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in title, tags, annotations or urlHow French Secularism Became Fundamentalist | Foreign Policy - 0 views
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In the end, Charlie Hebdo warns, the only defense against terrorism, the only defense against ending up in a France of veiled women and daily prayer, is a form of militant secularism: one that doesn’t flinch at making the leap from pious baker to radical bomb-maker
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Laïcité, the French term for secularism, today has acquired so much mystique as to be practically an ideology, a timeless norm that defines Frenchness.
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There was essentially no substantive difference between the style of secularism envisioned by the founders of laïcité and the framers of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As in the United States, French secularism initially sought to ensure religious pluralism in the public and private spheres — nothing more, nothing less.
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Erdogan, Sultan of Jerusalem? - 0 views
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No one who has visited Jerusalem over the past few years will be surprised by the preponderance of red Turkish flags with their crescent and star, fluttering over the city’s eastern Palestinian neighborhoods. These flags are just one visible manifestation of a major effort by the Turkish government to establish a presence in the Israeli capital. Investigative reports in the press, conducted over the last few years, have revealed the scope of Turkish activity in Jerusalem, which includes the renovation of homes, restoration of mosques and efforts to expose the residents of East Jerusalem to Turkish culture, including cooking workshops and Turkish-language classes. These efforts also include increasing involvement in the affairs of Al-Aqsa Mosque, as described by Ben Caspit in July 2018.
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Israel has decided to put an end to this Turkish involvement in Jerusalem affairs
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Israel intends to revoke the head of TIKA’s diplomatic status in Jerusalem, effectively making his presence in Israel illegal. “The era of the Ottoman Empire is over. Turkey has no reason to be in Jerusalem,” said the Foreign Ministry in an especially bellicose statement. “[Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan’s declarations that Jerusalem belongs to all Muslims are absolutely baseless and ridiculous. Israel maintains sovereignty in Jerusalem, while ensuring freedom of worship for all religions. We will not allow anyone to interrupt this sovereignty.”
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How Mike Pence's Office Meddled in Foreign Aid to Reroute Money to Favored Christian Groups - ProPublica - 0 views
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Decisions about U.S. aid are often no longer being governed by career professionals applying a rigorous review of applicants and their capabilities. Over the last two years, political pressure, particularly from the office of Vice President Mike Pence, had seeped into aid deliberations and convinced key decision-makers that unless they fell in line, their jobs could be at stake
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ProPublica viewed internal emails and conducted interviews with nearly 40 current and former U.S. officials and aid professionals that shed new light on the success of Pence and his allies in influencing the government’s long-standing process for awarding foreign aid.
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“There are very deliberate procurement guidelines that have developed over a number of years to guard precisely against this kind of behavior,”
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So Why Did I Defend Paul Bowles? | by Hisham Aidi | The New York Review of Books - 0 views
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Long a sanctuary for Spanish and French writers, American writers began visiting Tangier in the late nineteenth century: Mark Twain on his way to Jerusalem in 1867, the painters Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1870 and Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1912, and Edith Wharton in 1917. In 1931, when Bowles first visited, the American artists living in Tangier were primarily black: Claude McKay, Anita Reynolds, Juice Wilson, Josephine Baker. These African-Americans came to Morocco from Paris, where they had formed a community after World War I, and as the Harlem Rennaissance spread to France. Upon arrival, Bowles began to socialize with both McKay and Anita Reynolds. Like the other Americans, he had also discovered North Africa through France. In high school, he had read Marcel Proust, Comte de Lautréamont, and André Gide—the latter’s accounts, in particular, of his travels and sexual trysts in Algeria and Tunisia had conjured North Africa in Bowles’s teenage imagination.
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in December 1923, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom signed the Tangier Protocol in Paris, setting up a new administration and placing the city at the center of a 150-square mile International Zone overseen by a committee of nine Western powers. The city was henceforth governed by a court that included French, Spanish, and British judges, along with the mendoub, the Moroccan sultan’s representative. It is this international period, from 1923 to 1956, especially postwar, that has shaped the image of Tangier as a free port, a tax haven, and a place of international intrigue and excess.
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His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, told the story of an American who flees the numbing modernity of New York and meanders through the Algerian desert, only to disintegrate psychologically. Published in the fall of 1949, it became a bestseller and made Bowles a household name. Three more novels and a handful of short stories set in Tangier followed.
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Libyans march against militias after attack - 0 views
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Some 30,000 people filled a broad boulevard as they marched along a lake in central Benghazi on Friday to the gates of the headquarters of Ansar al-Shariah. "No, no, to militias," the crowd chanted, filling a broad boulevard. They carried banners and signs demanding that militias disband and that the government build up police to take their place in keeping security.
