The attack on a busload of U.S. Air Force troops at Frankfurt airport that killed two is being investigated as a possible act of Islamic terrorism, German federal prosecutors said Thursday.
Two airmen were also wounded late Wednesday when a man identified as a 21-year-old ethnic Albanian from Kosovo fired on the servicemen at close range. His family said the young man worked at Frankfurt airport and was a devout Muslim.
The problem here is that this defence of the authority of human reason is ultimately circular and parasitical. It assumes and depends upon its conclusion. This philosophical defence of the validity of reason by reason is thus intrinsically self-referential. It cannot be sustained.
The rational defence of reason itself may amount to a demonstration of its internal consistency and coherence – but not of its truth. There is no reason why a flawed rationality will show up its own flaws. We are using a tool to judge its own reliability. We have convened a court, in which the accused and the judge are one and the same.
Reason needs to be calibrated by something external….
The historic reconciliation between Jews and Roman Catholics over the past 40 years should be extended to Muslims to deal with the challenges of the 21st century, a senior Jewish official has said.
The regular dialogue the two faiths have maintained since the Catholic Church renounced anti-Semitism at the Second Vatican Council, should be “a model for transformed relations with Islam,” Rabbi Richard Marker told an interfaith conference.
Marker addressed the opening session on Sunday evening of a meeting reviewing four decades of Catholic-Jewish efforts to forge closer ties after 1,900 years of Christian anti-Semitism and to ask how the dialogue can progress in the future.
Islam was the most frequent topic of religion news coverage in 2010, as the media doubled the amount of time and space devoted to religion compared to 2009.
An analysis by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that more than 40 percent of religion coverage centered on three issues: plans to build an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero, a Florida pastor’s threat to burn the Quran, and commemorations of the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The popular revolts shaking the Arab world have begun to shift the balance of power in the region, bolstering Iran’s position while weakening and unnerving its rival, Saudi Arabia, regional experts said.
While it is far too soon to write the final chapter on the uprisings’ impact, Iran has already benefited from the ouster or undermining of Arab leaders who were its strong adversaries and has begun to project its growing influence, the analysts said. This week Iran sent two warships through the Suez Canal for the first time since its revolution in 1979, and Egypt’s new military leaders allowed them to pass.
Saudi Arabia, an American ally and a Sunni nation that jousts with Shiite Iran for regional influence, has been shaken. King Abdullah on Wednesday signaled his concern by announcing a $10 billion increase in welfare spending to help young people marry, buy homes and open businesses, a gesture seen as trying to head off the kind of unrest that fueled protests around the region.
Is sending a secret informant into a mosque in search of terrorists proactive policing, or a violation of worshippers’ civil rights?
That’s the question a federal judge will have to answer after the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council of American-Islamic Relations filed a lawsuit Tuesday (Feb. 22) in Los Angeles against the FBI.
The suit charges the nation’s top law enforcement agency targeted Muslims for surveillance based solely on their religious affiliation, violating their constitutional rights.
Nearly 70 years later, Athens, one of the last European capitals to commemorate those who perished at the hands of Nazi forces, finally has a Holocaust memorial.
But since its dedication in May, synagogues have been targeted, Jewish cemeteries desecrated, Holocaust monuments elsewhere in Greece vandalized and the Jewish Museum of Greece, in the capital, defaced with swastikas. What’s more, an alarming chunk of Athenians in November supported the election of a neo-Nazi candidate to the capital’s city council.
‘Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” So goes the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood.
What’s extraordinary about this maxim is the succinct way that it captures the political dimension of Islam. Even more extraordinary is the capacity of these five pillars of faith to attract true believers. But the most remarkable thing of all is the way the Brotherhood’s motto seduces Western liberals.
To many Americans, religious or not, chastity before marriage is a quaint tradition at best and emotionally damaging at worst.
After all, more than 90 percent of men and women, according to Guttmacher Institute surveys during the past 50 years, have reported engaging in premarital sex. And the older a single person becomes, many people believe, the more ridiculous it seems to forgo physical intimacy.
