Tajikistan moves to ban adolescents from mosques
Tajikistan has taken the first step toward banning children and adolescents from worshipping in mosques and churches, drawing criticism from Muslim leaders who oppose the Central Asian state’s crackdown on religious freedom. The lower house of parliament in the impoverished ex-Soviet republic this week passed a “parental responsibility” bill that would make it illegal to allow children to be part of a religious institution not officially sanctioned by the state.
Authorities say the measures are necessary to prevent the spread of religious fundamentalism in the volatile republic, the poorest of the 15 former Soviet republics, where government troops have been fighting insurgents in the mountainous east. Muslim leaders said the law, the brainchild of long-serving President Imomali Rakhmon, would only increase discontent among the majority Muslim population of a nation that fought a civil war in the 1990s in which tens of thousands were killed.
“It’s a black day for Muslims. Even in Soviet times, such punitive measures and religious persecution did not exist,” said prominent Muslim theologist Akbar Turadzhonzoda. “If the state doesn’t want to, the people will defend their faith themselves.”
Tajikistan, which shares a 1,340 km (840 mile) border with Afghanistan, has accused religious groups of stoking unrest. Rakhmon last year called home students from religious schools abroad and criticised a growing trend for Islamic dress.
Read the full story by Roman Kozhevnikov here.
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Ayman al-Zawahri: Suburban doctor who became chief of al Qaeda
The Egyptian who has taken the helm of al Qaeda after Osama bin Laden did not emerge from the crowded slums of Egypt’s sprawling capital a militant or develop his ideas in any religious college or seminary. Instead, Egyptian-born Ayman al-Zawahri was raised in Cairo’s leafy Maadi suburb where comfortable villas are a favourite among expatriates from the Western nations he rails against. He studied at Cairo University and qualified as a doctor.
The son of a pharmacology professor was not unique in his generation. Many educated youngsters were outraged at the treatment of Islamists in the 1960s when Egypt veered towards a Soviet-style one-party state under socialist Gamal Abdel Nasser. Thousands of people suspected of subversion were thrown into prison after show trials. “Zawahri is one of the many victims of the Nasser regime who had deep political grievances and a feeling of shame at Egypt’s defeat by Israel in 1967. He grew up a radical,” said Khalil al-Anani, an expert in Islamist movements at Durham University.
He rose to be al Qaeda’s No. 2 before taking over as leader after bin Laden was killed by U.S. special forces at his Pakistan hideout on May 2, almost 10 years after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
Born in 1951 to a prominent Cairo family, Zawahri was a grandson of the grand imam of Al Azhar, one of the most important mosques in the Muslim world. As he studied for a masters in surgery in the 1970s, Zawahri was active in a movement that later became Islamic Jihad, which aimed to expel the government and establish an Islamic state.
Taking over the leadership of Jihad in Egypt in 1993, Zawahri was a main figure in a violent campaign in the mid-1990s to set up a purist Islamic state, when more than 1,200 Egyptians were killed. In 1999, an Egyptian military court sentenced Zawahri to death in absentia. By then he had swapped his comfortable suburban background for the spartan life of a holy warrior in Afghanistan.
Read the full NEWSMAKER profile by Tom Pfeiffer and Marwa Awad here. For more, see:
Family, Taliban scare off actresses in Afghan film industry
A young bride silently sobs on the floor watching her mentally disturbed husband gorge on chicken, rub his greasy hands through his hair and scream at her for more, just another chapter in the couple’s violent life together. Film director Saba Sahar anxiously watches the scene by the cameraman, squatting in blue jeans and wearing a bright pink headscarf. “Cut!” she calls.
The first Afghan female in her profession, Sahar, 36, has become a household name after acting and directing for more than half her life. She is adored by Afghan women. Like other Afghan directors, Sahar says finding actresses is her top challenge in an ultra-conservative Muslim country where many view acting as un-Islamic and inappropriate for women.
“Some Afghans think cinema is a bad place for girls,” said 19-year-old Deba Barekzai, who plays the young bride in Sahar’s 15-part TV series. “Working in cinema has caused me lots of problems and difficulties.”
Afghan-Canadian director Nelofer Pariza said family pressure stopped several of her actresses from showing up on set when filming 2009′s “An Act of Dishonour”, a real-life story about an honour killing. “It was really sad. Fear would actually stop them from coming to work,” Pariza told the audience last month following the film’s first public screening in Afghanistan.
Further complicating their challenges are the threats the film industry receives from a resurgent Taliban, who banned television and women from most work before their austere rule was toppled by U.S.-backed Afghan forces a decade ago. Amid escalating violence across Afghanistan in the tenth year of fighting in the NATO-led war, fear of the Taliban is ever present across many sectors of society.
Read the full story by Amie Ferris-Rotman and Sayed Hassib here.
