March 16, 2008
Spain’s Many Muslims Face Dearth of Mosques
By VICTORIA BURNETT
LLEIDA, Spain — As prayer time approached on a chilly Friday afternoon and men drifted toward the mosque on North Street, Hocine Kouitene hauled open its huge steel doors.
As places of worship go, the crudely converted garage leaves much to be desired, said Mr. Kouitene, vice president of the Islamic Association for Union and Cooperation in Lleida, a prosperous medieval town in northeastern Spain surrounded by fruit farms that are a magnet for immigrant workers. Freezing in winter and stifling in summer, the prayer hall is so cramped that the congregation, swollen to 1,000 from 50 over the past five years, sometimes spills onto the street.
“It’s just not the same to pray in a garage as it is to pray in a proper mosque,” said Mr. Kouitene, an imposing Algerian in a long, black coat and white head scarf. “We want a place where we can pray comfortably, without bothering anybody.”
Although Spain is peppered with the remnants of ancient mosques, most Muslims gather in dingy apartments, warehouses and garages like the one on North Street, pressed into service as prayer halls to accommodate a ballooning population.
The mosque shortage stems partly from the lack of resources common to any relatively poor, rapidly growing immigrant group. But in several places, Muslims trying to build mosques have also met resistance from communities wary of an alien culture or fearful they will foster violent radicals.
Distrust sharpened after a group of Islamists bombed commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004, killing 191 people, and in several cities, local governments, cowed by angry opposition from non-Muslims, have blocked Muslim groups from acquiring land for mosques.
The result, Muslim leaders say, is that some Muslims feel anchorless and marginalized.
“A proper mosque would act as a focus, a reference point for Islam here,” said Mohammed Halhoul, spokesman for the Catalan Islamic Council. A quarter of Spain’s Muslims live in Catalonia, the northeastern region that is home to Lleida, but the area has no real mosques.
“I feel like a Catalan,” Mr. Halhoul said, “except when it comes to the question of the mosque.”
Muslims ruled much of Spain for centuries, but after they were ultimately vanquished in the 1400s, their mosques were either left to ruin or converted into churches. Since then, fewer than a dozen new mosques have been built to serve Spain’s Muslim population, which has grown in the past 10 years to about one million from about 50,000 as immigrants have poured into the country.
That rise has coincided with a decline in church attendance in overwhelmingly Catholic Spain, giving new echo to an old rivalry between the two religions. It was the Catholic king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, who defeated the last Moorish ruler in Spain in 1492 and oversaw the expulsion of Jews and Muslims. Now, as churches struggle to draw a dwindling flock, Muslim prayer halls are overflowing.
“The reality of this country has changed much faster than that of other countries,” Ángel Ros, Lleida’s mayor, said in an interview. “A process that took 30 years in Italy or France has taken 10 years in Spain.”
Lleida is a case in point: a city whose 13th-century cathedral looms from a fortified hilltop over plains that produce half of Spain’s pears and apples, it has drawn a flood of immigrants. They now make up nearly a fifth of the city’s 125,000 residents, compared with 4 percent in 2000. A quarter of them are from Muslim countries. Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, has replaced Saturday as a day off in addition to Sunday on many local farms.
The North Street prayer hall faced opposition from the outset. Marta Roigé, head of the local neighborhood association, said residents tried to block it five years ago by renting the garage themselves, but backed down after the landlord started a bidding war. They have since sued the local council to close it down on the basis that it is a health and safety hazard.
“The tension has grown as the numbers have grown,” Ms. Roigé said. “They’ve set up shops, butchers, long-distance call centers and restaurants.” These businesses, catering to Muslim immigrants, line the surrounding streets.
She added: “They are radicals, fundamentalists. They don’t want to integrate.”
Muslim leaders, however, say the lack of proper mosques is one barrier to integration. And Spanish authorities and Muslim leaders say the potential for extremism would be easier to monitor at fewer, larger mosques than at the 600 or so prayer halls scattered throughout the country.
Some Muslim leaders believe the tide is starting to turn in their bid to return minarets to Spanish skylines. Following a pact between the Islamic Association and Lleida’s town hall in December, the city may become the first in Catalonia to build a mosque.
The association secured a 50-year lease on a plot of government land on the edge of town, and Mr. Kouitene says the group hopes to break ground next year if it can raise the money.
Several other Muslim communities are on the verge of similar breakthroughs. In the southern city of Seville, Muslims are close to obtaining a plot of land for a mosque after years of bitter local resistance; in 2005 protesters dumped a pig’s head on a plot originally chosen.
Meanwhile, the ruling coalition in Catalonia submitted a bill in the regional parliament in December that would oblige local governments to set aside land for mosques and other places of worship. Representatives of Muslim organizations hope it will inspire a similar national law.
“People are realizing the world has changed and they can’t look the other way,” said Mohammed Chaib, a member of the Catalan parliament and the only Muslim lawmaker in Spain.
Some Catholic clerics see things differently. Cardinal Luis Martínez Sistach, archbishop of Barcelona, opposes the bill, which would entitle all religious groups to land on an equal basis. He argues that Catholicism requires different rules.
“A church, a synagogue or a mosque are not the same thing,” he said, according to the conservative Spanish newspaper ABC. The bill, he said, “impinges on our ability to exercise a fundamental right, that of religious liberty.”
While no law on religious land use exists, the wealthy Catholic Church faces no difficulty acquiring land, experts in law and religion say.
Álex Seglers, an expert on church-state relations, is skeptical that the bill will be effective. The bill is vague and gives local governments too much discretion over what land it provides to which group, he says.
For the worshipers at North Street, the next big hurdle is money. Spain’s secular state cannot finance religious buildings, though it has a special arrangement to subsidize the Catholic Church.
“We have a saying in our religion,” Mr. Kouitene said. “Anywhere there are even a few Muslims, you must build a mosque for joint prayer. Otherwise, the devil rules in that place.”
Mayor Ros, for one, welcomes the building.
“We used to have a dominant religion, and now we have many religions and we have to find a way of respecting that fact,” he said. “Churches were the great public works of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. Now I see a day when every large city in Spain will have a mosque.”
ISLAM IN EUROPE
Practising Muslims 'will outnumber Christians by 2035'
By George Pitcher , Religion Editor
Last updated: 2:41 AM BST 08/05/2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1936418 ... 2035'.html
Practising Muslims will outnumber worshipping Christians in Britain within 30 years, according to research published today.
British Muslims perform their traditional prayers(photo)
By 2035, there will be about 1.96 million active Muslims in Britain, compared with 1.63 million church-going Christians, according to calculations by Christian Research, a think- tank.
The figures are published in the latest in a series of reports entitled Religious Trends.
The think-tank has warned that 4,000 churches could close by 2020 if congregations continue to shrink at current rates.
According to the most recent figures from the Church of England, regular Sunday, weekly and monthly attendance each fell by one per cent in 2006.
Fewer than a million people attend church every Sunday.
Although at the last count there were only 1.6million Muslims living in Britain – compared to 41million Christians – experts have suggested Muslims are more likely to practise their faith.
More than half of the Muslims who responded to the 2001 census said they prayed every day, compared to 6.3 per cent of Christians who attend church services each week.
Christian Research describes its aim as encouraging "change in Christian culture so that by 2010 more churches are growing".
The Church of England moved to discredit the research last night, criticising its methodology and saying the results were "flawed and dangerously misleading".
A C of E spokesman said: "These sorts of statistics, based on dubious presumptions, do no one of any faith any favours.
"Faith communities are not in competition and simplistic research like this is misleading and unhelpful."
The research does not compare like with like, according to the spokesman. The number of practising Muslims, for instance, is based on the number of people who said they were active in the 2001 census.
If the same process were applied to Christians it would give a figure of 20 million active churchgoers, according to Church House, the headquarters of the C of E.
The study used the number of adults on the Church's parish-based formal voting lists as the sole measure of its active "members".
This omitted large numbers who worship every week and are involved in their churches in other ways, according to Church House.
The Rev Lynda Barley, head of research and statistics for the Archbishops' Council, said last night: "There are more than 1.7 million people worshipping in a Church of England church or cathedral each month, a figure which is 30 per cent higher than the electoral roll figures and has remained stable since 2000.
"More are involved in fresh expressions of church and chaplaincies across the country and we have no reason to believe that this will drop significantly in the next decade.
"These statistics are incomplete and represent only a partial picture of religious trends in Britain today."
Story from Telegraph News:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1936418 ... 35%27.html
By George Pitcher , Religion Editor
Last updated: 2:41 AM BST 08/05/2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1936418 ... 2035'.html
Practising Muslims will outnumber worshipping Christians in Britain within 30 years, according to research published today.
British Muslims perform their traditional prayers(photo)
By 2035, there will be about 1.96 million active Muslims in Britain, compared with 1.63 million church-going Christians, according to calculations by Christian Research, a think- tank.
The figures are published in the latest in a series of reports entitled Religious Trends.
The think-tank has warned that 4,000 churches could close by 2020 if congregations continue to shrink at current rates.
According to the most recent figures from the Church of England, regular Sunday, weekly and monthly attendance each fell by one per cent in 2006.
Fewer than a million people attend church every Sunday.
Although at the last count there were only 1.6million Muslims living in Britain – compared to 41million Christians – experts have suggested Muslims are more likely to practise their faith.
More than half of the Muslims who responded to the 2001 census said they prayed every day, compared to 6.3 per cent of Christians who attend church services each week.
Christian Research describes its aim as encouraging "change in Christian culture so that by 2010 more churches are growing".
The Church of England moved to discredit the research last night, criticising its methodology and saying the results were "flawed and dangerously misleading".
A C of E spokesman said: "These sorts of statistics, based on dubious presumptions, do no one of any faith any favours.
"Faith communities are not in competition and simplistic research like this is misleading and unhelpful."
The research does not compare like with like, according to the spokesman. The number of practising Muslims, for instance, is based on the number of people who said they were active in the 2001 census.
If the same process were applied to Christians it would give a figure of 20 million active churchgoers, according to Church House, the headquarters of the C of E.
The study used the number of adults on the Church's parish-based formal voting lists as the sole measure of its active "members".
This omitted large numbers who worship every week and are involved in their churches in other ways, according to Church House.
The Rev Lynda Barley, head of research and statistics for the Archbishops' Council, said last night: "There are more than 1.7 million people worshipping in a Church of England church or cathedral each month, a figure which is 30 per cent higher than the electoral roll figures and has remained stable since 2000.
"More are involved in fresh expressions of church and chaplaincies across the country and we have no reason to believe that this will drop significantly in the next decade.
"These statistics are incomplete and represent only a partial picture of religious trends in Britain today."
Story from Telegraph News:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1936418 ... 35%27.html
June 8, 2008
Giving Young French Muslims a Close Look at the U.S.
By KATRIN BENNHOLD
CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France — For Karim Zéribi, the highlight was shaking the hand of Barack Obama. For Ali Zahi, it was meeting his childhood hero, the basketball star Magic Johnson. And Mohamed Hamidi was surprised to find a mosque in Washington that was bigger than the one in his parents’ village in Algeria.
Mr. Hamidi is a well-known blogger, Mr. Zahi is a mayoral aide in this Paris suburb, and Mr. Zéribi runs an employment agency. All are French, Muslim and under 42. All grew up and work in suburbs that became emblematic of the frustration among second- and third-generation immigrant youths that led to three weeks of riots in France in 2005.
And all three joined the small but growing ranks of influential Muslims in Europe invited to the United States on 21-day trips organized by the State Department as part of its International Visitor Leadership Program.
The longstanding program, which seeks to introduce future leaders from around the world to the United States, has become part of an American effort to reach out to Europe’s Muslims, especially the disaffected young people who American officials fear could fall prey to jihadist talk.
For the three men who participated in the program in recent months, the exposure to America softened views of a superpower generally distrusted and disliked in their communities.
“Many young people think that America is waging a war on Muslims,” said Mr. Zahi, 32, chief of staff for the mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois, where the 2005 rioting started after the deaths of two teenagers of African origin who were being chased by the police.
“I tell them America is many things,” said Mr. Zahi, who is also on his local town council. “It is a country that has a black presidential candidate and a self-confident Muslim community. I tell them the American people are hospitable and generous.”
But recent reports about the State Department program have also stoked something of a backlash, with some in the news media accusing the participants of being seduced by a program meant to spy on the Muslim community.
The International Visitor program started in the 1930s. Alumni include President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — and the discovery that they were planned by Islamists who lived in Hamburg, Germany — the State Department made reaching out to Europe’s Muslims a priority, according to James L. Bullock, director of public affairs at the United States Embassy in Paris.
France became one focus because of the size of its Muslim community — the largest in Western Europe, with an estimated five million people — and the anger at discrimination and unemployment that was evidenced in the riots. From 25 to 30 French citizens are chosen each year to go to the United States under the program; since the 2005 riots, about a dozen have been Muslim.
Mr. Bullock said the number of Muslims is larger than before, part of the effort to reach minorities for whom “America has become a voodoo doll.” Beyond “delegitimizing the appeal of terrorist recruiters,” Mr. Bullock said, the tours are a way for some Americans to become acquainted with “the future movers and shakers of Europe.”
The United States is trying to reach out to France’s suburbs in other ways as well, by directing some of its small cultural grants to those communities. The embassy has provided grants of $1,000 to $5,000 for events like a conference aimed at identifying new-media talent in the suburbs, Mr. Bullock said.
But even this modest American effort has raised concerns in France. One television documentary on America’s cultural programs in the suburbs and the visitor program included the headline: “The C.I.A. in the suburbs.” And the left-leaning magazine Marianne warned of an “American takeover of Arabs and blacks.”
Mr. Zahi, whose trip last fall took him to Texas, Arkansas, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and New York, said he had felt a backlash. When the newspaper Le Parisien, which is widely read in the suburbs, wrote about his trip, the article appeared opposite one alleging that the Central Intelligence Agency was recruiting in the suburbs and a cartoon of a Muslim using an American flag as his prayer mat. After that, several people accused him of being a spy, Mr. Zahi said.
The French government has conducted similar programs with the United States. When a spike in anti-Semitic vandalism in France drew widespread coverage in American news media in 2002, the French Foreign Ministry sought young Jewish leaders and journalists for its visitor program, said Justin Vaisse, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who at the time was an adviser to the French Foreign Ministry. “Often,” he said, “it is just a matter of showing people that the country is more complex than a media cliché.”
Mr. Zéribi, 41, who in addition to running the employment agency is a politician in Marseille, and Mr. Hamidi, 35, the editor of the popular Bondy Blog, returned from the United States last month.
“It was not all pretty,” Mr. Hamidi said, describing rough parts of Washington and visible poverty on the streets of New York City.
But he and Mr. Zéribi were impressed to see people of every color in government offices in Washington. In Los Angeles, they met a Saudi-American teacher preparing to run in local elections. In Jackson, Miss., they spent half a day patrolling with a black police officer.
After shaking Mr. Obama’s hand at a political rally in Philadelphia, Mr. Hamidi shared the experience on his blog, which covers current affairs.
Mr. Zéribi, the son of an Algerian father and an Algerian-French mother, said that he had always thought America’s minorities culturally isolated, but that the trip changed his view.
“I saw the American Dream with my own eyes,” he said. “Barack Obama incarnates that dream.” Mr. Zéribi said that he, like Mr. Obama, had one Muslim grandmother and one Christian grandmother.
“I’m not naïve,” said Mr. Hamidi, who besides his work on the blog is a high school teacher. “I know why they invited us, but this was not clumsy lobbying. It was fun and we learned a lot.”
He has watched first-hand the growth of anti-American sentiment in recent years, he said. Some of his students became intrigued by jihadist ideology in the 1990s, he said, then turned against America in 2003 after the start of the Iraq war. A factor continuing to fuel anti-Americanism, he said, is the perception that Washington’s unstinting support of Israel is unfair to the Palestinians.
All three men said that as a result of participating in the program they had learned as much about France and its prejudices as they had about the United States.
Mr. Zahi and Mr. Zéribi contend that the backlash in the French media was stoked by anti-immigrant feelings. “It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious, people saying we are agents,” Mr. Zéribi said. “When did anyone ever accuse any of the white French politicians on that program of working for the C.I.A.?”
Mr. Zahi said that French elites, unlike Americans, had trouble imagining members of minority groups as future leaders. “Maybe that is why some of the reactions in the French establishment were so paranoid when they learned that America is doing something for the French suburbs,” he said. “Maybe they are afraid of a French Obama.”
Giving Young French Muslims a Close Look at the U.S.
By KATRIN BENNHOLD
CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France — For Karim Zéribi, the highlight was shaking the hand of Barack Obama. For Ali Zahi, it was meeting his childhood hero, the basketball star Magic Johnson. And Mohamed Hamidi was surprised to find a mosque in Washington that was bigger than the one in his parents’ village in Algeria.
Mr. Hamidi is a well-known blogger, Mr. Zahi is a mayoral aide in this Paris suburb, and Mr. Zéribi runs an employment agency. All are French, Muslim and under 42. All grew up and work in suburbs that became emblematic of the frustration among second- and third-generation immigrant youths that led to three weeks of riots in France in 2005.
And all three joined the small but growing ranks of influential Muslims in Europe invited to the United States on 21-day trips organized by the State Department as part of its International Visitor Leadership Program.
The longstanding program, which seeks to introduce future leaders from around the world to the United States, has become part of an American effort to reach out to Europe’s Muslims, especially the disaffected young people who American officials fear could fall prey to jihadist talk.
For the three men who participated in the program in recent months, the exposure to America softened views of a superpower generally distrusted and disliked in their communities.
“Many young people think that America is waging a war on Muslims,” said Mr. Zahi, 32, chief of staff for the mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois, where the 2005 rioting started after the deaths of two teenagers of African origin who were being chased by the police.
“I tell them America is many things,” said Mr. Zahi, who is also on his local town council. “It is a country that has a black presidential candidate and a self-confident Muslim community. I tell them the American people are hospitable and generous.”
But recent reports about the State Department program have also stoked something of a backlash, with some in the news media accusing the participants of being seduced by a program meant to spy on the Muslim community.
The International Visitor program started in the 1930s. Alumni include President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — and the discovery that they were planned by Islamists who lived in Hamburg, Germany — the State Department made reaching out to Europe’s Muslims a priority, according to James L. Bullock, director of public affairs at the United States Embassy in Paris.
France became one focus because of the size of its Muslim community — the largest in Western Europe, with an estimated five million people — and the anger at discrimination and unemployment that was evidenced in the riots. From 25 to 30 French citizens are chosen each year to go to the United States under the program; since the 2005 riots, about a dozen have been Muslim.
Mr. Bullock said the number of Muslims is larger than before, part of the effort to reach minorities for whom “America has become a voodoo doll.” Beyond “delegitimizing the appeal of terrorist recruiters,” Mr. Bullock said, the tours are a way for some Americans to become acquainted with “the future movers and shakers of Europe.”
The United States is trying to reach out to France’s suburbs in other ways as well, by directing some of its small cultural grants to those communities. The embassy has provided grants of $1,000 to $5,000 for events like a conference aimed at identifying new-media talent in the suburbs, Mr. Bullock said.
But even this modest American effort has raised concerns in France. One television documentary on America’s cultural programs in the suburbs and the visitor program included the headline: “The C.I.A. in the suburbs.” And the left-leaning magazine Marianne warned of an “American takeover of Arabs and blacks.”
Mr. Zahi, whose trip last fall took him to Texas, Arkansas, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and New York, said he had felt a backlash. When the newspaper Le Parisien, which is widely read in the suburbs, wrote about his trip, the article appeared opposite one alleging that the Central Intelligence Agency was recruiting in the suburbs and a cartoon of a Muslim using an American flag as his prayer mat. After that, several people accused him of being a spy, Mr. Zahi said.
The French government has conducted similar programs with the United States. When a spike in anti-Semitic vandalism in France drew widespread coverage in American news media in 2002, the French Foreign Ministry sought young Jewish leaders and journalists for its visitor program, said Justin Vaisse, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who at the time was an adviser to the French Foreign Ministry. “Often,” he said, “it is just a matter of showing people that the country is more complex than a media cliché.”
Mr. Zéribi, 41, who in addition to running the employment agency is a politician in Marseille, and Mr. Hamidi, 35, the editor of the popular Bondy Blog, returned from the United States last month.
“It was not all pretty,” Mr. Hamidi said, describing rough parts of Washington and visible poverty on the streets of New York City.
But he and Mr. Zéribi were impressed to see people of every color in government offices in Washington. In Los Angeles, they met a Saudi-American teacher preparing to run in local elections. In Jackson, Miss., they spent half a day patrolling with a black police officer.
After shaking Mr. Obama’s hand at a political rally in Philadelphia, Mr. Hamidi shared the experience on his blog, which covers current affairs.
Mr. Zéribi, the son of an Algerian father and an Algerian-French mother, said that he had always thought America’s minorities culturally isolated, but that the trip changed his view.
“I saw the American Dream with my own eyes,” he said. “Barack Obama incarnates that dream.” Mr. Zéribi said that he, like Mr. Obama, had one Muslim grandmother and one Christian grandmother.
“I’m not naïve,” said Mr. Hamidi, who besides his work on the blog is a high school teacher. “I know why they invited us, but this was not clumsy lobbying. It was fun and we learned a lot.”
He has watched first-hand the growth of anti-American sentiment in recent years, he said. Some of his students became intrigued by jihadist ideology in the 1990s, he said, then turned against America in 2003 after the start of the Iraq war. A factor continuing to fuel anti-Americanism, he said, is the perception that Washington’s unstinting support of Israel is unfair to the Palestinians.
All three men said that as a result of participating in the program they had learned as much about France and its prejudices as they had about the United States.
Mr. Zahi and Mr. Zéribi contend that the backlash in the French media was stoked by anti-immigrant feelings. “It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious, people saying we are agents,” Mr. Zéribi said. “When did anyone ever accuse any of the white French politicians on that program of working for the C.I.A.?”
Mr. Zahi said that French elites, unlike Americans, had trouble imagining members of minority groups as future leaders. “Maybe that is why some of the reactions in the French establishment were so paranoid when they learned that America is doing something for the French suburbs,” he said. “Maybe they are afraid of a French Obama.”
There is a related video linked at:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121581460304047109.html
Why Islam Is Unfunny for a Cartoonist
The arrest of a controversial Dutch cartoonist has set off a wave of protests. The case is raising questions for a changing Europe about free speech, religion and art.
By ANDREW HIGGINS
July 12, 2008; Page W1
Amsterdam
On a sunny May morning, six plainclothes police officers, two uniformed policemen and a trio of functionaries from the state prosecutor's office closed in on a small apartment in Amsterdam. Their quarry: a skinny Dutch cartoonist with a rude sense of humor. Informed that he was suspected of sketching offensive drawings of Muslims and other minorities, the Dutchman surrendered without a struggle.
"I never expected the Spanish Inquisition," recalls the cartoonist, who goes by the nom de plume Gregorius Nekschot, quoting the British comedy team Monty Python. A fan of ribald gags, he's a caustic foe of religion, particularly Islam. The Quran, crucifixion, sexual organs and goats are among his favorite motifs.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
See examples of cartoons and caricatures from over the years that have skewered political and religious authority.
Mr. Nekschot, whose cartoons had appeared mainly on his own Web site, spent the night in a jail cell. Police grabbed his computer, a hard drive and sketch pads. He's been summoned for further questioning later this month by prosecutors. He hasn't been charged with a crime, but the prosecutor's office says he's been under investigation for three years on suspicion that he violated a Dutch law that forbids discrimination on the basis of race, religion or sexual orientation.
The cartoon affair has come as a shock to a country that sees itself as a bastion of tolerance, a tradition forged by grim memories of bloody conflict between Catholics and Protestants. The Netherlands sheltered Jews and other refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, and Calvinists fleeing persecution in France. Its thinkers helped nurture the 18th-century Enlightenment. Prostitutes, marijuana and pornography have been legal for decades.
"This is serious. It is about freedom of speech," says Mark Rutte, the leader of a center-right opposition party. Some of Mr. Nekschot's oeuvre is "really disgusting," he says, "but that is free speech."
The saga has turned the previously obscure artist into a national celebrity. His predicament reprises, with a curious twist, a drama that debuted in Denmark just over two years ago. Then, Danish cartoonists published a series of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in the nation's Jyllands-Posten newspaper. The drawings set off a tempest of often violent protests across the Muslim world and a fierce debate in Europe about how to balance secular and sacred values. One of the Danish cartoonists fled his house and went into hiding late last year after the state security service uncovered a murder plot against him. (The elderly artist is now back at home, guarded by police.) Last month, a suicide bomber killed six in an attack on the Danish Embassy in Pakistan.
The Dutch scenario involves similar issues but has followed a very different script. This time the state has stepped in to rein in the artist, rather than protect him, and it is secular champions of free speech who are angry. They haven't resorted to violence but have stirred up a political storm. Parliament held an emergency debate on the affair and cartoonists have bombarded the Dutch Justice Ministry with a blizzard of faxed protest caricatures.
Amke
"Denmark protects its cartoonists. We arrest them," says Geert Wilders, a populist member of the Dutch Parliament famous for his dyed-blond bouffant hairdo and incendiary denunciations of the Quran as an Islamic version of Hitler's "Mein Kampf." The arrested cartoonist, says Mr. Wilders, is "a bit obsessed" with Muslims and sex, but "it is not bad for artists to have a little obsession."
How to handle Muslim sensitivities is one of Europe's most prickly issues. Islam is Europe's fastest-growing religion, with immigrants from Muslim lands often rejecting a drift toward secularism in what used to be known as Christendom. About 6% of Holland's 16.3 million people are Muslims, and nearly half of Amsterdam's population is of foreign origin. Some predict the city could have a Muslim majority within a decade or so.
The contrasting Danish and Dutch responses "show that there is a serious struggle of ideas going on for the future of Europe," says Flemming Rose, a Danish newspaper editor who commissioned the drawings of Muhammad in Jyllands-Posten. At stake, he says, is whether democracy protects the right to offend or embraces religious taboos so that "citizens have a right not to be offended."
In Britain, a local police force got caught up recently in a flap over its use of a German shepherd puppy to promote an emergency hotline. A Muslim councilor, noting that dogs are viewed as unclean in Islam, complained that the puppy could turn off believers. The police force apologized and regretted not consulting its diversity officer.
In Switzerland, meanwhile, a bombastic anti-immigration political party is campaigning to ban all Muslim prayer towers, known as minarets. This week it gathered enough signatures to force a national referendum on the issue. The Swiss government says such a ban would violate freedom of religion and pose a security threat by provoking Muslims.
Afshin Ellian, an Iranian-born history of law professor at Holland's Leiden University, says he fled Tehran to escape religious taboos and now worries that Europe is "importing problems from the Middle East." He understands why Muslims, Christians and other devout believers might take offense at certain cartoons, paintings or texts, but he calls it "a matter of aesthetics not criminal law."
The inquiry into Mr. Nekschot's case is being led by an Amsterdam prosecutor unit that specializes in combating neo-Nazis and other hate-mongers. The cartoonist denies any links to fascist or other extremist groups. He says he loathes all ideologies and all religions as recipes for tyranny.
Mr. Nekschot, who calls the investigation "surreal," says, "Not even Monty Python could have come up with this." (His pen name, Gregorius Nekschot, is a mocking tribute to Gregory IX, a 13th-century pope who set up a Vatican department to hunt down and execute heretics. Nekschot means "shot in the neck" in Dutch.) Some Muslim groups have voiced dismay at his arrest as well. The head of an organization of Moroccan preachers in Holland said authorities seemed "more afraid" of offending Islam than Muslims.
"We are led by the law," says Franklin Wattimena, a spokesman for the Amsterdam Public Prosecutor's Office. He denies any attempt to squelch free speech and says locking Mr. Nekschot up overnight was probably a "mistake."
If formally charged and taken to court, Mr. Nekschot risks up to two years in prison and a maximum fine of €16,750, or about $26,430, says his Amsterdam lawyer, Max Vermeij. He thinks the odds on his client being prosecuted are better than even but draws some comfort from recent Dutch court rulings in discrimination cases that mostly came down on the side of free speech.
Mr. Nekschot himself is very worried. "I'm afraid of getting a judge who doesn't have a sense of humor," he says.
He's also worried that his identity will get exposed if he goes to court. This, says the cartoonist, could make him a target for attack like Theo van Gogh, a polemical filmmaker and foul-mouthed celebrity murdered by an Islamic extremist in November 2004. Mr. Van Gogh was a fan of Mr. Nekschot's work and posted his drawings on his own Web site, The Happy Smoker.
Justice Minister Hirsch Ballin, when grilled about the cartoon affair in Parliament, promised to protect Mr. Nekshot's anonymity so as "to guarantee the suspect's safety." (The Wall Street Journal also agreed not to publish Mr. Nekschot's real name.)
But the minister, a devout Christian, added fuel to a mounting political furor by revealing the existence of a previously secret bureaucratic body, called the Interdepartmental Working Group on Cartoons. Officials later explained that the cartoon group had no censorship duties and had been set up after the 2006 Danish cartoon crisis to alert Dutch officials to any risks the Netherlands might face. The group examined Mr. Nekschot's work, say officials, but played no part in his arrest. Headed by a senior bureaucrat from a national agency coordinating counterterrorism, it draws from the intelligence service, the interior minister, the prosecutor's office and various other government bodies.
Until his brush with the law, Mr. Nekschot was barely known outside a narrow circle of Internet-savvy aficionados. Newspapers shunned his caricatures. "They all said 'no way,' " he recalls. "They thought I was too offensive, too explicit and too strong on sensitive issues like religion." He set up his own Web site, at www.gregoriusnekschot.nl/blog, in 2003 to break the blockade. He published two books, "Sick Jokes" in 2006 and "Sick Jokes 2" earlier this year, but sales languished. A big book distributor refused to touch them.