That’s the perspective of Mormon poet Nicole Hardy, who, in a New York Times essay last month, described her decision to join the rest of the modern world.
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, or al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, is more than a radical network, comparable to al Qaeda; more than an ideological phenomenon, like the followers of Khomeini in the 1979 Iranian Revolution; and more than a political insurgency, similar to Pakistani jihadism. It is an Egyptian Islamist subculture of great depth and influence.
It is therefore also much more than a product of political decisions made by Hosni Mubarak. The Brotherhood was powerful before Mubarak, before his predecessor Anwar Sadat, and before their elder comrade, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Bilal Philips was once a guitar god. Now he is trying to convince Muslims that God doesn’t want them listening to guitars.
A Saudi-trained Canadian, Mr. Philips is among a small group of lecturers who preach against most forms of music — a controversial prohibition that surfaced in Manitoba recently, where a dozen Muslim families want to pull their children from music class.
“A heart filled with music will not have room for God’s words,” he writes in his bookContemporary Issues, which also defends child marriages, wife beating, polygamy and killing apostates while calling homosexuality “evil and dangerous.”
Moaz Abdel Karim, an affable 29-year-old who was among a handful of young activists who plotted the recent protests here, is the newest face of the Muslim Brotherhood. His political views on women’s rights, religious freedom and political pluralism mesh with Western democratic values. He is focused on the fight for democracy and human rights in Egypt.
A different face of the Brotherhood is that of Mohamed Badi, 66-year-old veterinarian from the Brotherhood’s conservative wing who has been the group’s Supreme Guide since last January. He recently pledged the Brotherhood would “continue to raise the banner of jihad” against the Jews, which he called the group’s “first and foremost enemies.” He has railed against American imperialism, and calls for the establishment of an Islamic state.
After Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down on Friday amid the region’s most dramatic grassroots uprising since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Brotherhood became poised to assume a growing role in the country’s political life. The question for many is: Which Brotherhood?
As William James pointed out many years ago, religious faith is basically “faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found and explained.” Faith is based on reason, yet not limited to the somewhat meagre truths that reason can actually prove.
So is this irrational, as the New Atheist orthodoxy declares? Christianity holds that faith is basically warranted belief. Faith goes beyond what is logically demonstrable, yet is nevertheless capable of rational motivation and foundation.
It is not a blind leap into the dark, but a joyful discovery of a bigger picture of things, of which we are part. It is complex and rich idea, which goes far beyond simply asserting or holding that certain things are true.
{BOB] ABERNETHY: There was a poll that came out this week taken by phone in Cairo and Alexandria asking questions about these things, and a very low percentage, 15 percent, said they approved of the Muslim Brotherhood. Has there been a change since years ago in that as a new generation has come up?
[GENEIVE] ABDO: Well, I think that the statistic that people that have used is 20 percent generally””that if there were free elections today, 20 percent of Egyptians would vote for Brotherhood candidates, but I think that could be sort of an underestimation.
ABERNETHY: But so what would that mean in a government if the Muslim Brotherhood or any strongly Islamist group had influence?
ABDO: Well, there are a lot of parties in Egypt. There are a lot of political parties, as we all know. Some of them are secular, some are nationalist. The Brotherhood is only one of them. However, the Brotherhood is very well organized, and they’ve been around for a long time. They’re a social, also, organization. They run hospitals. They do a lot of sort of social work in Egypt. So they are very, very influential.
Many Christian leaders believe that the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic political group banned in Egypt, will grow in political power with Mubarak’s ouster. The brotherhood maintains strong support among some Egyptians. Religious-freedom analysts believe the leaders of the brotherhood, famous for the slogan “Islam is the solution,” could very well usher in repression of all minority religious groups. Christians are Egypt’s largest minority, representing 6 to 10 percent of Egypt’s 85 million people. About 90 percent of all Christians in Egypt are Orthodox.
