Muslims should avoid prayers that call for the destruction of non-Muslims, an influential Saudi cleric has said.

“Praying for the ruin and the destruction of all infidels is not permitted because it goes against God’s law to call upon them … to take the righteous path,” Sheikh Salman al Awdah told Dubai-based MBC Television channel.

Many mosque imams and preachers in some Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia, close their Friday sermons with prayers that call for the destruction of Islam’s enemies, especially Israel and its allies.

Awdah is a director of the Arabic edition of the website Islam Today and he has a number of TV shows and newspapers articles. In 2007, he publicly denounced Osama bin Laden and urged him to abandon violence, a rare move among clerics in his native Saudi Arabia who have avoided direct criticism of the al Qaeda leader.

See the whole story here.

(Photo: Worshippers listen to a sermon in a Baghdad mosque, 23 Oct 2006/Namir Noor-Eldeen)

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Given the popularity of glitzy television gameshows of all sorts, it was probably inevitable that some secular channel somewhere one would come up with one about religion. Turkey’s Kanal T television station now has.

Its show, entitled “Penitents Compete,” will bring together spiritual guides from Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism who try to convert a group of non-believers. Those who get religion win a pilgrimage to a holy site of the faith they’ve chosen — Mecca for Muslims, the Vatican for Christians, Jerusalem for Jews and Tibet for Buddhists.

But the show, due to debut in September, has run into some unexpected trouble. The religious authorities in Muslim but secular Turkey have refused to provide an imam for the show, which they say will cheapen religion. Read the whole story here.

Do you think a program like this is offensive?

(Photo: Popular German TV gameshow “Wetten, dass…?”– “Bet that..?” — on 22 Jan 2005/Christian Charisius)

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One of the many rumours that swirled around Michael Jackson in the final years of his life was that he had secretly converted to Islam and taken the name Mikaeel. The “King of Pop” does not seem to have spoken about this publicly himself, and that scene in Bahrain when he went shopping badly disguised in an Arab woman’s abaya could be put down to his well-known penchant for dressing up. So unless there is some statement in his will or documentary evidence in his estate, his funeral expected this week may be the last time to test whether this rumour has any basis in fact.

(Photo: Veiled Jackson greets security guard as he enters shopping mall in Manama, Bahrain with veiled child, 25 Jan 2006/Hamad Mohammed)

The Jacksons are Jehovah’s Witnesses and could be expected to bury Michael in the tradition of that faith. When he announced the death, his brother Jermaine — a Muslim — ended with the words: “May Allah be with you, Michael, always.” Jermaine said in 2007 he was trying to convince Michael to convert.

The post-mortem period hasn’t looked very Muslim so far. Traditions vary, but in Islamic funeral practices in general, autopsies and cremation are out and the body should be buried quickly, usually in a day or two. Jackson is reported to have asked for cremation in his will and his family has asked for a second autopsy after the first one failed to pinpoint the cause of death without long toxicology tests.

Jehovah’s Witnesses prefer short and simple funerals, usually with a Scripture reading, and warn adherents against funerals with emotional outbursts ranging “from frantic wailing and shouting in the presence of the corpse to joyous festivities after the burial. Unrestrained feasting, drunkenness, and dancing to loud music often characterize such funeral celebrations.”

The focal point of an Islamic funeral is the funeral prayer called the salat al-janazah. An imam facing Mecca leads the faithful in saying the prayer, punctuated by declarations of Allahu Akbar. The corpse of the deceased is placed perpendicular to the qibla, the direction of Mecca in which all worshippers are standing, rather than in the same direction as the faithful as usual in a Christian funeral.

The funeral service could be in the Jehovah’s Witness style, it could be Islamic or it could be a mix of the two (maybe even with borrowings from other traditions as well). If Michael Jackson’s artistic career is anything to go by, the third option wouldn’t be a surprise at all.

Many Italians were shocked to find pictures in their daily newspapers recently of Muslims kneeling in prayer on the piazzas in front of the cathedrals in Milan and Bologna during demonstrations in support of Palestinians in Gaza.
Predictably, politicians in the centre-right government criticised the protests with some, including the ministers for defence and European affairs, calling them a blasphemous provocation.

