In Sinai, militant Islam flourishes – quietly
The group of 50 young men who had blocked off access to a small international military base in the Sinai desert would say nothing of who they were but their appearance held a few clues. Dressed in army fatigues and armed with AK-47s, they wore the long beards of the hardline Islamists who are increasingly a law unto themselves in this part of Egypt.
Quietly, barely noticed by outsiders fascinated by upheavals in Cairo and other Arab capitals, they are building a presence in Sinai that might offer a new haven for anti-Western militancy at the strategic junction of the Mediterranean, Africa and Asia.
When finally one of the men broke a silence that hung heavy on the barren plain, it was to explain to a reporter their demands: for the government to release five comrades jailed for bombings of tourist resorts in Sinai more than six years ago.
“We are ready to die under tanks for this,” he said, refusing to give his name and saying little else beyond muttering Islamic mottos as he toured the positions the militants had established to surround the base, inconveniencing dozens of troops from the Multinational Observer Force, a unit set up in 1979 to monitor Egypt’s U.S.-brokered peace treaty with Israel.
Under a rare rainy sky on a Thursday night in March, the men would only speak with the permission of a man they simply referred to as “sheikh”. A wolf’s cry pierced the otherwise tranquil scene outside the remote base that is home to foreign peace observers including Fijians, Americans and Spaniards.
Not a shot was fired in anger, however, and the next day, the group lifted their eight-day siege. It was not because they feared arrest or attack by the authorities. But instead they had secured their demands. The government agreed to free the men accused of being part of a group which carried out the 2004 and 2005 attacks that killed some 125 people at the Red Sea beach resorts of Sharm el-Sheikh, Dahab and Taba.
It was a scenario unthinkable a year or so ago. But with Hosni Mubarak’s removal from power after three decades, government authority has collapsed in much of Sinai, leaving a vacuum where Islamist militant groups are flourishing, posing a security risk to Egypt, neighbors including Israel, and the Suez Canal, the busy waterway linking Asia and Europe.
Egypt’s Coptic Christians quit constitution talks over Islamist domination
Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church has announced it is withdrawing from talks on a new constitution, saying Islamist domination of the drafting body made its participation “pointless”, Egypt’s state news agency said.
The decision late on Sunday followed calls by Egyptian liberals to boycott the constitution drafting committee, which is seen as failing to adequately represent the nation’s diversity.
The current constitution was suspended by the country’s army rulers in February of last year shortly after they took power from Egypt’s long-serving autocratic president, Hosni Mubarak.
The 100-member constitutional assembly selected by the parliament is dominated by Islamists, reflecting their resounding victory in parliamentary elections.
“The Coptic Orthodox Church General Council agreed with the approval of all of the council’s 20 members to withdraw from the constitutional assembly… as it found it was pointless for the church to be represented following the comments made by the national forces about the way the assembly was formed,” the state news agency said, quoting a church statement.
Coptic Christians, who form Egypt’s biggest minority group and constitute most of Egypt’s 10 percent Christian population, have long had a difficult relationship with the country’s overwhelmingly Muslim majority.
Since Mubarak’s ouster, Christians have become increasingly worried after an upsurge in attacks on churches, which they blame on hardline Islamists, although experts say local disputes are often also behind them.
Turkey passes a school reform law that secular critics view as Islamist
Turkey’s ruling party pushed through a school reform act on Friday that provoked brawls among parliamentarians and mass protests by secular Turks and teachers, who said the law was pushing an Islamic agenda and would lower education standards. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan sent shudders through the secular opposition earlier this year when he said his goal was to raise a “religious youth.” Earlier this month, his AK Party sprang the surprise proposal to overhaul the education system.
Education has been one of the main battlegrounds between religious conservatives – who form the bedrock of AKP support – and secularists since soldier statesman Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Turkish republic in 1923. Believing that religion was holding back Turkey, one of Ataturk’s first acts was to close madrasas, religious schools. Admirers of Ataturk say the AK Party is rolling back policies hurtful to pious Muslims.
The changes approved on Friday included measures that will allow schools specialising in religious education combined with a modern curriculum, known as imam hatip schools, to take boys and girls from the age of 11 instead of 15, and to provide optional classes in Koranic studies and the life of the Prophet Mohammad in other schools.
The law stipulates that children should complete 12 years schooling, though critics say the overall quality of education will suffer as parents have the option of putting their children into technical colleges grooming them for low-paid blue-collar and service industry jobs, like hairdressing for girls, from an early age.
Opposition anger over the bill boiled over when the AK Party steamrollered it through the committee stage, provoking brawls in parliament earlier this month.
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Hardline Sunnis find foothold to push Syria’s revolt toward militant Islamism
Sheikh Abu Abdullah Zahed, a Lebanese Muslim cleric with influence amongst radical youth, is part of a growing effort to push the uprising in Syria towards militant Islam.
Hardline Sunni Muslims in Lebanon are maneuvering for influence over Syrians across the border who have spent the last year fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad.
