Visiting a mosque on the second day of his closely watched first visit to the Holy Land, Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday denounced the “ideological manipulation of religion” and called for greater understanding between the Christian and Muslim faiths.

Speaking outside Al-Hussein bin-Talal mosque in Amman, Benedict said that because of “the burden of our common history so often marked by misunderstanding,” Christians and Muslims alike should “strive to be seen” as faithful worshipers of God.

In a speech that also touched on a central theme of his papacy and thought, the tension between faith and reason, Benedict said that “the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends,” was often “the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society.”

Relations between the Vatican and Muslims were strained in 2006 when, in a speech in Regensburg, Germany, Benedict quoted a Byzantine emperor who said Islam had brought things “evil and inhuman.”

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Muslim calligrapher Yasser Abu Saymeh has dedicated the past two months to Christian art, writing the Gospel of Luke in ornate Arabic script to be presented to Pope Benedict XVI when the Roman Catholic leader visits the Holy Land next month.

Abu Saymeh never read a New Testament text before he was picked for the prestigious assignment by Bethlehem’s Christian mayor. He said he has since come to appreciate the shared strands of the two faiths.

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Along with agriculture, herding and trade, the ghazu was a recognized part of the seventh-century Arabian economy, and those who indulged in it were often celebrated as Robin Hoods of a sort. But the bounty raid was also a national pastime””a sport for turning boys into men. As is the case with piracy today, these earlier raids almost always ended without bloodshed, since any death was sure to bring on a cycle of vendetta killings every tribesman was eager to avoid””a cycle that Somali pirates recently promised to set into motion in response to the killing of pirates by American and French special forces.

All this might be of purely antiquarian concern except for the fact that Muslims today regard Muhammad not only as God’s final prophet but also as the human being par excellence. The Hadith, an Islamic scripture second in authority only to the Quran, records thousands of instances of Muhammad’s beliefs and actions, so Muslims can follow his example on matters as detailed as the cut of his beard. If Christians ask, “What Would Jesus Do?” Muslims ask, “What Would Muhammad Do?”

There are of course ways to read the Islamic sources as antithetical to piracy, but Muhammad himself both organized and participated in the seventh-century overland equivalent of the high-seas buccaneering that now bedevils world trade.

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Speaking at a forum sponsored by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, [Tony] Blair pointed out the shortcomings of peaceful negotiation.

“President Obama’s reaching out to the Muslim world at the start of a new American administration is welcome, smart, and can play a big part in defeating the threat we face,” he said. “But it will expose, too, the delusion of believing that there is any alternative to waging this struggle to its conclusion.”

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Egyptians are cautiously rejoicing over the recent appointment of a veiled Egyptian American Muslim woman as an advisor to President Obama.

Dalia Mogahed, senior analyst and executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, was appointed this month to Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Arabs are closely watching for signs that the new leadership in Washington is making efforts to improve relations with Islam, which many Muslims believe were severely damaged during the eight years of the Bush administration. The selection of Mogahed is viewed by many in the Middle East as a step by Obama to move beyond the stereotypes and prejudices that Muslims believe they have encountered since the attacks Sept. 11, 2001.

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The sunny apartment had everything Palvisha Aslam, 22, a Bollywood producer, wanted: a spacious bedroom and a kitchen that overlooked a garden in a middle-class neighborhood that was a short commute to Film City, where many of India’s Hindi movies are shot.

She was about to sign the lease when the real estate broker noticed her surname. He didn’t realize that she was Muslim, he said. Then he rejected her. It was just six weeks after the November Mumbai terrorist attacks and Indian Muslims were being viewed with suspicion across the country. He then showed her a grimy one-room tenement in a Muslim-dominated ghetto. She felt sick to her stomach as she watched the residents fight over water at a leaky tap in a dark alley.

“That night I cried a lot. I was still an outcast in my own country — even as a secular Muslim with a well-paid job in Bollywood,” said Aslam, who had similar experiences with five other brokers and three months later is still crashing on friends’ sofas. “I’m an Indian. I love my country. Is it a crime now to be a Muslim in Mumbai?”

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A progressive Muslim imam from Oxford has won a libel action against a Muslim newspaper in what he claims is a “watershed moment” in the battle between liberal and extremist Muslims in Britain.

Dr Taj Hargey, who provoked controversy last year when he invited the first ever woman to lead and preach at Friday prayers in Britain, has been awarded a “substantial” five-figure sum in libel damages against the Muslim Weekly, which takes a conservative line on community issues.

In its latest edition, the newspaper urges the Government not to play a “divide and rule” policy over the Muslim Council of Britain. The Government has threatened to cut ties with the council after it refused to sack its deputy leader, Daud Abdullah, who signed a pro-Hamas declaration at a conference on Gaza in Istanbul.

