Insult laws: Elusive and longstanding | Egypt Independent - 0 views
Our revolution has been stolen, say Libya's jihadists | Reuters - 0 views
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One effect of hostile reactions at home and abroad has been that some Islamist groups, part of a patchwork of militias which fill a vacuum left by Gaddafi, have made a tactical retreat from view, in some declaring their brigades to have disbanded.
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Islamist fighters in Derna make clear they will seek redress for grievances, many with little to do with religion, some dating to colonial times, others rooted in a sense that victory in the fight against Gaddafi they began years ago has been "stolen" by his former henchmen and stooges of the West
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"The state is making up this conspiracy. The state deliberately ignores the fact that there is an Islamic renaissance," said Dirbi, whose brother was among more that 1,200 Islamist inmates machine-gunned by guards in a Tripoli prison in 1996."I want to see Gaddafi's men on trial, not being rewarded and honored,"
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What's behind calls to close Shiite media outlets in Egypt? - 0 views
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In October 2016, lawyer Samir Sabri filed a lawsuit before the Second Circuit of the Administrative Judiciary Court, demanding that Shiite media outlets and websites be shut down in Egypt
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“It is unacceptable and unreasonable to have a media platform in Egypt promoting Shiite ideology. Egypt is an Islamic state and the main source of legislation is Sharia under the constitution, which recognizes Christianity and Judaism to be monotheistic. El-Nafis is one of the news websites inciting against Saudi Arabia, Al-Azhar and the Ministry of Awqaf, where Ahmad Rasem al-Nafis attacks in his articles the Sunnis and Saudi Arabia and calls for professing the Shiite faith.”
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“The Salafist leaders’ Wahhabism was behind the dissemination of extremism in Syria and Yemen. Shiite channels and websites in Egypt do not advocate extremism or renounce any ideology or doctrine. They call for dealing with the Shiites as Muslims at a time when Salafist movements claim that Shiites are non-Muslims.”
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Church threatens to withdraw from Constituent Assembly over Sharia article | Egypt Inde... - 1 views
A Dangerous Mind? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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As a political scientist specializing in Islamic law and war, I frequently read, store, share and translate texts and videos by jihadi groups. As a political philosopher, I debate the ethics of killing. As a citizen, I express views, thoughts and emotions about killing to other citizens. As a human being, I sometimes feel joy (I am ashamed to admit) at the suffering of some humans and anger at the suffering of others. At Mr. Mehanna’s trial, I saw how those same actions can constitute federal crimes.
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having the intent to support a foreign terrorist organization
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MR. MEHANNA’S crimes were speech crimes, even thought crimes. The kinds of speech that the government successfully criminalized were not about coordinating acts of terror or giving directions on how to carry out violent acts. The speech for which Mr. Mehanna was convicted involved the religious and political advocacy of certain causes beyond American shores
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The Arab Spring Still Blooms - www.nytimes.com - Readability - 0 views
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The Arab revolutions have not turned anti-Western. Nor are they pro-Western. They are simply not about the West. They remain fundamentally about social justice and democracy — not about religion or establishing Shariah law2.
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The democratization of Tunisia, Egypt and other countries has allowed a number of extremist free riders into the political system. But it has also definitively refuted the myth that democracy and Islam are incompatible. Islamists are political actors like any others: they are no more pure, more united or more immune from criticism than anyone else.
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Radical Salafis who advocate violence and Shariah constitute a very small minority in Tunisia — and even in Egypt they are vastly outnumbered by more moderate Islamists. They are a minority within a minority, and extremely unpopular among both religious and secular Tunisians. They do not speak for all Tunisians, Arabs or Muslims.
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Is Israel a 'Jewish and Democratic' State? - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East - 0 views
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The description of Israel as “Jewish and democratic” appears initially not in the Declaration of Independence — as is often thought — but in two 1992 constitutional laws pertaining to freedom of professions and dignity of all humans. Since that time, this has become the most common phrase describing the essence of Israel. But this formulation, originally intended to help resolve various tensions, has in itself become a source of problems. By its very phrasing as Jewish and democratic — joined together by the article “and” — the immediate assumption is that the two aspects are inherently contradictory and that Israel could hope for nothing more than a problematic compromise between the two.
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Both left and right perceive Jewish and democratic as conflicting adjectives. They are wrong.
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In seeking to understand Israel, the question then is not whether there is an inherent tension between Jewish and democratic, but whether there is an inherent tension between Jewish values and liberal values. The answer of course is, it depends.