Today, he's a cult phenomenon. Hits on his Web site went from a few thousand a day to over 100,000 a day when news of his arrest broke, he says. Newspapers that wanted nothing to do with him now print his work. He's been interviewed on television -- with his face hidden -- and his work is currently on display in the Parliament building, where Mr. Rutte, the politician, has set up a "free-thinkers space." Other exhibits include poems by Mr. Van Gogh, the murdered filmmaker, and abstract paintings of seminaked women that were banished from a town hall in central Holland after complaints from Christians and Muslims.
Guessing Mr. Nekschot's true identity has become a media parlor game -- to the chagrin of one prominent cartoonist who was named in print, wrongly, as the mystery man. The case has also stirred much speculation in the media and Parliament about why an apparently dormant investigation first launched in 2005 suddenly became so urgent that Mr. Nekschot had to be snatched from his home without warning. The prosecutor's office says it simply took a long time to figure out Mr. Nekschot's true identity and then find him.
Others say the timing of his arrest suggests an attempt by authorities to soothe Muslims angry over the March release on the Internet of "Fitna," a short film by Mr. Wilders, the Dutch legislator. The film, which denounces "hateful verses from the Quran," infuriated many Muslims and also Dutch leaders, who had urged that it not be released.
Officials deny any connection. The prosecutor's office notes that it has also taken action against Muslims suspected of discrimination. A Moroccan-born Dutchman was recently convicted of discrimination for writing in a blog that homosexuals should be tossed from rooftops and thrown down stairs. A court ordered him to do community-service work.
Mr. Nekschot makes no apologies for causing offense. "Harmless humor does not exist," he says. "I like strong stuff."
But, eager to stay out of prison, he's pruned his Web site of eight cartoons that prosecutors say are the focus of their investigation. Deleted were cartoons of a Muslim at the North Pole engaging in deviant sex, and of a black youth waving two pistols at a left-wing do-gooder wearing a peace sign.
Among the cartoons that survived his cut is a drawing of Mr. Van Gogh's jailed killer naked on his prison bed. It shows him leering salaciously at a copy of the Quran and lamenting that the holy book doesn't have any pictures.
The cartoonist blames his woes on what he calls Holland's "political correctness industry," a network of often state-funded organizations set up to protect Muslims and other minority groups. One of these, an Internet monitoring group known as MDI, says it received dozens of complaints about the cartoonist's mockery of Islam and first reported him to the prosecutor's office in 2005.
"We're not sure what he does is illegal, but there is a possibility that it is not legal," says the group's head, Niels van Tamelen. Many of the complaints, he says, came from followers of a controversial Muslim convert called Abdul-Jabbar van de Ven.
Mr. Van de Ven caused an uproar after the 2004 murder of Mr. Van Gogh, when he seemed to welcome the killing on national TV. He said Mr. Wilders, the anti-immigrant legislator, also deserved to die, preferably from cancer. Mr. Nekschot, appalled by the outburst, caricatured the convert as a fatwa-spewing fanatic.
Mr. Van de Ven says he's glad to see Mr. Nekschot in trouble. The cartoonist deserves prosecution, he says, for "disgusting cartoons about our beloved prophet Muhammad, may Allah's peace and blessings be upon him." Politicians who cry about free speech, he says, "shouldn't stick their noses into judicial matters."
Mr. Nekschot says everyone is entitled to their opinions. "If people say my cartoons are disgusting that is fine by me. I see lots of things I don't like. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
Write to Andrew Higgins at [email protected]
****
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121582719248648031.html
Ruling May Heighten France-Muslim Tension
By DAVID GAUTHIER-VILLARS and STACY MEICHTRY
July 12, 2008; Page A6
PARIS -- In the latest clash between religion and secular tradition in France, a court has denied citizenship to a Moroccan woman on the grounds that she practices a radical form of Islam that prevented her from assimilating French culture.
In a recent ruling, the Conseil d'Etat, France's highest court, dismissed an appeal by Faiza Mabchour to recognize her right to become French because she is married to a Frenchman.
Upholding a judgment from 2005, the court said that while Ms. Mabchour speaks fluent French, her religious practices are "not compatible with the essential values of the French community, notably the principle of gender equality."
The court based its decision on immigration-police reports saying that Ms. Mabchour acted submissively before her husband and, during questioning, wore a garment that fully covered her body and concealed her face, an official at the Conseil d'Etat said.
Many devout Muslim women wear headscarves, but only a small minority hide the face, a custom often associated with the Salafi strain of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia.
Ms. Mabchour, who lives in a suburb south of Paris, couldn't be reached on Friday. Neighbors said she had left for a vacation in Morocco.
The ruling is the latest chapter in France's struggle to square its secular ideals with the traditional and religious beliefs of Europe's largest Muslim community.
The denial of citizenship for Ms. Mabchour could exacerbate tensions between France's Muslim community and the country's political establishment, since the ruling essentially extends the demands of French secularism into what has been considered a private sphere -- the home. The ruling, issued on June 27, was disclosed by a report in French daily Le Monde on Friday.
French Muslim leaders urged caution. "I hope people won't judge the entire Muslim community of France by this example," said Moroccan-born Mohamed Béchari, president of the National Federation of French Muslims. "Muslims are not oppressed in France."
The Conseil d'Etat ruling comes as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who this week took the reins of the European Union's six-month rotating presidency, is urging the 27-nation bloc to follow France's example and toughen immigration rules.
Mr. Sarkozy has introduced measures aimed at better integrating France's large immigrant population into mainstream society. As interior minister, he helped push through legislation requiring immigrants seeking work visas to speak French.
Since the beginning of the year, immigrants must sign a "contract of integration" that attests to their support for French ideals such as "laicite," or "secularism," or risk expulsion. They must also attend a day-long course on French history.
Although France's constitution guarantees freedom of religion, many French people regard religion as a private matter. That strict separation between church and state has come under severe strain as the country's growing Muslim population seeks to express its religious traditions in public settings.
In 2004, Parliament drew a line in the sand by banning religious symbols, including Islamic headscarves, from public spaces such as schools. The ban sparked widespread protests among Muslims who argued that the law infringed on their religious rights.
Tensions again flared after a court in the northern city of Lille in April annulled a marriage between a French engineer who had converted to Islam and a French woman of North African origins.
The grounds of the ruling: the husband had been misled, discovering that his bride wasn't a virgin on their wedding night. Justice Minister Rachida Dati, the daughter of North African immigrants, has filed an appeal of the decision.
--Andrew Higgins contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121581460304047109.html
Why Islam Is Unfunny for a Cartoonist
The arrest of a controversial Dutch cartoonist has set off a wave of protests. The case is raising questions for a changing Europe about free speech, religion and art.
By ANDREW HIGGINS
July 12, 2008; Page W1
Amsterdam
On a sunny May morning, six plainclothes police officers, two uniformed policemen and a trio of functionaries from the state prosecutor's office closed in on a small apartment in Amsterdam. Their quarry: a skinny Dutch cartoonist with a rude sense of humor. Informed that he was suspected of sketching offensive drawings of Muslims and other minorities, the Dutchman surrendered without a struggle.
"I never expected the Spanish Inquisition," recalls the cartoonist, who goes by the nom de plume Gregorius Nekschot, quoting the British comedy team Monty Python. A fan of ribald gags, he's a caustic foe of religion, particularly Islam. The Quran, crucifixion, sexual organs and goats are among his favorite motifs.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
See examples of cartoons and caricatures from over the years that have skewered political and religious authority.
Mr. Nekschot, whose cartoons had appeared mainly on his own Web site, spent the night in a jail cell. Police grabbed his computer, a hard drive and sketch pads. He's been summoned for further questioning later this month by prosecutors. He hasn't been charged with a crime, but the prosecutor's office says he's been under investigation for three years on suspicion that he violated a Dutch law that forbids discrimination on the basis of race, religion or sexual orientation.
The cartoon affair has come as a shock to a country that sees itself as a bastion of tolerance, a tradition forged by grim memories of bloody conflict between Catholics and Protestants. The Netherlands sheltered Jews and other refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, and Calvinists fleeing persecution in France. Its thinkers helped nurture the 18th-century Enlightenment. Prostitutes, marijuana and pornography have been legal for decades.
"This is serious. It is about freedom of speech," says Mark Rutte, the leader of a center-right opposition party. Some of Mr. Nekschot's oeuvre is "really disgusting," he says, "but that is free speech."
The saga has turned the previously obscure artist into a national celebrity. His predicament reprises, with a curious twist, a drama that debuted in Denmark just over two years ago. Then, Danish cartoonists published a series of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in the nation's Jyllands-Posten newspaper. The drawings set off a tempest of often violent protests across the Muslim world and a fierce debate in Europe about how to balance secular and sacred values. One of the Danish cartoonists fled his house and went into hiding late last year after the state security service uncovered a murder plot against him. (The elderly artist is now back at home, guarded by police.) Last month, a suicide bomber killed six in an attack on the Danish Embassy in Pakistan.
The Dutch scenario involves similar issues but has followed a very different script. This time the state has stepped in to rein in the artist, rather than protect him, and it is secular champions of free speech who are angry. They haven't resorted to violence but have stirred up a political storm. Parliament held an emergency debate on the affair and cartoonists have bombarded the Dutch Justice Ministry with a blizzard of faxed protest caricatures.
Amke
"Denmark protects its cartoonists. We arrest them," says Geert Wilders, a populist member of the Dutch Parliament famous for his dyed-blond bouffant hairdo and incendiary denunciations of the Quran as an Islamic version of Hitler's "Mein Kampf." The arrested cartoonist, says Mr. Wilders, is "a bit obsessed" with Muslims and sex, but "it is not bad for artists to have a little obsession."
How to handle Muslim sensitivities is one of Europe's most prickly issues. Islam is Europe's fastest-growing religion, with immigrants from Muslim lands often rejecting a drift toward secularism in what used to be known as Christendom. About 6% of Holland's 16.3 million people are Muslims, and nearly half of Amsterdam's population is of foreign origin. Some predict the city could have a Muslim majority within a decade or so.
The contrasting Danish and Dutch responses "show that there is a serious struggle of ideas going on for the future of Europe," says Flemming Rose, a Danish newspaper editor who commissioned the drawings of Muhammad in Jyllands-Posten. At stake, he says, is whether democracy protects the right to offend or embraces religious taboos so that "citizens have a right not to be offended."
In Britain, a local police force got caught up recently in a flap over its use of a German shepherd puppy to promote an emergency hotline. A Muslim councilor, noting that dogs are viewed as unclean in Islam, complained that the puppy could turn off believers. The police force apologized and regretted not consulting its diversity officer.
In Switzerland, meanwhile, a bombastic anti-immigration political party is campaigning to ban all Muslim prayer towers, known as minarets. This week it gathered enough signatures to force a national referendum on the issue. The Swiss government says such a ban would violate freedom of religion and pose a security threat by provoking Muslims.
Afshin Ellian, an Iranian-born history of law professor at Holland's Leiden University, says he fled Tehran to escape religious taboos and now worries that Europe is "importing problems from the Middle East." He understands why Muslims, Christians and other devout believers might take offense at certain cartoons, paintings or texts, but he calls it "a matter of aesthetics not criminal law."
The inquiry into Mr. Nekschot's case is being led by an Amsterdam prosecutor unit that specializes in combating neo-Nazis and other hate-mongers. The cartoonist denies any links to fascist or other extremist groups. He says he loathes all ideologies and all religions as recipes for tyranny.
Mr. Nekschot, who calls the investigation "surreal," says, "Not even Monty Python could have come up with this." (His pen name, Gregorius Nekschot, is a mocking tribute to Gregory IX, a 13th-century pope who set up a Vatican department to hunt down and execute heretics. Nekschot means "shot in the neck" in Dutch.) Some Muslim groups have voiced dismay at his arrest as well. The head of an organization of Moroccan preachers in Holland said authorities seemed "more afraid" of offending Islam than Muslims.
"We are led by the law," says Franklin Wattimena, a spokesman for the Amsterdam Public Prosecutor's Office. He denies any attempt to squelch free speech and says locking Mr. Nekschot up overnight was probably a "mistake."
If formally charged and taken to court, Mr. Nekschot risks up to two years in prison and a maximum fine of €16,750, or about $26,430, says his Amsterdam lawyer, Max Vermeij. He thinks the odds on his client being prosecuted are better than even but draws some comfort from recent Dutch court rulings in discrimination cases that mostly came down on the side of free speech.
Mr. Nekschot himself is very worried. "I'm afraid of getting a judge who doesn't have a sense of humor," he says.
He's also worried that his identity will get exposed if he goes to court. This, says the cartoonist, could make him a target for attack like Theo van Gogh, a polemical filmmaker and foul-mouthed celebrity murdered by an Islamic extremist in November 2004. Mr. Van Gogh was a fan of Mr. Nekschot's work and posted his drawings on his own Web site, The Happy Smoker.
Justice Minister Hirsch Ballin, when grilled about the cartoon affair in Parliament, promised to protect Mr. Nekshot's anonymity so as "to guarantee the suspect's safety." (The Wall Street Journal also agreed not to publish Mr. Nekschot's real name.)
But the minister, a devout Christian, added fuel to a mounting political furor by revealing the existence of a previously secret bureaucratic body, called the Interdepartmental Working Group on Cartoons. Officials later explained that the cartoon group had no censorship duties and had been set up after the 2006 Danish cartoon crisis to alert Dutch officials to any risks the Netherlands might face. The group examined Mr. Nekschot's work, say officials, but played no part in his arrest. Headed by a senior bureaucrat from a national agency coordinating counterterrorism, it draws from the intelligence service, the interior minister, the prosecutor's office and various other government bodies.
Until his brush with the law, Mr. Nekschot was barely known outside a narrow circle of Internet-savvy aficionados. Newspapers shunned his caricatures. "They all said 'no way,' " he recalls. "They thought I was too offensive, too explicit and too strong on sensitive issues like religion." He set up his own Web site, at www.gregoriusnekschot.nl/blog, in 2003 to break the blockade. He published two books, "Sick Jokes" in 2006 and "Sick Jokes 2" earlier this year, but sales languished. A big book distributor refused to touch them.
Today, he's a cult phenomenon. Hits on his Web site went from a few thousand a day to over 100,000 a day when news of his arrest broke, he says. Newspapers that wanted nothing to do with him now print his work. He's been interviewed on television -- with his face hidden -- and his work is currently on display in the Parliament building, where Mr. Rutte, the politician, has set up a "free-thinkers space." Other exhibits include poems by Mr. Van Gogh, the murdered filmmaker, and abstract paintings of seminaked women that were banished from a town hall in central Holland after complaints from Christians and Muslims.
Guessing Mr. Nekschot's true identity has become a media parlor game -- to the chagrin of one prominent cartoonist who was named in print, wrongly, as the mystery man. The case has also stirred much speculation in the media and Parliament about why an apparently dormant investigation first launched in 2005 suddenly became so urgent that Mr. Nekschot had to be snatched from his home without warning. The prosecutor's office says it simply took a long time to figure out Mr. Nekschot's true identity and then find him.
Others say the timing of his arrest suggests an attempt by authorities to soothe Muslims angry over the March release on the Internet of "Fitna," a short film by Mr. Wilders, the Dutch legislator. The film, which denounces "hateful verses from the Quran," infuriated many Muslims and also Dutch leaders, who had urged that it not be released.
Officials deny any connection. The prosecutor's office notes that it has also taken action against Muslims suspected of discrimination. A Moroccan-born Dutchman was recently convicted of discrimination for writing in a blog that homosexuals should be tossed from rooftops and thrown down stairs. A court ordered him to do community-service work.
Mr. Nekschot makes no apologies for causing offense. "Harmless humor does not exist," he says. "I like strong stuff."
But, eager to stay out of prison, he's pruned his Web site of eight cartoons that prosecutors say are the focus of their investigation. Deleted were cartoons of a Muslim at the North Pole engaging in deviant sex, and of a black youth waving two pistols at a left-wing do-gooder wearing a peace sign.
Among the cartoons that survived his cut is a drawing of Mr. Van Gogh's jailed killer naked on his prison bed. It shows him leering salaciously at a copy of the Quran and lamenting that the holy book doesn't have any pictures.
The cartoonist blames his woes on what he calls Holland's "political correctness industry," a network of often state-funded organizations set up to protect Muslims and other minority groups. One of these, an Internet monitoring group known as MDI, says it received dozens of complaints about the cartoonist's mockery of Islam and first reported him to the prosecutor's office in 2005.
"We're not sure what he does is illegal, but there is a possibility that it is not legal," says the group's head, Niels van Tamelen. Many of the complaints, he says, came from followers of a controversial Muslim convert called Abdul-Jabbar van de Ven.
Mr. Van de Ven caused an uproar after the 2004 murder of Mr. Van Gogh, when he seemed to welcome the killing on national TV. He said Mr. Wilders, the anti-immigrant legislator, also deserved to die, preferably from cancer. Mr. Nekschot, appalled by the outburst, caricatured the convert as a fatwa-spewing fanatic.
Mr. Van de Ven says he's glad to see Mr. Nekschot in trouble. The cartoonist deserves prosecution, he says, for "disgusting cartoons about our beloved prophet Muhammad, may Allah's peace and blessings be upon him." Politicians who cry about free speech, he says, "shouldn't stick their noses into judicial matters."
Mr. Nekschot says everyone is entitled to their opinions. "If people say my cartoons are disgusting that is fine by me. I see lots of things I don't like. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
Write to Andrew Higgins at [email protected]
****
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121582719248648031.html
Ruling May Heighten France-Muslim Tension
By DAVID GAUTHIER-VILLARS and STACY MEICHTRY
July 12, 2008; Page A6
PARIS -- In the latest clash between religion and secular tradition in France, a court has denied citizenship to a Moroccan woman on the grounds that she practices a radical form of Islam that prevented her from assimilating French culture.
In a recent ruling, the Conseil d'Etat, France's highest court, dismissed an appeal by Faiza Mabchour to recognize her right to become French because she is married to a Frenchman.
Upholding a judgment from 2005, the court said that while Ms. Mabchour speaks fluent French, her religious practices are "not compatible with the essential values of the French community, notably the principle of gender equality."
The court based its decision on immigration-police reports saying that Ms. Mabchour acted submissively before her husband and, during questioning, wore a garment that fully covered her body and concealed her face, an official at the Conseil d'Etat said.
Many devout Muslim women wear headscarves, but only a small minority hide the face, a custom often associated with the Salafi strain of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia.
Ms. Mabchour, who lives in a suburb south of Paris, couldn't be reached on Friday. Neighbors said she had left for a vacation in Morocco.
The ruling is the latest chapter in France's struggle to square its secular ideals with the traditional and religious beliefs of Europe's largest Muslim community.
The denial of citizenship for Ms. Mabchour could exacerbate tensions between France's Muslim community and the country's political establishment, since the ruling essentially extends the demands of French secularism into what has been considered a private sphere -- the home. The ruling, issued on June 27, was disclosed by a report in French daily Le Monde on Friday.
French Muslim leaders urged caution. "I hope people won't judge the entire Muslim community of France by this example," said Moroccan-born Mohamed Béchari, president of the National Federation of French Muslims. "Muslims are not oppressed in France."
The Conseil d'Etat ruling comes as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who this week took the reins of the European Union's six-month rotating presidency, is urging the 27-nation bloc to follow France's example and toughen immigration rules.
Mr. Sarkozy has introduced measures aimed at better integrating France's large immigrant population into mainstream society. As interior minister, he helped push through legislation requiring immigrants seeking work visas to speak French.
Since the beginning of the year, immigrants must sign a "contract of integration" that attests to their support for French ideals such as "laicite," or "secularism," or risk expulsion. They must also attend a day-long course on French history.
Although France's constitution guarantees freedom of religion, many French people regard religion as a private matter. That strict separation between church and state has come under severe strain as the country's growing Muslim population seeks to express its religious traditions in public settings.
In 2004, Parliament drew a line in the sand by banning religious symbols, including Islamic headscarves, from public spaces such as schools. The ban sparked widespread protests among Muslims who argued that the law infringed on their religious rights.
Tensions again flared after a court in the northern city of Lille in April annulled a marriage between a French engineer who had converted to Islam and a French woman of North African origins.
The grounds of the ruling: the husband had been misled, discovering that his bride wasn't a virgin on their wedding night. Justice Minister Rachida Dati, the daughter of North African immigrants, has filed an appeal of the decision.
--Andrew Higgins contributed to this article.
French applaud decision to deny woman citizenship over veil
SUSAN SACHS
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
July 16, 2008 at 6:52 PM EDT
PARIS — Politicians, feminists and some Muslim leaders here are
applauding a court decision to deny citizenship to a Muslim woman
from Morocco whose French husband requires her to completely cover
her face and body.
The Council of State, the country's highest administrative court,
said the woman's acquiescence to the veil showed her failure to
assimilate and demonstrated behaviour "incompatible with the
essential values of the French community and, notably, the principle
of equality of the sexes."
The decision was hailed across the political spectrum, from the
leftist Socialists to the far-right National Front, despite their
long-standing divisions over whether the state should get involved
in regulating private religious or cultural practices.
One of the strongest endorsements came from Fadéla Amara, the
Algerian-born junior minister for urban affairs and a founder of a
Muslim women's group, Ni Putes Ni Soumises (with translates as the
provocative Neither Whores Nor Submissives), that fought
successfully to ban the veil in French public schools four years ago.
The ruling was "a springboard for the emancipation and freedom of
women," Ms. Amara said in an interview published Wednesday in the
newspape Le Parisien.
Like the veil, the niqab is a coercive means to oppress women, she
added. "It's not a sign of religiosity, but the visible expression
of a totalitarian position."
The case of "Madame M," as the woman was identified in court papers,
was decided on June 27, but gained notice only last week when it was
reported in the press.
The 32-year-old woman first applied for French nationality in 2004,
four years after marrying a Frenchman in southern Morocco and moving
with him to a western Paris suburb. The couple subsequently had
three children, all of them born in France and, consequently, French
citizens.
Her application was denied in 2005 and she appealed to the Council
of State on the grounds of religious freedom.
According to an account of the case in the newspaper Le Monde, the
woman came to several interviews with government officials wearing a
floor-length robe, a scarf covering her hair and a mask-like cloth
over her face with just a slit for the eyes.
She and her husband were said to have described
themselves "spontaneously" as Salafists, a fundamentalist movement
that claims to practise the only pure Islam of the sixth-century
Prophet Mohammed.
Some of the most active terrorist groups in Iraq and North Africa in
the past 20 years have also called themselves Salafists. But there
was no suggestion in the French court ruling that Madame M and her
husband had any links to those militants.
Rather, it was the woman's apparently passive acceptance of her
cloistered life in France and her "total submission to the men of
her husband's family" that drew the most criticism in court
documents that were cited by the newspaper.
"According to her own statements, she leads a life that is … cut off
from French society," according to a government lawyer's report to
the court. "She has no idea about secularism or the right to vote."
In her appeal, Madame M argued that she has never disputed French
values.
The appearance of women in face-concealing veils in immigrant
neighbourhoods has alarmed some French Muslim leaders.
Abdelalai Mamoun, an imam in the suburb where the Moroccan woman
lived, told a Paris newspaper that women who voluntarily veil
themselves "are rejecting the system" and should emigrate to Muslim
countries.
Others worried that the case would increase prejudice against
Muslims in general. A court decision last month, annulling the
marriage of two French Muslims because the bride had lied about
being a virgin, raised similar concerns.
Had Madame M not worn her veil when she applied for French
nationality, she probably would have gotten it, said Mohammed
Moussaoui, the president of the French Council of Muslims.
What if she then put her veil back on once granted citizenship, he
added. "Would she then have been stripped of her nationality?"
Special to The Globe and Mail
SUSAN SACHS
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
July 16, 2008 at 6:52 PM EDT
PARIS — Politicians, feminists and some Muslim leaders here are
applauding a court decision to deny citizenship to a Muslim woman
from Morocco whose French husband requires her to completely cover
her face and body.
The Council of State, the country's highest administrative court,
said the woman's acquiescence to the veil showed her failure to
assimilate and demonstrated behaviour "incompatible with the
essential values of the French community and, notably, the principle
of equality of the sexes."
The decision was hailed across the political spectrum, from the
leftist Socialists to the far-right National Front, despite their
long-standing divisions over whether the state should get involved
in regulating private religious or cultural practices.
One of the strongest endorsements came from Fadéla Amara, the
Algerian-born junior minister for urban affairs and a founder of a
Muslim women's group, Ni Putes Ni Soumises (with translates as the
provocative Neither Whores Nor Submissives), that fought
successfully to ban the veil in French public schools four years ago.
The ruling was "a springboard for the emancipation and freedom of
women," Ms. Amara said in an interview published Wednesday in the
newspape Le Parisien.
Like the veil, the niqab is a coercive means to oppress women, she
added. "It's not a sign of religiosity, but the visible expression
of a totalitarian position."
The case of "Madame M," as the woman was identified in court papers,
was decided on June 27, but gained notice only last week when it was
reported in the press.
The 32-year-old woman first applied for French nationality in 2004,
four years after marrying a Frenchman in southern Morocco and moving
with him to a western Paris suburb. The couple subsequently had
three children, all of them born in France and, consequently, French
citizens.
Her application was denied in 2005 and she appealed to the Council
of State on the grounds of religious freedom.
According to an account of the case in the newspaper Le Monde, the
woman came to several interviews with government officials wearing a
floor-length robe, a scarf covering her hair and a mask-like cloth
over her face with just a slit for the eyes.
She and her husband were said to have described
themselves "spontaneously" as Salafists, a fundamentalist movement
that claims to practise the only pure Islam of the sixth-century
Prophet Mohammed.
Some of the most active terrorist groups in Iraq and North Africa in
the past 20 years have also called themselves Salafists. But there
was no suggestion in the French court ruling that Madame M and her
husband had any links to those militants.
Rather, it was the woman's apparently passive acceptance of her
cloistered life in France and her "total submission to the men of
her husband's family" that drew the most criticism in court
documents that were cited by the newspaper.
"According to her own statements, she leads a life that is … cut off
from French society," according to a government lawyer's report to
the court. "She has no idea about secularism or the right to vote."
In her appeal, Madame M argued that she has never disputed French
values.
The appearance of women in face-concealing veils in immigrant
neighbourhoods has alarmed some French Muslim leaders.
Abdelalai Mamoun, an imam in the suburb where the Moroccan woman
lived, told a Paris newspaper that women who voluntarily veil
themselves "are rejecting the system" and should emigrate to Muslim
countries.
Others worried that the case would increase prejudice against
Muslims in general. A court decision last month, annulling the
marriage of two French Muslims because the bride had lied about
being a virgin, raised similar concerns.
Had Madame M not worn her veil when she applied for French
nationality, she probably would have gotten it, said Mohammed
Moussaoui, the president of the French Council of Muslims.
What if she then put her veil back on once granted citizenship, he
added. "Would she then have been stripped of her nationality?"
Special to The Globe and Mail
INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
Paris Muslims break Ramadan fast in soup kitchen
By Brian Rohan
Reuters
Friday, September 12, 2008
PARIS: It's sunset in the French capital, and hundreds of hungry people are poised to begin their meals at the sounding of a Muslim call to prayer.
Elsewhere in the world, the call rings forth from the minarets of mosques, but inside a tent in a gritty part of north Paris, it comes from a tinny radio speaker.
For the holy month of Ramadan, a soup kitchen has opened outside Cite Edmond Michelet, a tough public housing project in Paris' notorious 19th arrondissement. On the menu is a traditional dinner, starting with yoghurt and dates.
"A lot of people can't make ends meet nowadays, but they'd never tell you," said Ali Hasni, 45, a volunteer for the non-profit group "Une Chorba Pour Tous" (Soup for Everyone).
France is home to Europe's largest Muslim minority and debate about the integration of these 5 million people into an avowedly secular society is a recurring theme in a political arena where only a handful of Muslims hold government posts.
The tower blocks surrounding the tent are a common sight in the French urban landscape.
Often run down, the forbidding high-rises are home to many Muslim immigrants who came here to work in the construction boom of the 1960s and 70s, as well as immigrants from other faiths.
Many tower blocks were on the frontline in 2005 when mainly immigrant youths rioted across France after two teenagers were accidentally electrocuted in a power sub-station after a run-in with police. Violence has flared sporadically in many such neighbourhoods since then.
The 19th arrondissement tops Paris' violent crime statistics, and unemployment is rife. But the soup kitchen's organisers are unfazed by its reputation.
"We adapt to wherever the mayor lets us set up shop, tough neighbourhood or not. But we'd really like a more permanent address since demand rises every year," said Farid Adjadj, a 34-year-old postal worker who's been a volunteer since 1994.
While fights between groups of Arab Muslims and young Orthodox Jews make the local papers in the 19th every few months, some residents say tensions are under control.
"This is one of the most populous parts of Paris, and we get along very well -- I just wish that were the same in the Middle East," said David Siksik, a Jewish volunteer.
BIG TOP
The tent, known as "the big top", stretches across several basketball courts. Most of those shuffling in are men on their own. Many speak in Arabic as they settle in at long tables set with plastic tableware.
The main dish is a spicy stew that is eaten -- in dozens of variations -- across North Africa, the Middle East, Southern Europe, Turkey and India. Here it's called "chorba" -- a French transliteration of the Arabic word for soup.
Une Chorba Pour Tous, which mostly targets poor Muslims, has been operating since 1992. Its 150,000 euro (119,000) annual budget from private donations and public grants allows it to provide some 700 meals a day year-round.
But it is busiest at Ramadan when it serves an average of 2,000 meals per night. Charity is a religious duty in Islam.
"Charity is all the more important during Ramadan, and most of our volunteers are Muslim. But we don't exclude anyone who needs help or wants to help," said Fanny Ait-Kaci, 56, one of the group's founding members.
RICH COUNTRY
Food prices in France rose by 6.4 percent annually in July -- although overall consumer inflation eased 0.3 percent from the previous month -- and charities say many, especially the poorest, have been struggling to make ends meet.
Soup kitchen volunteers say most people who come to the tent are not homeless, but poor immigrant workers or solitary unemployed who, above all, miss living in a community.
"Many people come but wouldn't want their families to know they're here, especially since they might think they're living the high life in a rich country," Hasni said.