But while most Egyptian Muslims are Sunni, like the brotherhood, they are not as fundamentalist as it is. One Coptic Orthodox businessman based in Cairo told CT that he was surprised that Christians’ property was not targeted during the growing protests. “I thought that the first thing to be attacked [by protestors] would be the churches,” he said.
“It wasn’t like that. In the neighborhood of my parents, there are many mosques and churches. No single mosque has announced anything against us Christians. Very soon, a big change will happen. Egypt has been like someone sleeping. Now, wake up! Do something better.”
A quick survey of priests, ministers, rabbis, and one imam made clear that social media were made for religion, in which connection and community are key.
“I love Facebook,” says Pastor Andrena Ingram of St. Michael’s Lutheran Church in Mount Airy. “You just reach everybody and anybody.” Like many religious congregations, St. Michael’s has a robust website. “When people come to visit us from out of town, very often it’s because they saw the website.”
On Facebook, Ingram posts news and announcements, and coordinates a youth group. She also runs a separate Facebook page “to minister to those both infected and affected with HIV,” connecting her with people as far away as Africa.
“It’s like a cyber-pastorship,” she says.
In a San Antonio chapel last August, after reciting their wedding vows and exchanging their rings, Sally and Mark Austin prepared to receive communion for the first time as husband and wife. Just before they did, their minister asked them to sign a document. It was a ketubah, a traditional Jewish marriage contract.
The Austins’ was not an interfaith marriage. Nor was their ceremony some sort of multicultural mashup. Both Sally and Mark are evangelical Christians, members of Oak Hills Church, a nationally known megachurch. They were using the ketubah as a way of affirming the Jewish roots of their faith.
In so doing, the Austins are part of a growing phenomenon of non-Jews incorporating the ketubah, a document with millennia-old origins and a rich artistic history, into their weddings. Mrs. Austin, in fact, first learned about the ketubah from her older sister, also an evangelical Christian, who had been married five years earlier with not only a ketubah but the Judaic wedding canopy, the huppah.
Bishop [Thomas] Tobin has found strong support for his position on same-sex marriage in Episcopal Bishop Geralyn Wolf and in Imam Farid Ansari, of the Muslim America Dawah Center of Rhode Island and the Rhode Island Council for Muslim Advancement.
“As Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Rhode Island, I firmly support the traditional definition of marriage as the union between one male and one female,” Bishop Wolf said in a statement released to Rhode Island Catholic in January. “I believe that Holy Matrimony is a sacred religious rite, whose definition should not be re-interpreted by legislation or civil courts.”
According to a statement released by the Media Committee of the Rhode Island for Muslim Advancement, the Islamic community of Rhode Island “affirms the standards set forth in the Torah, Gospel and Holy Qur’an on the issue of same-sex relationships and marriage.”
Not only is political “moderation” an ill-Âdefined concept, but the confusion between religious and political spheres makes analysis even more problematic. People are quick, far too quick, to assume that because a woman or a man is religiously “liberal” with regard to Islamic practices such as wearing the hijab or drinking alcohol, for instance, she or he will hold equally “liberal” political views. In my Âexperience, nothing could be further from the truth. There are innumerable cases of political personalities, intellectuals and civil society activists who are indeed Muslims with liberal views and practices but who publicly support the most hardline dictatorial regimes and/or the most violent resistance groups everywhere from Algeria to France. So moderation in religion cannot be correlated with its supposed political equivalent. In the western-generated analysis, however, there is a tendency to conflate these categories.
Relations with the “west” offer another interesting standard by which to evaluate the political and religious stances of contemporary Muslims. The violent extremist groups view their relations with the west only in terms of complete opposition and enmity, couched in religious, political, cultural and economic Âconceptual language. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims – particularly western Muslims – recognise the achievements of western societies, while at the same time claiming the right to determine for themselves the parameters of their identity, the nature and extent of their religious practices, and their spiritual and moral convictions. Seen from this perspective, criticism and rejection of the west are linked only to a refusal to accept political, economic or cultural domination.
