FaithWorld

from Photographers Blog:

In the darkest corner of my soul

Dado Ruvic

May 2, 2012 12:30 EDT

By Dado Ruvic

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Bosnian war.

I was only three years old when the war broke out. Although I was only a child, I keep the dark images of horror, blood and the suffering inside me, buried deep in the darkest corner of my soul. I was only a child, but the memories of war will never fade away. It is something all of us carry as a burden on our souls, each every one of us in our own way.

Regardless of my memories, I try to do my job impartially and without any influences. I want to see things rationally. I want to cover the stories that matter; the stories that carry the message. I want to say and express what some people dare not say. The photos are not merely photos, they are tears. They are screams of the desolate despair. They are pain.

Guestview: Why “militant Islam” is a dangerous myth

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Dalia Mogahed is Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies.

By Dalia Mogahed

Right-wing pundits in the U.S. and Europe sometimes argue that it is misguided to avoid religious language when describing terrorists. They point out that members of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates call themselves “jihadists”, a derivative of the Arabic noun “jihad” meaning a struggle for God. They explain that it is therefore accurate and fair to refer to Al-Qaeda and its affiliates by the same term.

These same commentators also assert that political correctness in labelling the enemy is the last thing Western societies should be worried about. In fact, they say, focusing too much on not offending others may even weaken Americans’ and Europeans’ will to defeat those who wish them harm.

Yet Gallup research paints a very different picture; an ambitious new study suggests that casting tensions between Muslims and the West in religious terms may actually weaken the ability of America and Europe to fight religiously-branded extremists. This report, which inaugurates Gallup’s Abu Dhabi Center, is entitled “Measuring Muslim-West Relations: Assessing the “New Beginning,” and presents the results of more than 100,000 interviews with citizens in 55 countries. A key finding is that those who see the conflict as primarily due to religious differences are more likely to see a clash as inevitable.

To better understand this finding it is useful to examine the message of Al Qaeda affiliated violent extremists. The religious authenticity of the terrorists group, as well as the inevitability of conflict between Muslims and the West, are cornerstones of Al Qaeda’s narrative. Violent extremists who wave a religious banner do so to legitimise their movement and bolster its claims to moral superiority. Therefore, when pundits cast these violent activists as religiously motivated, they only reinforce the terrorist appeal to religion.

Moreover, if these tensions are indeed unavoidable, the extremists’ narrative continues, then dialogue is useless and force is necessary. Once a clash is the only option, the extremists claim that for their own survival people must support those fighting on their behalf Western thought-leaders would therefore do well to refute, not reinforce, the idea of inevitable religious war.

A review of Christian-Muslim conflict and a modest proposal to counter it

Tom Heneghan

Nov 5, 2010 11:12 EDT

At a Christian-Muslim conference in Geneva this week, participants agreed to build a network for “peace teams” to intervene in crises where religious differences are invoked as the cause of the dispute. The idea is that religious differences may not be the real problem in a so-called religious conflict, but rather a means to mobilise the masses in a dispute that actually stems from political or economic rivalries.

If outside experts could help disentangle religion from the other issues, the argument goes, that could help neutralise religion’s capacity to mobilise and inflame, in the hope of leading to a de-escalation of the crisis.

Is this idealistic? Maybe. However, given the number of crises throughout the world that have religion factored into the equation, it certainly seems worth the effort. Many of these conflicts are not simply battles between religious fanatics, as they may be presented, but calculated agitation by one group against another, usually for political or economic advantage. Some smokescreens are easy to see through, others almost impenetrable.

In his speech to the conference, Jordanian Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal sketched out the problem facing religious experts who undertake such peace missions.  “Before considering what to do and how to do it, we are faced with a series of complex social, political and religious puzzles which we must fully understand in order not to make things worse,” he said.

He then offered a brief tour d’horizon of Christian-Muslim tension and conflict in the world.  It’s not complete and readers may disagree on specific points (that’s what the Comments section below is for!), but it’s a useful overview worth posting verbatim to highlight the problems and invite debate on them.

