Islamic militants attacked a boarding school in northeast Nigeria before dawn Saturday, killing 29 students and one teacher.
Some of the pupils were burned alive in the latest school attack blamed on a radical terror group, survivors said.
Parents screamed in anguish as they tried to identify the charred and gunshot victims.
In Canadian eyes, Calgary has not exactly been synonymous with cosmopolitanism.
Located some 200 miles north of Montana, the western city has long been condescended to by eastern elites in metropolitan cities like Toronto and Montreal, who cringed at its cowboy heritage, oil corporations, and conservative politics.
But these days, with Toronto’s mayor stumbling through scandal and the now ex-mayor of Montreal facing corruption charges, many in the east look with envy at the wildly popular Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, a Harvard Kennedy School graduate, the first Muslim mayor of a major North American metropolis, and symbol of a city moving from cow-town stereotypes to something more cosmopolitan….
The Muslim Brotherhood, among the most powerful forces in Egypt, is facing perhaps the worst crisis in its 80-year history. Its members have been gunned down in the streets. Its new headquarters have been ransacked and burned, its political leader, President Mohamed Morsi, abandoned, threatened and isolated by old foes and recent allies.
It is a steep fall for the pre-eminent Islamist movement in the region, and especially surprising for a group that was elected just one year ago. Its critics say the Brotherhood remains stuck in old divisions, pitting Islamists against the military, and has failed to heed the demands of ordinary citizens.
“I think this is an existential crisis, and it’s much more serious than what they were subjected to by Nasser or Mubarak,” said Khaled Fahmy, a historian at the American University in Cairo, referring to the governments of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Hosni Mubarak, the autocrat deposed in 2011. “The Egyptian people are increasingly saying it is not about Islam versus secularism,” Mr. Fahmy said. “It is about Egypt versus a clique.”
Previous demonstrations have led to violence, and these are intended to be the biggest since the January 25 revolution which overthrew President Hosni Mubarak. Three people, including an American student who stopped to take photographs of protests in Alexandria, were killed on Friday alone.
The American, Andrew Pochter, 21, was working in the city over the summer as part of a volunteer scheme.
“As we understand it, he was witnessing the protest as a bystander and was stabbed by a protester,” his family said in a statement on Saturday from their home in Ohio.
Read it all and please join us in praying for Egypt.
Update: There is more from Reuters there.
What is going to happen on the 30th of June? We do not know! All what we know is that when emotions run high, anything can happen. However, we trustthat God is in control and we are in His hands.Two days ago during his visit to Egypt, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby encouraged us by using St. Paul s words, while in the middle of a storm, “But now I urge you to keep up your courage, because not one of you will be lost (Acts 27:22).
While listening to a fiery preacher of the gospel I observed three young men in their thirties just to my right giggling at and mocking the preacher’s insistence that Jesus was who he claimed to be. Here was my opportunity.
They were Muslims, and soon we were talking about how Jesus could be both the Son of God and at the same time one with the Father. I asked them if they had read the Injeel, the Arabic word for the Gospels, since Mohammed said that Jesus was a prophet and that God had given us the Gospels. “Ah, but the Injeel has been corrupted,” they said. “But why if God is all powerful would he have allowed his word to be corrupted?” I asked them. No answer.
Our conversation ranged on a wide variety of subjects including Jihad (they insisted that those who interpreted Jidad violently were not “real” Muslims), suicide bombers (again they were not real Muslims), and whether those who followed Jesus caused wars or believed in turning the other cheek. When I turned my cheek and asked one of them to hit me, they all smiled (as did I), but they knew I meant it.
– See more at: http://www.stmichaelschurch.net/my-muslim-encounter-in-london/#sthash.EQYEeald.dpuf
The public meeting in Manchester, Tenn., about 70 miles from Nashville, was supposed to address and tamp down discrimination toward Muslims there.
But instead it turned into a shouting match.
Bill Killian, the local U.S. attorney who organized the meeting, told the people in attendance that hate speech was not protected by the First Amendment. Over the last few years, there have been tensions between Muslims and many Christians in Tennessee. A Coffee County commissioner recently posted a picture on Facebook of a man with one eye looking down the sights of a shotgun, with the caption: “how to wink at a Muslim.” The photo went viral.
Egyptian author Karam Saber said that a misdemeanor court in Beni Suef sentenced him to five years on Wednesday on charges of insulting religion in a collection of short stories he wrote two years ago titled “Where is God?”
The politically active author told Aswat Masriya in a phone call on Wednesday that he plans to appeal the verdict through a legal challenge he will present to the court tomorrow.
