Bangladesh Islamists stage strike against dropping Allah from constitution
Police in Bangladesh Sunday fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse Islamist activists trying to enforce a nationwide strike over the removal of a Muslim phrase in the constitution, and witnesses said around 50 people were injured. The clashes erupted when thousands of bludgeon-carrying Islamists cut off a stretch of highway leading to the capital’s eastern suburbs with barricades. The protesters also damaged several cargo trucks before the police crackdown, and some 100 people were detained.
The strike, which began two days after the country emerged from a 48-hour stoppage enforced by the opposition, was called to protest a recent amendment to the constitution which dropped the words “absolute faith and trust in Allah.” The Islamists also want to scrap “secularism” as a state principle in the Muslim-majority country.
The strike, which was called for by 12 Islamist parties, was however, largely ignored by most people in Bangladesh, where businesses and transportation was operating as normal.
The strike was spearheaded by the Bangladesh Islami Andolon, one of a handful of small Islamist parties that have no representation in parliament but who back the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) of former prime minister Begum Khaleda Zia, who is trying to force early elections. The BNP lost to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League in the 2008 parliament polls and has since been trying to rally support of the Islamist and other groups. The two women have dominated the south Asian country’s often volatile politics for two decades and are likely to face off again in the next election due by end of 2013.
– by Anis Ahmed, via Police, Islamists clash in Bangladesh, dozens hurt | Top News | Reuters.
Pope urges help for traditional families crumbling in secularised Europe
Pope Benedict warned on Sunday that the traditional family in Europe was disintegrating under the weight of secularization and called for laws to help couples cope with the costs of having and educating children. On the second day of his trip to Croatia, a bastion of Roman Catholicism in the Balkans, the pope said an open-air mass for hundreds of thousands of people and hammered home one of the major themes of his papacy.
“Unfortunately, we are forced to acknowledge the spread of a secularization which leads to the exclusion of God from life and the increasing disintegration of the family, especially in Europe,” he said in his sermon on the edge of the capital.
The 84-year-old Benedict’s sermon was the latest in a series of salvos against what the Church sees as growing anti-Catholicism and “Christianophobia” in Europe. Speaking on the day Croatia, whose population of 4.4 million people is 90 percent Catholic, celebrates its “Family Day,” he denounced practices such abortion, cohabitation as a “substitute for marriage,” and artificial birth control.
The pope urged Catholic families throughout Europe not to give in to a creeping “secularized mentality” and called for “legislation which supports families in the task of giving birth to children and educating them.”
The sermon reflected the Vatican’s belief that the Catholic Church in Europe is under assault by some national governments and European institutions over issues such as gay marriage, abortion, religious education and the use of Christian religious symbols in public places.
Read the full story here. For more on the pope’s visit, see Pope tells Croatians EU too bureaucratic, sometimes ignores local cultures
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Sarkozy party: Islam debate undercuts French far-right
France’s ruling conservative party held a controversial debate on the practice of Islam on Tuesday, rejecting charges of bigotry and saying that airing the issue could help stem the rising popularity of the far-right. President Nicolas Sarkozy called for the discussion on Islam and secularism to address fears that some overt displays of Muslim faith, including street prayer and full-face veils, were undermining France’s secular identity.
With his popularity at record lows a year before a presidential election, Sarkozy has been accused of seeking to woo back right-wing voters increasingly drawn to the National Front party under its telegenic new leader Marine Le Pen. Even before it began, the debate had been tarnished by criticism from religious leaders, a boycott by France’s largest Muslim group and the absence of Prime Minister Francois Fillon.
“Everything possible has been done to stop this meeting taking place…but we have not yielded to those pressures… because it is the French people who are calling for it,” said Jean-François Copé, secretary-general of Sarkozy’s UMP party. “One less problem is one less electoral argument for Marine Le Pen,” he said.
The talks included ministers, French Chief Rabbi Gilles Bernheim and representatives of other faiths, but no Muslim clerics. “We did not ask for this debate,” Bernheim said. “But there was no question for us of boycotting it and stigmatising a political party, even if it is a ruling party.”
