FaithWorld

Syria’s Christians fear for their religious freedom

Reuters Staff

May 18, 2011 08:46 EDT

Syria’s minority Christians are watching the protests sweeping their country with trepidation, fearing their religious freedom could be threatened if President Bashar al-Assad’s autocratic but secular rule is overthrown. Sunni Muslims form a majority in Syria, but under four decades of rule by Assad’s minority Alawites the country’s varied religious groups have enjoyed the right to practice their faith.

Calls for Muslim prayers ring out alongside church bells in Damascus, where the apostle Paul started his ministry and Christians have worshipped for two millennia. But for many Syrian Christians, the flight of their brethren from sectarian conflict in neighbouring Iraq and recent attacks on Christians in Egypt have highlighted the dangers they fear they will face if Assad succumbs to the wave of uprisings sweeping the Arab world.

“Definitely the Christians in Syria support Bashar al-Assad. They hope that this storm will not spread,” Yohana Ibrahim, the Syriac Orthodox Archbishop of Aleppo, told Reuters.

Protests erupted in Syria two months ago, triggered by anger and frustration at widespread corruption and lack of freedom in the country ruled with an iron fist by the Assad family for nearly half a century. Although some Christians may be participating in the protests, church institutions have not supported them. Christians contacted by Reuters said they backed calls for reform but not the demands for “regime change”, which they said could fragment Syria and give the upper hand possibly to Islamist groups that would deny them religious freedom.

Read the full story by Mariam Karouny here.

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Top Algerian Salafist’s fatwa says unrest is un-Islamic

The spiritual leader of Algeria’s influential Salafist movement has issued a 48-page fatwa, or religious decree, urging Muslims to ignore calls for change because he says that democracy is against Islam. The fatwa by Sheikh Abdelmalek Ramdani, who lives in Saudi Arabia, comes at an opportune time for President Abdelaziz Bouteflika as Algerians watching protests in other Arab states have begun pushing their own political and economic demands.

“As long as the commander of the nation is a Muslim, you must obey and listen to him. Those who are against him are just seeking to replace him, and this is not licit,” Ramdani wrote in the fatwa obtained by Reuters. “During unrest, men and women are mixed, and this is illicit in our religion,” said Ramdani, who claims several hundred thousand followers here.

Algeria has been shaken since January by a wave of protest sparked by a spike in food prices. The opposition has made several attempts to march in Algiers for democracy, transparency and a change of leadership. Anxious to keep a wave of popular revolts in the Arab world from spreading to Algeria, the government has lifted a 19-year state of emergency and opened up state media to the opposition. It has also been paying out huge sums in subsidies, wage increases and interest-free loans to placate discontent.

Ramdani, who moved to Saudi Arabia after threats from radical Islamists, wrote in his “Fatwa on Unrest” that an observant Muslim can only “pray and be patient” when faced with an unwanted ruler.

Read the full story here.

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Watching Bahrain, Saudi Shi’ites demand reforms

When Saudi Shi’ites mark the birthday of the Prophet Mohammad, meeting at mosques and exchanging sweets is only part of what’s going on. The Shi’ites also are testing the tolerance of Sunni clerics and taking advantage of reforms introduced by King Abdullah that allow them greater freedom to practise their branch of Islamic faith.

For the hundreds of Shi’ites who gathered on Sunday in the rundown eastern town of Awwamiya, near the Gulf coast, this year is special. Just an hour’s drive and a bridge away is the island nation of Bahrain, usually a place where Saudis go for a bit of weekend fun but now the scene of a majority Shi’ite uprising that is challenging the minority Sunnis’ grip on power.

“You need to demand reforms and start popular movements if you want to achieve something. If you don’t do anything the government will not act,” said Mohammed, a young man who, like others, gave only his first name.

“You need to make use of the fact that the regime is in a weak position,” he said, referring to anti-government protests sweeping across the Arab world after popular uprisings toppled the rulers of Tunisia and Egypt.

Mohammed used the Arabic word ‘nizam’ for ‘regime’ — the same word shouted by thousands of Egyptian protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand change. Normally fear of landing in jail would curb such talk, but television images of protests and rapid Internet communication are making people think about what might be possible.

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Nigerian air force joins bid to contain Islamist sect

Reuters Staff

Oct 20, 2010 06:19 EDT

Nigeria’s security services are beefing up efforts to contain the radical Islamist sect Boko Haram in the remote north, launching joint army and police exercises and using attack helicopters to help with patrols.

Army Chief of Staff Azubuike Ihejirika, appointed by President Goodluck Jonathan just over a month ago, said on Tuesday he had instructed the security forces to be at the ready after a string of attacks blamed on the  sect.