Ghazi said there are:

• “places where Christians are clearly severely oppressed by Muslims (such as Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan), and places where Muslims are clearly severely oppressed by Christians (such as the Philippines);

Christian-Muslim crisis response group to defuse religious tensions

Tom Heneghan

Nov 4, 2010 17:24 EDT

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.

Vatican synod to mull Middle East Christian exodus

Tom Heneghan

Oct 7, 2010 16:57 EDT

With Christianity dwindling in its Middle Eastern birthplace, Pope Benedict has convened Catholic bishops from the region to debate how to save its minority communities and promote harmony with their Muslim neighbours.

For two weeks starting on Sunday, the bishops will discuss problems for the faithful ranging from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and strife in Iraq to radical Islamism, economic crisis and the divisions among the region’s many Christian churches.

They come from local churches affiliated with the Vatican, but the relentless exodus of all Christians — Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants — has prompted them to take a broad look at the challenges facing all followers of Jesus there.

While conditions for Christians vary from country to country, the overall picture is dramatic. Christians made up around 20 percent of the region’s population a century ago, but now account for about five percent and falling.

“If this phenomenon continues, Christianity in the Middle East will disappear,” said Rev. Samir Khalil Samir, a Beirut-based Egyptian Jesuit who helped draw up the working document for the October 10-24 synod at the Vatican.

Read the full analysis here. See also our factbox on Christians in the Middle East.

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from Photographers Blog:

A job to do on the Srinagar streets

After offering special Eid prayers to mark the end of Ramadan, I got myself ready to cover the large Eid prayer congregation at Eid Gah in downtown Srinagar where senior separatist leader, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, was scheduled to address thousands of Muslims.

Soon after the end of Eid prayers, Farooq called for a protest march to Lal Chowk, the heart of Srinagar. Continually shooting pictures I followed the tens of thousands of demonstrators shouting "we want freedom". When they reached Lal Chowk, the shouts turned to violence and I saw protesters damaging the clock tower. Again Farooq addressed the people calling for anti-India protests. I ran to the office nearby to file the pictures.

As I finished filing I received a call from Sheikh Mushtaq, Reuters Kashmir correspondent, he told me protesters had set fire to police and government buildings. I rushed out to take more pictures. By the time I finished transmitting them I had worked 14 hours straight and, having fasted all day, was extremely hungry.

The following morning the police imposed a curfew throughout the valley. I prepared to go out with my media pass which exempts me from the curfew, but the curfew was so strict I was not allowed to move outside my home. After a series of frantic calls to officials, I finally got permission to leave my home at 5 p.m. I reached the office and decided to stay there for the night. I was not able to shoot any pictures.

Jerusalem: heart of the Mideast conflict

Reuters Staff

Mar 25, 2010 12:09 EDT

Next week is the time of year when millions of people around the world look to Jerusalem as the source of inspiration for the Christian festival of Easter and Jewish Passover celebrations. But this week the city is also the recurrent focus of bitter dispute. The United States has directed rare strong criticism at Israel over its plans to expand Jewish settlements there, saying the building undermines U.S. efforts to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Want to know more? Following are links to a sampling of recent Reuters stories about Jerusalem and a Reuters graphic on new Israeli construction in East Jerusalems:

LATEST NEWS

Israel awaits word, signs are no deal with US

Israel, undeterred, to build in East Jerusalem

FEATURE STORIES

Jerusalem struggle goes on, years after war

Religion, poverty and strife: what comes first?

Ed Stoddard

Aug 6, 2009 19:39 EDT

An uprising by a radical Islamic sect in northern Nigeria may ostensibly have been about religion, but such bloodletting will recur unless underlying issues of poverty, unemployment and education are addressed.

West African Islam is overwhelmingly moderate and northern Nigeria is home to a powerful political elite, yet militant cleric Mohammed Yusuf was able to establish a cult-like following. Yusuf’s sect, Boko Haram, wanted sharia (Islamic law) more widely applied across Africa’s most populous nation. Its name means “Western education is sinful”.

But the support Yusuf drummed up — from illiterate youths to professionals who quit jobs and families to join him — came as much from frustration with what is seen as a corrupt and self-serving political establishment as from pure religious fervour.

To see an analysis by my colleague Nick Tattersall, click here.

