Group items tagged

Malek Layouni was not thinking about her Muslim faith, or her head scarf, as she took her excited 9-year-old son to an amusement site near Paris. But, as it turned out, it was all that mattered.

Mrs. Layouni still blushes with humiliation at being turned away in front of friends and neighbors, and at having no answer for her son, who kept asking her, “What did we do wrong?”

10 years after France passed its first anti-veil law restricting young girls from wearing veils in public schools, the head coverings of observant Muslim women, from colorful silk scarves to black chadors, have become one of the most potent flash points in the nation’s tense relations with its vibrant and growing Muslim population.

The rash of horrific attacks in the name of Islam is spurring an anguished debate among Muslims here in the heart of the Islamic world about why their religion appears cited so often as a cause for violence and bloodshed.

The majority of scholars and the faithful say Islam is no more inherently violent than other religions. But some Muslims — most notably the president of Egypt — argue that the contemporary understanding of their religion is infected with justifications for violence, requiring the government and its official clerics to correct the teaching of Islam.

“It is unbelievable that the thought we hold holy pushes the Muslim community to be a source of worry, fear, danger, murder and destruction to all the world,” President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt lamented last week in a speech to the clerics of the official religious establishment. “You need to stand sternly,” he told them, calling for no less than “a religious revolution.”

(CNN)It is a message of defiance, but also forgiveness -- and many Muslims responded with similarly mixed emotions.

It's not surprising that, in its first issue since the attack, Charlie Hebdo again put Mohammed on the cover.

But this time, instead of showing the prophet in an unflattering light, the magazine struck a far different tone -- and was received by some Muslims in a far different way.

He previously said he would "strongly consider" shutting down some mosques in the U.S.

there's a country that has taken Trump's rhetoric one step further and actually put one of his proposed policies — shutting down mosques — into practice.

Both countries are roughly three-fourths Christian (Roman Catholicism dominates in Angola) and less than 1 percent Muslim.

severed pig’s head was left outside a mosque in Philadelphia

Islamic center in Florida was defaced

Sikh temple in California was vandalized by someone who mistook it for a mosque and left graffiti that included a profane reference to the Islamic State group.

What are Sufis? This was a question many were asking after at least 305 Egyptians were massacred on Friday in the Sinai. They were killed in an assault by Islamist militants (likely from the local Islamic State affiliate, although the group has not yet made a claim of responsibility) on Al Rawdah mosque, which is commonly described as a “Sufi mosque.” The implication is that its congregants observed a more “mystical” version of Islam, one that, for example, venerates saints. While such a description is not necessarily inaccurate—it is common to refer to mosques by their apparent ideological or spiritual orientation—like most things related to Islam, it’s a bit more complicated. Many Sufis do not self-define as Sufis, since for them, this is just how Muslims practice—and have always practiced—Islam.

For most of Islamic history, Sufism wasn’t considered as something apart. That it is today has much to do with the rise of Islamism, which is generally perceived as anti-Sufi.

To describe Sufis as “tolerant” and “pluralistic” may also be true, but doing so presupposes that non-Sufi Muslims aren’t tolerant or pluralistic. On the other hand, describing Sufis as heterodox, permissive, or otherwise less interested in ritual or Islamic law is misleading.

As the temperature in India’s capital plunged on a recent evening, Rehana Khatun bundled her 29-day-old daughter in a fuzzy quilt and went out for her new nightly activity: participating in a sit-in against the government.

She is one of a few hundred Muslim women — including grandmothers and children — who have occupied a stretch of road for a month, undeterred by rain, cold or threats, as a sign of opposition to a new law that excludes Muslim migrants from a fast track to citizenship.

The protest in the capital’s Shaheen Bagh neighborhood has become an enduring symbol of the demonstrations that have swept India over the new law, which was passed in December. Most of the women are homemakers, many in hijabs, and their long-running ­vigil has been featured on prime-time news shows, inspired similar sit-ins and attracted solidarity from across India.

PARIS — A knife-wielding man decapitated a teacher near a school in a suburb north of Paris on Friday afternoon and was later shot dead by the police

A police officer and parents with knowledge of the attack confirmed French media reports that the victim was a history teacher at the school who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on freedom of expression, which had incited anger among some Muslim families.

In a video that widely circulated on YouTube before the attack, a Muslim parent at the teacher’s school, College du Bois-d’Aulne, expresses anger that an unidentified teacher had asked Muslims in the class of 13-year-olds to leave because “he was going to show a photo that would shock them.”

Trump currently does surprisingly well from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the towns of upstate New York, and he won a resounding victory in the Nevada caucuses

it wasn't just Trump but his supporters who seemed to have come out of nowhere, suddenly expressing, in large numbers, ideas far more extreme than anything that has risen to such popularity in recent memory

CBS News exit poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters supported banning Muslims from the United States. A PPP poll found that a third of Trump voters support banning gays and lesbians from the country. Twenty percent said Lincoln shouldn't have freed the slaves.

The Crusades were a series of religious wars between Christians and Muslims started primarily to secure control of holy sites considered sacred by both groups.

Byzantium had lost considerable territory to the invading Seljuk Turks

In November 1095, at the Council of Clermont in southern France, the Pope called on Western Christians to take up arms to aid the Byzantines and recapture the Holy Land from Muslim control. This marked the beginning of the Crusades.

