God or mammon in Iran: Get Religion, April 8, 2013 April 9, 2013Posted by geoconger in Islam, Iran, Get Religion.
Tags: New York Times, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, New York Review of Books, Shiism, Twelfth Imam
The New York Times article “Power Struggle Is Gripping Iran Ahead of June Election” offers a detailed examination of the Iranian political scene as the country prepares to elect a successor to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Well written and intelligently crafted, the article, as the lede notes, discusses the:
power struggle ahead of the June election between Mr. Ahmadinejad’s faction and a coalition of traditionalists, including many Revolutionary Guards commanders and hard-line clerics.
However a religion ghost lurks beneath the surface of this front page story. A knowledgeable reader will be able to discern what lies behind the political dispute from the text of the New York Times story — but though the information is there the article will likely not inform the typical reader as to what is really happening. The article does aptly summarize the recent moves by Pres. Ahmadinejad to undercut the power of his opponents. The Times notes:
At the funeral of Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leader, he was photographed embracing the former president’s mother, a display that was denounced by the clerics, who forbid physical contact between unmarried men and women who are not closely related. But urban Iranians, many of whom have moved far beyond the social restrictions set by the Islamic republic, viewed his action as a simple gesture of friendship.
Despite his early advocacy of Islam’s role in daily affairs, the president is now positioning himself as a champion of citizens’ rights. “He more and more resembles a normal person,” said Hamed, a 28-year-old driver in Tehran who did not want his last name used. “He doesn’t allow them to tell him what to do.”
In speeches, he favors the “nation” and the “people” over the “ummah,” or community of believers, a term preferred by Iran’s clerics, who constantly guard against any revival of pre-Islamic nationalism. He has also said he is ready for talks with the United States, something other Iranian leaders strongly oppose under current circumstances.
Writing at Commentary magazine’s blog Jonathan Tobin argues the article’s liberal/conservative, left/right worldview masks the issues.
The differences between Ahmadinejad and Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are, no doubt, quite real. But they ought not to be interpreted as a sign that the regime is in danger of falling or there is any significant divergence between them and their followers about keeping an Islamist government or maintaining the country’s dangerous nuclear ambitions.
But unfortunately that is probably the conclusion that many of the Times’s liberal readers will jump to after reading the piece since it brands Ahmadinejad and his faction as the “opposition” to the supreme leader. That may be true in the literal sense but, as even the article points out, that is the result of the fact that Ahmadinejad and Khamenei worked together to wipe out any real opposition to Islamist hegemony in 2009 as the United States stood silent.
The religion ghost materialize towards the end of the Times article when it touches upon Pres. Ahmadinejad’s support for Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei as the next president of Iran.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s support of Mr. Mashaei, his spiritual mentor and the father-in-law of his son, is a particular stick in the eye for the conservatives, as well as a subtle appeal to more progressive Iranians. In messages filled with poetic language, Mr. Mashaei repeatedly propagates the importance of the nation of Iran over that of Islam.
Leading ayatollahs and commanders say that Mr. Ahmadinejad has been “bewitched” by the tall, beardless 52-year old, whom they have called a “Freemason,” a “foreign spy” and a “heretic.” They accuse Mr. Mashaei of plotting to oust the generation of clerics who have ruled Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and of promoting direct relations with God, instead of through clerical intermediaries. He and his allies, they say, are part of a “deviant” current.
Buried in the paragraph above is the theological or ideological grounds the dispute between the two factions. In 2011 the New York Review of Books reported that Pres. Ahmadinejad’s clerical opponents “hate” Mr. Mashaei.
The mullahs who make up the country’s conservative establishment hate Mashaei because he is reputed to be in contact with the Twelfth Imam—a messianic figure who, according to the dominant branch of Shiism, has been in a state of “occultation” (in effect, hiding or concealment) since the tenth century.The ramifications of Mashaei’s alleged “gift” of having relations with the Twelfth Imam are enormous. Most Shia Muslims endorse a dynastic line of claimants to the leadership of Islam that began with Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, who was elected caliph in 656 and murdered five years later. There were eleven more of these hereditary imams, or guides, and all but one of them met a violent death at the hands of their enemies—the forebears of today’s Sunni community, who had rejected the dynastic principle and established their own caliphate. According to the Shia tradition, in 941 the Twelfth Imam was occulted, promising to reveal himself at an unspecified moment in the future to end vice and confusion.
The prospect of an infallible imam who might return at any moment (having miraculously retained his youth) holds obvious attractions for an embattled minority religious community, and the history of Shiism is full of controversial figures who have alleged—or let it be alleged on their behalf—that they have met the Twelfth Imam. But these claims are a challenge to Shia clerics, who regard themselves as the rightful intermediaries between God and the community. What if someone from the community claims to be in direct contact with the imam, and can transmit his wishes to society? In that case, the clergy becomes superfluous.
What are the motivations at work among the various actors? The prospect of financial gain or the accumulation political power are certainly present. But it is also important to stress the place of ideology or religion in the affairs of men. While the outward workings of the dispute between Pres. Ahmadinejad’s faction and the clergy are taking place on the material or carnal plain — I would argue the real battle is over revelation. How does God communicate to his creation?
Which leads to the journalistic question. How much context is too much? It is easy to report on power struggles — but hard to report on ideology, on motivation. I would argue that when reporting on a theocracy such as Iran the theological divisions are more important to understanding the story than any other factor. Can a reader understand story unfolding in Iran without an appreciation of the Twelfth Imam? No.
Christians under fire in Zanzibar: The Church of England Newspaper, March 17, 2013, p 6. March 24, 2013Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Tanzania, Church of England Newspaper, Islam, Persecution.
Tags: Bill Atwood, Jakaya Kikwete, Michael Hafidh, Valentino Mokiwa
The Bishop of Dar es Salaam’s home has come under assault, church leaders report.
Bishop Bill Atwood writes: “On 2:45 on Sunday morning, an armed gang attacked Archbishop Valentino [Mokiwa]’s home. Most bishops in that part of the world have watchmen either from the Massai or Hehe tribes who serve as guards. That was the case at Archbishop Valentino’s home as well. His Hehe watchman was captured by armed men who cut through the wire fence. The watchman valiantly fought back crying out. The men with guns cut him severely with machetes (called pandas there), but fled. Archbishop Valentino and his wife and children were inside the house. It is clear that great evil was intended.”
The 10 March 2013 attack follows last month’s murder of Catholic priest Evarist Mushi, who was shot and killed by two gunmen on the steps of his church. A second Catholic priest, Fr. Ambrose Mkenda suffered gunshot wounds in an attempt on his life on Christmas Day while moderate Muslim cleric Sheikh Fadhil Suleiman Soraga was attacked with acid in November. Several churches have been burned over the past few weeks and on the mainland a Pentecostal minister was beheaded by Muslim extremists.
President Jakaya Kikwete’s move to invite foreign investigators to help local police thoroughly investigate the killings has been applauded by Zanzibar’s chief mufti, who has called on the government to actively investigate the targeting of religious leaders in Zanzibar, Tanzania’s Guardian newspaper reported on 4 March. (March 4th).
Sheikh Thabit Noman Jongo said the terror attacks, believed to have been carried out by al Qaeda-linked groups, violate Islamic principles. “According to the Holy Koran, it is not allowed to take life of another person without any reason … experts should dig more to find the source of these acts,” he said.
Tanzania’s Daily News reported that leaflets calling for Christians to fight back were being distributed over the weekend. “We Christians of Zanzibar and people from the mainland living in the islands have decided to organise ourselves to retaliate,” the leaflet said, according to the Daily News. “It is high time we hit back.”
Bishop Michael Hafidh and Catholic Bishop Augustine Shao condemned the leaflets and their content, and urged Christians not to return evil for evil.
Note: This article has been corrected following its first publication to state the attack was on the home of Archbishop Mokiwa, not Bishop Hafidh.
Tags: Huffington Post, Hugo Chavez, Mahdi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Muslim eschatology, Venezuela, Washington Post
A note of condolence written by Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, upon the death of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez has been the occasion of some of some mirth in the press. The Washington Post and the Huffington Post have made arch references to President Ahmadinejad’s statement that Hugo Chavez will be resurrected at the end of time. The Washington Post observed:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad left Tehran today to attend Hugo Chavez’s funeral. But that’s not all — in his condolences for the former Venezuelan president, Ahmadinejad said he has “no doubt Chavez will return to Earth together with Jesus and the perfect” Imam Mahdi, the most revered figure of Shiite Muslims, according to AP. Ahmadinejad also said the three men will together “establish peace, justice and kindness” in the world, and that he is “suspicious” about the cause of Chavez’s cancer.
The Huffington Post began its story by stating:
Hugo Chavez had a friend in Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who apparently held the Venezuelan leader in such high regard that he believes he will “return on resurrection day” with Jesus Christ and will “establish peace, justice, and kindness” on earth. After Chavez’s death on Tuesday afternoon, Ahmadinejad released a statement on Wednesday to announce a day of public mourning, according to Iran’s Raja News, Ahmadinejad’s official news agency. In his message, Ahmadinejad voiced skepticism over Chavez’s “suspicious” illness and proclaimed that the 58-year-old will resurrect with Jesus one day.
The tone of these stories suggests the Iranian president is a loon. Is that fair? I don’t know if President Ahmadinejad is a loon, but the statement on his website cited by these reports is not sufficient cause for making such a claim. Let’s look at the text and see what it actually says. The translation provided by the Mehr news agency states in part:
Chavez is alive, as long as justice, love and freedom are living. He is alive, as long as piety, brightness, and humanity are living. He is alive, as long as nations are alive and struggle for consolidating independence, justice and kindness. I have no doubt that he will come back, and along with Christ the Savior, the heir to all saintly and perfect men, and will bring peace, justice and perfection for all.
The language is flowery but not inconsistent with Muslim teachings on the end of time. Like Christians, Muslims believe that at the end of time Jesus will return, the dead shall be raised and the wicked and the righteous shall be judged, and will merit a place in Heaven or Hell. How this happens and the role played by Jesus are very different in the eschatology of Islam and Christianity — that is to say they are completely incompatible. Nor are Muslims in agreement on all aspects of eschatology, the final things.
Sunnis and Shiites have a different view on the role of the Mahdi, who will arrive before the return of Jesus. The Shiites view this person as someone who will establish order in the world and convert people to Islam before the return of Jesus. The timeline of particular events of the end are not completely spelled out in the Koran. However among the articles of faith in Islam is a belief in the day of judgment, when the dead shall be raised and all will be judged according to their deeds. What President Ahmadinejad said was that he believed Hugo Chavez would be judged as being righteous upon his resurrection. For a Muslim the fact of Chavez’ resurrection — as is mine or yours — is not in doubt.
The Guardian reports that some clerics have taken exception to President Ahmadinejad’s comments but these objections are about the mixing of religion and politics — and his presumption to speak for God. Who is President Ahmadinejad to claim that Chavez will be accounted righteous?
While it is good fun to beat up President Ahmadinejad, a reporter must take care not to look like an idiot or a religious bigot when doing so. In this case both Posts failed to get the story because they don’t get religion. The could have saved themselves great embarrassment by asking an expert.
First printed in GetReligion.
Piling on Pat Robertson: Get Religion, February 13, 2013 February 14, 2013Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Islam, Press criticism.
Tags: Huffington Post, Pat Robertson
Having apparently exhausted discussion of one octogenarian, The Huffington Post appears to have turned its attention to a second aged religious leader this week and published a hit piece on Pat Robertson. “Pat Robertson Claims Islam Is ‘Demonic’ And ‘Not A Religion’ But An Economic System” is a lazy, badly written story. What it reports is not news, and the tone it uses to report this non-news story is unprofessional.
Let me say at the outset that I am not seeking to examine the claims put forward by Pat Robertson in a recent episode of his television show, The 700 Club, rather I am concerned with quality of the reporting in this article. It begins:
Controversial conservative Christian Pat Robertson doubled down Tuesday on claims that Islam is not a religion. According to Right Wing Watch, Robertson, an elder statesman of the evangelical movement, made the inflammatory claim during an episode of his TV program, “The 700 Club.”
I too love alliteration. But this love is not shared by all. The repetition of consonants as an artifice of newspaper writing goes in and out of fashion. While the New York Daily News would have to fold up shop if it could not use alliteration in its headlines, Fowler’s The King’s English discourages it as a “novice’s toy” — yet The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage has no strictures against its use. In modern writing, alliteration is judged on how well it works in setting a mood, tone or in creating resonance or echoes of other works. William Safire’s Political Dictionary cites good, “evil empire,” and bad, “nattering nabobs of negativism”, examples of its usage.
Is a “controversial conservative Christian” who “doubles down” Reaganesque? Or is The Huffington Post channeling Spiro Agnew? While not quite in the same circle of writer’s hell as “vicars of vacillation” or “pusillanimous pussyfooters”, the tone it creates is a bit too much. Rather than having fun with language the author is giving voice to her contempt for the subject of the article. An editor also should have stricken out “controversial”. Where his word’s controversial or is he controversial? Also this silly syntactical start sadly slips in substantiating its statements of fact.
What Pat Robertson said is not new. According to the article, he stated:
“Every time you look up — these are angry people, it’s almost like it’s demonic that is driving them to kill and to maim and to destroy and to blow themselves up,” Robertson said of Islam. “It’s a religion of chaos.” He went on to say, “I hardly think to call it a religion, it’s more of — well, it’s an economic and political system with a religious veneer.”
The story notes Mr. Robertson shared his opinion that Islam was not a religion in a 2009 comment in a discussion of the Fort Hood shooting. A Google search reveals the most recent comments to be in line with what he has been saying for a number of years. Media Matters reported him having said in 2007.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have to recognize that Islam is not a religion. It is a worldwide political movement meant on domination of the world. And it is meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law. In the Quran, it says it very clearly. There are two spheres. One is the Dar al-Harb, which is the realm of war. The other is Dar al-Islam, which is that part that’s under submission to Islam. There is no middle ground. You’re either at war or you’re under submission. Now, that’s the way they think.
Why then are the comments made this week newsworthy? His words in 2007 were even stronger yet no conflagration ensued. How many times can you make “inflammatory” comments before they no longer become “inflammatory” — do they become combustible, explosive, or after the passage of time — and when no fire ensues — do they simply become rude?
The tone of offended outrage adopted by the article, that Pat Robertson has said a terrible thing, is not explored. The Huffington Post believes these sentiments are outrageous, but it does not say why. A long time ago I studied Arabic and Farsi as an undergraduate and took a number of courses in Islam. I have not kept up my studies and have lost my facilities in these languages, but I do recall the academic debates over Islam — whether it was a religion in the sense that Christianity or Judaism understood itself to be a religion, or whether it was a religio-political movement that did not bear a one to one comparison with the other Abrahamic faiths. I offer no answer to these questions. But given the unlimited space available to a Huffington Post author for an article, to denounce him without substantiation is sloppy reporting.
And please note, Pat Robertson is not an “elder statesman of the evangelical movement. ” He is a Pentecostal Christian. There is a difference. TMatt has discussed this point at GetReligion before. In a story about voodoo that included a reference to Pat Robertson, he wrote:
Also, Pat Robertson — last time I checked — was a Pentecostal leader, not an evangelical, which is important distinction to make when one is dealing with Haiti and its growing Protestant churches.
Also, out of all of the critics of voodoo in the Christian world, how does Robertson rise, once again, to the top of the list? Why is an American from TV land the authority on this complex and emotional subject, as opposed to Haitian Pentecostals or Catholics who are actually involved in these debates in Haiti and in Haitian communities in North America?
Cynics will say that the answer is simply: Robertson is a straw man, beloved by lazy journalists.
This is another lazy Pat Robertson story that is not worthy of the name news.
First published in GetReligion.
Is Christian Zionism off the radar for the NY Times?: Get Religion, January 24, 2013 January 25, 2013Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Islam, Israel, Judaism.
Tags: Christian Zionism, Dome of the Rock, Haaretz, Jeremy Gimpel, New York Times, Temple Mount, Times of Israel
Comments given to an American church audience in 2011 by an Israeli rabbi, who stood for election this week to the Knesset on the Habayit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) ticket were a one-day wonder over the weekend in the Israeli press. Atlanta-native Jeremy Gimpel was lambasted by the liberal press in Israel for allegedly calling for the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim mosque built atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, to be destroyed and replaced with a new Temple.
The controversy was also an example of the importance of fleshing out religious ghosts in a story. The American and Israeli press that picked up this issue focused on the political angle. If they had developed the religious elements of the story they would have turned a campaign “gotcha” story about one politician into a better story about the links between Christian Zionists in the U.S. and conservative religious political parties in Israel. Looking into the faith element would have made this a better political story.
Let’s run through the coverage first then ask the faith questions that were left unasked.
On Saturday Ha’aretz’s English language website ran a profile of Gimpel following a broadcast the previous day on Channel 2 of comments made by the rabbi in 2011 to a church in Florida.
The Times of Israel summarized the controversy this way:
Fending off a frenzy of political criticism over a 2011 speech in which he appeared to speak with relish of the theoretical prospect of the Dome of Rock being “blown up” and a new Jewish Temple being built in its stead, prospective MK Jeremy Gimpel claimed in a TV interview on Sunday that he had actually been telling a joke meant to “parody” the extremists who want to destroy the 1,300-year-old Muslim shrine.
Statements Gimpel has made in the past, examined by The Times of Israel, indeed show no record of him explicitly calling for the destruction of the Dome of the Rock. They do indicate that he considers the golden dome atop the Temple Mount an alien element which he wishes would be replaced by the third Jewish temple.
A candidate for the Orthodox, right-wing Jewish Home party, Gimpel also sports a long history of hard-line statements that would raise eyebrows in many circles in Israel and large parts of the Jewish world, including calling the Jewish outlook of non-Orthodox Jewish movements “nonsense” and questioning whether Israel is truly a democracy because it forbids freedom of Jewish worship on the Temple Mount.
The Israeli political left jumped on Gimpel, with former foreign minister Tzipi Livni’s liberal Hatnua party calling for his disqualification from the election for allegedly having uttered hate speech. The Anti-Defamation League’s Israel office weighed in also, saying they were appalled a rabbi would condone terrorism, Forward reported.
The New York Times‘ Israel correspondent picked up the story and it appeared in Monday’s edition on page A9 under the headline: “Rightist Israeli Candidate’s Remarks Cause Stir”. I imagine the American angle — Gimpel is a dual Israeli-American citizen and the Florida setting of the speech — prompted the editors to give the story space. The Times‘ article repeated the basic facts of the story of the speech and fleshed out the Israeli political context. It also carried the incendiary quotes that raised the ire of the left.
During a November 2011 lecture about biblical prophecies at the Fellowship Church in Winter Springs, Fla., Jeremy Gimpel, who is now a Jewish Home candidate, told the audience: “Imagine today if the dome, the Golden Dome — I’m being recorded so I can’t say blown up — but let’s say the dome was blown up, right, and we laid the cornerstone of the temple in Jerusalem. Can you imagine? I mean, none of you would be here, you’d all be like, I’m going to Israel, right? No one would be here. It would be incredible!”
After this mention of religion, the Times moves back into politics. This was unfortunate for if they had done some simple internet searching they would have learned some interesting things about the Florida church that calls into question Gimpel’s explanation.
A look through the website of the Fellowship Church in Winter Springs shows it to be a non-denominational Protestant Church that identifies itself as being part of the Christian Zionist movement. Among its outreach projects are the Temple Mount Faithful, whose mission according to its website is:
The goal of the Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful Movement is the building of the Third Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in our lifetime in accordance with the Word of G-d and all the Hebrew prophets and the liberation of the Temple Mount from Arab (Islamic) occupation so that it may be consecrated to the Name of G-d.
How credible is Gimpel’s explanation that he was making a joke that satirizes the views of those who want to destroy the Dome of the Rock and replace it with the Third Temple?
There are also questions that were left unasked as to what Gimpel meant when he told the Christian audience that if the Third Temple were rebuilt they would all “going to Israel.”
The question “why” a group of Central Florida Christians would go to Israel is not examined. Perhaps this statement from the Temple Mount Faithful website provides context for Gimpel’s words.
It is the view of the Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful that the redemption will proceed in an orderly fashion according to G-d’s plan.
- First is the foundation of the modern state of Israel and the miraculous victories that G-d gave the people of Israel in the wars against 22 Arab enemy states.
- Second is the regathering of the people of Israel from all over the world to the Promised Land.
- Third is the liberation and consecration of the Temple Mount and fourth is the building of the Third Temple.
- The final step is the coming of the King of Israel, Messiah Ben David.
The existence of the state of Israel and the return of the people of G-d to the Promised Land is the biggest G-dly event and miracle in the history of mankind – ever. This was predicted by the prophets of Israel. We are calling all the nations to link arms in support of this people and the State of Israel to help her complete this process of redemption. We are not allowed to forget that the redemption of the people of Israel is a condition for the redemption of the earth. Also, we remember what G-d said over 4,000 years ago to Abraham, the father of the Israelites: “I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you”.
The articles note that Gimpel states he was conducting a Bible study on prophecy — but again does not ask what prophecies and why they would be of interest to a non-Jewish audience? By not exploring the religious angle the Times is missing the story. Politicians say dumb things all the time. Leaving the story on that plane makes it old news the moment the it is printed. Exploring the faith angle opens up far more interesting and important questions.
Did the Times simply play follow my lead and not bother with the religion angle? Did they choose not to follow it, or just did not see it? And does the reason for the omission matter? Did ignoring the faith element in this political story leave this incomplete? What say you GetReligion readers?
First printed in GetReligion.
Bishop warns of civil war as Egypt heads to the polls: Anglican Ink, December 14, 2012. December 15, 2012Posted by geoconger in Anglican Ink, Episcopal Church in Jerusalem & the Middle East, Islam, Politics.
Tags: Egypt, Egyptian constitution, Mouneer Anis
The political battle between Islamists and moderates may push Egypt into civil war, the Bishop of Egypt, Dr. Mouneer Anis has warned.
In a pastoral letter released the day before first vote on a national referendum to ratify a constitution drawn up by the Islamist-dominated parliament, Dr. Anis writes the democratic hopes that lay behind the “Arab Spring”, the 2011 revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak, have faded away.
“I cannot tell you how much I am heavy-hearted because of what is going on in my beloved country Egypt. Many Egyptians were expecting that after the 25 January Revolution in 2011 there would be no exclusion for any citizen or groups because of their political or religious stance. Sadly, we are still groaning for this equality,” the bishop wrote on 14 Dec 2012.
In his letter, Dr. Anis described the background to the new constitution, noting it had been crafted by Islamists with little meaningful input from Christians, moderate Muslims or secularists. The lack of consultation spelled troubled, he warned.
Read it all in Anglican Ink.
Terror attack at base chapel in Nigeria: The Church of England Newspaper, November 29, 2012 December 5, 2012Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of Nigeria, Islam, Terrorism.
Tags: Boko Haram
Terrorists have attacked the base chapel at the Nigerian Armed Forces Command and Staff College (AFCSC) in Jaji in Kaduna State, killing an undisclosed number of people. While no group so far has claimed responsibility, the twin suicide attacks follows a campaign of bombings and shootings mounted by the Islamist Boko Haram terror group, which has demanded Christians convert to Islam or leave Northern Nigeria.
Government reports state that on 25 Nov 2012 at approximately 1:00 pm a terrorist driving a bus packed with explosives detonated his vehicle outside the Protestant Chapel at the Nigerian Army’s staff college. Services had concluded for the morning and only the parish council remained in the building. Aside from the bomber, no deaths occurred in the attack, though the exterior of the building was damaged.
