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Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Muslim India struggles to escape the past

Posted on April 6th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Misc. News.

Muslim India struggles to escape the past

Prominent individuals belie the poverty of a minority left behind by the 1947 partition
Randeep Ramesh in Mumbai
Wednesday April 5, 2006

Guardian
On the sprung floor of a Mumbai dance studio standing amid a huddle of male and female dancers is a young woman, dressed in tight sequinned clothes, sucking on a cigarette. She is shouting at her troupe.

It is difficult not to notice 19-year-old Mumait Khan. Tattoos ride on her shoulders and her lower back and her sinuous dance routines have made her one of the most sought-after “item girls” to roll out of Bollywood. “Item” is Mumbai film-speak for a raunchy musical number slipped into mainstream Hindi films.

In the lottery of life Mumait Khan has hit a jackpot. An Indian Muslim, she embodies an apparent contradiction that is rapidly becoming part of a national debate. (more…)

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Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Muslim India struggles to escape the past

Posted on April 6th, 2006 by .
Categories: Misc. News.

Muslim India struggles to escape the past

Prominent individuals belie the poverty of a minority left behind by the 1947 partition
Randeep Ramesh in Mumbai
Wednesday April 5, 2006

Guardian
On the sprung floor of a Mumbai dance studio standing amid a huddle of male and female dancers is a young woman, dressed in tight sequinned clothes, sucking on a cigarette. She is shouting at her troupe.

It is difficult not to notice 19-year-old Mumait Khan. Tattoos ride on her shoulders and her lower back and her sinuous dance routines have made her one of the most sought-after “item girls” to roll out of Bollywood. “Item” is Mumbai film-speak for a raunchy musical number slipped into mainstream Hindi films.

In the lottery of life Mumait Khan has hit a jackpot. An Indian Muslim, she embodies an apparent contradiction that is rapidly becoming part of a national debate. (more…)

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Christians Deal With Language of Martyrdom – Yahoo! News

Posted on April 4th, 2006 by .
Categories: Religion Other.

Christians Deal With Language of Martyrdom – Yahoo! News
Christians Deal With Language of Martyrdom

By BRIAN MURPHY Fri Mar 31, 2:35 PM ET

After the al-Qaida leader in Saudi Arabia was killed by security forces, his supporters issued a message hailing him as a martyr. A week earlier, Christian groups used the same word for an American peace campaigner whose body was found in Baghdad.
The statements reflect how the West’s struggle with radical Islam is creeping into views of religious martyrdom. Some Christians seem ready to embrace the connotations of “victim” and “hero” that have driven extremist Muslim declarations, with each side portraying the other faith as a persecutor.

“Each time Islamic radicals speak of suicide bomber ‘martyrs,’ for example, it reverberates in Christianity,” said Jonathan Bartley, co-director of Ekklesia, a London-based group that examines religious and social trends.

Christians match those claims by citing activists and clergy killed by Muslims. “There’s a radicalization of what martyrdom means by some Christian groups,” Bartley said. “They focus heavily on the idea of a clash of civilizations.”It’s a conflict that’s enhanced by the Internet and its ability to instantly spread viewpoints.Dozens of Christian Web sites and blogs â€” including some with critical opinions of Islam â€” have used “martyr” to describe peace activist Tom Fox of Clear Brook, Va., whose bullet-ridden body was found March 10, more than three months after he was abducted by a group calling itself Swords of Righteousness Brigades. His three colleagues from Christian Peacemaker Teams were freed March 23 in a U.S.-British raid.

The peacemaker teams appealed to Christians not to use Fox’s death as a rallying cry against Muslims. “We ask that everyone set aside inclinations to vilify or demonize others, no matter what they have done,” CPT said in a statement.

In February, an even wider outpouring followed the slaying of an Italian Roman Catholic priest, the Rev. Andrea Santoro, who was shot as he prayed in his church on Turkey’s Black Sea coast. Some reports have suggested the suspected gunman, a 16-year-old boy, was motivated by the protests against caricatures of Prophet Muhammad.

