At least 38 people have died in a car bombing in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna, officials said.
Many others were injured in the attack, which took place when officials stopped the vehicle as it approached a church.
Just hours afterwards, a bomb exploded in the central city of Jos, injuring several people.
With PowerPoint presentations and political promises, Egypt’s influential Muslim Brotherhood made its US diplomatic debut this week hoping to persuade Washington that the Islamist group is committed to democracy and rule of law.
A delegation from the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the political wing of the once-banned Islamist movement, has been making the Washington rounds talking to officials and think tank experts about their growing role as Egypt heads toward presidential elections.
Two fighters from the Islamist group Boko Haram were killed in a shootout Monday that reveals mounting frustration among residents of northern Nigeria with the group’s campaign of violence.
The two came into the Sheka neighborhood of Kano on a motorcycle, shooting bullets into the air, according to an eyewitness who requested anonymity for safety reasons. “People in the area summoned courage and nabbed them. As they were planning to hand them over to the police, gunmen came from nowhere and shot them instantly to death,” the witness said.
Members of the Jama’atu Ahlis Sunnati Lidda’awati Wal Jihad, also known as Boko Haram, may have concluded arrangements to engage the security operatives in Kaduna State in a free for all. They have warned residents to flee all security formations in the state.
In a letter distributed in Kaduna, the sect said it is ready to fight security operatives in the state and warns residents whose houses are located near military, police, SSS as well as prison formations to relocate with immediate effect to avoid being victims of the planned attack.
Confirming the report, the state police commissioner, Mohammed Abubakar, said: “Yes, we are aware of it… that unless their people are released from detention, if not they will come and stage attacks. We are aware of that one. We have strategized and are waiting for them….
Sydney’S acute shortage of burial space is set to hit the Muslim community hardest, with Islamic plots at Australia’s largest cemetery expected to run out – again – within a year.
When space dedicated to Islamic burials was last exhausted in Rookwood Necropolis two years ago, some Muslims were forced to fly their loved ones to Lebanon because they couldn’t afford to bury them here.
Hindu and Christian representatives say forced conversions to Islam have become the latest weapon of Islamic extremists in what they call a growing campaign against Pakistan’s religious minorities, on top of assassinations and mob intimidation of houses of worship. The groups are increasingly wondering if they still have a place in Pakistan.
“It is a conspiracy that Hindus and Christians and other minorities should leave Pakistan,” says Amar Lal, the lawyer representing Kumari in the Supreme Court. “As a minority, we feel more and more insecure. It is getting worse day by day.”
The insurgent violence stalking northern Nigeria has struck a long list of official targets, killing police and army officers, elected officials, high-ranking civil servants, United Nations workers and other perceived supporters of the Nigerian government.
Now it has an ominous new front: a war against schools.
Public and private schools here have been doused with gasoline at night and set on fire. Crude homemade bombs ”” soda bottles filled with gasoline ”” have been hurled at the bare-bones concrete classrooms Nigeria offers its children.
Earlier this month, the TLC network announced that it will cancel the reality show “All-American Muslim” due to low ratings. Critics had complained that the show whitewashed the problem of Islamic radicalism in the U.S. by not portraying Muslim extremists, which led major sponsors such as the retailer Lowe’s to drop their support.
But the show’s producers were closer to portraying reality than critics asserted. The story of Islam in America today is a story of rapid assimilation and even secularization, not growing radicalism.
Jihad Turk, director of religious studies at LA’s Islamic Center of Southern California, says that of the roughly 750,000 Muslims living in Southern California, just 30,000, or about 4%, regularly attend Friday prayer.
Two nuns in Upper Egypt faced “unimaginable fear”–with one later hospitalized over the emotional trauma–when 1,500 Muslim villagers brandishing swords and knives trapped them inside a guesthouse last week and threatened to burn them out.
The next day, the assailants frightened children at the school; attendance has since dropped by more than a third.
The greater New York City area (including Brooklyn, and central and northern New Jersey) is home to millions of atheists, including many who still engage in religious activities, including Jewish and Muslim rituals. While we have little interest in arguing against cultural affirmations, we are eager to question the false foundations for religious ideas ”“ and to call out atheists who’re helping keep irrationality alive.
Atheism needs the involvement of atheists, deserves the support of atheists ”“ and that’s every bit as true of atheists who read Hebrew or Arabic, as it is of anyone else.
Burned-out rubble is all that’s left of Christian shopkeeper Abskharon Suleiman’s appliance store in the northern Egyptian village of Sharbat. His home was destroyed as well as shops owned by his adult children ”“ all targeted because they are Christians.
For more than a dozen years, Khairat el-Shater guided his family of 10 children, his sprawling business empire and Egypt’s largest Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, all from a prison cell.