Amid sectarian violence by Muslims, Christians and security forces in this capital city of Plateau state, a flash point for ethnic and religious conflict in Nigeria, scores of Christians were estimated to have been killed in the past month.
Christmas Eve bombings by Islamic extremists have touched off tit-for-tat violence that has killed more than 200 people in Plateau state, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). A Jan. 27 report by HRW said the Christmas bombings in Jos left at least 107 dead.
In the predominantly Christian Barkin Ladi Government Area on the outskirts of Jos, Muslim assailants led by a police officer from Abuja on Jan. 27 killed 14 Christians, according to a military spokesman, and the next day Muslim youths stabbed two students at the University of Jos on the assumption that they were Christians.
The architect of the Obama administration’s new consumer protection bureau met with faith-based groups Tuesday (Feb. 8) in a bid to shape the agency’s work as a moral crusade.
“The most recent financial crisis caused many to question the moral underpinnings of our financial dealings with each other,” Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard University law professor who was appointed last year to start the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
When [Paul] Haggis first turned to Scientology, he considered himself an atheist. Scientology seemed to him less a religion than a set of useful principles for living. He mentioned the ARC Triangle; “ARC” stands for “Affinity, Reality, and Communication.” Affinity, in this formulation, means the emotional response that partners have toward each other; reality is the area of common agreement. Together, these contribute to the flow of communication. “The three parts together equal understanding,” Haggis said. “If you’re having a disagreement with someone, your affinity drops quickly. Your mutual reality is shattered. Your communication becomes more halted. You begin to talk over each other. There’s less and less understanding. But all you need to do is to raise one part of the triangle and you increase the others as well. I still use that.”
Some aspects of Scientology baffled him. He hadn’t been able to get through “Dianetics”: “I read about thirty pages. I thought it was impenetrable.” But much of the coursework gave him a feeling of accomplishment. He was soon commuting from London, Ontario, to Toronto to take more advanced courses, and, in 1976, he travelled to Los Angeles for the first time. He checked in at the old Chateau Élysée, on Franklin Avenue. Clark Gable and Katharine Hepburn had once stayed there, but when Haggis arrived it was a run-down church retreat called the Manor Hotel. (It has since been spectacularly renovated and turned into the flagship Celebrity Centre.) “I had a little apartment with a kitchen I could write in,” he recalls. “There was a feeling of camaraderie that was something I’d never experienced””all these atheists looking for something to believe in, and all these loners looking for a club to join….”
Since leaving the church, Haggis has been in therapy, which he has found helpful. He’s learned how much he blames others for his problems, especially those who are closest to him. “I really wish I had found a good therapist when I was twenty-one,” he said. In Scientology, he always felt a subtle pressure to impress his auditor and then write up a glowing success story. Now, he said, “I’m not fooling myself that I’m a better man than I am.”
A guide on how to convert witches to Christianity has been published by the Roman Catholic Church in Britain.
The move comes in response to fears that growing numbers of teenagers are being lured into Wicca, occult practices and paganism by the heroic depiction of witches in entertainment including the Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice films, and TV.
The booklet, called Wicca and Witchcraft: Understanding the Dangers, offers parents advice on what to do if one of their children takes an interest in witchcraft.
Read it all and you can read a description of the actual booklet here.
The proposed Park51 Islamic community center and mosque project near Ground Zero is again looking for a top imam after Sheik Abdallah Adhami resigned the post less than one month into the job.
…the [Muslim] Brotherhood, like everyone else, is evolving. It would be a serious error to believe that it has not sincerely wrestled with the seductive challenge of democracy, with the fact that the Egyptian faithful like the idea of voting for their leaders.
In 2007, members of the Brotherhood released, withdrew and unofficially re-released a political platform ”” the first ever for the organization ”” in which an outsider can see the Brothers’ philosophical struggle with the idea of parliamentary supremacy and the certainty that faithful Muslims may legislatively transgress Holy Law. The Brothers themselves didn’t know how much free rein to give to their compatriots ”” they, like everyone else, are moving in uncharted waters.