Muslim groups accuse the UMP of targeting their faith, which is France’s second largest religion after Roman Catholicism with some 5-6 million members, according to government figures. “This debate has only one purpose and that is to keep the UMP in the media in the year before the election,” said Hassan Ben M’Barek of “Banlieues Respect” which plans to hand out five-pointed green stars in protest at Islam’s singling-out. “Clearly, this will feed into Islamophobia.”
Read the full story by Nicholas Vinocur here.
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Catholic-atheist meetings end with Pope Benedict appeal to youth
Pope Benedict urged French youths on Friday to help put God back into public debate, either as Christians sharing their faith or as non-believers seeking more justice and solidarity in a cold utilitarian world. In a video address from the Vatican to an evening rally outside Notre Dame Cathedral in central Paris, the pope also urged them to “tear down the barriers of fear of the other, the foreigner, of those who are not like you” that mutual ignorance can create.
Benedict’s address, projected on a large screen in the square, came at the end of two days of a Vatican-sponsored dialogue between Roman Catholics and atheists, part of a drive to revive the faith in Europe that is a hallmark of his papacy.
“The question of God doesn’t endanger society, it doesn’t threaten human life!” he told the crowd during a break in its evening of modern and ancient Christian music. “The question of God must not be absent from the great questions of our time.”
He said religions had nothing to fear from secular society as long as it had “an open secularism that lets all live as they believe, in accordance with their conscience.”
The success of secularists, especially in France, in pushing faith to the fringes of the public sphere prompted Benedict to launch the discussions with atheists due to continue in at least 16 European and North American cities over the next two years.
The series started in impressive surroundings — the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the Sorbonne university and the Institut de France, home of the prestigious Academie Francaise. Click for the programme details in French for the sessions at UNESCO, the Sorbonne and the Institut de France.
Most speakers were eminent French thinkers, making the sessions feel more like a post-graduate philosophy seminar than a public debate likely to influence a wider public. They were also directed at select small audiences. Access to the UNESCO and the Institut de France events was by invitation only and the open session in the Sorbonne’s Grand Amphitheatre attracted at most around 200 people.
Vatican launches public dialogue with atheists in Paris
The Vatican has launched a series of public dialogues with non-believers, choosing leading intellectual institutions in Paris to present its belief that modern societies must speak more openly about God.
The decision to start the series in France, where strong secularism has pushed faith to the fringes of the public sphere, reflected Pope Benedict’s goal of bringing religious questions back into the mainstream of civic debates.
The dialogues, called “Courtyard of the Gentiles” after the part of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem where Jews and non-Jews met, will continue in at least 16 cities in Europe and North America over the next two years.
Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s culture minister, told the opening session on Thursday at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that the dialogue was meant not to confront believers and atheists but to seek common ground.
Rather it was “an invitation to non-believers … to start a voyage with believers through the desert,” he said.
The meeting was due to continue Friday with sessions at the Sorbonne university and the Institut de France, home of the prestigious Academie Francaise.
The public dialogue with Atheists could benefit from the new publication „The Great Leap-Fraud, Social Economics of Religious Terrorism.“ It is a saga of deceit and fraud under cover of religion through 2300 years of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In its approach as one piece of the struggle against poverty, it includes all necessary primary evidence how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unfolds through the eye of history.
Herbert L. Calhoun asks in his review for The Great Leap-Fraud by author A.J. Deus:
“Is this the Historico-religious Trifecta of the Century?
It is my considered opinion that all the Sam Harrises, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennetts in the world could not have made a more profound statement about why ridding the world of organized religion must remain postmodern man’s most urgent task than the case made here by this author.”
Summaries can be found at ajdeus.org.
Analysis: What role for the Islamists in the new Tunisia?
For years they were jailed or exiled. They were excluded from elections, banned from politics, and played no visible role in Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution. But in the brave new world of multi-party politics, moderate Islamists could attract more followers than their secular rivals like to admit.
And the downfall of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s police state may leave Tunisia open to infiltration by extremists from neighboring Algeria, where war between authorities and Islamists has killed 200,000 people in the last two decades.