“At first Syrians called on the West and NATO. Now they are calling on God,” said Zahed, sitting in his library, where black Islamic flags hang on the walls.
As opposition groups abroad squabble over politics and Assad’s army pounds rebellious cities, Muslim hardliners want to make religion the unifying basis of the revolt.
Radical Islamist elements are still on the fringe, but that’s enough to make a headache for opposition activists who are struggling to convince Syrian minorities to support a revolt led mostly by the country’s Sunni majority.
Foreign powers joining exile opposition leaders at a “Friends of Syria” meeting in Istanbul this week will also want proof of whom exactly they are making friends with, if they are ever to consider arming rebel forces.
“We don’t want to accidentally wind up supporting extremist groups,” said Joseph Holliday, of the Institute for the Study of War, in Washington. “The fundamental question is: What happens in the future? And does our involvement make this turn better or worse?”
Arab revolts bring Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist regional vision closer
The Muslim Brotherhood has quietly spread its influence far beyond Egypt in its 84-year history, but Arab revolts have opened broad new political horizons the group hopes will reflect its founder’s vision for the Arab and Islamic world.
“There is no doubt that Hassan al-Banna believed in Islamic unity and not just Arab unity. But with such a vision we must consider reality and what is possible,” said Mahmoud Ghozlan, a member of the Brotherhood’s executive bureau.
Interviewed at the group’s new headquarters in Cairo, he called such unity a “long-term objective”, but seemed alive to the possibilities thrown up by a ferment in which Islamists are driving mainstream politics across North Africa and beyond.
“This region is in a period of deep-rooted change,” the 64-year-old said. “Starting from Tunisia and ending with Syria, the nature of the region and alliances will change.”
The Brotherhood, banned and repressed under President Hosni Mubarak, did not instigate the uprising against him, but like Islamist parties elsewhere it has been the main beneficiary, using free elections to sweep to the brink of power.
Its success, along with election wins by Islamists in Tunisia and Morocco, and the emergence of powerful Islamist players in Libya and inside Syria’s opposition, is forcing the world to rethink how it deals with political Islam.
The Brotherhood, the oldest and most established contemporary Islamist movement, could find itself at the center of a Sunni arc of influence from the Atlantic to the eastern Mediterranean.
Pope Benedict slams U.S. embargo on Cuba, meets Fidel Castro
Pope Benedict called for an end to the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba and met with revolutionary icon Fidel Castro on Wednesday as he ended a trip in which he urged the communist island to change.
He also spoke at a public Mass in Havana’s sprawling Revolution Square where the Vatican said 300,000 people gathered to hear the 84-year-old pontiff.
In a trip laced with calls for change in Cuba, his last message was aimed at the United States, its long-time ideological foe, which for 50 years has imposed a trade embargo trying to topple the Caribbean island’s communist government.
Speaking in a departure ceremony at a rainy Havana airport, Benedict said Cuba could build “a society of broad vision, renewed and reconciled,” but it was more difficult “when restrictive economic measures, imposed from outside the country, unfairly burden its people.”
“The present hour urgently demands that in personal, national and international co-existence we reject immovable positions and unilateral viewpoints,” the German pope, dressed in white vestments, said in his soft voice and heavily accented Spanish.
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What does a pope do? Fidel Castro asks Pope Benedict
Pope Benedict and Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, both octogenarians, joked about their age in a brief meeting on Wednesday and then Castro popped the question: so what do you do?
The two world figures chatted for about 30 minutes at the Vatican embassy in Havana near the end of the pope’s three-day visit to Cuba, where he called for greater freedom and a bigger role for the Catholic Church in the communist-led nation.
Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said Benedict, 84, and Castro, 85, had an “exchange of ideas” in a “very cordial” atmosphere.
Castro led a 1959 revolution and transformed the Caribbean island into a communist state, ruling it for 49 years before stepping down due to poor health in 2008. Under his rule, Cuba for years called itself an atheist state, although relations with the Church have improved over the past two decades.
Castro arrived for his meeting with the pope on Wednesday in a green Mercedes SUV amid heavy security that included armed guards in a phalanx of surrounding black Mercedes cars.
He was helped out by two assistants, who supported him as he walked slowly up the steps into the stately white building where Benedict spent Tuesday night and where Pope John Paul II stayed during his landmark 1998 visit.
“What does a pope do?” Castro asked Benedict, who is just one year his junior. The pontiff told him of his ministry, his foreign trips and his service to the Church, saying he was happy to be in Cuba and with the welcome he received.
I hope this visit by Holy See will bear fruitful results. Christians and people of other faiths must have full authority to practice their religion and preaching in peaceful way. This will only create bond of love.
Gaddafi’s secret missionaries: Muslim preachers and Machiavellian politics
On a tidy campus in his capital of Tripoli, dictator Muammar Gaddafi sponsored one of the world’s leading Muslim missionary networks. It was the smiling face of his Libyan regime, and the world smiled back.
The World Islamic Call Society (WICS) sent staffers out to build mosques and provide humanitarian relief. It gave poor students a free university education, in religion, finance and computer science. Its missionaries traversed Africa preaching a moderate, Sufi-tinged version of Islam as an alternative to the strict Wahhabism that Saudi Arabia was spreading.