President Nicolas Sarkozy's government has angered many immigrant groups by cracking down on illegal immigration, but he has also championed labour reform as a way to fight poverty.
Unemployment has fallen almost a full point since he took office last year, but has since levelled off at 7.6 percent.
France does not keep official statistics on religion or ethnic background, so it's hard to see who is most affected by joblessness.
In the meantime, the soup tent fills.
"I live in a hotel and can't cook, so I came here -- if it weren't for this association I wouldn't be able to break the fast properly," said Karim, 32, an unemployed waiter who declined to give his last name.
"There's no real Ramadan spirit in my neighbourhood in (more upscale) western Paris, but here, there's all we need," said Salima Hajjaj, a hairdresser who had come with her unemployed husband and three children.
(Additional reporting by Dillah Teibi; Editing by Clar Ni Chonghaile)
Correction:
Paris Muslims break Ramadan fast in soup kitchen
By Brian Rohan
Reuters
Friday, September 12, 2008
PARIS: It's sunset in the French capital, and hundreds of hungry people are poised to begin their meals at the sounding of a Muslim call to prayer.
Elsewhere in the world, the call rings forth from the minarets of mosques, but inside a tent in a gritty part of north Paris, it comes from a tinny radio speaker.
For the holy month of Ramadan, a soup kitchen has opened outside Cite Edmond Michelet, a tough public housing project in Paris' notorious 19th arrondissement. On the menu is a traditional dinner, starting with yoghurt and dates.
"A lot of people can't make ends meet nowadays, but they'd never tell you," said Ali Hasni, 45, a volunteer for the non-profit group "Une Chorba Pour Tous" (Soup for Everyone).
France is home to Europe's largest Muslim minority and debate about the integration of these 5 million people into an avowedly secular society is a recurring theme in a political arena where only a handful of Muslims hold government posts.
The tower blocks surrounding the tent are a common sight in the French urban landscape.
Often run down, the forbidding high-rises are home to many Muslim immigrants who came here to work in the construction boom of the 1960s and 70s, as well as immigrants from other faiths.
Many tower blocks were on the frontline in 2005 when mainly immigrant youths rioted across France after two teenagers were accidentally electrocuted in a power sub-station after a run-in with police. Violence has flared sporadically in many such neighbourhoods since then.
The 19th arrondissement tops Paris' violent crime statistics, and unemployment is rife. But the soup kitchen's organisers are unfazed by its reputation.
"We adapt to wherever the mayor lets us set up shop, tough neighbourhood or not. But we'd really like a more permanent address since demand rises every year," said Farid Adjadj, a 34-year-old postal worker who's been a volunteer since 1994.
While fights between groups of Arab Muslims and young Orthodox Jews make the local papers in the 19th every few months, some residents say tensions are under control.
"This is one of the most populous parts of Paris, and we get along very well -- I just wish that were the same in the Middle East," said David Siksik, a Jewish volunteer.
BIG TOP
The tent, known as "the big top", stretches across several basketball courts. Most of those shuffling in are men on their own. Many speak in Arabic as they settle in at long tables set with plastic tableware.
The main dish is a spicy stew that is eaten -- in dozens of variations -- across North Africa, the Middle East, Southern Europe, Turkey and India. Here it's called "chorba" -- a French transliteration of the Arabic word for soup.
Une Chorba Pour Tous, which mostly targets poor Muslims, has been operating since 1992. Its 150,000 euro (119,000) annual budget from private donations and public grants allows it to provide some 700 meals a day year-round.
But it is busiest at Ramadan when it serves an average of 2,000 meals per night. Charity is a religious duty in Islam.
"Charity is all the more important during Ramadan, and most of our volunteers are Muslim. But we don't exclude anyone who needs help or wants to help," said Fanny Ait-Kaci, 56, one of the group's founding members.
RICH COUNTRY
Food prices in France rose by 6.4 percent annually in July -- although overall consumer inflation eased 0.3 percent from the previous month -- and charities say many, especially the poorest, have been struggling to make ends meet.
Soup kitchen volunteers say most people who come to the tent are not homeless, but poor immigrant workers or solitary unemployed who, above all, miss living in a community.
"Many people come but wouldn't want their families to know they're here, especially since they might think they're living the high life in a rich country," Hasni said.
President Nicolas Sarkozy's government has angered many immigrant groups by cracking down on illegal immigration, but he has also championed labour reform as a way to fight poverty.
Unemployment has fallen almost a full point since he took office last year, but has since levelled off at 7.6 percent.
France does not keep official statistics on religion or ethnic background, so it's hard to see who is most affected by joblessness.
In the meantime, the soup tent fills.
"I live in a hotel and can't cook, so I came here -- if it weren't for this association I wouldn't be able to break the fast properly," said Karim, 32, an unemployed waiter who declined to give his last name.
"There's no real Ramadan spirit in my neighbourhood in (more upscale) western Paris, but here, there's all we need," said Salima Hajjaj, a hairdresser who had come with her unemployed husband and three children.
(Additional reporting by Dillah Teibi; Editing by Clar Ni Chonghaile)
Correction:
Islamism is the Racism of Our Time
By Naser Khader, September 11 2008
Today marks the seven year anniversary of the attack on World Trade Center in New York. At least 2,986 people lost their lives in the terrorist assault, which was planned and executed by Al Qaeda.
The tragedy came as a shock to the free and democratic world, and the response was swift. The War on Terror was declared, and also Denmark volunteered to join battling the evil that terrorism is an expression of.
Today, on the 7th anniversary of 9/11, we face the fact that the War on Terror is not won. It is, however, not lost either. It’s more like a draw. And we are facing the fact that while the democratic world, using its superior firepower, has been able to keep the terrorists at bay, we have failed in a different battle.
This battle is one we have not launched in a similar decisive fashion. This is the battle against political Islam. Today, the Islamists are stronger than ever. While we shoot at terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the Islamists are winning still more souls for their cause. Both in the Arab world, in the Muslim countries in Asia, and amongst the Muslim minorities in the Western countries.
Everywhere the Islamists are advancing. Their influence in international organizations, in international business and through Islamic lobbying, is advancing on all levels on a daily basis.
Islamism as a political ideology is now a more serious threat against democracies than the violent terrorism that Al-Qaeda have been advancing. We simply need to wake up.
As Islamists gain a footing in still more countries, the very values that our soldiers fight for in Afghanistan are repressed. Freedom of expression is the first to go, and freedom of religion with it. In societies adhering to Sharia, fundamental civil liberties are suspended, and laws discriminating against ethnic and religious minorities are passed, with reference to religious doctrine.
Islamism is the racism of our time. It can be said no more clearly than this. And as such, a united democratic world must turn against Islamism — not seeking ‘dialogue’ or ‘understanding’, but in rejection and concrete resistance.
Later this year, the United Nations will hold a conference on racism. Durban II in Geneva. In spite of this conference, which, like the first, is being hijacked by Islamic countries to support Sharia, the Danish government has chosen to participate. Other countries, including Canada, will boycott it. Now that Denmark chooses to participate, this opportunity must be seized to make a firm stand.
I believe that the Danish government should use Durban II to propose a condemnation of political Islam as a racist ideology. We owe it to ourselves and to our soldiers, who set their lives on the line fighting terrorism on the battlefield, that we at the lofty conferences in the international society act equally firmly and with principle against Islamism.
The Islamists’ assaults and threats against authors, cartoonists, and other intellectuals, who challenge their monopoly on the right teaching, are increasing in strength. We experience it in Denmark with the threats against cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, and this goes on worldwide.
Recently, at a conference in France, I had the opportunity to meet some of the victims of Islamist intimidation. They were brave people standing firm in their criticism of religion — and for that reason were forced to live a life with security guards and insecurity for themselves and their families.
It is time that we discard the velvet gloves and make this clear: There exist religious practices that are not compatible with fundamental human rights. Islamism is one of those, and must therefore be fought.
It is not sufficient to keep killing Taliban warriors on the battlefields of Afghanistan, if we do not simultaneously put our fullest efforts into the other battle. If our souls are lost to the Islamists, we will eventually lose the War on Terror. Democracy must learn to strike hard.
Naser Khader is a Danish Muslim, immigrant of Syrian background, and member of the Danish parliament. He has tirelessly opposed radical Islam in his country, often at great personal risk. Khader is chairman of the political party Liberal Alliance.
http://europenews.dk/en/node/14088
By Naser Khader, September 11 2008
Today marks the seven year anniversary of the attack on World Trade Center in New York. At least 2,986 people lost their lives in the terrorist assault, which was planned and executed by Al Qaeda.
The tragedy came as a shock to the free and democratic world, and the response was swift. The War on Terror was declared, and also Denmark volunteered to join battling the evil that terrorism is an expression of.
Today, on the 7th anniversary of 9/11, we face the fact that the War on Terror is not won. It is, however, not lost either. It’s more like a draw. And we are facing the fact that while the democratic world, using its superior firepower, has been able to keep the terrorists at bay, we have failed in a different battle.
This battle is one we have not launched in a similar decisive fashion. This is the battle against political Islam. Today, the Islamists are stronger than ever. While we shoot at terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the Islamists are winning still more souls for their cause. Both in the Arab world, in the Muslim countries in Asia, and amongst the Muslim minorities in the Western countries.
Everywhere the Islamists are advancing. Their influence in international organizations, in international business and through Islamic lobbying, is advancing on all levels on a daily basis.
Islamism as a political ideology is now a more serious threat against democracies than the violent terrorism that Al-Qaeda have been advancing. We simply need to wake up.
As Islamists gain a footing in still more countries, the very values that our soldiers fight for in Afghanistan are repressed. Freedom of expression is the first to go, and freedom of religion with it. In societies adhering to Sharia, fundamental civil liberties are suspended, and laws discriminating against ethnic and religious minorities are passed, with reference to religious doctrine.
Islamism is the racism of our time. It can be said no more clearly than this. And as such, a united democratic world must turn against Islamism — not seeking ‘dialogue’ or ‘understanding’, but in rejection and concrete resistance.
Later this year, the United Nations will hold a conference on racism. Durban II in Geneva. In spite of this conference, which, like the first, is being hijacked by Islamic countries to support Sharia, the Danish government has chosen to participate. Other countries, including Canada, will boycott it. Now that Denmark chooses to participate, this opportunity must be seized to make a firm stand.
I believe that the Danish government should use Durban II to propose a condemnation of political Islam as a racist ideology. We owe it to ourselves and to our soldiers, who set their lives on the line fighting terrorism on the battlefield, that we at the lofty conferences in the international society act equally firmly and with principle against Islamism.
The Islamists’ assaults and threats against authors, cartoonists, and other intellectuals, who challenge their monopoly on the right teaching, are increasing in strength. We experience it in Denmark with the threats against cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, and this goes on worldwide.
Recently, at a conference in France, I had the opportunity to meet some of the victims of Islamist intimidation. They were brave people standing firm in their criticism of religion — and for that reason were forced to live a life with security guards and insecurity for themselves and their families.
It is time that we discard the velvet gloves and make this clear: There exist religious practices that are not compatible with fundamental human rights. Islamism is one of those, and must therefore be fought.
It is not sufficient to keep killing Taliban warriors on the battlefields of Afghanistan, if we do not simultaneously put our fullest efforts into the other battle. If our souls are lost to the Islamists, we will eventually lose the War on Terror. Democracy must learn to strike hard.
Naser Khader is a Danish Muslim, immigrant of Syrian background, and member of the Danish parliament. He has tirelessly opposed radical Islam in his country, often at great personal risk. Khader is chairman of the political party Liberal Alliance.
http://europenews.dk/en/node/14088
From The Sunday TimesSeptember 14, 2008
Revealed: UK’s first official sharia courts
Abul Taher
ISLAMIC law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.
The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.
Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.
Previously, the rulings of sharia courts in Britain could not be enforced, and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims.
It has now emerged that sharia courts with these powers have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester with the network’s headquarters in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. Two more courts are being planned for Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Sheikh Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi, whose Muslim Arbitration Tribunal runs the courts, said he had taken advantage of a clause in the Arbitration Act 1996.
Under the act, the sharia courts are classified as arbitration tribunals. The rulings of arbitration tribunals are binding in law, provided that both parties in the dispute agree to give it the power to rule on their case.
Siddiqi said: “We realised that under the Arbitration Act we can make rulings which can be enforced by county and high courts. The act allows disputes to be resolved using alternatives like tribunals. This method is called alternative dispute resolution, which for Muslims is what the sharia courts are.”
The disclosure that Muslim courts have legal powers in Britain comes seven months after Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was pilloried for suggesting that the establishment of sharia in the future “seems unavoidable” in Britain.
In July, the head of the judiciary, the lord chief justice, Lord Phillips, further stoked controversy when he said that sharia could be used to settle marital and financial disputes.
In fact, Muslim tribunal courts started passing sharia judgments in August 2007. They have dealt with more than 100 cases that range from Muslim divorce and inheritance to nuisance neighbours.
It has also emerged that tribunal courts have settled six cases of domestic violence between married couples, working in tandem with the police investigations.
Siddiqi said he expected the courts to handle a greater number of “smaller” criminal cases in coming years as more Muslim clients approach them. “All we are doing is regulating community affairs in these cases,” said Siddiqi, chairman of the governing council of the tribunal.
Jewish Beth Din courts operate under the same provision in the Arbitration Act and resolve civil cases, ranging from divorce to business disputes. They have existed in Britain for more than 100 years, and previously operated under a precursor to the act.
Politicians and church leaders expressed concerns that this could mark the beginnings of a “parallel legal system” based on sharia for some British Muslims.
Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said: “If it is true that these tribunals are passing binding decisions in the areas of family and criminal law, I would like to know which courts are enforcing them because I would consider such action unlawful. British law is absolute and must remain so.”
Douglas Murray, the director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, said: “I think it’s appalling. I don’t think arbitration that is done by sharia should ever be endorsed or enforced by the British state.”
There are concerns that women who agree to go to tribunal courts are getting worse deals because Islamic law favours men.
Siddiqi said that in a recent inheritance dispute handled by the court in Nuneaton, the estate of a Midlands man was divided between three daughters and two sons.
The judges on the panel gave the sons twice as much as the daughters, in accordance with sharia. Had the family gone to a normal British court, the daughters would have got equal amounts.
In the six cases of domestic violence, Siddiqi said the judges ordered the husbands to take anger management classes and mentoring from community elders. There was no further punishment.
In each case, the women subsequently withdrew the complaints they had lodged with the police and the police stopped their investigations.
Siddiqi said that in the domestic violence cases, the advantage was that marriages were saved and couples given a second chance.
Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “The MCB supports these tribunals. If the Jewish courts are allowed to flourish, so must the sharia ones.”
Additional reporting: Helen Brooks
Revealed: UK’s first official sharia courts
Abul Taher
ISLAMIC law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.
The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.
Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.
Previously, the rulings of sharia courts in Britain could not be enforced, and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims.
It has now emerged that sharia courts with these powers have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester with the network’s headquarters in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. Two more courts are being planned for Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Sheikh Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi, whose Muslim Arbitration Tribunal runs the courts, said he had taken advantage of a clause in the Arbitration Act 1996.
Under the act, the sharia courts are classified as arbitration tribunals. The rulings of arbitration tribunals are binding in law, provided that both parties in the dispute agree to give it the power to rule on their case.
Siddiqi said: “We realised that under the Arbitration Act we can make rulings which can be enforced by county and high courts. The act allows disputes to be resolved using alternatives like tribunals. This method is called alternative dispute resolution, which for Muslims is what the sharia courts are.”
The disclosure that Muslim courts have legal powers in Britain comes seven months after Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was pilloried for suggesting that the establishment of sharia in the future “seems unavoidable” in Britain.
In July, the head of the judiciary, the lord chief justice, Lord Phillips, further stoked controversy when he said that sharia could be used to settle marital and financial disputes.
In fact, Muslim tribunal courts started passing sharia judgments in August 2007. They have dealt with more than 100 cases that range from Muslim divorce and inheritance to nuisance neighbours.
It has also emerged that tribunal courts have settled six cases of domestic violence between married couples, working in tandem with the police investigations.
Siddiqi said he expected the courts to handle a greater number of “smaller” criminal cases in coming years as more Muslim clients approach them. “All we are doing is regulating community affairs in these cases,” said Siddiqi, chairman of the governing council of the tribunal.
Jewish Beth Din courts operate under the same provision in the Arbitration Act and resolve civil cases, ranging from divorce to business disputes. They have existed in Britain for more than 100 years, and previously operated under a precursor to the act.
Politicians and church leaders expressed concerns that this could mark the beginnings of a “parallel legal system” based on sharia for some British Muslims.
Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, said: “If it is true that these tribunals are passing binding decisions in the areas of family and criminal law, I would like to know which courts are enforcing them because I would consider such action unlawful. British law is absolute and must remain so.”
Douglas Murray, the director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, said: “I think it’s appalling. I don’t think arbitration that is done by sharia should ever be endorsed or enforced by the British state.”
There are concerns that women who agree to go to tribunal courts are getting worse deals because Islamic law favours men.
Siddiqi said that in a recent inheritance dispute handled by the court in Nuneaton, the estate of a Midlands man was divided between three daughters and two sons.
The judges on the panel gave the sons twice as much as the daughters, in accordance with sharia. Had the family gone to a normal British court, the daughters would have got equal amounts.
In the six cases of domestic violence, Siddiqi said the judges ordered the husbands to take anger management classes and mentoring from community elders. There was no further punishment.
In each case, the women subsequently withdrew the complaints they had lodged with the police and the police stopped their investigations.
Siddiqi said that in the domestic violence cases, the advantage was that marriages were saved and couples given a second chance.
Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “The MCB supports these tribunals. If the Jewish courts are allowed to flourish, so must the sharia ones.”
Additional reporting: Helen Brooks
September 30, 2008
French Muslims Find Haven in Catholic Schools
By KATRIN BENNHOLD
MARSEILLE, France — The bright cafeteria of St. Mauront Catholic School is conspicuously quiet: It is Ramadan, and 80 percent of the students are Muslim. When the lunch bell rings, girls and boys stream out past the crucifixes and the large wooden cross in the corridor, heading for Muslim midday prayer.
“There is respect for our religion here,” said Nadia Oualane, 14, a student of Algerian descent who wears her hair hidden under a black head scarf. “In the public school,” she added, gesturing at nearby buildings, “I would not be allowed to wear a veil.”
In France, which has only four Muslim schools, some of the country’s 8,847 Roman Catholic schools have become refuges for Muslims seeking what an overburdened, secularist public sector often lacks: spirituality, an environment in which good manners count alongside mathematics, and higher academic standards.
No national statistics are kept, but Muslim and Catholic educators estimate that Muslim students now make up more than 10 percent of the two million students in Catholic schools. In ethnically mixed neighborhoods in Marseille and the industrial north, the proportion can be more than half.
The quiet migration of Muslims to private Catholic schools highlights how hard it has become for state schools, long France’s tool for integration, to keep their promise of equal opportunity.
Traditionally, the republican school, born of the French Revolution, was the breeding ground for citizens. The shift from these schools is another indication of the challenge facing the strict form of secularism known as “laïcité.”
Following centuries of religious wars and a long period of conflict between the nascent Republic and an assertive clergy, a 1905 law granted religious freedom in predominantly Roman Catholic France and withdrew financial support and formal recognition from all faiths. Religious education and symbols were banned from public schools.
France is now home to around five million Muslims, Western Europe’s largest such community, and new fault lines have emerged. In 2004, a ban on the head scarf in state schools prompted outcry and debate about loosening the interpretation of the 1905 law.
“Laïcité has become the state’s religion, and the republican school is its temple,” said Imam Soheib Bencheikh, a former grand mufti in Marseille and founder of its Higher Institute of Islamic Studies. Imam Bencheikh’s oldest daughter attends Catholic school.
“It’s ironic,” he said, “but today the Catholic Church is more tolerant of — and knowledgeable about — Islam than the French state.”
For some, economics argue for Catholic schools, which tend to be smaller than public ones and much less expensive than private schools in other countries. In return for the schools’ teaching the national curriculum and being open to students of all faiths, the government pays teachers’ salaries and a per-student subsidy. Annual costs for parents average 1,400 euros (less than $2,050) for junior high school and 1,800 euros (about $2,630) for high school, according to the Roman Catholic educational authority.
In France’s highly centralized education system, the national curriculum proscribes religious instruction beyond general examination of religious tenets and faiths as it occurs in history lessons. Religious instruction, like Catholic catechism, is voluntary.
And Catholic schools take steps to accommodate different faiths. One school in Dijon allows Muslim students to use the chapel for Ramadan prayers.
Catholic schools are also free to allow girls to wear head scarves. Many honor the state ban, but several, like St. Mauront, tolerate a discreet covering.
The school, tucked under an overpass in the city’s northern housing projects, embodies tectonic shifts in French society over the past century.
Founded in 1905 in a former soap factory, the school initially served mainly Catholic students whose parents were French, said the headmaster, Jean Chamoux. Before World War II, Italian and some Portuguese immigrants arrived; since the 1960s, Africans from former French colonies. Today there is barely a white face among the 117 students.
Mr. Chamoux, a slow-moving, jovial man, has been here 20 years and seems to know each student by name. Under a crucifix in his cramped office, he extolled the virtues of Catholic schools. “We practice religious freedom; the public schools don’t,” he said. “We teach the national curriculum. Religious activities are entirely optional.”
“If I banned the head scarf, half the girls wouldn’t go to school at all,” he added. “I prefer to have them here, talk to them and tell them that they have a choice. Many actually take it off after a while. My goal is that by the time they graduate they have made a conscious choice, one way or the other.”
Defenders of secularism retort that such leniency could encourage other special requests, and anti-Western values like the oppression of women.
“The head scarf is a sexist sign, and discrimination between the sexes has no place in the republican school,” France’s minister of national education, Xavier Darcos, said in a telephone interview. “That is the fundamental reason why we are against it.”
Mr. Chamoux said he suspects that some pupils (“a small minority,” he said) wear the scarf because of pressure from family. He acknowledged that parents routinely demand exemptions from swimming lessons for daughters who, when denied, present a medical certificate and miss class anyway. Recently, he said, he put his foot down when students asked to remove the crucifix in a classroom they wanted for communal prayers during Ramadan, which in France ends on Tuesday.
The biology teacher at St. Mauront has been challenged on Darwin’s theory of evolution, and history class can get heated during discussions of the Crusades or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks, some Muslim students shocked the staff by showing glee, Mr. Chamoux recalled.
The school deals swiftly with offensive comments, he said, but also tries to respect Islam. It takes Muslim holidays into account for parent-teacher meetings. For two years now, it has offered optional Arabic-language instruction — in part to steer students away from Koran classes in neighborhood mosques believed to preach radical Islam.
When Zohra Hanane, the parent of a Muslim student, was asked why she chose Catholic school for her daughter, Sabrina, her answer was swift. “We share the same God,” she said.
But faith is not the only argument. Even though Ms. Hanane, who is a single mother and currently unemployed, struggles to meet the annual fee at St. Mauront of 249 euros ($364) — unusually low, because the school receives additional state subsidies and has spartan facilities — she said it was worth it because she did not want her children with “the wrong crowd” in the projects.
“It’s expensive and sometimes it’s hard, but I want my children to have a better life,” Ms. Hanane said. “Today this seems to be their best shot.”
Across town, in the gleaming compound housing the Sainte-Trinité high school in the wealthy neighborhood of Mazargues, the rules and conditions are different, but the arguments are similar. Muslim girls there do not wear head scarves.
But Imene Sahraoui, 17, a practicing Muslim and the daughter of an Algerian businessman and former diplomat, attends the school, above all to get top grades and move on to business school, preferably abroad.
“Public schools just don’t prepare you in the same way,” she said.
Fifteen of the top 20 high schools in France are Catholic schools, according to a recent ranking in the magazine L’Express. Catholic schools remain popular among Muslims even in cities where Muslim schools have sprung up: Paris, Lyon and Lille.
Muslim schools have been hampered in part by the relative poverty of the Muslim community. And only one Muslim school, the Averroës high school on one floor of the Lille mosque, has qualified for state subsidies. To survive, the other three charge significantly higher fees.
Also, as M’hamed Ed-Dyouri, headmaster of a new Muslim school just outside Paris, said, “We have to prove ourselves first.” For now, he plans to enroll his son in Catholic school.
French Muslims Find Haven in Catholic Schools
By KATRIN BENNHOLD
MARSEILLE, France — The bright cafeteria of St. Mauront Catholic School is conspicuously quiet: It is Ramadan, and 80 percent of the students are Muslim. When the lunch bell rings, girls and boys stream out past the crucifixes and the large wooden cross in the corridor, heading for Muslim midday prayer.
“There is respect for our religion here,” said Nadia Oualane, 14, a student of Algerian descent who wears her hair hidden under a black head scarf. “In the public school,” she added, gesturing at nearby buildings, “I would not be allowed to wear a veil.”
In France, which has only four Muslim schools, some of the country’s 8,847 Roman Catholic schools have become refuges for Muslims seeking what an overburdened, secularist public sector often lacks: spirituality, an environment in which good manners count alongside mathematics, and higher academic standards.
No national statistics are kept, but Muslim and Catholic educators estimate that Muslim students now make up more than 10 percent of the two million students in Catholic schools. In ethnically mixed neighborhoods in Marseille and the industrial north, the proportion can be more than half.
The quiet migration of Muslims to private Catholic schools highlights how hard it has become for state schools, long France’s tool for integration, to keep their promise of equal opportunity.
Traditionally, the republican school, born of the French Revolution, was the breeding ground for citizens. The shift from these schools is another indication of the challenge facing the strict form of secularism known as “laïcité.”
Following centuries of religious wars and a long period of conflict between the nascent Republic and an assertive clergy, a 1905 law granted religious freedom in predominantly Roman Catholic France and withdrew financial support and formal recognition from all faiths. Religious education and symbols were banned from public schools.
France is now home to around five million Muslims, Western Europe’s largest such community, and new fault lines have emerged. In 2004, a ban on the head scarf in state schools prompted outcry and debate about loosening the interpretation of the 1905 law.
“Laïcité has become the state’s religion, and the republican school is its temple,” said Imam Soheib Bencheikh, a former grand mufti in Marseille and founder of its Higher Institute of Islamic Studies. Imam Bencheikh’s oldest daughter attends Catholic school.
“It’s ironic,” he said, “but today the Catholic Church is more tolerant of — and knowledgeable about — Islam than the French state.”
For some, economics argue for Catholic schools, which tend to be smaller than public ones and much less expensive than private schools in other countries. In return for the schools’ teaching the national curriculum and being open to students of all faiths, the government pays teachers’ salaries and a per-student subsidy. Annual costs for parents average 1,400 euros (less than $2,050) for junior high school and 1,800 euros (about $2,630) for high school, according to the Roman Catholic educational authority.
In France’s highly centralized education system, the national curriculum proscribes religious instruction beyond general examination of religious tenets and faiths as it occurs in history lessons. Religious instruction, like Catholic catechism, is voluntary.
And Catholic schools take steps to accommodate different faiths. One school in Dijon allows Muslim students to use the chapel for Ramadan prayers.
Catholic schools are also free to allow girls to wear head scarves. Many honor the state ban, but several, like St. Mauront, tolerate a discreet covering.
The school, tucked under an overpass in the city’s northern housing projects, embodies tectonic shifts in French society over the past century.
Founded in 1905 in a former soap factory, the school initially served mainly Catholic students whose parents were French, said the headmaster, Jean Chamoux. Before World War II, Italian and some Portuguese immigrants arrived; since the 1960s, Africans from former French colonies. Today there is barely a white face among the 117 students.
Mr. Chamoux, a slow-moving, jovial man, has been here 20 years and seems to know each student by name. Under a crucifix in his cramped office, he extolled the virtues of Catholic schools. “We practice religious freedom; the public schools don’t,” he said. “We teach the national curriculum. Religious activities are entirely optional.”
“If I banned the head scarf, half the girls wouldn’t go to school at all,” he added. “I prefer to have them here, talk to them and tell them that they have a choice. Many actually take it off after a while. My goal is that by the time they graduate they have made a conscious choice, one way or the other.”
Defenders of secularism retort that such leniency could encourage other special requests, and anti-Western values like the oppression of women.
“The head scarf is a sexist sign, and discrimination between the sexes has no place in the republican school,” France’s minister of national education, Xavier Darcos, said in a telephone interview. “That is the fundamental reason why we are against it.”
Mr. Chamoux said he suspects that some pupils (“a small minority,” he said) wear the scarf because of pressure from family. He acknowledged that parents routinely demand exemptions from swimming lessons for daughters who, when denied, present a medical certificate and miss class anyway. Recently, he said, he put his foot down when students asked to remove the crucifix in a classroom they wanted for communal prayers during Ramadan, which in France ends on Tuesday.
The biology teacher at St. Mauront has been challenged on Darwin’s theory of evolution, and history class can get heated during discussions of the Crusades or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks, some Muslim students shocked the staff by showing glee, Mr. Chamoux recalled.
The school deals swiftly with offensive comments, he said, but also tries to respect Islam. It takes Muslim holidays into account for parent-teacher meetings. For two years now, it has offered optional Arabic-language instruction — in part to steer students away from Koran classes in neighborhood mosques believed to preach radical Islam.
When Zohra Hanane, the parent of a Muslim student, was asked why she chose Catholic school for her daughter, Sabrina, her answer was swift. “We share the same God,” she said.
But faith is not the only argument. Even though Ms. Hanane, who is a single mother and currently unemployed, struggles to meet the annual fee at St. Mauront of 249 euros ($364) — unusually low, because the school receives additional state subsidies and has spartan facilities — she said it was worth it because she did not want her children with “the wrong crowd” in the projects.
“It’s expensive and sometimes it’s hard, but I want my children to have a better life,” Ms. Hanane said. “Today this seems to be their best shot.”
Across town, in the gleaming compound housing the Sainte-Trinité high school in the wealthy neighborhood of Mazargues, the rules and conditions are different, but the arguments are similar. Muslim girls there do not wear head scarves.