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Q+A: Women’s rights in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban
Women have won hard-fought rights in Afghanistan since the austere rule of the Taliban was ended by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in 2001. But gains made in areas such as education, work and even dress code look shaky as the government plans peace talks that include negotiating with the Taliban.
Reuters Kabul has produced a Q+A to accompany the feature How will Afghan women fare in Taliban reconciliation? by Amie Ferris-Rotman. Click here to read it in full.
Below are the headings for the questions and answers about women’s rights in Afghanistan today.
HOW BAD WAS IT FOR WOMEN UNDER TALIBAN RULE?
Rights groups and Western governments described the situation as one of the worst that the world had encountered for women at that time.
HAVE WOMEN’S RIGHTS REALLY IMPROVED IN AFGHANISTAN?
Yes. With the fall of the Taliban, women regained many of the basic rights that had been denied them.
How will Afghan women fare if Kabul and the Taliban reconcile?
The gaggles of giggling schoolgirls in their black uniforms and flowing white hijabs seen across Afghanistan’s cities have become symbolic of how far women’s rights have come since the austere rule of the Taliban was toppled a decade ago. While women have gained back basic rights in education, voting and work, considered un-Islamic by the Taliban, their plight remains severe and future uncertain as Afghan leaders seek to negotiate with the Taliban as part of their peace talks.
The United States and NATO, who have been fighting Taliban insurgents for 10 years in an increasingly unpopular war, have repeatedly stressed that any peace talks must abide by Afghanistan’s constitution, which says the two sexes are equal. But President Hamid Karzai’s reticence on the matter, constant opposition by the Taliban, and setbacks even at the government level cast a shadow on the prospects of equality for the 15 million women who make up about half the population.
“I am not optimistic at all,” said Suraya Parlika, 66, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and member of the upper house of the Afghan parliament. “We do not know the agenda of the talks and this worries all women in Afghanistan.”
“Women are at risk of losing everything they have regained,” she told Reuters in her office at the All Afghan Women’s Union, the country’s most prominent women’s rights group that she set up 20 years ago.
The dangerous business of fighting for women’s rights in Afghanistan highlights just how precarious their situation is. Parlika said Taliban militants have tried to kill her eight times. In the latest attempt, gunmen tried to shoot her through a window at her home but missed and blew a hole in the wall.
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Women brave social barriers to join Afghan police force
Married off at 12 years old to an abusive husband more than four times her age, Maryam wanted to join Afghanistan’s police force to help others avoid an all-too-familiar plight in a country where women’s voices often go unheard. A mother of three, Maryam is one of the women who make up less than one percent of Afghanistan’s National Police. They wear knee-length olive green skirts over thick trousers with navy hijabs.
The 22-year-old’s eyes light up when she talks about her job, one widely viewed in deeply conservative Muslim Afghan society as off-limits for women. This sentiment is shared by her father, who has stopped speaking to her and moved out of the family home because she works in an office with men who are not relatives.
“I am serving my country, which needs kind, honourable and honest women who are able to solve specifically women’s problems. We need policewomen as well as men,” Maryam, who only gave her first name, told Reuters. “With this job, you get to feel like a human being in this society. I love it,” she added, enthusiastically gesturing her manicured hands in a small room in the heavily barricaded Interior Ministry in Kabul, which has been repeatedly bombed in recent years by Taliban insurgents.
Women number up to 1,000 of Afghanistan’s 126,000 police officers. Afghan officials and the West, who do most of their training, say female police fill much-needed gaps in a society where the two sexes must often be separated.
In Kabul’s only synagogue, Afghan merchants open up shop
(An Afghan woman clad in burqa and her daughter walks past a restaurant built inside part of the only synagogue building in Kabul, June 1, 2011/Omar Sobhani)
A lattice of corrugated iron Star of Davids marks Afghanistan’s only working synagogue, a white-washed, two-storey building tucked into a sidestreet in the centre of Kabul. Kebabs, carpets and flowers are served and sold on the ground floor of the synagogue, which has been transformed into businesses over the last 18 months by the country’s sole remaining Jew, who lives upstairs in a small pink room.
Cafe manager Sayed Ahmad is unfazed by his small cafe’s history, where Kabul’s hundreds-strong Jewish community once gathered for prayers. Most fled to Israel and the United States amid the Soviet invasion of 1979. “Some of my customers know this is the synagogue and know about the Jew upstairs, but they don’t care and neither do I,” Ahmad told Reuters in his cafe, where bearded men on purple cushions puff on water pipes and eat traditional Afghan food.
The firebrand anti-Semitism found in some other Muslim countries, often fuelled by anti-Israeli sentiment, seems noticeably absent among ordinary Afghans. “I pray my way and he prays his way. I see him as a friend, someone to spend time with,” Ahmad said of his landlord, sitting beside large black and silver wall-hangings depicting Mecca.