The Society won approval in high places. The Vatican counted it among its partners in Christian-Muslim dialogue and both Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict received its secretary general. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual head of the world’s Anglicans, visited the campus in 2009 to deliver a lecture. The following year, the U.S. State Department noted approvingly how the Society had helped Filipino Christian migrant workers start a church in Libya.
But the Society had a darker side that occasionally flashed into view. In Africa, rumors abounded for years of Society staffers paying off local politicians or supporting insurgent groups. In 2004, an American Muslim leader was convicted of a plot to assassinate the Saudi crown prince, financed in part by the Society. In 2011, Canada stripped the local Society office of its charity status after it found the director had diverted Society money to a radical group that had attempted a coup in Trinidad and Tobago in 1990 and was linked to a plot to bomb New York’s Kennedy Airport in 2007.
Now, with the Gaddafi regime gone, it is possible to piece together a fuller picture of this two-faced group. Interviews with three dozen current and former Society staff and Libyan officials, religious leaders and exiles, as well as analysis of its relations with the West, show how this arm of the Gaddafi regime was able to sustain a decades-long double game.
Yet Libya’s new leaders, the same ones who fought bitterly to overthrow Gaddafi and dismantle his 42-year dictatorship, are unanimous in wanting to preserve the WICS. They say they can disentangle its religious work from the dirty tricks it played and retain the Society as a legitimate religious charity – and an instrument of soft power for oil-rich Libya.
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We in Pakistan are also facing the situation from decades where religious outfits are provided funds from abroad, specially Middle East countries and some from EU (Muslims) who work as Charity Organizations but along with their brand of Islam as mentioned in the article. This is why we are pitched against each others on the interpretation of holy verses and bloody past of the history. A close watch by every country is needed including their own governments if they want peace both In and Abroad.
Kuwait arrests man said to blaspheme Prophet Mohammad via Twitter
Kuwaiti authorities arrested a man late on Tuesday for insulting the Prophet Mohammad via his Twitter account, the Interior Ministry said, in a rare case of alleged blasphemy in the Gulf Arab state using social media.
Blasphemy is illegal in Kuwait under the 1961 press and publications law, but it is not punishable by death as in neighbouring Saudi Arabia, where the case of a columnist facing similar accusations has drawn international attention.
The man, whose name was not disclosed, defamed the Islamic faith and slandered the Prophet Mohammad, his companions and his wife, the ministry said in a statement issued on state-run news agency KUNA. He is being interrogated ahead of court proceedings.
The ministry “regretted the abusing of social networks by some individuals to offend basic Islamic and spiritual values, vowing to show zero tolerance in combating such serious offences,” it said in the statement.
In September a Kuwaiti court convicted a man for insulting Gulf rulers and posting inflammatory sectarian comments on social media, but he was released immediately because of time already served while awaiting trial, according to a human rights activist.
Twitter is very popular in Kuwait, with many politicians, journalists and other public figures using the micro-blogging site to debate current events and share gossip. Popular figures can have hundreds of thousands of followers.
Kuwaiti media carried comments from the man denying the accusations. “I will never attack the Holy Prophet,” he was reported as saying and added that someone must have hacked his account to post the comments.
Saudi religious police drop lethal car chases in effort to improve image
Saudi religious police will stop car chases that have led to fatal accidents in the past, local media say, in an attempt to soften the image of a force that aggressively enforces Islamic Sharia laws. Bearded members of the religious police patrol the streets in Saudi Arabia to enforce strict gender segregation laws and ensure that all shops close during Muslim prayer times and that men and women are modestly dressed.
Formally known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, religious police officers arrest those who do not adhere to their rules. Involvement in violent incidents and lethal car chases has tarnished the reputation of the force.
“The car chases by the religious police will end,” Alriyadh newspaper on Tuesday quoted the head of the force, Sheikh Abdulatif Al al-Sheikh, as saying. A spokesman for the force confirmed this. “We care a great deal to make the image of the commission a positive one that reflects the true image of Islam. There is no doubt that these (plans) portray a new vision for the commission,” said the spokesman, Abdulmohsen al-Qifari.
Earlier this year, footage of religious police attacking a family outside a shopping mall in the capital, Riyadh, was posted on You Tube, registering more than 180,000 hits and generating much social media criticism of the force.
In January King Abdullah replaced the head of the religious police, Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Humain, with Al al-Sheikh, who swiftly banned the activities of “volunteers” who take it on themselves to chase or detain arrest presumed sharia violators.
The Commision now wants to polish its image after repeated criticism at home and abroad, most notoriously after local media accused religious police of hampering efforts to rescue 15 girls who died inside a blazing Mecca school in 2002. “We have carried out many training sessions to prepare our patrols for catching up with the times,” Al al-Sheikh said.
Last week, Riyadh governor Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz eased restrictions that had prevented single men from entering shopping malls. The decision was supported by Al al-Sheikh.
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