Each week, he held court behind prison walls as young Muslim Brothers delivered to him dossiers about the organization that sometimes were as long as 200 pages. His corporate employees paid regular visits for strategic advice about his investments in software, textile, bus manufacturing and furniture companies and other enterprises. And before consenting to the marriages of his eight daughters, he met in prison with each of their suitors. Some of the grooms were prisoners with him, others made the pilgrimage, and five said their vows in his presence, behind bars.
Now Mr. Shater, 62, commands far wider influence.
Everyone willing to follow the Lord is supposed to have listened in some way to this seemingly imperious command: “Come!” a command which implies an act of faith, referred to sometimes as the “leap of faith.” As it is clear from the Scriptures, what we are able to see is not faith, as the biblical faith is defined as : “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” We have to decide “in spite of”’, in order to experience the power of God. But we need to remember that everything must be done according the Word of God. Peter did not experience the possibility to walk on water because he decided to leave the boat but because of the Word, the Command of the Lord.
The Word of God tell us to “expect to suffer hardship” and dishonor for the sake of His Name. Our Christian confession is not acceptable if we ignore this statement, if we do not manifest the patience of the Lord in our sufferings. Anybody ignoring it will be ashamed in that day.
Let us remember that sometimes the leap of faith leads us towards some impasses. Just as the Word led the sons of Israel leaving Egypt toward the impasse of the Red sea. These impasses are midway between promises of God and their fulfillments and they challenge our faith. Believers are to accept these challenges as a part of their spiritual course. The Son was challenged at Calvary in the hardest way, as it is written in the Scriptures….
Muslims are being used as “scapegoats” in the French election campaign in which halal slaughter has become a hot-button issue, the French Council of the Muslim Faith said yesterday.
The statement came a day after the prime minister, Francois Fillon, urged Muslims and Jews to consider scrapping their “outdated” halal and kosher slaughter rules.
The council, asked about Mr Fillon’s comment on halal, said it “does not accept that Islam and Muslims be used as scapegoats in this [election] campaign”.
…[Middle Eastern Christians] share of the region’s population has plunged from 20% a century ago to less than 5% today and falling. In Egypt, 200,000 Coptic Christians fled their homes last year after beatings and massacres by Muslim extremist mobs. Since 2003, 70 Iraqi churches have been burned and nearly a thousand Christians killed in Baghdad alone, causing more than half of this million-member community to flee. Conversion to Christianity is a capital offense in Iran, where last month Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani was sentenced to death. Saudi Arabia outlaws private Christian prayer.
As 800,000 Jews were once expelled from Arab countries, so are Christians being forced from lands they’ve inhabited for centuries.
The only place in the Middle East where Christians aren’t endangered but flourishing is Israel. Since Israel’s founding in 1948, its Christian communities (including Russian and Greek Orthodox, Catholics, Armenians and Protestants) have expanded more than 1,000%.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops last week started mandatory refresher training on how to handle the Koran. Troops are now told flatly not to dispose of Korans and will be urged to err on the side of caution when dealing with Arabic texts, assuming “material is sacred if there is any doubt over its religious significance.”
But some experts think the more explicit approach might not stop future incidents. Montgomery McFate, an anthropologist who has worked closely with the U.S. Defense Department, said the issuance of cultural do’s and don’ts was only useful to a point.
“It makes culture into a set of arbitrary rules. You don’t understand why,” she said. “The Bible is not considered itself a holy object, and unless you’d grown up in a religious tradition where that was true, you wouldn’t understand the way that Muslims feel about the Koran.
A high-ranking Nigerian customs officer has been shot dead by gunmen thought to be from the militant Islamist Boko Haram, police have said.
Adamu Ahmadu was killed in Yobe state in north-east Nigeria, weeks after tightening up border controls to stem the flow of arms in the region.
Boko Haram has its stronghold in Maiduguri in neighbouring Borno state.
Tensions remain high in an Egyptian village where as many as 5,000 mostly Islam and that Christians had kidnapped her, the church priest told Compass.” Salafi Muslims went on a rampage over a false rumor that a church was holding a girl against her will in order to convert her back to Christianity.
Dismissing media reports of 20,000 rioting Muslims, sources told Compass that between 2,000 and 5,000 hard-line Muslims, most of them from the Salafi movement, last month harassed Christian villagers in Meet Bahsar in the Nile Delta, attacked a church building in a misguided effort to “save” the girl, damaged a priest’s house and then destroyed his car.
American Christians would be understandably outraged if they learned of Muslims burning the Bible. Muslims have an even greater reverence for their holy book. Omid Safi, who teaches Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina, notes that Muslims look at the Qur’an the way Christians look at Jesus. “In an Islamic universe . . . the word becomes not a person, but a book,” he says. “For a Muslim to see the Qur’an burnt . . . it would look and feel like someone burning Jesus, or a crucifix.”
