from Photographers Blog:
The trouble with Northern Ireland
Tradition is something that is celebrated, enjoyed and handed down to the next generation, but in the small corner of western Europe where I was born, it has led to shootings and bombings and the loss of thousands of lives.
For 16 years I’ve worked as a photographer covering ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and in this time I’ve come to realize that what one side of the political and religious divide sees as celebration, the other sees as triumphalism.
The Twelfth of July parades are one such tradition that sparked disturbances on the streets of Belfast this week with rioters throwing petrol bombs and police responding with plastic bullets as Catholics and Protestants once again clashed.
Q+A-What is Nigeria’s radical Islamist sect Boko Haram?
Nigeria’s radical Islamist sect Boko Haram is suspected to be behind almost daily attacks in the remote northeast and claimed a series of bomb blasts further afield last month. Following are questions and answers on who the group are, what they want, and whether their ideology is widely followed.
WHAT IS BOKO HARAM?
Based in Maiduguri, capital of the northeastern state of Borno, it was initially led by self-proclaimed Islamic scholar, Mohammed Yusuf, who was radically opposed to Western education and wanted strict sharia Islamic law adopted across Nigeria.
Sometimes referred to as the “Nigerian Taliban”, the group’s name means “Western education is sinful” in the Hausa language spoken across northern Nigeria.
Boko Haram followers pray in separate mosques in cities including Maiduguri, Kano and Sokoto, and wear long beards and red or black headscarves.
They believe their wives should not be seen by any men other than themselves and are not supposed to use Western-made goods.
Egypt’s Sufis see post-Mubarak Islamist threat, consider launching own movement
Down the narrow alleyways of Cairo’s Sayidda Zeinab neighbourhood, 100 men sway their heads and clap in rhythm as they invoke God’s name. “O how you have spread benevolence,” chant the men, some dressed in ankle-length galabeya robes, to celebrate the birth of Fatima al-Zahraa, the daughter of the Prophet Mohammed.
The men are followers of the centuries-old Azaimiya Sufi order who seek to come closer to God through mystical rites. Some of the country’s estimated 15 million Sufis say their traditions are now threatened by various groups of Islamists elbowing for influence after the overthrow of Egypt’s veteran leader Hosni Mubarak. Some Islamists, such as the ultra-conservative Salafists, see Sufi practices such as the veneration of shrines as heresy.
So as Sufis seek to defend traditions dating back centuries, what began as a loose religious identity could be gelling, gradually, into a political movement.
Alaa Abul Azaim, sheikh of the Azaimiya Sufi order, says moves by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi groups to enter formal politics endanger religious tolerance and oblige Sufis to do the same. “If the Salafists or Muslim Brotherhood rise to power, they could well cancel the Sufi sheikhdom, so there has to be a party for Sufis,” he said.
“If the Sufis stood side by side, they could be an important voting bloc … but their political and organisational power is less than their numerical power,” said political analyst Nabil Abdel Fattah.
Read the full story by Shaimaa Fayed and Abdel Rahman Youssef here.
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from Photographers Blog:
Srebrenica: The story that will never end
I've been to more than one hundred mass graves, mass funerals and witnessed the long, exhaustive process of victim identification. I took pictures of bones found in caves and rivers, taken from mud, recovered from woods and mines or just left by the road.
Most of these terrible assignments were around the small, used to be forgotten at-the-end-of-the-road town called Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia.
The international criminal court said the most terrible crimes of genocide were committed in Srebrenica area when the Bosnian Serb forces massacred thousands of Muslims after the enclave, ironically under U.N. protection as a safe heaven, was overrun by an army led by its ruthless commander.
Ratko Mladic, a typical officer from what used to be the Yugoslav people's army, was the commander of the forces that overran the enclave. He commanded what he said was the revenge upon the Turks for the events from the early 19th century. Thousands of white Muslim gravestones at the terrifying and extremely sad Srebrenica memorial remain as a symbol of that “revenge”. Thousands are still missing, their bones hidden in heavy Bosnian soil.
