Hizb ut-Tahrir urges Pakistanis to take to the streets for Islamic rule
Hizb ut-Tahrir, a global Islamist party banned in many Muslim states, said on Friday Pakistanis should take to the streets to call for Islamic rule and join a campaign to end subservience to Washington that was advancing “from Indonesia to Tunisia”. The party, which says it is non-violent but is accused by some analysts of seeking a coup in Islamabad, added that “powerful factions” in Pakistani society including the military should also take part, but violence had no place in its work.
Hizb ut-Tahrir won international attention when Pakistan’s army said on June 22 it was questioning four majors about alleged links to the party, following the arrest in May of a brigadier suspected of having such ties. Brigadier Ali Khan, whose lawyer has denied the allegations, was the highest-ranking serving officer arrested in a decade. The Pakistan army is under pressure to remove Islamist sympathisers in its ranks after U.S. forces found and killed Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad on May 2.
In an interview, party spokesman Taji Mustafa said the party sought to emulate the creation of the first Islamic state in what is now Saudi Arabia by “winning public opinion in favour of Islam” through discussions, marches and rallies.
The party worked “to motivate all sections of society to express their determined will, such that they take to the streets and demand the Islamic Caliphate system.”
The party and its goal of an Islamic ruler, or Caliph, who implements sharia law posed no threat to Pakistan, said Mustafa, based in Britain, where the party is not banned.
“The threat to Pakistan comes from Zardari, Kayani and Gilani who support drone strikes that kill their own citizens, and who collude with a U.S.-led war of terror,” he said, referring to the president, army chief and prime minister.
Archbishop of Canterbury attacks UK government policies as radical
Britain’s coalition government has embarked on “radical, long-term policies for which no one voted,” causing anxiety and fear, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said in an article on Thursday. The comments are his most outspoken against the year-old Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.
“With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted,” the spiritual leader of the 80-million strong Anglican Communion wrote. “At the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context.”
The archbishop’s comments came in an edition of the weekly New Statesman that he was invited to edit. Among other contributors are UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and the “Church of England atheist” Philip Pullman.
The government has announced radical reforms of the National Health Service and education in its first year. Education Secretary Michael Gove has promoted a flagship policy of “free schools,” which would allow parents, teachers or charities in England to set up schools with taxpayers’ money.
Williams said the “comprehensive reworking” of the education system “might well be regarded as a proper matter for open probing in the context of election debates.”
The government also wants to shake-up the NHS, putting the 60 billion pound healthcare budget in the hands of family doctors. Before the election, Conservative leader David Cameron promised to stop the “top-down reorganisations of the NHS.”
“Government badly needs to hear just how much plain fear there is around such questions at present,” Williams wrote.
Beyond bin Laden – Britain’s fight against violent Islamist radicalism
In a community centre in the British Midlands, 12 teenage boys — all of south Asian descent — watch intently as Jahan Mahmood unzips a canvas bag and pulls out the dark, angular shape of a World War Two machine gun. He unfolds the tripod, places the unloaded weapon on a table and pulls back the cocking handle. The boys crane forward. Mahmood pulls the trigger; a sharp snap rings out.
It’s two days since the killing of Osama bin Laden, and Mahmood, a local historian, is taking his own stand against global militancy. His show comes with a dose of education: a lesson in how Muslim and British soldiers fought together to defeat the Nazis. His methods are unconventional, but Mahmood believes they help address a weakness at the core of British counter-terrorism policy.
The U.S. operation to kill bin Laden may have marked “a strike at the heart” of international terrorism, as Prime Minister David Cameron put it, but in the broader fight against terror, the al Qaeda leader’s death was largely irrelevant.
In deprived British inner-city districts like Alum Rock — a huddle of redbrick homes, fabric shops, Urdu-language DVD stores and fruit stalls — the Saudi-born militant is almost an afterthought. Young men’s beliefs here are driven more by their own sense of alienation, racial abuse and what they see as a deeply anti-Muslim foreign policy.