Christians should at least understand and respect the way Muslims look at the Qur’an. Most Muslims have a higher regard for the Bible than most Christians have for the Qur’an. It is unlikely that a Muslim would ever burn a Bible.
Against a backdrop of heartland fears that U.S. Muslims seek to impose Islamic law on American courts, a leading Muslim group will launch a campaign on Monday to dispel what it called misconceptions about Shariah.
The “Defending Religious Freedom: Understanding Shariah” campaign comes at a time when more than 20 states are considering or have passed laws forbidding judges from considering Shariah in their deliberations…
The march of secularism means Britain may no longer be a Christian country in just 20 years, a report said yesterday.
If trends continue, the number of non-believers is set to overtake the number of Christians by 2030.
Christianity is losing more than half a million believers every year, while the count of atheists and agnostics is going up by almost 750,000 annually.
New Jersey’s attorney general told Muslim leaders Saturday that he was still looking into the extent of New York Police Department surveillance operations in the state, yet stopped short of promising a formal investigation during a meeting that both sides characterized as productive.
Leaders from different New Jersey Muslim organizations met with Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa and state and federal law enforcement officials for nearly three hours in Trenton to discuss concerns over the NYPD’s activities in the state.
Some officials found the current case particularly troubling because it followed more than 10 years at war in the Muslim world, in which outrage over even the rumor of American defacement of Korans has caused previous crises in Afghanistan and Iraq. Several of the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the investigations.
An American military official familiar with the joint investigation somberly described the burning as a “tragedy,” but rejected any suggestion that it was intentional. He said that the joint commission of three senior Afghan security officials and an American military officer was convinced that the military personnel involved in making the decision to get rid of the Korans and those who carried out the order did not set out to defile the Muslim holy book.
“There was no maliciousness, there was no deliberateness, there was not an intentional disrespect of Islam,” he said.
The number of Islamic places of worship in the United States soared 74% in the past decade.
While protests against new mosques in New York, Tennessee and California made headlines, the overall number of mosques quietly rose from 1,209 in 2000 to 2,106 in 2010.
And most of their leaders say American society is not hostile to Islam, according to a comprehensive census of U.S. mosques and survey of imams, mosque presidents and board members released Wednesday.
Gamal al-Banna’s vision for Egypt would have set him at odds with his elder brother Hassan, the teacher who founded the Muslim Brotherhood as an Islamist movement in 1928 and was assassinated in 1949.
Gamal, Hassan’s last surviving sibling, argues that Egypt today would be best served by a secular leader, and believes that the current mix of politics and religion will eventually fail.
The Taliban is attempting to capitalize on the outbreak of violence that followed the inadvertent burning of the holy Quran by NATO troops by characterizing the war as a conflict between infidels and Islam, analysts say.
“It’s tailor-made to their argument that the United States is trying to desecrate and destroy Islam,” said Seth Jones, an analyst at RAND Corp. and author of In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan. “It’s patently untrue.”
A suicide car bomber has killed at least three people at a church in the troubled central Nigerian city of Jos, sparking reprisals by Christian youths.
Witnesses said the suicide bomber drove his car into the prominent Church of Christ during morning prayers.
The radical Islamist sect Boko Haram later said that it carried out the attack.
The facts are that the Korans were seized at a jail because jihadists imprisoned there were using them not for prayer but to communicate incendiary messages. The soldiers dispatched to burn refuse from the jail were not the officials who had seized the books, had no idea they were burning Korans, and tried desperately to retrieve the books when the situation was brought to their attention.
Of course, these facts may not become widely known, because no one is supposed to mention the main significance of what has happened here. First, as usual, Muslims ”” not al-Qaeda terrorists, but ordinary, mainstream Muslims ”” are rioting and murdering over the burning (indeed, the inadvertent burning) of a book…
Police discovered the body of a 79-year-old Christian woman killed in northeast Nigeria, with a note in Arabic left on her chest reading: “We will get you soon,” a witness said Thursday.
The slaying raises religious tensions in Nigeria as a radical Islamist sect increasingly targets Christians in its bloody attacks. While police said they knew of no immediate suspects in the killing, witnesses blamed the attack on the sect known as Boko Haram, which has been blamed for killing at least 305 people this year alone, according to an Associated Press count.
The book seems to suggest that you think African-American kids have lost touch with the struggles of their forebears. Do you?
Absolutely. They came into a world where, after these battles had been fought, they have a lot more opportunities and the ability to see themselves as being able to go anywhere and do anything. We have to maintain continuity by giving them the history of what the struggle was all about….
Is the U.S. in a postracial era in professional sports?
I don’t think we’ll ever be postracial, because of the fear and anxiety of dealing with the other ”” people who aren’t like you. But the ability of racism to distort and corrode our society has become a lot less.