The group, which wants sharia (Islamic law) more widely applied across Africa’s most populous nation, launched an uprising in the city of Maiduguri last year which led to days of gun battles with the security forces in which hundreds died.

Suspected Boko Haram members burned down a police station in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, last week, and have been blamed for the targeted killings of police officers, politicians and traditional leaders in recent weeks.

The unrest has raised fears of a repeat of last year’s uprising, which began with attacks on police stations, government offices, prisons and schools.

Nigeria, a vast nation of more than 140 million people, is roughly equally divided between Christians and Muslims. The vast majority of the Muslim population, the largest in sub-Saharan Africa, do not espouse Boko Haram’s views. Its followers eschew the use of Western-made goods and are sometimes referred to as the “Nigerian Taliban” for their long beards and turbans. But there is no published evidence of any links with foreign groups.

Read the full story by Ibrahim Mshelizza here. See also an earlier timeline on ethnic and religious violence in Nigeria.

TIMELINE-Ethnic and religious unrest in Nigeria

Four days of clashes this week between Christian and Muslim mobs armed with guns, knives and machetes killed hundreds of people in Jos and surrounding communities before the military was deployed to contain the violence. At least 460 people have been reported killed

The unrest around the capital of Plateau state, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria’s Muslim north and predominantly Christian south, underscores the fragility of Africa’s most populous nation as it approaches the campaign period for 2011 elections with uncertainty over who is in charge.  President Umaru Yar’Adua has been receiving medical treatment in Saudi Arabia for two months.

Following is a timeline of religious and ethnic violence in Nigeria:

2000 – Thousands killed in northern Nigeria as non-Muslims opposed to the introduction of Islamic sharia law fight Muslims who demand its implementation in the northern state of Kaduna.

Sept. 2001 – Christian-Muslim violence flares after Muslim prayers in Jos, with churches and mosques set on fire. According to a Sept. 2002 report by a panel set up by Plateau state government, at least 915 people were killed in the rioting.

Nov. 2002 – Nigeria decides to abandon the Miss World contest in Abuja. At least 215 people die in rioting in the northern city of Kaduna following a newspaper article suggesting the Prophet Mohammad would probably have married one of the Miss World beauty queens if he were alive today.

May 2004 – Hundreds of people, mostly Muslim Fulanis, are killed by Christian Tarok militia in the central Nigerian town of Yelwa. Survivors say they buried 630 corpses. Police say hundreds were killed.

Can China and the Vatican make beautiful music together?

Philip Pullella

Apr 30, 2008 07:45 EDT

Remember ping-pong diplomacy, the exchange of ping-pong players between the United States and communist China in the 1970s that was one of the first steps that led to a thaw in relations between the two countries? If the Vatican had a ping-pong team, perhaps China would have considered sending their squad to the walled city in Rome for a match.

But the Vatican does not have a ping-pong team, as far as we know. So, the next best thing appears to be music. This week, Vatican Radio made a surprise announcement on its daily 2 p.m. bulletin. The China Philharmonic Orchestra of Beijing and the Shanghai Opera House Chorus will perform Mozart’s Requiem for Pope Benedict on May 7 in the Vatican’s audience hall, adding a stop to its already scheduled European tour.

As one diplomat said, “this could not have happened without the Beijing government approving it.” Given the fact that relations between the Vatican and Beijing have been scratchy to say the least, one can only wonder if this is the start of a mating game. It could lead to diplomatic relations and China’s recognition of the pope as leader of all Catholics in the world, including Chinese Catholics, many of whom have been forced to join the state-backed Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

Something seemed afoot in the last few months. In November, Monsignor Pietro Parolin, undersecretary for relations with states, was reported to have made a secret visit to China. The Vatican never denied the reports. In March, a Chinese delegation secretly had talks in the Vatican, sources confirmed.

One precedent for baton diplomacy that comes to mind is a similar event that happened in the Vatican on February 20, 1988 when the now mostly-forgotten Cold War still existed.

The then-Soviet Union’s Red Army Choir performed for Pope John Paul, singing, of all things, Ave Maria. It, too, was a shocker when it was announced. But on Dec 1, 1989, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made his historic visit to the Vatican, turning relations between the Kremlin and the Vatican on their head after some 70 years of mutual distrust. Relations between Russia and the Vatican were established in 1990 and the rest, as they say, is history.

So, if music be the food of diplomacy, play on.

Pope breaks “silence” on Tibet with carefully worded appeal

Philip Pullella

Mar 19, 2008 12:11 EDT

As readers of this blog will have noticed, I posted a note yesterday about calls by Italian intellectuals for Pope Benedict to break his supposed silence over Tibet. On Wednesday he did so at his weekly general audience, making a carefully worded appeal (here in Italian) for an end to the suffering of the people there.

