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.
Egyptian clerics protest at graft in Islamic religious bodies
Egyptian clerics and employees of state Islamic religious bodies are demanding an end to what they say is rampant corruption by senior officials who manage religious endowments. No official figures exist for the sums donated to Egypt’s top Islamic institutions to help manage and build mosques and pay imams, but independent estimates suggest they run to the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The bodies have been under state control for more than three decades and their reputation among many Egyptians has declined as part of broader discontent at the failings of government. Last month’s popular revolt that ended President Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade rule was the cue for an anti-corruption drive targeting senior officials in the former regime.
Sheikh Mostafa Hassan, head of a mosque and an employee in the endowments ministry, said kickbacks and book-fiddling in Egypt’s Islamic religious bodies were rife.
“We want an end to the huge administrative and financial corruption practised by officials in the endowment ministry for many years,” he said. “We also want the head of (Egypt’s highest Islamic authority) al-Azhar to be elected. We want measures for reviewing religious authorities that are fair and transparent.”
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“The Jury is Out”: WikiLeaks shows U.S. trying to understand Islam in Turkey
The WikiLeaks documents from the U.S. embassy in Ankara show several attempts by American diplomats to understand the role of Islam and the Islamic world in the political stand of the governing AK Party of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. Their efforts can be summarised in a subtitle of a cable in 2007 purporting to show “the truth behind the AKP’s “secret Islamic agenda.” It said simply: The Jury is Out.”
Following are some interesting excerpts, with links to the full documents:
20 Jan 2010 — WHAT LIES BENEATH ANKARA’S NEW FOREIGN POLICY
¶1. (C) There is much talk in chanceries and in the international media these days about Turkey’s new, highly activist foreign policy … The ruling AKP foreign policy is driven by both a desire to be more independently activist, and by a more Islamic orientation…
¶2. (C) Does all this mean that the country is becoming more focused on the Islamist world and its Muslim tradition in its foreign policy? Absolutely. Does it mean that it is “abandoning” or wants to abandon its traditional Western orientation and willingness to cooperate with us? Absolutely not. At the end of the day we will have to live with a Turkey whose population is propelling much of what we see … Turkey will remain a complicated blend of world class “Western” institutions, competencies, and orientation, and Middle Eastern culture and religion.
¶9. (C) Various factors explain the shifts we see in Turkish foreign policy beyond the personal views of the AKP leadership:
In a small way, this reminds me of both Voltaire’s Letters on The English, and Tocqueville’s America. This should have never been classified information.
Radical Islamists aim to infiltrate Hamburg mosques
Radical Islamists from a shut down Hamburg mosque linked to the September 11 attacks on the United States are now trying to infiltrate other mosques in and around the German city, according to officials and Muslim leaders.
Small groups of radicals have turned up at several mosques trying to establish a new meeting place since the Taiba Mosque, where the 9/11 leader Mohammad Atta once prayed, was raided and closed by police in August, they told Reuters.
With radicals no longer grouped around one mosque near the city’s main train station, security services have stepped up their observation of Islamists around the city and Muslim associations are on the lookout for suspicious newcomers.
“There are small groups of 3 to 5 people from the former Taiba Mosque who have gone to other mosques,” said Ralf Kunz, internal affairs spokesman for the city government. Individual radicals have turned up “at lots of mosques, both in Hamburg and the surrounding region,” he said. “They have not been able to assemble at any mosque.”
Muslim organizations in the city said they had stepped up their vigilance. Mustafa Yoldas, head of Hamburg’s largest Muslim group Schura, said it had no evidence of any problem at its mosques but added: “The salafis are trying to get a foothold in some other congregations. I know of two mosques where they meet and give lectures… They are and will remain a fringe group, they will never be mainstream here.”
At DITIB, a German-Turkish association linked to Ankara’s Religious Affairs Ministry, regional chairman Zekeriya Altug said his group’s structure made it harder to infiltrate. “I know that the (Taiba Mosque) congregation has been split up and is seeking refuge elsewhere,” he said. “Our imams are university graduates who are competent to counter them.”
German universities to train Muslim imams, teachers
Germany has announced it will fund Islamic studies at three state universities to train prayer leaders and religion teachers more in tune with Western society than the foreign imams preaching at most mosques here.
Two universities, Tübingen and Münster, are famous for their faculties of Christian theology and count German-born Pope Benedict among their former professors. The third, Osnabrück, opened a course for imams this week with 30 students.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, several European countries have been seeking ways to educate imams at their universities rather than importing them from Islamic countries out of step with modern and multicultural societies.
