The Barbarians Within Our Gates – Hisham Melhem

2014/09/27 Leave a comment

A thoroughly depressing article on the failure of Arab states, unfortunately one that rings all too true:

Almost every Muslim era, including the enlightened ones, has been challenged by groups that espouse a virulent brand of austere, puritanical and absolutist Islam. They have different names, but are driven by the same fanatical, atavistic impulses. The great city of Córdoba, one of the most advanced cities in Medieval Europe, was sacked and plundered by such a group Al Mourabitoun in 1013, destroying its magnificent palaces and its famed library. In the 1920s the Ikhwan Movement in Arabia no relation to the Egyptian movement was so fanatical that the founder of Saudi Arabia, King Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, who collaborated with them initially, had to crush them later on. In contemporary times, these groups include the Taliban, al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

Yes, it is misleading to lump—as some do—all Islamist groups together, even though all are conservative in varying degrees. As terrorist organizations, al Qaeda and Islamic State are different from the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative movement that renounced violence years ago, although it did dabble with violence in the past.

Nonetheless, most of these groups do belong to the same family tree—and all of them stem from the Arabs’ civilizational ills. The Islamic State, like al Qaeda, is the tumorous creation of an ailing Arab body politic. Its roots run deep in the badlands of a tormented Arab world that seems to be slouching aimlessly through the darkness. It took the Arabs decades and generations to reach this nadir. It will take us a long time to recover—it certainly won’t happen in my lifetime.

My generation of Arabs was told by both the Arab nationalists and the Islamists that we should man the proverbial ramparts to defend the “Arab World” against the numerous barbarians imperialists, Zionists, Soviets massing at the gates. Little did we know that the barbarians were already inside the gates, that they spoke our language and were already very well entrenched in the city.

The Barbarians Within Our Gates – Hisham Melhem – POLITICO Magazine.

Filed under Religion Tagged with ,

Robyn Urback on the HPV vaccine: What’s worse than pre-marital sex? Cancer. That’s what

2014/09/25 Leave a comment

Robyn Urback on HPV vaccination and opposition by Catholic leaders:

Yet according to a letter penned by Church leaders and distributed to parents of children enrolled Calgary’s Catholic school board, the medical efficacy of the HPV vaccine is still up for debate.

“There is no consensus among those involved in public health in Canada that HPV vaccination is the most prudent strategy in terms of allocating health care resources to address the goal of preventing deaths resulting from cervical cancer,” according to the bishops’ mendacious claim. “We encourage parents to learn the medical facts.”

The bulk of the letter is not concerned with medical facts, however, but rather the propensity for such a vaccination to encourage pre-marital sex. “A school-based approach to vaccination sends a message that early sexual intercourse is allowed, as long as one uses ‘protection,’” the bishops write. “We…would prefer to equip [young people] for proper decision-making.

The problem with that line of reasoning is that while the HPV vaccine has proven nearly 100% effective in preventing cervical precancers caused by four strains of HPV, Catholic teaching over the past, oh, 2000 years, has proven considerably less effective in preventing pre-marital sex. Indeed, equipping young people for “proper decision-making,” prevents neither pre-marital sex, nor HPV infection. It simply leaves young people who have the misfortune of dogmatic-minded guardians at particular risk of catching an infection proven to lead to certain types of cancers.

Robyn Urback on the HPV vaccine: What’s worse than pre-marital sex? Cancer. That’s what

Filed under Religion Tagged with , ,

More Americans Favor Mixing Religion And Politics, Survey Says : The Two-Way : NPR

2014/09/25 Leave a comment

Religion has always been an important force in US politics, more so than in Canada (roughly a quarter of Canadians in the 2011 National Household Survey reported as “nones,” 44 percent in British Columbia):

As we [Pew] reported two years ago, the percentage of those “nones” has grown in recent years, especially among younger Americans. In a 2012 Pew survey, 1 in 5 in the U.S. said he was “religiously unaffiliated,” a group that includes those who say they have no particular religion as well as self-described atheists and agnostics. Among those under 30 years of age, fully one-third said that religion played “little or no role” in their lives.