On the frontline of the war against terrorism — and Britain is undoubtedly a frontline — private initiatives like Mahmood’s hint at the failure of state-sponsored efforts to counter jihad. Almost six years on from a massive coordinated terror attack on London’s transport system, the main nationwide programme to deter young men from extremism still hasn’t moved past mistrust and suspicion. The one-year-old Conservative-led government now wants to tweak the policy. For some Muslims, the question is whether the state should even try.
“There’s still a basic inability to get the idea that, actually, as government, you might not know best,” says Rachel Briggs, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “There’s a very difficult balance between where government can be involved, and be effective, and where actually government involvement negates the whole process.”
Read the full story by Michael Holden, Stefano Ambrogi and William Maclean here.
Heaven is a fairy tale, says British physicist Stephen Hawking
Heaven is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking said in an interview published on Monday. Hawking, 69, was expected to die within a few years of being diagnosed with degenerative motor neurone disease at the age of 21, but became one of the world’s most famous scientists with the publication of his 1988 book “A Brief History of Time”.
“I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first,” he told the Guardian newspaper. “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
Hawking gave the interview ahead of the Google Zeitgeist meeting in London where he will join speakers including British finance minister George Osborne and Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. Addressing the question “Why are we here?” he will argue tiny quantum fluctuations in the very early universe sowed the seeds of human life.
His 2010 book “The Grand Design” provoked a backlash among religious leaders, including chief rabbi Lord Sacks, for arguing there was no need for a divine force to explain the creation of the universe.
Read the full story by Nia Williams here. A link to the interview is here.
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UK Catholics urged to shun meat on Fridays
Britain’s Catholics have been urged to make more effort to follow religious custom and abstain from eating meat on Fridays, potentially boosting sales of fish.
Church law required Catholics over the centuries to comply with this abstinence as part of Friday penance, the day set aside for special prayer and fasting to mark the day Jesus died. Traditionally Catholics have opted to eat fish instead, though a combination of new church guidance and changing eating habits has eroded this habit.
Now the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales wants to re-establish the practice of Friday penance and its abstinence from eating meat as a symbol of a simple shared act of self-denial.
“I think Catholics will welcome this,” the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, told reporters. “What we have sought to do in this decision is to establish a shared practice, a shared habit, because habits that are carried out together are better learned and are stronger — we give each other mutual support. So that’s why there’s a simple, across-the-board expectation that this will be something that Catholics will do.”
In 1984, the Church broadened its list of things Catholics could do to mark Friday penance in an attempt to attract more people to take part, but it only seemed to dilute adherence to the non-meat rule. The Church hopes the practice will be resumed from September 16 to mark the first anniversary of Pope Benedict’s visit to England and Scotland.
via UK Catholics urged to shun meat on Fridays | Reuters.
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Archbishop of Canterbury voices unease over bin Laden killing
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual head of the 80-million strong Anglican Communion, has said the killing of an unarmed Osama bin Laden left a “very uncomfortable feeling.” Rowan Williams said the different versions of events coming out of the White House “have not done a great deal to help here.”
Bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces early Monday during a raid on his home at Abbottabad, a garrison town near Islamabad in Pakistan.
U.S. accounts of what happened have changed throughout the week, and initial characterisations of a 40-minute gun battle have given way to officials being quoted as saying only one of the five people who were killed had been armed.
Citing U.S. officials, the U.S. television network NBC said four of the five, including bin Laden himself, were unarmed and never fired a shot.
“I think that the killing of an unarmed man is always going to leave a very uncomfortable feeling because it doesn’t look as if justice is seen to be done in those circumstances,” Williams told reporters in response to a question at a press briefing on Thursday.
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Re: the killing of an unarmed Osama bin Laden left a “very uncomfortable feeling.”
Imagine how uncomfortable he was about 3,000 unarmed people 10 years ago.
Archbishop of Canterbury praises “unpretentious” Kate and William
The Archbishop of Canterbury, who will marry Prince William and Kate Middleton next week, said on Thursday he had been struck by their wedding preparations, describing the couple as courageous and unpretentious. Rowan Williams, spiritual head of the Church of England, praised the couple’s “simplicity” and the way they had dealt with the build-up to next Friday’s wedding, which is set to be watched by an estimated two billion people worldwide.