Given the delicate nature of relations between the Vatican and China, the appeal seemed to strike a balance between his concern for the people and Vatican diplomacy. He mentioned the violence without mentioning China.

In fairness to the Pope, the accusations of “silence” made by some in Italy were perhaps, as was noted by his defenders in yesterday’s blog, a bit premature. Unless he is saying a Mass on a Church holy day or a similar occasion, the Pope only has set days in which he can make a public appeal that the Vatican believes is most effective — Sunday at the Angelus prayer from his window and Wednesday at the general audience.

The unrest in Tibet began last Friday. He did not mention the troubles on Palm Sunday. So the wait for the “silence” to be broken lasted only five days.

In a related development, the Rome-based Catholic agency Asianews published some pretty harrowing photos from Tibetan province of Amdo, which currently is part of the northern Chinese province of Sichuan. Asianews said the photos were sent from the monastery of Kirti to the Free Tibet Campaign and from there to Asianews. They speak for themselves.

Why we don’t call them “Muslim riots” in Paris suburbs

Tom Heneghan

Nov 29, 2007 13:13 EST

As soon as a riot starts in one of the poor suburbs around Paris, we get emails from readers and see comments on blogs accusing the media of hiding the supposedly key fact about the unrest. That fact, they tell us without providing any proof, is Islam. Why don’t we call this violence “Muslim riots?” they ask. What are we trying to hide by not identifying the rioters as Muslims? Do the MSM have a hidden agenda? Don’t we have the courage to “tell the truth?”

We’ve had rioting this week and the same questions came again. This blog has discussed this issue already in a post last month called “Smoke without fire – there was no Paris intifada in 2005.” That dealt with the 2005 riots in detail. This latest unrest is a good opportunity to explain why we don’t write “Muslim riots” — and ask in return why readers so far from the events are so convinced that we should.

We mention race and religion in Reuters news stories when they are relevant to the event being covered. It would be absurd to write “Presbyterian second baseman XYZ…” in a baseball story. He may be a Presbyterian, but he is not at second base as a Presbyterian, but as a baseball player.

When Muslims marched in Paris demanding the end to a ban on headscarves in public schools, we called them Muslim protesters. When French Muslim Council members speak out on an issue, we call them Muslim leaders. These people are speaking as Muslims, so we identify them as such. They also have other identities — they may be French or foreign citizens, male or female, football fans or music lovers — but these other identities would be irrelevant to a story about Muslim issues.

In this week’s events, young men, often hooded, roamed the suburbs at night and firebombed cars, dumpsters and a library. They did not shout Muslim demands, spray Muslim graffiti or wear the trademark beards and baggy pants of a salafi. They did not gather at mosques or shout “Allah-o-akbar!” They avoided journalists, presumably seeing them as part of “the system” that they oppose, and made no demands related to Islam. When those detained were questioned by police, they were not asked about their religion or ethnic identity — that’s not allowed in France.

So my first question is — how are we supposed to write as fact that they are Muslims? Where are the facts to justify phrases like “Muslim riots” or “French intifada?”

Some might say that we know these riots happen in “Muslim neighbourhoods.” But when journalists go visit them, they find neighbourhoods that are multiracial, multicultural, multilingual and multifaith. Judging by the faces seen on the streets, there are Arabs (mostly from North Africa), blacks from Africa and the Caribbean, people from the Indian Subcontinent (often Sri Lankans) and whites — yes, poor French whites. There are Muslims who pray in mosques and Christians who attend various churches, including a growing number of African evangelicals. Here and there in Paris or its suburbs, you even find poor Jews who moved to France from North Africa — some even still speak Arabic and live peacefully with their Muslim neighbours. And don’t forget there are a lot of agnostics and atheists out there — this is France, after all, where the average rate of regular attendance in churches, synagogues and mosques is about 10 percent.

Kashmiri Hindus hold festival for first time in 18 years

Tom Heneghan

Oct 23, 2007 05:10 EDT

Some international crises drag on so long that outsiders can forget what life in the area was like before the unrest began. Look at Kashmir, the beautiful mountain region split by war between India and Pakistan at Partition in 1947. The Muslim separatist unrest in Indian Kashmir flared up again in 1989 and led to clashes 10 years later that threatened to spark a full war between the two nuclear states. These years of unrest have fanned tension and suspicion between the majority Muslim population and the minority Hindus and Sikhs. But peace efforts in recent years have brought the violence down to the point where the Hindus could revive a religious tradition they dared not celebrate publicly for 18 years. The violence is not over, as our photo of the police protection for the ceremony vividly shows, but progress is being made.