However, as a crowd gathered to inspect the damage and help the wounded a second bomb exploded. Reuters reported that at least five people were killed while the Vanguard newspaper reported 11 deaths. The Kaduna state police command declined to comment on the incident telling This Day newspaper that as the attack took place at an army compound, only the army could discuss the incident. A military spokesman in Kaduna, told AFP that two bombs have exploded at the AFCSC, but he declined to offer further
Last month, at least 10 people were killed and 145 wounded in the bombing of a Catholic Church in Kaduna, and an estimated 3000 people have died in terror attacks since Boko Haram began its jihad in 2009.
Last week, the Nigerian Armed Forces offered a reward of 50m Naira (£198,000) for information leading to the capture of Abu Bakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Justin Welby joins Tony Blair in Nigerian launch of inter-faith youth dialogue: The Church of England Newspaper, November 29, 2012 December 5, 2012Posted by geoconger in Church of England, Church of England Newspaper, Church of Nigeria, Interfaith, Islam.
Tags: Justin Welby, Tony Blair, Tony Blair Faith Foundation
The Archbishop of Canterbury-designate has joined Tony Blair and Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad of Jordan in launching an inter-faith initiative in Nigeria to promote reconciliation between Christians and Muslims.
On 22 Nov 2012, Bishop Justin Welby took part in the conference in Abuja organized by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation that brought Christian and Muslim students together. “By talking directly to one another, the aim is to break down barriers, and give the students the knowledge to resist extremist voices and ideology by working together to achieve long term peace for the next generation in Nigeria,” conference organizers said.
“Thirty four years after first coming to Nigeria, and with more than seventy visits since in all parts of this vibrant, passionate, talented and promising country, I am both challenged and profoundly excited by this initiative,” Bishop Welby said.
“It is a service, there is no question of bringing some external solutions, and peace and development in this country are always made possible only by Nigerians. Thank you for allowing me to contribute to the future of a country I admire and love,” he told the young people participating in the gathering.
Christian and Muslim leaders welcomed the dialogue between young people, while Mr. Blair said personally “deeply committed to addressing the challenges of religious reconciliation in Nigeria. Understanding and respecting different faiths is central to securing sustainable peace, particularly where those who seek to misuse religion for violent ends aim to destroy it.”
He lauded the work of Bishop Welby also, saying he hoped “that over the coming months, the work he and my Foundation do will go towards healing the rifts and divisions amongst faiths in the country, bringing unity and peaceful co-existence”.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Tags: BBC, Mark Thompson, media bias, New York Times, Pakistan
An International Herald Tribune report about Pakistan seems a bit confused as to what constitutes sectarian violence. Written under the title “Christian Aid Worker Is Shot in Pakistan” the article from the New York Times’ international edition ties together three different stories in one article. But it does not want to say why.
This story with a dateline of Hong Kong is a compilation of Pakistani press reports and wire service bulletins. As per its ethical reporting standards, the Times‘ man acknowledges his debt to these sources, though he did make a few phone calls to provide some original material to the stories. As this is a first report on the incidents I am not that concerned with how complete it is or if all the facts are properly nailed down. My interest in in how the reporter laid out his story given what he had in hand.
And it is the construction of the article and the unwillingness to state the obvious that leads me to say the Times has lost the plot.
The shooting of Swedish missionary, an attack on a Ahmadiya graveyard, and the kidnapping of a Jewish-American aid worker all have something in common (it is called militant Islam) but the Times’ reporter appears at a loss as to how to put the pieces together. Last month the New York Times brought on board as its CEO Mark Thompson, the former Director General of the BBC. It also appears to have taken on board Thompson’s policy of treating Islam with kid gloves.
Here is the lede:
HONG KONG — A Swedish woman doing charity work through her evangelical church was shot outside her home in Lahore on Monday, according to news reports from Pakistan. A gunman riding a motorcycle fired at the 72-year-old woman as she got out of her car in the upscale Model Town neighborhood.
It was not immediately clear whether the attack was sectarian in nature or was perhaps linked to another event Monday in Model Town in which masked gunmen vandalized a cemetery.
The article then goes into the details as they were known of the attack and then links to the second subject with this transitional sentence:
But early Monday morning in Model Town, gunmen tied up the caretakers of an Ahmadi cemetery and desecrated more than a hundred grave markers, the Express Tribune newspaper reported.
The Times gives details of the attack on the graveyard, notes that Ahmadiya Muslims are “considered heretical by mainstream Muslims”, and recounts past terror attacks and government fostered discrimination against the Ahmadiyas.
The story closes with the tale of a kidnapped American aid worker Warren Weinstein seized by al Qaeda last year. Details of Mr. Weinstein’s plight are offered and a quote from an earlier Times story is offered.
Mr. Weinstein, now 71, also appeared in a video in September, embedded below, in which he appeals for U.S. acceptance of the Qaeda demands. At one point he addresses Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, saying:
Therefore, as a Jew, I’m appealing to you, Prime Minister Netanyahu, the head of the Jewish state of Israel, one Jew to another, to please intervene on my behalf. To work with the mujahideen and to accept their demands so that I can be released and returned to my family.
These three stories share the common theme of extremist Muslim violence against religious minorities in Lahore: Christians, Ahmadiyas and Jews. What then is the problem I have with this article, you might ask?
Look at the second sentence of the story.
It was not immediately clear whether the attack was sectarian in nature or was perhaps linked to another event Monday in Model Town in which masked gunmen vandalized a cemetery.
The choices the Times is offering the reader are: a) the shooting of the Christian missionary was a sectarian act; or b) it was not a sectarian act but somehow linked to the attack by Salafist Muslims against an Ahmadiya graveyard. Perhaps I am thick but I do not see the distinction between a and b. Are they not both sectarian attacks?
And by adding in Mr. Weinstein’s case, which also took place in Lahore and also has a religious element — an American Jew being held captive by Muslim extremists who is forced to make a plea to the Israeli prime minister for his life — the militant Islam links are all there. But the Times does not want to connect the dots.
Why? Maybe the author was in a rush to get something into print quickly and mangled his syntax. Or is this an example of the Times‘ stifling political correctness? Is the Times heading the way of the BBC and self-censoring its stories?
In March 2012 the Daily Telegraph carried a short item reporting on Mark Thompson’s decision not to broadcast a show that might be offensive to Muslims.
Although the BBC was willing to disregard protests from Christians who considered its decision to broadcast Jerry Springer: The Opera as an affront, Mark Thompson, its outgoing director-general, is more wary of giving airtime to Can We Talk About This?, the National Theatre’s examination of how Islam is curtailing freedom of speech.
Lloyd Newson, the director of the DV8 physical theatre company which staged the new work, challenged Thompson to screen his production during a platform discussion at the theatre.
He pointed out that Jerry Springer: The Opera was a lot more controversial because it was a “satire”, whereas his work, consisting of a series of comments and factual statements set to dance, is “a factual piece”.
Thompson’s spokesman tells me: “We are currently working with the National on various ideas. There are currently no plans to broadcast Can We Talk About This?, but this is not due to the play’s content or themes.”
In the past, Thompson has conceded that there is “a growing nervousness about discussion about Islam”. He claimed that because Muslims were a religious minority in Britain, and also often from ethnic minorities, their faith should be given different coverage to that of more established groups.
Has more than Mark Thompson crossed the Atlantic from London? While the Times has long been a bastion of PC reporting, its aping of the BBC’s supine stance on Islam is disappointing. The hiring of Mark Thompson did not cause the New York Times to engage in self-censorship on Islam — but I suspect courage will not be one of the strengths he will bring to his new post.
First posted in GetReligion.
Tags: Asia Times, France, gay Muslims, latent-Episcopalian syndrome, Le Monde, Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, reformation of Islam, Spengler
Has anyone seen a story in the U.S. press about the opening of France’s first gay-friendly mosque? I’ve not come across anything in the U.S. mainstream media so far, but the story has received a great deal of play from the European press.
Now the cynic in me would want to feign shock at the New York Times not having picked up this story as it deals with an issue dear to its heart. However, it is the foreign policy ramifications of this story that I thought would attract the attention of the U.S. media elite — for the underlying theme of this story has been the philosophical principle behind U.S. Middle East policy. All right-thinking people — government leaders, columnists, the professoriate — believe Islam can be reformed and its tenets brought in line with the Western liberal mind. I am surprised not to have seen America’s public intellectuals jump all over this story.
On Friday Le Monde published a tight, nicely written story entitled « Une “mosquée” ouverte aux homosexuels près de Paris ». Drawing from a Reuters wire service story and its own reporting, Le Monde reported that a gay French Muslim had opened a mosque in a borrowed room on the grounds of a Buddhist dojo outside Paris.
Europe’s first gay and lesbian-friendly mosque opens on Friday in an eastern Paris suburb, in a challenge to mainstream Islam’s long tradition of condemning same-sex relationships. The mosque, set up in a small room inside the house of a Buddhist monk, will welcome transgender and transsexual Muslims and seat men and women together, breaking with another custom where the sexes are normally segregated during prayer. Its founder, French-Algerian gay activist and practicing Muslim Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, will also encourage women to lead Friday prayers, smashing yet another taboo.
“It’s a radically inclusive mosque. A mosque where people can come as they are,” said Zahed, 35, whose prayer space will be the first in Europe to formally brand itself as a gay-friendly mosque, according to Muslim experts.
M. Zahed sounds like he has latent Episcopalian-syndrome and uses all the right sort of Christian left buzz words. The story offers a few more words of explanation from M. Zahed, negative reactions from French Muslim leaders and closes with comments from a French academic.
“The goal of these Muslims is to promote a form of Islam that is inclusive of progressive values,” said Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, an associate researcher at France’s Research and Studies Institute on the Arab and Muslim World. The push by gay Muslims for acceptance comes as a younger generation of Muslims is questioning some of the existing interpretations of the Koran as over-conservative. “Even though they are still a extreme minority, their views have a solid theological basis. So their message is not having an insignificant impact,” Bergeaud-Blackler said.
The Le Monde story goes a bit deeper. The comments from French Muslim leaders are much harsher than those reported by Reuters.
« Il y a des musulmans homosexuels, ça existe, mais ouvrir une mosquée, c’est une aberration, parce que la religion, c’est pas ça », estime Abdallah Zekri, président de l’Observatoire des actes islamophobes, sous l’autorité du Conseil français du culte musulman (CFCM).
Which I roughly translate as:
“There are Muslim homosexuals. They exist. But to open a mosque, that is an aberration because homosexuality is contrary to our religion,” said Abdallah Zekri, president of the Islamophobia (sorry AP but that’s what Le Monde calls it) Observer for the CFCM.
Le Monde also has some choice quotes from M. Zahed as well.
« Les musulmans ne doivent pas se sentir honteux. L’homosexualité n’est condamnée nulle part, ni dans le Coran ni dans la sunna. Si le prophète Mahomet était vivant, il marierait des couples d’homosexuels. » Il rêve d’un islam « apaisé, réformé, inclusif », qui accepterait le blasphème car « la pensée critique est essentielle pour le développement spirituel ».
Which I understand to mean:
“Muslims should not feel ashamed. Homosexuality is not condemned either in the Koran or in the Sunna. If the Prophet Muhammad were alive, he would marry of homosexual couples.” [Zahed] dreams of “peaceful, reformed, inclusive” Islam which which accepts blasphemy as “critical thinking essential to its spiritual development.”
Le Monde frames the story in a sympathetic light to M. Zahed. He is the underdog seeking to reform an ossified, dyed in the wool religious establishment. The article offers both sides of the debate — M. Zahed’s beliefs and the institutional response. However, I am surprised this item has not received the New Yorker 10,000 word treatment. A Muslim who speaks like an Episcopalian I imagine would be catnip to the mainstream American media.
The Islam of M. Zahed is that of Presidents Bush and Obama. Government policy since 9/11 has been predicated on the belief that Islam is like Christianity or Judaism. Given enough time, money and jawboning, Islam can reform and accommodate itself within a secularist pluralist society.
Le Monde‘s article about M. Zahed and Islam is written from a Westernized Christian worldview. Change the location to Texas and Islam for Southern Baptists and you would have the exact same story — even down to the buzz words and phrases proffered by M. Zahed. How often is it repeated that Jesus never said anything about homosexuality?
However, Islam is fundamentally different from Judaism and Christianity and this difference is what makes it nearly impossible for Islam to reform. And, it is the consensus of Islamic scholars that Islam is in no need of reform. Writing in the Asia Times under the pen name Spengler, David P. Goldman’, stated:
Hebrew and Christian scripture claim to be the report of human encounters with God. After the Torah is read each Saturday in synagogues, the congregation intones that the text stems from “the mouth of God by the hand of Moses”, a leader whose flaws kept him from entering the Promised Land. The Jewish rabbis, moreover, postulated the existence of an unwritten Revelation whose interpretation permits considerable flexibility with the text. Christianity’s Gospels, by the same token, are the reports of human evangelists.
The Archangel Gabriel, by contrast, dictated the Koran to Mohammed, according to Islamic doctrine. That sets a dauntingly high threshold for textual critics. How does one criticize the word of God without rejecting its divine character? In that respect the Koran resembles the “Golden Tablets” of the Angel Moroni purported found by the Mormon leader Joseph Smith more than it does the Jewish or Christian bibles.
Now almost 10 years old, Spengler’s “You say you want a reformation?” remains fresh and his observations stand as a challenge to U.S. government policies that believe Islam can be transformed into another variety of American Protestantism.
Speaking at the U.N. in September, President Obama said of the Arab Spring:
“True democracy—real freedom—is hard work,” Mr. Obama said. “Those in power have to resist the temptation to crack down on dissidents. In hard economic times, countries must be tempted— may be tempted—to rally the people around perceived enemies, at home and abroad, rather than focusing on the painstaking work of reform.”
Can Islam, which allows for no distinction between church and state, reform? The academic cited in the Le Monde piece believes it can. France’s first gay mosque will be a symbol of the younger generation’s desire for an “Islam that is inclusive of progressive values,” she stated. A contrary voice speaking to Islam’s response to minority voices (past and present) would have been a welcome counterweight. And give pause to those expecting peace to break out all over the Muslim world.
First printed in Get Religion.
Muslim extremists attack Zanzibar’s Anglican Cathedral: The Church of England Newspaper, October 28, 2012 p 6. October 30, 2012Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of Tanzania, Church of England Newspaper, Islam, Persecution, Terrorism.
Tags: Christ Church Cathedral Stone Town, Farid Hadi Ahmed, Ponda Issa Ponda, Uamsho, Zanzibar
Christ Church Cathedral in Stone Town on the island of Zanzibar came under assault last week after militant Islamists rioted in the wake of the disappearance of a leading Muslim cleric, Sheikh Farid Hadi Ahmed.
The Muslim Mobilization and Propagation Group (UAMSHO) has been calling for the dissolution of the United Republic of Tanzania and the creation of an Islamist state for the island of Zanzibar. UAMSHO cadres have also demanded the expulsion of Zanzibar’s Christians, saying they have no place on the island. In July two rural Pentecostal churches were attacked by Islamist extremists and attacks on Christians have been reported across the island.
On the morning of 16 October 2012 Sheikh Ahmed was seen getting into a car driven by an unidentified man. UAMSHO reported his disappearance to the police soon after.
Police Commander Said Juma told the Dar es Salaam Daily News the police had not arrested Sheikh Ahmed and “immediately we started to investigate.”
“Unfortunately as the investigation continues, youths started demonstrating by blocking streets with stones, garbage and burning tyres.” He reported a leisure centre was destroyed by fire and riot police deployed to the old city area of Stone Town.
Anglican leaders were warned to evacuate as Islamist militants had issued death threats against Bishop Michael Hafidh and foreign clergy serving on the island. Unconfirmed reports from Stone Town sent to Dar es Salaam report militants had attacked the cathedral after the bishop was evacuated and attempted to burn the coral stone building. Built on the sight of the former slave market of Zanzibar, the Nineteenth century cathedral is one of the island’s leading tourist attractions. It also hosted Dr. Rowan Williams and the primates of the Anglican Communion in 2007.
Four days after leaving the island, the bishop and the evacuated clergy were able to return to their homes. One priest told the Church of England Newspaper that although his car had been vandalized his home appeared untouched, as the army was patrolling the streets and had restored order. As of our going to press, no reports have been released on the condition of the cathedral.
Riot police were also deployed in the Central Business District of the capital Dar es Salaam last week after militants marched on the Central Police Station demanding the release of Mr. Ponda Issa Ponda, the Secretary of the Council of Muslims’ Organizations.
Mr. Ponda had been arrested on 16 Oct after threatening President Jakaya Kikwete. The Muslim leader had issued an ultimatum to the government calling upon it to release members of his organization arrested last week for their involvement in a sectarian riot sparked by claims a 14-year old Christian boy had urinated on a Koran.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Crazy Charlie: His cartoons are insane: Get Religion, September 29, 2012 September 29, 2012Posted by geoconger in Free Speech, Get Religion, Islam.
Tags: blasphemy, Charlie Hebdo, Crazy Eddie, El Jueves, Muhammad cartoons, Titanic
In this week’s podcast Issues Etc. host Todd Wilkin and I discussed two of my recent GetReligion stories: “Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad Cartoon Crassness” and “Foggy Bottom’s ‘pantywaist protocol pussy-footers’.” Starting with the press coverage on the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Cairo and consulate in Benghazi, the articles (and our discussion) moved on to the vexed question of how the Western media reports on blasphemy in an Islamic context.
I argued the early coverage on the Middle East stories was uneven. There were some great stories from the Washington Post, New York Times and other outlets from their reporters on the streets of Cairo. I also singled out for praise a CNN story that put the issue of blasphemy in context for an American audience — answering the question why the “Innocence of Muslims” movie would be so offensive.
The domestic reporting on the embassy attacks was not as strong. In my opinion, stateside reporters seemed to view this incident through the lens of the Presidential election campaign. They parroted the State Department’s claims the riots were spontaneous reactions to to the YouTube video — even though the same papers’ overseas reporters were writing there was evidence the riots were scripted and pre-planned, awaiting a suitable provocation.
The second story about the cartoons satirizing Muhammad as a gay porn star in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo reinforces the disconnect between the domestic and overseas reporting. The assertion that this was spontaneous, or some sort of religious flash mob, has not been borne out by the responses to the French cartons. The Charlie Hebdo cartoons are obscene, while the “Innocence of Muslims” video is dumb. The French government closed 20 embassies in the Muslim world in fear of attacks, yet nothing so far has happened (either in Metropolitan France or abroad).
Other European magazines have joined Charlie Hebdo in printing Muhammad cartoons. The German magazine Titanic pictured depicts Germany’s former “First Lady” Bettina Wulff, being threatened (or defended) by an armed Muslim. Is it Muhammad?
The Spanish magazine El Jueves last week published its Muhammad cover showing a line up of men in Islamic outfits. The cover says: “But how do they know which one is Muhammad?”
Writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Hilmar Klute argued the Muhammad cartoons and videos — and the responses they have generated have become rather tiresome.
Seldom has satire been so much in the public spotlight as it has these days. Seldom have satirical drawings and cover pages in Germany and especially in France caused such a great stir. And rarely have so many supporters and opponents of satire popped up with a number of somewhat outrageous claims and warnings. Günter Wallraff wants to flood the European media with anti-Islamic cartoons to ensure that the “demonstration of liberty” – and he really means it – is not just the concern of a few friends of freedom.
This vibrant audacity is, in truth, the quivering anger of an over-excited neo-bourgeoisie that believes that the liberal order can be toppled by crazed Islamists and that we can also defend our open society with art. Sharpened quills versus the scimitar.
This is a pity because satire, precisely at a time when there’s so much material, has seldom been as mediocre as it is today. The mediocre craftsmanship of Charlie Hebdo cartoonist, Charb, is not the problem here. What’s sad is the intellectual laziness behind all these sensationalist pictures, photo-montages and jokes.
My sympathies lie with Mr. Klute. There is an air of unreality and lack of intellectual and moral seriousness about this controversy. Those who lived in the New York area in the 1980s will certainly remember “Crazy Eddie”. The discount electronics chain ended each of its high power, high volume advertisements with the tag line: “His prices are insane!”.
At times I feel Crazy Eddie has returned, but this time round he is peddling politics.
First published in GetReligion.
Egyptian bishop backs blasphemy ban: The Church of England Newspaper, September 23, 2012 p 5. September 24, 2012Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Episcopal Church in Jerusalem & the Middle East, Islam.
Tags: Ban K-moon, blasphemy, Diocese of Egypt, Mouneer Anis, United Nations
The Government of Egypt reports the Anglican Bishop of Egypt, Dr. Mouneer Anis, has written to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon endorsing the call made by Islamic member states to ban blasphemy. The government statement comes as part of the Muslim Brotherhood government’s media response to the attack on the U.S. embassy in Cairo by Muslim militants last week ostensibly in response to a YouTube video that defamed Mohammad.
In a statement released on 16 Sept 2012, the Egyptian State Information Service said Dr. Anis had written to the U.N. chief the previous day urging him to “issue a declaration that prohibits blasphemy.”
The Egyptian government said that in his letter, Dr. Anis said a ban on blasphemy would “not run counter to freedom of speech, but it prevents using this right to insult religious sanctities. ‘We believe that mutual respect is the only way for peaceful coexistence’.”
The Church of England Newspaper has not been able to confirm with Dr. Anis or the Diocese of Egypt the veracity of the state information service’s claim, or whether Dr. Anis’ letter was an endorsement of the resolution adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on 19 Dec 2011 condemning the stereotyping, negative profiling and stigmatization of people based on their religion, and urging countries to take effective steps “to address and combat such incidents.”
Similar resolutions had been brought to the U.N. each year since 1999 by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – a 56 member block of Muslim nation-states, but had been opposed by Western states.
However, in 2011 the language of the resolution was changed with language condemning the “defamation” of religion dropped and a clause inserted that reaffirmed “the positive role that the exercise of the right to freedom of opinion and expression and the full respect for the freedom to seek, receive and impart information can play in strengthening democracy and combating religious intolerance.”
The amended resolution received the backing of the U.S. and U.K. and the E.U., though Poland’s ambassador questioned whether this resolution favored one religion over others. After the vote, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said “the best way to treat offensive speech is by people either ignoring it or combating it with good arguments and good speech that overwhelms it.”
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Pakistan church torched by Muslim mob: Anglican Ink, September 21, 2012 September 22, 2012Posted by geoconger in Anglican Ink, Church of Pakistan, Islam, Persecution.
Tags: Diocese of Peshawar, Humphrey Peters, Innocence of Muslims, Mardan, Samuel Azariah
A Muslim mob has set fire to a church and looted its school in response to Western acts of “blasphemy” against Muhammad. Reports from Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province near the border with Afghanistan remain unclear on the size and motivation of the mob, however, the Church of Pakistan and the security services police have confirmed the assault and looting of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and St Paul’s High School in Mardan.
On 21 Sept 2012 the mob, a several thousand strong mob stormed the compound after Friday prayers. The Diocese of Peshawar reports the church was set alight and the homes of its two priests and the school’s headmaster were destroyed. The school, which serves the Christian and Muslim community, was ransacked and newly installed computers taken away by the mob.
“The damage has been very severe, and we will need to rebuild. We are asking for people around the world to keep us in your prayers,” said Bishop Humphrey Peters of Peshawar.
Read it all in Anglican Ink.
Charlie Hebdo cartoons 18 Sept 2012 September 19, 2012Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Islam, Press criticism.
Tags: Charlie Hebdo
Foggy Bottom’s ‘pantywaist protocol pussy-footers’: Get Religion, September 13, 2012 September 14, 2012Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Islam, Press criticism.
Tags: Benghazi, Cairo, CNN, MEMRI
Wanted to thank me brokenly, I suppose, for so courteously allowing her favorite brother a place to have his game legs in, Eh? [said Bertie Wooster]
Possibly sir. On the other hand she alluded to you in terms suggestive of disapprobation. [said Jeeves]
She — what?