Charges of “insulting religion” against authors, artists, television hosts and Coptic Christians have increased in recent months.
Hello Dr. Craig,
I would first like to acknowledge your intellectual and humble manner in defending Christianity. I am Muslim though and I have a few questions for you about Islam that you might answer. I would tremendously appreciate it if you could answer back, I am on the brink of considering Christianity but I want answers:
1) is it true Mohammed took the Gospel of Jesus from the Bible and twisted/perverted it for his own benefits?
2) does Islam have an experiential reality (like modern day miracles, visions from Muhammad) if so what is the best explanation for that?
3) if I became a Christian and asked God sincerely to reveal Jesus to me in a supernatural form, will it happen?
Read it all and see what you make of his answers.
An Egyptian court has convicted a Coptic Christian teacher of blasphemy but didn’t hand down a prison sentence and only imposed a fine on her.
The court on Tuesday ruled that elementary schoolteacher Dimyana Abdel-Nour had insulted Islam. It ordered that she pay a fine of 100,000 Egyptian pounds ($14,000). Abdel-Nour was not in the courtroom for the verdict.
If there was a Bible belt over 1,500 years ago, it was in Turkey. However, that changed with the rise of Islam and its eventual conquest of the region. Then, a few centuries later, the area would be at the heart of one of the world’s most powerful empires, the Islamic Ottoman Empire.
After the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey took a road less traveled among majority Islamic nations””it leaned toward Europe rather than the Middle East.
Turkey has more recently been seen as a moderate Muslim country, though some (including the current President) reject that terminology, and there are troubling signs for the future.
[On May 21 Dominique] Venner, a conservative ultra-nationalist who as a young man had been jailed for violence against Communists, was 78, ailing, and had come to the extreme conclusion that French civilisation was dying and being replaced by an ”Afro-Maghreb culture” and would give way to sharia law. The former colonies were overrunning the republic. In his final message before leaving for the cathedral, he wrote on his internet blog: ”Peaceful street protests will not be enough to prevent it ”¦ It will require new, spectacular, and symbolic gestures to wake up the sleepwalkers, to shake the slumbering consciousness and to remind us of our origins ”¦ and rouse people from their complacency ”¦ We are entering a time when words must be backed up ”¦ by new, spectacular and symbolic actions.”
He had his own spectacular symbolic action in mind. His timing was prompted by the passage, the week before, of a law legalising gay marriage in France. Venner regarded this as a key element in the dismantling of French culture. He also regarded the immigration of millions of Muslims as a demographic and cultural disaster for France. And he saw white French culture as being overwhelmed by Americanism.
Venner predicted current social trends would lead to a ”total replacement of the population of France, and of Europe”….
In his Zurich speech he warned against the rising threat of a “tyranny of the majority” in countries affected by the recent Arab revolutions, and called on all concerned to commit themselves to equal rights for religious minorities and women in these countries.
Noting that humanity lives in world-changing times, the bishop referred to a recent attack in London on a soldier who was hacked to death by two men and a similar attack in France by people who regard themselves as converts to Islam.
At first the media reported politicians saying the London attack was done by “lone wolves”, but the bishop said it emerged there is a connection with bigger groups and that the people were acting in connection with others.
Read it all (and please note the video for this talk was posted earlier this week)
Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God? Since the devastating attacks of 9/11””when the world saw afresh that religion has geo-political consequences, and that Islam is the most volatile religion on the world’s stage””more and more Christians have been asking this question.
Yale theologian Miroslav Volf answers the question in a recent book (Allah: A Christian Response) with a nuanced but insistent Yes: Christians and Muslims do indeed worship the same God. In a review of Volf’s book, Baylor historian Thomas Kidd faults Volf for sidestepping the question of salvation””and therefore the question of true worship””and for not being critical enough in his evaluation of the identity of the God or gods of these two religions.
Kidd is quite right; indeed, there are deeper problems with Volf’s thesis. His argument for the identity of the Muslim and Christian Gods collapses under its own weight. Volf’s own logic underscores what the Qur’an itself suggests””that the God of the Qur’an is radically different from the God Christians worship.
Watch it all, from a speech hosted by Christian Solidarity International (CSI).
I wasn’t surprised by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s recent statement about a “problem within Islam.”
It’s not as though I’ve never heard anything like it before. I hear it all the time.
Still, his words ”“ in response to a recent attack in London that left a British soldier dead ”“ made me wonder: How might the public have reacted in a different context, had Blair replaced the word “Islam” with “Christianity” or “Judaism”?
I’m guessing not well.