“I’ve been very struck by the way in which William and Catherine have approached this great event,” Williams said in a short film released by his Lambeth Palace office, adding it had been a “real pleasure” to get to know the couple. “They’ve thought through what they want for themselves, but also what they want to say. They’ve had a very simple, very direct picture of what really matters about this event.”
“They’re responsible to the whole society, and responsible to God for their relationship. And I think it’s impressive that they’ve had that simplicity about it, they’ve known what matters, what’s at the heart of all this,” he said. “They are deeply unpretentious people.”
The Dean of Westminster will conduct the April 29 ceremony at Westminster Abbey and Williams will marry the couple while the Bishop of London Richard Chartres, who knows William well, will give the address.
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U.K. academic says Easter date can now be fixed
The Last Supper took place on a Wednesday — a day earlier than thought — and a date for Easter can now be fixed, according to a Cambridge University scientist aiming to solve one of the Bible’s most enduring contradictions.
Christians have marked Jesus’ final meal on Maundy Thursday for centuries but thanks to the rediscovery of an ancient Jewish calendar, Professor Colin Humphreys suggests another interpretation.
“I was intrigued by Biblical stories of the final week of Jesus in which no one can find any mention of Wednesday. It’s called the missing day,” Humphreys told Reuters. “But that seemed so unlikely: after all Jesus was a very busy man.”
His findings help explain a puzzling inconsistency between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, who said the Last Supper coincided with Passover and John, who said the meal took place before the Jewish holy day commemorating the Exodus from Egypt.
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The first of April is not favorable – it is the fool’s day. Even the pope John Paul II spent one more day here on earth, thanks to modern medicine, so as not to die exactly on April 1st. As for the determined researcher, he departed from a fundamental mistake – last supper. So, no matter what he found, it is flawy. Remember, Jesus could not be a catholic; catholicism – where the last supper only and exclusively belongs to – only began to gain shape about six or seven centuries later. Since there is enormous ignorance, and indoctrination is fertile as… a rabbit, I end up with this, which can suit almost everyone: be selective about the chocolate!
Kate Middleton confirmed ahead of royal wedding
Royal bride-to-be Kate Middleton has been confirmed into the Church of England ahead of her wedding to Prince William this month, his office said on Wednesday. The ceremony, carried out by the Bishop of London Richard Chartres who will give the address at the April 29th wedding, took place on March 10 with Middleton, 29, accompanied by her future husband, a spokeswoman for St James’s Palace said.
“Catherine Middleton was confirmed by the Bishop of London at a private service at St James’s Palace attended by her family and Prince William,” the spokeswoman said. “Miss Middleton, who was already baptised, decided to be confirmed as part of her marriage preparations.”
William himself was confirmed by Chartres in a ceremony at Windsor Castle in March 1997 when he was 14, around the usual time for a youth to be confirmed. That ceremony represented a break in tradition as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion, usually performed such services for the royal family.
The Church of England and the throne have been linked since Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century and had himself declared the supreme head of the Church of England, a position currently held by the Queen. As second in line to the throne, William is set to become supreme head of the Church of England when he becomes monarch.
British law forbids a Catholic, or anyone married to a Catholic, from taking the throne.
via Kate Middleton confirmed ahead of royal wedding | Reuters.
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British Christian couple loses foster ruling over gays stance
A British Christian couple opposed to homosexuality because of their faith lost a court battle in London on Monday over the right to become foster carers. The couple, who are Pentecostal Christians, had gone to court after a social worker expressed concerns about them becoming respite carers after they said they could not tell a child that a “homosexual lifestyle” was acceptable.
Eunice and Owen Johns, both in their 60s and from Derbyshire in the English midlands, asked judges to rule that their faith should not be a bar to them becoming carers, and that the law should protect their Christian values.
But Lord Justice Munby and Mr Justice Beatson ruled at the Royal Courts of Justice in London that laws protecting people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation “should take precedence” over the right not to be discriminated against on religious grounds, the Press Association reported.
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