Zebulon Simentov, who chose to stay behind when his wife and children emigrated to Israel, has been known to conduct services in the upstairs of the synagogue for visiting Jews even though he is not a rabbi.
Now living alone in the synagogue, the 52 year-old says the building has become too hard to maintain. “This place is big and I need money,” he told Reuters as he adjusted his pyjama-like shalwar kameez, traditional clothing for men in the region.
“I pray my way and he prays his way.” If only every religious person in the world thought this way. Moderates would make this world a peaceful place.
Bin Laden ‘eased’ into sea in contentious burial
He may have been America’s enemy number one, but after U.S. forces killed him, Osama bin Laden was afforded Islamic religious rites by the U.S. military as part of his surprise at-sea burial on Monday.
The U.S. military said preparations for the al-Qaida leader’s burial lasted nearly an hour. His body was washed before being covered in a white sheet and religious remarks translated into Arabic by a native speaker were read over bin Laden’s corpse.
“The burial of bin Laden’s remains was done in strict conformance with Islamist precepts and practices,” said John Brennan, U.S. President Barack Obama’s top counter-terrorism adviser.
Washington said bin Laden was buried at sea after U.S. forces killed him at a compound near the Pakistani capital Islamabad because it was the best option, given tight time constraints.
Under Islamic tradition Muslims need to be buried within 24 hours. Transferring the body to another country for interment could have taken too long, officials said.
A prominent imam in Egypt, Dr Ahmed El-Tayeb, said the U.S. violated Islamic custom by not burying bin Laden on land, a move seen as a U.S. attempt to prevent his resting place from becoming a shrine for extremist followers.
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Anti-Western messages grow among Afghanistan’s imams
Enayatullah Balegh is a professor at Kabul University and preaches on Fridays in the largest mosque in central Kabul, where he advocates jihad, or holy war, against foreigners who desecrate Islam. After a fundamentalist U.S. pastor presided over the burning of a copy of the Koran last month, there has been a growing perception among ordinary people that many of the foreigners in Afghanistan belong in just one category: the infidels.
“The international community and the American government is responsible for this gravest insult to Muslims,” Balegh told Reuters in the blue-and-white tiled Hazrat Ali mosque. “I tell my students to wage jihad against all foreigners who desecrate our religious values. We have had enough.”
Protests in Kabul against the Koran-burning have not become violent but there are many other mullahs in the overcrowded capital whose sermons are filled with criticism of the foreigners fighting and working in Afghanistan.
In Kabul’s northwest, firebrand Habibullah Asaam warns his congregation that all contact with non-Muslims is dangerous. “The Jews and crusaders can never be friends of Muslims, they are the despoilers of our society and culture,” he said during Friday sermons. Worshippers cried “Allahu Akbar” — God is greatest — in response.
“Those who want them here are cowardly Muslims. Women avoid wearing veils, men chase fashion and show off, it’s all because of the foreigners,” he said.
With few Dari or Pashto-speaking foreigners in the country, the messages broadcast from mosques by loudspeakers often pass unnoticed by the people they are condemning. But the extent and impact of anti-Western sentiment was brought into stark relief last week when a protest in normally peaceful Mazar-i-Sharif city in the north ended with the frenzied killing of seven foreign U.N. workers.
>>>…..foreigners in Afghanistan belong in just one category: the infidels.
U.S. pastor unbowed, vows new anti-Islam protest
A militant fundamentalist Christian preacher in Florida whose burning of a Koran triggered deadly riots in Afghanistan is unrepentant and defiantly vows to lead an anti-Islam protest outside the biggest mosque in the United States. The planned demonstration could further inflame tensions over the Koran burning, which led to two days of protests in Afghanistan that included the killings of U.N. staff and stoked anti-Western sentiment in parts of the Muslim world.
“Our aim is to make an awareness of the radical element of Islam,” Pastor Terry Jones told Reuters in an interview on Saturdayat the church he leads in the college town of Gainesville, Florida. A picture of the burning Koran was on his computer screen. “Obviously it is terrible any time people are murdered or killed. I think that on the other hand, it shows the radical element of Islam.”
Jones, a former hotel manager turned pastor who claims the Koran incites violence, said he will go ahead with a protest on April 22 in front of the largest mosque in the United States, located in Dearborn, Michigan.
President Barack Obama denounced the act of burning a Koran but did not mention Jones by name. “The desecration of any holy text, including the Koran, is an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry,” Obama said in a statement released by the White House on Saturday. “However, to attack and kill innocent people in response is outrageous, and an affront to human decency and dignity.”
Jones provoked an international outcry last year over his plan to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. He backed down after pleas from the U.S. government and other world officials, but then presided over a March 20 mock trial of the Koran that included a torching of the book. It barely drew media attention but Internet footage reverberated across the Muslim world.
Read the full story by Yusila Ramirez here.
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