But Imene Sahraoui, 17, a practicing Muslim and the daughter of an Algerian businessman and former diplomat, attends the school, above all to get top grades and move on to business school, preferably abroad.
“Public schools just don’t prepare you in the same way,” she said.
Fifteen of the top 20 high schools in France are Catholic schools, according to a recent ranking in the magazine L’Express. Catholic schools remain popular among Muslims even in cities where Muslim schools have sprung up: Paris, Lyon and Lille.
Muslim schools have been hampered in part by the relative poverty of the Muslim community. And only one Muslim school, the Averroës high school on one floor of the Lille mosque, has qualified for state subsidies. To survive, the other three charge significantly higher fees.
Also, as M’hamed Ed-Dyouri, headmaster of a new Muslim school just outside Paris, said, “We have to prove ourselves first.” For now, he plans to enroll his son in Catholic school.
October 14, 2008
Generation Faithful
Youthful Voice Stirs Challenge to Secular Turks
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
ISTANBUL — High school hurt for Havva Yilmaz. She tried out several selves. She ran away. Nothing felt right.
“There was no sincerity,” she said. “It was shallow.”
So at 16, she did something none of her friends had done: She put on an Islamic head scarf.
In most Muslim countries, that would be a nonevent. In Turkey, it was a rebellion. Turkey has built its modern identity on secularism. Women on billboards do not wear scarves. The scarves are banned in schools and universities. So Ms. Yilmaz dropped out of school. Her parents were angry. Her classmates stopped calling her.
Like many young people at a time of religious revival across the Muslim world, Ms. Yilmaz, now 21, is more observant than her parents. Her mother wears a scarf, but cannot read the Koran in Arabic. They do not pray five times a day. The habits were typical for their generation — Turks who moved from the countryside during industrialization.
“Before I decided to cover, I knew who I was not,” Ms. Yilmaz said, sitting in a leafy Ottoman-era courtyard. “After I covered, I finally knew who I was.”
While her decision was in some ways a recognizable act of youthful rebellion, in Turkey her personal choices are part of a paradox at the heart of the country’s modern identity.
Turkey is now run by a party of observant Muslims, but its reigning ideology and law are strictly secular, dating from the authoritarian rule in the 1920s of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a former army general who pushed Turkey toward the West and cut its roots with the Ottoman East. For some young people today, freedom means the right to practice Islam, and self-expression means covering their hair.
They are redrawing lines between freedom and devotion, modernization and tradition, and blurring some prevailing distinctions between East and West.
Ms. Yilmaz’s embrace of her religious identity has thrust her into politics. She campaigned to allow women to wear scarves on college campuses, a movement that prompted emotional, often agonized, debates across Turkey about where Islam fit into an open society. That question has paralyzed politics twice in the past year and a half, and has drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets to protest what they call a growing religiosity in society and in government.
By dropping out of the education system, she found her way into Turkey’s growing, lively culture of young activists.
She attended a political philosophy reading group, studying Hegel, St. Augustine and Machiavelli. She took sociology classes from a free learning center. She met other activists, many of them students trying to redefine words like “modern,” which has meant secular and Western-looking for decades. She made new friends, like Hilal Kaplan, whose scarf sometimes had a map of the world on it.
Their fight is not solely about Islam. Turkey is in ferment, and Ms. Yilmaz and her young peers are demanding equal rights for all groups in Turkey. They are far less bothered by the religious and ethnic differences that divide older generations. “Turkey is not just secular people versus religious people,” Ms. Kaplan said. “We were a very segregated society, but that segregation is breaking up.”
In a slushy week in the middle of January, the head scarf became the focus of a heated national outpouring, and Ms. Yilmaz one of its most eloquent defenders.
There is a video and a multimedia and more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/world ... ref=slogin
Generation Faithful
Youthful Voice Stirs Challenge to Secular Turks
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
ISTANBUL — High school hurt for Havva Yilmaz. She tried out several selves. She ran away. Nothing felt right.
“There was no sincerity,” she said. “It was shallow.”
So at 16, she did something none of her friends had done: She put on an Islamic head scarf.
In most Muslim countries, that would be a nonevent. In Turkey, it was a rebellion. Turkey has built its modern identity on secularism. Women on billboards do not wear scarves. The scarves are banned in schools and universities. So Ms. Yilmaz dropped out of school. Her parents were angry. Her classmates stopped calling her.
Like many young people at a time of religious revival across the Muslim world, Ms. Yilmaz, now 21, is more observant than her parents. Her mother wears a scarf, but cannot read the Koran in Arabic. They do not pray five times a day. The habits were typical for their generation — Turks who moved from the countryside during industrialization.
“Before I decided to cover, I knew who I was not,” Ms. Yilmaz said, sitting in a leafy Ottoman-era courtyard. “After I covered, I finally knew who I was.”
While her decision was in some ways a recognizable act of youthful rebellion, in Turkey her personal choices are part of a paradox at the heart of the country’s modern identity.
Turkey is now run by a party of observant Muslims, but its reigning ideology and law are strictly secular, dating from the authoritarian rule in the 1920s of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a former army general who pushed Turkey toward the West and cut its roots with the Ottoman East. For some young people today, freedom means the right to practice Islam, and self-expression means covering their hair.
They are redrawing lines between freedom and devotion, modernization and tradition, and blurring some prevailing distinctions between East and West.
Ms. Yilmaz’s embrace of her religious identity has thrust her into politics. She campaigned to allow women to wear scarves on college campuses, a movement that prompted emotional, often agonized, debates across Turkey about where Islam fit into an open society. That question has paralyzed politics twice in the past year and a half, and has drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets to protest what they call a growing religiosity in society and in government.
By dropping out of the education system, she found her way into Turkey’s growing, lively culture of young activists.
She attended a political philosophy reading group, studying Hegel, St. Augustine and Machiavelli. She took sociology classes from a free learning center. She met other activists, many of them students trying to redefine words like “modern,” which has meant secular and Western-looking for decades. She made new friends, like Hilal Kaplan, whose scarf sometimes had a map of the world on it.
Their fight is not solely about Islam. Turkey is in ferment, and Ms. Yilmaz and her young peers are demanding equal rights for all groups in Turkey. They are far less bothered by the religious and ethnic differences that divide older generations. “Turkey is not just secular people versus religious people,” Ms. Kaplan said. “We were a very segregated society, but that segregation is breaking up.”
In a slushy week in the middle of January, the head scarf became the focus of a heated national outpouring, and Ms. Yilmaz one of its most eloquent defenders.
There is a video and a multimedia and more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/world ... ref=slogin
THE TIMES OF INDIA
Sharia incompatible with human rights: House of Lords
24 Oct 2008, 2136 hrs IST, PTI
LONDON: The House of Lords on Friday described the Islamic legal code Sharia as "wholly incompatible" with human rights legislation, a comment that could spark an outcry among Muslims in the United Kingdom.
The Upper House of the British Parliament has drawn sharp attention to the conflict between Sharia and UK law, calling the Islamic legal code "wholly incompatible" with human rights legislation.
The controversial remarks came amidst a debate in Britain over the appropriateness of incorporating Sharia courts into the UK's legal system, a move advocated by figures including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams and Lords Phillips, the new senior law lord.
The comments in the House of Lords came today as it considered the case of a woman who, if she was sent back to Lebanon, would be obliged under Sharia law to hand over custody of her 12-year-old son to a man who beat her, threw her off a balcony and, on one occasion, attempted to strangle her.
The woman was seeking asylum in the UK to avoid the provisions of Sharia law that give fathers or other male family members the exclusive custody of children over seven.
In the most high-profile UK criticism of the family law provisions of Sharia law so far, the Lords stated that these provisions breached the mother's rights to family life and the right against discrimination and were severely disruptive to the child.
The minister for community cohesion, Sadiq Khan, a Muslim said recently that Sharia courts risked entrenching unequal bargaining power between the sexes.
Sharia courts have been delivering judgments in the UK since last year, and currently operate in London, Birmingham, Bradford, Coventry and Manchester, with plans to expand into Scotland.
Sharia incompatible with human rights: House of Lords
24 Oct 2008, 2136 hrs IST, PTI
LONDON: The House of Lords on Friday described the Islamic legal code Sharia as "wholly incompatible" with human rights legislation, a comment that could spark an outcry among Muslims in the United Kingdom.
The Upper House of the British Parliament has drawn sharp attention to the conflict between Sharia and UK law, calling the Islamic legal code "wholly incompatible" with human rights legislation.
The controversial remarks came amidst a debate in Britain over the appropriateness of incorporating Sharia courts into the UK's legal system, a move advocated by figures including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams and Lords Phillips, the new senior law lord.
The comments in the House of Lords came today as it considered the case of a woman who, if she was sent back to Lebanon, would be obliged under Sharia law to hand over custody of her 12-year-old son to a man who beat her, threw her off a balcony and, on one occasion, attempted to strangle her.
The woman was seeking asylum in the UK to avoid the provisions of Sharia law that give fathers or other male family members the exclusive custody of children over seven.
In the most high-profile UK criticism of the family law provisions of Sharia law so far, the Lords stated that these provisions breached the mother's rights to family life and the right against discrimination and were severely disruptive to the child.
The minister for community cohesion, Sadiq Khan, a Muslim said recently that Sharia courts risked entrenching unequal bargaining power between the sexes.
Sharia courts have been delivering judgments in the UK since last year, and currently operate in London, Birmingham, Bradford, Coventry and Manchester, with plans to expand into Scotland.
Professor Hired for Outreach to Muslims Delivers a Jolt
Islamic Theologian's Theory: It's Likely the Prophet Muhammad Never Existed
By ANDREW HIGGINS
MÜNSTER, Germany -- Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a Muslim convert and Germany's first professor of Islamic theology, fasts during the Muslim holy month, doesn't like to shake hands with Muslim women and has spent years studying Islamic scripture. Islam, he says, guides his life.
So it came as something of a surprise when Prof. Kalisch announced the fruit of his theological research. His conclusion: The Prophet Muhammad probably never existed.
Muslims, not surprisingly, are outraged. Even Danish cartoonists who triggered global protests a couple of years ago didn't portray the Prophet as fictional. German police, worried about a violent backlash, told the professor to move his religious-studies center to more-secure premises.
"We had no idea he would have ideas like this," says Thomas Bauer, a fellow academic at Münster University who sat on a committee that appointed Prof. Kalisch. "I'm a more orthodox Muslim than he is, and I'm not a Muslim."
When Prof. Kalisch took up his theology chair four years ago, he was seen as proof that modern Western scholarship and Islamic ways can mingle -- and counter the influence of radical preachers in Germany. He was put in charge of a new program at Münster, one of Germany's oldest and most respected universities, to train teachers in state schools to teach Muslim pupils about their faith.
Muslim leaders cheered and joined an advisory board at his Center for Religious Studies. Politicians hailed the appointment as a sign of Germany's readiness to absorb some three million Muslims into mainstream society. But, says Andreas Pinkwart, a minister responsible for higher education in this north German region, "the results are disappointing."
Prof. Kalisch, who insists he's still a Muslim, says he knew he would get in trouble but wanted to subject Islam to the same scrutiny as Christianity and Judaism. German scholars of the 19th century, he notes, were among the first to raise questions about the historical accuracy of the Bible.
Many scholars of Islam question the accuracy of ancient sources on Muhammad's life. The earliest biography, of which no copies survive, dated from roughly a century after the generally accepted year of his death, 632, and is known only by references to it in much later texts. But only a few scholars have doubted Muhammad's existence. Most say his life is better documented than that of Jesus.
"Of course Muhammad existed," says Tilman Nagel, a scholar in Göttingen and author of a new book, "Muhammad: Life and Legend." The Prophet differed from the flawless figure of Islamic tradition, Prof. Nagel says, but "it is quite astonishing to say that thousands and thousands of pages about him were all forged" and there was no such person.
All the same, Prof. Nagel has signed a petition in support of Prof. Kalisch, who has faced blistering criticism from Muslim groups and some secular German academics. "We are in Europe," Prof. Nagel says. "Education is about thinking, not just learning by heart."
Prof. Kalisch's religious studies center recently removed a sign and erased its address from its Web site. The professor, a burly 42-year-old, says he has received no specific threats but has been denounced as apostate, a capital offense in some readings of Islam.
"Maybe people are speculating that some idiot will come and cut off my head," he said during an interview in his study.
A few minutes later, an assistant arrived in a panic to say a suspicious-looking digital clock had been found lying in the hallway. Police, called to the scene, declared the clock harmless.
A convert to Islam at age 15, Prof. Kalisch says he was drawn to the faith because it seemed more rational than others. He embraced a branch of Shiite Islam noted for its skeptical bent. After working briefly as a lawyer, he began work in 2001 on a postdoctoral thesis in Islamic law in Hamburg, to go through the elaborate process required to become a professor in Germany.
The Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S. that year appalled Mr. Kalisch but didn't dent his devotion. Indeed, after he arrived at Münster University in 2004, he struck some as too conservative. Sami Alrabaa, a scholar at a nearby college, recalls attending a lecture by Prof. Kalisch and being upset by his doctrinaire defense of Islamic law, known as Sharia.
In private, he was moving in a different direction. He devoured works questioning the existence of Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Then "I said to myself: You've dealt with Christianity and Judaism but what about your own religion? Can you take it for granted that Muhammad existed?"
He had no doubts at first, but slowly they emerged. He was struck, he says, by the fact that the first coins bearing Muhammad's name did not appear until the late 7th century -- six decades after the religion did.
He traded ideas with some scholars in Saarbrücken who in recent years have been pushing the idea of Muhammad's nonexistence. They claim that "Muhammad" wasn't the name of a person but a title, and that Islam began as a Christian heresy.
Prof. Kalisch didn't buy all of this. Contributing last year to a book on Islam, he weighed the odds and called Muhammad's existence "more probable than not." By early this year, though, his thinking had shifted. "The more I read, the historical person at the root of the whole thing became more and more improbable," he says.
He has doubts, too, about the Quran. "God doesn't write books," Prof. Kalisch says.
Some of his students voiced alarm at the direction of his teaching. "I began to wonder if he would one day say he doesn't exist himself," says one. A few boycotted his lectures. Others sang his praises.
Prof. Kalisch says he "never told students 'just believe what Kalisch thinks' " but seeks to teach them to think independently. Religions, he says, are "crutches" that help believers get to "the spiritual truth behind them." To him, what matters isn't whether Muhammad actually lived but the philosophy presented in his name.
This summer, the dispute hit the headlines. A Turkish-language German newspaper reported on it with gusto. Media in the Muslim world picked up on it.
Germany's Muslim Coordinating Council withdrew from the advisory board of Prof. Kalisch's center. Some Council members refused to address him by his adopted Muslim name, Muhammad, saying that he should now be known as Sven.
German academics split. Michael Marx, a Quran scholar at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, warned that Prof. Kalisch's views would discredit German scholarship and make it difficult for German scholars to work in Muslim lands. But Ursula Spuler-Stegemann, an Islamic studies scholar at the University of Marburg, set up a Web site called solidaritymuhammadkalisch.com and started an online petition of support.
Alarmed that a pioneering effort at Muslim outreach was only stoking antagonism, Münster University decided to douse the flames. Prof. Kalisch was told he could keep his professorship but must stop teaching Islam to future school teachers.
The professor says he's more determined than ever to keep probing his faith. He is finishing a book to explain his thoughts. It's in English instead of German because he wants to make a bigger impact. "I'm convinced that what I'm doing is necessary. There must be a free discussion of Islam," he says.
—Almut Schoenfeld in Berlin contributed to this article.
Write to Andrew Higgins at [email protected]
*****
French appeals court overturns annulment of Muslim marriage
Associated Press
November 17, 2008 at 1:46 PM EST
DOUAI, France — A French appeals court Monday reinstated the
marriage of a Muslim man who had sought an annulment because his
bride lied about being a virgin.
The controversial case pitted France's secular values against the
traditions of its growing immigrant communities.
The couple married in 2006 but the husband quickly sought an
annulment after discovering on their wedding night that his bride
had lied about her virginity.
In April, a lower court in the northern town of Douai granted the
annulment, saying the woman "acquiesced" to the man's demand for
one "based on a lie concerning her virginity."
On Monday, the appeals court in Douai overturned the annulment,
effectively ruling that the couple is again married, said lawyer
Xavier Labbee, representing the husband.
Mr. Labbee said the ruling amounted to a "forced marriage." He
criticized "the intrusion of the notion of secularism into the most
intimate parts of family life."
Both the woman and the man opposed the appeal, according to their
lawyers. The woman's lawyer, Charles-Edouard Mauger, has said she
was distraught by the dragging out of the humiliating case.
The couple must now seek a divorce if they want to separate.
Prosecutors argued the annulment discriminated against women and
wanted it thrown out.
The lower court had based its decision on an article of the French
Civil Code that states that a spouse can seek an annulment if the
partner has misrepresented his or her "essential qualities."
The couple, a man in his 30s and a woman in her 20s, has not been
identified by name.
In Monday's decision, the appeals court said virginity was not "a
condition posed for their union," according to a statement from the
prosecutor's office. It said the lie was not enough to justify an
annulment.
Islamic Theologian's Theory: It's Likely the Prophet Muhammad Never Existed
By ANDREW HIGGINS
MÜNSTER, Germany -- Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a Muslim convert and Germany's first professor of Islamic theology, fasts during the Muslim holy month, doesn't like to shake hands with Muslim women and has spent years studying Islamic scripture. Islam, he says, guides his life.
So it came as something of a surprise when Prof. Kalisch announced the fruit of his theological research. His conclusion: The Prophet Muhammad probably never existed.
Muslims, not surprisingly, are outraged. Even Danish cartoonists who triggered global protests a couple of years ago didn't portray the Prophet as fictional. German police, worried about a violent backlash, told the professor to move his religious-studies center to more-secure premises.
"We had no idea he would have ideas like this," says Thomas Bauer, a fellow academic at Münster University who sat on a committee that appointed Prof. Kalisch. "I'm a more orthodox Muslim than he is, and I'm not a Muslim."
When Prof. Kalisch took up his theology chair four years ago, he was seen as proof that modern Western scholarship and Islamic ways can mingle -- and counter the influence of radical preachers in Germany. He was put in charge of a new program at Münster, one of Germany's oldest and most respected universities, to train teachers in state schools to teach Muslim pupils about their faith.
Muslim leaders cheered and joined an advisory board at his Center for Religious Studies. Politicians hailed the appointment as a sign of Germany's readiness to absorb some three million Muslims into mainstream society. But, says Andreas Pinkwart, a minister responsible for higher education in this north German region, "the results are disappointing."
Prof. Kalisch, who insists he's still a Muslim, says he knew he would get in trouble but wanted to subject Islam to the same scrutiny as Christianity and Judaism. German scholars of the 19th century, he notes, were among the first to raise questions about the historical accuracy of the Bible.
Many scholars of Islam question the accuracy of ancient sources on Muhammad's life. The earliest biography, of which no copies survive, dated from roughly a century after the generally accepted year of his death, 632, and is known only by references to it in much later texts. But only a few scholars have doubted Muhammad's existence. Most say his life is better documented than that of Jesus.
"Of course Muhammad existed," says Tilman Nagel, a scholar in Göttingen and author of a new book, "Muhammad: Life and Legend." The Prophet differed from the flawless figure of Islamic tradition, Prof. Nagel says, but "it is quite astonishing to say that thousands and thousands of pages about him were all forged" and there was no such person.
All the same, Prof. Nagel has signed a petition in support of Prof. Kalisch, who has faced blistering criticism from Muslim groups and some secular German academics. "We are in Europe," Prof. Nagel says. "Education is about thinking, not just learning by heart."
Prof. Kalisch's religious studies center recently removed a sign and erased its address from its Web site. The professor, a burly 42-year-old, says he has received no specific threats but has been denounced as apostate, a capital offense in some readings of Islam.
"Maybe people are speculating that some idiot will come and cut off my head," he said during an interview in his study.
A few minutes later, an assistant arrived in a panic to say a suspicious-looking digital clock had been found lying in the hallway. Police, called to the scene, declared the clock harmless.
A convert to Islam at age 15, Prof. Kalisch says he was drawn to the faith because it seemed more rational than others. He embraced a branch of Shiite Islam noted for its skeptical bent. After working briefly as a lawyer, he began work in 2001 on a postdoctoral thesis in Islamic law in Hamburg, to go through the elaborate process required to become a professor in Germany.
The Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S. that year appalled Mr. Kalisch but didn't dent his devotion. Indeed, after he arrived at Münster University in 2004, he struck some as too conservative. Sami Alrabaa, a scholar at a nearby college, recalls attending a lecture by Prof. Kalisch and being upset by his doctrinaire defense of Islamic law, known as Sharia.
In private, he was moving in a different direction. He devoured works questioning the existence of Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Then "I said to myself: You've dealt with Christianity and Judaism but what about your own religion? Can you take it for granted that Muhammad existed?"
He had no doubts at first, but slowly they emerged. He was struck, he says, by the fact that the first coins bearing Muhammad's name did not appear until the late 7th century -- six decades after the religion did.
He traded ideas with some scholars in Saarbrücken who in recent years have been pushing the idea of Muhammad's nonexistence. They claim that "Muhammad" wasn't the name of a person but a title, and that Islam began as a Christian heresy.
Prof. Kalisch didn't buy all of this. Contributing last year to a book on Islam, he weighed the odds and called Muhammad's existence "more probable than not." By early this year, though, his thinking had shifted. "The more I read, the historical person at the root of the whole thing became more and more improbable," he says.
He has doubts, too, about the Quran. "God doesn't write books," Prof. Kalisch says.
Some of his students voiced alarm at the direction of his teaching. "I began to wonder if he would one day say he doesn't exist himself," says one. A few boycotted his lectures. Others sang his praises.
Prof. Kalisch says he "never told students 'just believe what Kalisch thinks' " but seeks to teach them to think independently. Religions, he says, are "crutches" that help believers get to "the spiritual truth behind them." To him, what matters isn't whether Muhammad actually lived but the philosophy presented in his name.
This summer, the dispute hit the headlines. A Turkish-language German newspaper reported on it with gusto. Media in the Muslim world picked up on it.
Germany's Muslim Coordinating Council withdrew from the advisory board of Prof. Kalisch's center. Some Council members refused to address him by his adopted Muslim name, Muhammad, saying that he should now be known as Sven.
German academics split. Michael Marx, a Quran scholar at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, warned that Prof. Kalisch's views would discredit German scholarship and make it difficult for German scholars to work in Muslim lands. But Ursula Spuler-Stegemann, an Islamic studies scholar at the University of Marburg, set up a Web site called solidaritymuhammadkalisch.com and started an online petition of support.
Alarmed that a pioneering effort at Muslim outreach was only stoking antagonism, Münster University decided to douse the flames. Prof. Kalisch was told he could keep his professorship but must stop teaching Islam to future school teachers.
The professor says he's more determined than ever to keep probing his faith. He is finishing a book to explain his thoughts. It's in English instead of German because he wants to make a bigger impact. "I'm convinced that what I'm doing is necessary. There must be a free discussion of Islam," he says.
—Almut Schoenfeld in Berlin contributed to this article.
Write to Andrew Higgins at [email protected]
*****
French appeals court overturns annulment of Muslim marriage
Associated Press
November 17, 2008 at 1:46 PM EST
DOUAI, France — A French appeals court Monday reinstated the
marriage of a Muslim man who had sought an annulment because his
bride lied about being a virgin.
The controversial case pitted France's secular values against the
traditions of its growing immigrant communities.
The couple married in 2006 but the husband quickly sought an
annulment after discovering on their wedding night that his bride
had lied about her virginity.
In April, a lower court in the northern town of Douai granted the
annulment, saying the woman "acquiesced" to the man's demand for
one "based on a lie concerning her virginity."
On Monday, the appeals court in Douai overturned the annulment,
effectively ruling that the couple is again married, said lawyer
Xavier Labbee, representing the husband.
Mr. Labbee said the ruling amounted to a "forced marriage." He
criticized "the intrusion of the notion of secularism into the most
intimate parts of family life."
Both the woman and the man opposed the appeal, according to their
lawyers. The woman's lawyer, Charles-Edouard Mauger, has said she
was distraught by the dragging out of the humiliating case.
The couple must now seek a divorce if they want to separate.
Prosecutors argued the annulment discriminated against women and
wanted it thrown out.
The lower court had based its decision on an article of the French
Civil Code that states that a spouse can seek an annulment if the
partner has misrepresented his or her "essential qualities."
The couple, a man in his 30s and a woman in her 20s, has not been
identified by name.
In Monday's decision, the appeals court said virginity was not "a
condition posed for their union," according to a statement from the
prosecutor's office. It said the lie was not enough to justify an
annulment.
November 19, 2008
Britain Grapples With Role for Islamic Justice
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
LONDON — The woman in black wanted an Islamic divorce. She told the religious judge that her husband hit her, cursed her and wanted her dead.
But her husband was opposed, and the Islamic scholar adjudicating the case seemed determined to keep the couple together. So, sensing defeat, she brought our her secret weapon: her father.
In walked a bearded man in long robes who described his son-in-law as a hot-tempered man who had duped his daughter, evaded the police and humiliated his family.
The judge promptly reversed himself and recommended divorce.
This is Islamic justice, British style. Despite a raucous national debate over the limits of religious tolerance and the pre-eminence of British law, the tenets of Shariah, or Islamic law, are increasingly being applied to everyday life in cities across the country.
The Church of England has its own ecclesiastical courts. British Jews have had their own “beth din” courts for more than a century.
But ever since the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, called in February for aspects of Islamic Shariah to be embraced alongside the traditional legal system, the government has been grappling with a public furor over the issue, assuaging critics while trying to reassure a wary and at times disaffected Muslim population that its traditions have a place in British society.
Boxed between the two, the government has taken a stance both cautious and confusing, a sign of how volatile almost any discussion of the role of Britain’s nearly two million Muslims can become.
“There is nothing whatever in English law that prevents people abiding by Shariah principles if they wish to, provided they do not come into conflict with English law,” the justice minister, Jack Straw, said last month. But he added that British law would “always remain supreme,” and that “regardless of religious belief, we are all equal before the law.”
Conservatives and liberals alike — many of them unaware that the Islamic courts had been functioning at all, much less for years — have repeatedly denounced the courts as poor substitutes for British jurisprudence.
They argue that the Islamic tribunals’ proceedings are secretive, with no accountability and no standards for judges’ training or decisions.
Critics also point to cases of domestic violence in which Islamic scholars have tried to keep marriages together by ordering husbands to take classes in anger management, leaving the wives so intimidated that they have withdrawn their complaints from the police.
“They’re hostages to fortune,” said Parvin Ali, founding director of the Fatima Women’s Network, a women’s help group based in Leicester. Speaking of the courts, she said, “There is no outside monitoring, no protection, no records kept, no guarantee that justice will prevail.”
But as the uproar continues, the popularity of the courts among Muslims has blossomed.
Some of the informal councils, as the courts are known, have been giving advice and handing down judgments to Muslims for more than two decades.
Yet the councils have expanded significantly in number and prominence in recent years, with some Islamic scholars reporting a 50 percent increase in cases since 2005.
Almost all of the cases involve women asking for divorce, and through word of mouth and an ambitious use of the Internet, courts like the small, unadorned building in London where the father stepped in to plead his daughter’s case have become magnets for Muslim women seeking to escape loveless marriages — not only from Britain but sometimes also from Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany.
Other cases involve disputes over property, labor, inheritances and physical injury. The tribunals stay away from criminal cases that might call for the imposition of punishments like lashing or stoning.
Indeed, most of the courts’ judgments have no standing under British civil law. But for the parties who come before them, the courts offer something more important: the imprimatur of God.
“We do not want to give the impression that Muslims are an isolated community seeking a separate legal system in this country,” said Shahid Raza, who adjudicates disputes from an Islamic center in the West London suburb of Ealing.
“We are not asking for criminal Shariah law — chopping of hands or stoning to death,” he continued. “Ninety-nine percent of our cases are divorce cases in which women are seeking relief. We are helping women. We are doing a service.”
Still, there is ample room for clashes with British custom. Three months ago, for example, a wealthy Bangladeshi family asked Dr. Raza’s council to resolve an inheritance dispute. It was resolved according to Shariah, he said. That meant the male heirs received twice as much as the female heirs.
Courts in the United States have endorsed Islamic and other religious tribunals, as in 2003, when a Texas appeals court referred a divorce case to a local council called the Texas Islamic Court.
But Shariah has been rejected in the West as well.
The Canadian province of Ontario had allowed rabbinical courts and Christian courts to resolve some civil and family disputes with binding rulings under a 1991 law. But when the Islamic Institute on Civil Justice there tried to create a Shariah court, it was attacked as a violation of the rights of Muslim women.
As a result, Ontario changed the entire system in 2006 to strip the rulings of any religious arbitration of legal validity or enforceability.
In Britain, beth din courts do not decide whether a Jewish couple’s marriage should end. They simply put their stamp of approval on the dissolution of the marriage when both parties agree to it. The beth din also adheres to the rules of Britain’s 1996 Arbitration Act and can function as an official court of arbitration in the consensual resolution of other civil disputes, like inheritance or business conflicts.
“People often come to us for reasons of speed, cost and secrecy,” said David Frei, registrar of the London Beth Din. “There’s nothing to prevent Muslims from doing the same thing.”
In Britain’s Islamic councils, however, if a wife wants a divorce and the husband does not, the Shariah court can grant her unilateral request to dissolve the marriage.
Most Shariah councils do not recognize the Arbitration Act, although Mr. Straw has been pushing them in recent months to do so. The main reason for their opposition is that they do not want the state involved in what they consider to be matters of religion.
The conflict over British Shariah courts comes at a time when Islamic principles are being extended to other areas of daily life in Britain.
There are now five wholly Islamic banks in the country and a score more that comply with Shariah.
An insurance company last summer began British advertising for “car insurance that’s right for your faith” because it does not violate certain Islamic prohibitions, like the one against gambling.
