RECENT FROM Attitudes
Study: Radicalized Muslims Have Little Actual Knowledge Of Islam...
Extremists and Islamophobes alike have attempted to paint violent factions within Islam as the true expression of the faith. But a new study gives credence to what countless Muslim leaders, activists and scholars have argued: that groups like the self-proclaimed Islamic State are Muslim in name alone. A group of German scholars at the Universities of Bielefeld and Osnabrück analyzed 5,757 WhatsApp messages found on a phone seized by police following a terrorist attack in the spring of 2016. The messages were exchanged among 12 young men involved in the attack. The attack itself was not identified in the report. Deutsche Welle noted that the timeframe suggested it may...
RECENT FROM Sports
Boxing Champ Launches Sports Hijab...
A boxing champion from the East End has created a sports hijab to help more Muslim women get into combat sports. Ruqsana Begum (below) – who is the current British female Atomweight Muay Thai boxing champion – runs personal training sessions and women-only sessions in the sport at the Osmani Centre in Whitechapel. She said: “I came up with the idea during the Olympics. I was interested in the story of an American athlete who was told she couldn’t compete wearing her hijab due to health and safety reasons, so her father created one that was approved for her to fight in. “I thought if they can create one...
RECENT FROM Service
Is Islamic Law an Answer for Humanitarians?...
DUBAI, 24 April 2014 (IRIN) – Humanitarian action today is largely taking place in Muslim-majority countries where some combatants turn to Islamic law, among other sources, to guide their military behaviour. As a result, in the last decade, aid and advocacy agencies have increasingly tried to understand Islamic law in order to use its humanitarian provisions as tools of negotiation with armed groups in the Muslim world. This is particularly helpful in engaging Islamist armed groups, some of whom reject international humanitarian law (IHL). Some aid agencies try to situate their arguments for access or protection of civilians within a religious context, sometimes using scholars, mullahs or other religious...
The Muslims Who Saved Jews From The Holocaust
A new exhibition aims to celebrate the role Muslims played in saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust. The Righteous Muslim Exhibition is being launched at the Board of Deputies of British Jews in Bloomsbury, central London. Photographs of 70 Muslims who sheltered Jews during World War II will be displayed alongside stories detailing their acts of heroism. The exhibition hopes to inspire new research into instances of collaboration between the Muslim and Jewish communities. Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to victims of the Holocaust, honours nearly 25,000 so-called “righteous persons” who risked their lives to protect the Jewish community during Nazi Germany’s reign of terror. Some 70 Muslims have recently been added to the list. The exhibition explores...
Thomas Jefferson’s Quran: How Islam Shaped the Founders
One of the nastiest aspects of modern culture wars is the controversy raging over the place of Islam and Muslims in Western society. Too many Americans say things about Islam and Muslims that would horrify and offend them if they heard such things said about Christianity or Judaism, Christians or Jews. Unfortunately, those people won’t open Denise A. Spellberg’s Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders. This enlightening book might cause them to rethink what they’re saying. Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an examines the intersection during the nation’s founding era of two contentious themes in the culture wars—the relationship of Islam to America, and the proper relationship between church and state. The story that it tells ought to be familiar to most...
Our Founding Fathers Included Islam
[He] sais “neither Pagan nor Mahamedan [Muslim] nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.” — Thomas Jefferson, quoting John Locke, 1776 At a time when most Americans were uninformed, misinformed, or simply afraid of Islam, Thomas Jefferson imagined Muslims as future citizens of his new nation. His engagement with the faith began with the purchase of a Qur’an eleven years before he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s Qur’an survives still in the Library of Congress, serving as a symbol of his and early America’s complex relationship with Islam and its adherents. That relationship remains of signal importance to this day. That he owned a Qur’an reveals Jefferson’s...
Christians Not Islam’s Enemies, Says Malaysian Minister of Islamic Affairs
Islam does not have any enmity towards Christians, said Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom, in response to a parliamentary question today. Jamil, who is the minister in charge of Islamic affairs, said while Islam is the religion of the federation, other religions are free to be practised. Jamil said this in response to a supplementary question from DAP’s Beruas Member of Parliament Datuk Ngeh Koo Ham. Ngeh querried if there was any truth in a report on the Friday sermon prepared by the Department of Islamic Development Malaysia (Jakim) at a mosque on August 30, in which Christians were labelled as enemies of Islam. Jamil however sidestepped Ngeh’s question on the Friday...