As our Srinagar correspondent Sheikh Mushtaq wrote,

Hundreds of chanting Hindus burnt a huge effigy of a demon king to mark one of their biggest festivals for the first time in Kashmir since Muslim militants launched a revolt 18 years ago.

The celebrations late on Sunday came at the end of the nine-day Dusshera festival, which celebrates god-king Ram’s victory over the mythological king Ravana, symbolising the triumph of good over evil.

Although the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley is home to about 10,000 Hindus, they had stopped celebrating Dusshera in the open due to fear of Islamist militants who targeted the community after the anti-India insurgency erupted in 1989.

But with militant violence falling to an all-time low this year, more than 400 Hindus, known as Kashmiri Pandits, marched through the streets of Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital, and burned Ravana’s effigy in a highly guarded cricket stadium.

Read the full story here.

This doesn’t mean fighting is not continuing out in the hills. As our colleagues in India reported on October 8, more than 26 separatist guerrillas and seven soldiers were killed in fierce firefights in the first eight days of the month before the Pakistan-based United Jihad Council declared a three-day truce to celebrate the end of Ramadan.

Tourism, which would be a valuable moneyspinner for the region if public safety were better assured, has also suffered badly. Check out a video by our television producer Stefanie McIntyre:

Smoke without fire – there was no “Paris intifada” in 2005

Tom Heneghan

Oct 19, 2007 13:47 EDT

One of the most persistent canards about Islam in France is that Muslim groups played a key role in stoking the three weeks of rioting in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities in late 2005. Stories still regularly pop up on the Internet talking about “Muslim riots” or mentioning that cries of Allah-o-akbar were heard amid all the burning and trashing that went on. These cries, reported in the French press at the time, were taken as a sign the Islamists were behind the unrest. Bloggers coined the term “Paris intifada.” Some talked about “Baghdad-on-the-Seine.” Others were frustrated because the media did not make clear what role religion played in the unrest.

The French television channel France 2 has just broadcast an excellent documentary called Quand la France s’embrase… (When France Flares Up) about the 2005 riots in the suburbs and the 2006 student protests in the centre of many French cities. They interviewed dozens of police, politicians, community leaders and residents. They showed a lot of previously unbroadcast on-the-spot video footage taken on cellphones (sometimes by the rioters themselves). Their conclusion is actually not new. Most journalists covering the riots at the time (myself included) came to same conclusion after some initial confusion caused in part by false statements from politicians who should have known better. But the documentary is an excellent analysis of those confusing days, with new information filling out the story better than anything done before.

The unrest was spontaneous and hardly organised at all, the documentary concluded. The rioters protested against widespread discrimination, unemployment and the government’s failed integration policies. Many were from North African immigrant families, and therefore from a Muslim background. But religion was not the driving force and Islamists did not organise or stoke the unrest. Some politicians accused Islamists early on in the saga, but this was more a case of clueless suits seeking a scapegoat than solid facts the police observed on the ground, the documentary concluded.

Bruno Laffargue, head of police intelligence for the Paris region, said: “We received no solid information that would permit us to accuse the Islamists of this or that riot. They stayed very much in the background in this affair.” Footage broadcast just before his interview showed an imam trying to calm down some hotheads. The clip (in French) can be seen at the end of the second video — entitled “Le tournant, quand tout bascule” (The turning point, when everything tips over) — on the documentary’s video clips page.

If anyone suspects Laffargue of whitewashing the Islamists, it should be noted that his conclusion — first written in a confidential note in late November 2005 for his boss, the interior minister at that time — contradicted what his boss had publicly said. The boss was none other than the current president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. Early on in the riots, it was Sarkozy who said the unrest was “perfectly organised” by “mafiosi” (his term for drug dealers) and “fundamentalists.” His tough talk was controversial at the time and he was embarrassed when the note contradicting him was leaked to the press in early December 2005.

This is not to say there are no Islamists in the Paris banlieues or that they don’t stir things up when they want. They did stoke the headscarf controversy of 2003/2004 quite effectively. But even as the rioting was going on, we journalists covering it on the ground noticed the classic Islamist demand in France — to repeal the law banning Muslim headscarves in state schools — was never expressed by the rioters. Interviews with residents in riot-hit areas (Muslims and non-Muslims) showed they didn’t buy the Islamist explanation.

There may well have been some Allah-o-akbars shouted in the din of the rioting but, like one swallow not making a spring, they didn’t make an Islamist plot that the MSM just didn’t see. We have known this for quite a while, and now have even more evidence for it. Is it finally time to retire the misleading term “Paris intifada?”