Violent Nigerian Islamist sect Boko Haram rejects amnesty offer
A radical Islamist sect in remote northeastern Nigeria, blamed for almost daily killings and attacks, has rejected an offer of an amnesty. Kashim Shettima, governor-elect of Borno state, made the amnesty offer to the Boko Haram sect shortly after winning April elections to try to end months of attacks on symbols of authority including politicians and police officers.
“We reject any offer of dialogue or so-called amnesty from Kashim Shettima for two reasons,” a spokesman for the group said in a statement broadcast on the BBC Hausa service, a local language radio station in northern Nigeria, on Monday. “First we do not believe in the Nigerian constitution and secondly we do not believe in democracy but only in the laws of Allah,” the spokesman said, speaking in Hausa.
Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sinful”, wants sharia (Islamic law) to be more widely applied across Nigeria but its views are not widely espoused by the country’s Muslim population, the largest in sub-Saharan Africa.
Sect members launched an uprising in 2009, attacking government buildings and triggering days of gun battles with the security forces in which up to 800 people were killed. Its attacks became increasingly political in the run-up to last month’s presidential, parliamentary and state governorship elections but there has been no let-up in the violence since then.
Read the full story by Ibrahim Mshelizza here.
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Sectarian strife tests Egypt’s post-Mubarak rulers
Egypt’s army rulers face a dilemma as a bolder stance adopted by Islamists in the post-Mubarak era is worsening sectarian tension and triggering demands for the kind of crackdown that made the former president so unpopular. Armed clashes between conservative Muslims and Coptic Christians left 12 dead in a Cairo suburb on Saturday, touching off angry protests by some of the capital’s residents who called for the army to use an “iron fist” against the instigators.
The violence has deepened fear among Christians, who complain of poor police protection and a new tolerance of Muslim extremists, raising the risk of new flashpoints in a country dogged by poverty, soaring prices and a faltering economy. Police deserted their posts during the January and February uprising against Mubarak. Many have returned but many Egyptians say that has failed to stop theft and violent crime spreading as Egypt looks ahead to its first free elections in September.
“The softness of the state is a problem right now,” said political analyst Issandr El Amrani, who expects the interim military government to restore a tough line against conservative Salafist Islamic groups and others that incite religious hatred. “It’s not going to be popular with a segment of the population but a government has to do unpopular things sometimes,” said Amrani.
Egypt, which relies on an image of stability to draw millions of tourists, has seen a steady increase in inter-faith violence in recent years, despite a pause during the uprising.
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Indonesian Islamists shift targets, religious intolerance rises
A suicide bombing in Indonesia last week highlighted a trend of militants acting alone or in small groups to attack Indonesians rather than foreigners to push an Islamist agenda, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said in a report. This has raised concern about more low-level attacks in the world’s most populous Muslim country, which has been seen as having successfully combated militancy but is now seeing a spike in religious intolerance.
“Ideological shifts originating in the Middle East have combined with local circumstances to produce a trend that favours targeted killings over indiscriminate bombings, local over foreign targets and individual or small group action over operations by more hierarchical organisations,” the ICG said on Tuesday.
Militant attacks and incidents of religious intolerance have risen in recent weeks, with mobs lynching three followers of the minority Muslim Ahmadi sect and torching two churches on Java island.
Nigerian president appeals to Muslim leaders before vote
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has appealed to Muslim leaders to help ensure that elections next month, which risk stoking regional rivalries, pass off peacefully. Africa’s most populous nation holds presidential, parliamentary and state governorship elections spread over three weeks in April, all of which are set to be fiercely contested.
Jonathan met on Sunday with the Sultan of Sokoto, one of Nigeria’s most influential Islamic leaders, and other senior figures from the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs and Muslim umbrella organisation Jamatul Nasir Islam in the northern city of Kaduna. Nigeria is home to the largest Muslim community in sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for roughly half of the country’s 150 million people, as well as to more than 200 ethnicities, most of whom generally live peacefully side by side.
