Hillary Clinton seeks to smooth Islamic defamation row with OIC
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton agreed with a major global Islamic organization on Friday to pursue new ways of resolving debates over religion without resorting to legal steps against defamation. Clinton met Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the head of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), in Istanbul to help set up new international mechanisms both protect free speech and combat religious discrimination around the world.
“Together we have begun to overcome the false divide that pits religious sensitivities against freedom of religion. We are pursuing a new approach based on concrete steps to fight intolerance wherever it occurs,” Clinton said.
Under heavy U.S. pressure, the OIC agreed in March to set aside its 12-year campaign to have religions protected from defamation, a step which allowed the U.N. Human Rights Council to approve a broader plan on religious tolerance. Western countries and their Latin American allies, strong opponents of the defamation concept, joined Muslim and African states in backing without vote the new approach that switches focus from protecting beliefs to protecting believers.
Ihsanoglu underscored that the OIC’s aim was not to limit free expression, but to combat religious intolerance which he said was spreading dangerously around the world. “Our cause, which stems from our general concern, should not be interpreted as calls for restriction of freedom,” he said. “We believe that mutual understanding, tolerance, respect and empathy should also be accompanying components when we advocate supremacy of freedom of expression.”
Both Ihsanoglu and Clinton outlined steps they would take to cultivate religious and cultural diversity along guidelines set by the U.N. Human Rights Commission, part of a process that will be overseen by the United Nations. “These are fundamental freedoms that belong to all people in all places and they are certainly essential to democracy,” Clinton said. “We now need to move to implementation.”
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In free Egypt, Islamic Jihad leader says the time for the gun is over
Abboud al-Zumar went to jail 30 years ago for his role in killing Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Now a free man, he believes democracy will prevent Islamists from ever again taking up the gun against the state.
Zumar was a prisoner for as long as Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, was president. His release with other leading Islamists jailed for militancy is a sign of dramatic change in Egypt in the five weeks since Mubarak was swept from power by mass protests. Zumar, 64, was a founding member of the Islamic Jihad group which gunned down Sadat during a military parade in 1981. He was released along with his cousin, Tarek al-Zumar, who had also spent three decades in jail on similar charges.
“The revolution created a new mechanism: the mechanism of strong, peaceful protests,” said Zumar, released on March 12 and one of the political prisoners who owes his freedom to the peaceful revolt against Mubarak. “Public squares around the Arab world are ready to receive millions who can stop any ruler and expose him,” added Zumar in an interview in his home village of Nahia on the rural outskirts of Cairo.
To many Egyptians, Zumar’s name evokes a violent chapter in the history of a country that has been an incubator for Islamist militancy. Seeking to ease concerns, Zumar describes the Islamist movement as the “first line of defense” of Egyptian society. Islamists merely want to enjoy the same freedoms as everyone else in the new Egypt, he says.
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Is free Iraq becoming a more Islamic state?
A group of men recently ordered Siham al-Zubaidi to close down her Baghdad hair salon for two months for Shi’ite religious festivities. She had no idea who they were but complied because she feared for her life.
“Can you just tell me who will pay the rent of my shop for these two months? What shall I do to support my family? What is the relation between hair dressing and religious events?” Zubaidi, 40, asked furiously. “This is a new dictatorship. They want Iraq to be an Islamic state. But this is not right. Iraq includes a variety of religious factions … These are alien ideas, not Iraqi.”
Recent efforts by authorities, clergy and unknown bands of neighbourhood enforcers to police morals by shutting nightclubs, bars and other establishments has heightened concerns among academics and intellectuals that Iraq, now emerging from war, is displaying the tendencies of a hard-line Islamic state.
Baghdad’s local government this month re-activated a federal order from last year to close down the capital’s nightclubs and liquor shops due to concern the venues were undermining morals. The crackdown followed similar actions in some Shi’ite-majority provinces in the south.
“What is going on are normal consequences when religious parties take over power. They start with such practices, and end the way the Taliban in Afghanistan ended, or other parties in Iran,” Baghdad political analyst Hazim al-Nuaimi said.
