Nigerian president appeals to Muslim leaders before vote
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has appealed to Muslim leaders to help ensure that elections next month, which risk stoking regional rivalries, pass off peacefully. Africa’s most populous nation holds presidential, parliamentary and state governorship elections spread over three weeks in April, all of which are set to be fiercely contested.
Jonathan met on Sunday with the Sultan of Sokoto, one of Nigeria’s most influential Islamic leaders, and other senior figures from the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs and Muslim umbrella organisation Jamatul Nasir Islam in the northern city of Kaduna. Nigeria is home to the largest Muslim community in sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for roughly half of the country’s 150 million people, as well as to more than 200 ethnicities, most of whom generally live peacefully side by side.
But ethnic and religious rivalries bubble under the surface and the candidacy of Jonathan, a Christian from the southern Niger Delta, has fuelled resentment from some in the north who believe the next president should be a northern Muslim. Jonathan is running for what would have been the second term of late President Umaru Yar’Adua, a northerner who died last year leaving Jonathan to inherit the country’s highest office.
His main rival in the presidential race is former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari, a northerner whose reputation as a devout Muslim and a disciplinarian means he has strong grass roots support in large parts of the north.
“Some members of the political class may be very desperate to win the elections by all means,” Jonathan said after the meeting, also attended by the Emir of Kano and Shehu of Borno, the leaders of Nigeria’s other two main Muslim dynasties. “They will create a lot of problems and the only people who can counsel us are religious leaders and our traditional rulers … I am requesting for you to continue to impress on all Nigerians the need for peaceful coexistence.”
Read the full story by Sahabi Yahaya here.
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Conservative bishops deliver blow to Anglican Covenant
Conservative Anglicans have rejected a proposed landmark agreement designed to prevent splits in the worldwide Anglican Communion, just as the Church of England — the Communion’s mother church — moved a step closer to adopting it.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the 80 million Anglicans worldwide, has invested much personal authority in the proposed Anglican Covenant, which aims to prevent disputes over divisive issues such as gay bishops and same-sex unions. He has said the Anglican Communion faced a “piece-by-piece dissolution” if member churches failed to undertake to avoid actions that upset others.
The General Synod, the Church of England’s governing body, voted in favour of the deal, although it still has a number of stages to go before adoption, which would be no earlier than 2012.
But the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) Primates’ Council, a group largely led by African church leaders, on Wednesday rejected the proposed Covenant, which would require member churches to settle disputes through discussion.
“While we acknowledge that the efforts to heal our brokenness through the introduction of an Anglican Covenant were well intentioned we have come to the conclusion the current text is fatally flawed and so support for this initiative is no longer appropriate,” the council said in a statement.
The covenant was first proposed in 2004 following tensions over the consecration of an openly gay bishop at the Episcopal Church, the official U.S. member of the Communion. Those Anglicans who supported the consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson fear the covenant would impede similar acts in future.
Pope words on condoms bolster AIDS fight in Africa
Pope Benedict’s qualified backing of condom use to help prevent AIDS marks a small breakthrough for efforts to fight the scourge in Africa, giving health workers and clergy more scope to broach a still-taboo subject.
News of the pontiff’s comments in a book came days before a U.N. report on Tuesday showed that even Africa was making inroads into the epidemic, with a fall in infection rates over the past decade coinciding with greater availability of condoms.
“It does open the opportunity for discussion,” Paul De Lay, Deputy Executive Director of the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) said of the pope’s statement, citing past confusion among many African Catholics over the Church’s approach to AIDS.
“These comments are positive in the sense that they correct the message he gave last year. Now we need to really spread the word right into the villages,” said Eugide Bashombana, HIV Officer for aid group Oxfam in Democratic Republic of Congo where Catholics make up around half the population and which has an estimated HIV infection rate of 4.3 percent.
Among the large Catholic minority in Kenya, where infection rates peaked at around 10 percent in the 1990s, the pope’s comments were welcomed by many followers. “As the world is changing and things are also changing every day, I think the use of condoms is a right thing at the moment for the young generation,” businessman Alfred Nalango told Reuters outside the Holy Family Basilica church in Nairobi.
De Lay believed the relaxation of the official line could encourage priests who for years have tacitly approved condom use, for example to protect a women during sex with her HIV-positive husband. “They will not preach condoms from the pulpits but they will not say anything against them,” he said. “It is not in spite of the pope. It is just a recognition that millions are dying.”
Overpopulation is the biggest cause of human suffering and environmental destruction worldwide. In fact every other major problem around the globe is either caused or exaggerated by the global population problem. So, if the catholic church was really serious about relieving human suffering they would promote family planning and help people have smaller families. The best thing anyone can do for the future of the children they do have is have fewer children. If everyone had smaller families (one, or two, three at the most) everyone would be better off. Pope Benedict, too little, way to late, all thinking people should leave the church NOW.