But ethnic and religious rivalries bubble under the surface and the candidacy of Jonathan, a Christian from the southern Niger Delta, has fuelled resentment from some in the north who believe the next president should be a northern Muslim. Jonathan is running for what would have been the second term of late President Umaru Yar’Adua, a northerner who died last year leaving Jonathan to inherit the country’s highest office.
His main rival in the presidential race is former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari, a northerner whose reputation as a devout Muslim and a disciplinarian means he has strong grass roots support in large parts of the north.
“Some members of the political class may be very desperate to win the elections by all means,” Jonathan said after the meeting, also attended by the Emir of Kano and Shehu of Borno, the leaders of Nigeria’s other two main Muslim dynasties. “They will create a lot of problems and the only people who can counsel us are religious leaders and our traditional rulers … I am requesting for you to continue to impress on all Nigerians the need for peaceful coexistence.”
Read the full story by Sahabi Yahaya here.
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Ethiopia’s religious divides flare up in Muslim attacks on Christians
The hollow chants of “Allahu Akbar!” reverberating from a distance seemed innocuous at first for Abera Gutema, who ventured home quietly from his shop just a short distance away. Moments later, a large, angry mob of machete-wielding Muslim youths descended on his family’s dwelling and chased him out, before burning and looting his property.
Abera, a Christian, escaped through a back door, clutching his infant son Eyoel in one hand. By the time the smoke cleared, all that remained of his hard-earned belongings had been reduced to rubble, not to mention the theft of 100,000 birr — his lifetime savings.
“They were our friends, our neighbours with whom we shared everything,” said Abera, his eyes watering with tears. “I never thought that this day would ever come.”
Abera was one of more than 4,000 members of local Protestant denominations displaced by a rare bout of religious violence earlier this month when Muslims staged a week of attacks in an area about 300 km (200 miles) west of the capital. According to official figures, Ethiopia is about 60 percent Christian and 30 percent Muslim, with smaller faiths making up the remainder.
Local imams say the incidents were sparked when word came out that Muslim labourers working at a construction site at a Protestant church claimed to have found pages from the Koran used as toilet paper. Despite appeals for restraint, they say an angry mob quickly gathered as calls for attacks blared from the loudspeakers of nearby mosques.
A total of 69 churches, a Bible school and an office were eventually burned to the ground, and one Christian was killed.
Pope’s Jesus book raps religious violence, explains exoneration of Jews
Pope Benedict has condemned violence committed in God’s name and personally exonerated Jews of responsibility for Jesus’ death in his latest book, released on Thursday. The book, the second in a planned three-part series on the life of Jesus, is a detailed, highly theological and academic recounting of the last week in Jesus’ life.
Publishers have printed 1.2 million copies of the book in seven languages. A blaze of international publicity included teleconferences with the media in several countries.
In one section, Benedict writes that there can be no justification for violence carried out in God’s name, an assertion as applicable to Islamist militancy today as to violence that the Catholic Church itself committed in the past as it spread the faith.
“The cruel consequences of religiously motivated violence are only too evident to us all,” the pope writes. “Violence does not build up the Kingdom of God, the kingdom of humanity.”
The part of the book that may have the most far-reaching effect on Catholic relations with other religions is one in which the pontiff details the events of Christ’s trial before Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and his sentencing to death. In that section, he repudiates the concept of collective guilt of the Jews at the time and of their progeny for Jesus’ death, a charge that has haunted Christian-Jewish relations for centuries.
It was the first time a pope had made such a detailed dissection and close comparison of various New Testament accounts and concluded that there was no basis to the charge, first officially repudiated in a Church document in 1965.
Read the full story here. Here’s a Reuters video on the book, with my interview with Rome’s Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni and short explanation of the argument the pope makes in the book.
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