Terrorism has no place in Islam: Turkey’s top imam
The president of the Directorate General for Religious Affairs (Diyanet), Mehmet Görmez, has dismissed suggestions that Islam could be used to justify recent attacks on civilians in Kenya and Pakistan, saying terrorism had no place in Islam. It is impossible to find references in Islam that permit any attacks on people of different religious faiths across the breadth of the Islamic world, he said. “These things are totally outside of Islam and are things Islam rejects and never accepts,” Görmez said Oct.1, referring to recent attacks in Kenya and Pakistan, at a meeting in Istanbul. More than three dozen people still remain unaccounted for almost a week after the end of the four-day terrorist attack on Nairobi’s Westgate...
Change of Faith: Why Young Brits Turn from Christianity to Islam
The UK’s official religion is dwindling at a record speed, with the decline of the Church “approaching rock bottom,” experts warn. While Christian congregations age, most British mosques are bringing more and more young people on board. Public mosque services attract thousands of British Muslims, but when you check out a church, there are hardly a dozen participants at Sunday morning worship, RT’s Polly Boiko reports from London. “The decline of churches in the UK is long term, now it just happens to be approaching rock bottom. So 95 percent of people don’t attend church on an average Sunday. Christian worship is already the concern of a tiny minority of people,” Andrew Copson, chief executive of the British Humanist...
1,200-year-old Qur’an Discovered in Bodrum, Turkey
(ANSAmed) – ANKARA, SEPTEMBER 16 – A 1,200 year-old handwritten Quran has been found in the basement of a mosque in the Aegean resort town of Bodrum as Cihan news agency reported. The imam Yuksel Kilicaslan found the holy Quran and some tafsir (the interpretation of the Quran) books which was being kept in a prayer rug and immediately reported Bodrum’s Mufti Emin Arik. After a series of examinations by historians, it has been confirmed that the Quran dated back more than a thousand year. The manuscripts were handed in the officials from The Ministry of Environment and Urban Planning and Underwater Archaeology Museum....
Project Downtown Focuses on Interfaith Effort to Give Back
Each Sunday, a group of volunteers, most college-aged, meet at the Clifton Mosque to make sandwiches, bag lunches and wrap pastries to pass out to individuals in downtown Cincinnati. The volunteers make up an organization calledProject Downtown, a nonprofit whose local chapter has been in existence since 2008, and whose ultimate goal is to eliminate poverty downtown. Yousef Hussein, director of PD, says the goal is a lofty one, but he’s confident that it can be accomplished. “It’s going to be difficult, but at the end of the day, I feel that if we set our mind to it, and people receive us properly, we can get the support and make a big impact in our community,” he...
Imam Leads Campaign Against Forced Marriages
Shaykh Amer Jamil says the practice has no place in Islam. During the next few weeks leaflets and sermons are being given in mosques as part of an initiative to educate the community. “In the Muslim community there’s a misconception amongst some people that religion allows this, that parents have an Islamic right to choose partner of their children, and that they don’t have a choice in this,” says the Glasgow-based Imam. Every week he receives calls, e-mails and texts from concerned young people at risk of being forced to marry against their will. Today is no exception. In a corridor of a Glasgow building, he speaks to a distressed young woman in her early 20s. Her parents...
All Terrorists are Muslims…Except the 94% that Aren’t
CNN recently published an article entitled Study: Threat of Muslim-American terrorism in U.S. exaggerated; according to a study released by Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “the terrorist threat posed by radicalized Muslim-Americans has been exaggerated.” Yet, Americans continue to live in mortal fear of radical Islam, a fear propagated and inflamed by right wing Islamophobes. If one follows the cable news networks, it seems as if all terrorists are Muslims. It has even become axiomatic in some circles to chant: “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but nearly all terrorists are Muslims.” Muslims and their “leftist dhimmi allies” respond feebly, mentioning Waco as the one counter example, unwittingly affirming the belief that “nearly all...
Quick Links
