Orient and Occident online magazine seeks to promote not just coexistence but cooperation with Muslims.
It was Egyptian media that brought the appalling “Innocence of Muslims” trailer to the wider attention of Muslims around the world. The consequences have been tragic to watch.
The country has also seen all-too-regular violent clashes between local Muslim and Christian communities, that have got no better since Egypt’s revolution.
In this difficult atmosphere, the Diocese of Egypt, under the leadership of Bishop Mouneer Hanna Anis, has relaunched a magazine online that was first started by two pioneering CMS missionaries more than 100 years ago.

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When a senior Iraqi intelligence official traveled to Tehran in the summer of 2007 to meet with the Iranian leadership, he quickly figured out who was in charge of Iran’s policy toward its neighbor to the west.

It was not the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was Qassim Suleimani, the shadowy commander of Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force, who calmly explained that he was the “sole authority for Iranian actions in Iraq,” according to an account the Iraqi official later provided to American officials in Baghdad.

A soft-spoken, gray-haired operative who carries himself with the confidence that comes from having the backing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, General Suleimani is the antithesis of the bombastic Iranian president. Now a major general ”” the highest rank in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps ”” after a promotion last year, he has been the mastermind behind two central Iranian foreign policy initiatives, exerting and expanding Tehran’s influence in the internal politics of Iraq and providing military support for the rule of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

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While it is not a new thing to suffer as a Copt, the raised expectations of better treatment after the revolution turned to be a big frustration. It is not simply about complaining; the goal of the article is to highlight the Copts’ plight and how to overcome those sufferings.

This article will highlight some recent incidents that support my argument of the Copts’ dilemma. It will also examine the weak reaction by the current regime, the lack of effort to seriously tackle those issues, and it will provide some suggestions for ways forward.

Bishoy Kameel, a Coptic teacher in Sohag, was sentenced to six years in prison for insulting Islam and defaming President Morsi on his Facebook page. This sentence was confirmed by an appeal court in Sohag, and the whole process happened in a matter of days.

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With participants from Church of England dioceses, pilgrimage tour operators and Christian organisations linked to the Holy Land, the conference aimed to share ideas, resources and connections to help deepen the pilgrimage experience. The day sought to foster pilgrimages that make connections, using the resources and landmarks of the past to engage with the present, and encountering the present to transform understanding of the Bible.

Read it all (and note the audio link).

After spending 18 of the last 30 years in Egypt, I am not a romantic when it comes to the realities of religious intolerance, social discrimination and sectarian violence experienced by many Christians due to religious fanatics who claim to be Christian, Jewish or Muslim. I have overheard various “men of religion” refer to Christians using the religious “M” word, “mushrik” meaning polytheist and idolater or “K” word “kafr” meaning infidel. I’ve heard it all and seen a lot. While two wrongs never make a right, Christians of most denominations should never fail to recall the violence, discrimination and persecution we have been guilty of during our own 2,000 year history “in the name of God and Jesus Christ”.

I cannot speak for Muslims outside of Egypt, but I can try to explain the reactions of many to such a film without equating these reasons to being justifications. Most Americans get quite upset when we watch the American flag being burned or trampled on. We at least get upset if someone desecrates the Bible and Catholics get very upset if someone desecrates the Eucharist. Maybe we don’t burn those who do or torture them anymore, but we have in the past. We claim to be “one nation under God with liberty and justice for all” and yet we have always found at least one race, nationality, religion or orientation to focus on and “go after”.

Western societies that profess “freedom of religion” have moved toward “freedom FROM religion”. Personally, even as a Catholic priest, I feel that “religion” in civil democracies have the obligation to form and educate the individual and collective conscience of its followers and to be “a voice of conscience” in society. However, I oppose any religion dictating to government how it should legislate morality according to any particular religious belief system. At the same time, this is NOT the current reality in the Muslim world whether I/we like it or not. Cultural sensitivity must include religious and social sensitivity.

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At least 32 people have been killed in Iraq as car bomb attacks targeted security forces and Shia pilgrims around the country, police say.