In September, local authorities in Babil province prevented an arts festival that has been held yearly since before 2003. Security forces told organizers a day after the festival started to end it because it included dance shows. In the southern city of Basra, the government shut down a foreign circus a few days after it opened last month. Basra authorities said the government department of Shi’ite endowments held that the land on which the circus was set up could not be used in a way that violated Islamic Sharia law.
The new measures sparked protests by some Iraqis who said the government is trying to kill freedom more than seven years after the U.S.-led invasion that ousted Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein and paved the way for majority Shi’ites to take power.
Religion crowded out in “cloud” of Ayatollah Khamenei’s sermon
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered a major address today on the election there. It was in the form of a khutbah, an Islamic Friday sermon that is often the platform for the most important public pronouncements in the Islamic Republic. So one might assume it would be couched in Islamic terminology and religious themes.
But a rough-and-ready indicator, a web “cloud” that indicates the frequency of certain words, tells us otherwise. Aziz Poonawalla over at the City of Brass blog generated a Khamenei khutbah cloud on Wordle on the basis of a quick translation of the ayatollah’s speech. I had some trouble reading all the terms, so I went to that site and generated one myself. Here is the result:
To be absolutely clear — this cloud is only a rough computer analysis. I generated it in Paris hours after the speech, without consulting any other Reuters bureau, so it played no part in our Tehran reporting of Khamenei’s comments or other coverage on our wire from Beirut and from London. Nothing can replace on-the-spot reporting by Persian-speaking correspondents who understand all the nuances in a political sermon like this.
That said, my techie side still thinks this cloud does highlight some interesting aspects of the sermon. The most frequently used words — people, election, state, president, revolution, country, leaders, legal — are political terms. Islamic makes a good showing, but it is only one of the top dozen or so terms — including God , which came up nine times — after the clear front-runner people (56 times).
Koran doesn’t appear at all.
I guess that only minority of Iranian wanted to change the majority is there on the other side
Can academia help Islam’s dialogue with the West?
Since 9/11, studying the relations between Islam and the West have become a growth field in academia. Among its leading proponents is Saudi Arabian investor Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, a billionaire who has spent tens of millions of dollars via his Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation creating study centres at leading universities, including Cambridge, Harvard and Georgetown, with the goal of fostering interfaith dialogue and understanding.
In the wake of the Islamist attacks in Mumbai last November, the foundation’s executive director, Muna AbuSulayman said recently, the organisation is keen to set up a centre in India and also to foster dialogue between Muslims and Jews.
A Mumbai Jewish community centre was seized and its rabbi and his wife killed during those attacks, in which 179 people were killed in a days-long rampage by members of a Pakistan-based militant group. “What has happened in India with the shooting was a wake up call,” she said. “India and Pakistan have a history, there’s a reason they separated. We want to help them minimise that.”
During an interview in London, AbuSulayman, wearing a cream-coloured headscarf, talked broadly about the need for interfaith dialogue, and included Judaism in that. But she said the Alwaleed Foundation definitely wouldn’t open a centre in Israel even though it does support dialogue with Jews.
“Would we do something on Jewish studies? Most definitely. We really do separate the idea between Zionism and Judaism,” said AbuSulayman. “We do believe in this tradition of all of the Abrahamic religions being together.”
Saudi Arabia and Israel have no diplomatic relations, although last summer King Abdullah hosted a meeting of Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists in Madrid.
“We wouldn’t get into the political part of it,” said AbuSulayman. “The prince really believes in academia as a way to solve problems, a way to ask uncomfortable questions.”
Thank god that the Swiss have the guts to start the ball rolling.Let us pray that the UK now do the same and the muslim faith and all the evil associated with it comes to an end in the UK.
Tough times empty the collection plate
For many churches, synagogues and mosques in the United States, this holiday season will be a lean one.
The outpouring of contributions usually prompted by festive goodwill and end-of-the-year giving geared to next year’s income tax calculations is feeling the pinch from the global financial meltdown. The shortfalls are startling.
“The giving patterns we’re witnessing suggest that churches, alone, will receive some $3 billion to $5 billion less than expected during this fourth quarter. The average church can expect to see its revenues dip about 4 percent to 6 percent lower than would have been expected without the economic turmoil. We anticipate that other non-profit organizations will be hit even harder.”
That grim news comes from George Barna, whose California-based Barna Group looks at trends and patterns among worshippers and church goers. He based it on a survey of 1,203 adults in the United States done in November.
