Egypt’s al-Azhar university and mosque complex has placed a modern twist on the age-old ritual of book burning - now they want to throw a film to the flames.

Earlier this month, Egypt summoned an Iranian diplomat to protest against an Iranian documentary about the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, saying it would hurt improving ties between the two countries. Official statements from Cairo gave few details as to the contents of the film, other than suggesting it glorified Sadat’s assassins and portrayed Sadat as a traitor who sold out the Palestinian cause.

But apparently calling in the Iranian diplomat was deemed insufficient censure of the film, and al-Azhar, the thousand-year-old edifice of Islamic learning, was called into the fray as well. The government-appointed Sheikh of al-Azhar Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, known for his close ties to the state, convened an emergency session of al-Azhar’s Islamic Research Academy to address the issue. The resulting statement was published in the state’s flagship al-Ahram daily.

Condemning the “deviant group” that produced the movie, the academy said the film was the worst kind of un-Islamic behaviour imaginable, the “worst kind of crime.” Sadat was a martyr who deserved praise for welcoming the shah of Iran and for making peace with Israel, it said. Those acts were evidence of his courage and wisdom, “of which the world of wise men stood in awe.”

Sadat was slain by Islamist assassins in October 1981, when his popularity reached its lowest point with Egyptians following his purge of and extensive crackdown on political opponents of his controversial peace with Israel. His welcoming of the deposed shah in Egypt earned him the enmity of the Iranian regime.

But here’s the kicker: “(The rulers of Iran) must know that this ugly film will be a cause for the collapse of any efforts at rapprochement (between Sunnis and Shiites)… and this rift will not be healed without the burning of this ridiculous film.”

The wording of the preamble to the statement suggests that no one in the academy has actually seen the film, as it quotes media reports about it being offensive.

An Iranian newspaper later quoted an Iranian official as saying “The documentary has been produced by a private organisation… and does not represent Iran’s official stance.” The article seemed to confirm that the documentary praised Sadat’s assassins.

That’s actually one of the cultural issues that pops up every time something like this happens. During the Danish cartoons controversy, various figures in the religious or political establishments of Muslim countries demanded the offending paper and artists be prosecuted. They seemed to operate on the assumption that all states can control media output in their countries, as many Muslim and Arab governments do.

Despite Iran’s official disdain for Sadat, it’s possible that Tehran wasn’t too happy about this, given that Iran has been racheting up efforts to achieve a rapprochement with Egypt, possibly to break its international isolation.

The episode is another in a long line of cases where the state enlists what was once a prestigious and independent (well, depending on when) collective of Islamic scholars into echoing the government’s grievances with an added Islamic flavour. It is arguably al-Azhar’s apparent willingness to engage in such overtly nationalist and populist political manoeuvres that has left it suffering a serious credibility crisis with most Muslims.

It’s tempting to say few will have much sympathy for Al-Azhar’s statement when it rarely speaks out so vociferously against the political, social and economic ills that afflict Egypt. But nationalism backed up by powerful state-controlled media has historically had a good record at whipping up popular support.

Sitting in the sun-kissed grounds of a London church, U.S.Bishop Gene Robinson reflected in sombre mood on what it meant to be the first openly gay bishop in the 450-year history of the Anglican church.

Robinson, a divorced father of two, has received death threats and wore a bulletproof vest at his consecration back in 2003. Two uniformed police officers stood guard last month as he entered into a civil partnership with his longtime partner. He was heckled when preaching in London over the weekend.

“I take the threats very seriously, I have to,” he said. “But I am not interested in being a martyr, I just want to be a bishop.”

Robinson’s visit to Britain concides with the Lambeth Conference, the ten-yearly meeting of bishops from the worldwide Anglican Communion, but he has not been invited to attend. So he has several speaking engagements outside of the conference, including a sermon at Saint Mary’s Church in the Putney section of London on Sunday where he urged Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to show firmer leadership and get conservative foes to tone down homophobic taunts.

In an interview with Reuters, there was no hiding the disappointment in his voice when talking about Williams’ decision not to invite him. And he repeated that he felt it was high time Williams took a stand against Conservative opponents who taunted him with homophobic mockery.

“There is no place in the Christian Church for someone to say Satan has entered the church with my consecration or that gay people are lower than dogs,” the 61-year-old bishop said.

“You cannot say those kind of things about gays and lesbians people and then be shocked when there is violence against them,” he said.

Clearly exasperated with a navel-gazing church obsessed with its own internal problems, he said human sexuality was an important issue but added “I would agree with many Africans that there are so many more important things to be dealing with.”