In Taji, a mainly Sunni town north of the capital, Baghdad, four car bombs went off within minutes of each other, killing at least eight people.

In the southern town of Madain, a bomb exploded near a Shia shrine and Iranian pilgrims were among the injured.

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[Jo Henderson]… went through a rigorous three-day selection process in England, she said, to see if her calling was genuine and if she could handle the training at the theological Ripon College Cuddesdon outside of Oxford, England.

After her selection, she had to travel back and forth between the UAE and the UK every six weeks.

Her 20-year-old son, James, said it was tough.

“It was hard for her to leave her family every month or so,” he said. “We were supportive of her. And very proud of her today.”

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….[Bishop Suheil Dawani] said the task was harder than ever, with a Christian population that has shrunk from about 30 percent of the population of the overall total just after World War II to about 1 percent today.

The Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem oversees the Anglican community in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, but only has 29 parishes and about 7,000 members. Its reach, though, is deeper and wider than what shows up in the pews, with direct support of two hospitals, five health clinics, five rehabilitation centers and 17 schools.

“Our main influence is through the work of our institutions,” Dawani said.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew his “red line” for Iran’s nuclear program on Thursday despite a U.S. refusal to set an ultimatum, saying Tehran will be on the brink of a nuclear weapon in less than a year.

By citing a time frame in an address to the U.N. General Assembly, Netanyahu – who has clashed with President Barack Obama over the urgency of military action against Iran – appeared to suggest no Israeli attack was imminent before the November 6 U.S. presidential election….

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The 14-minute trailer on YouTube enraged Muslims worldwide with its depiction of Muhammad as a womanizer, religious fraud and child molester. Most Egyptian Christians in the U.S. have rejected the movie and say the man and the nonprofit tied to the film are fringe players who are not well-known in the Coptic Orthodox Church, the church for the vast majority of Coptic Christians in America.

A tiny minority of U.S. Copts, however, have used their adopted nation’s free speech protections to speak out against Islam in a way that would not be tolerated in their native Egypt. The few who engage in this anti-Muslim, evangelical activism _ including those behind the movie trailer _ are fueled by that history, said Eliot Dickinson, an associate professor of political science at Western Oregon University who has written a book on U.S. Copts.

“Whoever made this film is such an outlier in their community that it’s completely unrepresentative,” Dickinson said. “But what it does is, it taps into this frustration of always being persecuted back in Egypt and let’s not downplay that. To be a Copt in Egypt now is a very, very difficult life because, especially after the Arab Spring, it’s open season.”

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They are in their 80s now, the last living links to Janusz Korczak, the visionary champion of children’s rights who refused to part with his young charges even as they were herded to the gas chambers.

When they speak of him, the old men are young again: transported to their days in his orphanage, a place they remember as a magical republic for children as the Nazi threat grew closer.

“It was a utopia,” said Shlomo Nadel, 85, one of the surviving orphans who managed to flee Poland before the Jewish orphanage was forced into the ghetto.

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Four Anglican bishops serving in northeastern Africa and Cyprus have written the United Nations asking that “an international declaration be negotiated that outlaws the intentional and deliberate insulting or defamation of persons (such as prophets), symbols, texts and constructs of belief deemed holy by people of faith.” They make this proposal in response to the recent movie on Muhammad and “similar offensive incidents [which] have occurred in some European countries” and ”evoked massive and violent responses worldwide.”

It is a bad idea, a very bad idea, on many levels. For one thing, such a law would violate the Western ideal of free speech we should not give up. For another, it would quickly be used to suppress not only “deliberate insulting or defamation” but reasonable criticism and disagreement. One man’s well- and kindly-argued belief that another man is in error can be to that other man insult and defamation, especially if he has no natural appreciation for the free exchange of ideas.

Read it all and make sure to read the letter the bishops wrote if you have not before today.

Anger over a film trailer mocking a sanctified Muslim religious figure has sparked violent protests across the Middle East that have taken the lives of dozens of people. Now, the strife is manifesting itself in the form of cyber war waged against America at home.