Britain’s first Shariah-compliant prepaid MasterCard was begun in August.
Here in London, Suhaib Hasan’s “courtroom” is a sparsely furnished office of the Islamic Shariah Council in Leyton, a working-class neighborhood in the eastern corner of the city. It has no lawyers or court stenographer, no recording device or computer, so Dr. Hasan takes partial notes in longhand.
“Please, will you give him another chance?” he asked the woman in black who was seeking divorce — that is, before she brought in the weighty voice of her father.
“No, no!” the woman, a 24-year-old employment consultant who had come seeking justice from 200 miles away, replied. “I gave him too many chances. He is an evil, evil man.”
“I’ll give you one month’s time to try to reconcile,” Dr. Hasan ruled.
Then her father tipped the scales.
“He was not a cucumber that we could cut open to know that he was rotten inside,” the father testified. “The only solution is divorce.”
Apparently convinced, Dr. Hasan said he would recommend divorce at the London Central Mosque, where he and several other religious scholars meet once a month to give final approval to cases like this.
Dr. Hasan, a silver-bearded, Saudi-educated scholar of Pakistani origin, handles the Pakistani community; an Egyptian ministers to the ethnic Arab community, while a Bangladeshi and a Somali work with their own communities.
The council in Leyton is one of the oldest and largest courts in the country. It has been quietly resolving disputes since 1982 and has dealt with more than 7,000 divorce cases.
Under some interpretations of Islamic law, a woman needs the blessing of a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence to be divorced, while a man can simply say three times that he is divorcing his wife.
Dr. Hasan counsels women that they must have their civil marriages dissolved in the British civil system.
“We always try to keep the marriages together, especially when there are children,” said Dr. Hasan’s wife, Shakila Qurashi, who works as an unofficial counselor for women.
If the husband beats her, she should go to the police and have a divorce, Ms. Qurashi said. “But if he’s slapped her only once or something like that,” she said, “and he admits he has made a mistake and promised not to do it again, then we say, ‘You have to forgive.’ ”
One recent afternoon, the waiting room was full of women and their family members.
A Pakistan-born 33-year-old mother of five explained that her husband would beat her and her children. “He threatens to kill us,” she said, as her daughter translated from Urdu. “He calls me a Jew and an infidel.” Dr. Hasan told her to immediately get police protection and request an Islamic divorce.
Another woman, 25, wanted out of a two-year-old arranged marriage with a man who refused to consummate the relationship. Dr. Hasan counseled dialogue.
“Until we see the husband,” he said, “we can’t be sure that what you’re saying is true.”
Basil Katz contributed reporting.
Britain Grapples With Role for Islamic Justice
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
LONDON — The woman in black wanted an Islamic divorce. She told the religious judge that her husband hit her, cursed her and wanted her dead.
But her husband was opposed, and the Islamic scholar adjudicating the case seemed determined to keep the couple together. So, sensing defeat, she brought our her secret weapon: her father.
In walked a bearded man in long robes who described his son-in-law as a hot-tempered man who had duped his daughter, evaded the police and humiliated his family.
The judge promptly reversed himself and recommended divorce.
This is Islamic justice, British style. Despite a raucous national debate over the limits of religious tolerance and the pre-eminence of British law, the tenets of Shariah, or Islamic law, are increasingly being applied to everyday life in cities across the country.
The Church of England has its own ecclesiastical courts. British Jews have had their own “beth din” courts for more than a century.
But ever since the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, called in February for aspects of Islamic Shariah to be embraced alongside the traditional legal system, the government has been grappling with a public furor over the issue, assuaging critics while trying to reassure a wary and at times disaffected Muslim population that its traditions have a place in British society.
Boxed between the two, the government has taken a stance both cautious and confusing, a sign of how volatile almost any discussion of the role of Britain’s nearly two million Muslims can become.
“There is nothing whatever in English law that prevents people abiding by Shariah principles if they wish to, provided they do not come into conflict with English law,” the justice minister, Jack Straw, said last month. But he added that British law would “always remain supreme,” and that “regardless of religious belief, we are all equal before the law.”
Conservatives and liberals alike — many of them unaware that the Islamic courts had been functioning at all, much less for years — have repeatedly denounced the courts as poor substitutes for British jurisprudence.
They argue that the Islamic tribunals’ proceedings are secretive, with no accountability and no standards for judges’ training or decisions.
Critics also point to cases of domestic violence in which Islamic scholars have tried to keep marriages together by ordering husbands to take classes in anger management, leaving the wives so intimidated that they have withdrawn their complaints from the police.
“They’re hostages to fortune,” said Parvin Ali, founding director of the Fatima Women’s Network, a women’s help group based in Leicester. Speaking of the courts, she said, “There is no outside monitoring, no protection, no records kept, no guarantee that justice will prevail.”
But as the uproar continues, the popularity of the courts among Muslims has blossomed.
Some of the informal councils, as the courts are known, have been giving advice and handing down judgments to Muslims for more than two decades.
Yet the councils have expanded significantly in number and prominence in recent years, with some Islamic scholars reporting a 50 percent increase in cases since 2005.
Almost all of the cases involve women asking for divorce, and through word of mouth and an ambitious use of the Internet, courts like the small, unadorned building in London where the father stepped in to plead his daughter’s case have become magnets for Muslim women seeking to escape loveless marriages — not only from Britain but sometimes also from Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany.
Other cases involve disputes over property, labor, inheritances and physical injury. The tribunals stay away from criminal cases that might call for the imposition of punishments like lashing or stoning.
Indeed, most of the courts’ judgments have no standing under British civil law. But for the parties who come before them, the courts offer something more important: the imprimatur of God.
“We do not want to give the impression that Muslims are an isolated community seeking a separate legal system in this country,” said Shahid Raza, who adjudicates disputes from an Islamic center in the West London suburb of Ealing.
“We are not asking for criminal Shariah law — chopping of hands or stoning to death,” he continued. “Ninety-nine percent of our cases are divorce cases in which women are seeking relief. We are helping women. We are doing a service.”
Still, there is ample room for clashes with British custom. Three months ago, for example, a wealthy Bangladeshi family asked Dr. Raza’s council to resolve an inheritance dispute. It was resolved according to Shariah, he said. That meant the male heirs received twice as much as the female heirs.
Courts in the United States have endorsed Islamic and other religious tribunals, as in 2003, when a Texas appeals court referred a divorce case to a local council called the Texas Islamic Court.
But Shariah has been rejected in the West as well.
The Canadian province of Ontario had allowed rabbinical courts and Christian courts to resolve some civil and family disputes with binding rulings under a 1991 law. But when the Islamic Institute on Civil Justice there tried to create a Shariah court, it was attacked as a violation of the rights of Muslim women.
As a result, Ontario changed the entire system in 2006 to strip the rulings of any religious arbitration of legal validity or enforceability.
In Britain, beth din courts do not decide whether a Jewish couple’s marriage should end. They simply put their stamp of approval on the dissolution of the marriage when both parties agree to it. The beth din also adheres to the rules of Britain’s 1996 Arbitration Act and can function as an official court of arbitration in the consensual resolution of other civil disputes, like inheritance or business conflicts.
“People often come to us for reasons of speed, cost and secrecy,” said David Frei, registrar of the London Beth Din. “There’s nothing to prevent Muslims from doing the same thing.”
In Britain’s Islamic councils, however, if a wife wants a divorce and the husband does not, the Shariah court can grant her unilateral request to dissolve the marriage.
Most Shariah councils do not recognize the Arbitration Act, although Mr. Straw has been pushing them in recent months to do so. The main reason for their opposition is that they do not want the state involved in what they consider to be matters of religion.
The conflict over British Shariah courts comes at a time when Islamic principles are being extended to other areas of daily life in Britain.
There are now five wholly Islamic banks in the country and a score more that comply with Shariah.
An insurance company last summer began British advertising for “car insurance that’s right for your faith” because it does not violate certain Islamic prohibitions, like the one against gambling.
Britain’s first Shariah-compliant prepaid MasterCard was begun in August.
Here in London, Suhaib Hasan’s “courtroom” is a sparsely furnished office of the Islamic Shariah Council in Leyton, a working-class neighborhood in the eastern corner of the city. It has no lawyers or court stenographer, no recording device or computer, so Dr. Hasan takes partial notes in longhand.
“Please, will you give him another chance?” he asked the woman in black who was seeking divorce — that is, before she brought in the weighty voice of her father.
“No, no!” the woman, a 24-year-old employment consultant who had come seeking justice from 200 miles away, replied. “I gave him too many chances. He is an evil, evil man.”
“I’ll give you one month’s time to try to reconcile,” Dr. Hasan ruled.
Then her father tipped the scales.
“He was not a cucumber that we could cut open to know that he was rotten inside,” the father testified. “The only solution is divorce.”
Apparently convinced, Dr. Hasan said he would recommend divorce at the London Central Mosque, where he and several other religious scholars meet once a month to give final approval to cases like this.
Dr. Hasan, a silver-bearded, Saudi-educated scholar of Pakistani origin, handles the Pakistani community; an Egyptian ministers to the ethnic Arab community, while a Bangladeshi and a Somali work with their own communities.
The council in Leyton is one of the oldest and largest courts in the country. It has been quietly resolving disputes since 1982 and has dealt with more than 7,000 divorce cases.
Under some interpretations of Islamic law, a woman needs the blessing of a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence to be divorced, while a man can simply say three times that he is divorcing his wife.
Dr. Hasan counsels women that they must have their civil marriages dissolved in the British civil system.
“We always try to keep the marriages together, especially when there are children,” said Dr. Hasan’s wife, Shakila Qurashi, who works as an unofficial counselor for women.
If the husband beats her, she should go to the police and have a divorce, Ms. Qurashi said. “But if he’s slapped her only once or something like that,” she said, “and he admits he has made a mistake and promised not to do it again, then we say, ‘You have to forgive.’ ”
One recent afternoon, the waiting room was full of women and their family members.
A Pakistan-born 33-year-old mother of five explained that her husband would beat her and her children. “He threatens to kill us,” she said, as her daughter translated from Urdu. “He calls me a Jew and an infidel.” Dr. Hasan told her to immediately get police protection and request an Islamic divorce.
Another woman, 25, wanted out of a two-year-old arranged marriage with a man who refused to consummate the relationship. Dr. Hasan counseled dialogue.
“Until we see the husband,” he said, “we can’t be sure that what you’re saying is true.”
Basil Katz contributed reporting.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Batunimurid/message/36348
Muslims and city politics
When town halls turn to Mecca
Dec 4th 2008 | DUISBURG, LYON AND ROTTERDAM
From The Economist print edition
For many European municipalities and a few American ones (see article) accommodating Islam is a big dilemma—but not an insoluble one
Eyevine
IN CITIES all over Europe, mayors are fretting about the coming religious festivities. No, not just Christmas lights. They want to ensure hygiene and order in the slaughter of sheep for the feast of Eid al-Adha on December 8th. This remembers the readiness of Abraham—the patriarch revered by all three monotheistic faiths—to sacrifice his son. Muslims often sacrifice a lamb, whose meat is shared with family members and the poor.
In the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, where the dominant culture is that of Morocco, a circular from the district authorities reminds residents not to kill animals at home. It invites them to a “temporary abattoir” that will function for 48 hours in a council garage. Molenbeek is one of four areas of Brussels which have set up makeshift slaughterhouses, each with a capacity of at least 500 sheep. In practice, home killing is hard to stop, despite vows by the city authorities to prosecute offenders.
In places like Molenbeek, a few miles away from the European Union’s main institutions, talk of the continent’s transformation into Eurabia doesn’t sound absurd. Although Muslims make up less than 4% of the EU’s total population, their concentration in urban areas is altering the scene in some European cities.
In some of these places bad relations between Muslims, non-Muslims and the authorities are creating political opportunities for the far right. In east London, for example, arguments are raging over plans for a “mega-mosque” near the site of the 2012 Olympics. In rough parts of northern Paris, there are fights between Muslims and Jews. In Italian cities, where Muslims are numerous but not many can vote, Catholics and secularists have united to stop the erection of mosques.
Yet talk of civilisational war in Europe’s cobblestoned streets is out of line in one respect: it understates the ability of democratic politics, especially local politics, to adapt to new social phenomena. For cities to work, compromises have to be struck and coalitions assembled. In city affairs, more than in national politics, politicians borrow each other’s slogans and policies.
In London, many expected a change in municipal attitudes towards Islam when a Conservative, Boris Johnson, took over as mayor from Ken Livingstone, a leftist maverick who had feted Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a controversial Muslim preacher. But in October, when the fasting month of Ramadan ended, Mr Johnson worked as keenly as his predecessors had done with the Muslim Council of Britain to stage an Islamic celebration in Trafalgar Square.
Or take Rotterdam, where Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Muslim from Morocco, will take over as mayor at the start of 2009. On the face of things, Rotterdam has the ingredients for a Eurabian nightmare. Its Muslim population (at least 13% of the total, some say more) huddles in a few poor districts; there is a big white working class; and this is the home of Pim Fortuyn, the Islam-bashing gay politician who was killed in 2002. A group set up by Fortuyn—Liveable Rotterdam—remains active, though it lost control of the city hall to a Labour-led coalition in 2006.
And yet for now the public mood in Rotterdam is one of compromise. Among the leftist councillors who induced Mr Aboutaleb to leave his government job, the talk is of reaching out to xenophobic voters. Some policies adopted by Liveable Rotterdam—such as house searches to find illegal immigrants—have been kept under Labour. And Labour councillors like Hamit Karakus (born in Turkey but now steeped in Dutch emollience) stress the need for sensitivity to the “host” community.
Muslim citizens, he says, must understand old Dutch people who fear to leave their homes because neighbourhoods have changed. Muslims, he adds, are entitled to call the Netherlands home and practise Islam, but must accept the basics of democracy, and equality between the sexes. For the foreseeable future, no ezan, or call to prayer, will be heard on Rotterdam’s quays: too provocative, says Mr Karakus.
In the rough dockside area of Feijenoord, a local Labour politician, Robbert Baruch, enthuses about the role of mosque committees in a “social network” that mitigates poverty. He has often helped Muslim groups to qualify for municipal funds by broadening (to include non-Muslims) the range of partners and beneficiaries in their social activities. While scholars debate the role in European history of Islamic culture, local politicians face practical issues. Should recreation be segregated by sex? What food should be served in schools? How should city workers dress?
Each European country has its own traditions and taboos. Since 1905 the French state (and public space such as ministries and schools) has been off-limits to religion; it is axiomatic that no faith can ask for political favours. Belgium is messily theocratic, with a raft of subsidies for “recognised” places of worship and religious teachers, a category that now includes Muslims.
Despite these contrasts, some dilemmas faced by local authorities with large Muslim populations vary little across Europe. And the responses are often similar. In east London, double-parking is tolerated when the streets fill with Friday mosque-goers; in Molenbeek, traffic is curbed during Muslim feasts. When there is an electoral, or practical, imperative to deal with Muslim concerns, local administrators somehow get round the taboos. Muslims, meanwhile, find themselves in strange alliances. Brahim Bourzik, a well-connected Rotterdam Muslim, co-organises public events with a gay newspaper: to remind people, he says, that gays have often spoken up for immigrants’ rights.
As a case of local pragmatism, take Lyon in France, where 16,400 pupils at primary schools returned from half-term to find a new lunch menu. Alongside the expected meat dish—sauté de dinde—there was a meatless alternative. Although it wasn’t presented that way, this change was a response to the fact that many Muslims won’t eat meat unless it has been killed in a halal way. In some city schools, about 40% of pupils had been skipping lunch.
Lyon council is the first in France to introduce in schools what it defensively calls a “secular menu”. Its meatless lunches are a neat compromise. Under France’s secular doctrine of laicité it would be unthinkable to make full halal meals; a gesture to “vegetarians” got round a problem that needed facing in a department where 300,000 Muslims (19% of the population) live.
When diet divides
One local civil-liberties group called the new policy “dietary apartheid”. But the Lyon authorities hope to avoid the passions over food in schools (and other Islamic issues) that rage in, say, Antwerp. That port is a bastion of the Flemish-nationalist movement, Vlaams Belang, which plays on fear of Islam as much as linguistic chauvinism. In the last city elections in 2006, VB retained about a third of the vote, and was kept out of power only by a broad centre-left block. Between Antwerp and Rotterdam—both historic ports that are diverse but Dutch-speaking—there is a big difference in political climate.
Every time moves are made towards opening a new mosque in Antwerp (there are now 36), Vlaams Belang stages a noisy protest. Last January it brought to Antwerp a gaggle of far-right groups from across Europe; a cross-border effort to stop creeping Islamisation was duly proclaimed. And nationalist Flemings reacted with triumphant rage when an Antwerp bureaucrat quietly decided that, henceforth, all food in city schools would be halal. The finesse that other north European cities bring to inter-faith relations seems lacking in Flanders. A compromise over the apparel of Antwerp city workers—scarves were not to be worn when dealing with the public, but okay elsewhere—left all sides grumbling.
If relations between Muslims and others are tense in Flemish cities, that reflects the sick state of Belgium. In Brussels, Flemings accuse French-speaking bureaucrats of enfranchising francophone Moroccans so as to tilt the balance against Dutch. And as Hilde de Lobel, a VB legislator, puts it: “People say they haven’t fought against the French language only to yield to Arabic.”
The Flemish right has taken heart from the widely publicised protests against a large mosque in Cologne. In September a protest meeting in the German city (with participants from Flanders, Italy and Austria) was called off only after police clashed with counter-demonstrators.
But in Germany as a whole, inter-faith relations are happier than in Belgium. Take Duisburg, just 60km from Cologne, where Turks began arriving in the 1950s to work in the coal and steel industries.
In the suburb of Marxloh, in Duisburg’s gritty outskirts, a big mosque has just opened with few problems. A history of inter-faith co-existence has made the region tolerant, says Peter Greulich, a city father in Duisburg. Still, when the Muslims of Marxloh decided to turn their prayer space (an old canteen) into a real mosque, they took no chances. Duisburg had been through a fight in 1997-98 over the call to prayer: “We learnt our limits then,” says Zulfiye Kaykin, head of community outreach at the new mosque.
From the start, non-Muslims were brought in. A board of 25 people—from churches, voluntary groups and trade unions—was set up to figure out “how to integrate the majority community into the whole project”, says Ms Kaykin. The mosque is something of a hybrid. It is built in a familiar Byzantine-Ottoman style, but some features reflect local needs. These include a community centre on the floor below the prayer space, serving both Muslims and non-Muslims. Planners didn’t want a male-only Turkish tea room. Instead, the communal area hosts events for women, youth and the aged plus exhibitions of Muslim and Turkish culture for outsiders. A cabaret artist of Turkish origin has performed there: a first for a mosque.
Miracles do happen
What some call the “miracle from Marxloh” draws little local opposition. Neo-Nazis from elsewhere held a protest in 2005, but Duisburg united against it. The city’s mayor, from the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, backs the project.
The mosque has also been a catalyst for change in the community. “Women have to come out of anonymity,” says Ms Kaykin, herself a stylish, scarf-less dresser. Of the mosque’s 740 members, 80 are women: a change from the old restriction to male heads of households. The mosque has big windows, in part to reassure Germans that nothing bad is being preached.
In Cologne, critics deplore the proposed mosque’s visibility, and the height of its minarets. But in Marxloh, visibility is part of the point. Duisburg has more than 40 mosques, most in nondescript buildings. Some arouse suspicious talk of “parallel societies”. A mosque that announces itself seems reassuring. “We need more mosques in our country, not in backrooms but visible,” said Jürgen Rüttgers, the CDU premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, at the mosque’s opening in October.
The fact that centre-right figures like him back Muslim construction projects shows how far political Europe has come in accepting Islam. In France, local politicians on the centre-right have let through initially controversial plans for large mosques—in Toulouse and Marseille, for example. Several French city halls have faced legal challenges for giving mosques land too cheaply. But in France and Germany it is now widely accepted that more purpose-built mosques are needed.
None of this means that all problems over mosques—and other policy issues related to Islam—are solved. In Heinersdorf, a poor area of east Berlin, there was uproar when Ahmaddiya Muslims from Pakistan, a group which mainstream Islam eschews, set up a mosque. A local citizens’ group called the newcomers “anti-women, anti-democratic and anti-Semitic” and the neo-Nazis were even ruder. But Abdul Basit Tariq, the imam, says the row died down a bit after the mosque opened in October, with the mayor of Berlin present.
On other touchstone issues, like segregated swimming, each country applies its own legal tradition. Rotterdam’s Mr Karakus says this question is no harder than having set times for older swimmers. In France, things are tougher. This year, the mayor of La Verpillière, a village near Lyon with a Turkish population, had to stop a weekly session at the pool that was reserved for women. Non-Muslim women liked these dips as much as their Islamic sisters, but they were deemed to violate French ideals of equality. Fadela Amara, the government minister for cities, who is of Muslim origin and a feminist, called segregated swims a sop to fundamentalism.
But on some matters, a humane accommodation of Muslim customs is increasingly common. One such issue is burial. In Britain, Leicester has pioneered good practice in Islamic internment. In Lyon, the Regional Council for the Muslim Faith (CRCM) has secured Muslim plots, aligned with Mecca, in public cemeteries. On this question, and over sheep sacrifice, regional councils work better than the national body—the CFCM or French Council for the Muslim Faith—of which they are part. On slaughter, talks with the prefecture were “efficient and straightforward”, says Azzedine Gaci, head of the Lyon CRCM.
This bears out an argument made by Jonathan Laurence, a professor at Boston College. As he puts it, local pragmatism often works better than high-stakes posturing between governments and “national” Muslim bodies. In the latter case, expectations are too high: governments want to resolve all their worries about security and political stability, while on the Muslim side, there is rivalry between ethnic groups and a compulsion to flex muscles. But Mr Laurence adds that for local deals to work, there has to be some national consensus about the limits of cultural freedom.
In many parts of Europe, the far right scored well by vowing to tighten those limits—only to lose ground, in some countries, as other parties adopted parts of their agenda (for example, by pledging to curb immigration), and as Muslims became more skilled at politics. However, there are areas of Europe where Islamophobia is still in the ascendant—such as Austria, where the far right took 29% of the national vote in September and picked a fight over teachers and veils.
In France and Germany, the centre-right has grown friendlier to Islam. In Italy, by contrast, the centre-left has been forced to take a tougher line over Islam by the xenophobic right. A mosque-building project in Bologna collapsed in April after its sponsors rejected terms imposed by a leftist mayor, such as transparent funding, and the severing of ties to a pan-Italian body which is seen as close to the Muslim Brotherhood. In Genoa, a leftist mayor has imposed even stiffer conditions (like a bar on minarets) on a mosque-building effort that began last year. But opponents still want a local referendum before work starts.
Neither in Italy nor elsewhere is there any ground for complacency about social peace in Europe’s cities. The absorptive power of local democracy is great, but it is not infinite. From Amsterdam to Leicester, conurbations that now thrive on diversity could face problems if economic pressures put an end to the municipal largesse that keeps all groups happy. But at least this much can be said: there are enough examples of Muslims and non-Muslims learning to rub along, through the trade-offs of local politics, to disprove the fatalists. In urban Europe, there is nothing predestined about the clash of civilisations.
Muslims and city politics
When town halls turn to Mecca
Dec 4th 2008 | DUISBURG, LYON AND ROTTERDAM
From The Economist print edition
For many European municipalities and a few American ones (see article) accommodating Islam is a big dilemma—but not an insoluble one
Eyevine
IN CITIES all over Europe, mayors are fretting about the coming religious festivities. No, not just Christmas lights. They want to ensure hygiene and order in the slaughter of sheep for the feast of Eid al-Adha on December 8th. This remembers the readiness of Abraham—the patriarch revered by all three monotheistic faiths—to sacrifice his son. Muslims often sacrifice a lamb, whose meat is shared with family members and the poor.
In the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, where the dominant culture is that of Morocco, a circular from the district authorities reminds residents not to kill animals at home. It invites them to a “temporary abattoir” that will function for 48 hours in a council garage. Molenbeek is one of four areas of Brussels which have set up makeshift slaughterhouses, each with a capacity of at least 500 sheep. In practice, home killing is hard to stop, despite vows by the city authorities to prosecute offenders.
In places like Molenbeek, a few miles away from the European Union’s main institutions, talk of the continent’s transformation into Eurabia doesn’t sound absurd. Although Muslims make up less than 4% of the EU’s total population, their concentration in urban areas is altering the scene in some European cities.
In some of these places bad relations between Muslims, non-Muslims and the authorities are creating political opportunities for the far right. In east London, for example, arguments are raging over plans for a “mega-mosque” near the site of the 2012 Olympics. In rough parts of northern Paris, there are fights between Muslims and Jews. In Italian cities, where Muslims are numerous but not many can vote, Catholics and secularists have united to stop the erection of mosques.
Yet talk of civilisational war in Europe’s cobblestoned streets is out of line in one respect: it understates the ability of democratic politics, especially local politics, to adapt to new social phenomena. For cities to work, compromises have to be struck and coalitions assembled. In city affairs, more than in national politics, politicians borrow each other’s slogans and policies.
In London, many expected a change in municipal attitudes towards Islam when a Conservative, Boris Johnson, took over as mayor from Ken Livingstone, a leftist maverick who had feted Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a controversial Muslim preacher. But in October, when the fasting month of Ramadan ended, Mr Johnson worked as keenly as his predecessors had done with the Muslim Council of Britain to stage an Islamic celebration in Trafalgar Square.
Or take Rotterdam, where Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Muslim from Morocco, will take over as mayor at the start of 2009. On the face of things, Rotterdam has the ingredients for a Eurabian nightmare. Its Muslim population (at least 13% of the total, some say more) huddles in a few poor districts; there is a big white working class; and this is the home of Pim Fortuyn, the Islam-bashing gay politician who was killed in 2002. A group set up by Fortuyn—Liveable Rotterdam—remains active, though it lost control of the city hall to a Labour-led coalition in 2006.
And yet for now the public mood in Rotterdam is one of compromise. Among the leftist councillors who induced Mr Aboutaleb to leave his government job, the talk is of reaching out to xenophobic voters. Some policies adopted by Liveable Rotterdam—such as house searches to find illegal immigrants—have been kept under Labour. And Labour councillors like Hamit Karakus (born in Turkey but now steeped in Dutch emollience) stress the need for sensitivity to the “host” community.
Muslim citizens, he says, must understand old Dutch people who fear to leave their homes because neighbourhoods have changed. Muslims, he adds, are entitled to call the Netherlands home and practise Islam, but must accept the basics of democracy, and equality between the sexes. For the foreseeable future, no ezan, or call to prayer, will be heard on Rotterdam’s quays: too provocative, says Mr Karakus.
In the rough dockside area of Feijenoord, a local Labour politician, Robbert Baruch, enthuses about the role of mosque committees in a “social network” that mitigates poverty. He has often helped Muslim groups to qualify for municipal funds by broadening (to include non-Muslims) the range of partners and beneficiaries in their social activities. While scholars debate the role in European history of Islamic culture, local politicians face practical issues. Should recreation be segregated by sex? What food should be served in schools? How should city workers dress?
Each European country has its own traditions and taboos. Since 1905 the French state (and public space such as ministries and schools) has been off-limits to religion; it is axiomatic that no faith can ask for political favours. Belgium is messily theocratic, with a raft of subsidies for “recognised” places of worship and religious teachers, a category that now includes Muslims.
Despite these contrasts, some dilemmas faced by local authorities with large Muslim populations vary little across Europe. And the responses are often similar. In east London, double-parking is tolerated when the streets fill with Friday mosque-goers; in Molenbeek, traffic is curbed during Muslim feasts. When there is an electoral, or practical, imperative to deal with Muslim concerns, local administrators somehow get round the taboos. Muslims, meanwhile, find themselves in strange alliances. Brahim Bourzik, a well-connected Rotterdam Muslim, co-organises public events with a gay newspaper: to remind people, he says, that gays have often spoken up for immigrants’ rights.
As a case of local pragmatism, take Lyon in France, where 16,400 pupils at primary schools returned from half-term to find a new lunch menu. Alongside the expected meat dish—sauté de dinde—there was a meatless alternative. Although it wasn’t presented that way, this change was a response to the fact that many Muslims won’t eat meat unless it has been killed in a halal way. In some city schools, about 40% of pupils had been skipping lunch.
Lyon council is the first in France to introduce in schools what it defensively calls a “secular menu”. Its meatless lunches are a neat compromise. Under France’s secular doctrine of laicité it would be unthinkable to make full halal meals; a gesture to “vegetarians” got round a problem that needed facing in a department where 300,000 Muslims (19% of the population) live.
When diet divides
One local civil-liberties group called the new policy “dietary apartheid”. But the Lyon authorities hope to avoid the passions over food in schools (and other Islamic issues) that rage in, say, Antwerp. That port is a bastion of the Flemish-nationalist movement, Vlaams Belang, which plays on fear of Islam as much as linguistic chauvinism. In the last city elections in 2006, VB retained about a third of the vote, and was kept out of power only by a broad centre-left block. Between Antwerp and Rotterdam—both historic ports that are diverse but Dutch-speaking—there is a big difference in political climate.
Every time moves are made towards opening a new mosque in Antwerp (there are now 36), Vlaams Belang stages a noisy protest. Last January it brought to Antwerp a gaggle of far-right groups from across Europe; a cross-border effort to stop creeping Islamisation was duly proclaimed. And nationalist Flemings reacted with triumphant rage when an Antwerp bureaucrat quietly decided that, henceforth, all food in city schools would be halal. The finesse that other north European cities bring to inter-faith relations seems lacking in Flanders. A compromise over the apparel of Antwerp city workers—scarves were not to be worn when dealing with the public, but okay elsewhere—left all sides grumbling.
If relations between Muslims and others are tense in Flemish cities, that reflects the sick state of Belgium. In Brussels, Flemings accuse French-speaking bureaucrats of enfranchising francophone Moroccans so as to tilt the balance against Dutch. And as Hilde de Lobel, a VB legislator, puts it: “People say they haven’t fought against the French language only to yield to Arabic.”