But he was clearly proud of what he had achieved in trying to sweep hypocrisy away, saying: “I would like to think I have raised the issue of how destructive ‘Don’t ask, Don’t tell’ can be.”

What do Albania, Greece, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan,  Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia have in common?
Their heads of state all received identical or nearly identical telegrams from Pope Benedict as his plane was flying over their countries on the way from Rome to Australia to preside at the Roman Catholic Church’s World Day of Youth.
The telegrams said “FLYING OVER (NAME OF COUNTRY) EN ROUTE TO AUSTRALIA FOR THE CELEBRATION OF WORLD YOUTH DAY, I SEND CORDIAL GREETINGS TO YOU AND TO ALL YOUR FELLOW-CITIZENS, ALONG WITH THE ASSURANCE OF MY PRAYERS THAT ALMIGHTY GOD WILL BLESS THE NATION WITH PEACE AND PROSPERITY. BENEDICTUS PP. XVI.
That was the version received by heads of state of countries whose majority of citizens practice one of the three monotheistic religions. The others, where other religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism are practiced, received a slightly different version  in which the phrase “invoking divine blessings” replaced the phrase “that almighty God will bless the nation”. 
But one could not help but wonder why the telegrams were virtually identical (apart from the God/divine difference) even though the situation in the various countries hardly is.  Current events in Greece, for example, are hardly similar to those in Myanmar or Afghanistan.
When he flew over countries, the late Pope John Paul would sometimes tailor his telegrams to reflect the situation on the ground, even if only obliquely. So, when reporters aboard Benedict’s  plane were handed out 18 telegrams, some read them expecting, or hoping, that a  straightforward or diplomatically creative tea-leaves message might be found in those being beamed to hot spots such as Afghanistan, which is engulfed in war, Myanmar, which is still trying to recover from the devastation of Cyclone Nargis and whose human rights record has prompted concern by the international community, or Vietnam, with which the Vatican hopes to soon establish full diplomatic relations after decades of tensions.
Granted, telegrams are not the building blocks of any state’s diplomacy. But of all the countries that were flown over, the pope has only visited one (Turkey) and perhaps this is the closest he will come to most of the rest of them. 
And, a little old-style tea leaves reading would have helped reporters who clocked more than 20 hours of flying with the pope between Rome and Sydney kill a little time.
And maybe even have produced a story or two more.  

Is Pope Benedict planning a visit to a cradle of Protestantism? Should a Catholic pontiff tour the medieval castle where Martin Luther translated the Bible into German at the start of the Reformation? It’s far too early to get confirmations or denials from the Vatican or the German government, since the visit — still only in the rumor stage — is not due until the spring of 2009. But a local newspaper in the eastern state of Thuringia, where the Wartburg is located, says security planning has already begun.

According to the Erfurt daily Thüringer Allgemeine, an advance team from the German president’s office in Berlin has already met local police. Dieter Althaus, the state premier who invited Benedict to Thuringia during a visit in Rome in April, has also met mayors from towns in the area “to discuss the emergency case of a papal visit. Also in Eisenach, the words ‘pope’ and ‘Wartburg’ are mentioned together more frequently.” An earlier German press report about a possible trip mentioned that Benedict would visit Eichsfeld, a nearby island of Catholicism in an otherwise Lutheran region, so he would be in the neighborhood.

Apart from the security, a visit by any pope to the Wartburg would need careful preparation to ensure it helps rather than hurts Catholic-Protestant relations. If that pope is Joseph Ratzinger, the task becomes even more tricky. Pope Benedict has studied the writings of Martin Luther — he’s probably the only pontiff who ever has — and impressed Lutherans with his knowledge and appreciation of his fellow German theologian. At the same time, he has also been blunt in describing Protestant denominations as “not proper churches.” In fact, he doesn’t refer to them as churches at all, but “ecclesial communities.” Not surprisingly, Protestant leaders feel offended.

Do you think a papal visit to the Wartburg would help or hurt ecumenical relations?

Bishop Gene Robinson hasn’t been invited to the Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference, which opens next week, but he’s sure to be in the news all the same. The openly gay Episcopal bishop, whose consecration in 2003 sparked a near-schism by traditionalist Anglicans from the Global South, plans to preach in churches, attend receptions and appear at a film premiere in Britain before, during and after Lambeth (details below). He also plans to blog at a site called Canterbury Tales from the Fringe. Extensive coverage seems guaranteed.

