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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Ed Webb

Ed Webb

Islamists bring religion down to earth: the end of religious idealism | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • the first decisions of the government have shown the speed with which religious idealism has given way to practical realism. 
  • On February 4, Moucef Ben Salim, minister of higher education and member of Ennahda, accused an unnamed foreign country of “pumping large sums of money in to destabilize the country."
  • For Saudi companies or individuals to invest in Tunisia, the Saudi rulers must authorize those investments. For that to happen, the Tunisian leadership must realign itself with the political agenda of the Saudi rulers in order to secure this economic support. Hosting an anti-Assad meeting on Syria, as is scheduled for this Friday, is a step in that direction.
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  • In an interview with journalists before leaving the Kingdom, Jebali assured the Saudis that Tunisians are not interested in exporting their revolution or interfering in the affairs of other countries. He made this claim just three days before his country was scheduled to host an international conference to “exert more pressure on the Syrian regime.” More accurately, Jebali should have said that his country is not interested in interfering in the affairs of rich States of Gulf.
  • the most significant achievement of the ruling Islamist parties is relativizing religious discourse.
  • The Tunisian and Egyptian elections, however, have unveiled the profuse diversity within Islamism. The Muslim Brethren now face formidable competition from at least three other Islamist groups including the al-Nur Party which won over 24% of the votes. In Tunisia, Ennahda is under constant pressure by Salafis and al-Tahrir Party Islamists who did not field their own candidates in the October 23 elections. In Morocco, the Islamist party (Justice and Development) won decisive number of seats in the recent parliamentarian elections but remains challenged by the more popular Islamist movement, al-Adl wa-‘l-Ihsan, that shunned elections under the watch of a monarch.
  • Despite the short-term instability that will accompany the Arab revolutions, the future of the Arab world is promising. Excluding Islamists deprived the peoples of the region of the extraordinary opportunities to develop their societies, preserve human dignity, and take pride in belonging. Their rise to power is moderating their views and teaching them a lesson in humility and realism. The emergence of different Islamist parties is a path towards innovation and reform in modern Islamic thought and practice. The new spread of elections endorses the universal idea that people are the only true sovereign, and should have the opportunity to choose their public servants through fair and transparent elections. 
Ed Webb

The jihad industry | Blog | DAWN.COM - 0 views

  • Being a Muslim does not automatically grant him the nationality of all the 56 countries that claim allegiance to Islam.The moment he wants to travel, even from one Muslim country to another, he or she ceases to be a Muslim and becomes an Egyptian or an Iranian. No Islamic country allows a Muslim to enter its territory on the basis of his or her faith only. And this is where the national identity, which provides the traveler with a passport and a visa, becomes more important than the religious identity.
  • Sometimes one identity takes precedence over the other. Thus some Muslims living in the West, where they now confront a gradually increasing hostility after 9/11, often get more comfort from their Islamic identity than from their nationality, acquired or native.Others, particularly Pakistanis, re-discover their regional affiliation too. The first people Pakistanis living in the West often befriend are Indians.But a Pakistani living in the Gulf finds it more useful to be a Pakistani before a Muslim. Here his Pakistani identity comes before his religious identity. It also comes before his regional identities as a Punjabi or a Pashtun because it provides him strength in dealing with the Arabs who often look down upon him as a Pakistani, whichever province of Pakistan he is from.However, back in Pakistan his Pakistani identity becomes less important. Now he is more cautious of being a Pashtun, a Punjabi, a Mohajir, a Baloch or a Sindhi. And when he goes to his ancestral district, he has to further divide his identity on ethnic and tribal lines thus becoming a Seraiki speaking Sindhi or a Sindhi speaking Sindhi, a Pashto speaking Baloch or a Balochi speaking Baloch
Ed Webb

Tunisia Navigates a Democratic Path Tinged With Religion - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “We’re surrendering our right to think and speak differently,”
  • The popular revolts that began to sweep across the Middle East one year ago have forced societies like Tunisia’s, removed from the grip of authoritarian leaders and celebrating an imagined unity, to confront their own complexity.
  • “It’s like a war of attrition,” said Said Ferjani, a member of Ennahda’s political bureau, who complained that his party was trapped between two extremes, the most ardently secular and the religious. “They’re trying not to let us focus on the real issues.”
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  • debates in Tunisia often echo similar confrontations in Turkey, another country with a long history of secular authoritarian rule now governed by a party inspired by political Islam. In both, secular elites long considered themselves a majority and were treated as such by the state. In both, those elites now recognize themselves as minorities and are often mobilized more by the threat than the reality of religious intolerance
  • secular Tunisians might soon retreat to enclaves. “We’ve become the ahl al-dhimma,” he said, offering a term in Islamic law to denote protected minorities in a Muslim state. “It’s like the Middle Ages.”
  • Others insisted that Ennahda take a stronger stand against the Salafis before society became even more polarized. “I don’t see either action or reaction — where is the government?” asked Ahmed Ounaïes, a former diplomat who briefly served as foreign minister after the revolution. “What is Ennahda’s concept of Tunisia of tomorrow? It hasn’t made that clear.”
  • He complained that the case had been “blown out of proportion,” that media were recklessly fueling the debate and that the forces of the old government were inciting Salafis to tarnish Ennahda. But he conceded that the line between freedom of expression and religious sensitivity would not be drawn soon. “The struggle is philosophical,” he said, “and it will go on and on and on.”
Ed Webb