The Brotherhood is trying to come to terms with the idea of hurriya, “freedom.” In the past, for the Muslim devout, hurriya had denoted the freedom of a believer to worship God; for the Arab nationalist, the word was the battle cry against European imperialism. Today, in Egypt and elsewhere, hurriya cannot be understood without reference to free men and women voting. The Brothers are trying to figure out how to integrate two civilizations and thereby revive their own. This evolution isn’t pretty. But it is real.
[STEVE] INSKEEP: OK. Is that a fair comparison, Tarek Masoud? Are they just a conservative party or are they something more now?
Dr. [TAREK] MASOUD: Well, there’s two kinds of extremism. OK, there’s an extremism of ends and an extremism of means. OK. Extremism of means is if they’re willing if they want to use violence to get what they want. I certainly think they are not that. Extremism of ends, do they want things that we think are really, you know, out of the norm? I think a lot of them do, but again, you know, you let them participate in the political process and you hopefully beat them. I think and there’s evidence that the brothers, as Dr. ElBaradei said, would not necessarily capture a majority of votes in Egypt, although they are a very strong and organized party. But, you know, there’s other ideological trends and we’re seeing them being played out right now on the Egyptian street.
Representatives of the Egyptian democracy movement vowed Sunday to escalate their pressure for the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, even as his government sought to portray itself as well on the way to successfully negotiating an end to the uprising now in its 13th day.
In a historic first, Vice President Omar Suleiman met with representatives of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood as part of a group of about 50 opposition members that included prominent politicians and youth organizers.
The encounter itself was remarkable for bringing together members of the brotherhood ”” Egypt’s biggest opposition movement ”” and the autocratic government that has for decades repressed it as an Islamist threat.
After maintaining a low profile in protests led largely by secular young Egyptians, the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s largest opposition force, appeared to be taking a more assertive role Thursday, issuing a statement asking for President Hosni Mubarak to step aside for a transitional government.
“We demand that this regime is overthrown, and we demand the formation of a national unity government for all the factions,” the Brotherhood said in a statement broadcast by Al Jazeera.
The Obama administration has spoken cautiously about the future role of the Brotherhood, which has long been banned by Mr. Mubarak’s government, saying only that all parties must renounce violence and accept democracy. But one of the few near-certainties of a post-Mubarak Egypt is that the Muslim Brotherhood will emerge as a powerful political force.
After years of watching Muslims portrayed as terrorists in mainstream TV and movies, an advocacy group hopes to change that image by grooming a crop of aspiring Muslim screenwriters who can bring their stories ”” and perspective ”” to Hollywood.
The Muslim Public Affairs Council is hosting a series of workshops taught by Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated veterans over the next month, an initiative that builds on the group’s outreach for a more representative picture of Muslim-Americans on the screen.
The workshops are the natural evolution of MPAC’s efforts to lobby TV networks and movie studios from the outside, and they fit into a small, but growing, movement to get more Muslim-Americans behind the cameras.
Egypt’s old guard has long presented the world with a potent choice: Accept our police state or extremists will take over. Rooted in the old politics of colonialism, this dichotomy effectively deterred democracy in the Arab world. What the ongoing uprising shows is that this dichotomy is no longer valid. Real change is now possible, and the old analysis that it can come only through empowering Islamists has been shattered.
The new Egypt””led by but not restricted to the youth””has little time for the octogenarians of old, who include not only Hosni Mubarak but also Mohamed Badie, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and my former cellmate. Within the Brotherhood, Mr. Badie has recently been challenged by a reformist faction now led by the younger Abdul Monim Aboul Fatouh (another former cellmate of mine).
The leaderless nature of Egypt’s street uprising raises the question of who will fill the vacuum after victory. Concerns about an Islamist takeover are valid. But that scenario is unlikely.