalent in Bavaria, where the Merkel-allied Christian Social Union is losing support and increasingly embracing anti-immigration, anti-Islamic views.

CSU leader Horst Seehofer nearly brought down the German government this year after demanding tighter border controls, and more recently he called immigration the “mother of all political problems” and said he would have joinedfar-right anti-migrant protests were he not an elected official. Bavaria’s CSU premier ordered that crucifixes be hung in all government buildings, and the party last year drafted a law banning full-face veils in public places.

Much like in several other countries where establishment parties mimic the far right, most recently Sweden, the CSU’s shift hasn’t worked, and the party is expected to lose its absolute majority government in a state where it once dominated.

Source: Germany’s New Far-Right Campaign Poster Is Unsubtly Racist

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Macron Wants to Create ‘French Islam’ to Align Muslims With Secular Society

2018/09/13 Leave a comment

Ongoing French struggles with integration approaches. While there are obviously serious problems of Islamist extremism, France also needs to deal with failures of economic integration and ongoing discrimination:

French President Emmanuel Macron will review a new report that lays out proposals to reform Muslim society in France and create a “French Islam.”

The report’s author, Hakim El Karoui, who is the nephew of former Tunisian Prime Minister Hamed Karoui, has called for “a system with men, money and financing to combat [radicalization],” Politico reported. He proposes funding this regulatory system by taxing halal foods, while also restricting religious financing from abroad.

“There are activists on one side and nobody across to say something else. [The Islamists] have an influence that goes well beyond their number of followers,” El Karoui told Europe 1 Radio on Monday.

Speaking to BFM TV, the report’s author also warned that young French Muslims often learned about Islam via social media, where extremists often had a strong presence. He further raised concerns about preachers and mosques funded by religiously conservative foreign nations, such as Saudi Arabia.

In France, many politicians and analysts have long drawn attention to the “parallel society” arising within the country’s Muslim population. At the same time, France’s strict laws separating religion from the state prevent the government from interfering directly to oversee what is presented in mosques. Some politicians, such as far-right leader Marine Le Pen, have capitalized on a wave of terror attacks and anti-Semitic murders to urge the government to police mosques and crack down on extremist clerics.

A public call was made by several leading political figures in April to strike verses in Islam’s holy book, the Koran, that call for punishing and killing Jews, Christians and nonbelievers, The Atlantic reported. While the manifesto did not specifically say the verses should be removed from the text, many Muslims saw the open letter as an attempt to alter their sacred text, which led to significant backlash.

El Karoui also emphasized this week that only a small fraction of France’s Muslim population turned to extremism.

“There are many Muslims who are going to eat halal, women who are going to be veiled, but who are not Islamists in the sense that they do not think that the ideological political project of the Islamists is better or more important than that of the Republic,” he said, according to France 24.

Earlier this year, Macron indicated a plan to address the tensions arising in the country and to create an “Islam of France.” French Muslim leaders had also called for reforms, but efforts made by previous governments had proved unsuccessful. Under the leadership of former President Nicolas Sarkozy, France tried to create a central Islamic religious authority recognized by the state, as was done with France’s Jewish population during the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, according to Politico. But the representative council failed to maintain popular support, primarily because of significant differences among Muslims hailing from many different countries.

It remains to be seen whether or not the new report will lead to government action. Some politicians have already criticized the proposals.

Bruno Retailleau, a senator for the right-leaning Les Républicains party said that creating “an Islam of France” would “not protect the French from radical Islam,” Politico reported. He also argued that it could weaken the devoutly secular nation’s “republican pact.”

Source: Macron Wants to Create ‘French Islam’ to Align Muslims With Secular Society

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