“Feckless idiot” was one of the expressions she employed, sir.
I couldn’t make it out. I couldn’t see what the woman had based her judgement on. My Aunt Agatha has frequently said that sort of thing about me, but then she has known me from a boy.
P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves! (1930) p 124.
The 9/11 assaults on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and embassy in Cairo have jumped to center stage since the first reports came out on Tuesday. The press has continued to do a fine job of highlighting the religious and political issues behind the protests — this report from the AP on the Benghazi attack is quite good. The latest round of stories also addresses the question whether the assaults were spontaneous acts of religious outrage in response to an anti-Mohammad film, or where they planned attacks?
Yahoo! News’ The Lookout reports:
The deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya may have been a planned operation and not a spontaneous protest that turned violent, U.S. officials told the New York Times and CNN on Wednesday. Initial reports suggested that protesters in Benghazi, Libya, were angry about an online video that mocked the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, and then attacked the consulate, killing U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other foreign service workers. But now, according to the New York Times, officials suspect that “an organized group had either been waiting for an opportunity to exploit like the protests over the video or perhaps even generated the protests as a cover for their attack.”
There are reports out of Egypt that the Cairo assault was also a planned spontaneous political action that was awaiting a religious provocation — this was the opinion of my Christian Egyptian contacts on Tuesday. MEMRI states:
On September 7, 2012, Nasser Al-Qaeda, a prominent writer on the Jihadi forum Shumoukh Al-Islam suggested burning down the U.S. embassy in Egypt with all workers inside in order to pressure the U.S. to release Sheikh ‘Omar ‘Abd Al-Rahman aka the Blind Sheikh. In the post, titled “How can the U.S. embassy remain in Egypt while [the U.S.] imprisons Sheikh ‘Omar ‘Abd Al-Rahman,” Nasser Al-Qaeda wrote: “Oh people of Egypt, it is time [to launch] a powerful movement to liberate the mujahid Sheikh ‘Omar ‘Abd Al-Rahman.
In contrast to the foreign reporting, I’ve not been that impressed with the even handedness of the domestic stories. For example, Geoffrey Dickens at NewsBusters reports:
The Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) Wednesday evening newscasts devoted more than 9 minutes (9 minutes, 28 seconds) to the flap over Mitt Romney’s statement criticizing the administration’s handling of the Libyan crisis but spent just 25 seconds on questions regarding Barack Obama’s Middle-East policy, a greater than 20-to-1 disparity.
Has anyone seen any MSM reports about why conciliatory messages from U.S. officials aren’t going over well with some Americans?
I would however like to single out for particular praise CNN’s story “Ambassador’s killing shines light on Muslim sensitivities around Prophet Mohammed” by Dan Gilgoff and Eric Marrapodi.
This well written, well researched, finely balanced piece from CNN provides the views of Sunni Muslim scholars who explain why a film portraying Mohammad in an unflattering light would provoke religious outrage.
Violence over depictions of the Prophet Mohammed may mystify many non-Muslims, but it speaks to a central tenet of Islam: that the Prophet was a man, not God, and that portraying him threatens to lead to worshiping a human instead of Allah.
“It’s all rooted in the notion of idol worship,” says Akbar Ahmed, who chairs the Islamic Studies department at American University. “In Islam, the notion of God versus any depiction of God or any sacred figure is very strong.”
“The Prophet himself was aware that if people saw his face portrayed by people, they would soon start worshiping him,” Ahmed says. “So he himself spoke against such images, saying ‘I’m just a man.’”
Do read the whole story. It will give you a good grounding in one of the religious angles in this affair.
My first post on this story also generated several thoughtful comments focusing on the statements issued via twitter from the U.S. embassy in Cairo. “The Old Bill” asked who had tweeted these comments, while “Ben” questioned the timeline. When did the Embassy release the tweet and press statement — before, during or after the compound was attacked?
By day’s end, these questions had entered the U.S. political arena as Mitt Romney criticized the administration over the tweets and statement. Foreign Policy Magazine’s “The Cable” has a solid story that looks at these issues, identifying the embassy staffer who wrote the tweet — and revealing the anger within the State Department over the content, timing and tone of the embassy tweets and statement.
People at the highest levels both at the State Department and at the White House were not happy with the way the statement went down. There was a lot of anger both about the process and the content,” the official said. “Frankly, people here did not understand it. The statement was just tone deaf. It didn’t provide adequate balance. We thought the references to the 9/11 attacks were inappropriate, and we strongly advised against the kind of language that talked about ‘continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.’”
Despite being aware of Washington’s objections, the embassy continued to defend the statement for several hours, fueling the controversy over it, a decision the official again attributed to Schwartz.
“Not only did they push out the statement but they continued to engage on Twitter and retweet it,” the official said. “[Schwartz] would have been the one directing folks to engage on Twitter on this.”
The State Department has long had a reputation of being disconnected from reality. Spiro Agnew is not the author of the title of this post — that honor belongs to a Democratic congressman from Ohio who in a 1948 speech condemned the reluctance of the State Department to engage with China over the fate to two downed airmen. The actions of its public affairs officer in Cairo has done the administration no good — adding yet another stanza to the song of the feckless idiots of Foggy Bottom.
First published in Get Religion.
Mullah accused of fabricating evidence in Pakistan child blasphemy case: The Church of England Newspaper, September 9, 2012 p 7 September 12, 2012Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of Pakistan, Islam, Persecution.
Tags: Blasphemy Laws, Khalid Jadoon Chisthi, Rimsha Masih
One of the accusers of the 11-year old Christian girl imprisoned in Pakistan and awaiting trial on for blasphemy has been arrested by Islamabad police for fabricating evidence and filing false charges.
On 31 August 2012, a witness came forward to inform the police that a local mullah, Khalid Jadoon Chisthi, had concocted the accusations against Rimsha Masih, and had conspired to foment anti-Christian hatred.
The Express Tribune reported that Hafiz Zubair informed police that he had witnessed Mr. Chishti fabricate the evidence and had heard him describe his plan to frame the Christian girl. “We tried to stop him but he said this would strengthen the blasphemy case against Rimsha,” said Zubair in his statement to the police.
A police spokesman told the Express Tribune Chishti “put pages into the ashes, showed them to the people of the area, gathered them to attack the girl’s house and detained her before taking her to the police station. He made the boy Hammad become a complainant in the case and urged the police to press blasphemy charges against the 11-year-old girl,” said the police officer.
Rimsha, whose baptismal certificate indicates she is 11 years of age, although a police medical examination places her age at 13, has Downs Syndrome and is illiterate. She was arrested on 16 August after she was accused by Chishti and others of burning a Koran. The girl and her mother remain in protective police custody and a hearing is scheduled on her case this week.
The outcry over the arrest of Rimsha led to an anti-Christian pogrom, allegedly fomented by Chishti, that forced 900 families from their homes – emptying the Islamabad neighborhood of Christians who feared for their lives.
If convicted of falsifying evidence in a capital case, Chishti could face life imprisonment. If charged with blasphemy for burning the pages containing Koranic verses, he could be executed.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Righteous Religious Indignation in Cairo: Get Religion, September 11, 2012 September 12, 2012Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Islam, Politics.
Tags: Benghazi, Cairo, Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi Muslims
There are conflicting reports coming out of Egypt and Libya tonight on the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the consulate in Benghazi.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, drawing upon reports from Reuters and AFP, stated one U.S. official was killed and a second injured in the attack on the Benghazi consulate,while the Washington Post, citing the Associated Press, reported that no one was inside the Benghazi consulate when the attack occurred.
The protests, coming on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 bombings, are being described in most press accounts as being driven by religious fervor. The New York Times reported:
The protest was a result of outrage over a movie being promoted by an anti-Muslim Egyptian Christian campaigner in the United States, clips of which are available on YouTube and dubbed in Egyptian Arabic. The video depicts Muhammad as a fraud, and shows him having sex and calling for massacres. Muslims find it offensive to depict Muhammad at all, much less in an insulting way.
And the ABC noted:
Reports suggest both incidents were sparked by anger over a film which was produced by expatriate members of Egypt’s Christian minority resident in the United States.
Reports said the Cairo protesters, numbering nearly 3,000 were mostly hardline Islamist supporters of the Salafist movement.
A dozen men scaled the embassy walls and one of them tore down the US flag, replacing it with a black one inscribed with the Muslim profession of faith: “There is no God but God and Mohammed is the prophet of God.”
The New York Times added a bit of context about this black flag, stating: “The flag, similar to Al Qaeda’s banner, is popular with ultraconservatives around the region.”
Religion, then would seem to be one of the forces driving the attack — though some Egyptian Christians with whom I was in contact via email today suggested the attacks were driven by Egyptian domestic political considerations. Their argument was that the Salafist parties — the hardline Islamist groups that are junior coalition partners with the Muslim Brotherhood government — are seeking to incite the “Arab Street” to pressure the government to adopt a stricter Sharia law-based government. Religion, this line of thinking believes, is a tool for political ends.
I have no knowledge as to the truth of these assertions, but the first day reports out of the Middle East have noted the religious and political nature of the protests.
The Washington Post reported:
Many of the protesters at the U.S. Embassy Tuesday said that they were associated with the Salafist political parties Al Nour and Al Asala. Salafism is an extremely conservative branch of Islam.
Protesters condemned a video clip that depicted the prophet Mohammed in a series of humiliating scenes. A controversial Cairo television host, Sheikh Khaled Abdallah, aired clips from the video on an Islamic-focused television station on Saturday, and the same video clips were posted to YouTube on Monday. Depicting Mohammed at all is considered deeply offensive by Muslims. Some protesters said that the movie had been created by Egyptian-American Coptic Christians, though its provenance online was unclear.
“We are speaking out and will never be tolerant toward any curses for our prophet,” said Moaz Abdel Kareem, 37, who had a long beard typical of followers of the Salafist movement and was carrying a black flag.
Congratulations to the Post — and the wire services — for being on the scene and doing a great job in explaining what is taking place.
I would note that the prohibition against the portrayal of Mohammad is a Sunni Muslim tradition and not practiced by the Shia. My colleagues and I at GetReligion have written extensively about reporting on images of Mohammad. Articles on Everybody Draw Mohammad Day, South Park, and the Jyllands-Posten cartoons have raised questions about the quality of reporting and unwarranted suppositions about Islam. I hope we will not see these same mistakes in this news cycle.
While the press has done a great job so far, I would not say the same about the U.S. embassy press people in Cairo. There response to the violation of American sovereignty, the raising of the al-Qaeda flag at the U.S. embassy and destruction of the American flag by the Salafist protestors on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 was to send out this tweet:
We condemn the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims
An extraordinarily feckless statement — even by the standards of the State Department.
I do hope that in the days to come the press continues pushing this story, seeking to unravel the political and religious dimensions of this story.
First printed in GetReligion.
Iran frees Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani: Anglican Ink, September 8, 2012 September 8, 2012Posted by geoconger in Anglican Ink, Islam, Persecution.
Tags: Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Iran, Yousef Nadarkhani
The Iranian Christian pastor awaiting execution has been acquitted of the charge of apostasy and released from imprisonment.
Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) reports that at an 8 September 2012 hearing, the court overturned Yousef Nadarkhani’s 2010 conviction for apostasy, finding him guilty instead of proselytizing Muslims. He was sentenced to three years imprisonment, but released for time served.
In 2009, Mr. Nadarkhani was arrested and charged with apostasy after he complained that new government regulations requiring that his two sons, Daniel (10) and Yoel (8) be instructed in Islam in school violated the Iranian constitution’s guarantee of the free practice of religion.
Read it all in Anglican Ink.
Church leaders urge Egypt’s new president to support religious tolerance: The Church of England Newspaper, September 2, 2012 p 6. September 6, 2012Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Episcopal Church in Jerusalem & the Middle East, Islam, Persecution.
Tags: Arab Spring, Egypt, Mohammad Morsi, Mouneer Anis, Muslim Brotherhood
The sacking of the country’s top generals puts an end to 52 years of military rule and restores the rule of law to Egypt, President Mohammed Morsi told a gathering of Christian leaders this week, the Bishop of Egypt Dr. Mouneer Anis writes.
On 22 August, Dr. Anis along with 12 other bishops and ministers representing Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant Churches met for two hours at the presidential palace with the new president.
“I, and all my colleagues, appreciated the fact that the President called us twice in less than two months to talk and listen to us. This never happened in the last 30 years,” Dr. Anis said.
“The President shared with us the reasons behind his recent decisions to dismiss the military chiefs and the cancelling of the constitutional declarations they made. By these decisions the President put an end to the military ruling of the country which started since 1952. He also shared his hopes that the new Constitution would represent the hopes and views of all Egyptian regardless of their religion, ethnic background and political views. This will guarantee the support of the vast majority of people to the new constitution,” the bishop reported.
Asked to share with him the concerns of Egypt’s Christian minority, the church leaders urged the president to clamp down on sectarian violence. “Ignorance and wrong teaching are behind such congestion,” they told the president and urged him to support the “sound and moderate religious teaching of Islam as taught by Al Azhar.”
A member of the Muslim Brotherhood before his run for office, President Morsi has supported the introduction of Shari’a law in Egypt. At a 13 May rally broadcast by Misr-25 TV, he told supporters the Koran would be the true constitution of Egypt.
“Above all – Allah is our goal… The shari’a, then the shari’a, and finally, the shari’a. This nation will enjoy blessing and revival only through the Islamic shari’a. I take an oath before Allah and before you all that regardless of the actual text [of the constitution]… Allah willing, the text will truly reflect [the shari'a], as will be agreed upon by the Egyptian people, by the Islamic scholars, and by legal and constitutional experts,” he proclaimed.
The Christian leaders urged the president to improve the quality of Egypt’s schools to “care for the education of the new generations so that they become more tolerant and good citizens. We suggested that common values should be taught in schools,” Dr Anis said.
They also asked the president to ensure non-partisan policy and that the security services apply the “rule of law on everyone, especially when sectarian clashes” as well as take steps to improve public order across the country.
“We told the President that we are aware that he received a heavy responsibility at a very difficult time in Egypt’s history and we all need to be patient and hard-working in order to see the desired fruits,” the bishop reported, adding the president “assured us that he is working to achieve the dream of Egypt: to be a democratic and modern country where the rights of citizenship and the constitution are held up high.”
“In the end, we came out of the meeting very encouraged and determined to do our best in order to see the Egypt that we dream of,” said Dr. Anis.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Tags: AFP, Burma, France 24, Rohingya
What is driving the violence in Burma? Race or religion? And can the two be distinguished from one another. Reports from the South East Asian nation have framed the conflict in terms of sectarian violence — but is religion really the issue here?
The English-language service of France 24 reported that Buddhist monks had staged a mass political rally in the streets of Burma’s second largest city Mandalay. But unlike the 2007 anti-government protests that sparked the unsuccessful “Saffron Revolution”, France 24 reported this week’s rally was in support of the government and against Muslims.
Drawn from an AFP wire service report, France 24‘s headline read: “Buddhist monks stage anti-Rohingya rally”. The subtitle firmly anchored the story to the theme of sectarian Buddhist-Muslim clashes.
Hundreds of Buddhist monks marched in the Burmese city of Mandalay on Sunday to back President Thein Sein’s proposal to deport members of the Rohingya Muslim minority group. Fighting between the two sides has left almost 90 people dead since June.
The article stated:
“Protect Mother Myanmar by supporting the President,” read one banner, while others criticised United Nations human rights envoy Tomas Ojea Quintana, who has faced accusations that he is biased in favour of the Rohingya, following deadly unrest between Buddhists and Muslims in western Rakhine state.
This article is the best I have seen so far on the disturbances. Written from Burma, it offered comments from a leader of the monks as well as concerns from international rights groups. But the title and subtitles given by France 24 do not quite match the story written by AFP.
The leader of the protest march did not use religion as a reason for his march, but race.
Wirathu, the 45-year-old monk who led the march, claimed that as many as 5,000 monks had joined the procession, with another several thousand people taking to the streets to watch.
He told AFP the protest was to “let the world know that Rohingya are not among Myanmar’s ethnic groups at all”.
The monk, who goes by one name, said the aim was also to condemn “terrorism of Rohingya Bengalis who cruelly killed ethnic Rakhines”.
Speaking a dialect similar to one in neighbouring Bangladesh, the estimated 800,000 Rohingya in Myanmar are seen by the government and many Burmese as illegal immigrants and the violence has stoked a wave of anger across the Buddhist-majority country.
The video accompanying the France 24 story along with the text of the article quoted the leader of the monks as stressing a clash of peoples who happen to be of different faiths, than a clash of faiths. In the video Wirathu tells the camera that all Burmese “religions, sects and political parties” are united against the Rohingya.
A second AFP story from Burma suggested that race and religion may not be divisible. In an article entitled “Myanmar Christians forced to convert: rights group” a spokesman for the Chin, a predominantly Christian minority group in Burma, stated:
Rachel Fleming, another member of the [Chin] group, said Christianity does not fit with the national view that “to be Burmese, you should be Buddhist”.
Where then should the emphasis be in the phrase “Rohingya Muslim minority group”? On the ethnic — Rohingya — or religious — Muslim — descriptors for this minority group? It may well be argued that this is a meaningless distinction, that the reasons for the Rohinga’s suffering are of secondary consequence to the fact of their suffering. I have some sympathy for this argument, but it is a journalist’s duty to split these hairs and dig into a story. The bottom line is that what AFP reported is not so straight forward as the France 24 title suggested.
To paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, Burma is a far away country that we know little about — and hence care little about. Why would balancing race versus religion matter? One consequence of the Rohingya conflict is that it has become a political football in the Islamic world, with some extremist groups calling for jihad against Buddhists.
The anti-Buddhist rhetoric became so bad the Central Tibetan Administration — the Dhali Lama’s government in exile — issued a press statement denouncing the use of misleading photos to whip up anti-Buddhist sentiment in the Muslim world.
The Central Tibetan Administration based in Dharamsala is deeply disturbed and concerned over the circulation of a misleading photograph in some section of the media showing Tibetan monks in their reports on the recent violence in Myanmar involving Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims.
A photograph of Tibetan monks standing in front of a pile of dead bodies appeared in many websites in the Muslim countries, especially Pakistan. This photo of Tibetan monks was actually taken during their relief work in Kyegudo (Yushul), eastern Tibet, after a devastating earthquake hit the region on 14 April 2010. The Tibetan monks extended remarkable service in the rescue and relief operations at the time.
The relevant department of the Central Tibetan Administration wrote a letter to a website in Pakistan (ColumPk.com, Urdu Current Affairs Portal) on 30 July to remove the photo from its website, which it did so the next day. But the photo is still in circulation, as some Muslims carrying the photo during their recent protest in Mumbai on 11 August 2012, appeared in Zee News, a leading news channel in India.
We strongly appeal to the media across the world not to use this photo, which is being circulated by miscreants to provoke conflict between the Buddhist and Muslim communities.
Pakistani pro-democracy bloggers have chronicled the use of the fake atrocity photo by Islamist extremist groups to inflame public sentiment, while retaliatory attacks on Buddhist temples in Indonesia by Muslim extremist groups in the wake of the Burmese conflict have been reported. Would these attacks have taken place if the Muslim angle were downplayed and the ethnic angle stressed? Does it make any difference? Should the press dig deeper into this story and find out what is really going on in Burma?
What say you GetReligion readers? How should this story be played out? Should reporters worry about the consequences of their stories if fanatics seize upon them for their own ends?
First printed in GetReligion.
Boko Haram violence a threat to the “Nigerian project”: The Church of England Newspaper, August 26, 2012 p 6. August 29, 2012Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of Nigeria, Islam.
Tags: Boko Haram, Diocese of Kaduna, Goodluck Jonathan, Josiah Idowu-Fearon, Nicholas Okoh
The Archbishop of Nigeria has called upon the government of President Goodluck Jonathan to stop the drift towards anarchy as more Christians were killed last week by Islamist terrorists. Attacks on churches and Christians were reported across Northern and Central Nigeria, with 19 worshipers attending a Pentecostal service in Okene in the central Kogi state murdered by gunmen.
In an interview with Punch, Archbishop Nicholas Okoh said that at the “rate we are going, the country is drifting fast into anarchy and if people now capitalise on that situation, it will degenerate to dog eat dog.”
Anti-Christian violence has prompted some Christians to flee the North, while many churches report sharp decreases in worship attendance. The Bishop of Kaduna, the Rt. Rev. Josiah Idowu-Fearon told his synod last week that the latest outbreak of violence had caused a 30 per cent drop in attendance.
On 6 August 2012, gunmen attacked a Bible Study held at the Deeper Life Bible Church in Okene. Local press accounts of the attack say that the attackers shut off the generator plunging the church into darkness and then sprayed the building with machine gun fire. Nineteen were killed in the attack, and two soldiers were killed in a firefight the following morning with the suspected gunmen.
In a communique released at the close of the 19th Kaduna Synod, the diocese warned Nigeria was sliding towards anarchy. Nigeria could soon see its own version of the Rwandan and Bosnian “ethnic cleansing” of recent years.
The Muslim militant group Boko Haram posed a threat to the “98 year old Nigerian project” the synod warned by its “acts of bombing, shooting and other forms of destructive attack on the Nigerian state.”
First posted in The Church of England Newspaper.
Are There Muslim Evangelists? Get Religion, August 28, 2012 August 28, 2012Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Islam, Persecution, Press criticism.
Tags: Aamir Liaquat, Ahmadi Muslim, da'i, Da'wah, evangelist, imam, Lauren Frayer, National Public Radio, Pakistan, preacher, sheikh
How far should the press go to acculturate their overseas news stories — to make them palatable to an American audience while also being true to the underlying facts? NPR Morning Edition reporter Lauren Frayer had a great story last week that “gets religion”, but also brought this issue to mind.
Her report broadcast on Pakistan’s Aamir Liaquat was an example of solid reporting. Her story entitled “Pakistani Televangelist Is Back On Air, Raising Fears” meets the Orwell test for journalism as it is free from cant, has a moral compass, is well researched and well crafted. But were the correct nouns used?
Here is the lede:
Pakistan’s most famous, and infamous, TV evangelist has been rehired by a top station. In 2008, Aamir Liaquat made on-air threats against a religious minority, the Ahmadis. Those comments were followed by widespread violence against the group. Liaquat’s return to the airwaves has rekindled the controversy.
As Pakistan’s media has expanded in recent years, there’s been a rise in Islamic preachers with popular TV call-in talk shows. And they’ve had their share of scandal. One famous TV host fled the country after embezzlement allegations. Others are accused of spewing hate speech
That’s the case for Pakistan’s most popular televangelist, Aamir Liaquat, who’s just been rehired by the country’s top TV channel despite accusations that he provoked deadly attacks in 2008.
I have some small knowledge of the political and religious culture of Pakistan and can say she knows what she is talking about. I encourage you to listen to the broadcast. To often Western reporters are parachuted into overseas hotspots and report on issues they know nothing about — either mangling the facts or mouthing a script written by others. My colleague at GetReligion M.Z. Heminway reported on a particularly egregious howler along these lines committed by the New York Times.
I applaud NPR for bringing this story to an American audience. Given the growing U.S. involvement in the Muslim word, it behooves the American press to cover these stories and not confine them to the ghetto of specialist publications.
In writing about the Muslim world, however, I wonder how appropriate it is to use Christian terminology. Terms such as “fundamentalist Muslim” are often dropped into stories to give Western readers some context or equivalence. In the headline of this story, and in the opening paragraphs the term evangelist and televangelist are used to describe Liaquat. Is that right?