(Photo: Il Giornale says Milan square “transformed into a mosque”)

The government ministers noted that it would be impossible for Christians to pray in Mecca and one called on the Roman Catholic Church to take a harder stand and be less tolerant.

Critics of the demonstrations have found an unlikely ally in Yahya Pallavicini, the vice-president of CO.RE.IS, Italy’s Islamic Religiuos Community. The demonstrations were organised by another Islamic group, the Union of Islamic Communities in Italy (UCOII) and Pallavicini thinks they went over the top.

“We pray in our mosques and in our in mosques and our homes but using prayer during demonstrations in such a theatrical way after burning U.S. and Israeli flags creates disorder and leads to the stereotyping of Islam in Italy,” he told me in a phone conversation. “This is a manouevre to try to help fundamentalist positions.”

“This is a very misleading use of religion, this is the strategy of Hamas,” he said.

After some Catholics expressed outrage over the prayers in front of Milan’s cathedral, some Muslims apologised to the city’s archbishop, Cardinal Dionisio Tettamanzi. But Pallavicini urged the prelate not to accept their apology and to take a hard line instead against Muslims who abuse religion for political purposes.

Do you think Muslims crossed a red line by praying in front of these cathedrals or do you think they have a right to do so?

(Photo: Milan cathedral, 13 Jan 2001/Stefano Rellandini)

Here is an Italian video discussing the Muslim prayer protest in Milan. Footage of the protest runs from 0:54 to 1:26:

There’s one thing you have to say about the World Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace — when they disagree about something, they don’t mind saying so. The final session of their third conference in Paris on Wednesday was the stage for an exchange of dramatic charges and counter-charges abut the perennial problem of Israeli-Palestinian relations. The atmosphere was tense in the UNESCO conference room where the 3-day session took place and several participants spoke up to calm down their more agitated colleagues. Since this was the only session the media was allowed to witness, it would have been easy to conclude that the imams and rabbis needed to seek peace among themselves first before preaching it to others.

(Photo: An imam in Berlin, 3 Aug 2007/Fabrizio Bensch)

But there were actions that spoke louder than words in the hall. Several participants were frowning as the finger-pointing progressed. Others turned to the nearest participant of the other faith to chat. At one point, a rabbi in his Hasidic black hat and coat walked over to an imam wearing a karakul hat, embraced him warmly and sat down for a lively talk. A television camera would have had a field day contrasting the words and the deeds in evidence there.

(Photo: A rabbi in Debent, Russia, 17 Sept 2007/Thomas Peter)

At the news conference ending the session, the organiser Alain Michel announced there had not been enough time to agree on a final resolution — a sign of a serious disagreement, as any reporter who has covered summit meetings could tell you. But he proceeded to say the meeting had agreed to set up a steering committee that would work out joint statements whenever there were major acts of violence in the name of religion. Names of the committee members were read out and all seemed to be satisfied that this was progress. Here is my news report about the meeting and here’s the official programme.

When it came to question time, I couldn’t help asking how they expected us to think of them as imams and rabbis for peace when they fought so much during the debate. Several got up to defend the meeting, saying they had made progress and it was only natural that there should be tension when it came to Israel and Palestine. Several participants came up to me afterwards, during the lunch, to give their view on why the meeting was more constructive than it seemed to be.

(Photo: Yahya Hendi)

The question elicited several nice quotes. “The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom,” said Yahya Hendi, the Palestinian-born Muslim chaplain at Georgetown, a Catholic university in Washington. “Blunt talk is not against the process, it’s part of the process,”said Rabbi Tsion Cohen of Shaar-HaNegev in Israel, who added that his community was near Gaza and often got hit by missiles from there.

A rabbi and an imam — both from outside the Middle East — pulled me aside to say basically the same thing about their respective sides. There’s a Middle East view and an international view (the rabbi called it the “diaspora view”) at discussions like this, and the occasional Middle Eastern clash is hard to avoid.