Germany, whose state schools have separate religion classes for their Catholic, Protestant and Jewish pupils, also needs qualified Islam teachers for Muslims. Some states already offer Islam classes in their schools and more plan to do so.
“We want as many imams as possible to be educated in Germany,” said Education Minister Annette Schavan on Thursday. “Imams are bridge builders between their congregations and the communities in which their mosques stand.”
The project was announced amid an emotional debate in Germany about the role of Islam. Central bank board member Thilo Sarrazin was forced to resign after publishing a book, to become a bestseller, accusing Muslims of exploiting the welfare state and making little effort to integrate. President Christian Wulff said in a speech marking 20 years of reunification that Islam had won its place in German society.
Mosques to become bigger part of German life – Chancellor Angela Merkel
Chancellor Angela Merkel has said Germans had for too long failed to grasp how immigration was changing their country and would have to get used to the sight of more mosques in their cities.
Germany, home to at least 4 million Muslims, has been divided in recent weeks by a debate over integration sparked by disparaging remarks about Muslim immigrants by an outspoken member of the country’s central bank.
“Our country is going to carry on changing, and integration is also a task for the society taking up the immigrants,” Merkel told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Saturday. “For years we’ve been deceiving ourselves about this. Mosques, for example, are going to be a more prominent part of our cities than they were before,” she added.
The uproar sparked by the Bundesbank’s Thilo Sarrazin, who argued Turkish and Arab immigrants were failing to integrate and swamping Germany with a higher birth rate, is one of several recent prominent disputes touching on religion and integration. Read the full story by Dave Graham here.
In the interview, Merkel also said “we now have to ask the question whether we should train imams here in our country who accept the principles of our state and legal order, or whether preachers should continue in the next few decades to come mostly from Turkey.
“I said that mosques will be a more prominent part of our urban landscape than before. Our constitution guarantees freedom of religion. I also say that everyone must respect our laws and all articles of our constitution. We cannot allow parallel societies where our basic rights, for example the equality of man and woman, do not apply. Only on the basis of our constitution can we live together in tolerance and respect. Everyone who lives here must accept that.”
Teach Islam at German universities – academic council report
Germany should set up centres for Islamic studies at two or three state universities to educate Muslim scholars, teachers and pastoral workers for its large Muslim minority, an academic advisory council has said. The Council on Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) said the lack of such institutes at universities, which already teach Christian and Jewish theology, “does not do justice to the importance of the largest non-Christian faith community in Germany.”
Muslim organisations should join advisory boards to help develop Islam institutes and choose faculty members and all main Muslim views in Germany should be represented, it said in a report (here in German) on Monday.
“For me, this is part of a modern integration policy,” Education Minister Annette Schavan told Deutschlandfunk radio in Berlin. “The main question will be who the partner is in developing this.”
Since the September 11 attacks in the United States, several European countries have been seeking ways to educate Muslim imams and teachers in Europe rather than importing them from Islamic countries out of step with modern western societies. France has set up an imam training course in Paris run jointly by the Grand Mosque and Catholic Institute, which stepped in after the Sorbonne university declined to join because it might violate the separation of church and state. Private schools operate in several countries, but the German report advised against this option, saying Islamic studies needed to be in the university system to ensure they met the same academic standards as theology studies of other faiths.
The report said Germany, where around four million Muslims live, has about 700,000 Muslim pupils and would need 2,000 Islam teachers if all states offer religious education for them. Only a few states now teach Islam, often with teachers from Turkey.
Many German universities teach about Islam in Middle Eastern studies or history courses, but none teach its theology, law and languages in an academic curriculum similar to that used in their Christian theology faculties. The only German university training Muslim teachers is in Münster, but several Muslim organisations have criticised it because one professor — a German convert to Islam — has questioned whether the Prophet Mohammad actually existed.
The report said the advisory councils meant to help universities develop Islam studies should be made up of representatives of the main Muslim organisations, which are often organised along ethnic or political lines. “Various theological schools of Islam should be represented,” it said.
Mauritanian Muslim imams initiate rare ban on female circumcision
Human rights campaigners who have been struggling for years to eliminate female genital mutilation (FGM) in West Africa got a boost this week as news emerged that a group of Muslim clerics and scholars in Mauritania had declared a fatwa, or religious decree, against the practice.