The Vatican

Vatican‘s top diplomat to Turkey, Archbishop Antonio Lucibello, mourned Santoro as a “new martyr for this millennium.”

In recent years, Christian groups increasingly have used martyrdom to describe other cases, too, including the 2004 slaying of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh and the victims of major terrorist attacks.

“There’s a growing belief in a Muslim jihad against Christians,” said Jeremy Sewell, policy analyst for International Christian Concern, a Silver Spring, Md.-based group that tracks claims of Christian persecution. “That definitely shapes the dialogue on who is considered a martyr.”

In Islam, stories of martyrdom date back to bloodshed as the faith took root in the seventh century. It became increasingly linked to radical movements in the 20th century with calls for “martyrdom” by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and later with Palestinian militants and terrorist groups.

The end of the Cold War brought Christian-Muslim tensions into sharper focus, including inter-religious clashes in Indonesia and the 1996 murder of seven French monks in Algeria by Islamic militants.

While such cases are always shocking, Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Sant’Egidio lay movement in Rome, worries that concepts of Christian martyrdom may be drifting toward a “counter-punch” to Islamic radicals.

“Would someone who goes out to retaliate against Islamic terrorism be worthy of being called a martyr? The answer is no. The Christian martyr does not desire death or seek it for others,” said Riccardi, who wrote a book on martyrdom.

Some Christian groups â€” particularly conservative evangelicals â€” are quick to “use the language of martyrdom” to reinforce suspicions about Islam, said Elizabeth Castelli, an associate professor of religion at Barnard College who studies the issue.

“The point isn’t that (Muslim) suicide bombers, for example, really ‘are’ or ‘are not’ martyrs,” Castelli said. “The point is that people revere them as martyrs.

“For some Christians, the defining characteristic of their identity as Christians is ‘to be persecuted.’ Hence, for some, one isn’t really a Christian unless one is at risk of martyrdom.”

Most denominations agree that “martyr” fits the early Christians who died for their faith, but its grows more complex after that. Many Christians also suffered at the hands of fellow Christians during the Inquisition, Protestant Reformation and other periods. Some churches and others broadly define martyrdom as any Christian who is believed killed for their religious convictions, which can extend to figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and anti-apartheid fighter Stephen Biko.

Missionary groups today usually estimate 200 million Christians are under some form of persecution around the world.

At the funeral of Santoro, the papal vicar for Rome, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, said “all the elements of Christian martyrdom” were present. Ruini also expressed hope of eventual sainthood for Santoro.

But the momentum behind Santoro’s case has even unsettled some in the Vatican. If the suspected killer was mentally unbalanced or acting for criminal motives, it could seriously undermine the campaign for martyrdom.

An editorial in Italy’s influential Corriere Della Sera newspaper warned of rushing to judgment “in a poisoned atmosphere” in which many see “an Islamic siege on the entire Christian world.”

“It’s easy in this climate,” the editorial said, “to fall into the trap of the ‘war of civilizations.'”

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CNN.com – Islamic preacher ripped for reform push

Posted on April 4th, 2006 by .
Categories: Internal Debates.

CNN.com – Islamic preacher ripped for reform push – Mar 20, 2006
Islamic preacher ripped for reform push
Popular Egyptian televangelist tries to bridge Islam and West