Over the course of this week, three major U.S. financial institutions have seen their web infrastructure targeted in technical attacks. On at least two occasions, groups or individuals claiming to be aligned with Muslims said the attacks were a reprisal for the ”˜Innocence of Muslims’ trailer that ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad.

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Less than a week after this grim conversational bidding war, the district of the capital where these women and their children had been taken in was shelled, then raided by government forces.

Not surprisingly, the regime’s iron-fisted approach has made real what had merely been a nightmarish fantasy. From the start it portrayed the revolutionaries as bands of heavily armed Sunni Muslim fanatics, funded and directed by Syria’s enemies. The charge was laughable a year ago, when by all accounts there were simply no guns in opposition hands at all. Even by February, after eleven months of unrest, a trophy table of captured “terrorist” weapons displayed for journalists at an army club in Deraa, the battered city near the Jordanian border where protests first began, proved embarrassingly puny. Amid rusted pistols and primitive pipe bombs, the only serious weapon was a Stalingrad-vintage Bulgarian-made sniper rifle.

Only recently has the Free Syrian Army, the loose coalition of local fighting groups that emerged last fall, begun to wield much firepower. Despite talk of large-scale aid from sympathetic Sunni Muslims in the Persian Gulf, and in particular the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the flow of money did not pick up until this spring, while the flow of weapons from outside Syria even now remains a trickle.

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The appeal for legislation to ban the publication of material that causes religious offence was con­tained in a letter sent last weekend to the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, by the President-Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Jerusa­lem and the Middle East, the Most Revd Mouneer Anis. The other sig­natories were: the Bishop in Cyprus & the Gulf, the Rt Revd Michael Lewis; the Area Bishop for North Africa, Dr Bill Musk; and the Area Bishop for the Horn of Africa, Dr Grant Le­-Marquand.

The Bishops proposed that an “international declaration be nego­tiated that outlaws the intentional and deliberate insulting or defama­tion of persons (such as prophets), symbols, texts, and constructs of belief deemed holy by people of faith”.

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A newly revealed piece of papyrus offers fresh evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus was married, according to a Harvard Divinity School professor.

A fourth-century codex in Coptic quotes Jesus referring to “my wife,” Karen King, a scholar of early Christianity, said on Tuesday (Sept. 18). It is the only extant text in which Jesus is explicitly portrayed as betrothed, according to King.

King is calling the receipt-sized slip of papyrus “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” She believes it was originally written in Greek, and later translated into Coptic, an Egyptian language.

Read it all and another article is there.

Islamists almost by definition have a vested interest in continuously fanning the flames of Muslim victimhood. For Islamists, wrath against the West is the basis for their claim to the support of Muslim masses, taking attention away from societal political and economic failures. For example, the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Conference account for one-fifth of the world’s population but their combined gross domestic product is less than 7% of global output””a harsh reality for which Islamists offer no solution.

Even after recent developments that were labeled the Arab Spring, few Muslim-majority countries either fulfill””or look likely to””the criteria for freedom set by the independent group Freedom House. Mainstream discourse among Muslims blames everyone but themselves for this situation. The image of an ascendant West belittling Islam with the view to eliminate it serves as a convenient explanation for Muslim weakness.

Once the Muslim world embraces freedom of expression, it will be able to recognize the value of that freedom even for those who offend Muslim sensibilities. More important: Only in a free democratic environment will the world’s Muslims be able to debate the causes of their powerlessness, which stirs in them greater anger than any specific action on the part of Islam’s Western detractors.

Until then, the U.S. would do well to remember Osama bin Laden’s comment not long after the Sept. 11 attacks: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” America should do nothing that enables Islamists to portray the nation as the weak horse.

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The pope also demanded that everyone must have the right to freely choose their own religion, and to practice it publicly, “without endangering one’s life.”

He said the time has come “to move beyond tolerance to religious freedom.”