This whole situation — and I have seen frustrated and violent Nigerian youth in other parts of the country when I reported there in the past – is perhaps a classic example of how underlying factors, be they social, economic or even environmental, can exacerbate religious divisions.

It brings to mind a book we wrote and blogged about last year by  historian Philip Jenkins entitled “The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia — and How It Died”.

GUESTVIEW: Missing dimension in Middle East peace process

Reuters Staff

Jun 1, 2009 10:21 EDT

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Rev. Bud Heckman is Director for External Relations at Religions for Peace (New York) and Matthew Weiner is Program Director at the Interfaith Center of New York.

By Rev. Bud Heckman and Matthew Weiner

In the foreshadow of President Obama’s much anticipated speech to the Muslim world and on peace this week, there is new hope for peace in the Middle East. Its source is the opposite of what many may think: religion, and the extraordinary promise of principled inclusion of religions in seeking solutions for peace and justice.

Of course, in one sense this is nothing new. Think of the Peace of Westphalia and the political virtue of tolerance developed in response to bloody religious civil wars, which were no less serious than any religious conflict we face today. One difference now — to some degree the result of secularization — is the assumption that the political and public is more frequently separate from the religious. That is to say, an assumption arises that we can do without religion in the public sphere to solve public problems. With this secular mind set, when making a political peace, it is assumed that religion should be sidelined or asked to join only in some superficial way.

But this neglects the very real power of religion when it comes to developing shared forms of peace-building and reconciliation. In fact, the very frameworks of social justice and peace that good minded politicians hold dear often emerge from these religious moral principles.

Again, U.S. President Barack Obama will make what presages to be an historic address in Cairo on June 4. We are among those who eagerly await details of his peace plan as well as the dialogue that his announcement will spark around the world. Together with President Obama, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and King Abdullah II of Jordan have each offered to bring fresh initiatives towards achieving security and peace in the Middle East. These are encouraging signs. Prioritization of attention and resource allocation on behalf of the United States, the other members of the Quartet, and Arab countries are welcome developments.

However, these initiatives alone are not enough. In fact, too often grand peace agreements are reached with little attention either before or after to building peace on the ground, between communities, which leads to festering and a breakdown of peace later on. Instead religious communities must be engaged through their own moral structures. We believe that the collective voices and actions of millions of people of faith can make a meaningful and substantive contribution to forging lasting peace.

Soldier says rabbis pushed “religious war” in Gaza

Tom Heneghan

Mar 20, 2009 13:43 EDT

Our Jerusalem bureau has sent a very interesting report about criticism within the Israeli army of the Gaza offensive in January. What caught my eye was that it brings up the issue of a religious war, a term usually used in relation to Muslims.

The story starts off as follows:

Rabbis in the Israeli army told battlefield troops in January’s Gaza offensive that they were fighting a “religious war” against gentiles, according to one army commander’s account published on Friday.

“Their message was very clear: we are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land,” he said.

The account by Ram, a pseudonym to shield the soldier’s identity, was published by the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper on the second day of revelations about the Gaza offensive that have rocked the Israeli military. (www.haaretz.com “Shooting and Crying, 2009″)…

The officer felt there was a “huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out”.

The corps distributed pamphlets about the history of Israel’s fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present, he said.  But the rabbinate’s message imparted to many soldiers the sense that “this operation was a religious war”.

Read the whole article here.

It’s hard to know when to use terms like “religious war” for violence such as what we’ve seen in the Middle East, Northern Ireland or Afghanistan. The opposing sides in these conflicts have different religious labels, so there is — at least superficially — a religious angle there. But there is also an underlying political struggle which often plays a far bigger role than those labels. Northern Ireland, for example, is not about religion but has often been presented mostly as a struggle between Catholics and Protestants. By contrast, the unrest in Sri Lanka pits secessionist Tamils (Hindus) against majority Sinhalese (Buddhists), but nobody calls that a religious war. Some seem to evolve — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken on more religious overtones over time while the Taliban are now seen more as insurgents than the Koran students their name signals.

What do you think? When is a conflict a religious war and when is it more a political struggle going on behind those labels? Or is it impossible to disentangle the two?

Here is our video report on the story and the script (including translations).