Ed Webb Religion & Politics Seminars

Blasphemy laws were first introduced to Muslim countries during the days of colonialism and are now a major obstacle to Islamic reform. Often used to restrict freedom of expression and to settle personal scores, these laws have led to devastating consequences for religious minorities and others whose views differ from the majority.

the Quran documents the criticism of Islam by poets and political leaders at the time of its revelation. Though the Prophet was accused of sorcery and mania, in each and every case, God did not order him to punish the blasphemers. Instead, His order to the Prophet was to respond to their hate speech with good speech and good work. In other words, Islam calls for freedom of speech and for competing freely in the marketplace of ideas.

The Quran provides a response to defamation in general: "Good and evil are not equal; so repel evil with something good and better so that the one with whom there is enmity will become a close friend."

Before the revolution, men didn't have their rights and would take out the injustice they felt on women. If all Egyptians have their human rights, women's rights will be achieved

As a result of taking part in the revolution, Egyptian women now see themselves as equal to men and have the confidence to demand their rights. We've proved that we can organise and effect change and the challenge for us and all Egyptians is to make sure extremists don't take control

All this means nothing, however, to 25-year-old Hemmat Ahmed, who sells vegetables on a wooden cart at the side of a busy Cairo road. "I stand here from 0600 every day to feed my children and I earn more money than my husband, who doesn't have a regular job. I left school and went to work when I was eight years old, but I'll make sure my children get an education, even if I have to beg for it." She has no faith in the political system and thinks that the new president, whoever it may be, will continue to steal the country's riches. "At least Hosni Mubarak was full from 30 years of robbery. "People will soon be back in Tahrir because nothing will change. There are no jobs, no good salaries, I can't even afford oil and sugar anymore. "All I dream of is to have a home and some new clothes for my children."

"According to the psychological literature, people who believe in God don't appear to act any more morally than people who don't believe in God," he said. "We wanted to look deeper at particular beliefs. One idea is the supernatural punishment hypothesis: Punishing counter-normative behavior -- immoral behavior -- has been an important part of living in societies. Societies don't get far without regulating moral behavior."

Since donning the burka, the woman said she had been taunted by neighbours who called her a "smelly Arab" and that Israeli soldiers had asked to see her identification papers to prove she was not a Muslim. They backed down, she said, when she showed them that her children were clearly Jewish. The trend has also caused tensions in family life. One man went to a rabbinical court in an attempt to get a ruling to force his wife to stop wearing the burka. The plan backfired, however. The court ruled that that woman's behaviour was so "extreme" that it ordered the couple to undergo an immediate religious divorce.

In a statement on its page on global social networking site Facebook

The Muslim Brotherhood announced on Wednesday that it would organize a number of demonstrations against the Friday protest in Alexandria. Meanwhile, a number of Salafi groups said they considered the people organizing the protest to be "infidels and atheists".

Invoking Sharia and casting it as a growing danger at odds with American principles has become a rallying cry for conservatives. It’s also quickly becoming an unlikely pet issue among 2012 presidential contenders: Potential candidates have almost unilaterally assailed the Islamic code, making it as much a staple of the campaign stump speech as economic reform, job creation and rising gas prices.

“Even immediately after Sept. 11, we didn’t see this kind of hatred mainstream in our society,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “There seems to be a coordinated effort to both marginalize American Muslims and demonize Islam.”

Bill sponsors interviewed by POLITICO could offer no examples of cases from their home states, instead pointing to a 2010 New Jersey case that used Sharia as a defense, though that decision was reversed by a higher court.

Lady Cox

Many chaplains and corrections officials credit the faith, when taught properly, with being a stabilizing force that can help inmates turn their lives around.

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.

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.

at least six million people - or one in every three young men - belong to one or another of the more than 40 Sufi orders

Erdogan’s Islamic-rooted government seeking to promote religious freedoms has pledged to address the problems of the religious minorities. In the past few years, it amended laws to allow for the return of some of the properties, but restrictions remained and the issue on how to resolve properties that were sold on to third parties was left unsolved.The decree overcomes those restrictions and helps scupper further court rulings. “There was huge pressure from the European Court of Human Rights which has already ruled against Turkey,” said Orhan Kemal Cengiz a human rights activist and lawyer who specializes in minority issues. “It is nevertheless a very important development,” he said. “With the return of properties and the compensations, the minority communities will be able to strengthen economically and their lives will be made easier.”

Turkey is also under intense pressure to reopen a seminary that trained generations of Greek Orthodox patriarchs. The Halki Theological School on Heybeliada Island, near Istanbul, was closed to new students in 1971 under a law that put religious and military training under state control.

"a very small group of people who scream very loud, have a disproportionate share of the public discourse when it comes to culture."

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.

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.

“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.”

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

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.

“It’s a painful but necessary part of the process,” Baghat said. “It could prove beneficial in the long run, in our transition toward democracy. It’s a battle we’ve put off for 70 years – the role of religion in politics. The place of the religious parties in a future polity. And now is the time to have it. Because with power there will come accountability and responsibility. And it’s time that the Islamist activists start answering tough questions they’ve been relieved from answering over past few decades of persecution.”

18 tumultuous days of nonstop media coverage

Reflecting on Bouazizi's death on his popular TV show, al-Shari'a wa-l-Hayat, Qaradawi affirmed that suicide was generally a major sin (kabira), but blamed the Tunisian state for Bouazizi's sin and prayed that God would absolve him of any blame for that sin. Qaradawi's sympathy for Bouazizi's otherwise sinful act was a reflection of Qaradawi's more general approach to the problem of religion and politics: that justice is a central demand of the Shari'a and that interpretations of the Shari'a that strengthen oppressors and tyrants cannot be deemed to be legitimate parts of the Shari'a.

Qaradawi's reputation for moral courage in the face of Arab dictators, however, suffered a significant blow as a result of his refusal to condemn the actions of the Bahraini and Saudi governments in violently suppressing the peaceful protests in Manama's Pearl Square. His attempts to distinguish the Bahraini protests on the ground that they were sectarian in character rather than national hardly seemed at the time plausible; in light of subsequent events, they are even less so.