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Residents of another main eastern city, Darna, have also begun to stand up against Ansar al-Shariah and other militias. The anti-militia fervor in Darna is notable because the city, in the mountains along the Mediterranean coast north of Benghazi, has long had a reputation as a stronghold for Islamic extremists. During the Gadhafi era, it was the hotbed of a deadly Islamist insurgency against his regime. A significant number of the Libyan jihadists who travelled to Afghanistan and Iraq during recent wars came from Darna. During the revolt against him last year, Gadhafi's regime warned that Darna would declare itself an Islamic Emirate and ally itself with al-Qaida. But now, the residents are lashing out against Ansar al-Shariah, the main Islamic extremist group in the city. "The killing of the ambassador blew up the situation. It was disastrous," said Ayoub al-Shedwi, a young bearded Muslim preacher in Darna who says he has received multiple death threats because has spoken out against militias on a radio show he hosts. "We felt that the revolution is going in vain."
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Militiamen have been blamed for a range of violence in Darna. On the same day Stevens killed in Benghazi, a number of elderly Catholic nuns and a priest who have lived in Darna for decades providing free medical services, were attacked, reportedly beaten or stabbed. There have been 32 killings over the past few months, including the city security chief and assassinations of former officers from Gadhafi's military.
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Europe Is Getting Tough on Political Islam - 0 views
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Europeans are concerned about the growing sway of Islamist groups that seek to push members of local Muslim communities to detach from mainstream society—mostly through preaching but also through various forms of social pressure, intimidation and, occasionally, violence— and resort to alternative legal, educational, and social systems
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For obvious reasons, terrorist attacks get all the attention from policymakers, security services, and the media. The activities of nonviolent Islamists, on the other hand, tend to be ignored: They are mostly legal, rarely flare up in dramatic incidents, and often bring (sometimes justified, sometimes not) charges of racism and Islamophobia to those who highlight them.
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These concerns are not new, but what is noteworthy is that they are no longer expressed almost exclusively by those on the right of the political spectrum but, much more frequently than in the past, by politicians and commentators of all political persuasions—not to mention security services.
Jesus, Carpet Bomb My Heart: An Undercover Muslim in Detroit | Politics | Religion Dispatches - 0 views
Saudi Arabia, My Changing Home - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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We do indeed live in a gender-segregated society. But affluent and educated Saudis who follow international news often find it difficult to accept a viewpoint that portrays their family members as subjugated and oppressed. Many Saudis, for example, regard the requirement that their mothers, wives and sisters obtain permission slips to leave the country or pursue higher education as nothing but a minor inconvenience. It’s also hard for many well-off people here to wrap their minds around the fact that there are actually women who might not be content to live in a country whose legal system still permits an 80-year-old man to marry an 11-year-old girl or can force a happily married couple to divorce if religious courts accept a family member’s claim that the husband comes from a lower-status tribe. Many Saudis believe that the outside world has some ulterior motive for criticizing their country. There were times in school when I was told that “infidels” take a hypocritical stance on justice and human rights out of spite, to sully Muslim women and denigrate Islam.
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Growing up in the Midwest Bible-belt during the 1980s, my family and I were sometimes treated like the enemy
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some Saudi parents would not let their daughters play with me because they thought I might teach them how to be “Westernized.” My American-accented Arabic put off some classmates and even some teachers. Those who taught religion were particularly suspicious, often checking whether I would say noon-day prayers
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Secular Good, Muslim Bad: Unveiling Tunisia's Revolution | Religion Dispatches - 0 views
Muslim lesbian couple defy death threats to tie the knot in civil ceremony - Birmingham Mail - 0 views
Living on a prayer: in Istanbul's Gezi Park, protesters try to bridge the religious divide - Vocativ - 0 views
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a group of religious anti-capitalists led by the Islamic theologian, Ihsan Eliacik, prayed at the park in front of several thousand in honor of kandil, a Muslim celebration of the Prophet Mohammad’s ascension to heaven. Though a number of religious Muslims have been part of the demonstrations, the group’s prayer appeared to mark the largest presence of religious conservatives at the protests
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Eliacik has derided the government for installing what he calls a “looting regime,” referring to the construction boom that created a wealthy class of AKP supporters. “This shopping mall obsession, these concrete blocks — we reject this,”
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“[This diversity] has become confusing to many,” Eliacik said. “[But] respect is in the air. We respect people who wear miniskirts — that doesn’t mean that we approve of them. But it means that we see them as equals.” Other members of the group echoed his sentiments. “The socialists were the first to give us a hand when we mentioned the kandil celebration at the park,” said Kazım İnanç, a member of the religious group. “That says so much about the spirit here.”
Pro-Muslim Ads to Hang Near Anti-Jihad Ads in New York Subway - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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