The absence of the Communion’s most critical conservatives should heighten Robinson’s media presence. Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, who led the rival GAFCON conference in Jerusalem last month, is boycotting the ten-yearly Lambeth Conference, as are four other traditionalist primates. So it seems unlikely that reporters there will hear headline-grabbing sound bites like accusations of apostasy against Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams (as Akinola made at GAFCON) or charges that gay hit men might be ready to whack their critics (as Uganda’s Archbishop Henry Orombi said in a recent sermon).

Mike Conlon has blogged here about the effort to lower the Lambeth Conference’s profile, which could indirectly raise Robinson’s. The 1998 session was dominated by a divisive debate about homosexuality and voting on a resolution “rejecting homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture.” That makes headlines. This time around, the organisers seem to have taken the wind out of the critics’ sails by drawing up an agenda with no voting rounds on it. “Everything they’ve suggested says there won’t be any voting of any kind at any point,” said Jim Naughton, spokesman for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

Apart from his Canterbury Tales blog, another one called The Gene Pool will also be on the lookout for “Gene sightings.” In a video on that blog, Robinson puts a biblical twist on his non-invitation to the conference:

“When I think about being banished to the marketplace, it occurs to me that that’s where Jesus would be. Jesus would be with the marginalized. He was always in conflict with the religious authorities of his day. He was always preaching that people trump rules…

“I’ll be at Lambeth and I’ll be telling my story and I will be witnessing to the God that I know as powerfully as I can muster. Then I’ll let the Holy Spirit do the rest.”

Robinson has already arrived in Britain. According to a letter by him posted on The Lead at The Episcopal Cafe,

Thursday, July 10: I will be speaking at the Modern Churchperson’s Union conference (along with former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, the Primate of Wales, and several African bishops).

Sunday, July 13: I will be preaching at St. Mary’s, Putney (just across the Thames from London, in the Diocese of Southwark). This will be the only time I’m allowed to preach while in England.

Monday, July 14: British premiere of the documentary “For the Bible Tells Me So,” in Queen Elizabeth Hall, at the South Bank Centre for the Arts. I will be appearing with Daniel Karslake, the filmmaker, and Shakespearean actor (and Lord of the Rings star) Sir Ian McKellen. This event will be a fund-raiser for AIDS work in Africa.

Wednesdays, July 23 and 30: American bishops will be hosting two “Come meet our brother bishop Gene” evenings, open only to bishops and spouses. I will be “introduced” by several clergy and lay leaders from NH in a little DVD we’ve made for the event. Then I’ll have a chance to engage bishops from around the Communion and tell them about the work of the Gospel here in NH.

August 3-6, I’ll be preaching and speaking in Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland, as guest of the Church that gave us bishops some 200+ years ago.

MOUNT UNION, Pa. - It was muddy, it was loud and there were a lot of smiling, happy people offering free hugs and praising Jesus.

The Creation Festival drew around 70,000 people to rural Pennsylvania last month to listen to Christian music, ranging from hard rock to R&B, hip-hop and punk.

Check out the Reuters story on the festival along with an audio slideshow of pictures by Mike Segar, who got his feet wet to catch the moment when nearly 200 people were baptized in a pond. 

Now in its 30th year and growing bigger every year, the festival is in many ways like any secular summer music festival — thousands of young people camping out, getting muddy in the rain and eagerly hunting down their heroes for autographs.

But these music fans wore T-shirts with slogans such as “Virginity Rocks” and “Mosh for Jesus.” To read more about the unusual merchandise on offer, click here.

PICTURES: Reuters/Mike Segar.

Sydney is not a city famous for protests. In fact, people usually only get angry at traffic congestion, if their football team loses on the weekend or if rain stops them hitting the city’s sandy beaches. But Sydneysiders have become angry and many are aiming to vent their spleen at Pope Benedict and pilgrims attending the Roman Catholic Church’s World Youth Day here this month.

Except for a handful of people promoting the safe sex message of using condoms, nobody was publicly planning to protest during the Pope’s first visit to Australia. Australians mostly come from a Christian background and Catholics make up the biggest congregation.

But now every man and his dog seems to be planning to take to the streets in protest. What changed?

Sydneysiders believe their civil liberties have been crushed with police introducing tough new anti-protest powers for the papal visit that allows them to arrest and fine people A$5,5000 (US$52,885) for annoying or disturbing Catholic pilgrims. Wearing a T-shirt with an anti-Catholic message or handing out condoms can break the law. Police have asked anyone planning to protest to send them photographs of their banners and what they will be wearing so they can be approved.