Using the Associated Press style book as a guide, using this terminology is not wrong — but it is not quite right either. It states:
Capitalize only in reference to the men credited with writing the Gospels. The four Evangelists were Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In lowercase, it means a preacher who makes a profession of seeking conversions.
Conversions to what? To proselytize is the verb that means to attempt to convert someone to another faith or point of view, while a Muslim evangelist traditionally has been someone who seeks to convert Muslims to the Christian faith. Turning to Wikipedia provides little clarity as it defines an evangelist as one who practices Christian evangelism, while the Merriam-Webster‘s dictionary further refines evangelist as a:
Protestant minister or layman who preaches at special services [or] an enthusiastic advocate <an evangelist for physical fitness>
On one level it may well be appropriate to use terms familiar to readers to illustrate a story. That is after all the purpose of an analogy. But is this appropriate when language is available to describe the same fact set in the terms of the culture being described?
A Muslim preacher who seeks to evangelize is called a sheikh or imam. Da‘wah, meaning the issuing of a summons, call or invitation, is the duty of every Muslim to invite people to their faith or to recall lapsed or nominal Muslims to a deeper faith. A Muslim who practices da‘wah, either as a preacher, religious worker or someone engaged in a faith-building community activity is called a da‘i, plural du‘at.
To a Muslim audience, Aamir Liaquat is a da‘i — someone who seeks to renew the Muslim faith, proselytize non-Muslims, and combat false teaching. Yes, he is an enthusiastic advocate for Islam, but should Christian terms be used to describe this activity when then are Muslim terms to describe such actions?
At the same time there is a danger in taking this too far.
A Saturday Night Live skit that aired on 10 November 1990 and can be viewed here made fun of the mock Spanish some television reporters used on air. Entitled “NBC News Employees”, the skit starred Latino actor Jimmy Smits and the shows regular cast. The scene opens with a reporter speaking on air from Nicaragua, who says the word Nicaragua in a hyper-Spanish phonology. The skit progresses with the Anglo characters pronouncing Spanish place names (Los Angeles, San Diego, Honduras), foods (enchilada, burrito), and even sports teams (Denver Broncos) in a ridiculous Spanish accent.
Jimmy Smits’ character, Antonio Mendoza, is introduced to the Anglo reporters and says his name with an American English accent. The other actors respond by saying his name with an excessive accent and Smit’s character becomes more and more uncomfortable as the skit progresses. He finally states:
If you don’t mind my saying, sometimes when you take Spanish words and kind of over pronounce them, well its kind of annoying.
So, GetReligion readers, is it kind of annoying to Muslim terms for Muslim religious leaders in news stories? Is it too politically correct, or effete — perhaps pretentious? Unnecessary? Ridiculous? A tele-sheikh? Or is it demeaning to the non-Western world to subsume all things into an American milieu? What say you?
First published in GetReligion.
BBC Bias? Sharia law and Egypt: Get Religion, August 24, 2012 August 24, 2012Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Islam.
Tags: Al Ahram, BBC, Egypt, Egypt Independent, MEMRI, Mohammed Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, ribah, Sayyid Qutb, Sharia Law, usury
Above all – Allah is our goal… The shari’a, then the shari’a, and finally, the shari’a. This nation will enjoy blessing and revival only through the Islamic shari’a. I take an oath before Allah and before you all that regardless of the actual text [of the constitution]… Allah willing, the text will truly reflect [the shari'a], as will be agreed upon by the Egyptian people, by the Islamic scholars, and by legal and constitutional experts…
Mohammed Mursi: Jihad Is Our Path, Death for the Sake of Allah Is Our Most Lofty Aspiration, the Shari’a Is Our Constitution. Misr-25 TV, 13 May 2012. Video clip and translation provided by MEMRI.
From time to time it is important to remind readers (and me) about GetReligion‘s mandate. This site does not seek to discuss religious issues of the moment and their intersection with politics, culture, the arts, economics and the like. It critiques press coverage of religion. The underlying issues are not central to a GetReligion story line.
Nor is this a “gotcha” site. I have made mistakes as a writer and have suffered from the deprivations sub-editors pruning and mis-titling my work. An example of a religion article that is not a proper GetReligion story is this article from the Seattle Times entitled: “Pakistani Christians flee after girl, 12, is accused of blasphemy”.
The subheading states: “A 12-year-old Muslim girl is in jail while Pakistani police investigate allegations that she burned a Quran, a crime that, if she is convicted, carries a life sentence.”
Now this is a dumb mistake. The girl is described as Christian in the article but called a Muslim in the subheading. This is not a question of the Seattle Times not getting religion, but a sub-editor’s mistake.
The mission of GetReligion is to point out what our editor TMatt calls “religion ghosts” — examples of an article misunderstanding, omitting or denigrating the role religion plays in a story. A classic example of this sort of religion ghost appears in a BBC story printed today entitled “Egypt requests $4.8bn loan from visiting IMF chief”.
The story opens:
Egypt has asked the International Monetary Fund for a $4.8bn (£3bn) loan to help revive its struggling economy. The request was made during talks in Cairo between President Mohammed Mursi and IMF chief Christine Lagarde.
Ms Lagarde said the IMF would respond quickly, while Prime Minister Hisham Qandil said he hoped the deal could be finalised before the end of the year. It is needed to cover budget deficits resulting from shrinking tourism and foreign investment revenues.
The article unfolds as a straight forward international finance story, discussing Egypt’s parlous economy, its “balance-of-payments crisis and high borrowing costs”, summarizing negotiations with the IMF, exploring possible U.S., Qatari and Saudi aid, and describing the terms of the loan:
After meeting [IMF chief Christine] Lagarde on Wednesday, Prime Minister Qandil said he expected the IMF loan would be for five years, with a grace period of 39 months and an interest rate of 1.1%.
Perhaps you are asking yourself where the GetReligion angle lies? Is this not a straight forward, somewhat dull, international economics story? Yes — but go back to the top of the article and look at the comments made by candidate Mohammed Mursi to the Muslim Brotherhood. If elected he would govern Egypt under the dictates of Shari’a law — which means a banking system without interest.
Throughout its time in opposition and underground, the Muslim Brotherhood denounced Western banking as being contrary to Shari’a. Sayyid Qutb, the ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood interpreted the Koran’s verses on riba (interest or usury) to apply to commercial banking. He accused banks of “eating the flesh and bones” of the poor and “drinking their sweat and blood” through the charging of interest. Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Brotherhood, in 1947 wrote to the leaders of Muslim state calling for them to repudiate Western banking practices in favor of interest-free Islamic banking.
The religion ghost in this story is whether Mohammed Mursi will jettison his protestations about Sharia law being the cornerstone of his administration in exchange for cheap interest loans from the West to keep his economy afloat.
Reuters and the Telegraph made no mention of the religion angle in their stories also, while the AP noted that past negotiations had been stalled by opposition from the Islamists. The Financial Times reported:
Analysts say the IMF’s loan terms could impede its acceptance by an Islamist government with populist pretences and a rhetorical commitment to thinning the gap between rich and poor.
The religious ramifications of the interest bearing loans were not omitted in the Egyptian press however. The Egypt Independent reported:
The government should not borrow from the International Monetary Fund to boost the country’s cash reserve, the Salafi Nour Party stated on Wednesday. “Borrowing from abroad is usury,” said Younis Makhyoun, a member of the party’s supreme committee. “God will never bless an economy based on usury.”
Mahkyoun called on Prime Minister Hesham Qandil to find other ways to raise funds instead of “allowing foreigners to interfere in our affairs.” The government should reduce spending, apply an austerity policy, set a maximum wage, apply Islamic regultations to stock exchange speculations and repatriate funds siphoned abroad, Makhyoun added.
Al-Ahram reported the left was outraged too by the prospect of IMF loans.
Dozens of demonstrators, meanwhile, protested outside the Cabinet building in downtown Cairo during Lagarde’s visit. Protestors, consisting mainly of leftist and revolutionaries, called on Egypt to reject the loan.
They chanted slogans and held signs against the proposed loan –and capitalism in general – such as “No to crony capitalism,” “Down with capitalism,” and “Reject the loans.”
“Why did we have a revolution? Wasn’t it to improve the living conditions of the people? We know that the money from these loans is pilfered by the authorities and will only lead to the further impoverishment of the people,” protest organiser Mary Daniel told Ahram Online.
IMF and World Bank loans are notorious among leftist activists in Egypt, as in the rest of the world, as they are generally seen as a means of spreading capitalism throughout the world.
The state-run daily, which has the largest circulation of any newspaper in Egypt, also noted that Islamists had been quiet.
Notably, Islamist political forces – which rejected a similar IMF loan offer last April – were nowhere to be seen in Wednesday’s protest.
In April, Egypt’s Islamist-led parliament said that the government’s economic programme failed to provide details on how the key problems facing Egypt’s economy – namely, unemployment and security – would be solved.
Some Islamists went so far as to say that such loans were haram (religiously proscribed) since they relied on interest, which is forbidden according to the tenets of Islam.
Let me offer a historical analogy. In the Fall of 1932 Adolf Hitler toned back his anti-Semitic tirades and played the bourgeois, President Paul von Hindenburg, the army and Germany’s wealthy industrialists. When he was appointed chancellor in 1933 some expected the Nazi leader’s anti-Semitism would dry up as he had achieved his goal of power.
The liberal German-Jewish playwright Carl Zuckmayer wrote at that time:
… even many Jews considered the savage anti-Semitic rantings of the Nazis merely a propaganda device, a line the Nazis would drop as soon as they reached power.
At that time it seemed reasonable that Hitler would drop the anti-Semitic rantings that had helped bring him to power as it no longer served a rational political or economic purpose. Are we seeing something similar happening in Egypt?
Is the Morsi government shedding its ideology, its fundamental commitment to a state governed by the dictates of Sharia law in return for cheap Western loans? Now that the army has been neutered, parliament dissolved and the opposition broken Mohammed Morsi can do as he likes. It would seem to make rational sense that he would drop his anti-modernist religious views now that he has a modern state to run — but will he?
Is there a religious ghost in the IMF story? Is the BBC bringing a Western secular worldview to this story that misses its inherent non-Western faith-driven elements?
Should these two stories be kept separate? Keep financial news in the business section and religion in the Saturday lifestyle supplement? Or, is there a religion angle in this finance story that must be explored in order for the reader to understand? What say you GetReligion readers?
First printed in GetReligion.
‘No reprisals’ Nigerian archbishop tells embattled Christians: The Church of England Newspaper, July 29, 2012 August 4, 2012Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of Nigeria, Islam, Persecution, Politics.
Tags: Boko Haram, Diocese of Kebbi, Edmund Akanya, Kaduna
The Archbishop of Kaduna has called upon Christians in Northern Nigeria to “stay and pray” in the face of sectarian attacks by Islamist militants and not respond to violence with violence.
In an interview published last week in the Sunday Tribune, Archbishop Edmund Akanya urged Christians “to pray. We are against the issue of reprisal and attacks because that would not lead anybody anywhere. Two wrongs don’t make a right. What we preach is peace; we do not preach violence. We do not encourage it and we are telling our members not to join in that kind of reprisal. That is the stand of the church on this issue.”
On 7-8 July, Muslim Fulani herdsmen reportedly attacked Christian Berom farmers in Plateau state killing more than 100 people including two government officials. While clashes between migrant herdsmen and farmers have taken place in the past, the Muslim militant group Boko Haram has claimed involvement in the latest clashes.
Boko Haram spokesman Abu Qaqa, told Nigerian reports his group “wants to inform the world of its delight over the success of the attacks we launched…in Plateau State on Christians and security operatives, including members of the National Assembly. We will continue to hunt government officials wherever they are; they will have no peace again.”
Security experts have questioned the Islamist terrorist group’s involvement in these latest attacks, but former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell writing on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations stated “whether Boko Haram was actually involved or not, Abu Qaqa’s rhetoric looks, indeed, like he is trying to incite all-out religious war.”
Reprisal attacks have also been launched against Muslim targets, and on 17 July a Muslim school was bombed in the state capital of Jos killing a boy.
Archbishop Akanya said churches in Northern Nigeria were taking steps to defend themselves. “We are encouraging our churches to put fence and gates; they should disallow cars from entering. They should get security men who can man the place. In many churches that I have visited, the bombers were not able to get access because of these barricades that are there.”
Those carrying out reprisal attacks were not true Christians, the archbishop said. “These boys that even carry out these reprisals do not go to church. That is the truth. I know what I am saying because those who go church will put their succor and relax their case in the hands of God and not going to fight back because they went to fight outside of the church environment. If it is self-defense, it would not have been outside of the church environment.”
Christians must not take the law into their own hands. “I do not think, by my conviction and the Bible I read that we have that instruction to go and be fighting people as a church or Christian. If anything, we should all cry to God to forgive our iniquities. Who knows if God is using this to warn us and to turn our hearts back to him. We should look at those facets and begin to think of how to cry unto God. We have seen cases that were worse than this in scriptures and how God delivered the people and it is still the same God. He can still do it for us,” Archbishop Akanya said.
Tags: Mitt Romney, Washington Post
The elected Christian is in the world only to increase this glory of God by fulfilling His commandments to the best of his ability. … Brotherly love, … is expressed in the first place in the fulfillment of the daily tasks given. … This makes labor in the service of impersonal social usefulness appear to promote the glory of God and hence to be willed by him.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (1905/2002),pp. 108-9.
Reporters on the campaign trail have a difficult task. They must report faithfully on the words and actions of their subject — while at the same time rendering these words and actions interesting and intelligible to their readers. The two do not always go hand in hand as campaign handlers works very hard to make sure their candidate does not stray from a script, keeping “on message” at all times. It is a good day then, when a candidate says something new, interesting or controversial for it allows a good reporter to show his command of the craft.
The presumptive Republican Party presidential candidate has been taking some hits for comments made on his latest overseas tour. Some members of the press corp have been putting a bit of stick about in their coverage of Mitt Romney, characterizing his latest comments as insensitive gaffes. Romney is not ready for prime time is the song playing on the campaign radio right now.
A 30 July 2012 story in the Washington Post entitled “Romney faces Palestinian criticism for Jerusalem remarks as he heads to Poland” is representative of this style of reporting. But in their zeal to play gotcha with the Mittster and focus the criticisms, the five WaPo reporters credited on the story have overlooked ethical and religious ghosts that might well have made this a better piece. And what is better? Better is an article that peals away on campaign cant giving a fresh look into the mind of Mitt Romney.
Let me walk you through this story and show you what I mean. The lede begins:
JERUSALEM — Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney angered Palestinian leaders on Monday when he suggested here that the Israeli economy has outpaced that of the Palestinian territories in part because of advantages of “culture.”
Palestinians said that Romney was ignoring long-running Israeli restrictions on crossings from the Gaza Strip and West Bank, which are an enormous drag on commerce.
“All I can say is that this man needs a lot of education. He doesn’t know the region, he doesn’t know Israelis, he doesn’t know Palestinians, and to talk about the Palestinians as an inferior culture is really a racist statement,” Saeb Erekat, a top aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said in an interview.
Though this appears in the domestic politics section of the Washington Post, the Post’s reporters have written a story about the opinions of second-tier Palestinian government officials. An accusation of racism is leveled at the top of the story by a Palestinian official in response to Romney’s comments on culture.
The article notes Romney’s comments on the sharp economic disparity between Israel and Palestine and recounts the words that led to the racism charge. Citing a 1998 book by Harvard economics professor David Landes entitled “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,” Romney said:
“Culture makes all the difference. Culture makes all the difference,” Romney said, repeating the conclusion he drew from the book, by David Landes. “And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.”
A decision was made by the authors of this narrative to enter the story through the door of response to comments. Why? As we go deeper into the article there are signs the Romney campaign were unhelpful. It moves to denials by the Romney campaign of any “attempt to slight the Palestinians.” The article did note that Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist, pushed his boss deeper into the mire: “Reporters pressed him to explain what Romney meant by ‘culture,’ but he declined to do so.”
The action shifts to Washington with comments from the Obama campaign and World Bank officials before it moves on to the next leg of Mitt’s overseas adventure. A diagram of the article’s content and perspective would be: Key Sentence: Romney is a racist Palestinian official claims — Palestinian quote — Romney quote — Romney campaign non-explanation — Obama response critical of Romney — Expert voice critical of Romney — Close as scene moves to Poland.
The Romney campaign appears to have been unhelpful and their man comes off badly from their actions. Yet what is also missing is an inquiry by the Post into Prof. David Landes and his book — which would go a long way toward answering the question of “what is culture?”.
And it is here was have the ethical and religious ghosts to this story for Landes’ book places great stress on the role of religion in economic development.
Two avenues of inquiry immediately present themselves — corruption and Islam. Is Mitt Romney saying that the Muslim culture of the Palestinian Authority is less conducive to economic advancement than the Jewish culture of Israel? Sociologists have been debating the role of religion and economic growth for over a century — most famously we have Max Weber’s “Protestant work ethic” thesis. The National Bureau of Economic Research released a paper last year entitled “Religious Identity and Economic Behavior” that found in the U.S. there were differences between the faith groups/denominations on their attitudes toward work.
We randomly vary religious identity salience in laboratory subjects to test how identity salience contributes to six hypothesized links from prior literature between religious identity and economic behavior. We find that religious identity salience makes Protestants increase contributions to public goods. Catholics decrease contributions to public goods, expect others to contribute less to public goods, and become less risk averse. Jews more strongly reciprocate as an employee in a bilateral labor market gift-exchange game.
While Islam did not play a part in this study, recent academic studies have sought to include the attitudes toward work in the Muslim world and define an Islamic work ethic. Is the economic success of Israel due to its Jewish culture — and are the economic failures of the surrounding states tied to their Muslim cultures?
And then there is corruption. It is odd the Washington Post article would stress the economic disadvantages of the security check points and trot out an expert to say this is a cause of the problem — some commentators have taken this idea and rather foolishly run with it even further. Why I saw it is odd is that the World section of the Post has featured articles discussing the problem of corruption for the economic, social and political development of the Palestinian Authority. A March 2012 Palestine Public Opinion Poll identified corruption as a significant problem in the PA.
73% say there is corruption in the PA institutions in the West Bank while only 62% say there is corruption in the institutions of the dismissed government in the Gaza Strip. These percentages are similar to those obtained three months ago. In the context of the recent step by the PA in the West Bank to submit corruption cases to courts, we asked the public if it thinks the PA is serious about fighting corruption: 53% said it was serious and 43% said it was not serious.
Is corruption a Muslim problem or a Palestinian problem? I don’t think so. In my own work I have reported on the problems of corruption within the Christian churches of the Palestinian Authority, and have written dozens of stories over the years about corrupt and crooked bishops from the U.S. to Africa.
Also, please hear what I am not saying — I am not saying Israeli security measures do not have some degree of harm for the Palestinian Authority’s economy — I am saying that there are other factors involved that may play as great or a greater role.
And, I am also saying the Washington Post story missed an opportunity to tell us more about Mitt Romney. There is a hundred years of sharply contested scholarship on the intersection of religion and economic advancement. Given Romney’s Mormon faith and its pronounced views on this topic I would have thought that this area would be explored in any story on culture and the economy emanating from the campaign. What we have is a rather tired and predictable story that advances a silly claim by a Palestinian functionary and partisan campaign officials. It is not really worth the time it takes to read.
What say you Get Religion readers? Did the Post miss the story? Was it justified in playing “gotcha” in light of the apparent unhelpful Romney campaign? With five reporters on the story should it have cracked open the covers of the book that formed Romney’s thinking on nations and culture? Or, because I write about religion, do I see it everywhere? Was this really just a Romney gaffe story? Or, has the press decided the trip was a failure and hence everything that arose from it must be deemed a failure?
Pray for conversion of the Middle East, Jerusalem conference urges: The Church of England Newspaper, June 24, 2012 p 6. June 25, 2012Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Episcopal Church in Jerusalem & the Middle East, Islam, Israel, Judaism.
Tags: Christ Church Jerusalem, CMJ, Israel Trust of the Anglican Church
A conference of Middle Eastern Christians and Messianic Jews meeting in Jerusalem has pledged to work and pray for the conversion of the Middle East through building the “kingdom of God” in the Middle East and fostering peace and harmony amongst Christians, Muslims and Jews.
Meeting from 7-12 May 2012 at Christ Church in the Old City of Jerusalem with a grant of support from the Israel Trust of the Anglican Church – a ministry of the CMJ — the “At the Crossroads” conference brought together more than seventy delegates from Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Palestinian Authority, Cyprus, Armenia, Turkey, Europe and North America with worship and presentations in Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, Hebrew and English.
While the bulk of the conference was closed due to security concerns over Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) protests, two talks were opened to the public.
The Vicar of Baghdad, Canon Andrew White and Pastor Ali Pektash spoke to the power of conversion and reconciliation. Pastor Pektash shared his conversion story also, stating that he had been a Muslim and while on pilgrimage to Mecca he had a dream where Jesus spoke to him – sparking his conversion to Christianity and a road that led to the ordained ministry.
The second public address was given by Taysir Abu Saada, author of Once an Arafat Man, who spoke to the power of Christ to reconcile enemies. The love of God, he told the conference, allowed believers to rake risks crossing ethnic, political and religious divides “to work together to expand God’s kingdom of righteousness, peace and joy in this troubled and unstable region,” a statement from the conference reported.
Delegates adopted a six point statement that sought to evangelize the region, work towards piece between Christians, Muslims and Jews, to protect and advocate for persecuted Christian groups, to foster communications amongst the churches, and to “proclaim that ‘Egypt my people, Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my inheritance’ will indeed become a blessing in the midst of the earth.”
“It is all too easy for Christians in the Middle East to become ghettoized due to their minority status and the many ethnic and political divisions,” one conference organizer noted in an email to The Church of England Newspaper.
“Consequently we often fail to see how God is working in our midst. Our focus must extend beyond these conflicts and only the survival of existing Christian communities. Without ignoring the suffering and injustice in so many parts of our region, we should focus on the call of Jesus to expand God’s sovereignty by making disciples, recognizing the crucial role Jewish believers in Israel have in the Great Commission to bless their neighbors with the Good News,” the organizer said.
“ And equally so, the followers of Jesus in the surrounding nations have a unique role in helping Israel become part of the blessing that God intends for this region,” he added.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Tags: Ali Mohamed Shein, Diocese of Zanzibar, Michael Hafidh, Uamsho, Valentino Mokiwa
Church leaders in Tanzania report the government has cracked down on Islamist extremists following two days of rioting in Zanzibar.
Members of the Islamist militant group Uamsho — the Association for Islamic Mobilization and Propagation – took to the streets on 28-29 May 2012 in protest to the arrest their leaders by police. Emails received from clergy in Zanzibar report that militants clashed with police and burned two Christian churches, shutting down Stone Town — the central business and tourist district of Zanzibar.
In a letter printed on 2 June 2012 in the Guardian of Dar es Salaam, three Zanzibari Christian leaders, Bishop Augustino Shayo of the Catholic Church, Bishop Michael Hafidh of the Anglican Church and Pentecostal Pastor Timothy Philemon of the Pentecostal Church, warned that Muslim fanatics were plotting to destroy all churches and church related buildings – schools, convents, cemeteries and heath centers on the island. Members of their churches were receiving mobile text messages warning them to leave the island or face death.
The Indian Ocean archipelago of about 1 million people merged with mainland Tanganyika in 1964 to form the modern Tanzania, but Zanzibar retains its own president and parliament. Tanzania is set to introduce a new constitution in 2014, and Uamsho has urged voters to push for dissolution of the union with Tanganyika.
After meeting with government ministers on 31 May 2012, Archbishop Valentino Mokiwa read a statement to the press on behalf of the country’s Christian leaders. “Our followers are living in fear, because of what happened to our churches some few days,” the Anglican archbishop said, adding “there is also displeasure, on the part [of Christians] over government inaction and failure to take those responsible to court,” he said.