“The Islamist movement was the most oppressed of all the opposition movements under Ben Ali. Its followers are also much greater in number than those of the secular opposition,” said Salah Jourchi, a Tunisian expert on Islamic movements. “Its effect could be large.”
Secularism has been strictly enforced in Tunisia since before its independence from France in 1956. Habib Bourguiba, the independence leader and long-time president, was a nationalist who considered Islam a threat to the state. Indeed, in 1987, when Ben Ali pushed aside Bourguiba, he briefly released Islamists from jail and allowed them to run in the 1989 elections. The results surprised and worried Ben Ali.
Ennahda, or Renaissance, Tunisia’s largest Islamist movement, officially won 17 percent of the vote, coming second to the ruling party. Ben Ali reversed his policy, banned Ennahda, jailed its followers and cracked down harshly on anyone showing any tendency toward Islamism. Ennahda’s leader Sheikh Rachid Ghannouchi was exiled to London the same year.
Tunisia revolt makes Islamist threat ring hollow
“No to a government born of corruption”
The absence of Islamist slogans from Tunisia’s pro-democracy revolt punches a hole in the argument of many Arab autocrats that they are the bulwark stopping religious radicals sweeping to power.
Ousted strongman Zine el Abidine Ben Ali spent much of his 23-year rule crushing Islamist opposition groups who opposed his government’s brand of strict secularism: after Sept. 11 2001, he was an enthusiastic backer of Washington’s “war on terror”.
But the evidence of the past week is that the protest slogans that rang out before his fall demanded not an imposition of Islamic sharia law but fair elections and free speech.
“The lesson from what’s happening in Tunisia is that (Arab leaders) won’t be able to hide any more behind the Islamist threat argument,” said Amel Boubekeur, a North Africa specialist at social sciences school EHESS in Paris.
It remains to be seen whether Tunisia’s enfeebled Islamists will be able to win significant support in the event that they are unbanned and allowed to contest planned free elections. But so far most complaints levelled at a new interim government set up after Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia have focused not on a lack of Islamists but on too many faces from the old regime.
Yes most Tunisians are muslims, but we’re not the fanatic, twisted minded extremists who dragged Islam into dirt. Our revolution occured without one single death to the old regime’s police. Anyone who generalizes over 1.5 Billion muslims is simply an idiot with a barbaric mouth. Watch and learn instead.
Musharraf says Pakistan’s blasphemy law cannot be changed
Former President Pervez Musharraf has said that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws could not be changed, but that the man who killed Punjab Province Governor Salman Taseer over his opposition to them must be punished.
Musharraf, who is planning to return to Pakistan to fight elections due by 2013, said blasphemy was an extremely sensitive issue for the people of Pakistan. “Therefore doing away with the blasphemy law is not at all possible and must not be done,” he told Reuters in an interview at his London home on Sunday.
Taseer was killed by his security guard this month after backing amendments to the blasphemy laws, which are often misused to settle personal scores. The man who confessed to killing him, Mumtaz Qadri, has been treated as a hero by some in Pakistan and religious parties have led demonstrations against any changes to the blasphemy laws.
Musharraf said that, rather than amend the laws, Pakistan needed to find ways to make sure they were not misused.
Read the full story here. For more recent Reuters coverage of the blasphemy issue in Pakistan, see:
In France, far right seizes on Muslim street prayers
A call to prayer goes up from a loudspeaker perched on the hood of a car, and all at once hundreds of Muslim worshippers touch their foreheads to the ground, forming a sea of backs down the road. The scene is taking place not in downtown Cairo, but on a busy market street in northern Paris, a short walk from the Sacre Coeur basilica. To locals, it’s old news: some have been praying on the street, rain or shine, for decades.
But for Marine Le Pen — tipped to take over from her father this weekend as leader of the far-right National Front party — it is proof that Muslims are taking over France and becoming an occupying force, according to remarks she made last month.
Her comments caused a furore as she seized on the street prayers to drive home the idea that Islam is threatening the values of a secular country where anxiety over the role of Muslims in society has deepened in the past few years.