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An overseas rights activist said Monday that authorities in China’s predominantly Muslim far west are closing unregistered Islamic schools and conducting house-to-house searches in a new security crackdown in the restive region.

The campaign under way for five weeks in the city of Hotan underscores Beijing’s persisting concerns about separatist movements in its Central Asian border province of Xinjiang.

While anti-government protests and a security clampdown in Tibetan areas have grabbed attention over the past year, China has also been battling unrest in Xinjiang, with a flare-up in violence last year that killed 33 people. Like the Tibetans, many of Xinjiang’s ethnic minority Uighurs have chafed under Beijing’s rule and restrictions on the practice of religion.

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Dr Michael Nazir-Ali is only 59 and could have stayed for another decade in his post, one of the most senior in the Church, but has chosen instead to devote the rest of his career to working in communities where Christians are in a minority.

While this is likely to see him involved in the Middle East and Pakistan, the bishop revealed that he also plans to work with Muslim converts to Christianity in Britain.

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Last year, the Bishop of Oxford said that he had received death threats for supporting the broadcasting of the call to prayer from another mosque in Oxford, in the Cowley Road.

Oxford has given up its Anglican preferences. The vacuum will be filled, if not by liberalism, then secularism, but not yet Islam.

Old Mesopotamia is called Iraq today, and its Christian population still dwindles as secular Ba’athism is replaced by Islam. The muezzin’s call has reached Cherwell’s edge, but awaits much response.

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Jesus saves, the Episcopal Church teaches, but a growing number of its clergy and leaders believe other faiths may lead to salvation as well. Long divided and distracted by questions of sexual ethics, the Episcopal Church (along with most mainline Protestant communities) are facing a cultural and theological shift towards religious pluralism””the belief that there are diverse paths to God.

The debate is not just academic. In two current cases, Episcopal clergy are under scrutiny for practicing and promoting other religions. On February 12 a devotee of Zen Buddhism was elected bishop of the Episcopal Church’s Northern Michigan diocese. Meanwhile, a Seattle-area priest has been given until March 30 to decide whether she is a Muslim or a Christian as her bishop will not permit her to profess both faiths.

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One day last July, Naji Hamdan was summoned to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates. He drove two hours through the desert heat from Dubai to answer questions from FBI agents who had arrived from Los Angeles, where Hamdan had gone to school, started a family, built a successful auto-parts business and become a U.S. citizen.

At his apartment six weeks later, he was awakened from a nap by men who bundled him into a black Chevrolet Suburban with tinted windows. Hamdan was told he was a prisoner of the UAE and was held in a cell painted glossy white to reflect the lights that burned round the clock, according to a note he wrote from prison. Between interrogations, he wrote, he was confined in a frigid room overnight, strapped into “an electric chair” and punched in the head until he lost consciousness.

In one session, the blindfolded prisoner recalled hearing a voice that sounded American. The voice said, “Do what they want or these people will [expletive] you up,” Hamdan wrote.

The prisoner obliged, signing a confession that he later said meant only that he would do anything to make the pain stop. The case might have ended there but for Hamdan’s U.S. citizenship and his American attorney’s assertion that he was tortured “at the behest” of his own government.

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In 2003, imams in northern Nigeria fomented a boycott of polio vaccinations, claiming they were a Western plot to make Muslims infertile or infect them with AIDS. The result: The number of newly crippled children more than doubled the following year, and there were fears that the disease would spread into a dozen countries nearby.

Now, after another tripling of cases in 2008, a big new anti-polio push is under way in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. And this time, some Muslim clerics have made themselves part of the solution, joining community leaders, health workers and the victims themselves in waging the war.

In the dusty streets of Kano, northern Nigeria’s main city, town criers with bullhorns cut through the traffic and crowds, urging parents to take their children to one of hundreds of vaccination centers. Radio and newspapers are full of get-vaccinated ads.

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Religion must reject violence, Pope Benedict XVI told Muslim leaders Thursday before celebrating an open-air Mass in front of thousands and delivering a message of hope for Africa’s expanding, vibrant Catholic flock.

In Cameroon’s capital of Yaounde, a clapping, swaying crowd of 40,000 welcomed Benedict to a sports stadium ”” his first occasion as pope to be among a great crowd of faithful on the continent that is witnessing the church’s biggest growth.

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The region has been handed over to the Pakistani Taliban in a foolish bargain made on behalf of Mr. Zardari’s government. Like most violent revolutionary movements, the Taliban use social injustice and a half-understood philosophy as an excuse to grab land and power. Houses and property have been taken over, and the Taliban have announced that people should pay 40 percent of their rent to their landlords and 60 percent to “jihad.”

In the district capital, Mingora, decapitated corpses were dangled from lampposts with notices pinned to them stating the “un-Islamic” action that merited death. At least 185 schools, most for girls, have been closed. Government officials, journalists and security troops have had their throats slit. Little wonder that most of my brother-in-law’s family has fled, along with 400,000 others.

What many Westerners fail to understand is that the Swat Valley is not one of Pakistan’s wild border areas. It is only 100 miles from Islamabad. In the words of Shaheen Sardar Ali, a cousin of Sana’s who is a law professor at Warwick University in England and was the first female cabinet minister in the government of North-West Frontier Province, “Swat is not somewhere you could ever see as being a breeding ground for extremism.” She remembers going to school unveiled as a child in the 1960s and studying alongside boys. But today, any girl who goes to school is risking her life.

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(ACNS) Participants included bishops, clergy and lay people, both men and women, of ECS along with representatives of the Sudan Council of Churches and CMS. There was a representative from the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Presentations were made on inter faith relations in each of seven clustered areas, covering the whole Province. Based on the presentations and the discussion which followed, a number of areas for consultation and dialogue ecumenically and with Muslim partners emerged: the relationship between the churches and the National Government; a review of provision for Christian teaching and curriculum in schools; devising an inter faith curriculum in theological institutions; issues concerning the safety and dignity of women and children; increased local interaction between Christians and Muslims to develop mutual understanding and respect, and to safeguard permanent prosperity.

Future immediate work will concern the strengthening of ecumenical relationships within the Sudan ”“ nationally and regionally ”“ clustered inter faith workshops with Muslim people. The Commission recognised the importance of positioning inter faith dialogue within the contexts of identity, mission and witness. It further recognised he interconnectedness of the dialogue of life and the dialogue of ideas.

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A study of Muslim Americans released Monday presents a portrait of an often misunderstood community — one that is integrated socio-economically but culturally alienated; that succeeds in the workforce but struggles to find contentment.

The numbers suggest economic and career success among Muslim Americans — they have a higher employment rate than the national average and are among the nation’s most educated religious groups. Yet only 41% described themselves as “thriving.”

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Muslims in America have a much more positive outlook on life than their counterparts in most predominantly Muslim countries and some other Western societies, according to a poll released Monday.

The Gallup Organization study found Muslim-Americans to be racially and ideologically diverse, extremely religious, and younger and more highly educated than the typical American.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, warned this week that the current financial climate could pave the way for increased xenophobia in the UK.

Speaking at the Christian-Muslim Forum at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, in an event discussing the current financial crisis, the Archbishop said that we needed to learn important lessons from history. In responding to a question he said: “I think we do ignore, at our peril, the very high risk which history should have taught us.”

He went on to say: “The very high risk of financial stringency could lead to political extremism. Anger finding its expression in xenophobia, prejudice, rivalry — all the tactics that both sociologists and psychologists remark on as the displacement of unease and fear.”

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Nearly three years on, the government’s biggest problem is that it is struggling with two big questions at once. One is the set of problems described under the catch-all term of “cohesion”””narrowing the social, economic and cultural gap between Muslims (especially in some poor urban areas of northern Britain) and the rest of society. The second is countering the threat from groups preparing to commit violence in Britain or elsewhere in the name of Islam.

The government says the two problems are related: poor, frustrated and mainly self-segregated groups are more likely to produce terrorists. Muslims as a group lag behind other Britons in qualifications, employment, housing and income (see chart). But in fact the overlap between exclusion and extremism is messy. And attempts to fight terrorism through tougher policing, which can alienate whole communities, make boosting cohesion harder.

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Imams are out of touch with the needs of Western Muslims, and divorced from the struggles their congregants face in secular society, according to a new report from a leading Canadian scholar.

Many religious leaders don’t offer constructive advice about how to reconcile traditional beliefs with the challenges of integration in Western societies, concludes the study, which is based on focus groups with 60 lay Muslims in Ottawa, Washington and Britain.

“My ultimate fantasy would be to find an imam who gives a sermon in a Friday mosque, who happens to be someone who goes out to work from 9 to 5, takes the bus, is dealing with his kid who is picking up a marijuana joint at the age of 13,” one interviewee said, “and not speaking to me about the battles that we won 1,200 years ago.”

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Today, there are between 1,200 and 1,600 mosques in Britain – no definite figure exists. Yesterday, the Charity Commission sought to gloss over the malaise in them by publishing figures on attendance, but not inquiring into difficult areas. At Quilliam, Britain’s first counter-extremism think-tank, we commissioned a poll of more than 1,000 mosques in 2008, during Ramadan when mosques are busiest. Despite employing Urdu and Bengali-speaking researchers, we could poll only just over 500. Most British mosques don’t maintain a reception or service to answer questions, and not every one we did reach was willing to answer.

Quilliam’s report, Mosques Made in Britain, reveals the true extent of the mess. We found that 97 per cent of imams, or leaders, were from overseas and 92 per cent were educated abroad, mostly in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Almost all mosques are controlled by first-generation immigrant men, leaving most British Muslims – women and young people – out of the management structure.

This is not new. Quilliam has merely found evidence of a problem that has been known among Muslims for more than two decades.

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A new wave of violence has erupted in Nigeria as Muslims and Christians battled in the northern Bauchi state.

The latest incident saw Muslims attacking Christian places of worship after two mosques were set on fire. The Muslims blamed this on the local Christian population.

However, Government officials were blaming the violence on local politicians. “This is a crisis fomented by troublemakers intent on causing disaffection in the state,” state governor Yuguda said in a radio broadcast.

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If suicide-murder is deemed legitimate by a community when attacking its “enemies” abroad, it will eventually be used as a tactic against “enemies” at home, and that is exactly what has happened in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The only effective way to stop this trend is for “the village” ”” the Muslim community itself ”” to say “no more.” When a culture and a faith community delegitimizes this kind of behavior, openly, loudly and consistently, it is more important than metal detectors or extra police. Religion and culture are the most important sources of restraint in a society.

That’s why India’s Muslims, who are the second-largest Muslim community in the world after Indonesia’s, and the one with the deepest democratic tradition, do a great service to Islam by delegitimizing suicide-murderers by refusing to bury their bodies. It won’t stop this trend overnight, but it can help over time.

“The Muslims of Bombay deserve to be congratulated in taking this important decision,” Raashid Alvi, a Muslim member of India’s Parliament from the Congress Party, said to me. “Islam says that if you commit suicide, then even after death you will be punished.”

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The religious order banning women from dressing like tomboys was bad enough. But the fatwa by this country’s leading clerics against yoga was the last straw.

“They have never even done yoga,” said Zainah Anwar, a founder of a Malaysian women’s rights group called Sisters in Islam.

Anwar argues that the edict, issued late last year by the National Fatwa Council of Malaysia, is pure patriarchy. Islam, she says, is only a cover.

It was frustrations like those that drew several hundred Muslim women to a conference in this Muslim-majority country over the weekend. Their mission was to come up with ways to demand equal rights for women. And their tools, however unlikely, were the tenets of Islam itself.

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On the anniversary of the interview in which Dr Rowan Williams said it “seems inevitable” that some parts of sharia would be enshrined in this country’s legal code, he claimed “a number of fairly senior people” now take the same view.

He added that there is a “drift of understanding” towards what he was saying, and that the public sees the difference between letting Muslim courts decide divorces and wills, and allowing them to rule on criminal cases and impose harsh punishments.

However critics insist that family disputes must be dealt with by civil law rather than according to religious principles, and claim the Archbishop’s comments have only helped the case of extremists while making Muslim women worse off, because they do not have equal rights under Islamic law.

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An Ancient religious enmity is at the centre of a new conflict in the Sydney bikie scene, with a new gang comprised mainly of Sunni Muslims warring with a group of bikies with a Shiite Muslim background.

While detectives continue to investigate the February 4 bombing of a Hells Angels clubhouse in Crystal Street, Petersham, police and other sources are indicating that the city chapter of the Comanchero is involved in an escalating feud with a new club, Notorious.

The president of Notorious is a Lebanese-Australian with a long-standing association with a bikie from a colourful Sydney Sunni Lebanese family. The two are among Sydney’s original “Nike” bikies – sporting white sneakers, fashionable T-shirts and clean-shaven instead of the traditional boots, dirty vests and bushy beards – and both are from Sunni families from Sydney’s west.

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They have raised more than £1,000 for a mobile dental clinic delivering frontline medical aid around the bombed out streets of Gaza. The clinic, which has been funded totally by the Church in Wales since 2000, is part of the work of family health centres in Gaza run by the Near East Council of Churches.

Members of the Young Muslim Community Organisation in Newport, South Wales, held a bazaar to raise money following an appeal by the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, for urgent aid for the work of the NECC clinics. The appeal was intensified after a direct missile attack destroyed one of the family centres in Shij’ia last month.

Ifthir Ahmed, chair of the YMCO, said the group was pleased to support a Welsh appeal for humanitarian aid.

He said, “We read about the destruction of the family clinic and the invaluable service the mobile dental clinic provides for so many people in the strip. We felt that some of the money we raised had to go to this very noble cause.

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As credit markets have imploded, triggering a global economic crisis, Islamically correct investors have seen a change of fortune: The conservative principles this small group of devout Muslims clung to during the economic heyday has insulated them from the worst of the past year’s suffering.

Their renunciation of the interest-based economy kept them away from investments in financial services companies, whose stocks have collapsed, and out of traditional mortgages.

“There was a time two or three years ago that Islamic finance was considered simply too conservative,” said Professor Ibrahim Warde, author of “Islamic Finance in the Global Economy” and an adjunct professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “Right now, many people are recognizing that maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing.”

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