The Flemish right has taken heart from the widely publicised protests against a large mosque in Cologne. In September a protest meeting in the German city (with participants from Flanders, Italy and Austria) was called off only after police clashed with counter-demonstrators.
But in Germany as a whole, inter-faith relations are happier than in Belgium. Take Duisburg, just 60km from Cologne, where Turks began arriving in the 1950s to work in the coal and steel industries.
In the suburb of Marxloh, in Duisburg’s gritty outskirts, a big mosque has just opened with few problems. A history of inter-faith co-existence has made the region tolerant, says Peter Greulich, a city father in Duisburg. Still, when the Muslims of Marxloh decided to turn their prayer space (an old canteen) into a real mosque, they took no chances. Duisburg had been through a fight in 1997-98 over the call to prayer: “We learnt our limits then,” says Zulfiye Kaykin, head of community outreach at the new mosque.
From the start, non-Muslims were brought in. A board of 25 people—from churches, voluntary groups and trade unions—was set up to figure out “how to integrate the majority community into the whole project”, says Ms Kaykin. The mosque is something of a hybrid. It is built in a familiar Byzantine-Ottoman style, but some features reflect local needs. These include a community centre on the floor below the prayer space, serving both Muslims and non-Muslims. Planners didn’t want a male-only Turkish tea room. Instead, the communal area hosts events for women, youth and the aged plus exhibitions of Muslim and Turkish culture for outsiders. A cabaret artist of Turkish origin has performed there: a first for a mosque.
Miracles do happen
What some call the “miracle from Marxloh” draws little local opposition. Neo-Nazis from elsewhere held a protest in 2005, but Duisburg united against it. The city’s mayor, from the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, backs the project.
The mosque has also been a catalyst for change in the community. “Women have to come out of anonymity,” says Ms Kaykin, herself a stylish, scarf-less dresser. Of the mosque’s 740 members, 80 are women: a change from the old restriction to male heads of households. The mosque has big windows, in part to reassure Germans that nothing bad is being preached.
In Cologne, critics deplore the proposed mosque’s visibility, and the height of its minarets. But in Marxloh, visibility is part of the point. Duisburg has more than 40 mosques, most in nondescript buildings. Some arouse suspicious talk of “parallel societies”. A mosque that announces itself seems reassuring. “We need more mosques in our country, not in backrooms but visible,” said Jürgen Rüttgers, the CDU premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, at the mosque’s opening in October.
The fact that centre-right figures like him back Muslim construction projects shows how far political Europe has come in accepting Islam. In France, local politicians on the centre-right have let through initially controversial plans for large mosques—in Toulouse and Marseille, for example. Several French city halls have faced legal challenges for giving mosques land too cheaply. But in France and Germany it is now widely accepted that more purpose-built mosques are needed.
None of this means that all problems over mosques—and other policy issues related to Islam—are solved. In Heinersdorf, a poor area of east Berlin, there was uproar when Ahmaddiya Muslims from Pakistan, a group which mainstream Islam eschews, set up a mosque. A local citizens’ group called the newcomers “anti-women, anti-democratic and anti-Semitic” and the neo-Nazis were even ruder. But Abdul Basit Tariq, the imam, says the row died down a bit after the mosque opened in October, with the mayor of Berlin present.
On other touchstone issues, like segregated swimming, each country applies its own legal tradition. Rotterdam’s Mr Karakus says this question is no harder than having set times for older swimmers. In France, things are tougher. This year, the mayor of La Verpillière, a village near Lyon with a Turkish population, had to stop a weekly session at the pool that was reserved for women. Non-Muslim women liked these dips as much as their Islamic sisters, but they were deemed to violate French ideals of equality. Fadela Amara, the government minister for cities, who is of Muslim origin and a feminist, called segregated swims a sop to fundamentalism.
But on some matters, a humane accommodation of Muslim customs is increasingly common. One such issue is burial. In Britain, Leicester has pioneered good practice in Islamic internment. In Lyon, the Regional Council for the Muslim Faith (CRCM) has secured Muslim plots, aligned with Mecca, in public cemeteries. On this question, and over sheep sacrifice, regional councils work better than the national body—the CFCM or French Council for the Muslim Faith—of which they are part. On slaughter, talks with the prefecture were “efficient and straightforward”, says Azzedine Gaci, head of the Lyon CRCM.
This bears out an argument made by Jonathan Laurence, a professor at Boston College. As he puts it, local pragmatism often works better than high-stakes posturing between governments and “national” Muslim bodies. In the latter case, expectations are too high: governments want to resolve all their worries about security and political stability, while on the Muslim side, there is rivalry between ethnic groups and a compulsion to flex muscles. But Mr Laurence adds that for local deals to work, there has to be some national consensus about the limits of cultural freedom.
In many parts of Europe, the far right scored well by vowing to tighten those limits—only to lose ground, in some countries, as other parties adopted parts of their agenda (for example, by pledging to curb immigration), and as Muslims became more skilled at politics. However, there are areas of Europe where Islamophobia is still in the ascendant—such as Austria, where the far right took 29% of the national vote in September and picked a fight over teachers and veils.
In France and Germany, the centre-right has grown friendlier to Islam. In Italy, by contrast, the centre-left has been forced to take a tougher line over Islam by the xenophobic right. A mosque-building project in Bologna collapsed in April after its sponsors rejected terms imposed by a leftist mayor, such as transparent funding, and the severing of ties to a pan-Italian body which is seen as close to the Muslim Brotherhood. In Genoa, a leftist mayor has imposed even stiffer conditions (like a bar on minarets) on a mosque-building effort that began last year. But opponents still want a local referendum before work starts.
Neither in Italy nor elsewhere is there any ground for complacency about social peace in Europe’s cities. The absorptive power of local democracy is great, but it is not infinite. From Amsterdam to Leicester, conurbations that now thrive on diversity could face problems if economic pressures put an end to the municipal largesse that keeps all groups happy. But at least this much can be said: there are enough examples of Muslims and non-Muslims learning to rub along, through the trade-offs of local politics, to disprove the fatalists. In urban Europe, there is nothing predestined about the clash of civilisations.
December 26, 2008
Newfound Riches Come With Spiritual Costs for Turkey’s Religious Merchants
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
ISTANBUL — Turkey’s religious businessmen spent years building empires on curtains, candy bars and couches. But as observant Muslims in one of the world’s most self-consciously secular states, they were never accepted by elite society.
Now that group has become its own elite, and Turkey, a more openly religious country. It has lifted an Islamic-inspired political party to power and helped make Turkey the seventh largest economy in Europe.
And while other Muslim societies are wrestling with radicals, Turkey’s religious merchant class is struggling instead with riches.
“Muslims here used to be tested by poverty,” said Sehminur Aydin, an observant Muslim businesswoman and the daughter of a manufacturing magnate. “Now they’re being tested by wealth.”
Some say religious Turks are failing that test, and they see the recent economic crisis as a lesson for those who indulged in the worst excesses of consumption, summed up in the work of one Turkish interior designer: a bathroom with faucets encrusted with Swarovski crystal, a swimming pool in the bedroom, a couch rigged to rise up to the ceiling by remote control during prayer. “I know people who broke their credit cards,” Ms. Aydin said.
But beyond the downturn, no matter how severe, is the reality: the religious wealthy class is powerful now in Turkey, a new phenomenon that poses fresh challenges not only to the old secular elite but to what good Muslims think about themselves.
Money is at the heart of the changes that have transformed Turkey. In 1950, it was a largely agrarian society, with 80 percent of its population living in rural areas. Its economy was closed and foreign currency was illegal. But a forward-looking prime minister, Turgut Ozal, opened the economy. Now Turkey exports billions of dollars in goods to other European countries, and about 70 percent of its population lives in cities.
Religious Turks helped power that rise, yet for years they were shunned by elite society. That helps explain why many are engaged in such a frantic effort to prove themselves, said Safak Cak, a Turkish interior designer with many wealthy, religious clients. “It’s because of how we labeled them,” he said. “We looked at them as black people.”
Mr. Cak was referring to Turkey’s deep class divide. An urban upper class, often referred to as White Turks, wielded the political and economic power in the country for decades. They saw themselves as the transmitters of the secular ideals of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder. They have felt threatened by the rise of the rural, religious, merchant class, particularly of its political representative, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“The old class was not ready to share economic and political power,” said Can Paker, chairman of the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, a liberal research organization in Istanbul. “The new class is sharing their habits, like driving Mercedes, but they are also wearing head scarves. The old class can’t bear this.”
“ ‘They were the peasants,’ ” the thinking goes, Mr. Paker said. “ ‘Why are they among us?’ ”
Ms. Aydin, 40, who wears a head scarf, encountered that attitude not long ago in one of Istanbul’s fanciest districts. A woman called her a “dirty fundamentalist” when Ms. Aydin tried to put trash the woman had thrown out her car window back inside.
“If you’re driving a good car, they stare at you and point,” Ms. Aydin said. “You want to say, ‘I graduated from French school just like you,’ but after a while, you don’t feel like proving yourself.”
She does not have to.
Her father started by selling curtains. Now he owns one of the largest home-appliance businesses in Europe. Ms. Aydin grew up wealthy, with tastes no different from those of the older class. She lives in a sleek, modern house with a pool in a gated community. Her son attends a prestigious private school. A business school graduate, she manages about 100 people at a private hospital founded by her father. Her head scarf bars her from employment in a state hospital.
Her husband, Yasar Aydin, shrugged. “Rich people everywhere dislike newcomers,” he said. In another decade, those prejudices will be gone, he said.
The businessmen describe themselves as Muslims with a Protestant work ethic, and say hard work deepens faith.
“We can’t lie down on our oil like Arab countries,” said Osman Kadiroglu, whose family owns a large candy company in Turkey, with factories in Azerbaijan and Algeria. “There’s no way out except producing.”
Fortunes were made, forming new patterns of consumption. Istanbul, Turkey’s economic capital, is No. 4 in the world on the latest Forbes list of cities with the highest number of billionaires. Luxury cars stud its streets. Shopping malls, 80 at last count, are mushrooming.
“Now, unfortunately, there is a taste for luxury, excessive consumption and comfort, vanity, exhibitionism and greed,” said Mehmet Sevket Eygi, a 75-year-old newspaper columnist, who has written extensively about Muslims and wealth.
An Islamic concept called israf forbids consuming more than one needs, but the line is blurry, leaving rich Muslims struggling with questions like whether luxury cars can be offset by donations to charity, a central tenet of Islam.
“You have money, but do you buy whatever you want?” said Recep Senturk, a sociologist at the Center for Islamic Studies in Istanbul. “Or should you keep a humble life? This is a debate in Turkey right now.”
Islam requires that the wealthy give away a portion of their income to the poor. In the Ottoman Empire, it paid for everything from hospitals to dishes broken by maids in rich houses.
Donations to Deniz Feneri, one of the largest charities in Turkey, jumped almost 100-fold in the six years ending in 2006, when they topped $62 million.
Even house designs take charity into account. Mr. Cak described a multimillion-dollar house whose design included an industrial-size kitchen where food was cooked daily and distributed in trucks.
Ms. Aydin, for her part, supports 25 families. The real problem is not finding a place to pray on a busy day out (mall fitting rooms work), but being truly charitable and putting others first when the frenzied pace of life pushes in the opposite direction. She holds onto traditions, like Muslim holidays, tightly.
“The world is changing but I don’t want to lose this,” she said.
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.
Newfound Riches Come With Spiritual Costs for Turkey’s Religious Merchants
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
ISTANBUL — Turkey’s religious businessmen spent years building empires on curtains, candy bars and couches. But as observant Muslims in one of the world’s most self-consciously secular states, they were never accepted by elite society.
Now that group has become its own elite, and Turkey, a more openly religious country. It has lifted an Islamic-inspired political party to power and helped make Turkey the seventh largest economy in Europe.
And while other Muslim societies are wrestling with radicals, Turkey’s religious merchant class is struggling instead with riches.
“Muslims here used to be tested by poverty,” said Sehminur Aydin, an observant Muslim businesswoman and the daughter of a manufacturing magnate. “Now they’re being tested by wealth.”
Some say religious Turks are failing that test, and they see the recent economic crisis as a lesson for those who indulged in the worst excesses of consumption, summed up in the work of one Turkish interior designer: a bathroom with faucets encrusted with Swarovski crystal, a swimming pool in the bedroom, a couch rigged to rise up to the ceiling by remote control during prayer. “I know people who broke their credit cards,” Ms. Aydin said.
But beyond the downturn, no matter how severe, is the reality: the religious wealthy class is powerful now in Turkey, a new phenomenon that poses fresh challenges not only to the old secular elite but to what good Muslims think about themselves.
Money is at the heart of the changes that have transformed Turkey. In 1950, it was a largely agrarian society, with 80 percent of its population living in rural areas. Its economy was closed and foreign currency was illegal. But a forward-looking prime minister, Turgut Ozal, opened the economy. Now Turkey exports billions of dollars in goods to other European countries, and about 70 percent of its population lives in cities.
Religious Turks helped power that rise, yet for years they were shunned by elite society. That helps explain why many are engaged in such a frantic effort to prove themselves, said Safak Cak, a Turkish interior designer with many wealthy, religious clients. “It’s because of how we labeled them,” he said. “We looked at them as black people.”
Mr. Cak was referring to Turkey’s deep class divide. An urban upper class, often referred to as White Turks, wielded the political and economic power in the country for decades. They saw themselves as the transmitters of the secular ideals of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder. They have felt threatened by the rise of the rural, religious, merchant class, particularly of its political representative, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“The old class was not ready to share economic and political power,” said Can Paker, chairman of the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, a liberal research organization in Istanbul. “The new class is sharing their habits, like driving Mercedes, but they are also wearing head scarves. The old class can’t bear this.”
“ ‘They were the peasants,’ ” the thinking goes, Mr. Paker said. “ ‘Why are they among us?’ ”
Ms. Aydin, 40, who wears a head scarf, encountered that attitude not long ago in one of Istanbul’s fanciest districts. A woman called her a “dirty fundamentalist” when Ms. Aydin tried to put trash the woman had thrown out her car window back inside.
“If you’re driving a good car, they stare at you and point,” Ms. Aydin said. “You want to say, ‘I graduated from French school just like you,’ but after a while, you don’t feel like proving yourself.”
She does not have to.
Her father started by selling curtains. Now he owns one of the largest home-appliance businesses in Europe. Ms. Aydin grew up wealthy, with tastes no different from those of the older class. She lives in a sleek, modern house with a pool in a gated community. Her son attends a prestigious private school. A business school graduate, she manages about 100 people at a private hospital founded by her father. Her head scarf bars her from employment in a state hospital.
Her husband, Yasar Aydin, shrugged. “Rich people everywhere dislike newcomers,” he said. In another decade, those prejudices will be gone, he said.
The businessmen describe themselves as Muslims with a Protestant work ethic, and say hard work deepens faith.
“We can’t lie down on our oil like Arab countries,” said Osman Kadiroglu, whose family owns a large candy company in Turkey, with factories in Azerbaijan and Algeria. “There’s no way out except producing.”
Fortunes were made, forming new patterns of consumption. Istanbul, Turkey’s economic capital, is No. 4 in the world on the latest Forbes list of cities with the highest number of billionaires. Luxury cars stud its streets. Shopping malls, 80 at last count, are mushrooming.
“Now, unfortunately, there is a taste for luxury, excessive consumption and comfort, vanity, exhibitionism and greed,” said Mehmet Sevket Eygi, a 75-year-old newspaper columnist, who has written extensively about Muslims and wealth.
An Islamic concept called israf forbids consuming more than one needs, but the line is blurry, leaving rich Muslims struggling with questions like whether luxury cars can be offset by donations to charity, a central tenet of Islam.
“You have money, but do you buy whatever you want?” said Recep Senturk, a sociologist at the Center for Islamic Studies in Istanbul. “Or should you keep a humble life? This is a debate in Turkey right now.”
Islam requires that the wealthy give away a portion of their income to the poor. In the Ottoman Empire, it paid for everything from hospitals to dishes broken by maids in rich houses.
Donations to Deniz Feneri, one of the largest charities in Turkey, jumped almost 100-fold in the six years ending in 2006, when they topped $62 million.
Even house designs take charity into account. Mr. Cak described a multimillion-dollar house whose design included an industrial-size kitchen where food was cooked daily and distributed in trucks.
Ms. Aydin, for her part, supports 25 families. The real problem is not finding a place to pray on a busy day out (mall fitting rooms work), but being truly charitable and putting others first when the frenzied pace of life pushes in the opposite direction. She holds onto traditions, like Muslim holidays, tightly.
“The world is changing but I don’t want to lose this,” she said.
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.
December 27, 2008
Islamic Revival Tests Bosnia’s Secular Cast
By DAN BILEFSKY
SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — Thirteen years after a war in which 100,000 people were killed, a majority of them Muslims, Bosnia is undergoing an Islamic revival.
More than half a dozen new madrasas, or religious high schools, have been built in recent years, while dozens of mosques have sprouted, including the King Fahd, a sprawling $28 million complex with a sports and cultural center.
Before the war, fully covered women and men with long beards were almost unheard of. Today, they are common.
Many here welcome the Muslim revival as a healthy assertion of identity in a multiethnic country where Muslims make up close to half the population.
But others warn of a growing culture clash between conservative Islam and Bosnia’s avowed secularism in an already fragile state.
Two months ago, men in hoods attacked participants at a gay festival in Sarajevo, dragging some people from vehicles and beating others while they chanted, “Kill the gays!” and “Allahu Akbar!” Eight people were injured.
Muslim religious leaders complained that the event, which coincided with the holy month of Ramadan, was a provocation. The organizers said they had sought to promote minority rights and meant no offense.
In this cosmopolitan capital, where bars have long outnumbered mosques, Muslim religious education was recently introduced in state kindergartens, prompting some secular Muslim parents to complain that the separation between mosque and state was being breached.
Bosnia’s Muslims have practiced a moderate Islam that stretches back to the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. Sociologists and political leaders say the religious awakening is partly an outgrowth of the war and the American-brokered Dayton agreement that ended it, dividing the country into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic.
“The Serbs committed genocide against us, raped our women, made us refugees in our own country,” said Mustafa Efendi Ceric, the grand mufti and main spiritual leader of Bosnia’s Muslim community.
“And now we have a tribal constitution that says we have to share political power and land with our killers,” he said. “We Bosnian Muslims still feel besieged in the city of Sarajevo.”
That resentment is evident. As several thousand worshipers streamed into the imposing King Fahd mosque on a recent Friday, a young man sat outside selling a popular conservative Muslim magazine with President-elect Barack Obama on the cover.
"Hussein, Will Your America Kill Muslims?" the headline asked, using Mr. Obama’s middle name, a source of pride for many Muslims here.
Religious and national identity have long been fused in multifaith Bosnia.
It was tradition in villages to refer to neighbors by their religion — Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic, rather than as Bosniak, Serb or Croat.
In the nation-building that followed Dayton, that practice has become stronger.
In Sarajevo, a predominantly Muslim city, dozens of streets named after Communist revolutionaries were renamed after Muslim heroes, and political parties stressing Muslim identity gained large constituencies.
Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, meanwhile, cleave to their own religious and cultural identities. Church attendance is on the rise; in the Serb Republic, even ministries and police departments have their own Orthodox patron saints.
Muharem Bazdulj, deputy editor of the daily Oslobodenje, the voice of liberal, secular Bosnia, said he feared the growth of Wahhabism, the conservative Sunni movement originating in Saudi Arabia that aims to strip away foreign and corrupting influences.
Analysts say Saudi-financed organizations have invested about $700 million in Bosnia since the war, often in mosques.
Wahhabism arrived via hundreds of warriors from the Arab world during the war and with Arab humanitarian and charity workers since, though sociologists here stress that most Bosnian Muslims still believe that Islam has no place in public life.
Dino Abazovic, a sociologist of religion at the University of Sarajevo, who recently conducted a detailed survey of 600 Bosnian Muslims, said 60 percent favored keeping religion a private matter; only a small minority prayed five times a day.
Still, violent episodes have occurred. Earlier this year, after an explosion at a shopping mall in the town of Vitez killed one person and wounded seven, Zlatko Miletic, head of uniformed police of the Muslim-Croat Federation Interior Ministry, warned that a group in Bosnia linked to Salafism, an ultraconservative Sunni Islamic movement, was bent on terrorism.
Nonetheless, Grand Mufti Ceric said Wahhabism had no future in Bosnia, even if more people were embracing religion.
“Children are fasting on Ramadan, going to the mosque more than their parents,” he said. “We had de-Islamification for 40 years during Tito’s time, so it is natural that people are now embracing the freedom to express their religion.”
Some critics of the mufti argue that he has allowed religion to encroach on civic life.
Vedrana Pinjo-Neuschul, who comes from a mixed Serb and Muslim household, has led the fight against Islamic classes in state-financed kindergartens across Sarajevo. Parents may remove their children from the religious classes, but Ms. Pinjo-Neuschul, whose husband is part Jewish, Catholic and Serb, said the policy would stigmatize non-Muslim children.
She recently withdrew her two young children from a public kindergarten and gathered 5,000 signatures against the policy, which has also been criticized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Vienna-based group monitoring democracy. “I do not want to explain to my 4-year-old son, Sven, who is in love with his Muslim classmate Esma, why they suddenly have to sit in different rooms,” she said at a Jewish community center in Sarajevo. “Nobody has the right to separate them.”
But she says she has been harassed by Islamic radicals on the street and has received hate mail in Arabic. “There are some people who want to turn Bosnia into a Muslim state,” she said.
Mustafa Effendi Spahic, a prominent liberal Muslim intellectual and professor at the Gazri Husrev-beg Madrasa in Sarajevo, went further, calling the introduction of religious education in kindergarten “a crime against children.”
“The Prophet says to teach children to kneel as Muslims, only after the age of 7,” said Professor Spahic, who was imprisoned under Communism for Islamic activism. “No one has any right to do that before then because it is an affront to freedom, the imagination and fun of the child’s world.”
Milorad Dodik, prime minister of Bosnia’s Serb Republic, has referred to Sarajevo as the new Tehran, and talks of a “political Islam and a fight against people who don’t share the same vision.”
But Muslim leaders and most Western analysts here counter such assertions, saying they do not correspond to Bosnia’s secular reality and are part of an attempt by Serb nationalists to justify the brutal wartime subjugation of Muslims by both Serbs and Croats.
Photo at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world ... &th&emc=th
Islamic Revival Tests Bosnia’s Secular Cast
By DAN BILEFSKY
SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — Thirteen years after a war in which 100,000 people were killed, a majority of them Muslims, Bosnia is undergoing an Islamic revival.
More than half a dozen new madrasas, or religious high schools, have been built in recent years, while dozens of mosques have sprouted, including the King Fahd, a sprawling $28 million complex with a sports and cultural center.
Before the war, fully covered women and men with long beards were almost unheard of. Today, they are common.
Many here welcome the Muslim revival as a healthy assertion of identity in a multiethnic country where Muslims make up close to half the population.
But others warn of a growing culture clash between conservative Islam and Bosnia’s avowed secularism in an already fragile state.
Two months ago, men in hoods attacked participants at a gay festival in Sarajevo, dragging some people from vehicles and beating others while they chanted, “Kill the gays!” and “Allahu Akbar!” Eight people were injured.
Muslim religious leaders complained that the event, which coincided with the holy month of Ramadan, was a provocation. The organizers said they had sought to promote minority rights and meant no offense.
In this cosmopolitan capital, where bars have long outnumbered mosques, Muslim religious education was recently introduced in state kindergartens, prompting some secular Muslim parents to complain that the separation between mosque and state was being breached.
Bosnia’s Muslims have practiced a moderate Islam that stretches back to the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. Sociologists and political leaders say the religious awakening is partly an outgrowth of the war and the American-brokered Dayton agreement that ended it, dividing the country into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic.
“The Serbs committed genocide against us, raped our women, made us refugees in our own country,” said Mustafa Efendi Ceric, the grand mufti and main spiritual leader of Bosnia’s Muslim community.
“And now we have a tribal constitution that says we have to share political power and land with our killers,” he said. “We Bosnian Muslims still feel besieged in the city of Sarajevo.”
That resentment is evident. As several thousand worshipers streamed into the imposing King Fahd mosque on a recent Friday, a young man sat outside selling a popular conservative Muslim magazine with President-elect Barack Obama on the cover.
"Hussein, Will Your America Kill Muslims?" the headline asked, using Mr. Obama’s middle name, a source of pride for many Muslims here.
Religious and national identity have long been fused in multifaith Bosnia.
It was tradition in villages to refer to neighbors by their religion — Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic, rather than as Bosniak, Serb or Croat.
In the nation-building that followed Dayton, that practice has become stronger.
In Sarajevo, a predominantly Muslim city, dozens of streets named after Communist revolutionaries were renamed after Muslim heroes, and political parties stressing Muslim identity gained large constituencies.
Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, meanwhile, cleave to their own religious and cultural identities. Church attendance is on the rise; in the Serb Republic, even ministries and police departments have their own Orthodox patron saints.
Muharem Bazdulj, deputy editor of the daily Oslobodenje, the voice of liberal, secular Bosnia, said he feared the growth of Wahhabism, the conservative Sunni movement originating in Saudi Arabia that aims to strip away foreign and corrupting influences.
Analysts say Saudi-financed organizations have invested about $700 million in Bosnia since the war, often in mosques.
Wahhabism arrived via hundreds of warriors from the Arab world during the war and with Arab humanitarian and charity workers since, though sociologists here stress that most Bosnian Muslims still believe that Islam has no place in public life.
Dino Abazovic, a sociologist of religion at the University of Sarajevo, who recently conducted a detailed survey of 600 Bosnian Muslims, said 60 percent favored keeping religion a private matter; only a small minority prayed five times a day.
Still, violent episodes have occurred. Earlier this year, after an explosion at a shopping mall in the town of Vitez killed one person and wounded seven, Zlatko Miletic, head of uniformed police of the Muslim-Croat Federation Interior Ministry, warned that a group in Bosnia linked to Salafism, an ultraconservative Sunni Islamic movement, was bent on terrorism.
Nonetheless, Grand Mufti Ceric said Wahhabism had no future in Bosnia, even if more people were embracing religion.
“Children are fasting on Ramadan, going to the mosque more than their parents,” he said. “We had de-Islamification for 40 years during Tito’s time, so it is natural that people are now embracing the freedom to express their religion.”
Some critics of the mufti argue that he has allowed religion to encroach on civic life.
Vedrana Pinjo-Neuschul, who comes from a mixed Serb and Muslim household, has led the fight against Islamic classes in state-financed kindergartens across Sarajevo. Parents may remove their children from the religious classes, but Ms. Pinjo-Neuschul, whose husband is part Jewish, Catholic and Serb, said the policy would stigmatize non-Muslim children.
She recently withdrew her two young children from a public kindergarten and gathered 5,000 signatures against the policy, which has also been criticized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Vienna-based group monitoring democracy. “I do not want to explain to my 4-year-old son, Sven, who is in love with his Muslim classmate Esma, why they suddenly have to sit in different rooms,” she said at a Jewish community center in Sarajevo. “Nobody has the right to separate them.”
But she says she has been harassed by Islamic radicals on the street and has received hate mail in Arabic. “There are some people who want to turn Bosnia into a Muslim state,” she said.
Mustafa Effendi Spahic, a prominent liberal Muslim intellectual and professor at the Gazri Husrev-beg Madrasa in Sarajevo, went further, calling the introduction of religious education in kindergarten “a crime against children.”
“The Prophet says to teach children to kneel as Muslims, only after the age of 7,” said Professor Spahic, who was imprisoned under Communism for Islamic activism. “No one has any right to do that before then because it is an affront to freedom, the imagination and fun of the child’s world.”
Milorad Dodik, prime minister of Bosnia’s Serb Republic, has referred to Sarajevo as the new Tehran, and talks of a “political Islam and a fight against people who don’t share the same vision.”
But Muslim leaders and most Western analysts here counter such assertions, saying they do not correspond to Bosnia’s secular reality and are part of an attempt by Serb nationalists to justify the brutal wartime subjugation of Muslims by both Serbs and Croats.
Photo at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world ... &th&emc=th
This is a computer generated translation of an article in Portuguese which discusses the recent controversial statement by Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon on marrying Muslims.
http://translate.google.com/translate?p ... auto&tl=en
http://translate.google.com/translate?p ... auto&tl=en
Anti-Islamic film's maker faces UK ban
Story Highlights
Wilders said he was to screen controversial film at UK parliament's upper house
His film "Fitna" accused of painting Islam as a threat to Western society
Britain's Home Office confirmed that Wilders had been denied entry
Wilders says he opposes the "Islamization" of the European continent
By Melissa Gray
CNN
LONDON, England (CNN) -- A Dutch lawmaker who made a controversial film about Islam planned to travel to Britain on Thursday despite a ban on his entry.
Geert Wilders said he was invited to screen his film, "Fitna," at the House of Lords on Thursday evening, but was informed by the British ambassador to the Netherlands that he would be refused entry because the beliefs expressed in the film would threaten public security.
Wilders said he still intends to fly to Britain in the hope that he will be let in.
Britain's Home Office confirmed that Wilders had been denied entry. It said the move is permitted under European Union law, which allows states to refuse entry on the grounds of public policy, public security or public health.
"The government opposes extremism in all its forms," said a Home Office spokesman, who would not be identified, in line with policy. "It will stop those who want to spread extremism, hatred and violent messages in our communities from coming to our country."
Wilders called the move "incredible." Do you agree with the UK's decision to bar Wilders? Have your say
"This is freedom of speech. I mean, let's have a debate," Wilders told the BBC. "This is how a democracy and the rule of law and a civil society should work. If you disagree, talk to one another."
Wilders is a member of the Dutch parliament for the right-wing Party for Freedom. He released "Fitna" online in March 2008 to immediate controversy.
The 15-minute film features disturbing images of terrorist acts superimposed over verses from Islam's holy book, the Quran, to paint Islam as a threat to Western society.