Other findings in the latest poll: a slight drop in support for allowing gays and lesbians to marry, with 49 percent of Americans in favor and 41 percent opposed; a 5-point dip in support from a February Pew Research poll, but about the same level as in 2013, Pew says. However, Pew notes: “It is too early to know if this modest decline is an anomaly or the beginning of a reversal or leveling off in attitudes toward gay marriage after years of steadily increasing public acceptance.”

There has also been a rise in the number who view homosexuality as a sin 50 percent from 45 percent a year ago. While almost half 49 percent of those surveyed say they believe that businesses such as caterers and florists should not be allowed to reject same-sex couples as customers, nearly as many 47 percent said they approved of such a practice.

More Americans Favor Mixing Religion And Politics, Survey Says : The Two-Way : NPR.

Filed under Religion Tagged with ,

Twin visions of Islamic Feminism Split Muslim Community – The Daily Beast

2014/09/23 Leave a comment

A good counter-point to ISIS/ISIL use of social media and how Muslim women activists are using it to press for a greater role and equality:

Fast-forward to present day and the explosive popularity of social media, which has finally given Muslim women, and Muslim feminists in particular, a resounding voice in cyberspace. “Social media has been great for Muslim feminism,” Zobair said. “It provides a space for Muslim women to speak, which is often denied particularly in sacred spheres such as mosques where the boards are all men and women are kept out of the decision-making. Sites like Twitter allow women to speak out.”

And speak out they have. Twitter hashtags such as #EmpoweredMuslimWomen and #ifKhadijacandoit, referring to the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife, a respected businesswoman and trusted advisor to the prophet in Islam’s early days, have gone viral as Muslim women have taken to social media to help shape their own discourse. Tumblr sites, such as Side Entrance, which highlights the inconsistent standards of women’s prayer spaces at mosques around the world and websites, such as Muslimah Montage, which offers a space for Muslim women to share their own personal narratives, have provided a window into how Muslim women truly feel about their place in society.

Call it Islamic feminism 2.0 – a global cyber movement where Muslim women and their male and non-Muslim feminist allies seek to drown out the critical rhetoric of both fundamentalist mouthpieces that seek to silence their Muslim sisters as well as Islamophobes that seek to reduce Muslim women to caricatures of oppression. But Islamic feminism, like its Western counterpart, is not without controversy.

Twin visions of Islamic Feminism Split Muslim Community – The Daily Beast.

Filed under Religion Tagged with , ,

Islam and Catholicism: Beyond reason versus faith | The Economist

2014/09/23 Leave a comment

The Economist’s commentary on faith, reason, Islam and Catholicism:

These are choppy seas for any theologian or historian of religion to navigate.  In every faith that believes in divine revelation—the idea that at certain moments, God discloses essential truths about Himself or the universe—there is bound to be a tension between revelation and reason as methods of understanding the world. Christians and Muslims have found many different answers to that dilemma.  It’s probably true, on balance, that after much internal debate, Islamic thought from the Middle Ages onwards put more emphasis on divine revelation, while Christianity as it emerged in western Europe put more stress on reason. But that did not make the west Europeans behave more peacefully.

Over the centuries, Muslim thinkers have had a lot to say about reason, including the reasonableness of God; and many Christian texts—including the New Testament—stress the fact that God can utterly trump and render meaningless whatever passes for intelligent reason among unaided human minds.

Ironically, this is exactly the sort of thing that Christian and Muslim thinkers could and should talk about in a civilised way. They cant and wont agree on the question of when and to whom God definitively revealed himself—unless one or the other religion ceases to exist. But they do face common intellectual dilemmas, and they can interact constructively as well as destructively. Not all the exchanges between Christianity and Islam in the medieval era were as abrasive as the Byzantine emperors dialogue quoted by Benedict.

His big failure of tact, perhaps, lay in making generalisations about Islam which relied on Christian commentaries, instead of letting Islamic sources speak for themselves. To any Muslim listener, his tone sounded “Orientalist” and condescending. But an indirect result of the furore was the “Common Word” initiative launched in 2007 by 138 Muslim scholars who invited their Christian counterparts to a debate on the subject of “love of neighbour and love of God”—and the resulting debate continues in universities like Yale and Cambridge.