In Turkey, the president is technically second to the prime minister. But in practice, when Mr. Erdogan was elected president in August, he absorbed the power and privilege of the prime minister’s post into his new position. And like Mr. Putin, who also shifted between the presidency and prime minister’s office, the stronger Mr. Erdogan has grown, the tenser relations have become with the United States.

he has used his conflict with Washington and his political enemies as a force to help consolidate power, as he continues to carry out the duties associated with the prime minister. He has rallied his conservative base behind his religiously infused agenda, clashing with United States policy for confronting Islamic State militants, while also blaming foreign interference for the growing catalog of crises he faces. As Turkey’s challenges have magnified — fighting on its border with Syria, strained relations with its NATO allies, pressure on the economy — Mr. Erdogan’s authority has grown only stronger.

Turkey’s continued refusal to allow the United States to use its bases for airstrikes against the Islamic State’s forces in Syria and Iraq — and insistence that the coalition target the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria — has laid bare deep divisions between the two countries that have prompted analysts to question Turkey’s reliability as an ally, and some have even suggested that Turkey be expelled from NATO.

Many Muslims upset by the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical newspaper, argue that the issue is not about free speech but about the insult to a religious figure revered by roughly a quarter of the world’s population.

Less clear are the precise origins of the Muslim objection to visual depictions — insulting or otherwise — of the prophet and holy persons of any faith.

That objection, which Islamist militants have cited in justifying their deadly attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris last week, has some roots in the Quran, which discourages image-making as a form of idol worship that demeans God.

In June the leader of Islamic State declared the creation of a caliphate stretching across parts of Syria and Iraq - Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi named himself the caliph or leader. Edward Stourton examines the historical parallels and asks what is a caliphate, and what is its appeal?

The last caliphate - that of the Ottomans - was officially abolished 90 years ago this spring. Yet in a 2006 Gallup survey of Muslims living in Egypt, Morocco, Indonesia and Pakistan, two-thirds of respondents said they supported the goal of "unifying all Islamic countries" into a new caliphate

"Seventy years after the Prophet's death, this Muslim world stretched from Spain and Morocco right the way to Central Asia and to the southern bits of Pakistan, so a huge empire that was all… under the control of a single Muslim leader," says historian Prof Hugh Kennedy. "And it's this Muslim unity, the extent of Muslim sovereignty, that people above all look back to."

Muslims Around the World Have Overwhelmingly Negative Views of ISIS

Donald Trump, the controversial 2016 Republican contender, on Monday called for a "complete" shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S. as a national security measure until our country's leaders "can figure out what is going on.

rump's ban would include tourists and Muslims hoping to enter the U.S. on visas, and comes as authorities uncover more details about the shooters in last week's rampage in San Bernardino, who they believe had been radicalized into following an extreme form of Islam.

The group's rise in Iraq -- and its capture of thousands of square miles of land -

"We have not defeated the idea," he is reported to have said. "We do not even understand the idea."

A global caliphate secured through a global war. To that end it speaks of "remaining and expanding" its existing hold over much of Iraq and Syria. It aims to replace existing, man-made borders, to overcome what it sees as the Shiite "crescent" that has emerged across the Middle East, to take its war -- Islam's war -- to Europe and America, and ultimately to lead Muslims toward an apocalyptic battle against the "disbelievers."

The very idea of the British Raj—the British rule over India—seems inexplicable today.

Indian written history stretches back almost 4,000 years, to the civilization centers of the Indus Valley Culture at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Also, by 1850 C.E., India had a population of some 200 million or more.

Britain, on the other hand, had no indigenous written language until the 9th century

“The one thing I like about President Trump, he understands that we’re in a religious war,”

And Trump is—you guessed it—“right to slow down who comes into this country.”

Graham’s comments illustrate one of the most fascinating dynamics of the Trump era: Trump exposes the character of the politicians around him

Donald Trump, who was then an improbable but officially declared candidate for the presidency, tweeted, “When will President Obama issue the words RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM? He can’t say it, and unless he will, the problem will not be solved!”

Trump, when presented with the chance to denounce, in plain, direct language, individuals who could fairly be described as “white supremacist terrorists,” or with some other equivalent formulation, instead resorted to euphemism and moral equivalence.

Obama’s critics argued throughout his presidency that his unwillingness to embrace the incantatory rhetoric of civilizational struggle—his reluctance to cast such groups as al-Qaeda and ISIS as vanguards of an all-encompassing ideological and theological challenge to the West—meant that, at the very least, he misunderstood the nature of the threat, or, more malignantly, that he understood the nature of the threat but was, through omission, declaring a kind of neutrality in the conflict between the United States and its principal adversary.

India’s top military commander has created shock waves by suggesting that Kashmiris could be shipped off to “deradicalization camps,” which rights activists consider an alarming echo of what China has done to many of its Muslim citizens.

But rights activists and Kashmiri intellectuals were deeply unsettled, saying that the general’s words revealed how the highest levels of the Indian military viewed Kashmiri people and that his comments could presage another disturbing turn of events.

Over the past three years, the Chinese government has corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into what it calls vocational training centers but what rights activists say are internment camps and prisons. The Uighurs, like Kashmiris, are Muslims who are part of a minority that is often viewed with suspicion by the central government.

Many countries, especially in the democratic West, champion freedom of expression and allow publications that lampoon Islam’s prophet.

So why is France singled out for protests and calls for boycotts across the Muslim world, and so often the target of deadly violence from the extremist margins?

brutal colonial past, staunch secular policies and tough-talking president who is seen as insensitive toward the Muslim faith