Islamic televangelist Amr Khaled is young, smiling, teaches love and mercy and is so popular he’s credited with inspiring thousands of women — turned off by dour, traditional clerics — to take on the veil. Now he’s putting his popularity on the line by trying a new role, as a bridge between Islam and the West at a time when many are talking about a clash of civilizations. In the process, Khaled is sometimes telling the faithful what they’re not used to hearing from clerics — that Muslims aren’t blameless in tensions, that the West is not always bad and that dialogue is better than confrontation. “A young Muslim goes to Europe with a forged visa, takes unemployment insurance there, then goes on TV and says, ‘We’re going to expel you from Britain, take your land, money and women,'” Khaled said recently on his weekly program on the Saudi satellite TV channel Iqraa, trying to explain mistrust of Muslims in Europe. “It’s a rare example but it exists.” The 38-year-old Egyptian raised a storm of controversy when he attended a March 9 dialogue conference of European and Muslim leaders in Copenhagen — the capital of Denmark, which has been the focus of anger across the Islamic world over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed first published in a Danish paper. Some in the Arab world saw his attendance as a surrender and branded him a traitor and an opportunist. This week, Khaled is headed to a gathering of Islamic clerics in Bahrain that begins Wednesday, aimed at considering the next step in the response to the prophet cartoons. The conference is organized by one of Khaled’s most vocal critics, hard-line Sheik Youssef el-Qaradawi. Many Muslims saw the caricatures — which depicted their beloved prophet as violent and backward — as an intentional insult and reacted with a wave of protests. In the West, the outrage was seen as an attack on freedom of speech and only deepened anti-Muslim sentiment. For Khaled, the controversy underlined what he has seen as a need for a new approach by Muslims, one of reform and dialogue with the rest of the world. “For the past three years, with youth across the Islamic world, we’ve been working for a faith-based renaissance in this region, which will not take place by clashes but by coexistence,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press in Cairo. (more…)

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WorldWide Religious News-Can Muslims be allowed to pray under the Acropolis, Greeks wonder

Posted on April 4th, 2006 by .
Categories: Islamnews, Multiculti Issues.

WorldWide Religious News-Can Muslims be allowed to pray under the Acropolis, Greeks wonder
“Can Muslims be allowed to pray under the Acropolis, Greeks wonder”

(AFP, April 02, 2006)

Athens, Greece – A solidly Christian country with a sizeable Muslim community, Greece has spent years debating the establishment of a mosque somewhere in its capital — without success.

A new round of debate on the topic opened this week, with Greek lawmakers discussing whether to reinstate a former mosque in the Athens tourist district of Monastiraki, currently used as a folk art museum.

Attributed to new Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis — who was mayor of Athens until February — the proposal appeared in the Greek press one day before the Council of Europe issued a report bemoaning the lack of sanctioned Muslim prayer sites in Greece.

In his report, the council’s Human Rights Commissioner Alvaro Gil-Robles said the Greek authorities had not kept a promise to create a mosque in the rural Athens district of Peania ahead of the Athens 2004 Olympics, leaving Muslim believers to still “meet in secret, in locations unsuited to prayer”.

“Building a mosque in Peania could take 2-3 years … but the Monastiraki (building) is ready to go,” said pro-opposition Ta Nea daily, which broke the story on March 28.

A lively debate has begun, with both proponents and detractors noting that the proposed site in Monastiraki, built in 1759 during the Ottoman occupation of Greece, is a stone’s throw away from the Greek Orthodox Church cathedral in the city centre.

“Restoring the functions of a former mosque at the foot of the Acropolis, and next to churches, would serve as proof of our city’s tolerance,” said Marios Begzos, professor of religion philosophy at Athens University.

“I have no objection to a mosque in Monastiraki as long as Turkey gives the keys of Haghia Sophia to the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate,” countered conservative MP Stelios Papathemelis, referring to the iconic church of the old Byzantine capital of Constantinople (Istanbul) that was turned into a mosque when the Ottoman Turks captured the city in 1453.

The government insists that no decision has been taken on the issue.

Greece’s Muslims currently have no sanctioned prayer sites outside Thrace, the Greek region closest to the Turkish border that is the home of a 100,000-strong Muslim community of Turkish origin.

The influential Greek Orthodox Church has made no official comment on the Monastiraki proposal, though its leader Archbishop Christodoulos in December expressed support for a mosque in the Athens area.

“It is our desire to create a mosque, but without creating religious opposition and fanaticism,” deputy education minister George Kalos said recently in parliament.

Greek television stations echoed the sentiment, airing complaints by local shop owners who said a mosque would threaten the district’s tourist character.

Noting that “dozens of churches are in operation in Istanbul,” independent liberal deputy Stefanos Manos protested that the government is happy to hear the views of the Orthodox Church on the issue, but has not bothered to consult the Muslim community living in Greece.

“Nobody has asked us anything,” confirmed Sudanese community imam Monir Abdeltrassou.