Caroline Cox, a member of Britain's House of Lords who is not affiliated with a political party, invited Wilders to screen his film at a private session in parliament. She told CNN that she wanted lawmakers to see the film to provoke discussion.
"We're showing it on the basis of freedom of speech," said Cox, who has been a free speech advocate throughout her career. "It's a serious showing, with serious concerns and serious consideration."
Cox said she disagreed with the government's decision to bar Wilders, who was also scheduled to discuss the film.
"I think it's appalling," she told CNN. "(For) the British government to prevent a European parliamentarian coming to speak to parliamentarians over here is very disturbing. I think it will be ready by many people as a sign of appeasement to threat and intimidation."
After its release, the movie drew complaints from the European Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, as well as concern from the United States, which warned it could spark riots.
Dutch authorities filed charges against Wilders last month, accusing him of inciting racial hatred in speeches and in the film.
"Fitna" opens with a controversial caricature of the Prophet Mohammed wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, followed by translated portions of the Quran. The passages are interspersed with graphic images of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States, juxtaposed with audio from 911 calls made by the victims trapped inside the World Trade Center in New York.
The video includes images of other terror attacks; bloodied victims; beheadings of hostages; executions of women in hijab, the traditional full-body covering; and footage, with subtitles, of Islamic leaders preaching inflammatory sermons against Jews and Christians.
In his interview with the BBC, Wilders said he does not hate Muslims but opposes the "Islamization" of the European continent.
The title "Fitna," is Arabic for "strife" or "conflict" of the type that occurs within families or any other homogenous group.
Five years ago, Dutch director Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death by a member of a radical Islamic group after his short film "Submission" used verses from the Quran written on women's bodies to criticize the treatment of women in Islamic cultures.
His co-producer on the project, Somali-born former Dutch lawmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali, lived under government protection for several years after van Gogh's killing. She now lives in the United States.
All AboutIslam • Geert Wilders
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europ ... index.html
Story Highlights
Wilders said he was to screen controversial film at UK parliament's upper house
His film "Fitna" accused of painting Islam as a threat to Western society
Britain's Home Office confirmed that Wilders had been denied entry
Wilders says he opposes the "Islamization" of the European continent
By Melissa Gray
CNN
LONDON, England (CNN) -- A Dutch lawmaker who made a controversial film about Islam planned to travel to Britain on Thursday despite a ban on his entry.
Geert Wilders said he was invited to screen his film, "Fitna," at the House of Lords on Thursday evening, but was informed by the British ambassador to the Netherlands that he would be refused entry because the beliefs expressed in the film would threaten public security.
Wilders said he still intends to fly to Britain in the hope that he will be let in.
Britain's Home Office confirmed that Wilders had been denied entry. It said the move is permitted under European Union law, which allows states to refuse entry on the grounds of public policy, public security or public health.
"The government opposes extremism in all its forms," said a Home Office spokesman, who would not be identified, in line with policy. "It will stop those who want to spread extremism, hatred and violent messages in our communities from coming to our country."
Wilders called the move "incredible." Do you agree with the UK's decision to bar Wilders? Have your say
"This is freedom of speech. I mean, let's have a debate," Wilders told the BBC. "This is how a democracy and the rule of law and a civil society should work. If you disagree, talk to one another."
Wilders is a member of the Dutch parliament for the right-wing Party for Freedom. He released "Fitna" online in March 2008 to immediate controversy.
The 15-minute film features disturbing images of terrorist acts superimposed over verses from Islam's holy book, the Quran, to paint Islam as a threat to Western society.
Caroline Cox, a member of Britain's House of Lords who is not affiliated with a political party, invited Wilders to screen his film at a private session in parliament. She told CNN that she wanted lawmakers to see the film to provoke discussion.
"We're showing it on the basis of freedom of speech," said Cox, who has been a free speech advocate throughout her career. "It's a serious showing, with serious concerns and serious consideration."
Cox said she disagreed with the government's decision to bar Wilders, who was also scheduled to discuss the film.
"I think it's appalling," she told CNN. "(For) the British government to prevent a European parliamentarian coming to speak to parliamentarians over here is very disturbing. I think it will be ready by many people as a sign of appeasement to threat and intimidation."
After its release, the movie drew complaints from the European Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, as well as concern from the United States, which warned it could spark riots.
Dutch authorities filed charges against Wilders last month, accusing him of inciting racial hatred in speeches and in the film.
"Fitna" opens with a controversial caricature of the Prophet Mohammed wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, followed by translated portions of the Quran. The passages are interspersed with graphic images of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States, juxtaposed with audio from 911 calls made by the victims trapped inside the World Trade Center in New York.
The video includes images of other terror attacks; bloodied victims; beheadings of hostages; executions of women in hijab, the traditional full-body covering; and footage, with subtitles, of Islamic leaders preaching inflammatory sermons against Jews and Christians.
In his interview with the BBC, Wilders said he does not hate Muslims but opposes the "Islamization" of the European continent.
The title "Fitna," is Arabic for "strife" or "conflict" of the type that occurs within families or any other homogenous group.
Five years ago, Dutch director Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death by a member of a radical Islamic group after his short film "Submission" used verses from the Quran written on women's bodies to criticize the treatment of women in Islamic cultures.
His co-producer on the project, Somali-born former Dutch lawmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali, lived under government protection for several years after van Gogh's killing. She now lives in the United States.
All AboutIslam • Geert Wilders
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europ ... index.html
Sectarian, conservative leadership is driving confused young Muslims
into the arms of radicals
Ed Husain
The Times, London
As a child, I was unsure if I belonged to Britain, India - or both,
or neither. In the day I went to a multifaith, multi-ethnic state
school in the East End of London. At school I was taught to
question, think and see all religions equally. In the evenings, I
attended Koran schools at a mosque on Brick Lane where I was forced
to learn to read Arabic, but not to understand meanings of words. I
was not allowed to question, but simply to bob to and fro and learn
Arabic prayers without understanding. All our teachers were elderly
Asian immigrant men, and we were not allowed to mix with girls. At
school, our teachers were mostly English women and we were
encouraged to mix with everybody.
I developed two personalities, two worlds, two allegiances: one
at "English school" and another at the mosque. I was torn, confused
and full of questions. But what now? Two decades on, surely
Britain's Muslims are in a better place.
Today, there are between 1,200 and 1,600 mosques in Britain - no
definite figure exists. Yesterday, the Charity Commission sought to
gloss over the malaise in them by publishing figures on attendance,
but not inquiring into difficult areas.
At Quilliam, Britain's first counter-extremism think-tank, we
commissioned a poll of more than 1,000 mosques in 2008, during
Ramadan when mosques are busiest. Despite employing Urdu and Bengali-
speaking researchers, we could poll only just over 500. Most British
mosques don't maintain a reception or service to answer questions,
and not every one we did reach was willing to answer.
Quilliam's report, Mosques Made in Britain, reveals the true extent
of the mess. We found that 97 per cent of imams, or leaders, were
from overseas and 92 per cent were educated abroad, mostly in
Pakistan or Bangladesh. Almost all mosques are controlled by first-
generation immigrant men, leaving most British Muslims - women and
young people - out of the management structure.
This is not new. Quilliam has merely found evidence of a problem
that has been known among Muslims for more than two decades.
Most British Muslims are under 25. When, like me, they have
questions about identity, belonging, values, and religion, their
local mosque leadership is futile. Britain's mosques are run by men
who are physically in Britain, but psychologically in Pakistan. They
retain their village rituals and sectarianism, and prevent the
growth of an indigenous British Islam. And for as long as young
Muslims are confused about whether they belong in Britain or
elsewhere, we risk handing them over to preying extremists in our
midst.
By importing cheap imams from poor, intellectually deprived and
theologically conservative places mosques put young Britons in the
hands of men who do not have the linguistic or cultural backgrounds
to deal with modern Britain. Little wonder, then, that many young
Muslims turn to radical university Islamic societies, extremist
websites, and Hamas-supporting groups in Britain for "religious
guidance".
Mosques Made in Britain also found that nearly half of mosques do
not make provisions for women. And those that do provide
disgraceful, unhygienic quarters for them to pray and ensure that
women maintain no real presence at mosques. With very few
exceptions, most mosque management committees are dominated by older
men who have successfully kept out women.
As this generation of imams and elders eventually move aside, who
will take their place? Of the 27 or so Muslim seminaries or dar ul
uloom in Britain, 25 come from the austere, Deobandi tradition - the
preferred school of the Taleban. So while British soldiers risk
their lives in Afghanistan, in British Muslim seminaries we allow
the teaching of intolerance, unequal treatment of women, religious
rigidity, the banning of music and theatre, and an end to free
mixing of the sexes.
At these seminaries, medieval textbooks are still taught without any
reference to context. Graduates of these highly conservative
madrassas have taken up nearly 100 posts as chaplains in our
prisons. Soon, they will move into mosques as English-speaking
imams, without any understanding of British values of liberty,
tolerance and pluralism.
How long will we tolerate this underworld in Britain?
Two years ago the Government established a Mosques and Imam National
Advisory Board and included Hamas supporters to win over radicals.
What has it achieved? Large numbers of British mosques are not
properly registered with the Charity Commission, imams work with
children without Criminal Record Bureau checks, and mosque buildings
flout health and safety regulations. Would other schools or churches
get away with this?
More than three years after the July 7 bombings, where are the
citizenship classes in mosques? Or the English-language teaching for
foreign imams? With such problems on our doorstep, as a community we
are still focused on British policy in Palestine and Iraq at the
expense of our children's education, gender apartheid at mosques,
and inadequacies in language, safety and leadership. Labour
politicians are only too keen to campaign for the Muslim vote in
mosques in Blackburn, Manchester and Bradford while turning a blind
eye to the failure that surrounds their constituents. For how much
longer?
Ed Husain is co-director of Quilliam, and author of The Islamist
into the arms of radicals
Ed Husain
The Times, London
As a child, I was unsure if I belonged to Britain, India - or both,
or neither. In the day I went to a multifaith, multi-ethnic state
school in the East End of London. At school I was taught to
question, think and see all religions equally. In the evenings, I
attended Koran schools at a mosque on Brick Lane where I was forced
to learn to read Arabic, but not to understand meanings of words. I
was not allowed to question, but simply to bob to and fro and learn
Arabic prayers without understanding. All our teachers were elderly
Asian immigrant men, and we were not allowed to mix with girls. At
school, our teachers were mostly English women and we were
encouraged to mix with everybody.
I developed two personalities, two worlds, two allegiances: one
at "English school" and another at the mosque. I was torn, confused
and full of questions. But what now? Two decades on, surely
Britain's Muslims are in a better place.
Today, there are between 1,200 and 1,600 mosques in Britain - no
definite figure exists. Yesterday, the Charity Commission sought to
gloss over the malaise in them by publishing figures on attendance,
but not inquiring into difficult areas.
At Quilliam, Britain's first counter-extremism think-tank, we
commissioned a poll of more than 1,000 mosques in 2008, during
Ramadan when mosques are busiest. Despite employing Urdu and Bengali-
speaking researchers, we could poll only just over 500. Most British
mosques don't maintain a reception or service to answer questions,
and not every one we did reach was willing to answer.
Quilliam's report, Mosques Made in Britain, reveals the true extent
of the mess. We found that 97 per cent of imams, or leaders, were
from overseas and 92 per cent were educated abroad, mostly in
Pakistan or Bangladesh. Almost all mosques are controlled by first-
generation immigrant men, leaving most British Muslims - women and
young people - out of the management structure.
This is not new. Quilliam has merely found evidence of a problem
that has been known among Muslims for more than two decades.
Most British Muslims are under 25. When, like me, they have
questions about identity, belonging, values, and religion, their
local mosque leadership is futile. Britain's mosques are run by men
who are physically in Britain, but psychologically in Pakistan. They
retain their village rituals and sectarianism, and prevent the
growth of an indigenous British Islam. And for as long as young
Muslims are confused about whether they belong in Britain or
elsewhere, we risk handing them over to preying extremists in our
midst.
By importing cheap imams from poor, intellectually deprived and
theologically conservative places mosques put young Britons in the
hands of men who do not have the linguistic or cultural backgrounds
to deal with modern Britain. Little wonder, then, that many young
Muslims turn to radical university Islamic societies, extremist
websites, and Hamas-supporting groups in Britain for "religious
guidance".
Mosques Made in Britain also found that nearly half of mosques do
not make provisions for women. And those that do provide
disgraceful, unhygienic quarters for them to pray and ensure that
women maintain no real presence at mosques. With very few
exceptions, most mosque management committees are dominated by older
men who have successfully kept out women.
As this generation of imams and elders eventually move aside, who
will take their place? Of the 27 or so Muslim seminaries or dar ul
uloom in Britain, 25 come from the austere, Deobandi tradition - the
preferred school of the Taleban. So while British soldiers risk
their lives in Afghanistan, in British Muslim seminaries we allow
the teaching of intolerance, unequal treatment of women, religious
rigidity, the banning of music and theatre, and an end to free
mixing of the sexes.
At these seminaries, medieval textbooks are still taught without any
reference to context. Graduates of these highly conservative
madrassas have taken up nearly 100 posts as chaplains in our
prisons. Soon, they will move into mosques as English-speaking
imams, without any understanding of British values of liberty,
tolerance and pluralism.
How long will we tolerate this underworld in Britain?
Two years ago the Government established a Mosques and Imam National
Advisory Board and included Hamas supporters to win over radicals.
What has it achieved? Large numbers of British mosques are not
properly registered with the Charity Commission, imams work with
children without Criminal Record Bureau checks, and mosque buildings
flout health and safety regulations. Would other schools or churches
get away with this?
More than three years after the July 7 bombings, where are the
citizenship classes in mosques? Or the English-language teaching for
foreign imams? With such problems on our doorstep, as a community we
are still focused on British policy in Palestine and Iraq at the
expense of our children's education, gender apartheid at mosques,
and inadequacies in language, safety and leadership. Labour
politicians are only too keen to campaign for the Muslim vote in
mosques in Blackburn, Manchester and Bradford while turning a blind
eye to the failure that surrounds their constituents. For how much
longer?
Ed Husain is co-director of Quilliam, and author of The Islamist
Thursday, Apr. 02, 2009
Updating the Mosque for the 21st Century
By Carla Power
The whole world is a mosque, the Prophet Muhammad once said. With pious intent, a faithful Muslim can conjure a mosque almost anywhere, transforming a desert sand dune, airport departure lounge or city pavement into a sacred space simply by stopping to pray. The first mosque was Muhammad's mud-brick house in Medina, where a portico of palm-tree branches provided shade for prayer and theological discussion. As the young religion spread, Arabs — and later Asians and Africans — developed their own ideas of what made a building a mosque. But that innovative spirit has slowed in recent decades, leaving most Islamic skylines dominated by the dome-and-minaret design that first appeared centuries ago.
That's now changing. A new generation of Muslim builders and designers, as well as non-Muslims designing for Muslim groups, often in Europe or North America, are updating the mosque for the 21st century, sparking not just a hugely creative period in Islamic design, but one riven by controversy. The disputes over modern mosques echo larger debates taking place in the Islamic world today about gender, power and, particularly in immigrant communities, Islam's place in Western societies. Even the simplest design decision can reflect questions that are crucial to Islam and its adherents: Should women be allowed in a mosque's main hall or confined to separate quarters? Are minarets necessary in the West, where laws on noise levels mean they are rarely used for the call to prayer? What should a mosque attended by Muslims from different parts of the world look like? The boldest of the new mosques try to answer such questions but are also powerful statements of intent. "Islam wants to proclaim itself," says Hasan-Uddin Khan, an architecture professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. "These new mosques are saying, 'We are here, and we want it to be known that we are here.' "
Designs for Life
As the number of European Muslims grows — from 12 million a decade ago to 20 million today — so does the need for mosques. A 2007 report by the Italian Department for Security Information found the number of mosques in the country had grown from 351 to 735 in a mere seven years. Mosque numbers in France and Germany have also exploded. While Europe's churches sit empty or are converted into luxury lofts and schools, Muslims are building mosques in old nightclubs and supermarkets, in former sauerkraut and pharmaceutical factories and, yes, abandoned churches. As Muslims get wealthier, more confident and more geographically diffuse — almost a third of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims live in non-Muslim-majority states — their mosques are no longer just monuments to the rulers whose names they bear. Increasingly, they symbolize the struggle to marry tradition with modernity and to set down roots in the West. The most daring buildings are dreamt up by second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants, who have the confidence and cash to build stone-and-glass symbols of Islam's growing strength in places like Europe. Simply importing traditional mosque architecture "doesn't express loyalty to your current surroundings," says Zulfiqar Husain, honorary secretary of an innovative new eco-mosque in Manchester, England. "It almost expresses that you want to be separate from the society you live in."
The designers behind the best of the mosques take the opposite view: they may be making statements but they are also sensitive to local concerns and aesthetics. The mosque that Husain helps administer, in a gritty working-class Manchester neighborhood, uses reclaimed wood and solar panels on the roof to power its under-floor heating. Inside, peach carpeting and plasma TVs give the air of a prosperous suburban English home, while the prayer hall has carvings inspired by the 10th century North African Fatimid dynasty.
In Singapore, the architects of the Assyafaah Mosque, which was finished in 2004, cater to the country's multicultural population by creating an aesthetically neutral space, sleek and futuristic, where the island's Malay and Chinese Muslims can both feel comfortable.
Innovation also blooms in unlikely places such as southern Bavaria. In the town of Penzberg, the Islamic Forum, built in 2005, last year won a Wessobrunner Architekturpreis, an award granted every five years for outstanding Bavarian architecture. A simple block of glass and pearly stone, the Forum beckons Muslims and non-Muslims alike to enter through two doors built to resemble an open book. "It's a place of communication," explains its Bosnian-born architect, Alen Jasarevic, in an e-mail. "Vast windows and openings in the façade, even in the prayer room, invite the citizens of Penzberg to become acquainted with Islam and its people." The delicate minaret, lace-like from a distance, is a calligraphic representation of the words of the call to prayer, punched out of steel plates. "It doesn't call for prayer five times a day, but 24 hours a day," observes Jasarevic. "Without disturbing the neighbors."
Shaping the Skyline
But mosques, and their neighbors, aren't always so quiet. Particularly in Europe, mosques have become the architectural equivalent of the veil: visible signs of Islam's presence and thus sites for tension between Muslims and non-Muslim traditionalists. A recent report from the London-based Institute of Race Relations chronicles scores of campaigns against plans to build mosques across Europe. In 2007, a petition posted on British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's website calling for the government to scrap plans to build a mega-mosque on an 18-acre (7 ha) plot near the site of London's 2012 Olympics drew over 275,000 signatures. That same year, members of Italy's anti-immigrant Northern League party "blessed," as they called it, a site reserved for a mosque in Padua by parading on it with a pig, an animal deemed unclean by Muslims. A 2004 Dutch opinion poll found that mosques, which in the 1990s had been lauded as "enrichments to the urban landscape," were now derided as "unimaginative," "ugly" and "cheap imitations."
One aspect of mosque design provokes more anger than most: the minaret. Across Europe, minarets on city skylines have become a political issue. In the Netherlands, Filip Dewinter, a leader of the right-wing Vlaams Belang party, decried a new Rotterdam mosque because its minarets were higher than the lights of the city's soccer stadium. "These kinds of symbols have to stop," he told Radio Netherlands Worldwide. In 2007, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that minarets shouldn't be "ostentatiously higher than church steeples."
Debate is playing out within Western Muslim communities, too. "The immigrant Muslims often want [a minaret], because for them it symbolizes a mosque," says Omar Khalidi, an archivist at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But they cost a lot, and there are others who argue that [economically,] they're a luxury Muslims can't afford."
For Paul Böhm, a German architect behind a new mosque planned for Cologne, minarets are a crucial part of designing a proud and honest building. "We believe this building should show its intent, and the minarets can help it do that," he says. "The Muslims of Germany have, over the last 40 or 50 years, been hiding in basements and [abandoned] manufacturing areas to pray. [Many Germans] have never recognized that they are part of society. Giving them a building which brings them up to the same status [as other faith groups] can help us understand and accept them."
But some Cologne residents disagree. Members of the right-wing Pro Cologne group have protested the $20 million mosque, arguing that the two 166-ft. (51 m) minarets will spoil the skyline, now dominated by the city's famous Gothic cathedral. Construction is going ahead, and Böhm hopes his design will foster an openness that will one day silence the critics. His plan for the complex, due to be completed in 2010, calls for a piazza with a fountain and a cafe, designed to draw non-Muslims to the site. The local Muslim elders hope that, once there, visitors will browse in the library, check out the art gallery or spend in the shopping mall, which Böhm envisions as "a modern souk with the quality of the traditional souk." The mosque's prayer hall consists of shells of textured concrete connected by glass panels, to create "ideological and architectural transparency," says Böhm. Far from a nod to tradition, the minarets are a declaration that the building is "not a sports hall, a concert hall or a museum, but a mosque."
Respect Tradition, Embrace Today
Like many architects designing mosques, Böhm grappled with how much access women should have to the most important parts of the building. Traditional mosques tend to keep women hidden by walls or curtains. In newer, more progressive buildings, prayer areas for men and women often remain separate — but equal. After much debate, the Cologne mosque committee agreed that women and men should pray in the same room, but with women confined to a balcony. Böhm's design is flexible enough that one day both sexes could end up on the same level. "I'm an architect, not a politician," he says. "But I've included little details — like allowing men and women to come through the same doors — that allow for evolution. It's a process that'll take time, just as in the Catholic Church. My father could remember women sitting on the upper level in the church, and men downstairs."
Unsurprisingly, it's immigrant Muslim communities that are pushing the biggest changes. "The Western mosque is fast becoming the site of contestation between the kind of Muslims who espouse the traditional mosque, and those who want to win proportionate space for women," says MIT's Khalidi. "The second generation are the ones demanding, and often getting, that kind of space." Architectural historian Khan estimates that until recently, North American mosques gave only about 15% of their space to women. Over the past five years or so, the space women have access to has increased to at least 50%.
The new architecture and the break with traditions are beginning to influence designers in Muslim nations as well. Sometimes the change is simply a return to the religion's roots. Architect Zeynep Fadillioglu drew on her own experiences praying in mosques when designing the ultramodern Sakirin Mosque in Istanbul. "In the Prophet's time, men and women prayed next to each other," she says. "Lately, with the rise of political Islam everywhere, the women's sections have started to be covered up and boxed off. I've been in mosques like that, and I felt very uncomfortable."
Fadillioglu's women's section is an expansive balcony overlooking the central hall and divided only by crisscrossed railings. An airy and luxurious sensibility pervades the building. The facilities for preprayer ablution have blond-wood and Plexiglas lockers. In the main hall hangs a bronze chandelier, dangling with hand-blown glass raindrops — a visual allusion to the Koranic verse that says Allah's light should fall on believers like drops of rain. The mihrab, which indicates the direction of prayer, is tulip-shaped and turquoise — "an opening to God," says Fadillioglu.
God is celebrated in a different way in the Floating Mosque currently under construction off the coast of Dubai. Designed by Dutch firm Waterstudio.NL, the arresting building, which is due to be finished by 2011, resembles a futuristic submarine rising from the Persian Gulf with minarets so short and slender they could be periscopes. Built of floating modules of concrete and foam, it will be cooled by seawater pumped through the roof, walls and floors.
Back in Europe, a group of young Dutch architects led by Ergün Erkoçu wanted their concept for the Polder Mosque to achieve a similar level of cool. Riffing on the Dutch idea of seeking consensus, their design features not minarets but windmills. Inside, they planned space for a hammam (or bathhouse) and a row of shops. The mosque was never meant to exist but to generate discussion. Mission accomplished: elders have sniffed that it isn't traditional enough and Dutch-born Muslims eager to see the mosque's role expand beyond prayer have applauded it.
The design also earned Erkoçu a commission for the An-Nasr Mosque in Rotterdam, where again he is tweaking tradition. An-Nasr's minaret will be glass — transparent and subtle, rather than dominating the skyline. The call to prayer will be broadcast in lights, pulsating to the rhythm of the muezzin's voice. Once the mosque is built, Erkoçu hopes Rotterdam's citizens will see the call to prayer beamed across the sky. Muslims will be able to look up and, no matter where they are in the city, turn their thoughts to prayer.
With reporting by Pelin Turgut / Istanbul
Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 47,00.html
Updating the Mosque for the 21st Century
By Carla Power
The whole world is a mosque, the Prophet Muhammad once said. With pious intent, a faithful Muslim can conjure a mosque almost anywhere, transforming a desert sand dune, airport departure lounge or city pavement into a sacred space simply by stopping to pray. The first mosque was Muhammad's mud-brick house in Medina, where a portico of palm-tree branches provided shade for prayer and theological discussion. As the young religion spread, Arabs — and later Asians and Africans — developed their own ideas of what made a building a mosque. But that innovative spirit has slowed in recent decades, leaving most Islamic skylines dominated by the dome-and-minaret design that first appeared centuries ago.
That's now changing. A new generation of Muslim builders and designers, as well as non-Muslims designing for Muslim groups, often in Europe or North America, are updating the mosque for the 21st century, sparking not just a hugely creative period in Islamic design, but one riven by controversy. The disputes over modern mosques echo larger debates taking place in the Islamic world today about gender, power and, particularly in immigrant communities, Islam's place in Western societies. Even the simplest design decision can reflect questions that are crucial to Islam and its adherents: Should women be allowed in a mosque's main hall or confined to separate quarters? Are minarets necessary in the West, where laws on noise levels mean they are rarely used for the call to prayer? What should a mosque attended by Muslims from different parts of the world look like? The boldest of the new mosques try to answer such questions but are also powerful statements of intent. "Islam wants to proclaim itself," says Hasan-Uddin Khan, an architecture professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. "These new mosques are saying, 'We are here, and we want it to be known that we are here.' "
Designs for Life
As the number of European Muslims grows — from 12 million a decade ago to 20 million today — so does the need for mosques. A 2007 report by the Italian Department for Security Information found the number of mosques in the country had grown from 351 to 735 in a mere seven years. Mosque numbers in France and Germany have also exploded. While Europe's churches sit empty or are converted into luxury lofts and schools, Muslims are building mosques in old nightclubs and supermarkets, in former sauerkraut and pharmaceutical factories and, yes, abandoned churches. As Muslims get wealthier, more confident and more geographically diffuse — almost a third of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims live in non-Muslim-majority states — their mosques are no longer just monuments to the rulers whose names they bear. Increasingly, they symbolize the struggle to marry tradition with modernity and to set down roots in the West. The most daring buildings are dreamt up by second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants, who have the confidence and cash to build stone-and-glass symbols of Islam's growing strength in places like Europe. Simply importing traditional mosque architecture "doesn't express loyalty to your current surroundings," says Zulfiqar Husain, honorary secretary of an innovative new eco-mosque in Manchester, England. "It almost expresses that you want to be separate from the society you live in."
The designers behind the best of the mosques take the opposite view: they may be making statements but they are also sensitive to local concerns and aesthetics. The mosque that Husain helps administer, in a gritty working-class Manchester neighborhood, uses reclaimed wood and solar panels on the roof to power its under-floor heating. Inside, peach carpeting and plasma TVs give the air of a prosperous suburban English home, while the prayer hall has carvings inspired by the 10th century North African Fatimid dynasty.
In Singapore, the architects of the Assyafaah Mosque, which was finished in 2004, cater to the country's multicultural population by creating an aesthetically neutral space, sleek and futuristic, where the island's Malay and Chinese Muslims can both feel comfortable.
Innovation also blooms in unlikely places such as southern Bavaria. In the town of Penzberg, the Islamic Forum, built in 2005, last year won a Wessobrunner Architekturpreis, an award granted every five years for outstanding Bavarian architecture. A simple block of glass and pearly stone, the Forum beckons Muslims and non-Muslims alike to enter through two doors built to resemble an open book. "It's a place of communication," explains its Bosnian-born architect, Alen Jasarevic, in an e-mail. "Vast windows and openings in the façade, even in the prayer room, invite the citizens of Penzberg to become acquainted with Islam and its people." The delicate minaret, lace-like from a distance, is a calligraphic representation of the words of the call to prayer, punched out of steel plates. "It doesn't call for prayer five times a day, but 24 hours a day," observes Jasarevic. "Without disturbing the neighbors."
Shaping the Skyline
But mosques, and their neighbors, aren't always so quiet. Particularly in Europe, mosques have become the architectural equivalent of the veil: visible signs of Islam's presence and thus sites for tension between Muslims and non-Muslim traditionalists. A recent report from the London-based Institute of Race Relations chronicles scores of campaigns against plans to build mosques across Europe. In 2007, a petition posted on British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's website calling for the government to scrap plans to build a mega-mosque on an 18-acre (7 ha) plot near the site of London's 2012 Olympics drew over 275,000 signatures. That same year, members of Italy's anti-immigrant Northern League party "blessed," as they called it, a site reserved for a mosque in Padua by parading on it with a pig, an animal deemed unclean by Muslims. A 2004 Dutch opinion poll found that mosques, which in the 1990s had been lauded as "enrichments to the urban landscape," were now derided as "unimaginative," "ugly" and "cheap imitations."
One aspect of mosque design provokes more anger than most: the minaret. Across Europe, minarets on city skylines have become a political issue. In the Netherlands, Filip Dewinter, a leader of the right-wing Vlaams Belang party, decried a new Rotterdam mosque because its minarets were higher than the lights of the city's soccer stadium. "These kinds of symbols have to stop," he told Radio Netherlands Worldwide. In 2007, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that minarets shouldn't be "ostentatiously higher than church steeples."
Debate is playing out within Western Muslim communities, too. "The immigrant Muslims often want [a minaret], because for them it symbolizes a mosque," says Omar Khalidi, an archivist at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But they cost a lot, and there are others who argue that [economically,] they're a luxury Muslims can't afford."