None of that is much help, you might say, to people threatened by the nihilist fury of al-Qaeda or Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria. But ill-judged pronouncements in the world of academia can certainly have a negative effect on the streets. It would be nice to think that the opposite is also the case: that jaw-jaw is not merely better than war-war but at least a partial antidote.

Islam and Catholicism: Beyond reason versus faith | The Economist.

Filed under Religion Tagged with , ,

UK and US Muslim communities key to tackling rise of Islamic extremism?

2014/09/22 Leave a comment

Starting with the UK:

‘As the prime minister said, the root of these actions lies in a poisonous political ideology that a small minority supports. In contrast, Islam is a religion which is observed peacefully and devoutly by more than a billion people.’

But commenting on Mr Brokenshire’s remarks, Nadim Nassar said distancing the extremism from Islam would not help the problem.

‘Mr Brokenshire is right to condemn these horrible acts of terrorism in Iraq and Syria,’ he told Lapido, ‘and to work with the community to get some aid to those areas. I do not agree that the problem is purely political and ideological because the extremists are abusing religion for political ends and they are recruiting religious leaders to help them.‘

It is simplistic to say that this is “nothing to do with Islam or any other faith”. Young people are being recruited not through political speeches; they are being recruited by religious leaders that use the Quran and the Hadith. We have to acknowledge that Islamic extremism is not a true representation of Islam any more than the Crusades are a true representation of Christianity; in both cases, however, they are “to do with” Islam and Christianity.’

Muslim communities key to tackling rise of Islamic extremism? | Lapido Media – Centre for Religious Literacy in World Affairs.

And from the US, a more theological message:

The Prophet Muhammad, who was a head-of-state as well as a prophet, established a society that is the model to all Muslims. That state was declared a sanctuary, protecting and securing all members of his community including non-Muslims. He said that the Jews were a community alongside the Muslims. They had their religion and the right to practice their customs and religious laws. Fourteen hundred years later, the advancement of civilization made by Islam remains idealistic to all Muslims today. At the very least, let these ideals can extinguish the venom from ISIS.

That’s the message that needs to be conveyed to Muslims worldwide in order to isolate ISIS from Islam and provide Islam as the antidote to the ideological distortion of ISIS and its destructive ambitions. That’s the substance in countering the narrative of violent extremism. It needs a vehicle and that’s where media, government and civil society can help.

The Key to Defeating ISIS Is Islam

Filed under Radicalization, Religion Tagged with , , , ,

Unindicted co-conspirator in 1993 World Trade Centre bombing deported to Canada

2014/09/17 Leave a comment

Understand why not welcome in many places:

Mr. Philips did not respond to requests for comment. But in an “official statement” on Facebook, he wrote that, “I have never had any links nor have I ever been accused of having links to any terrorist group.”

He said there was nothing to the U.S. allegations against him. “In normal language, ‘unindicted’ simply means ‘no charges have been filed against me due to lack of evidence,’ and ‘co-conspirator’ means ‘guilty by association,’ that someone who the authorities arrested had my name in their telephone book, or they were seen shaking hands with me, or they prayed next to me in a mosque, etc…”

He vowed to clear his name and return to the Philippines. “In banning and demonizing us, they have created a vacuum of information which continues to be exploited and filled by extremist elements who easily recruit youthful impressionable followers with emotional messages to their savage, violent and merciless unIslamic methodologies and ideologies.”

Unindicted co-conspirator in 1993 World Trade Centre bombing deported to Canada

From the Globe, not a model of integration:

However, Mr. Philips is seen with suspicion by authorities because he advocates a staunchly orthodox, literal form of Islam.

“If Salafi means that you’re a traditionalist that follows the scripture according to the early traditions, then yeah. I’m not a modernist. I’m not a person who makes his own individual interpretations according to the times,” he said.