Barna says most churches and non-profit groups operate in the red for most of any calendar year, expecting to gain a third or more of their annual income in the final three months of the year. But his survey found that one in every five households has cut back on giving to churches or other religious centers. Within that group, 22 percent have stopped giving completely.
The cutbacks come at a time when social needs, ranging from food and clothing to financial support for the needy, have risen dramatically. They also have the potential to pinch the flow of contributions from the United States to poverty-stricken destinations around the globe.
But some faith leaders in the United States believe global poverty and health concerns need not get pushed aside by the financial crisis, as long as the faithful are reminded of their obligations in the context of their beliefs.
GUESTVIEW: Mumbai violence brings New York faith groups together
The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone. Matthew Weiner, the author, is the Program Director at the Interfaith Center of New York. He is writing a book about Interfaith and Civil Society.
When terror attacks like those in Mumbai occur, many people of faith want to stand together despite their differences to condemn them with one voice. Faith leaders in New York, having seen their own city targetted in 2001, quickly responded with a show of support for their sister city in India. Their news conference on the steps of New York’s City Hall on Monday was an example of how faith communities in the world’s most religiously diverse metropolis can join hands to speak out against such violence.
Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, senior vice-president of the New York Board of Rabbis, Mo Razvi, a Pakistani-American Muslim and community organizer, and the Interfaith Center of New York organized the meeting while Councilman John Liu got the green light to use City Hall as the venue. Potasnick worked through Thanksgiving weekend to make it happen and insisted on having representatives from every faith. “It is very important to condemn the attacks…but it is imperative we stand together with one voice,” he said.
Indeed almost everyone was there. Imam Shamsi Ali of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York spoke condemned the attacks by Muslim extremists as un-Islamic. Jaspreet Singh of the United Sikhs spoke on behalf of a community rooted in the Indian Subcontinent. Imam Syed Sayeed, a Muslim from India and longtime New Yorker, recalled his homeland has been a religiously plural place for thousands of years. Ven. Kondannya of the New York Buddhist Council called for a non-violent response to the attacks, as did Jain community representative Naresh Jain, who lost a friend in the killing. Members of Chabad, the Brooklyn-based Hasidic community who lost a rabbi in the attacks, were also present.
Dr. Uma Mysorekar, president of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, said she had trained in a Mumbai hospital that treated many victims and remembered the discussions that students of different faiths used to have there. “In Mumbai now, they are getting back to work,” she said. “This is all we can do. It is what the terrorists want to stop us from doing.” Dr. Mysorekar had held a prayer service with Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn just hours after the attack and prayers have continued at her temple in Queens ever since.
“We know how hard it is to build relationships across difference in times of crisis, and our hearts go out to Mumbai,” Said Rev. Chloe Breyer, the Executive Director at the Interfaith Center of New York. In fact, it was not easy to assemble members of all the main religions represented in Mumbai; in the rush to arrange the meeting, we could not contact the Zoroastrians in time. But how often do Hindu, Ultra Orthodox Jewish and Muslim leaders get together?
Actually, they get together more often than one would think. Potasnik and Mysorekar first met at an Interfaith Center news conference two days after 9/11. It was there that Mysoekar witnessed the courage of a dozen Muslim leaders denouncing those attacks and realized how interfaith contacts could help keep the peace. She invited a Muslim speaker to her Hindu program in Queens, which did not go over all too well among some of her more conservative members.
Rabindranath Tagore said :”Every child comes with the message that God is not disappointed with man!”An Urdu Poet has said,”It is to show ‘empathy’ to the sufferinghumanity, God has created man.Otherwise to carry out His commandments He has an army of angels!”Thus, when someone in some part of the globe is bereaved, we hasten to condole the death of his kin and offer solace to the grieved.The living only prefer the barricades of religion for identity and survival.The soul remains free from all blemishes,hence, it is deemed sacred by all irrespective of differences of religion!How nice it would be if the living start respecting the “soul’” in the other living being and eschew from injuring or killing a fellow being!
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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Any “religion” that hands its apostates a death sentence, such as Islam does, is no religion at all.
It is a vile, fascistic, intolerant system of repression and abuse that yokes its followers like oxen to its bilge-filled bullock cart.