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Muslim fundamentalism in Europe… So what? - 0 views
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The most striking finding, going against decades of received wisdom, is that young Muslims are as fundamentalist as older Muslims. This is particularly surprising because, unlike the old Muslims, who are the original ‘guest workers’ who immigrated from Morocco and Turkey, the vast majority of young Muslims are born and raised in Western Europe. This finding goes against the received wisdom that ‘immigrants’ have assimilated by the third generation; a process that used to hold up for most of the 20th century, but seems to have changed in the current interconnected world. That said, recent research on French immigrants showed that the fourth generation (which they call ‘2.5 generation’) is much more integrated than the third.
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The most problematic part of the report is the, undoubtedly unintentional but nevertheless unfortunate, distinction between “Muslim immigrants” and “Christian natives.” As said, today most Muslims are not ‘immigrants’ but ‘natives,’ who were born and raised in the particular West European country. Moreover, many (non-Muslim) natives are not Christians. In fact, this is the only questionable part of the data of the survey: 70 percent of the ‘native respondents’ indicated that they were Christians. That seems an incredibly high proportion for a largely secular region. While numbers differ widely, mostly according to how it is measured, a comparative Ipsos-MORI survey of 2011 found much lower percentages. Using the inclusive question “What, if any, is your faith or religion even if you are not currently practising?,” they found that 49 percent of Belgians, 45 percent of the French, 50 percent of the Germans and just 35 percent of the Swedes mentioned Christianity. In the Netherlands, which wasn’t included in the study, the percentage is 44. While a more accurate representation of Christian ‘natives’ would probably narrow the gap with the Muslim ‘immigrants,’ it wouldn’t change the (much more) widespread fundamentalism among Muslims.
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Not surprisingly, the media focuses almost exclusively on the Muslim exceptionalism aspect, which is the dominant media frame in reports on Islam and Muslims. The main difference is how strong the findings are reported. For example, whereas the German version of The Huffington Post headlines “Are the Rules of Islam More Important Than the German Laws?”, the conservative German newspaper Die Welt titles “Muslims: Religion is More Important than Law.” Only a few media reports ask questions about the findings; most notably, the Dutch (Protestant) newspaper Trouw headlines “Survey Proves That Many Muslims Are Fundis. Or Not?,” interviewing Arabist Jan Jaap de Ruiter, who questions the equivalence of the statements across religions. For instance, he argues that religious laws are much more important for Muslims than for Christians, because they are very different (“The Sharia is really something completely different than, say, the Ten Commandments”).
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Donor-driven Islam ? | openDemocracy - 0 views
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Three examples of the policy direction of Anglo-American international development agencies, particularly DFID and USAID, highlight the new directions of ‘donor-driven Islam’ - development assistance that introduces a creeping theocratization of formerly rights-based approaches to gender.
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Ulama is a vague umbrella term for an imagined clergy which has no constitutional nor democratic legitimacy.
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If anything, the widespread practice of contracting the assistance of local religious leaders for distributing contraception and for other gender-related projects has resulted in the empowerment of a traditionally discredited local clergy. In Baluchistan, in an interview with the author, development activists agreed that these amounted to “Rent-A-Maulvi” projects.
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3quarksdaily - 0 views
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in a post-9/11 world, any non-state actor caught throwing a stone, be it the first stone or the thousandth, risks total warfare under the guise of counterinsurgency
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Mass, sustained civil disobedience at the corporate headquarters of insurance 'providers' and banks and petrol companies remains a long way off. Instead, Koch-funded campaigns continue to succeed at electing Republican governors who then refuse federal money to build high-speed rail networks . (See Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and more to come. Special shoutout to New Jersey.) When Americans begin to thirst for health care, re-pedestrianised cities, and the return of usury laws with the same fervor that Egyptians have shown in clamouring for democracy and the rule of law, only then will we know the revolution is here.
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The coming constitutional showdown between human law and divine law in the revolutionary Arab states may turn on the question of gay rights and sexual freedom generally
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Associated Press - 0 views
Egypt Sufis plan mass rally to counter Salafist and Wahhabi muscle flexing - Politics -... - 0 views
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Salafists have been tugging the rope towards a theocratic government, whereas most political forces are tugging towards a 'civil state', which accepts the status quo with regards to the recognition of Islam in the Constitution and would replace the de facto military rule with a civilian one.
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Sufi leaders, who tend to favour religious tolerance and generally abstain from politics, were alarmed after hundreds of thousands of Islamists organised mass protests around the country on 29 July to call for the establishment of an Islamic state in Egypt.
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at least six million people - or one in every three young men - belong to one or another of the more than 40 Sufi orders
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