Condoms sometimes permissible to stop AIDS: Pope
The use of condoms to stop the spread of AIDS may be justified in certain cases, Pope Benedict says in a new book that could herald the start of sea change in the Vatican’s attitude to condoms.
In excerpts published in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano on Saturday, the pope cites the example of the use of condoms by prostitutes as “a first step toward moralization” but says that condoms were “not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection.”
While some Roman Catholic leaders have spoken in the past about the limited use of condoms in specific cases to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS as a lesser of two evils, this is the first time the pope has mentioned the possibility.
The Vatican newspaper unexpectedly published significant excerpts from the book on Saturday night, days before extracts were initially due to be made public.
The pope’s words appeared to be a major shift in the Vatican’s attitude. While no formal position existed in a Vatican document, the majority of Church leaders have been saying for decades that the use of condoms was not even part of the solution to fighting aids. The late cardinal John O’Connor of New York famously branded the use of condoms to stop the spread of AIDS as “The Big Lie”.
Last year, the pope caused an international uproar when he told journalists taking him to Africa that condoms should not be used because they could worsen the spread of AIDS.
The new book, called Light of the World, is made up of Benedict’s responses to questions by German Catholic journalist Peter Seewald over a week of meetings at the papal summer residence.
@berniethomas – it is so much more than just stopping from having sex. Millions of people are infected with HIV and don’t know it – they bring it home to their wives, or mothers pass it to their children unknowingly. Condoms provide the possibility of slowing that spread. Then, when people know they are infected – many disadvantaged or uneducated people don’t realize how damaging their actions can be. After all, they look healthy.
Condoms are one of the many tools we have to fight spread of HIV. These include education and awareness, access to testing, access and education about condom use, access and education to male circumscision. Why condemn one of the cheapest and most effective ways of HIV prevention?
Christian-Muslim crisis response group to defuse religious tensions
Christian and Muslim leaders agreed on Thursday to set up “rapid deployment teams” to try to defuse tensions when their faiths are invoked by conflicting parties in flashpoints such as Nigeria, Iraq, Egypt or the Philippines. Meeting this week in Geneva, they agreed the world’s two biggest religions must take concrete steps to foster interfaith peace rather than let themselves be dragged into conflicts caused by political rivalries, oppression or injustice.
Among the organisations backing the plan were the World Council of Churches (WCC), which groups 349 different Christian churches around the world, and the Libyan-based World Islamic Call Society (WICS), a network with about 600 affiliated Muslim bodies. They would send Christian and Muslim experts to intervene on both sides in a religious conflict to calm tensions and clear up misunderstandings about the role of faith in the dispute.
“We call for the formation of a joint working group which can be mobilised whenever a crisis threatens to arise in which Christians and Muslims find themselves in conflict,” the leaders said in a statement after their four-day meeting. “Religion is often invoked in conflict creation, even when other factors, such as unfair resource allocation, oppression, occupation and injustice, are the real roots of conflict. We must find ways to disengage religion from such roles and reengage it towards conflict resolution and compassionate justice,” said the statement issued in Geneva.
Jordan’s Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought and the Common Word group of Muslim scholars promoting interfaith dialogue also backed the plan, which the scholars have been discussing with several Christian churches for the past two years.
“Rapid deployment peace teams are clearly needed today in light of the tragic recent conflicts in Nigeria, Iraq, Egypt and the Philippines, to name only a few countries,” said Aref Ali Nayed, director of the Kalam Research and Media centre in Dubai.
Religious clashes are frequent where Nigeria’s Christian south and Muslim north meet. Sunday’s Baghdad church bloodbath that killed 52 worshippers and police was the worst Islamist attack on Christians in Iraq’s seven-year sectarian war. Egypt’s Coptic Christians say they face growing intolerance from the Muslim majority. In the southern Philippines, Muslim guerrillas have been fighting for four decades for a homeland separate from the majority Catholic country.
“Interfaith dialogue is a must today, and the first step in establishing it is forgetting the past, ignoring polemical arguments, and giving precedence to common points, which far outnumber polemical ones.”
by Fethullah Gulen
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French “Satanic defenestration” story thrown out the window
Apart from the strikes against pension reform, one of the big stories in France that made headlines around the world these past few days has been about 12 people of African origin who reportedly jumped out of an apartment window in a Paris suburb to flee from a man they thought was the devil. A four-month old baby died in the incident. The initial stories spoke of satanic rituals, maybe something to do with voodoo, and a crazed collective leap into the dark.
The drama was said to have begun when a woman awoke late at night to find her husband walking in the bedroom naked. As one report put it:
She began screaming ‘it’s the devil! it’s the devil!’, and the man ran into the other room where 11 others adults and children were watching television. One woman grabbed a knife and stabbed the man before other family members pushed him out through the front door.