“This is not the first time” he noted, stating that “25 churches have been burned so far in different parts of Zanzibar, and the government is quiet, despite the initiatives taken to report the incidents to the police. We don’t know who should bear the blame.”
The archbishop, who is also chairman of the Tanzanian council of churches, added that government inaction had created the “impression that these acts have government blessing.”
“The government is duty-bound to extensively trace them and bring them to book – in order to restore public trust and confidence in the government,” he said.
Zanzibar President Dr Ali Mohamed Shein responded on 1 June saying his government was “conducting a thorough assessment before taking necessary measures, including the possibility of compensation.”
Speaking to the press, Dr. Shein said the government had banned unauthorized religious meetings, assemblies and demonstrations as a threat to public order. “We will not allow the peace and harmony created by the National Unity Government to be threatened by a few individuals who are using a religious umbrella” to shelter their political ambitions.
An Anglican clergyman who asked not to be named for fear of retribution from extremists told CEN the dispute appears to have died down. Zanzibar “is always fragile and relations between the ruling Muslims and religious minorities touchy,” he said.
“It doesn’t help for the media in general to exaggerate and sensationalize” as it “puts more pressure on the Christians” which “can really cause problems.”
The roots of the current dispute, he said were political. Opposition leaders want an independent Zanzibar. “They’re being particularly problematic during this time of constitutional review,” he clergyman said, adding that at present “Christian leaders are asking for the protections promised by the president” of Zanzibar.
Dr. Shein “has always been a public advocate for religious freedom and was very gracious in his speech last month at the consecration of the new Anglican bishop.”
However, the “situation generally is stable now everything is calm [with] things moving as usual” sources in Zanzibar report. The government has intervened “and they are dealing accordingly with the Muslim group which caused the riot.”
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Akinola warns of a Nigerian jihad from Boko Haram: The Church of England Newspaper, June 10, 2012 p 7. June 8, 2012Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Islam, Persecution, Terrorism.
Tags: Boko Haram, Goodluck Jonathan, Peter Akinola
The former Primate of Nigeria has rejected claims that the Boko Haram insurgency in Northern Nigeria is driven by economic deprivation or tribal jealousies.
Speaking to a congregation that included the country’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, and its political elites, Archbishop Peter Akinola lambasted the country’s parlous political state. Human sin, tribal passions and Britain’s determination to get out of Africa before it had prepared the new nation for independence had led to the present state of affairs.
“Shun all political claims that Boko Haram is not against Christianity. It is,” Archbishop Akinola said on 27 May 2012 in a sermon at the National Christian Centre in Abuja in celebration of Democracy Day.
The war has been “going on since 1966. They are committed to Jihad. You can’t stop them it is their religious obligations. They have been doing it for 36 years; they have not stopped and they won’t stop,” Archbishop Akinola said.
Recent press reports in the West have argued that the Boko Haram insurgency is not, at heart, a religious war. On 24 May 2012 the Voice of America reported that a report by the NGO Human Rights Watch claimed that while the conflict may be along ethnic and religious lines, but the “root of the fighting is often political and economic.”
“We have ignored the truth. Boko Haram must be seen in the right context. It is a continuation of the past,” the archbishop said.
“Boko Haram means Jews and Christians are abomination. They have been unleashing terror since 1966 and they have a mandate. This problem is not peculiar to Nigeria, many other stakeholders are disenchanted but waiting for their time. They want to eliminate infidels which includes you Mr. President,” the archbishop said to the congregation, which included Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan.
Archbishop Akinola warned the country’s leaders gathered for the Democracy Day service that Nigeria had lost its way. “We are still disunited. Leaders are interested in their own, no national identity. We are blood thirty and bloodletting society with no regards for sanctity of life. Nigeria is at war against itself. Selfish politicians are doing all things on basis of political exigency.”
Nigeria’s former colonial master had done the country no favours by its hasty grant of independence, the archbishop said. “A word of truth about our past amalgamation, there was no consent from the South and North. It was done for political and economic gains of the colonials. Our leaders failed to gather the authentic representatives of Nigerians to seek the kind of independent Nigeria they want.”
“This would have led to a new Nigeria,” the archbishop said according to accounts of his speech published in the Nigeria press.
“The euphoria of independence was consequently short-lived,” he said and the “political atmospheres” were now “full of acrimony. There is tribal war. The country has been fragmented with inhibitions to progress.”
The general election of first republic was based on a “faulty census leading to blood-letting that led to the [Biafran Civil War],” he said, as national unity cannot be maintained by “military fiat.”
The 1970s and 1980s in Nigeria were “characterised by unrest, military rule, coup, and armed robbery.” The year 1999 saw the “return of democracy,” but since that time “rather than dealing with the causes, successive governments have been hiding from the truth putting new wine in old bottle.”
“Insecurity has been with us. About 30 crises so far has occurred in the country leading to religious and ethnic cleansing. In 1980 another religious riot with Christians killing took place. In all cases, we have failed to address the causes,” the archbishop warned.
Nigeria’s structural problems were also coupled with the moral failings of its people. “Corruption, the hydra-headed monster, has taken over the soul of Nigeria,” Archbishop Akinola said.
“Officials are stealing us blind,” he said, and they scavenge the country’s “carcass” for their own ends. Government anti-corruption campaigns were “selective” and short lived. The police and judiciary did not have “clean hands” while the country’s universities had become diploma mills giving honours and “questionable titles” to the powerful. All of this “will continue because government pays lip service to the fight against corruption,” the archbishop said.
In his address to the gathering, President Jonathan disputed the predictions of further chaos made by Archbishop Akinola. “Even though people are predicting the disintegration of Nigeria, let me assure you that Nigeria will not disintegrate. Though we have these challenges, but we will succeed,” he said.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Tags: 9/11, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, The Old Curiosity Shop, USA Today
She was dead.
Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell, was dead.
Her little bird — a poor slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed — was stirring nimbly in its cage; and the strong heart of its child-mistress was mute and motionless for ever.
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)
The Anglo-Irish playwright and bon vivant, Oscar Wilde, once observed that “one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”
On the surface, Wilde’s aphorism is wicked. Laughing at the death of an impossibly good child is a heartless act. Yet the strength of Wilde’s remarks — and their repetition to this day — comes not from the discovery that Little Nell’s death was funny. Rather it is the realization that Dicken’s depiction of Little Nell’s death was aesthetically flawed. So over the top, so one-dimensional that the power of the narrative collapsed under the weight of its treacly sentiment. It was bad art.
Reading an article in USA Today entitled: “Mosque projects face resistance in some U.S. communities” elicited the same response from me as Little Nell’s death did for Wilde.
One must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the persecution of Muslims in America as depicted by USA Today. This article is so bad, so one-sided, so inept that its ham-handed attempt to elicit sympathy by condemning prejudice felt by some Muslims in America brought me to tears — of laughter.
The article begins:
CHICAGO – Mohammed Labadi has a lot at stake when the DeKalb City Council votes Tuesday on a request from the Islamic Society of Northern Illinois University to build a two-story mosque.
Labadi, a businessman and Islamic Society board member, wants a bigger mosque to replace the small house where local Muslims now worship. He also hopes for affirmation that his neighbors and city officials have no fear of the Muslim community.
The article offers a protestation by Mr. Labadi of his American credentials — and then notes the zoning commission has approved the request for a new mosque. An inaspicious beginning for an article on prejudice against Muslims — but USA Today has a narrative arc in mind that will not be deflected by the facts in its lede.
The article then takes a bizarre turn. Starting with the plea by Mr. Labadi not to “look at me just as a Muslim, look at me as an American” and to “take the unfortunate stereotypes about Muslims out of the picture” the article then removes Islam from 9/11. It states:
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which were carried out by hijackers from Arab countries, animosity toward Muslims sometimes has taken the form of opposition to construction of mosques and other Islamic facilities.
What is the author trying to say? Is it that 9/11 was really an Arab affair that has spawned unfortunate repercussions against Muslims? That Islam has nothing to do with it?
The article reports on “anti-mosque activity” in more than 25 states since 9/11, citing the ACLU as its source of information, and then quotes the director of the ACLU’s freedom of religion program as saying that some mosque opponents raise concerns about traffic and parking.
A lawyer for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) then enters the story, claiming prejudice — not zoning issues — lay behind the decision by DuPage County, Ill., to block a construction permit for a mosque.
Some DuPage County residents who objected to the permit “raised allegations of terrorism,” Vodak says. “The post-9/11 atmosphere has created a lot of fear and hysteria about Muslim institutions.”
The article does offer the voice of a neighbor to the proposed mosque, objecting to the building being located in a residential area — and then offers anecdotes of zoning concerns over proposed mosques in Connecticut and a successful zoning application in Wisconsin. The article then ends with comments from two Muslims a la Rodney King — “Why can’t we all get along”.
Still, says Othman Atta, the Islamic Society’s executive director, some opponents said the mosque would teach violence and impose Islamic law. “The level of knowledge about Muslims is pretty abysmal,” he says. “People, if they don’t understand something, they tend to fear it.”
Ebrahim Moosa, a Duke University professor of religion and Islamic studies, worries that discrimination against Muslims is growing. “Opposition to mosques,” he says, “is not a misunderstanding, because reasonable people can talk and mutually educate.”
Why the laughter? Why the sniggering? Because this is a mess of an article.
The news reported in this story is that two mosques have received zoning approval and two mosques have been denied zoning approval. The expert commentary offered in this story, however, comes only from those condemning anti-Muslim prejudice and ignorance — nothing from experts on religion and zoning.
A further problem with the story structure is that the article fails to offer any proven examples of prejudice and ignorance. We are offered a few factual crumbs courtesy of the ACLU, but they are not placed in any sort of context. How many mosques have been vandalized? Are Muslim hate crimes on the increase or decrease? Are hate crimes against Jews, Sikhs, Buddhist, Christians on the increase or decrease as well? What sort of Muslims are we talking about? Sunni, Shia, Ismaili, Ahmadiyya? Are mosques backed by Saudi money being built, but not those of other schools?
And CAIR? In an article complaining about the linkage between Islam and terrorism it is a bit much to have a group some members of Congress believe is a terrorist front organization put forward as a source without having any sort of context explaining from whom we are hearing.
This article is full of cliches and stock metaphors and uses these trite devices as well as an appeal to sentiment to advance an argument that it does neglects to support with facts.
Which takes me back to the death of Little Nell. The Old Curiosity Shop presented an unrealistic picture of death. Dickens offered the reader a child who on its death bed is uncomplaining — who as death approaches only increases in earnestness and gratitude for the little she has received in this life. There is no suffering, no pain, no loss. The only action found in the pages describing the death of Little Nell is the fluttering of an innocent bird hoping about its cage as life slips away.
Dickens depiction of death was so unconvincing, so trite and contrived that it was funny. Wilde’s bon mot was not heartless but an apt judgment on aesthetic failure — on the failure of Dickens as an artist in this passage from The Old Curiosity Shop.
While I concede that this article has no pretensions to being art, it too is an aesthetic failure. It is also a professional (journalistic) failure and a moral failure. It seeks not to establish the truth but to prove a point. All it succeeds in doing, however, is to glorify sentiment.
Oscar Wilde in a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas described the sentimentalist as one who
desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it … Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair …. And remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism.
By crafting the story on a foundation of sentiment rather than fact, USA Today fell short in its reporting. There is a story to be told on the acculturation of Muslims in America in the wake of 9/11. What say you GetReligion readers, does this article help tell this story?
Mosque image courtesy of Shutterstock.
First printed in GetReligion.
Tags: L. Ron Hubbard, Louis Farrakhan, Tampa Bay Times
The Tampa Bay Times reports the Pinellas County Florida Board of Education has revoked the license of a charter school that uses a religion-based curriculum after its students test poorly in the state-wide FCAT exams (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test).
By itself this summary is not likely to generate more than local or even parental interest. However the title of the article contains a noun that perked my interest; “FCAT scores at Pinellas charter school that used Scientology ‘study tech’ are among lowest in Tampa Bay”, while the lede pulled me into the story.
DUNEDIN — When Hanan Islam and her management company took control of the struggling Life Force Arts and Technology charter school here last summer, she passed out lesson plans based on the work of Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.
She said Hubbard’s “study technology” would enlighten children and help save the school. But grades from Florida’s standardized FCAT test released Thursday show that, in one year under Islam’s management, Life Force students’ education suffered.
The article did an excellent job in outlining the local issues involved and was able to pull strong quotes from supporters of the school, teachers and the school district. This comment from school district —
“It’s a classic case of how a management company mismanaged this school, was paid an extraordinarily large fee for dismal services, and the ultimate victims were those poor children,” said Dot Clark, the Pinellas County school district’s coordinator of partnership schools.
Islam’s company, Clark added, “promised the world and gave them nothing. … It breaks my heart.”
— is nicely paired with this one from a teacher:
Some blamed students’ poor marks on instability due to Islam’s repeated firings of, as third-grade teacher Lynne Kittredge said, “good, certified teachers, because they wouldn’t accept her Scientology stuff.”
“We worked our butts off. We did after-school, we did tutoring; we weren’t even being paid. But I’m not a miracle worker,” said Kittredge, who was hired in February. “By the time we came in, the best we could do was damage control.”
And stands well with these comments from the school:
Life Force board chairman Louis Muhammad, appointed by Islam in January, defended her management of the school, saying students’ scores would have drastically improved if study tech had been given more of a chance.
He also blamed the low scores on the Tampa Bay Times, saying the newspaper’s coverage of Life Force’s problems “caused confusion and, in other words, hindered the school.”
“You all put out this confusion on religion, and we’re not talking religion: we’re talking technology,” Muhammad said. “If you all had left the school alone, it would have been better.”
This aspect of the article is very well done. I applaud reporter Drew Harwell for doing a thorough job.
But I stopped short of giving full marks as the religion ghosts in this story were rattling their chains. For the casual reader two screamed out for attention: What is a Scientology-based curriculum and are we dealing with Muslim Scientologists?
I have no idea what a Scientology-based curriculum might be. The Washington DC Fox affiliate in 2010 ran a brief story over parent concerns over “study technology” after the DC school district approved the Scientology-based education program. The Tampa Bay Times article reports the school board chairman says this dispute is not over religion but technology. What does Mr. Muhammad mean by that?
And, the names in this story, Mr. Muhammad, Ms. Islam — to my eyes do not seem to belong to a Scientology story.
I checked Mr. Harwell’s past articles for the Tampa Bay Times and learned the failing was not the newspaper’s, but mine. I had come late into the game and had not read his February story that reported on parents complaining about the takeover of the school by the Nation of Islam and Scientologists.
Linking on its website or mentioning its past stories in the body of the article would have helped bring me (and I assume other readers) up to speed on the story. But I should say the Tampa Bay Times has done a superior job in reporting on Scientology and this article is further evidence of their fine work.
I have seldom reported on Scientology as it has not appeared on the radar that frequently in Europe. Reporting on the foibles of the Church of England is also a full time job. But when it does enter into a story my editors have always cautioned me to take special care as the group has a reputation for resorting to litigation when displeased.
What I have not seen before is a practical link between the Nation of Islam and Scientology. The Chicago Tribune reported last year on a speech given by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakahan that touted its benefits for “white people”.
He praised Scientology and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. Farrakhan extolled the virtues of Scientology and its auditing process, which is considered spiritual counseling by its members.
“L. Ron Hubbard is so exceedingly valuable to every Caucasian person on this Earth,” Farrakhan said.
“L. Ron Hubbard himself was and is trying to civilize white people and make them better human beings and take away from them their reactive minds. … Mr. Hubbard recognized that his people have to be civilized,” Farrakhan said to a cheering crowd.
The Nation of Islam is a black-nationalist or empowerment movement that does not allow for white members. Is Minister Farrakhan saying that those unable or unwilling to join the Nation of Islam consider Scientology? Is the Life Force Arts and Technology Charter School dispute a practical working out of this meeting of minds between the Nation of Islam and Scientology? How should reporters develop this story? Or is there even a story to develop?
Setting to one side the controversial public image of the two groups, the Nation of Islam and Scientology do share some common tenets including the place of UFOs in the great scheme of things.
The LA Times states that Scientology’s founder L. Ron Hubbard taught that:
Seventy-five million years ago a tyrant named Xenu (pronounced Zee-new) ruled the Galactic Confederation, an alliance of 76 planets, including Earth, then called Teegeeack.
To control overpopulation and solidify his power, Xenu instructed his loyal officers to capture beings of all shapes and sizes from the various planets, freeze them in a compound of alcohol and glycol and fly them by the billions to Earth in planes resembling DC-8s. Some of the beings were captured after they were duped into showing up for a phony tax investigation.
The beings were deposited or chained near 10 volcanoes scattered around the planet. After hydrogen bombs were dropped on them, their thetans were captured by Xenu’s forces and implanted with sexual perversion, religion and other notions to obscure their memory of what Xenu had done.
Soon after, a revolt erupted. Xenu was imprisoned in a wire cage within a mountain, where he remains today.
But the damage was done.
During the last 75 million years, these implanted thetans have affixed themselves by the thousands to people on Earth. Called “body thetans,” they overwhelm the main thetan who resides within a person, causing confusion and internal conflict.
In the Operating Thetan III course, Scientologists are taught to scan their bodies for “pressure points,” indicating the presence of these bad thetans. Using techniques prescribed by Hubbard, church members make telepathic contact with these thetans and remind them of Xenu’s treachery. With that, Hubbard said, the thetans detach themselves.
In the Chicago Tribune report of Minister Farrakhan’s 2011 speech we find this statement:
The keynote address, titled “God Will Send Saviours,” capped a weekend of workshops focused on health, preparing for natural disasters and unidentified flying objects. The Nation of Islam believes in a UFO called “the wheel” or “the Mother Plane.”
Farrakhan has described a 1985 religious experience in which he ascended into a flying saucer and heard the voice of Elijah Muhammad predicting events that came to pass.
A speech by Minister Farrakhan printed in the Final Call, the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, develops this theme:
The final thing is the destruction. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad told us of a giant Mother Plane that is made like the universe, spheres within spheres. White people call them unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Ezekiel, in the Old Testament, saw a wheel that looked like a cloud by day, but a pillar of fire by night. The Hon. Elijah Muhammad said that that wheel was built on the island of Nippon, which is now called Japan, by some of the original scientists. It took 15 billion dollars in gold at that time to build it. It is made of the toughest steel. America does not yet know the composition of the steel used to make an instrument like it. It is a circular plane, and the Bible says that it never makes turns. Because of its circular nature it can stop and travel in all directions at speeds of thousands of miles per hour. He said there are 1,500 small wheels in this Mother Wheel, which is a half mile by-a-half-mile. This Mother Wheel is like a small human built planet. Each one of these small planes carry three bombs.
What say you GetReligion readers? Are we seeing a meeting of minds? Or is this a local issue whose religious connotations can be exploited for sensationalist purposes? Or is this news?
First printed in GetReligion.
Iranian truths, Iranian lies: Get Religion April 19, 2012 April 19, 2012Posted by geoconger in Bahá’í, Get Religion, Iran, Islam, Press criticism.
Tags: Hillary Clinton, taqiyya
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called upon Iran last week not to proceed with its nuclear weapons program, warning that deployment of atomic weapons by Teheran would destabilize the Middle East, a story prepared by AFP reported.
Speaking at a dinner in Norfolk, Virginia Mrs. Clinton was quoted as saying:
There is no clear path. We know that a nuclear-armed Iran would be incredibly destabilizing to the region and beyond. A conflict arising out of their program would also be very destabilizing
The story continues in this vein: further warnings from the West, denials from Iran and so forth. It is rather a snooze in that this story has been written several dozen times before. I wrote a few of these for the Jerusalem Post at one time — but the Secretary of State was Condoleezaa Rice. Times, words and speakers change, but the same messages have been offered up by Obama and Bush Administration speakers.
What has this to do with GetReligion’s mandate? Where’s the hook, you ask? It comes towards the close of the story which the Telegraph entitled “Hillary Clinton warns nuclear-armed Iran would be ‘destabilising’.”
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in February that possession of a nuclear bomb “constitutes a major sin” for Iran, reiterating a fatwa – or religious edict – that he made in 2005.
Clinton revealed that she has been studying Khamenei’s fatwa, saying that she has discussed it with religious scholars, other experts and with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“If it is indeed a statement of principle, of values, then it is a starting point for being operationalised,” Clinton said in Norfolk.
As this was a wire service story that reported a speech given by the Secretary of State, the opportunities for AFP to develop the leads offered by Mrs. Clinton’s words are slight. However, I would have expected the Telegraph to have investigated this fatwa, which Commentary magazine called a “ruse” that had bought the Iranians five more weeks to develop the bomb.
Neither was the editor-in-chief of the London-based Arab newspaper, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, impressed by the U.S. government’s study of the fatwa. In an editorial entitled “The Security Council for Fatwas,” Tariq Alhomayed hammered Iran and stated Mrs. Clinton was naive and out of her depth —- not knowing that in Islam a believer may follow the principle of taqiyya to lie when facing danger.
it is absurd to talk about an Iranian fatwa when negotiating with Tehran, for countries – like individuals – have reputations and histories that cannot be ignored, therefore the reputation of a bad country, like the reputation of a bad individual, is not based on statements or fatwas, but rather past deeds! Therefore, when US Secretary of State Clinton talks about the Iranian fatwa, we can be certain that she has not heard about Iranian taqiyya [the practice of precautionary dissimulation emphasized in Shiite Islam whereby adherents may conceal their religion when under threat]!
… the claim that we can rely on a fatwa that prohibits the possession of nuclear weapons, reminds us of the famous Arab proverb: “the thief was asked to swear [his innocence], and he swore [falsely] and said “yes, this is the way out [of the predicament]!” If this fatwa is one of the merits of dialogue with Iran, then by God we are truly facing a disaster in the region!
I’ve written about the practice of taqiyya in GetReligion before, and have noted the Western press’s seeming inability to comprehend this practice. It may not matter in the great scheme of things if the Telegraph or the New York Times is unaware, or loathe to report on taqiyya. But when governments are clueless — that spells trouble.
As an aside, I had been thinking about the general question of fatwas before I read this article — and perhaps I chose it for that reason. A contact in Pakistan sent me a copy of a fatwa released by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that called upon Muslims to combat the Baha’i faith. My friend (an Anglican bishop in Pakistan) translated the letter, written on stationary from Khamenei’s office, as saying:
In the name of God All members of the Baha’i cult are guilty as being infidels and are regarded as “Najes” (an Islamic term for being inherently unclean/dirty), thus people are advised to avoid proximity in food and other things because of their contagious nature and it is paramount that the believers combat the schemes and devious nature of this misled cult.
I mention this in that the author of this Baha’i fatwa is the author of the no-nukes fatwa.
A wire service story is almost always limited by space and written for a general audience. I cannot fault AFP for not developing Mrs. Clinton’s remarks. But it would have improved the story tremendously, changing it from just another in a list of worthy diplomatic stories (a polite phrase for tedious) if the press had asked some questions. Mrs. Clinton consulted religious scholars: which ones? She spoke with the prime minister of Turkey: what did he, an Islamist, tell her? What is the weight of a fatwa from Khamenei? Is he credible? Is it comparable to a papal encyclical that must be followed, or is it an earnest wish? What is the implication of a London-based Saudi-backed newspaper saying taqiyya is something “those Shi’ites” do?
It is a shame that these angles were not addressed in the news sections, but only picked up in opinion pieces.
This a classical example of a religion ghost. The outward subject is nuclear proliferation. But the DNA of this story is one of religious restraint over the production and use of nuclear weapons.