“I’ve had it up to my rosaries with my city…Thou shalt not annoy or trespass on World Youth Day,” Bianca Nogrady wrote in protest to the Sydney Morning Herald. “This is religious oppression. Despite being a contented heathen, I am driven by sheer outrage to take up the mantle and T-shirt of every other religion and march proudly through the streets of my secular city.”

The anti-protest laws cover hundreds of city precincts, like cinemas, schools, train and bus stops, and allow police to partially strip-search people.

Before news of the extra police powers, most Sydneysiders were merely annoyed at the traffic inconvenience of World Youth Day, which organisers say could attract 500,000 pilgrims. Now talkback radio is jammed with irate listeners and newspapers have been flooded with letters and emails from angry people, many who now say they will protest. “World Youth Day arrives and roads are closed, parks cordoned off and traffic tipped to be a nightmare, but if we wear a T-shirt that might annoy the visitors we cop a A$5,500 fine. Jesus Christ,” wrote Andrea Kerekes.

Sydney is Australia’s gay capital, annually hosting the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, one of the world’s biggest homosexual parades and festivals, and the new laws have been mocked by the city’s gay community. “So Catholics can protest a gay parade, but we can’t protest Catholics,” declared one angry radio listener.

Doctors are also angry that the new police powers could stymie the safe sex message of using condoms. “We intend to hand out condoms to young people on World Youth Day. These draconian laws are a public health risk. Governments of this country agree condoms save likes,” wrote two doctors in The Australian newspaper.

One T-shirt seller has started a World Youth Day design competition which has produced several protest T-shirts, such as “$5,500 A small price to pay to annoy Catholics” and “WYDO8. We close 300 roads so 300,000 can close their minds.”

What do you think of this? Has Syndey gone too far in protecting the Pope?

A new book on the U.S. Republican Party sets out an agenda that its authors argue will help weld working class voters — who have bounced between political allegiances over the decades — to the party as the foundation for the next conservative majority.

Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, by Ross Douthat, a senior editor at The Atlantic, and Reihan Salam, an associate editor at the same magazine, is already making some waves.

What readers of this blog may find most interesting is some of its comments on religious conservatives, a key Republican Party base, and its contribution to the growing debate about America’s “culture wars.”

The authors take square aim at Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, an influential work that has become widely regarded as the leading liberal critique of the Republican Party’s blue-collar strategy.

In a nutshell, a big part of the Frank thesis is that social issues such as abortion are useful distractions from stagnating wages and job lay-offs which lead blue collar workers to vote against their economic interests, ie, for the Republican Party.

“… the ’social issues’, from abortion and marriage law to the death penalty and immigration, are not just red herrings distracting the working class from their economic struggles, as liberals have insisted for the better part of forty years,” Douthat and Salam write.

“Rather, they’re at the root of working class insecurity. Safe streets, successful marriages, cultural solidarity, and vibrant religious and civic institutions make working-class Americans more likely to be wealthy, healthy, and upwardly mobile,” they write.

On the 2006 congressional elections, in which the Democratic Party wrested control from the Republicans, they argue that a two-pronged strategy was employed.

On the one hand, the authors say Democratic candidates reached out to religious voters in the Midwest and the South. On the other, there was a stream of books, essays and blogs “warning of the looming theocratic” menace posed by the Republicans and their conservative Christian backers.

This they argue helped to galvanise part of the Democratic base “and delivered the party its largest majority ever among the faithless.”

Against this backdrop, one wonders how the 2008 presidential election will play out? There is no doubt that Barack Obama is aiming for the votes of the faithful, a topic that we and others have written about.

But can the secular left and mildly religious liberals warn of a right-wing theocracy when the presumptive Republican candidate, John McCain, is regarded with suspicion by the “Religious Right,” whose leaders he once branded as “agents of intolerance?”

What do you think?

“The opening of our yeshiva (in 2005) and the ordination of the new rabbis is the best answer we can give to Hitler and the Nazis, it shows they did not win,” said Rabbi Shalom Stambler. The ordination of nine new rabbis on Sunday evening in Warsaw, the first in Poland since the Nazis murdered most of what was one of the world’s largest Jewish communities, was a proud moment for the Warsaw-based head representative of Chabad Lubavitch of Poland. “Poland was always a centre of Jewish study in the world,” he said. “People used to come from all over the world to study the Torah here. This was stopped by the Nazis … We hope the yeshiva will grow and grow.”