“Are there texts in the Koran that clearly require that thing? They do not exist,” asked the secretary general of the Forum of Islamic Thought in Mauritania, Cheikh Ould Zein. “On the contrary, Islam is clearly against any action that has negative effects on health. Now that doctors in Mauritania unanimously say that this practice threatens health, it is therefore clear that Islam is against it.”
In many parts of West Africa, FGM has been presented as a religious obligation for practising Muslim women, leading most to believe that if they are not circumcised they are unclean and their prayers will not be heard. Which makes the decision by 34 imams and scholars — supported by the government of Mauritania and UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency — all the more unusual.
Read the whole story on the Reuters humanitarian news network AlertNet.
Praise be to the Human Rights Campaigners, wonderful news.
Muslims, Catholics rap Senegal prez over Stalinist-style tribute to Africa
Senegal has a reputation for harmony between its Muslim majority (about 90%) and Christian minority (about 6%). President Abdoulaye Wade ranks as a Muslim champion of dialogue with Christians and even with Jews. So it came as a surprise over the holiday period that the 83-year-old leader provoked separate protests by imams and Catholics, including the country’s cardinal. Even stranger, the dispute was sparked by a huge Stalinist-style statue that North Korean workers are constructing on a hill overlooking the capital Dakar.
Wade stirred up protests in recent months from imams who say the project smacks of idolatry and its celebration of a near-naked man and woman offends Muslim modesty. He compounded the problem by announcing that he, as the memorial’s designer, would personally take 35% of its expected tourism receipts. When the imams’ campaign spread with anti-memorial speeches in the mosques, Wade rejected their suggestion the statue was somehow pagan. “There are worse things that happen in churches,” he told a meeting of teachers on Dec. 28. “They pray to Jesus in churches and he’s not a god. Everybody knows this, but nobody has ever said we have to knock down the churches. Nobody has ever objected or cared what the people do there.”
At a meeting in the Catholic cathedral in Dakar on Dec. 30, Cardinal Theodore Adrien Sarr responded firmly: “We were shaken and humiliated by the comparison the head of state made between the monument to African renaissance and the representations found in our churches. It is scandalous and unacceptable that the divinity of Jesus is jeered and questioned by the highest authority of state.” At the same time, he urged Catholics to stay calm and thanked Muslims who had criticised Wade’s comments. Despite that, several hundred Catholics began a protest outside the cathedral, located close to the presidential palace, and security forces quickly intervened to break it up.
Wade sent his son to apologise, but Sarr demanded a public apology from the president himself. Wade did so in his New Year’s address to the nation, after saying his comments had been misreported by media opposed to him. “I would like to say to my Christian compatriots that I never intended to attack their religion, which I respect. If certain members of the Christian community felt offended by the way they understood my comments, I am the first to regret this,” he said. Sarr accepted his apology in a statement in which he stressed that he had reacted to “the words the chief of state actually used, and not on reports or commentaries in the press.”
Both sides seem keen to put the dispute behind them so Senegal may well retain its reputation for relative interfaith harmony. Doing that may turn out to be easier than ignoring the eyesore that now towers over the city.
I am not sure which is more amusing.
The fact that soviet era art style is now being used to further the worship of religion.
The fact that christianity both worships god alone as a monotheism, yet sees God as a trinity of three entities, involving a son who was mortal and also divine.
Or the fact that a statement such as “Senegal has a reputation for harmony between its Muslim majority and Christian minority” begs the rejoinder “muslims are always ready for harmony as long as it involves them as the majority”.
Medvedev turns to Muslim clerics to counter Islamist radicals
President Dmitry Medvedev has urged Russia’s top Muslim clerics to join forces to stop radical Islamist groups wooing young people in the turbulent North Caucasus.
“We cannot force people to give up Internet or close (Islamist) sites,” he told clerics and regional leaders at his summer residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. “We need to think about finding a (television) channel which would offer teaching and comprehensive explanation of Islam that is traditional for our country.”
Medvedev also proposed stronger control over young people returning to Russia after studying Islam abroad. “Unfortunately these people are returning … (and) bring back unorthodox views on Islam,” he said.
“It is absolutely essential to ensure full support for the Islamic leaders, the muftiat, those who serve in the Caucasus,” he said. “Without consolidating the authority of the Islamic leaders we will be unable to deal with the problems that exist.”
Read our reporting on this meeting here and here. For more background, see our analysis on the “Afghan-isation” of North Caucasus.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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>>>…..foreigners in Afghanistan belong in just one category: the infidels.