David Cameron will launch a new taskforce today aimed at confronting Islamic extremism and controlling preachers of hate.
The Prime Minister will chair the first session of the Whitehall body set up after of the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby. It will focus on how the influence of radical preachers in schools, mosques and jails can be curbed.
Ministers including Theresa May, the Home Secretary, and Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, will also look at whether the Government needs enhanced powers to expel foreign-born preachers guilty of hate speech from the UK.
Read it all (subscription required).
Religions and cultures with which we are unfamiliar are a lot harder to understand than most of us think. I suspect that most Americans would answer the question “Is Buddhism a religion of peace?” with a yes. The Dalai Lama, Richard Gere, and so on. Even the battling Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Kaine from the old TV series Kung Fu was as peaceful as people would let him be.
But this very day, Buddhists in Burma are accused of violent oppression of Muslims, no less than “ethnic cleansing.” And history includes plenty of examples of violence in the name of Buddhism.
Is Buddhism a religion of peace? It can be.
The conventional portrayal of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, has been built on the political canard that the secularist principles of the Republic of Turkey were a deliberate turn away from the Islamic theocracy of the Ottoman Empire. The reality is quite different. In fact, Turkey’s founding moment involved the genocide of two-and-a-half million Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christians in Ottoman Anatolia and Asia Minor–in short, most of the remaining Orthodox Christian population that had survived from Byzantine Christian times.
In some ways, Ankara’s policies against Turkey’s Christian citizens have added a modern veneer and sophisticated brutality to Ottoman norms and practices. Pogroms, persecution, and discrimination have been visited on Turkey’s Christians. The Turkish press revealed only weeks ago that Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew was the target of an assassination conspiracy (the second such plot against his life in four years), and the constant threats and interference in the affairs of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Greek Orthodox community have led to the near extinction of that ancient Christian community. In the words of an anonymous Church hierarch in Turkey fearful for the life of his flock, Christians in Turkey are an endangered species. The siege of Constantinople continues today, 560 years after the fall on May 29th, 1453.
Steps from the immense colonnade of St. Peter’s Square, Sarwar Jahan stood next to his souvenir stand. A dark, clean-shaven man wearing a navy blue jacket and a black knit cap, Jahan is one of the legions of peddlers selling trinkets of the new Pope Francis to tourists and pilgrims.
Like many of his fellow street merchants, Jahan is neither a Catholic nor a natural-born Italian. He’s a Muslim who moved to Rome from Bangladesh in search of work.
In a country dominated by Roman Catholics, Muslims make up Italy’s second-largest religious group. A Pew study estimated that more than 1.5 million Muslims live in Italy, a number projected to double by 2030.
A series of violent riots against Pakistani Christians in the past decade has concerned human rights watchers and religious minorities in Pakistan.
The latest deadly incident, which took place just two months ago, raised questions about what, if anything, can be done to prevent such violence.
The March incident when a Muslim mob burned down a Christian neighborhood in Lahore, echoed a similar incident in the rural town of Gojra four years earlier. Nine people were killed when rioters torched two Christian neighborhoods over rumors the Christians had celebrated a wedding by showering the groom with pages torn from the Quran. Despite hundreds of arrests, no one was tried for the riots, and relatives of those killed have now fled Pakistan.
Since the ouster of Mr. Mubarak in February 2011, a growing number of Copts, including some of the most successful businessmen, have left Egypt or are preparing to do so, fearing persecution by an Islamist-controlled government as much as the stagnant economy that is smothering their industries.
Among the most prominent are the heads of the Sawiris family, who for several months have been running their enormous business empire from abroad.
“Every week I learn of 10 people who are leaving or who have already left,” Mr. [Wasfi Amin] Wassef said. “They know that what happened to the Sawiris’ can happen to them tomorrow.”
Radical and intolerant Islamist leaders preached to crowds of students at almost 200 official events in the past year, according to a study of external speakers at universities including Cambridge, Birmingham and University College London.
Segregated seating for male and female students is understood to have been implemented for at least a quarter of those public meetings held by the Islamic societies at 21 universities.
Two institutions have announced investigations into segregated meetings. But research by Student Rights, which was set up to tackle extremism on campus, indicates that the practice is prevalent across Britain, despite university equality rules forbidding it.
Read it all (subscription required).
…many viewers of TV preachers are women. In the most conservative Egyptian households, women rarely leave their homes and account for nearly two-thirds of television viewers, according to Ipsos, a Paris-based global polling group. During the runoff of presidential elections last June, 76% of women voted for the Brotherhood’s Mr. Morsi, propelling him to a win, according to telephone exit polls by Baseera, a private Egyptian polling firm. Overall, Mr. Morsi received 51.7% of the vote.