Perhaps the author was a aware of the concept of taqiyya, but chose not to address the subject? In Western eyes taqiyya is inherently dishonorable. Yet how does one report upon this subject through Western eyes in a Western newspaper without loosing sight of the cultural and religious environment that produced a moral teaching that holds that the ends justify the means and that lying can be a moral good? Is this even a fair question?
What say you GetReligion readers?
Addendum: MEMRI reports that the no-nukes fatwa never existed — it was a propaganda ruse by the Iranian government. Curiouser and curiouser.
First printed in GetReligion.
Koran-Offensive in Die Welt: Get Religion, April 18, 2012 April 18, 2012Posted by geoconger in Free Speech, Get Religion, Islam, Press criticism, Terrorism.
Tags: Die Welt, Koran, Salafists
Who says the Germans don’t do comedy well? An article in a recent issue of Die Welt — “Koran-Offensive alarmiert Deutschlands Parteien” shows this not to be so. As I read the article, which tip-toes round the issue of radical Islam in Germany, my mind harkened back to an episode of the television series Seinfeld.
In the “Koran-Offensive” we know what Die Welt is talking about when it mentions Salafists or radical Muslims, but the paper will not say what it means. It sidles around the issue, performing a verbal silly walk that implies radical Islam is un-German, small minded, uncultured and a generally bad thing. Die Welt knows that we know, but is reluctant to say this aloud.
What we do have is a story about the distribution of Korans that is slightly strange. The story arc tells us that freedom of religion and expression is a good thing, freedom to distribute Korans during Holy Week is a bad thing. Or, is it that those doing the distribution are the bad thing? The article is not quite sure.
It is like “The Outing” episode of Seinfeld. Whilst seated at a cafe, Jerry, George and Elaine notice that a young woman in a nearby booth eavesdropping. In a spirit of fun, Elaine speaks to Jerry and George intimating that they are a secret gay couple. The woman reappears shortly thereafter when she arrives at Jerry’s apartment on assignment from her student newspaper. During the interview, the interplay between Jerry and George strengthens her belief the two are a gay couple. They then recognize her from the coffee shop and deny they are gay, closing each of their denials with the catch phrase “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
The humor in this episode came from the interplay between George’s and Jerry’s fear of being taken for homosexuals against their fear of being homophobic. The audience knows the truth about Jerry and George, but takes pleasure in their panic.
The Die Welt article follows the same line in its Good Muslim/Bad Muslim story.
Here is the lede, taken from the English translation provided from Worldcrunch.
After more than 300,000 copies of the Muslim holy book were reportedly distributed in German cities during Christian holy week, major political parties have announced that they will push for closer monitoring of Salafist groups advocating fundamentalist Islam.
The Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union, known as the Union parties, and Alliance ‘90/The Greens, have all declared their concern about the massive free distribution of the Koran launched by Ibrahim Abou Nagie, a Cologne-based businessman and preacher with Palestinian roots. According to Abou Nagie, the 300,000 copies were distributed at information booths and over the Internet, with the purchase of one copy entitling the buyer to another Koran free.
The timing of the action is thought to be a particular provocation for Christians, as thousands of the copies of the Koran were distributed around Good Friday and Easter.
Abou Nagie — one of Germany’s most influential Salafist leaders — has been charged in Cologne with inciting the public to commit illegal acts and disturbing the “religious peace.” The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has been monitoring Salafist groups, which is why this distribution of religious literature – normally not a cause for concern – is being seen in another light.
The article then shifts to comments from spokesmen from the major political parties, each of whom offered a version of “Not that there’s anything wrong with that (Islam).”
“I view the distribution campaign of free copies of the Koran by Salafists with great concern,” said an SDP spokesman, but added she had “fundamentally nothing against the distribution of religious literature as long as this is not associated with encouraging criminal acts or defamation.” The Green party spokesman told Die Welt. “Distributing the Koran is certainly not forbidden by the law, but this should be monitored very carefully by the police.” And a spokesman for the governing CDU/CSU parties called for “an urgent stop” to be placed on the “machinations of the growing radical Salafist movement in Germany.”
Germany’s churches were described as “maintaining a low profile”. An EKD spokesman stated that “Fortunately, in Germany it is not forbidden to distribute religious literature,”but “Of course I hope that in countries where Islam is the religion of the majority that the distribution of Bibles were allowed.” While a Catholic spokesman said the Salafists were not interested in dialogue, and view tolerance and any form of integration for Muslims as toxic.
Only the Greens seemed prepared to speak up. Its spokesman answered the question I had — why was this a problem — by saying:
the Koran campaign was “very worrisome, because calls to violence and terror have repeatedly risen from these radical Muslim splinter groups, which is why it is entirely justified for them to be watched by security authorities.”
A Green politician of Turkish descent, Cem Özdemir, added that he had a:
“problem with any religious group that puts their vision of the world above basic law, the Constitution and human rights. So that also goes for the Salafists, who do encourage violence, and whose ideology is a front for Islamic terrorism.” It was apparent, he said, “that the strategy underlying this campaign is to represent themselves as the mouthpiece of Muslims and to propagate what they would claim is the true Islam. The Salafists can’t be allowed to get away with this.”
Moderate Muslim groups said the right things in Die Welt’s narrative.
“The Koran is not some PR flyer to be handed out like mass merchandise,” Ayman Mazyek, the chair of the Central Council of Muslims, told the Catholic News Agency. Kenan Kolat, the chair of Germany’s Turkish community, said the action reminded him of Jehovah’s Witnesses. While it was not forbidden to distribute the Koran, Kolat told Die Welt that “the question to be asked are: Are the Salafists acting aggressively? Are they disturbing people?”
And a spokesman for the group giving out 300,000 Korans said?
We don’t know as their voice does not appear.
On its face the idea that distributing 300,000 Korans is a threat to public order in an open democracy seems ludicrous. The article asserts those handing out the books are not good, or acculturated westernized Muslims, but does not say what it is about the Koran getting into the hands of Germans that makes it a danger to public order.
This question is made even more curious by the Seinfeld answer given by those opposed to its distribution. “We’re against giving out the Koran, not that there is anything wrong with that.”
The answer is not the Koran, of course, but the people handing it out. But there is a reticence to make this clear save for the Greens. The BBC’s coverage of this story managed to include the objections voiced by political leaders but offered a few words of context that cleared away the absurdist Die Welt story structure.
Last summer, the president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Heinz Fromm, said: “Not all Salafists are terrorists. “But almost all the terrorists we know about had contacts with Salafists or are Salafists themselves.”
Is this part of the cultural cringe we see in some quarters — an ease at criticizing Western norms and culture, but a reticence to speak out about the “other”? Should Die Welt have made it clear at the top of its story the suspected link between Koran distribution and terrorism? Or would that have vilified Muslims as a whole, for the actions of a radicalized minority?
How should the press handle this? Who speaks for Islam?
What say you GetReligion readers?
First printed in GetReligion.
Anger over Saudi anti-Christian fatwah: The Church of England Newspaper, April 13, 2012 p 7. April 18, 2012Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Islam, Persecution.
Tags: All India Christian Council, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah. Saudi Arabia
Church leaders in India have joined the call made by Catholic and Orthodox leaders in Europe to condemn the call to tear down all Christian churches in the Arabian Peninsula made by the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia.
The All Indian Christian Council (AICC) said the comments made by Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah were “bigoted” and “dangerous” for the millions of Christians living Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states.
Last month the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia told a group of Kuwaiti clerics that it was “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region.” His remarks came as Kuwait’s parliament began debate over legislation banning the construction of new Christian churches. Over 3.5 million Christians live in the Arabian Peninsula including one million Filipino Roman Catholics and several hundred thousand members of the Church of South India along with members of other orthodox churches and protestant denominations.
Saudi Arabia forbids Christian worship and its rigorous anti-Christian policing has drawn condemnation from Western governments. The AICC’s general secretary, John Dayal, called on the Indian government to protect its citizens and for other “civilized countries to ensure that the nations of the Arabian Peninsula clearly reject the Wahhabi imam’s bigoted statement.”
Archbishop Mark of Yegoryevsk, the head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s department for overseas churches called the Saudi sheikh’s statement “alarming, while the Roman Catholic bishops’ conferences of Germany and Austria said the statement by the Saudi sheikh was an unacceptable denial of human rights for the millions of “overseas foreign workers” in the region.
See no evil, report no evil: Get Religion, February 2, 2012 February 2, 2012Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Islam, Press criticism, Religion Reporting.
Tags: Anne Marie Waters, British Humanist Society, censorship, militant Islam, National Secular Society
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If an Muslim radical makes death threats against a university audience in London, and the BBC does not report it, did it really happen?
There is a sense of unreality about the reporting of militant Islam in the U.K. The BBC is regularly chastised for its biases and omissions in reporting on Islamic militancy — while some tabloids are taken to task for whipping up anti-Muslim hysteria. However, one can usually count on the corporation making mention of an incident.
While I was researching background materials for an article, I happened to page through the website of the National Secular Society (NSS) — a humanist group in the U.K. I came across a 17 January 2012 press release entitled “Islamist stops university debate with threats of violence.” I had not heard about this incident, and when I googled the name of the lead actor in this drama I imagine you did not hear about this either as the Independent was the sole broadsheet to cover the story — and they buried the article in the crime section.
According to the NSS press release:
A talk on sharia and human rights by NSS Council Member Anne Marie Waters’ at Queen Mary University of London was cancelled at the last moment because of an Islamist who made serious threats against everyone there.
Ms Waters was due to give a talk on behalf of the One Law for All campaign on 16 January but before it started, a man entered the lecture theatre, stood at the front with a camera and filmed the audience. He then said that he knew who everyone was, where they lived and if he heard anything negative about the Prophet, he would track them down.
The man also filmed students in the foyer and threatened to murder them and their families. On leaving the building, he joined a large group of men, apparently there to support him. Students were told by security to stay in the lecture theatre for their own safety.
The Independent reported the same set of facts and interviewed a number of witnesses and Ms. Waters. The headline fairy seems to have been at work that evening at the Independent as the title of the story was sanitized. “Man threatens students at debate” is not likely to pull many readers interested to learn more.
“This is the first time this has happened, it’s really very frightening and you don’t know what else it’s going to turn into,” she said. “I’m not worried about repercussions, but I’m worried about it happening again.”
While the head of the British Humanist Association stated:
“Free expression, the free exchange of ideas and free debate are hallmarks of an open society; violence and the threat of violence should never be allowed to compromise that, especially in our universities.”
No comments from Islamist groups, or from experts on censorship was appropriate, or an exploration of why someone would commit a criminal act in the name of Islam. Yet, I am not that worried about the brevity of the Independent story and am pleased that something made it into print that reported on this assault on free speech and civil liberties.
Let’s look at this another way — imagine if a professed Christian activist entered the Queen Mary University lecture hall and threatened death to those attending a lecture disparaging the Christian faith. Do you think that this would not be spread across the British press? How many column inches would Polly Toynbee or Richard Dawkins take to denounce the incident and the belief system behind it?
But this is Islam — so we have silence.
In Peter Godwin’s wonderful memoir of life in Zimbabwe, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, he cites a phrase of Winston Churchill’s that speaks to this moral cowardice:
… appeasement is feeding the crocodile, hoping it will eat you last.
Perhaps it was an oversight, perhaps it was a cringing, craven self-censorship, perhaps the A-team of reporters was not back from the Christmas holidays. Whatever it may be, I can see no reason to spike this story.
Crocodile photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
First published in GetReligion.
Sharia court orders expulsion of Christian clergy from Kashmir: The Church of England Newspaper, January 27, 2012, p 6. February 2, 2012Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of North India, Islam, Persecution.
Tags: Chander Mani Khanna, Kashmir, Sharia Law, Srinigar
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Two priests convicted of blasphemy by an Indian sharia law court have been expelled from the state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K).
On 19 January 2012 the Deputy Grand Mufti of Srinigar, Muhammad Nasir-ul-Islam held a press conference to report that a sharia court had decided that the Rev. C.M. Khanna of the Church of North India’s All Saint’s Church in Srinigar, Roman Catholic Mill Hill missionary Fr. Jim Borst and two lay catechists, Gavoor Massi and Chandra Kanta must be expelled from J&K – the only Muslim majority state in India.
The four Anglican and Roman Catholics were “guilty of luring the Muslims especially young boys and girls to Christianity by exploiting their financial conditions, promoting immorality and moral degradation, exploiting serious health ailments by facilitating different kind of help to Muslims against the conversion from Islam to Christianity,” Nasir-ul Islam told the press conference according to the Kashmir newspaper the Rising Kashmir Daily.
The sharia court had “imposed a life time ban” on entering J&K, he said, adding that the state government had agreed to enforce the sharia court verdict.
Mr. Khanna, who has left Srinigar for the safety of the state’s winter capital Jammu, told UCANews the sharia court’s actions had put his life in peril, and the “government has not done anything to protect us.”
On 20 January the Greater Kashmir – the state’s largest circulation English language newspaper — published an article allegedly written by one of Mr. Khanna’s converts that offered a lurid account of his conversion. Mr. Khanna and his wife were accused of plying the young man with alcohol, narcotics, sex, money and the opportunity of moving to California if he became a Christian. The article entitled “Apostasy Unveiled” culminates with the fantastical passage:
“There were candles and an empty glass on the table. As the prayers went on, someone brought a jug full of red liquid and poured it into the glass. It was swine blood which we all had to drink. Khanna took some sips, then his daughter and I joined the others.”
The 64 year old Anglican minister has denied the charges proffered by the Sharia court, but has had to leave Srinigar after 24 years of service.
The Church of North India’s Bishop in Amritsar, the Rt. Rev. P K Samantaroy denounced the sharia court’s order saying “nobody has the right to expel us from the state or country.”
He told UCANews that it was “unfair” to question the integrity of Christians who “have played a major role in building peace and harmony in the state.”
However, Mufti Nasir warned Christians from trying to return to the state. He called upon the government to take over the administration of Srinigar’s Anglican and Roman Catholic mission schools and to combat the “dirty and sinister designs” of Christian missionaries.
The mufti appealed to his “fellow Muslims to remain vigilant and guard that such elements don’t reappear in the state.”
Canadian honor killing and Islam: Get Religion, January 31, 2012 January 31, 2012Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Islam, Multiculturalism, Press criticism.
Tags: CNN, Globe &Mail, honor killing, National Post, Shafia case, Star
An Ontario jury has convicted three members of the Shafia family — father, mother and son of an Afghan family living in Quebec — of murder in what has become Canada’s most notorious “honor killings” case. There has been some great crime and court reporting in the Shafia case, and the articles in the major newspapers are really quite good
But some of the analyses have fallen short and in a few cases come across as special pleading that there is only one legitimate view in Islam on these issues, when experience tells us that there is not a single view on the morality of honor killings in Islam — just as there is no single Islam.
“Pay no attention to the facts in these cases, trust our experts” is the line taken by CNN on this issue. While it is important to hear why some Muslim scholars believe honor killings are not condoned in Islam, one is left wondering why we do not hear from those who support this barbaric practice, or who can explain why it is such a widespread belief.
Do a little digging and you will find these voices. Do a little more digging and you will see that the legal codes of a number of Muslim-majority states do not in practice punish honor killings, or punish their perpetrators far less severely than they do others convicted of murder.
Lets look at the news reports from Canada and then the piece from CNN.
The lede sentences in the article entitled “Judge condemns ‘sick notion of honour’” in the Globe & Mail sets the scene nicely:
The murder trial of three Afghan-Canadians accused of drowning four relatives in a so-called “honour killing” came to a cathartic end Sunday afternoon as the defendants were convicted on all charges.
Before the trio were led away in handcuffs and shackles to begin automatic sentences of life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 25 years, each proclaimed their innocence, and they were visibly upset.
Mr. Justice Robert Maranger of Superior Court was unmoved. Their crimes stemmed from “a sick notion of honour that has absolutely no place in any civilized society,” he told the packed courtroom.
… “It is difficult to conceive of a more despicable, more heinous crime. The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your completely twisted concept of honour, a notion of honour that is founded upon the domination and control of women.”
Staring hard at the defendants, the judge said: “There is nothing more honourless than the deliberate murder” of the three teenaged girls and their step-mother.
Other Canadian press accounts are equally spirited. The Toronto Star opened its account, entitled “Shafia family members guilty of first-degree murder,” with:
This is blessed Canada. They won’t be “hoisted onto the gallows,’’ But they’re going to prison for life.
Mohammad Shafia: Guilty on four counts of first-degree murder. Tooba Mohammad Yahya: Guilty on four counts of first-degree murder. Hamed Shafia: Guilty on four counts of first degree murder.
In our country, men and women are equal. A female’s life is worth as much as a male’s. In our country, femicide is homicide.
The National Post’s columnists took an even stronger line:
By using the words “honourless” and “shameless”, [Judge] Maranger was tossing back at Shafia some of the very epithets he used so often when speaking about his dead daughters.
The mass honour slaying of Zainab, Sahar and Geeti — respectively 19, 17 and 13 — and 52-year-old Mohammad, Shafia’s other, and sadly barren, wife, ranks among the worst in the sordid history of honour crimes.
Let me set the terms of the debate for this post. What I am not saying is that honor killings occur only in Islam. They occur in other religions as well.
Nor am I saying that all Muslims support honor killings. They do not, as CNN has reported.
Nor am I saying the question of religion was ignored. The major newspapers for the most part bit the bullet and mentioned the I-word — how the killers’ interpretation of their faith shaped by the cultural mileau in which they were formed could have provided a sanction for their crimes.
My question is how religion was used to explain motive in this story and whether a blanket denial that Islam supports honor killings is sufficient when the Star reported during the trial that a wiretap recorded the killer justifying his deeds by reference to his faith.
To his wife, Shafia allegedly assured that the right actions had been taken: “I say to myself, you did well. Were they to come back to life, I would do it again. No Tooba, they messed up. There was no other way. They were treacherous. They betrayed us immensely. There can be no betrayal worse than this. They committed treason on themselves. They betrayed humankind. They betrayed Islam. They betrayed our religion. They betrayed everything.”
Some articles rule out of bounds any discussion the influence Islam may have on honor killings. In other words, an appearance of unequal treatment is created where Islam is given a pass that reporters would not give to other faiths.
GetReligion reader Ray McCalla directed my attention to an article in CNN entitled “Islam doesn’t justify ‘honor murders,’ experts insist” as an example of this tendency. Mr. McCalla wrote that he kept waiting for CNN:
to find a voice who does think that honor killings are justified by Islam. But no, it was just an apologetic piece, defending “true,” moderate Islam. The subtext seems to be that the perpetrators are acting on a perverted version of Islam or just backwards culture. But is that true, or just what the Western media want to be true?
His point is well taken. The CNN story states:
Leading Muslim thinkers wholeheartedly endorsed the Canadian judge’s verdict, insisting that “honor murders” had no place and no support in Islam.
“There is nothing in the Quran that justifies honor killings. There is nothing that says you should kill for the honor of the family,” said Taj Hargey, director of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford in England.
This is a a good strong quote and the rest of the CNN story continues similar statements and assertions. But which constituencies do these CNN-selected Muslim scholars represent? Do all Muslim scholars share these views? What is the difference in authority between a scholar, a sheik, an imam, a mufti, a kadi? How do their views, teachings or fatwas influence the faith of Muslims?
In a 4 Dec 2008 interview with Al-Hayat TV, Wafa Sultan argued that honor crimes arose from within Islam.
The subjugation of women reduces them to a level lower than beasts – not to mention the laws of inheritance, testimony in court, the beating of a wife who refuses to go to bed with her husband, and ‘honor’ crimes. “Muhammad said in a hadith: ‘Three things spoil one’s prayer: a woman, a black dog, and a donkey.’ Do they ever give this any thought? Do they realize that Allah chose the female body for his greatest invention – creation itself? Wouldn’t it be moral to bestow upon the female body a certain holiness, instead of viewing it as impure?”
Should we take Dr. Sultan seriously? She is a Syrian-born physician and human rights activist who now lives in Southern California and was profiled by Time magazine in 2006 as one of the “100 men and women whose power, talent or moral example is transforming our world.”
How about Ayaan Hirsi Ali? Writing in the Huffington Post Canada about the Shafia case, Ms. Ali stated:
The experiences of the Shafia sisters are becoming all too familiar. A recent spate of honour violence perpetrated in the United States exemplifies the tragic incompatibility between Western liberties and radical Islam.
Can we assume that there is a common moral code across faiths? If the reporting does not lay out why these killers interpreted their faith as allowing them to kill their children, the reader is left to conclude that the killers are moral monsters, are fanatics or insane. Radical Islam, though repellent to Western sensibilities, appears to justify honor crimes, Ms. Ali argues — should not reporters attempt to explain why this is so?
First published in GetReligion.
Christians targeted in Christmas bombing campaign in Nigeria: The Church of England Newspaper, December 23, 2011 p 7. December 29, 2011Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of Nigeria, Islam, Persecution.
Tags: Ben Kwashi, Boko Haram
Islamist militants are suspected of being behind a pre-Christmas terror campaign in the Northern Nigerian city of Jos. Boko Haram – a militant Muslim group that has pledged to convert all of Nigeria to Islam – has threatened to disrupt the Christmas holidays, the Nigerian media reports.
On 10 Dec 2011, three bombs exploded as crowds gathered to watch a Real Madrid – Barcelona football match at a public television viewing centre. One man was killed and 11 injured, while a fourth bomb was defused by police.
In the early hours of the following morning, a woman was killed and two others were wounded when gunmen attacked a Christian village in Kagora.
Speaking on the persecution of Christians in Nigeria at a conference sponsored by Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Archbishop Ben Kwashi of Jos observed that sectarian violence was unknown in the city until 1987.
In that year a Hausa militant group was organized and the administration of the city divided in two, with a Muslim majority area created for the north of the city. By 1997 tensions between the majority Christian population and the Muslim minority – who wielded political power through the support of the military government – began to erupt and fighting ensued.
Over 2000 people were killed in sectarian fighting in 2001, the archbishop said, and 2010 saw a “huge massacre” of Christians at the hands of Islamist militants. The Boko Haram insurrection saw the introduction of terror bombings of Christian sites in the city, with the first attack launched over Christmas 2010.
Archbishop Kwashi stated there has “never been an arrest” in the attacks on Christians in Jos, while the results of government investigations into the violence have been kept secret.
“If the killing of Christians is not called by its name,” he told the CSW meeting, this “crime will continue to go on under the name of religion.”
“If it is declared criminal” by the government, the “persecution will be reduced,” he said.
Speaking in response to last week’s bombings, CSW’s Advocacy Director Andrew Johnston said, “The security situation in both Plateau and Kaduna States are of great concern. Security services must remain vigilant regarding threats to disrupt Christmas celebrations in Jos, and take proactive steps to secure areas in both Plateau and Kaduna States where attacks are likely to occur. ”
Acceptable lies and the New York Times: Get Religion, December 23, 2011 December 24, 2011Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Islam, Israel, Press criticism.
Tags: Israel, New York Times, taqiyya, Yasser Arafat
The New York Times has an extraordinary article that extols the virtues of lying and doublespeak in a recent “Memo from Jerusalem.” Well, you might ask, what of it? How does a dodgy story on the Arab-Israeli conflict fall within the ambit of GetReligion? What is the religion/journalism hook you ask?
To which I respond: lying is a sin or bad manners or ethically challenged behavior from a Western perspective. Lying is not always a sin in Islam — that is to say lying to non-Muslims is not a sin, bad manners or ethically challenged behavior. The Times ties itself in knots trying to excuse lying by the Palestinians, even going so far as to raise instances of Israelis behaving badly. However, the moral equivalence argument expressed in the Times-patented insouciant world-weary tone, which holds that as both sides are dissemblers we should not cast aspersions, does not work here.