When the man forced his way back in, they all began screaming in terror and leapt from the balcony screaming ‘Jesus! Jesus!’ The naked man also leapt from the balcony after them, detectives said.
A four-month old baby died in his mother’s arms, while a two-year-old was critically injured.
Google News found 396 stories in English on this and 375 in French. But you can’t believe everything you read about belief. If the story sounded incredible, maybe that’s because it was.
A magistrate investigating the case has now thrown the “Satanic defenestration” story out the window. “There was no question of satanism or Satan,” magistrate Michel Desplan told journalists in Versailles on Monday. Police found religious books in the apartment, but “that’s nothing exceptional for a family of evangelicals.”
Malawi Muslims burn Gideons Bibles in protest
Muslims in southern Malawi have been burning Bibles in protest against their distribution in Islamic schools by Gideons International, a senior Muslim Association of Malawi official said on Tuesday.
Sheikh Imran Sharif, the association’s secretary general, said the burning of Bibles was carried out by a few Muslim fanatics and the association has ordered them to stop. The Muslim protest has been widely criticised in secular Malawi, which has had little religious friction.
Malawi has 1.7 million Muslims, mostly living in the south of the country, that has a population of about 15 million.
Gideons International, which is dedicated to providing copies of the Bible to people around the globe, said on its website it has distributed about 90 million Bibles in 22 countries in eastern Africa.
Congo’s children battle rising tide of witchcraft accusations
When Pascal’s little brother got sick, his family accused him of witchcraft and took him to a pastor who forced him to drink pigeon’s blood and oil. Denied food and beaten for three days, the ten-year-old managed to escape, joining some 250,000 other street children in Congo for three years until he was scooped up by a children’s centre in Kinshasa’s tough east end.
“(The pastor) wouldn’t let me eat or drink any water — he said it would increase the power of the witch,” Pascal, not his real name, said in the centre where nearly 100 other children, most accused of witchcraft, have also sought shelter.
UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s charity, says accusing children of sorcery is a fairly new and growing trend in Africa, despite long-held traditional and mystic beliefs on the continent. “The phenomenon of ‘child witches’… occurs in urban areas, where it has grown constantly in the last thirty years,” according to a UNICEF study published this month.
Where previously elderly women were accused, today the focus more often falls on young children, often some of the most vulnerable, such as orphans, disabled or poor. “It’s a problem that’s growing every day,” says Father Justin Onganga, a Catholic priest who manages another centre. “This has nothing to do with witchcraft but it has everything to do with urban poverty.”
South Africa Muslims look to welcome Muslim World Cup fans
South Africa’s Muslim community says as many as 130,000 Muslim fans could visit for the World Cup and it has set up welcome centres and a website to inform visitors where to eat and pray close to stadiums.
In Cape Town, local Muslims are expecting to welcome Muslim supporters from Algeria, who will play England in Cape Town on Friday, as well as fans of Muslim faith from competing nations such as Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Cameroon.
Just minutes from Cape Town’s Green Point stadium is the Bo-Kaap district, one of the city’s oldest residential quarters and traditionally associated with the Muslim community.
A special exhibition at the Bo-Kaap museum offers information about the history of Islam in South Africa as well as practical tips on where to eat and pray. A special “Islamic Cape Town Map” has also been produced and left in the prayer room of the airport.
Similar initiatives are taking place in other host cities and there is also a website: www.samuslims2010.net.
Latest Anglican bid to mediate gay dispute meets with skepticism
The Archbishop of Canterbury’s latest proposal to mediate a gay rights dispute splitting the worldwide Anglican Communion seems to be falling on deaf ears in the opposing camps he is trying to discipline. Archbishop Rowan Williams, spiritual head of the world’s 80 million Anglicans, suggested last week that member churches approving gay bishops and same-sex unions and those actively opposing them be sidelined from official doctrinal committees.
The initiative was sparked by the consecration of an openly lesbian bishop in California last month. Williams also said conservative churches — mostly in Africa — that appoint bishops to serve in other countries would also be sidelined.
The proposal, if accepted in the Communion, would be the first time such sanctions would be imposed on dissident national churches. Unlike Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism is a federation of churches whose head has no direct power over all members.
A group campaigning for homosexual rights in the Communion said the threatened discipline caused it little worry because the committees the dissenters could not work on were “trivial.”
“These are delaying tactics, sops to the conservatives, which in reality gives them nothing,” Colin Coward, director of Changing Attitude, UK, told Reuters.
UPDATE: Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has issued a pastoral letter that refers to Williams’s proposal with a call for continued dialogue with those who disagree “for we believe that the Spirit is always calling us to greater understanding.” See Episcopal Life Online.
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