“The advantage of the channels is that they reach those groups that the mosque will never reach,” said Aatif Abdel Rashid, one of the founders of Al Nas who is now a presenter on Al Hafez, another Salafi satellite station.
Al Nas was started by Saudi investors who owned a media group called Al Baraheen in 2006 as a “cultural” station that featured tame music videos, dance routines and religious dream interpretations””a variety show with an mildly Islamic slant.
The war in Ambon and the wider Maluku islands started for a variety of reasons. But it quickly boiled down to a question of identity, of Christians versus Muslims, as more than 5,000 people were killed and 500,000 were displaced from their homes between 1999 and 2002.
The religious passions and communal hatred stirred up in the war put a question mark over Indonesia’s moves to build a democracy after 40 years of dictatorship. Could Indonesia’s Muslim majority coexist with Christians and other religious minorities without an authoritarian hand on the tiller?
Sitting in Ambon’s Joas Coffee House 13 years after the fighting ended, the answer is clear: Yes. And sitting across from me is Jacky Manuputty, one member of a brave group of local community leaders, Muslim and Christian alike, who have helped heal the wounds of war and today act as the first responders of harmony when the fragile peace looks threatened.
Cemeteries and even some mosques have refused to take his body. His city, Cambridge, has urged family members to bury him elsewhere. Republican U.S. Senate candidate Gabriel Gomez and local talk radio host Dan Rae want him dumped in the ocean, like Osama bin Laden. Clergy have largely kept mum.
“The only signs of people who are showing some sort of moral conscience are those few who stand with a card near the funeral home saying (burial) is a corporal work of mercy,” said James Keenan, a moral theologian at Boston College. “To say, ”˜we won’t bury him’ makes us barbaric. It takes away mercy, the trademark of Christians. ”¦ I’m talking about this because somebody should.”
BOB ABERNETHY, host:….The president referred to self-radicalizing. What””how does that work, and what can the Muslim community do to prevent it?
HARIS TARIN (Muslim Public Affairs Council): Well, the phenomenon of self-radicalization is where individuals who do not find a place in mainstream Muslim institutions, places like mosques and organizations, they don’t find a place for their fiery rhetoric, for their violent, extremist rhetoric, so they go online, and they listen to sermons, and they listen to individuals like Anwar al-Awlaki or Adam Gadahn or other folks who misinterpret the religion to give it a violent, violent ideology, and they fall prey to these individuals who are basically online predators, and they get influenced by these individuals to address their grievances through violence….
ELKADER, Iowa–Amid an expanse of undulating farmland, deep in the steep valley carved by the Turkey River, the town of Elkader sits most of the year in remote obscurity. Population 1,200 and gradually shrinking, it is the seat of a county without a single traffic light.
Improbably enough, this community settled by Germans and Scandinavians, its religious life built around Catholic and Lutheran churches, bears the name of a Muslim hero. Abd el-Kader was renowned in the 19th century for leading Algeria’s fight for independence and protecting non-Muslims from persecution. Even Abraham Lincoln extolled him.
This weekend, for the fifth year in a row, Elkader will welcome a delegation of Arab dignitaries to celebrate this rare lifeline of tolerance, spanning continents and centuries. Coming less than three weeks after the Boston Marathon bombings, which the authorities say were committed by two Muslim brothers, the Abdelkader Education Project’s forum stands more than ever for an affirming encounter between the United States and Islam.
Of all the moral precepts instilled in Buddhist monks the promise not to kill comes first, and the principle of non-violence is arguably more central to Buddhism than any other major religion. So why have monks been using hate speech against Muslims and joining mobs that have left dozens dead?
This is happening in two countries separated by well over 1,000 miles of Indian Ocean – Burma and Sri Lanka. It is puzzling because neither country is facing an Islamist militant threat. Muslims in both places are a generally peaceable and small minority.
They have seen how trouble starts from the smallest things. They have seen the police powerless before mobs fired with religious zeal and armed with bricks and swords. They have seen on TV and in newspapers the burning homes of people just like them light up the night. And so they have erected rusted barbed-wire barricades and volunteered to sit on street corners, 10 men at time, watching through the night.
Fear courses through the streets of Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city, especially among its Muslim minority. They have watched as the sectarian violence threatening to destabilize the country’s fragile democracy creeps closer to home. With little faith in the government’s ability to protect them and a growing movement of Buddhist extremism, some feel they have little choice but to try to defend themselves.
Residents in some neighborhoods have started their own patrols.