Questioned by AFP about the Monastiraki proposal, Abdeltrassou said the former mosque could only provide a “temporary solution” due to its small size. He added that the whole initiative could have been intended to placate Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia, which have spent years lobbying for a mosque in Athens.

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WorldWide Religious News-Kosovo's Dervishes dance toward salvation

Posted on April 4th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Misc. News.

WorldWide Religious News-Kosovo’s Dervishes dance toward salvation
“Kosovo’s Dervishes dance toward salvation”

(AFP, April 04, 2006)

Prizren, Serbia-Montenegro – Every spring the Dervishes of Kosovo — among the last in Europe — dance, chant and push knives into their bodies in a quest for heavenly salvation.

They are shunned by many fellow Muslims as starry-eyed mystics, but the Dervishes who gathered recently in Prizen for a centuries-old celebration do not see themselves as outside the Islamic pale.

“We are the avant garde of the Muslim religion,” says Shejh Adrihusejn, a leader of the mystical order, playing down the dramatic extremes to which Dervishes go to attain religious fulfillment.

“We do not accept being presented as a Muslim mystic sect or an extreme branch of our religion,” says the Shejh, a title given to Dervish community leaders.

A fraternity of Sufi Islam famous for both their asceticism and their hypnotic, trance-inducing dances, the Dervish community in Kosovo is a legacy of the Ottoman empire that once held sway over this Serbian province.

While 95 percent of Kosovo’s two million inhabitants are Muslim, only a tiny fraction — some 50,000 — are Dervishes. There are also Sufi communities in neighboring Albania and Macedonia.

At the end of March the 5,000 Dervishes of Prizen in southern Kosovo celebrate the Spring equinox festival of “Sultan Nevruz,” the moment when the sun begins to favor the Northern Hemisphere and day become longer than night.

The ceremony unfolds in the hilly suburbs of this picture-postcard town in special ampitheatre, or “teqe,” that bears little resemblance to a traditional Muslim mosque.

Some 60 dervishes of all ages dressed in black and white waistcoats and flat hats, including a few children, begin chanting before an overflowing crowd. Women, guests and journalists are kept to the side or observe from a small wooden balcony.

What is about to unfold is so dramatic as to shock the uninitiated, and even shake one’s understanding of medical science.

“La-illaha-illallah” (“There is no god but God”) the Dervishes intone in a subdued prayer, forming a semi-circle around Shejh Adrihusejn.

Bobbing their heads, they slowly up the tempo and volume of the prayer from a deep murmur into full-throated howl, praying for their past sins to be pardoned.

The crescendo mounts for two hours until the Dervishes are swaying in a state of mystical ecstasy. “Allah Hu” (he is God), they chant in perfect unison.

That is when the skewers and knives appear.

The Shejh leads the way, coating 15-centimetre (six inch) long needles with his saliva and then piercing his two young sons. He does the same to three other children.

Miraculously, there is no blood, and the children show no sign of fear or pain, swaying silently as they hold the needles pierced through one side of their mouths.

Next come the blades: Shejh slowly eases 40-centimetre ( 1.3-foot) knives with rounded, pearl-coated stems through both cheeks of the Dervishes, one-by-one.

Driven by the rhythm of kettledrums and tambourines, the entranced worshipers sway in a semi-conscious state, repeating their calls to “Allah” over and over.

Next they begin piercing their necks with knives, proudly displaying the wounds.

“The knives symbolize the healing of all wounds. This is the blessing of God and the power of the order,” says an elderly, high-ranking Dervish after the ceremony.

Finally, the intensity subsides into a prayer for the souls of all prophets and believers, as the Dervishes remove the knives and return them to the Shejh, kissing his hands.

Later, the 44-year-old Shejh talks about his flock’s esoteric tradition, insisting that it has a place in modern society.

“We propagandize love among people. Belief is, in essence, love towards God, towards others and towards life,” he says.

“I am against any extremism. I am a Muslim and a European of the 21st Century — Internet is an important part of my life,” he says.

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WorldWide Religious News-Kosovo’s Dervishes dance toward salvation

Posted on April 4th, 2006 by .
Categories: Misc. News.