More than two thirds of French and German people now consider the integration of Muslims into their societies a failure, pollster IFOP said in a survey published on Jan. 5. In France, where Islam is the second-largest religion after Catholicism, 42 percent saw it as a threat to national identity.
“This has become a key political issue,” said Frederic Dabi, IFOP’s head of research. “Street prayers and the perceived growing influence of Islam are seen as impinging on French values of secularism, communal living.”
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
Pakistan and the taboo of secularism
For everyone trying to understand the implications of Salman Taseer's assassination, this essay from 2007 is good place to start (h/t Abu Muqawama). "The Politics of God" is about why Europe decided, after years of warfare over the correct interpretation of Christianity, to separate church and state. But it is also relevant to Pakistan, where the killing of the Punjab governor over his opposition to the country's blasphemy laws has shown that what was left of Pakistani secularism, is, if not dead, at least in intensive care.
Read the opening paragraph to understand why it resonates:
"For more than two centuries, from the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity — these were the questions that divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong."
The point of highlighting this essay is not to argue that Pakistan should emulate the west, nor indeed that secularism is necessarily the answer, but rather to suggest that there is still a debate to be had in a country where even using the word secular is becoming taboo. (And before anyone accuses me of orientalism, the advantage of looking at it through the lens of European history is that it also strips out some of the other factors which contribute to the nature of Pakistani society today -- the war in Afghanistan, America's response to 9/11, the role of the army, its past use of militant proxies, the weakness of its civilian governments, the fragility of the economy etc, etc).
As the blogger kala kawa put it, "too much space has been ceded. Too much PUBLIC space has been ceded. This debate cannot go underground. It must not be behind closed doors. We don’t have guns, and we don’t have bombs, and we don’t even want to kill anyone. We just want to talk it out. Unfortunately, that’s enough for them to want to kill us."
Or to quote Pakistan's ideological father, Ellama Mohammad Iqbal, himself not a secularist, in one of his early letters: "Let the many-headed monster of public (opinion) give their dross of respect to others who act and live in accordance with their false ideals of religion and morality. I cannot stoop to respect their conventions which suppress the innate freedom of man's mind."
So back to Europe and "The Politics of God". Author Mark Lilla traces the separation of church and state to the 17th century, at a time when Christians had wearied themselves with killing other Christians -- just as much of today's violence is a battle within Islam. In his treatise "Leviathan", the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes laid down the idea that men would only be free of fear and war if they created political institutions without grounding them in religion.
They tried to build a secular society using Islam as a foundation. Using a religion as a basis for founding a secular state is a contradiction in terms….particularly so when it’s an Islamic state that pretends to have secular aspirations. The founders of Pakistan saw what they wanted to see. They saw the secular values that they so cherished in their idealistic view of Islam. Secular moderation was to be found in a supposed moderate faith that always chooses the “middle path”. How wrong they were.
This leaves the Pakistanis confused. They keep trying to find a middle path. They don’t want to be Saudi Arabia. But they don’t want to be the West either. But I really do wonder if compromise is possible at all. I don’t think it is. Pakistan will slowly become another Saudi Arabia (and if the treatment of minorities is an indication, the pretense of even moderate secularism is slipping away). There’s very little chance it will go the way of Turkey and become a secular state with a large Muslim majority.
I know Pakistanis aspire to be Turkey. But the difference is that while there is debate in Turkey about secularism, most Turks understand and accept the necessity of separating mosque and state. In Pakistan, increasingly this is not the case. When the starting point of debate is that you are an Islamic Republic, that leaves very little room for debate.
Moreover, the situation of Pakistanis, ignores context. Pakistan was founded in direct contrast to the view that India would be a Hindu state. As such, Islam is a part of Pakistan’s identity. Even more than that, it’s Pakistan raison d’etre. Pretty hard to turn secular if the founding image of the country is based on the idea that Islam in South Asia was under threat from the Hindu hordes.
I do wonder what the founders of the Pakistani idea would think of the state of affairs today: an increasingly secular India (not perfect but constantly progressing away from sectarianism), sitting next door to a Pakistan that’s breeding more and more religious intolerance and fanaticism. Too bad. Pakistan could have been the Switzerland of South Asia.
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