Further, the pope seemed to link the deprival of religious liberty to Christian flight from the Middle East, warning that the long-standing decline in the region’s Christian footprint means “human, cultural, and religious impoverishment.”

“A Middle East without Christians, or with only a few Christians, would no longer be the Middle East,” the pope said, calling on political leaders to avoid the advent of a “monochromatic Middle East” without religious diversity.

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It had actually been online since July, but nobody had paid attention to its crude libels against the Prophet Mohammed until Mr Abdullah’s show broadcast clips from it last weekend, calling for the film-makers to be executed.

Within hours the hardline Salafi Islamists who watch his programme, and who have been growing in strength since last year’s revolution, were demonstrating in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and outside the US embassy, which they stormed on Tuesday, burning the US flag.

Thus came the spark to a week of violent protests against the film, leading to the killing of the US ambassador to Libya on Tuesday evening and assaults on Western embassies across the Middle East, leaving at least nine dead and hundreds injured.

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: Joining me now to talk about some of the major news of the week are Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, and Kevin Eckstrom, editor-in-chief of Religion News Service. So, Kevin, a fourteen-minute video is posted on YouTube and triggers violence all over the Muslim world, demonstrations resulting in the death of the U.S. ambassador to Libya. What are the messages from all that, especially the religious messages?

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor-in-Chief, Religion News Service): Well, I think, you know, we live in this increasingly smaller world, interconnected world, and things that happen in one place instantaneously affect things in another place, and religion obviously is playing a larger and larger role in global affairs, and what you’ve seen, I think, this week is that one of the greatest barriers to interfaith understanding is actually technology and the ability to get these messages out. You know, five years ago, ten years ago, somebody could have made a video like this and nobody ever would have seen it, but now you can post it on YouTube or you can put it on Twitter or Facebook, and it’s around the world instantaneously, and it automatically pits one religion against another, and that’s a huge challenge that nobody, I think, has quite figured out how to deal with just yet.

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Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church will choose a new pope on Dec. 2, after Pope Shenouda who led the church for four decades died in March and left many Christians worrying about their rights under an Islamist-led government.

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By telling his disciples that he must suffer and be put to death, and then rise again, Jesus wants to make them understand his true identity. He is a Messiah who suffers, a Messiah who serves, and not some triumphant political saviour. He is the Servant who obeys his Father’s will, even to giving up his life. This had already been foretold by the prophet Isaiah in today’s first reading. Jesus thus contradicts the expectations of many. What he says is shocking and disturbing. We can understand the reaction of Peter who rebukes him, refusing to accept that his Master should suffer and die! Jesus is stern with Peter; he makes him realize that anyone who would be his disciple must become a servant, just as he became Servant.

Following Jesus means taking up one’s cross and walking in his footsteps, along a difficult path which leads not to earthly power or glory but, if necessary, to self-abandonment, to losing one’s life for Christ and the Gospel in order to save it. We are assured that this is the way to the resurrection, to true and definitive life with God. Choosing to walk in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, who made himself the Servant of all, requires drawing ever closer to him, attentively listening to his word and drawing from it the inspiration for all that we do….

The vocation of the Church and of each Christian is to serve others, as the Lord himself did, freely and impartially. Consequently, in a world where violence constantly leaves behind its grim trail of death and destruction, to serve justice and peace is urgently necessary for building a fraternal society, for building fellowship! Dear brothers and sisters, I pray in particular that the Lord will grant to this region of the Middle East servants of peace and reconciliation, so that all people can live in peace and with dignity. This is an essential testimony which Christians must render here, in cooperation with all people of good will. I appeal to all of you to be peacemakers, wherever you find yourselves.

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The visit has coincided with anti-US protests across the region over a film deemed insulting to Islam.

The Pope appealed for the crowd to “be peacemakers” and prayed for an end to violence in neighbouring Syria.

“May God grant to your country, to Syria and to the Middle East the gift of peaceful hearts, the silencing of weapons and the cessation of all violence,” he said at the end of his Mass.