Ignorance of Islamic moral standards, or perhaps the reluctance to raise the precept of taqiyya has placed the Times in the position of endorsing cant.
Take a look at this 20 Dec 2011 article entitled “Finding Fault in the Palestinian Messages That Aren’t So Public.” The editorial voice of the story states that news agencies that translate into English the statements made in Arabic by Palestinian leaders are doing a disservice to the cause of peace.
The Times argues that statements in English that are tailored to a Western audience by Palestinian leaders that speak of peace and reconciliation should not be juxtaposed against by statements made in Arabic by the same Palestinian leaders to their constituencies that call for the destruction of Israel and death to Jews.
The article begins by observing that:
A new book by an Israeli watchdog group catalogs dozens of examples of messages broadcast by the Palestinian Authority for its domestic audience that would seem at odds with the pursuit of peace and a two-state solution.
This claim is “not new” the Times notes. As:
For years, many Israeli and Palestinian analysts have said that what Palestinian leaders tell their own people in their own language — as opposed to English-language statements tailored to opinion in the rest of the world — is the truest reflection of their actual beliefs. This has had the effect of further entrenching the sides to the conflict and undermining confidence that it can ever be resolved.
Let’s stop and think about what the Times has just said. It is true, the article concedes, that Palestinian political leaders are saying one thing to the West and another to their own people. The lede sentence in the story soft peddles the results of this lying: it “would seem at odds” with the peace process. However, the follow up sentence states this explicitly: it has had “the effect of further entrenching” Palestinian revanchist views.
The article quotes one of the lead authors of the study on Palestinian media doublespeak on why this is problematic, but the story then pivots with a sentence that sets the theme and context of the article.
Some Israelis struggle with the practice of monitoring the Palestinian news media, acknowledging the importance of knowing what is being said in Arabic, yet disturbed by how its dissemination is exploited by those not eager to see Israel make concessions.
The article offers examples of this doublespeak, but then introduces contrary Israeli and Palestinian voices that criticize the book. This criticism, however, is not that the results of the study are untrue, but that these truths are inconvenient to the political agenda of the Israeli left, which the Times also conflates as being co-equal to the cause of peace.
The Times then offers its critque.
Some of the examples publicized by the Israeli monitoring group are old ones that have been repeated over the years, and some of its interpretations are arguable.
A Palestinian critique is offered.
“This is not a serious attempt to solve the problem of incitement,” said Ghassan Khatib, the spokesman for the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank. Mr. Khatib said that the authority had significantly reduced the level of incitement on the Palestinian side in recent years. “The question is,” he said, “are the Israelis improving or reversing in this regard?”
And the story concludes with voices from the Israeli left.
“There is peace making and there is peace building,” said Itamar Rabinovich, who served as Israel’s chief negotiator with Syria and as Israel’s ambassador in Washington, explaining why the contentious messages in Arabic are so damaging. The lack of peace building, he said, is part of the failure of the Oslo peace process that began with accords signed in 1993 but has not yet produced a Palestinian state.
In one of the most egregious examples of Palestinian doublespeak, Yasir Arafat spoke in a mosque in South Africa in May 1994, only months after the signing of the Oslo accords, and called on the worshipers “to come and to fight and to start the jihad to liberate Jerusalem.”
As the ambassador to Washington at the time, Mr. Rabinovich said he found himself in the awkward position of having to explain to anyone who would listen that jihad, usually translated as holy war, could also mean a spiritual struggle, in order to justify continuing the peace process.
Still, he said, it is not by chance that those focusing on Palestinian incitement and publicizing it are “rightist groups who use it as ammunition.”
Where is the religion hook then? It comes in the form of a religion ghost — meaning that there is a religion element to this story that is omitted. And this omission is crucial, I believe, in understanding the story.
As it is written, the Times piece is a defense of sophistry and comes across as being morally dubious at best. By excusing the doublespeak the Times engages in the “soft bigotry of low expectations” — to quote a favorite of its editorial board, President George W. Bush. It belittles those who expose this duplicity by arguing that truth telling will block a two-state solution.
Are the Palestinians masters of moral duplicity then, as the Times would have us believe? Or are they acting according to the lights of their own moral and ethical system?
While the Qur’an is against believers deceiving other believers—for “surely God guides not him who is prodigal and a liar”— deception directed at non-Muslims, generally known in Arabic as taqiyya, also has Qur’anic support and falls within the legal category of things that are permissible for Muslims.
Ibrahim explains that Shia communities living as minorities in Sunni areas were permitted to dissemble about their religion in order to avoid persecution. But among the Sunni community,
… far from suffering persecution have, whenever capability allowed, waged jihad against the realm of unbelief; and it is here that they have deployed taqiyya—not as dissimulation but as active deceit. In fact, deceit, which is doctrinally grounded in Islam, is often depicted as being equal—sometimes superior—to other universal military virtues, such as courage, fortitude, or self-sacrifice.
Palestinian leaders have used taqiyya in their war with Israel. In an incident dismissed in the Times article as being “old” news, Ibrahim reports on a speech by Yasser Arafat that offers an example of this strategy.
More recently, and of great significance for Western leaders advocating cooperation with Islamists, Yasser Arafat, soon after negotiating a peace treaty criticized as conceding too much to Israel, addressed an assembly of Muslims in a mosque in Johannesburg where he justified his actions: “I see this agreement as being no more than the agreement signed between our Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh in Mecca.” In other words, like Muhammad, Arafat gave his word only to annul it once “something better” came along—that is, once the Palestinians became strong enough to renew the offensive and continue on the road to Jerusalem.
The implications of this way of thinking offend Western sensibilities, Ibrahim writes.
Yet most Westerners continue to think that Muslim mores, laws, and ethical constraints are near identical to those of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Naively or arrogantly, today’s multiculturalist leaders project their own worldview onto Islamists, thinking a handshake and smiles across a cup of coffee, as well as numerous concessions, are enough to dismantle the power of God’s word and centuries of unchanging tradition. The fact remains: Right and wrong in Islam have little to do with universal standards but only with what Islam itself teaches—much of which is antithetical to Western norms.
What then are we to make of this story about Palestinian doublespeak? The Times concedes it exists, but down plays its importance and gives prominence of place in its article to those who see the exposure of lies as being harmful to the cause of peace.
Would ascribing all divergence between what the Palestinian leaders say to the West and what they tell their own people to taqiyya answer the questions raised in this story? Or does cant play a role in any of this? What say you GetReligion readers?
But where ever the line may be found between lying to advance the faith and cant, the omission of this religion element to the story by the Times does a disservice to its readers.
First printed in GetReligion.
Arab Spring a security threat to Britain, Defence Chief warns: The Church of England Newspaper, December 23, 2011 p 6. December 23, 2011Posted by geoconger in Al Qaeda, British Foreign Policy, Church of England, Church of England Newspaper, Islam.
Tags: Arab Spring, David Richards
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
The Arab Spring could lead to outbreaks of Islamist unrest in Britain, the Chief of the Defence Staff has warned.
In a lecture given to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) on 14 December 2011,General Sir David Richards said radicalization born of the regime changes across the Middle East might well pose a domestic security threat for the U.K.
However, the collapse of the euro was Britain’s most immediate danger. “I am clear that the single biggest strategic risk facing the UK today is economic rather than military,” Sir David said.
“This is why the eurozone crisis is of such huge importance,” he said, as “no country can defend itself if bankrupt.”
In his year in review address to the RUSI, the defence chief highlighted Britain’s strategic risks and opportunities. The United States’ new strategic focus on Asia had lead to a refinement of the special relationship between the U.S. and U.K. “I know this does not mean it will turn its back on Europe and NATO but countries this side of the pond need to think through what this means to us,” he said.
“NATO is the bedrock of our security,” Sir David said, and had “guaranteed peace in Europe for 60 years and, as Libya and Afghanistan demonstrate, enables us to project power efficiently in concert with others to pursue our national interests.”
But a changing world will see “new groupings” emerge. “The most obvious is our alliance with the French,” he said, adding that military ties were now stronger than the “Entente Cordiale of a century ago.”
The military alliance with France was a “vehicle for joint action. Libya sealed this for us and demonstrated the benefits to Britain, Europe and NATO of having a solid Franco-British core.”
He added that the UK “will require other carefully chosen alliances over the coming decade through which to influence the strategic landscape and help determine the outcome of fast moving crises, all at minimum cost. “
The nature of the risks facing Britain was also changing. “What is happening in Syria is in many experts view becoming a proxy conflict between Shia Iranians and Sunni Arabs,” Sir David said.
There was also the “risk that the Arab awakening leads to fissures and internal conflict that could be exported, including militant Islamism,” he said.
Departing from his prepared speech the general added that militant Islam and the Arab world have “diasporas reaching back to this country, as does Pakistan and other states struggling with instability.”
BBC Double Standards on Abuse: Get Religion, December 16, 2011. December 17, 2011Posted by geoconger in Abuse, Get Religion, Islam, Press criticism, Roman Catholic Church.
Tags: BBC, Orla Guerin
There are times when the BBC is beyond parody. It is so relentlessly awful, biased and reflexively p.c. that many viewers become inured to its excesses. Yet Orla Guerin’s report from Pakistan is quite extraordinary — even for the BBC.
Take a look at the video and story entitled “Pakistan police free chained students in Karachi” and see if you see what I see.
The print version of the story from the BBC website begins:
About 50 students have been freed from a religious school in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, where some were being kept in chains, officials say.
The male students, some as young as 12, were reportedly beaten, deprived of food and kept in what police say amounted to a torture chamber.
Some parents paid for their children to attend the school known as the “jail madrassa” because their sons were addicted to drugs or involved in crime.
What type of religious school was it? We don’t know yet. Should we assume that being Pakistan, it is a Muslim school? No. The country’s leading private schools — the institutions where the elite educate their children are run by the Catholic Church and the Church of Pakistan. One can find Christian schools all across Pakistan, many with no Christian students. However, the next sentence gives us some hints:
At least two people helping run the madrassa have been arrested, but the head escaped, police said.
Ah, its a madrassa — you know what that is don’t you? Is it a Hindu, Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, Unitarian, Quaker madrassa? The story continues:
Students have described the brutal regime inside the seminary – some spoke to the media while still wearing their chains.
O.K., its a seminary. I went to one of those. Perhaps these are particularly strict Episcopalians. I was once punished by the dean for wearing golf spikes to prayers — there was a foursome ahead of me that would not allow me to play through. But while I was admonished for my gaucherie, the students at this seminary were “beaten 200 times” while others were told they would be “sent to join the jihad.” Perhaps that’s another clue.
The article states:
But the discovery of chained students of a religious seminary who claim they were being motivated to join the ranks of Taliban has come as a shock. These claims are still being verified as there seems to be no evidence of any weapons training being given there.
The words madrassa and seminary are used throughout the rest of the story, but it is not until the penultimate line that we are treated to the word “Islamic.”
The video report is even worse — it makes no mention of the world Islam or Muslim at all. When Guerin covered the Middle East for the BBC she was often pilloried for her biased reporting. Burying the Muslim angle of the story is shoddy reporting. Can you imagine a story about abuse at a Catholic school from the BBC not mentioning the world “Catholic” until the very end of the story? Compare the handling of religion in the Pakistan story to this one broadcast three days later entitled “Institutional Dutch Catholic abuse ‘affected thousands’.
Tens of thousands of children have suffered sexual abuse in Dutch Catholic institutions since 1945, a report says.
The report by an independent commission said Catholic officials had failed to tackle the widespread abuse at schools, seminaries and orphanages.
I find the BBC’s handling of the Pakistan abuse allegations troubling as well. While it reports the abuse, it juggles the facts of the abuse with their explanation, so that the explanation is given prominence of place. It gets the last word.
Many parents had left their children at the madrassa for treatment, believing that the harsh regime would aid rehabilitation – some of these parents told the BBC they were happy with the result. They say they were chained to prevent them for escaping.
“If a child has issues such as bad company, smoking and drugs then we have no choice but to get him admitted in such places,” Mohammed Qasim, the father of one student, told the BBC.
In her broadcast report, Guerin follows this pattern. She begins her story by saying there were “disturbing” reports of children as young as 8 being beaten, and notes that a local education official states the basement where the students were kept resembled a “torture cell.” But she then responds to a question from the newsreader by reporting that locals called the school the “jail madrassa”. She adds that this was one of its “attractions” for some parents, who “paid for the privilege” of sending their troubled sons to the school and “some of these parents even provided the chains.”
How does she know the mind of the parents? Was this a reform school or a seminary? Were no unhappy parents to be found? The arrangement of the arguments and lack of contrary voices gives the impression the BBC is explaining away the abuse. If the parents aren’t bothered, why should we be? The abuse was one of the attractions of the school after all, the BBC reports.
Nor am I arguing that the BBC should omit mention of the Catholic angle to the Dutch abuse article. It is an important component to the story. I am saying the BBC appears to have two standards when it comes to reporting religion related abuse. Play up the Catholic theme – play down the Muslim theme.
There are different reporters, different editors, different departments of the BBC involved such that it is not possible to have a one to one comparison. However, the way in which religion was handled in this Pakistani abuse case gives every appearance of a double standard.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
First printed in GetReligion.
Evolution and Islam: Get Religion, November 30, 2011 December 1, 2011Posted by geoconger in Get Religion, Islam, Press criticism.
Tags: Daily Mail, evolution
The Daily Mail has brought to its readers’ attention a timely twist to the conflict between faith and science. The article: “Muslim medical students boycotting lectures on evolution… because it ‘clashes with the Koran’,” reports the tensions felt by Muslim medical students who are divided between adherence to their faith and the pursuit of their profession.
However, readers expecting an updated version of “Inherit the Wind”, substituting Islam for Christianity and London for the American South, will be disappointed. There is a great idea for a story here, but no story as far as I can tell.
The article opens with a bang, and telegraphs the Daily Mail’s editorial view (the students are villains, the professor the hero):
Muslim students, including trainee doctors on one of Britain’s leading medical courses, are walking out of lectures on evolution claiming it conflicts with creationist ideas established in the Koran.
Professors at University College London have expressed concern over the increasing number of biology students boycotting lectures on Darwinist theory, which form an important part of the syllabus, citing their religion.
Similar to the beliefs expressed by fundamentalist Christians, Muslim opponents to Darwinism maintain that Allah created the world, mankind and all known species in a single act.
Steve Jones emeritus professor of human genetics at university college London has questioned why such students would want to study biology at all when it obviously conflicts with their beliefs.
Everything is here for a screenplay. It includes great characters: Muslim medical students, a lefty professor, and a mysterious Muslim scholar Harun Yahya. The photo of Yahya provided by the Daily Mail could have come from central casting. Forget Claude Akins as Rev. Jeremiah Brown (the preacher in the 1960 Stanley Kramer version of the film) Harun Yahya could be played by a mature Jack Nicholson.
We have a clash of ideals — the tenets of Islam versus evolution, and a change of scene to London. And in the background we have England’s unease in dealing with the demands of its growing population of immigrant Muslims. Throw in a clash of generations with the clash of cultures and an attractive female lead and we have a modern morality play. But that movie is not this story.
The Daily Mail article is unbalanced, un-sourced, and heavy handed. Neither good entertainment nor good journalism. Following its strong opening Prof. Jones speaks.
“I had one or two slightly frisky discussions years ago with kids who belonged to fundamentalist Christian churches, now it is Islamic overwhelmingly.
“They don’t come [to lectures] or they complain about it or they send notes or emails saying they shouldn’t have to learn this stuff.
“What they object to – and I don’t really understand it, I am not religious – they object to the idea that there is a random process out there which is not directed by God.”
So far so good — pithy, hard hitting comments from the professor. I was initially surprised, however, by placement of the professor’s comments first. When a reporter presents two sides to an argument he sometimes gives the less favored side the first chance to speak. That allows the reporter’s favorite the opportunity to speak in rebuttal. (“God tells me the earth ends tomorrow” claims Fred Loonie. “Not so,” replies Prof. John Serious. “The Science is against it,” said the Nobel laureate ….)
But surprise turned to astonishment when I read on and found no student or Muslim voice in rebuttal or explanation. After the professor’s comments comes a statement that an imam received “death threats for suggesting that Darwinism and Islam might be compatible.” This is followed by:
Sources within the group Muslims4UK partly blame the growing popularity of creationist beliefs within Islam on Turkish author Harun Yahya who, influenced by the success of Christian creationists in America, has written several books denouncing Darwinist theory. Yahya associates Darwinism with Nazism and his books are and videos are available at many Islamic bookshops in the UK and regularly feature on Islamic television channels.
And the article closes with a word from Richard Dawkins.
Evolutionary Biologist and former Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins has expressed his concern at the number of students, consisting almost entirely of Muslims, who do not attend or walk out of lectures.
That’s it. Somebody (known as Sources) in a group called Muslims4UK (who are they?) says the fault lies with a Turkish author who draws his insights from the work of American creationists. How does Muslims4UK know this? What does Mr. Yahya say about all of this? How does Prof. Dawkins know that students are walking out of classes at University College London because of their religious beliefs?
What we have here is the statement of one professor that some Muslim students are cutting his classes — and the professor believes this is because their faith is in conflict with the school’s syllabus. The absence of any contrary voice in explanation might just as well mean the professor was boycotted because he is a boring lecturer.
The Daily Mail commits the further sin of assuming Muslims speak with a single voice and that Islam rejects the teaching of evolution. While Hamas may believe that Darwinism is a nefarious plot by Jews to destroy religion, other Muslims believe Islam and evolution are compatible. A 2004 Guardian article that discussed the teaching of creationism in British schools quoted Dr Khalid Anees, president of the Islamic Society of Britain, as saying:
There is no contradiction between what is revealed in the Koran and natural selection and survival of the fittest. However, Muslims do not agree that one species can develop from another.
The journal Science reported that while belief in Darwinian evolution was not common in the Muslim world, the scientific communities of many Muslim nations backed the teaching of evolution in state schools. The 21 June 2006 InterAcademy Panel “Statement on the Teaching of Evolution” was endorsed by the national science academies of Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, Senegal, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.
Saying there is a single Muslim voice on evolution is as false as saying there is a single Christian view. Some conservatives Christians reject evolution, but the Catholic Church does not. While some Anglicans believe in creationism, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, does not. He told the Guardian he opposed teaching creationism in state schools.
“I think creationism is … a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories … if creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories I think there’s just been a jarring of categories … My worry is creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it.”
The shame of it all is that there is a real story in here — but not the one the Daily Mail is reporting. If the premise of the story is true, that Muslim medical students are boycotting classes on human evolution for religious purposes, then it is important to learn why and how such a radicalization took place. What has happened in British higher education that has converted Muslim students to an extremist view of their faith? A view rejected by the scientists from across the Muslim world.
All in all, this is a mess.
Photo of Charles Darwin courtesy of Shutterstock - Jose AS Reyes
First printed in GetReligion.
Moral cowardice and Mohammad: Get Religion November 2, 2011 November 2, 2011Posted by geoconger in Free Speech, Get Religion, Islam, Persecution, Politics, Press criticism.
Tags: Charlie Hebdo, Daily Mail, Jyllands-Posten, Le Nouvel Observateur, Sharia Law
Get ready GetReligion readers for a new round of righteous indignation, moral cowardice and sloppy reporting about Islam. There will be a cartoon of Mohammad — quelle horreur — on the cover of the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo. The magazine is set for distribution on newsstands today, 2 Nov 2011.
My colleagues at GetReligion have written extensively about reporting on images of Mohammad. Articles on Everybody Draw Mohammad Day, South Park, and the Jyllands-Posten cartoons have raised questions about the quality of reporting and unwarranted suppositions about Islam. And although we are only in the first days of this news cycle, the same errors, moral cowardice and surrender to the forces of religious extremism and censorship are cropping up in this latest cartoon controversy.
The editors of Charlie Hebdo — a lowbrow political humor magazine akin to Private Eye — held a press conference on Monday in Paris to announce that the Muslim prophet Mohammed would be this week’s guest editor and the magazine renamed “Sharia Hebdo” for this issue in honor of the occasion.
The French wire service AFP filed this dispatch from the front lines following the press conference:
“In order fittingly to celebrate the Islamist Ennahda’s win in Tunisia and the NTC (National Transitional Council) president’s promise that sharia would be the main source of law in Libya, Charlie Hebdo asked Mohammed to be guest editor,” said a statement.
The weekly has been rebaptised Sharia Hebdo for the occasion, and will feature on its cover a picture of Mohammed saying: “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter!”
On the back page, a picture of Mohammed wearing a red nose is accompanied by the words: “Yes, Islam is compatible with humour.”
The cover was circulating on social media such as Twitter on Tuesday, with many users incensed and describing it as “puerile”.
The weekly’s publisher, known as Charb, rejected accusations that he was trying to provoke.
“We feel we’re just doing our job as usual. The only difference is that this week, Mohammed is on the cover and that’s quite rare,” he told AFP.
Le Nouvel Observateur — a Paris-based weekly with a circulation of over half a million, it is generally considered the most prominent French-language general news magazine (think Time in its heyday) — ran a story late Monday evening (with a photo of the offending cover) on its website under the title “Quand ‘Charlie Hebdo’ devient ‘Charia Hebdo’.” This story drew upon the original AFP report for the details, and added a few color quotes from French social media sites. By the end of the day about two dozen French-language newspapers and broadcasters had their own stories up on the cartoon controversy — with most displaying the cartoon. And being France, opinions ran the gamut from praise to condemnation.
The story began to spread and at midnight Eastern Daylight Time on Monday night the Worldcrunch news service posted a translation of the Observatuer story illustrated with a copy of the offending issue. However, within hours the Mohammad cartoon disappeared. The article was now illustrated by by picture of a back issue of Charlie Hebdo. Was it copyright concerns or cowardice that led to the spiking of the cartoon?
English language stories began to appear but without the cartoon. The BBC ran a brief item by midday. The Telegraph ran first the AFP story and then its own re-write. By day’s end, the Daily Mail ran the first detailed report entitled “French satirical magazine set to spark outrage by naming Prophet Mohammed as editor-in-chief”.
The Daily Mail’s story was robust, damning both the French and radical Islam (no surprise there). It led with: “A leading French magazine is set to provoke fury around the world by calling itself Sharia Weekly and pretending that the Prophet Mohammed is editing it.”
The article set the scene well, but closed badly:
Islamic law forbids any depiction of the prophet, even positive ones, to prevent idolatry.There are some six million Muslims living in France – the largest group of its kind in western Europe. While many have welcomed the fall of despots like Muammar Gaddafi following the Arab Spring revolts, many fear that they will be replaced by extreme Islamist governments.
There may not have been space available to flesh out the consequences of Muslim reactions, or to touch upon the past cartoon controversies. The story would have been improved with a word or two on this point. But it too played the coward, running a cover from a back issue of Charlie Hebdo instead of the Mohammad cover to illustrate the story.
And no, Islamic law does not forbid depictions of Mohammad. As my colleagues at GetReligion have pointed out there is no one Muslim law, nor common view on this topic. Here is a gallery of Mohammad images in Western and Turkish art collections.
Silenced, a 2011 book on the collision between Western concepts of free speech and Islam by Paul Marshall and Nina Shae notes:
There are numerous representations of Muhammad in historic Muslim art. Such works are housed in the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace. Images of Muhammad appeared in illuminated manuscripts dating from as early as the thirteenth century and as late as the eighteenth century.