Talking with the Brotherhood | Transitions - 0 views

  • We have to find a way to convince the Egyptian people that they have been indulged in subsidies against their own interest and for the benefit of the rich. This is difficult, as many people don't fully understand the negative effects the subsidies have on the economy.
  • Over the past five or ten years, the public sector experienced a highly corrupt change in ownership. Businesses have been demolished, destroyed, sold at a loss to Mubarak's gangs. When you steal from the poor who are already poor, the effect is disastrous. As an economist, I think that the whole international financial system is a farce at the moment. I predict that the next international revolution will be against the banking institutions. This has already begun with the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the attacks on the private houses of bank managers is a new phenomenon which should not be ignored. You can't have justice in a human society without economic justice.
  • After the revolution, one of the most important outcomes was that political Islam became more than just a singular view. Before, al-Nour refused to engage in politics. Now they are developing their own policies. There is greater political participation and more plurality.
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  • Political Islam is broad enough to hold more than one opinion. At the same time, "extreme" is not in our vocabulary. Islam is generally a middle way. You can't be a Muslim and be extreme. Fanaticism is not a virtue.
  • women are not as mentally alert as men -- they cannot be, because they give birth to children, look after them, suffer monthly periods, and so on. All this takes the concentration of ten men. Their mental status is not constant and they can't have the same duties as a man.
Ed Webb

Are Europe's Muslims America's problem? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

  • Scapegoating and race-baiting during a US electoral season are not new; as the campaign heats up, so will the rhetoric. The irony is that the negative rhetoric surrounding race, Islam and Europe is rising - just as the State Department is trying to counter the "nativist surge" in Europe by showcasing the US model of racial integration, and dispatching African-American and Muslim-American goodwill ambassadors to Europe to extol the civil rights movement.
  • it is, perhaps not surprisingly, in France that the State Department's assessments and outreach to Muslim communities have triggered the most outrage. The dispatches from the US embassy in Paris are blunt in their appraisal - "the French have a well-known problem with discrimination against minorities". Some cables read like descriptions of a pre-civil rights United States: "The French media remains overwhelmingly white... Among French elite educational institutions, we are only aware that Science Po has taken serious steps to integrate."  
  • numerous outreach projects (exchange programmes, conferences, media appearance) to raise awareness among state and societal actors about the US civil rights movement.
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  • Young French Muslims note that the US embassy's outreach is different from the French government's security-centred approach and shrill rhetoric about Islam and immigration (Sarkozy a few years ago threatened to clean up a cité with a Kärcher, a high-pressure hose). Widad Ketfi, a young blogger, who participated in an embassy-sponsored programme says she knows she was targeted by the US embassy because of her Algerian-Muslim background, but adds: "What bothers me is being the target of the French state." These youths claim that French politicians will visit their enclaves only during election time, surrounded by security guards
  • given France's official discourse and self-image, "such an effort will continue to require considerable discretion, sensitivity and tact on our part".
  •  The cable that drew the most indignant responses from French state officials was written by then US Ambassador Craig Stephenson, at the height of the civil unrest in November 2005: "The real problem is the failure of white Christian France to view its dark-skinned and Muslim compatriots as citizens in their own rights." Speaking on a television show, former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin scoffed [FR], "This [cable] shows the limits of American diplomacy," adding that US diplomats were wrongly reading the banlieues crisis through their own history, and viewing France's urban crisis through a religious prism. 
  • As in Britain, segments of French society were displeased by revelations that the US had, since 2003, been deeply involved in the integration process - trying to shift the media discourse, to get French leaders to rethink their "terminology" and "intellectual frameworks" regarding minority inclusion; trying to generate public debates about "affirmative action", "multiculturalism", and hyphenated identity; pushing to reform history curricula taught in French schools, and working with French museums to exhibit the contributions of minorities. Left-leaning analysts opposed to US policies in the Islamic world saw this "Marshall Plan" for the banlieues as a diversionary tactic [FR]. One cable notes that, by improving the lot of French Muslims, the US embassy can alter French-Muslim perceptions of the US, to show that the US respects Islam and "is engaged for good in the Arab-Muslim worlds". Other critics just don't think US conceptions of race and integration can travel across the Atlantic.
  • Western states have a long history of intervening in the Muslim world to protect and empower religious minorities. This practice continues, in different forms to this day, but it is unprecedented for Western states - allies - to court or protect each other's minorities. And yet the US is spending millions of dollars to win the hearts and minds of Europe's disaffected Muslim communities, often vying with European states' own local efforts.
  • the efforts to exhibit US racial harmony and forestall ethnic conflict in Europe are taking place as political hopefuls whip up resentment of Muslims and African-Americans in the US.
  • Perhaps the greatest irony of the State Department's efforts to showcase the model integration of US Muslims, and to deploy the images and ideas of the civil rights movement in Europe, is that these efforts have been occurring against a backdrop of unfavourable media images of Quran burnings, anti-mosque rallies and accusatory Congressional hearings. The anti-mosque movement has now morphed into a broader "anti-Sharia" movement. Thirteen states from South Carolina to Arizona to Alaska have introduced bills banning Islamic law. The Texas Board of Education passed a resolution rejecting high-school textbooks that are "pro-Islam [and] anti-Christian", and a similar campaign is underway in Florida. American Muslims are facing a rising tide of discrimination that will no doubt worsen as the 2012 presidential campaign progresses. As for the Democrats, maybe it is politically easier to be photographed with Muslims in Paris singing "We Shall Overcome" than to challenge the organised bigotry brewing at home.
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