Read our feature “Pride, hope as Poland ordains first postwar rabbis” here. Apart from his comments in the feature, Rabbi Stambler told me a recent controversy in Poland over a book accusing Poles of persecuting Jews in the years after the Holocaust had told him something about today’s Poles. “I saw how many people entered into the dialogue, students, intellectuals, people who wanted to know how their grandparents had acted,” he said.

Jan Gross’s book Fear argues that anti-Semitism remained prevalent in Poland under the communist regime after 1945. In a sign of the continued sensitivity of the subject in Poland, state prosecutors investigated whether the book had slandered the Polish nation but finally decided not to press charges.

Stambler said he did not believe there was anti-Semitism in the higher echelons of Polish society, but noted the continued attraction of the ultra-Catholic, often anti-Semitic Radio Maryja among some sections of the population.

Commenting on anti-Semitism, Stambler’s brother Meir, a businessman, said: “Some old people, or young drunks, sometimes shout abuse. There is not plenty (of anti-Semitism) but it exists… But once an old man was screaming at us on a tram and some young people walked up and told him to stop, they were ashamed, they told him to join the 21st century,” he said.

Is Egypt’s Ministry of Religious Endowments planning to blindside people by quietly implementing an unpopular project to unify the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer?

That’s certainly the impression I got when I recently spoke to one of the ministry officials in charge of the project to enquire about its status. There has been talk for years about how chaotic and noisy it is to have each mosque in a city call out “Allahu akbar” at slightly different times, in quite different voices, sometimes in different musical keys and different tempos. A project unveiled two years ago to have one centralised call to prayer seemed to officials to be the answer.

The official was cagey at first, refusing to be drawn on whether the plan was going ahead or had been suspended, and refusing to give an ETA for the mythical unified adhan.

But then he relented and said, revealingly: “I’ll tell you something, one day you’ll find us, without media coverage… you’ll find (a unified) ‘Allahu akbar’ from the minarets.”

That goes some way to explaining why the whole thing seems to have dropped out of sight since it was “inaugurated” more than two years ago.

Back then, the project was hailed by officials as “a civilizing step.” In a ceremony at the ministry’s neo-Islamic offices in downtown Cairo, the minister handed out commemorative shields and monetary rewards to a number of people involved in the project. Everything about the news conference suggested the project would be up and running imminently.

But there’s been no almost no sightings (hearings?) of the unified adhan, save for some experiments carried out in a number of mosques, presumably to the delight of the plan’s many opponents - which includes the parliament’s religious affairs committee.

The committee expressed its opposition to the project in 2006 and said the money could be better spent elsewhere, on one of Egypt’s myriad problems, but local media quoted ministry officials as saying they were adamant about going ahead with it.

An IslamOnline report (in Arabic) on some of the ministry’s experiments described the scorn poured on the initiative by worshippers at the mosque where it was tested. “Flavourless, canned adhan” was how one described it. Another said he might just as well stay home and listen to the adhan on the radio. Others resented the mechanical nature of the thing, saying the move removed the human touch from the ritual and made it seem less spiritual.

The ministry says the move is meant to end the “clamour” that can result in areas with multiple mosques, where it can sometimes sound like the muezzins are attempting to drown each other out. They sometimes start seconds or even minutes apart.

Some Egyptians complain that the adhan in their neighborhood is too loud and disturbs their sleep. But sheikhs point out that the adhan is intended to do exactly that: wake people up to pray. They also say the argument that Egypt’s Christians shouldn’t be subjected to that is about as reasonable as expecting church bells to be silenced in Rome for the benefit of Italian Muslims.

IslamOnline also posted two fatwas prohibiting the use of an electronically transmitted adhan, saying that the recitation of the adhan is a ritual of worship in itself. The religious requirement was for an actual human voice at the location to recite the adhan.

They also point out that the performance of the adhan is a greatly meritorious deed. People draw lots for the privilege. Limiting the adhan to one person citywide or nationwide, they said, effectively denies people the spiritual reward.

The ministry says that currently, a lot of people with really horrible voices end up chanting the adhan, much to the discomfort of surrounding residents. The parliamentary committee responds that, well, maybe the ministry should carefully select the muezzin on the basis of vocal talents. And if noise pollution is the issue, how does the adhan compare to the 24/7 din of Egypt’s notoriously snarled and noisy traffic?

It looks like all that is moot, as the ministry seems unwilling to be deflected from a project that is way behind schedule, possibly over budget and almost certain to further alienate a large segment of Egypt’s devout Muslims and independent sheikhs.