Sunni Islam, in modern times, has prohibitions against depicting the Prophet or his companions. Sunni theologians at Al-Azhar University continue to prohibit his portrayal, as does the Muslim Brotherhood, and iconoclastic theology has been promoted with particular vigor by the conservative Wahhabi sect, supported by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Shia tradition is less stringently opposed to such depictions. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Iraq, a prominent Shia cleric, suggests on his website that portraying the Prophet is not problematic as long as the depiction is respectful. A primary reason for barring images of Muhammad is the prevention of idolatry…
Yes, I agree the Charlie Hebdo cartoons are puerile. But aesthetic considerations should not be grounds for censorship. Gustave Doré illustrations of Mohammad for Dante’s Inferno are as offensive to the Wahhabist Muslim as is Charlie Hebdo’s juvenile stunt. Nor am I persuaded that the self-censorship on display is intellectually or morally credible.
In 2009 the Yale University Press cancelled the publication of a scholarly book on the Mohammad cartoons after the school’s administration intervened. The university defended its cringing cowardice in a press release. While Yale was “institution deeply committed to free expression” publishing cartoons or “other illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad” ran “a serious risk of instigating violence.”
Writing in Slate, Christopher Hitchens deplored Yale’s mendacity and its misuse of the word“instigate”. One instigates violence by actively encouraging and abetting it, not by engaging in lawful acts of communication. Lawful or innocent actions can spark violence. But society is not subject to mob rule. Maintaining public order is why we have police forces.
This story may have legs. French President Nicolas Sarkozy will have a tough time winning reelection in 2012. The Socialist challenger François Hollande is playing on economic discontent in France, and is touted to win. However, if the latest Mohammad cartoons spark rioting in the Muslim banlieues, it will be a political gift to Sarkozy (as well as to Marine Le Pen of the National Front).
European Muslim militants have manufactured outrage about Mohammad cartoons in the past — remember it was not until a group of Danish imams toured the Middle East complaining about the Jyllands-Posten Mohammad-with-a-bomb-in-his-turban cartoon that rioting ensued. Danish embassies were attacked and a trail of murder and mayhem spread across the Muslim world that ultimately left some 200 people dead. The Assad regime and the Muslim Brotherhood, among others, have facilitated riots over past cartoons. Whether it is in their political interests to do so now is a calculation that will be made in the coming days.
In his 1946 essay, “Why I Write”, George Orwell stated, “every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism.” This is the duty of a free press. Though Stalinism and Fascism no longer have a place in Western intellectual life, the cant, hypocrisy and moral dishonesty they represented remain part of our intellectual and philosophical lives. And it is in this work, in challenging the orthodoxies of left and right, that journalism achieves its moral purpose.
Does the omission of Mohammad cartoons serve this moral good? No, it does not.
Addendum: In the hours between writing this story on Tuesday evening and publication on Wednesday morning the Charlie Hebdo story entered a new phase. The offices of the magazine were fire-bombed early this morning. No group has yet claimed responsibility or other actions against the magazine or its distributors been reported so far.
First published in GetReligion.
Tags: Guardian, Hinduism, Jainism
After me everybody … “Hindus do not worship cows.”
Repeat please … “Hindus do not worship cows.”
One more time like you really mean it … “Hindus do not worship cows.”
It is the caped crusader’s sidekick who cries “Holy Cow”, not the sadhu.
Hindus venerate cows. There is a difference.
The Observer — the Sunday edition of the Guardian newspaper in London — doesn’t appreciate the distinction. Nor does it appear to be fully on board about a number of religious dietary laws. But it does have an excruciatingly hip article in its lifestyle section entitled “Religion and food: Lord knows, they don’t mix.”
Written in a jocular, off-hand style this article offers the philosophical musings of a food writer on the dietary laws and food customs of some of the world’s major faiths. It is also a silly little piece whose treatment of religion is puerile, offensive and profoundly ignorant of the subjects it seeks to address. I am not complaining mind you. Critics need stories like this. When a quality newspaper like the Guardian is willing to throw a slow pitch down the center of the plate it is churlish of me to complain. Let’s take our place at the plate.
There are lots of good reasons for cutting down on meat; Jesus really isn’t one of them. Not that the Catholic Church would agree. A few weeks ago the UK’s bishops declared that they would be encouraging their congregations to give up flesh on Fridays as a way to “deepen… the spiritual aspects of their lives”. Organised religions have form where this sort of thing is concerned. This summer also saw the publication of Kosher Modern, a cookbook designed to make the stringent dietary rules of observant Jews – no pork, no shellfish, no mixing of milk and meat – an opportunity rather than a constraint. A few years ago, a Welsh Hindu community went to court (unsuccessfully) to save a bull called Shambo, marked down for slaughter because he had tested positive for bovine tuberculosis. Hindus don’t eat beef. They worship the animals. The Muslims don’t eat pork. The Buddhists are vegetarians and the Jains are strict vegans who won’t even touch root vegetables because of the damage it does to the plants.
From this I can reach only one conclusion: God is a seriously picky eater. And yes, I know, the Jains and the Buddhists don’t have an overarching deity per se, but you get the point. The divine is marked by a palate that would shame a three-year-old brought up on crisps and Sunny Delight.
From this point forward in the article the author provides his interpretation of these dietary laws, noting that he is a “head-banging atheist” and consequently a “Very Bad Jew”. I am not concerned with the author’s views on the merits of religion or dietary laws. His sentiment: “Worship however and whatever you wish, but don’t expect me to respect you for it,” is not the subject of this critique. What concerns me are the statements of fact.
Let’s go through these one by one in order of veracity.
“Muslims don’t eat pork.” Yes.
“Jews – no pork, no shellfish, no mixing of milk and meat.” Yes … but.
The author’s interpretation as to why Jews keep kosher: “Because it defines difference. It sets them apart” — would not meet with universal approval amongst all rabbinic scholars.
England’s Catholic “bishops declared that they would be encouraging their congregations to give up flesh on Fridays as a way to “deepen… the spiritual aspects of their lives”. Yes and no.
Effective 16 Sept 2011, Roman Catholics in England and Wales are to abstain from eating meat on Fridays as an act of penance. Those who do not eat meat normally should abstain from some other food. The bishops stated:
“Every Friday is set aside by the Church as a special day of penance, for it is the day of the death of our Lord” … the Bishops’ Conference wishes to remind all Catholics in England and Wales of the obligation of Friday Penance. The Bishops have decided to re-establish the practice that this should be fulfilled by abstaining from meat.
The Catholic Church in Britain is going back to meatless Friday’s as a mark of penance. No the bishops are not “encouraging their congregations to give up flesh”, it is an obligation. And they are not to give up “flesh”, but meat.
“Jains are strict vegans.” No.
Jains are “strict” vegetarians but not all Jains are vegans. Vegetarians do not eat meat, fish, or poultry. Vegans, in addition, do not consume animal by-products such as eggs, dairy products, or honey. Guided by the principle of ahimsa (non-harm) some Jains in the Indian diaspora have adopted a vegan lifestyle out of an ethical concern over Western factory farming practices. Their holy texts do not prohibit the consumption of dairy products and Jains may consume milk, curds and clarified butter (ghee).
“Buddhists are vegetarians.” No.
Not all Buddhists are vegetarians. The Buddha was not a vegetarian, and he did not prohibit eating meat. Some schools of Buddhism interpret his ethical strictures so as to discourage meat eating. Roughly speaking among the two major Buddhist traditions, the Mahayanists are vegetarian and the Theravadins are not. There are exceptions to this dictum. Ceylonese monks of the Theravadin school are often strict Buddhists, whilst amongst Tibetan and Japanese Buddhists of the Mabayanist school vegetarianism is rare.
“Hindus don’t eat beef. They worship the animals.” No.
Hindus don’t worship cows. We respect, honor and adore the cow. By honoring this gentle creature, who gives more than she takes, we honor all creation … Gandhi once said, “One can measure the greatness of a nation and its moral progress by the way it treats its animals. Cow protection to me is not mere protection of the cow. It means protection of all that lives and is helpless and weak in the world. The cow means the entire subhuman world.”
Looking at the box score, 2.5 answers rights, 3.5 answers wrong. This would have prompted a Holy Cow! out of Harry Caray.
I appreciate the audience for this article is the home team Guardian reader. But it does help not to be infantile when posing as l’enfant terrible. When you mock the religious sensibilities of others in a superior tone it helps to know what you are talking about. The Guardian doesn’t.
Archbishop backs a secular South Sudan: The Church of England Newspaper, Aug 26, 2011 p 7. August 30, 2011Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Episcopal Church of the Sudan, Islam.
Tags: Daniel Deng, Salva Kiir
First published in The Church of England Newspaper.
The Primate of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan has called upon Muslim leaders in South Sudan to set aside sectarian concerns and work towards building a free and tolerant nation.
Speaking at a dinner held by President Salva Kiir of South Sudan at the State House in Juba on 20 August for Muslim leaders in Africa’s newest nation, Archbishop Daniel Deng called upon Christians and Muslims to work together for the common good.
Fighting between the Arab Muslim north and the African Christian/animist south has been constant since Sudan gained its independence in 1956. Two civil wars left millions dead and displaced in the south, but culminated in a 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement which led to the Republic of South Sudan’s independence on 9 July, 2011.
A major source of dissension between North and South during the civil war had been the imposition of Sharia law upon the south by the Khartoum government. The new republic has adopted a secular constitution and civil code, removing Islam from its court system.
In his keynote address, Archbishop Deng called upon President Kiir to create a national religious council which would facilitate dialogue and foster cooperation between the faiths. Interfaith dialogue would also serve to stabilise the new nation, removing religious passions from the political sphere.
President Kiir called for the South Sudanese Muslim community to organize themselves in the wake of the break with Khartoum, and to build relations with the Christian majority.
“Here in South Sudan there is no difference between Christians and Muslims. In our new nation we need unity and development; we have not left you (Muslims) out,” President Kiir said, according to an extract of his speech printed in the Sudan Times.
“Discrimination, marginalisation and many things happened during the war, but it will not happen again in the new South Sudan, whether you are red, white or black, this is our country, you cannot discriminate against me because of my colour. Any South Sudanese has the right to stay here,” the President said.
He also gave his “blessings for the establishment of the South Sudan Religion Council” as proposed by Archbishop Deng, saying he welcomed such a move.
The President also disputed a claim made by the Akhir Lahza newspaper in Khartoum that had been reprinted across the region that claimed that a son by his fourth wife, John Salva Kiir, had converted to Islam on Independence Day. President Kiir noted this was untrue as he has had neither a fourth wife nor a son called John.
Say ‘no’ to Sharia law, say bishops: The Church of England Newspaper, June 24, 2011 p 8. June 29, 2011Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of North America, Church of England, Church of England Newspaper, Islam.
First published in The Church of England Newspaper.
Church leaders in the US and UK have called upon their governments to take a stand against Sharia law,
On June 9 the former Bishop of Rochester urged the government to support legislation outlawing the use of Sharia law in Britain when it conflicts with English law, while an American bishop has written to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voicing his dismay over NATO negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Bishop-elect Julian Dobbs of the Anglican Church in North America, and founder of the Church and Islam Project, told Mrs. Clinton that too many people were willing to ignore the implications of Sharia law and believe that Islam is a religion of peace.
“If negotiating peace with the Taliban is now part of US strategy in Afghanistan, I petition you to urgently consider the plight of Christians who are currently the target of inexcusable and indefensible atrocities perpetrated by the Taliban, all in accordance with the US sponsored constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan,” wrote Mr. Dobbs on June 18.
The ACNA leader denounced US complicity in the persecution of Christians by the Afghan Government of Hamid Karzai. “In an increasingly virulent campaign to win ‘hearts and minds’ by proving their loyalty to Islam,” the Karzai government was now targeting Christian converts.
While NATO forces “protected their capital and outlying provinces against revitalized Taliban incursions, the Karzai regime continued arresting native Afghan Christians; holding many of them behind bars today facing possible execution for ‘apostasy’,” Mr. Dobbs wrote, noting that “an outpouring of indignation and protest on this issue from those who enjoy religious liberty in the West is long overdue.”
On June 9, Bishop Michael Nazir Ali told the House of Lords Sharia law had no place in Britain, as it “inherently unequal in its treatment of men and women.”
Speaking in support of the Arbitration and Mediation Services (Equality) Bill introduced on June 7 by Baroness Cox, Bishop Nazir Ali said that while Britons enjoyed freedom of religion, “at the same time we have a very long tradition of people being equal under the law.”
The bishop noted that the ‘problem” with Sharia was that it was “is inherently unequal for certain kinds of people. Muslims and non-Muslims are treated unequally. Similarly, men and women are treated unequally.
‘So if Sharia is recognised in any way in terms of the public law in this country, that introduces a principle of contradiction in the body of the law which will cause problems for the country and for people who will suffer, particularly women,” he said.
Claims that allowing Sharia law to be enforced in family law cases would upend Western jurisprudence. “Bigamy is still a crime in this country. Would it then be only a crime for some, or for all? Equality before the law is immediately compromised,” the bishop said, adding that in divorce, child custody, and inheritance issues, secular law treats the parties equally while in Sharia law the “man’s position remains dominant.”
Bishop Nazir Ali told the House “we need to make sure that people have free access to the courts and equal protection from the state, as far as their fundamental rights are concerned.”
US Middle East policy naïve, bishop charges: The Church of England Newspaper, June 17, 2011 p 7. June 18, 2011Posted by geoconger in Church of England, Church of England Newspaper, Islam, Politics, Terrorism.
First published in The Church of England Newspaper.
The former Bishop of Rochester has roundly condemned US President Barack Obama’s May 19 speech on the Middle East, calling it naïve and insubstantial.
In an article printed on the website of the National Review, a conservative American political magazine, Bishop Michael Nazir Ali stated the president’s euphonious phrases on ‘hope’ and ‘change’ for peace in the Middle East were lovely to hear, but amounted to little more than “sugar coating.”
To Dr. Nazir Ali’s ears, the speech was not written for an American audience, but to assuage Muslim opinion. “Some scholars have written about the dhimmi mentality, i.e., a subservient attitude developed towards Muslim rulers by Christian, Jewish, and other communities that were allowed to survive, but under heavy restrictions, in the Muslim world. It has sometimes been held that the West’s response to events in the Muslim world betrays a similar mentality, brought about by fear. Was the president’s speech an example of this?,” he asked.
The president’s optimism that the death of Osama bin Laden would see the “end of radical Islam” was unduly optimistic, and “extremist Islamism is now so decentralized” the death of the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks “will have little effect.” Bin Laden’s death “may in fact lead to his becoming an icon or a martyr in exactly the way that the president does not wish.”
The president’s description of the revolts across North Africa and the Middle East as mostly “non-violent” would not be shared by Egyptian Christians “whose churches have been burned, whose young people have been killed, and whose women have been abducted,” the bishop said.
The benefits of democracy, touted by President Obama as one of the new growths of the ‘Arab Spring’ would likely see a tyranny of the majority. “Unless there is a strong charter of liberty that safeguards the rights of women and non-Muslim communities, democracy on its own may prove chimerical,” he said.
Bishop Nazir Ali welcomed the “president’s claim that America’s current policy in the region is not to support despotic regimes that deny people their fundamental freedoms,” but noted this “rhetoric sounded a little hollow in the absence of any reference in the speech to Saudi Arabia, a country which continues to deny its citizens religious freedom and freedom of movement, and to deny equality of opportunity to women.”
What was missing from the speech, the bishop said, was any statement that liberty was not a gift from the state, but a gift from God. “I would have welcomed an acknowledgment from the president of the Biblical basis of the idea, expressed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, that women and men are endowed with certain inalienable rights by their Creator.”
“This is the true basis for any struggle to have human equality affirmed and respected,” Bishop Nazir Ali said.
Anglican ‘no’ to Sharia banking in Nigeria: The Church of England Newspaper, June 2, 2011 June 2, 2011Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of Nigeria, Islam, Politics.
First published in The Church of England Newspaper.
Church leaders in Nigeria have denounced the introduction of Sharia banking in the West African nation, saying the introduction of religion into the financial services sector violates the law and will further divide the country along sectarian lines.
On May 8 the Diocese of Ughelli released a statement calling for the government to force the Central Bank of Nigeria to back down from its proposal to issue licences to Sharia banks.
The Ughelli synod noted “with suspicion the haste with which approval was granted for the issuance of a licence for Islamic banking in Nigeria, without any known or overt legislative support from the National Assembly.”
Sharia banks were banned by law and “could provoke negative reactions from other Nigerians who are not practising Muslims,” the leaders of the Delta State diocese said.
On Jan 13, 2011 the Central Bank of Nigeria released an official circular setting the “Framework for the Regulation and Supervision of Institutions Offering Non-Interest Financial Services in Nigeria,” stating the new banks must operate under Sharia law in order to be granted a licence.
Created in the 1970’s in Pakistan, the modern practice of Islamic banking follows conventional banking practices, except that it is governed by Muslim Sharia law and its Fiqh al-Muamalat (Islamic rules on transactions). The proposed Nigerian Sharia banks would be permitted to take non-interest bearing deposits and to issue Islamic mortgages and loans.
The plan would allow depositors to take shares in the bank while loans would be structured according to Islamic law. Instead of loaning money to a buyer to purchase a home or car and pay the bank back over time with interest, the bank would purchase the goods in its own name at a higher-than-market price. The bank then holds title to the asset as the buyer makes payments until the loan is paid.
An attorney for one of the groups opposed to move told the Nigerian Compass that while it was within the rights of the Central Bank to regulate the financial sector, “but with this new guideline, what they have simply done is to shut out Buddhists, Animists, Atheists, Christians and others from Non-Interest Financial Institution business by saying you must be Sharia-compliant before you can engage in this type of business or to get licence.”
“Nobody is against Islamic Banking or Muslims but what we are saying is that you can’t tell me to be Sharia-compliant to engage in this business in a secular state. There is Islamic banking in Europe and other places, but you can’t find it in their laws that you must be Sharia-compliant” in order to receive a government licence.
Central Bank governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi rejected the charges the new code violated the law and broached the line between church and state. “There is nothing called Sharia banking,” he told Next last week in Abuja. “There is non-interest banking or Islamic banking, which is a financial product all over the world. This is the only country in the world that I know that Islamic banking is being seen as a religious issue,” Mr. Sanusi said.
Nigeria’s 1991 Banking Act forbids banks from using the words “Christian, Islamic, Muslim, Koranic or Biblical in their names. The new Sharia banking regulations should be cancelled, church leaders argued, as it promotes religious banks in violation of the letter and spirit of the law.
Church protest over Malaysia Bible ban: The Church of England Newspaper, March 18, 2011 p 7. March 20, 2011Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of the Province of South East Asia, Islam, Persecution.
First printed in The Church of England Newspaper.
Church leaders are “fed up” with the Malaysian government’s discrimination against Christians and have condemned the seizure of 35,000 Bibles imported from Indonesia for Malay-speaking natives of Borneo.
In a statement released on March 10, the Anglican Bishop of West Malaysia, the Rt. Rev. Ng Moon Hing, speaking as president of the Christian Federation of Malaysia, said the government’s refusal to release the Bibles, seized in 2009, threatened religious liberties.
Malay-speaking Christians were “greatly disillusioned, fed up and angered by the repeated detention of Bibles,” the bishop said.
“It would appear as if the authorities are waging a continuous, surreptitious and systematic program against Christians in Malaysia to deny them access to the Bible;” known in Malay as the al-Kitab. Imports of English and Chinese language Bibles, however, are not banned.
The Bible ban centers round the use of the word “Allah” in the Malay Bible to refer to God. In 1986 the Malaysian government introduced legislation forbidding the use of “Allah” in non-Muslim texts. Christians in Borneo and other Malay speakers, however, have used “Allah” to refer to God since British missionaries brought the Christian faith to the island in the Nineteenth century.
In 2009 a Roman Catholic newspaper, The Herald, successfully challenged the ban, and the country’s High Court struck down the Allah law. The Home Ministry appealed the ruling, but no re-hearing has yet been scheduled.
The chairman of the Associated Churches of Sarawak (ACS), Bishop Bolly Lapok of Kuching last week said using the word “Allah” was “fundamental to our faith.”
The word has been used “for centuries and is already in the DNA of our vernacular” he told an ACS meeting on March 14 and was “banned for the exclusive possession of a certain race.”
The government’s ban served only to foster tension and mistrust, he said and would fuel sectarian tensions. “It is restrictions such as these that provide a perfect recipe for murdering the spirit of goodwill and peace among neighbours,” the Anglican bishop said.
The Allah fight was a defining moment for Malaysian Christians, he said. “I call it a crossroad because never before have the churches ever encountered, [been] rattled and stunned by the events that occurred during our tenure of office,” he said
Bishop Lapok’s views found support in a separate statement issued by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Malacca and Johore, Paul Tan. The church would not back down from their 1989 declaration “not to relinquish its right to use the word ‘Allah’ in its rituals of prayer and worship, and the dissemination of its teachings to the faithful,” Bishop Tan said on March 14.
“This right is grounded on history, etymology and now by secular jurisprudence,” he said, asking the government to honor its commitment to religious freedom, and “match deed to word as otherwise sloganeering becomes mere posturing, and words become platitudes.”
Handle with care militant Islam, British diplomat warns: The Church of England Newspaper, Jan 28, 2011 p 6. January 31, 2011Posted by geoconger in Church of England, Church of England Newspaper, Church of Pakistan, Islam, Terrorism.
First published in The Church of England Newspaper.
The EU should tread warily when dealing with militant Islam and not be seen as supporting Christian minorities in the Muslim world, the deputy Head of Mission at the British Embassy to the Holy See said last week. “We need to be very careful as to how the West, and the EU as part of the ‘western construct’, approaches the question of religions,” Justin Bedford told Vatican Radio on Jan 12.
His remarks come in contrast to comments made by the Second Church Estates Commission to Parliament on Jan 18, who condemned the persecution of Christians in the Muslim world and denounced the killing of the Governor of the Punjab this month—murdered for his support for Pakistan’s oppressed Christian minority.
Asked to comment on Pope Benedict XVI’s Jan 10 address to the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Vatican, where the pope voiced his concerns over the persecution of Christians in many Muslim majority countries, Mr. Bedford said the speech showed the pope’s belief in “protecting religious freedom as a fundamental human right.”
When questioned about what steps the EU might take to support or protect Christians in the Middle East, Mr. Bedford said “we need to be very careful as to how the West, and the EU as part of the ‘western construct’, approaches the question of religions.”
If the “West took the concept of Christianity under its umbrella,” it could “provide a reason for extremists to continue to divide those societies…we would seek to avoid that, if possible,” he said.
“If this question is discussed in the EU we would need to find an approach which did not divide societies, but sought to unite them and present solidarity between Christians and Muslims as they confront extremists.”
Speaking in response to a question from the member for Gillingham and Rainham, Mr. Rehman Chishti (Cons.), as to “what representations the Church Commissioners have made in support of Christians in Pakistan?”, the Second Church Estates Commissioner, Tony Baldry, said “It is a sad and terrible fact that Christian minorities who have lived peacefully in Muslim countries for generations are finding themselves subject to increasingly violent persecution.”
“Churches have recently been attacked in Egypt, Iraq and Nigeria, and the assassination in Pakistan of Salmaan Taseer for defending a Christian woman who had been sentenced to death was particularly horrible,” Mr. Baldry said.
Dr. Rowan Williams, Bishop Alexander Malik of Lahore and “the Christian community as a whole in Pakistan” were “working hard to foster inter-faith collaboration in Pakistan during this time of difficulty,” he said.
The murder of Governor Taseer was a “tragedy for Pakistan,” whose people appeared to have forgotten the maxim of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, “the father of Pakistan, who said: ‘you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship’.”
“What I suspect every Member of this House hopes for is that there shall be freedom of religion throughout the world,” Mr. Baldry said, “and I am sure that, as a Chamber, we will continue to campaign for that wherever we have the opportunity.”