Rabbi David Rosen, president of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, said that freewheeling session would have been better at a different time. “It’s not a bad thing if you do that at the beginning of the program. People feel they got it off their shoulders, they made their point and they get on to more practical things,” he said. Despite the programme, the meeting worked, he said, because it showed that imams and rabbis can meet and work with each other, contrary to a general impression many people have that they are fundamentally opposed. “It is not only possible but imperative for Islam and Judaism and their leadership to live in mutual respect.  That’s the real significance of this meeting.  Tha’ts the message that needs to get out,” he said.

(Photo: David Rosen)

Imam Yahya Sergio Yahe Pallavicini, an Italian Muslim leader, participated both in this meeting and in the Common Word conference with Catholic experts at the Vatican last month. He told me the imams and rabbis should keep their focus more narrowly on religious issues and not politics, as he said the Common Word group did. “We want to be involved in politics but not follow a political agenda,” he said. “We have to stick to our role” (as religious leaders). That last quote echoed a comment made by a rabbi during the open discussion.

(Photo: Yahya Pallavicini)

Rosen made another interesting point. Opening the conference on Monday, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade invited the imams and rabbis to hold their 2009 congress in Dakar. Wade is the current president of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and an interfaith meeting hosted by him could draw some high-level participation from across the Muslim world.

There are quite a few dialogues between imams and rabbis going on in different countries but they don’t seem to be that well known. We’ve written about some of them here. Are you surprised to hear there may soon be joint Jewish-Muslim declarations denouncing terrorism? Do you think they will succeed in doing this?

This is such a coincidence that some might suspect it wasn’t one. France’s Muslim and Jewish minorities, both the largest of their kind in Europe, elected new leaders on Sunday. In both cases, they opted for younger leaders who promised to play a more active role in their communities. We may see and hear more from these two groups than in the past.

The French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) chose Mohammed Moussaoui, 44, of the Moroccan-backed Rally of French Muslims group as its new president. Its outgoing president, Dalil Boubakeur, 67, boycotted the election. This is a secular post, so Moussaoui is the top Muslim representative in France, not a theological authority. Although he is an imam, his “day job” is mathematics lecturer at the University of Avignon. After five years of paralysis at the CFCM, it was a breath of fresh air to see him publish an action programme in advance and pledge to reform the council. We covered his election here and the first round of the voting on June 8 here. There are about five million Muslims in France, around 8 percent of the population, and Islam is the second-largest religion here after Roman Catholicism. Moussaoui was born in Morocco and came to France for university studies.

Rabbi Gilles Bernheim, 56, won election as the new grand rabbi of France, replacing Joseph Sitruk, 63, who had held the post for 21 years and sought reelection. Bernheim is an orthodox rabbi who has frequently spoken out in public on a wide range of issues. A former university chaplain, he is rabbi of the largest Paris synagogue, the Synagogue de la Victoire, and has been active in dialogue with Christians. He recently published “Le rabbin et le cardinal” (The Rabbi and The Cardinal), a long conversation with Lyon Cardinal Philippe Barbarin. This commitment to dialogue earned him some criticism during the election campaign from more traditionalist voices in an unusually lively campaign (see this pre-poll article in The Forward). In French, check out reports in Le Monde and RTL radio (audio and text). There are about 600,000 Jews in France.

A rabbi, an imam and a Catholic priest have written a book about the “painful verses” in scriptures that offend other faiths. Instead of plucking quotes out of each others’ holy books, however, they went to their own texts and picked out the passages they found difficult themselves. The result, recently published in France in the book Les Versets douloureux (The Painful Verses), amounts to an interfaith dialogue that goes straight for some of the most sensitive topics between different faiths.

The trio — Rabbi David Meyer, Imam Sohaib Bencheikh and Rev. Yves Simoens — thought it was a needed switch from the polite interfaith meetings they were used to attending.

Here’s a feature I wrote today after their book presentation this morning. Meyer said there were no plans yet to translate it but their publisher Editions Lessius was in contact with counterparts in Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain.

The World Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace, a group Meyer and Bencheikh are active in, has posted a short summary of the book in English.