He has in the past been accused of inciting hatred for saying that, under sharia law, homosexuality is punishable by death. And he believes Muslims owe allegiance to their religion first, before their country. “My message … really is for Muslims to be Muslims first, and then nationalist after, whatever their nationality is. So you’re a Muslim first and you are a Canadian second. You’re a Muslim first and an American second,” he said.

“This is looked at as some kind of fifth-column movement; we’re creating a group of people whose first allegiance is not to their country.”

Controversial imam Bilal Philips says banning him won’t stop his message

Filed under Radicalization, Religion Tagged with ,

Not everyone who went to fight in Syria goes on to live life as a Jihadi: Some return fed up with the experience

2014/09/15 Leave a comment

A caution that some policies meant to reduce radicalization can be counter-productive:

“The whole jihad was turned upside down,” the militant recently told Shiraz Maher, a senior researcher for the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London. “Muslims are fighting Muslims. I didn’t come for that.”

The fighter’s disillusionment, experts say, has become a recurring theme among some of the thousands of young men and women from around the globe who have answered ISIS’s call for holy war but have found the reality is significantly less glorious than what they were promised.

For those trying to stanch the flow of fighters and combat extremism here in Britain, it’s a perspective that could be the perfect antidote to ISIS propaganda. And yet it’s one that is seldom if ever heard here, in part because of government policy that focuses on keeping Brits who have gone to war from returning home — and locking them up if they even try.

“A lot of them feel trapped by [ISIS] not letting them go, and by the British government not letting them back,” said Richard Barrett, a former counterterrorism director with Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6. “But if you want people to understand that it’s bloody terrible out there, you have to hear from these people.”

Not everyone who went to fight in Syria goes on to live life as a Jihadi: Some return fed up with the experience

Filed under Radicalization, Religion Tagged with , ,

Salafist patrol sparks new debate on Islam in Germany

2014/09/13 Leave a comment

German Islamist extremists cross over the line by having a “Salafist patrol” like the Mutaween in Saudi Arabia or the Pasdaran in Iran (less active now):

The “PR gag by a group of young hooligans” has blurred the “clear definition between extremism and religion,” warned Aiman Mazyek, the head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany ZMD. The activists are doing all Muslims in Germany a disservice, he said, adding that many young extremists had long bowed out of Muslim society.

“They say, this is a mollycoddled Islam, we want to go the hard way,” Mazyek said – and suggested fighting Islamism with Islam.

Strengthen the mainstream and support Muslim organizations, he urged. “Unfortunately, the current political climate doesn’t indicate that that has been understood,” the ZMDs Secretary General told DW. “Instead, were being marginalized, which in turn strengthens the radical fringes.”

On September 19, Muslims across Germany have the opportunity to demonstrate for peace and against extremism. Under the motto “Muslims stand up against hatred and injustice”, the four leading German Islam organizations are calling for solemn vigils and peace demonstrations in seven German cities.

Salafist patrol sparks new debate on Islam in Germany | Germany | DW.DE | 10.09.2014.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

Aga Khan Museum will prove to be of historic significance: Siddiqui

2014/09/12 Leave a comment

Look forward to visiting it during one of our visits to Toronto:

The museum was planned for London but ran into bureaucratic hurdles. The Aga, spiritual leader of Shiite Ismaili Muslims, could have located it anywhere — in Europe, which is where he lives and works France and Switzerland or Africa or Asia which is where much of his nearly $1 billion development and cultural work is done or the United States. He chose Canada instead as a tribute to our pluralism and also to make a contribution to it “in the best way possible.”

England’s loss is Canada’s gain.

This is no ordinary museum.

  • It has not cost Canadian taxpayers a penny.
  • It is an architectural jewel, inspired by great Islamic structures and taking its inspiration from the Qur’anic theme of light, “God is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth,” light that basks all humans equally, and that lights up the heart and soul, etc.
  • It uses the familiar geometric patterns of Muslim lands to let in all the light possible. But it has no minarets and no huge domes.

“His Highness did not want this building to use overtly Islamic forms or references,” reveals architect Fumihiko Maki of Japan. “He wanted to have a modern building appropriate to its context.” References to Islam are “sublimated.”

Aga Khan Museum will prove to be of historic significance: Siddiqui | Toronto Star.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →