Muslims Share Same Sentiments with Catholics on Assisted Suicide...
TORONTO – There’s about one million Canadians who know suicide is wrong, assisted suicide turns doctors into murderers, the state has an obligation to protect life until natural death and that not everything in medicine depends on the freely chosen wishes of the patient. These people are not Catholic. They’re Muslim. Striking similarities between Catholic and Muslim bioethics were on show at a Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute lecture by Dr. Shabbir Alibhai at Toronto’s University of St. Michael’s College March 5. Alibhai practises geriatric and family medicine within Toronto’s University Health Network, but he’s also a cancer researcher and published bioethicist. There are differences with Catholic bioethics, often in approach or emphasis, but on end-of-life issues Islamic scholars...
Haitians Find ‘Peace, Guidance’ in Islam...
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Schoolteacher Darlene Derosier lost her home in the 2010 earthquake that devastated her country. Her husband died a month later after suffering what she said was emotional trauma from the quake. She and her two daughters now live in tents outside the capital of Port-au-Prince, surrounded by thousands of others made homeless and desperate by the disaster. What’s helped pull her through all the grief, she said, has been her faith, but not of the Catholic, Protestant or even Voodoo variety that have predominated in this island country. Instead, she’s converted to a new religion here, Islam, and built a small neighbourhood mosque out of cinderblocks and plywood, where some 60 Muslims pray daily. Islam...
Targeted Islamic Outreach to Hispanics Achieving Results...
PEARLAND, Texas • Carlos Lopez works in the United States to earn money and send it back home to his family in Mexico. But he sends back something else, too: pamphlets and personal testimonies about his new faith. On Dec. 22, 2013, Lopez took the “shahada” — the profession of the Islamic faith — and joined the ranks of what the American Muslim Council estimates is a 200,000 strong Hispanic Muslim community across the U.S. Unlike previous generations of Hispanic Muslims who were attracted to the faith by their own spiritual explorations, Lopez and many others like him are converting as a result of targeted Islamic outreach efforts. This new form of Islamic “da’wah,” or outreach, aims to...
I Wish All Americans Received the Message of Islam...
Diane Charles Breslin is an ex-Catholic Christian living in US. She lost faith after reading the Bible but her continued belief in God led her to explore other religions including Buddhism and Hinduism. In this concluding part of her series, Breslin recounts her Irish Catholic background and says it was only by instinct that she always would pray to God — the One and Only — before going to sleep. It took three full years of my searching and studying Qur’an before I was ready to proclaim that I wanted to be a Muslim. Of course I feared the changes in clothing and habits, such as dating and drinking to which I had become accustomed. Music and dancing...
Pope Encourages Dialogue and Mutual Respect with our Muslim Brothers...
Muslims are “our brothers” and Christians must cultivate “mutual respect” with them. These were the words of Pope Francis yesterday during the Angelus, a message which could signal a turnaround in the relationship between the Catholic Church and Islam. This changing tide can even be seen in the words used in addressing Muslims. This is the first Pope to have referred to Muslims in such direct and explicit terms as “our brothers”. This would have been practically unthinkable even up until the recent past. During the Angelus, the pontiff made reference to the message sent to Muslims to mark the end of Ramadan and the Eid al-Fitr feast, which was published on 2 August, which he asked to...
Muslim Students Help Stock Food Pantry at Episcopal Church...
Nameera Perwez picked up on her lesson fast, and she was eager to put it in action. This is the season for sacrifice in the Muslim community, and the fifth-grader from the Iqra Academy of Virginia had something in mind she wanted to share: food. For more than an hour Friday, she and 10 classmates from the small Muslim primary school in South Richmond were at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church helping sort canned goods and other nonperishable items they’d just donated to the community food pantry. “Other people need your help, and you need to help them,” Nameera said as she and classmate Fatin Salman prepared paper grocery bags. “You can’t be greedy. You need to help them.”...
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