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Ten years ago, I was nearly 30 and over $90,000 in debt. I had spent my twenties trying to build an interesting life; I had two degrees; I had lived in New York and the Bay Area; I had worked in a series of interesting jobs; I spent a lot of time traveling overseas. But I had also made a couple of critically stupid and shortsighted decisions. I had invested tens of thousands of dollars in a master’s degree in landscape architecture that I realized I didn’t want halfway through. While maxing out my student loans, I had also collected a toxic mix of maxed-out credit cards, personal loans, and $2,000 I had borrowed from my father for a crisis long since forgotten. My life consisted of loan deferments and minimum payments.

Like so many other lost children, I had fallen into a career in IT. The work was boring, but led to jobs with cool organizations””a lot of jobs, because I kept quitting them. As soon as I had any money in the bank, I’d quit and go backpacking in Southeast Asia. My adventures were life-changing experiences, but I was eventually left with a CV that was pretty scattershot.

My luck securing interesting jobs dried up. In 2001, I ended up living with my dad for four months and working at a banking infrastructure company in suburban Pittsburgh. I should have taken that as a warning that I needed to get it together, but I thought it was just an aberration. It was not.

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“Religious fundamentalism seeks to take power for political ends, at times using violence, over the individual conscience and over religion,” the Pope said.

“All religious leaders in the Middle East [should] endeavour, by their example and their teaching, to do everything possible to uproot this threat, which indiscriminately and fatally affects believers.”

The pontiff’s exhortations were made public as he signed recommendations on how to improve the lives of the Christian minority, making up 40% of Lebanon’s population, and its relations with Islam and Judaism.

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Pope Benedict XVI will arrive in Lebanon on Friday for a three-day visit that he labeled a “peace pilgrimage” at a time when the region and its people are facing anguish, from war in Syria to violence in Libya.

Ahead of the trip, a senior Vatican official said Thursday he didn’t expect the pope to make specific remarks about the violence against U.S. embassies in the area, or the online video that many protesters said had sparked it, during his visit so as not to risk angering the Muslim street and inflaming the crisis.

The trip “was already a minefield. Now a few more mines have been tossed in,” the official said.

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the director of the Vatican press office, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, …[Wednesday] released a message asserting that “profound respect for the beliefs, texts, outstanding figures and symbols of the various religions” is essential if people hope to coexist peacefully.

“The serious consequences of unjustified offense and provocations against the sensibilities of Muslim believers are once again evident in these days, as we see the reactions they arouse, sometimes with tragic results, which in their turn nourish tension and hatred, unleashing unacceptable violence,” the statement added.

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Perhaps you could encourage readers to be praying for calm in N. Africa and the Middle East tomorrow, and safety for all of us Americans & expat Christians who live and work in these countries?

. A simple, direct request which I plan to honor–please join me.

From here:

The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) grieves the tragic and senseless deaths of innocent representatives of the U.S. government at the embassy in Libya. Tuesday’s violence in Libya, and other areas, is reported to be sparked by an offensive film about Islam. The film’s origins have not been verified.

“Very few Americans knew anything about this film until the violence started,” said Leith Anderson, NAE President. “This insulting video does not represent the vast majority of Americans who desire to live at peace with people of other faiths.”

The attack has been condemned by both the U.S. and Libya governments. The NAE joins together in humble prayer for the victims’ families and for peace and justice in the region. The NAE calls its members to continue in efforts that build stronger relationships of understanding between those of different faiths.

Anderson said, “How should the people of the world respond to this video? Don’t watch it.”

Most Americans knew nothing about “Innocence of Muslims.” That’s the film that has set the Muslim world on fire, causing protests in Egypt and Libya that led to the death of the U.S. envoy to Libya, Christopher Stevens.

The bottom line is that we know very little about “Sam Bacile,” the man who says he produced the film and who says Sam Bacile is his name. The Wall Street Journal caught up with Bacile before he went into hiding. (Update at 3:34 p.m. ET. Some of the claims made in this interview have come under question. We’ve updated this post ”” read below ”” to reflect that…..)

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