For Paul Böhm, a German architect behind a new mosque planned for Cologne, minarets are a crucial part of designing a proud and honest building. "We believe this building should show its intent, and the minarets can help it do that," he says. "The Muslims of Germany have, over the last 40 or 50 years, been hiding in basements and [abandoned] manufacturing areas to pray. [Many Germans] have never recognized that they are part of society. Giving them a building which brings them up to the same status [as other faith groups] can help us understand and accept them."
But some Cologne residents disagree. Members of the right-wing Pro Cologne group have protested the $20 million mosque, arguing that the two 166-ft. (51 m) minarets will spoil the skyline, now dominated by the city's famous Gothic cathedral. Construction is going ahead, and Böhm hopes his design will foster an openness that will one day silence the critics. His plan for the complex, due to be completed in 2010, calls for a piazza with a fountain and a cafe, designed to draw non-Muslims to the site. The local Muslim elders hope that, once there, visitors will browse in the library, check out the art gallery or spend in the shopping mall, which Böhm envisions as "a modern souk with the quality of the traditional souk." The mosque's prayer hall consists of shells of textured concrete connected by glass panels, to create "ideological and architectural transparency," says Böhm. Far from a nod to tradition, the minarets are a declaration that the building is "not a sports hall, a concert hall or a museum, but a mosque."
Respect Tradition, Embrace Today
Like many architects designing mosques, Böhm grappled with how much access women should have to the most important parts of the building. Traditional mosques tend to keep women hidden by walls or curtains. In newer, more progressive buildings, prayer areas for men and women often remain separate — but equal. After much debate, the Cologne mosque committee agreed that women and men should pray in the same room, but with women confined to a balcony. Böhm's design is flexible enough that one day both sexes could end up on the same level. "I'm an architect, not a politician," he says. "But I've included little details — like allowing men and women to come through the same doors — that allow for evolution. It's a process that'll take time, just as in the Catholic Church. My father could remember women sitting on the upper level in the church, and men downstairs."
Unsurprisingly, it's immigrant Muslim communities that are pushing the biggest changes. "The Western mosque is fast becoming the site of contestation between the kind of Muslims who espouse the traditional mosque, and those who want to win proportionate space for women," says MIT's Khalidi. "The second generation are the ones demanding, and often getting, that kind of space." Architectural historian Khan estimates that until recently, North American mosques gave only about 15% of their space to women. Over the past five years or so, the space women have access to has increased to at least 50%.
The new architecture and the break with traditions are beginning to influence designers in Muslim nations as well. Sometimes the change is simply a return to the religion's roots. Architect Zeynep Fadillioglu drew on her own experiences praying in mosques when designing the ultramodern Sakirin Mosque in Istanbul. "In the Prophet's time, men and women prayed next to each other," she says. "Lately, with the rise of political Islam everywhere, the women's sections have started to be covered up and boxed off. I've been in mosques like that, and I felt very uncomfortable."
Fadillioglu's women's section is an expansive balcony overlooking the central hall and divided only by crisscrossed railings. An airy and luxurious sensibility pervades the building. The facilities for preprayer ablution have blond-wood and Plexiglas lockers. In the main hall hangs a bronze chandelier, dangling with hand-blown glass raindrops — a visual allusion to the Koranic verse that says Allah's light should fall on believers like drops of rain. The mihrab, which indicates the direction of prayer, is tulip-shaped and turquoise — "an opening to God," says Fadillioglu.
God is celebrated in a different way in the Floating Mosque currently under construction off the coast of Dubai. Designed by Dutch firm Waterstudio.NL, the arresting building, which is due to be finished by 2011, resembles a futuristic submarine rising from the Persian Gulf with minarets so short and slender they could be periscopes. Built of floating modules of concrete and foam, it will be cooled by seawater pumped through the roof, walls and floors.
Back in Europe, a group of young Dutch architects led by Ergün Erkoçu wanted their concept for the Polder Mosque to achieve a similar level of cool. Riffing on the Dutch idea of seeking consensus, their design features not minarets but windmills. Inside, they planned space for a hammam (or bathhouse) and a row of shops. The mosque was never meant to exist but to generate discussion. Mission accomplished: elders have sniffed that it isn't traditional enough and Dutch-born Muslims eager to see the mosque's role expand beyond prayer have applauded it.
The design also earned Erkoçu a commission for the An-Nasr Mosque in Rotterdam, where again he is tweaking tradition. An-Nasr's minaret will be glass — transparent and subtle, rather than dominating the skyline. The call to prayer will be broadcast in lights, pulsating to the rhythm of the muezzin's voice. Once the mosque is built, Erkoçu hopes Rotterdam's citizens will see the call to prayer beamed across the sky. Muslims will be able to look up and, no matter where they are in the city, turn their thoughts to prayer.
With reporting by Pelin Turgut / Istanbul
Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 47,00.html
Islam in Britain and South Asia
A single space
Apr 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Theologically as well as socially, Muslims in Britain and their countries of origin form a seamless whole
TWO government ministers, both practising Muslims, met in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, in April and agreed to co-ordinate their efforts to broaden the curriculum at religious schools. A set of teaching materials would be sent out to madrassas with the aim of enriching the diet. As well as learning the Koran, pupils would be taught how Islam was compatible with citizenship.
This approach, the ministers decided, would work well in their respective countries, Britain and Pakistan. Admittedly, the role played by madrassas in the two places is different. In England’s smokestack cities, they are frequented by Muslim children as a supplement to state schooling. In the slums and refugee camps of Pakistan, they offer a meal and an education of sorts to boys who would otherwise be illiterate.
But in both countries, the ministers agreed, madrassas at their most deficient can leave the young open to extremists. That is not just because of what they teach, more because of what they do not, such as how to live peaceably with those who follow a different faith or just another form of Islam. As the Pakistani official told his British counterpart, the cohesion minister, Sadiq Khan, inadequate theology and terrorism can be points on a single spectrum.
Not just for security types and sociologists, but also for theologians, Britain and its ex-dominions in South Asia are virtually a single entity. Schools of Islam that emerged in India as a reaction to the British raj are now vying for influence in the north of England. The passions generated by the Bangladeshi variety of Islamism are as lively in London as they are in Dhaka. Anybody who hopes for stability and social peace in the Muslim parts of South Asia has to keep an eye on the Islamic scene in Britain. The reverse also applies. The flow of South Asian imams to Britain has recently slowed, but in an internet age there are other ways for ideas to travel.
Whenever intra-Muslim tension flares in Pakistan—for example, with the trashing of a Sufi shrine or the takeover of a mosque—Britain’s authorities watch for tension in English cities. And the war now raging between the Pakistani government and Taliban rebels is affecting the mood among British Muslims. How exactly may depend on where they come from, geographically and theologically.
Life would be easier for students of Anglo-Asian Islam if one theological movement always produced moderates and another always led to extremism. But things are never that straightforward. As Philip Lewis, a Bradford-based writer on British Islam, puts it, “In all schools [of Islam], there are some individuals playing a constructive role.” And in virtually all schools there are some doing the opposite.
Still, in their Islamic scenes Britain and Pakistan do have one simple thing in common: religious education is dominated by purist teachers, who trace their roots to the Indian town of Deoband where an Islamic place of learning was founded in 1866. Designed to instil and spread a rigorous form of faith (robust enough to survive colonialism and the “corrupting” influences of other cultures), the Deobandi philosophy sets austere rules for personal behaviour. It sees the veneration of saints, and even excessive attention to the Prophet, as a distraction from God.
Among its offshoots are the Tablighi Jama’at, a huge, worldwide missionary movement (strong in Yorkshire and London), in which lay people help to propagate the idea of a pious life. And another offshoot of the Deobandis, as critics always note, is the Taliban, as they emerged in Afghanistan and then in Pakistan.
But that does not mean all Deobandis, either in Britain or South Asia, support violence. Just as well, given that at least 16 of Britain’s 22 Muslim “seminaries” (in other words, places that offer intensive, full-time Islamic instruction from the age of 12 upwards) are of the Deobandi persuasion. Their curriculum is modelled on Islamic learning under the Mogul empire.
Tim Winter, an influential British convert to Islam, believes that for all their narrow intensity, the British Deobandi seminaries won’t foster violence: their ethos is cautious and traditional. But some alumni of Britain’s Deobandi institutions do advocate self-segregation by Muslims, especially where local indigenous culture is dominated by alcohol and drugs.
Anyway, in Britain as in Pakistan, a plurality of ordinary South Asian Muslims follows a different form of the faith: the Barelvi tradition, which celebrates shrines, saints and music. One pioneer of Muslim education in Britain is of the Barelvi school: Musharraf Hussain, an imam who runs a school, mosque, radio station and magazine in Nottingham. He fears that among Britain’s Muslim establishment, sectarian splits are becoming “entrenched and fossilised”. Some Deobandis retain a deep sense of victimhood and grievance.
Clearly, some young British Muslims ignore the sectarian issues that gripped their parents. Sometimes this reflects secularisation. Sometimes it reflects the opposite: belief in a “global umma”, or community, that differentiates all Muslims from all non-believers. Still, the Nottingham imam has observed one unexpected side-effect from the turmoil engulfing Pakistan. Many British Muslims, he thinks, will “move on” in a healthy way. They will give up the dream of resettling in South Asia and put down firmer roots in Britain.
A harsher message is emerging from some mosques in the north of England, especially in places like Burnley where many have roots in the war zone on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. The plight of people fleeing the region is keenly felt. Many blame Pakistan’s government, not the rebels. “People think the Pakistani government is fighting not for itself, but for American interests,” says Abdul Hamid Qureshi, the chairman of the Lancashire Council of Mosques, which groups Muslims of all shades. People in an angry and defensive mood will hardly welcome Gordon Brown’s pledge, on April 29th, to work with the Pakistani army to fight terror. Neither will they take too seriously the prime minister’s vow to boost education and ease poverty on Pakistan’s border.
British Muslims, who number at least 2m, can amaze their cousins from South Asia with their religious conservatism. One reason is the high incidence of migration from poor, rural parts of South Asia, such as Mirpur in Kashmir and Sylhet in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh the fortunes of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party plummeted in last December’s election. But the movement can still attract second- and third-generation youths of Sylheti origin in London, who know little of the group’s record at home. Some British-based Bangladeshis are dismayed by the influence the Islamists enjoy in the diaspora.
Worry over radicalism made in Britain extends to Bangladesh, too. In March the Bangladeshi authorities raided a madrassa that was full of guns and ammunition. It emerged that this supposed school had been financed and run by a charity based in Britain. There are some institutions that no teaching material will correct.
http://www.economist.com/world/internat ... extfeature
A single space
Apr 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Theologically as well as socially, Muslims in Britain and their countries of origin form a seamless whole
TWO government ministers, both practising Muslims, met in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, in April and agreed to co-ordinate their efforts to broaden the curriculum at religious schools. A set of teaching materials would be sent out to madrassas with the aim of enriching the diet. As well as learning the Koran, pupils would be taught how Islam was compatible with citizenship.
This approach, the ministers decided, would work well in their respective countries, Britain and Pakistan. Admittedly, the role played by madrassas in the two places is different. In England’s smokestack cities, they are frequented by Muslim children as a supplement to state schooling. In the slums and refugee camps of Pakistan, they offer a meal and an education of sorts to boys who would otherwise be illiterate.
But in both countries, the ministers agreed, madrassas at their most deficient can leave the young open to extremists. That is not just because of what they teach, more because of what they do not, such as how to live peaceably with those who follow a different faith or just another form of Islam. As the Pakistani official told his British counterpart, the cohesion minister, Sadiq Khan, inadequate theology and terrorism can be points on a single spectrum.
Not just for security types and sociologists, but also for theologians, Britain and its ex-dominions in South Asia are virtually a single entity. Schools of Islam that emerged in India as a reaction to the British raj are now vying for influence in the north of England. The passions generated by the Bangladeshi variety of Islamism are as lively in London as they are in Dhaka. Anybody who hopes for stability and social peace in the Muslim parts of South Asia has to keep an eye on the Islamic scene in Britain. The reverse also applies. The flow of South Asian imams to Britain has recently slowed, but in an internet age there are other ways for ideas to travel.
Whenever intra-Muslim tension flares in Pakistan—for example, with the trashing of a Sufi shrine or the takeover of a mosque—Britain’s authorities watch for tension in English cities. And the war now raging between the Pakistani government and Taliban rebels is affecting the mood among British Muslims. How exactly may depend on where they come from, geographically and theologically.
Life would be easier for students of Anglo-Asian Islam if one theological movement always produced moderates and another always led to extremism. But things are never that straightforward. As Philip Lewis, a Bradford-based writer on British Islam, puts it, “In all schools [of Islam], there are some individuals playing a constructive role.” And in virtually all schools there are some doing the opposite.
Still, in their Islamic scenes Britain and Pakistan do have one simple thing in common: religious education is dominated by purist teachers, who trace their roots to the Indian town of Deoband where an Islamic place of learning was founded in 1866. Designed to instil and spread a rigorous form of faith (robust enough to survive colonialism and the “corrupting” influences of other cultures), the Deobandi philosophy sets austere rules for personal behaviour. It sees the veneration of saints, and even excessive attention to the Prophet, as a distraction from God.
Among its offshoots are the Tablighi Jama’at, a huge, worldwide missionary movement (strong in Yorkshire and London), in which lay people help to propagate the idea of a pious life. And another offshoot of the Deobandis, as critics always note, is the Taliban, as they emerged in Afghanistan and then in Pakistan.
But that does not mean all Deobandis, either in Britain or South Asia, support violence. Just as well, given that at least 16 of Britain’s 22 Muslim “seminaries” (in other words, places that offer intensive, full-time Islamic instruction from the age of 12 upwards) are of the Deobandi persuasion. Their curriculum is modelled on Islamic learning under the Mogul empire.
Tim Winter, an influential British convert to Islam, believes that for all their narrow intensity, the British Deobandi seminaries won’t foster violence: their ethos is cautious and traditional. But some alumni of Britain’s Deobandi institutions do advocate self-segregation by Muslims, especially where local indigenous culture is dominated by alcohol and drugs.
Anyway, in Britain as in Pakistan, a plurality of ordinary South Asian Muslims follows a different form of the faith: the Barelvi tradition, which celebrates shrines, saints and music. One pioneer of Muslim education in Britain is of the Barelvi school: Musharraf Hussain, an imam who runs a school, mosque, radio station and magazine in Nottingham. He fears that among Britain’s Muslim establishment, sectarian splits are becoming “entrenched and fossilised”. Some Deobandis retain a deep sense of victimhood and grievance.
Clearly, some young British Muslims ignore the sectarian issues that gripped their parents. Sometimes this reflects secularisation. Sometimes it reflects the opposite: belief in a “global umma”, or community, that differentiates all Muslims from all non-believers. Still, the Nottingham imam has observed one unexpected side-effect from the turmoil engulfing Pakistan. Many British Muslims, he thinks, will “move on” in a healthy way. They will give up the dream of resettling in South Asia and put down firmer roots in Britain.
A harsher message is emerging from some mosques in the north of England, especially in places like Burnley where many have roots in the war zone on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. The plight of people fleeing the region is keenly felt. Many blame Pakistan’s government, not the rebels. “People think the Pakistani government is fighting not for itself, but for American interests,” says Abdul Hamid Qureshi, the chairman of the Lancashire Council of Mosques, which groups Muslims of all shades. People in an angry and defensive mood will hardly welcome Gordon Brown’s pledge, on April 29th, to work with the Pakistani army to fight terror. Neither will they take too seriously the prime minister’s vow to boost education and ease poverty on Pakistan’s border.
British Muslims, who number at least 2m, can amaze their cousins from South Asia with their religious conservatism. One reason is the high incidence of migration from poor, rural parts of South Asia, such as Mirpur in Kashmir and Sylhet in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh the fortunes of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party plummeted in last December’s election. But the movement can still attract second- and third-generation youths of Sylheti origin in London, who know little of the group’s record at home. Some British-based Bangladeshis are dismayed by the influence the Islamists enjoy in the diaspora.
Worry over radicalism made in Britain extends to Bangladesh, too. In March the Bangladeshi authorities raided a madrassa that was full of guns and ammunition. It emerged that this supposed school had been financed and run by a charity based in Britain. There are some institutions that no teaching material will correct.
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Mosques and modernity
By Edwin Heathcote
Published: August 14 2009 15:06 | Last updated: August 14 2009 15:06
Sheikh Zayed Mosque in the United Arab Emirates
The threshold of the Jamme Masjid (Great Mosque) in London’s Brick Lane consists of a tatty set of worn steps rising to an inconspicuous door, its once creamy paint scuffed and dirty. From the cheap aluminium door handle hangs a loop of plastic acting as an improvised lock.
The Jamme Masjid (Great Mosque) in London’s Brick Lane
At street level, there is little to suggest this is the entrance to one of London’s most extraordinary structures, a building that embodies the urban fabric’s history as a palimpsest of migration and the turnover of immigrant cultures. Built in 1743 by the French Huguenots, who developed Spitalfields into a prosperous economy based on the silk trade, by 1819 it had become a Wesleyan chapel. In 1898, as Brick Lane flourished as a centre of Jewish immigration provoked by eastern European pogroms, the building became a synagogue. In 1976, long abandoned by a now prosperous Jewish population, it became the locus of the Bangladeshi community that had settled in the run-down district.
The mosque is contained in a boxy brick shell, solid, soot-stained and dour. There is little to express the joy or wonder of worship. It is a building that allows the life of the street to carry on without drawing attention to itself. It is the architecture of self-effacement and modesty.
Just around the corner in Fashion Street, though, is a far more Islamic-looking building, with a long terrace of Moorish arches and Alhambra motifs. Another, newer mosque? No, a century-old attempt at a commercial bazaar, its Middle Eastern aesthetic aimed more at the Jews who were then Spitalfields’ majority constituency. It was a commercial failure but now it has found a new market in the arts organisations sprouting across east London.
The only trace of Islam in the architecture of Brick Lane is to be found in an anorexic archway near the Whitechapel Gallery, a municipal gesture in sickly purple and green that falls in the no-man’s land between street furniture and lamp posts (the latter are also Islamicised here, in kitschy shapes and bright colours). This, it announces, is “Banglatown”, a south Asian riposte to the kitsch chinoiserie of Soho’s Chinatown.
With about a quarter of a million Muslims living in east London, the intriguing question arises of how the surge in the Islamic community (portrayed by alarmist tabloids as growing at 10 times the rate of the rest of the population) might begin to affect the physical fabric of the city. The question seems particularly pertinent to Britain as our model of the integration of immigrant communities, much questioned in the wake of the July 2005 bombings, has traditionally been multicultural, not the US melting-pot model in which everyone is subsumed into a wider American identity. There are some basic expressions of an Islamic presence, the primitive DIY Islamic of fibreglass domes and minarets tacked on to cheap brick boxes, but little else.
Is it, I wondered, that Muslims are wary of making their physical presence too visible, as were the Jews of Spitalfields still fearing anti-Semitism a century before them, or is it the tight planning restrictions of a heritage city? Perhaps architecture is unimportant to a community that has other things to worry about, from poverty and education to racism. Is it the difference between the conception of sacred space in Islam and Christianity, where to a Muslim, any space so designated becomes a space for prayer – a rug is enough? Or, perhaps, is it that the idea of an Islamic architecture is a patronising conceit? After all, the once booming Dubai has re-exported its glassy, brassy skyscrapers as a model for cities to the rest of the world. Perhaps architecture has globalised to the extent that the idea of an architecture of Islam is absurd. Or perhaps the wide spread of Islam, from Africa to China, has produced such a depth of architectures that the possibility of them merging into a coherent aesthetic is remote and a symptom of a condescending, colonial world view.
Spitalfields, with its mainly Bangladeshi, and still far from prosperous, community, represents one end of the social scale but it is hardly possible to blame a lack of Islamic buildings on poverty. From the 1970s London has been home – or second home – to some of the Arab world’s wealthiest figures. There are the big landmarks of Islam: the Regent’s Park mosque and the Ismaili Centre, both by establishment British modernist architects (Sirs Frederick Gibberd and Hugh Casson). There is even a lovely mosque, the Shah Jahan, at Woking, dating from 1889. All these were funded by wealthy donors, but what of buildings funded by local communities?
Dr Ahmed al-Shahi of St Antony’s College, Oxford, tells me: “Most of these mosques and community buildings have been built by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis from small villages. They are just recreating the modest structures they have at home; architecture is not a high priority.”
Dr Hassan Abedin of Oxford’s Centre for Islamic Studies agrees. “These are poor communities who put all their trust in their elders, who are often not aesthetically educated. They take a few motifs and apply them to a building. Buildings funded by local communities tend to be conservative.”
It is easy to attribute the lack of compelling modern Islamic buildings in western cities to poverty, to a lack of ambition or education or to conservatism. But is it also part of a desire to keep a low profile? Dr Omar Khalidi, librarian for the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says: “The great mosques of the Islamic world were a result of royal patronage. Mosques in the west are built by community subscription. They begin as an architecture of homesickness but, as Muslims have settled in, particularly in the US, the mosques tend to migrate with them to the suburbs, so they become less a part of the inner cities, more suburban in ambition.”
But the building of big mosques does still face startling opposition in western cities. Over the past couple of years there have been bitter battles across Europe – now home to an estimated 16m Muslims – as local communities have attempted to prevent major new Islamic structures. In 2007 the Swiss People’s party, part of the ruling coalition, called for a “minaret ban” in response to a wave of proposals for mosques in a country where more than 4 per cent of the population is Muslim. The motion was forcefully rejected in parliament earlier this year but not before it had prompted the Austrian right into similar attempts, taken up by the politician Jörg Haider before his death last year.
London generated controversy with a proposal for a “mega-mosque” at Abbey Mills near the 2012 Olympic site. Designed by young architects Mangera Yvars, covering 18 acres and able to accommodate 40,000 worshippers, it would have been the biggest mosque in Europe. A coalition of Christian groups and the far-right British National Party lobbied against it, citing its size, prominence and the way in which it would have overshadowed the architectural spectacle of the Olympics.
Then the sponsors were revealed to be the organisation Tablighi Jamaat, which had been linked by the FBI to the recruitment of members for al-Qaeda. The scheme was handed to another practice, downscaled to 12,000 capacity and seems to have quietly disappeared. Its website no longer exists and the new architects, Allies and Morrison, declined to talk to me about it.
Mangera Yvars, meanwhile, are planning a striking new building for an Islamic community centre in London’s Harrow. “At least the Abbey Mills plans shook up the scene and we’re now dealing with a new generation of more enlightened clients,” says founder Ali Mangera.
What the London mega-mosque did was to expose nervousness about the concretisation of the presence of the Muslim community. It was an insanely ambitious scheme but the vehemence of the opposition made it clear that there remains a significant residual fear of Islam.
The same symptoms appeared when another mosque, Germany’s largest with a 4,000 capacity, was proposed for the Ehrenfeld suburb of Cologne. The Turkish mosque association DITIB commissioned architect Paul Böhm to design the building. Böhm’s father and grandfather were the two most radical and admired church architects of their generations. His design is an amalgam of modernism and tradition. Its 34.5m-high dome resembles a Greek warrior’s helmet, while the 55m-tall minarets look like slender scrolls of scripture. The Catholic bishops, initially concerned that the mosque’s minarets were higher than the spire of the neighbouring church, to their great credit, ultimately supported the building and it is currently under construction, as are dozens of others across Germany, a country with around 3.2m Muslims.
One of the most recent to open was, uniquely in Europe, designed by a woman. Mubashra Ilyas, a German Muslim of Pakistani descent, is the architect of the Heinersdorf mosque in Berlin. A relatively modest building with a large, elegant dome, its construction was plagued with “accidents” and daubed with Nazi graffiti.
Of all the contemporary Islamic architecture in the west, the one most often cited as a success is the Institut du Monde Arabe (1988) in Paris. Jean Nouvel designed an unapologetically modernist building of steel and glass but relieved it with beautiful mechanical screens based on Islamic patterns that acted like the shutters of a camera lens, closing light out or letting it in.
But does that make it an example of Islamic architecture? Farshid Moussavi, the founder of Foreign Office Architects and a member of the steering committee of the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture, tells me: “There is no such thing now as an Islamic architecture. Is there such a thing as Christian architecture? Cultures are so complex and globalised that their expression is contemporary. The idea of applying Islamic ornament to a building relies on such a narrow definition of Islam.”
Hassan Abedin, though, is less dismissive of the idea. “There is a kind of Islamic pattern of living,” he says. “Architecture and public space are informed by notions of spirituality and community. The quadrangles of Oxford with their cloisters and foundations seem very familiar because they exist in this way.” The Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies is building its own new structure, designed by the traditionalist Egyptian architect Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil.
“There are also perhaps things we don’t see,” he continues, “[such as] adjacent terraced houses bought up and knocked together to create space for extended families, where the social dynamics inform the insides of the buildings more than the outside.”
Moussavi says that what we see as traditional Islamic architecture is often driven as much by climate as by culture. Yet historic Islamic cities, from the mud skyscrapers of Shebam in the Yemen to the awesome formal urbanism of Isfahan in Iran, have evolved the most beautiful, urbane, dense and most sustainable cities on earth. Surely we still have much to learn from them?
The history of Islamic architecture in the west is long and fraught. Racism, fear and conservatism conspire to make it a prickly subject. When the Ehrenfeld mosque in Cologne was proposed, the Holocaust survivor and usually impeccably liberal writer Ralph Giordano astonishingly called the project “a land grab of foreign territory”, and a monument to the failure of the integration of Muslims.
The motifs of Islam have become familiar in our cities through cultural theming. From cinemas to Masonic lodges, from the mongrel Mughal style of Brighton Pavilion to the Ali-Baba excess of the local Alhambra, a colonial version of Islam has been a constant presence. The question is when a genuine expression of Islamic culture will emerge in our cities.
The controversy may, perversely, help. Ìt may force architects to design beautiful buildings in an effort to assuage opposition, to use architecture, as did the Ottomans and the Moors in Europe, to persuade through the sublime. Perhaps the future lies also in commerce. We are enchanted as tourists by the buzz of the bazaar and the souk, exemplary forums for commercial and social life. Surely there is still much to learn about the infrastructure of an efficient trading city, from the earliest metropolises from Damascus to Baghdad.
There is a sundial on the façade of the grimy brick walls of Spitalfields’ Jamme Masjid, erected by its Huguenot builders. It is inscribed “umbra sumus”; “we are shadows”. The Huguenots came and went but still the shadows they left remain visible in their architecture, which has accommodated and welcomed generations of immigrants. Surely we can hope that Islam, too, can cast a similar legacy over London’s fluid fabric.
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture critic
..................................................
Islamic architecture in Britain: Arabian courtyards to Alhambra cinemas
The title of the oldest mosque in Britain is highly contested. The exquisite Shah Jehan mosque (pictured) in – of all places – Woking, is usually credited. Built in 1889 by architect WL Chambers, it is the country’s most beautiful mosque. It was commissioned by Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, a Hungarian linguist and founder of the University of the Punjab-Lahore as a place for students of the nearby Oriental Institute to worship. Executed in a kind of fantasy Saracenic-Mughal, it is closer to Brighton Pavilion than the Alhambra but remains a beautiful building.
The mosque at 2 Glynrhondda Street in Cardiff, founded in 1860 by Yemeni sailors, is earlier by several decades. A building at 8 Brougham Terrace, West Derby Street, in Liverpool, accommodated a mosque founded in 1889 – the same year as the Shah Jehan – by Muslim convert Henry William Quilliam. It was announced earlier this year that the now dilapidated Liverpudlian building would undergo a £3m rebuilding.
The earliest mosques were built not by immigrant communities but by western converts. Many Victorians were seduced by Islam and the impact of Islamic design could be felt beyond the few small mosques. When the painter and sculptor Lord Leighton rebuilt his house in London’s Holland Park in 1877, he put in an Arab hall, a space at the centre of the structure clad in 16th- and 17th-century Islamic tiles, with a fountain at its centre like an Arabian courtyard. Then there is the curious Sino-Islamic hybrid of the Prince Regent’s Mughal pleasure dome, the Royal Pavilion in Brighton (1815-1822) built by the architect of Regent Street, John Nash.
A taste for the exotic in entertainment saw the Arabian Nights style emerge in theatres, of which Leicester Square’s 1864 Alhambra was the best known. But it was with the coming of the picture palaces that it really reached the high street. Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheikh (1921) and Blood and Sand (1922) set a taste for the Islamic style that found expression in an emerging building type, the cinema. Alhambras, Meccas and Granadas, as they were then called, were a riot of onion domes and ogee arches. They still stand imposingly and incongruously at the hearts of our city centres, often turned (without apparent irony) into bingo halls and music venues.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/fb5744f4-8860 ... t=yes.html
By Edwin Heathcote
Published: August 14 2009 15:06 | Last updated: August 14 2009 15:06
Sheikh Zayed Mosque in the United Arab Emirates
The threshold of the Jamme Masjid (Great Mosque) in London’s Brick Lane consists of a tatty set of worn steps rising to an inconspicuous door, its once creamy paint scuffed and dirty. From the cheap aluminium door handle hangs a loop of plastic acting as an improvised lock.
The Jamme Masjid (Great Mosque) in London’s Brick Lane
At street level, there is little to suggest this is the entrance to one of London’s most extraordinary structures, a building that embodies the urban fabric’s history as a palimpsest of migration and the turnover of immigrant cultures. Built in 1743 by the French Huguenots, who developed Spitalfields into a prosperous economy based on the silk trade, by 1819 it had become a Wesleyan chapel. In 1898, as Brick Lane flourished as a centre of Jewish immigration provoked by eastern European pogroms, the building became a synagogue. In 1976, long abandoned by a now prosperous Jewish population, it became the locus of the Bangladeshi community that had settled in the run-down district.
The mosque is contained in a boxy brick shell, solid, soot-stained and dour. There is little to express the joy or wonder of worship. It is a building that allows the life of the street to carry on without drawing attention to itself. It is the architecture of self-effacement and modesty.
Just around the corner in Fashion Street, though, is a far more Islamic-looking building, with a long terrace of Moorish arches and Alhambra motifs. Another, newer mosque? No, a century-old attempt at a commercial bazaar, its Middle Eastern aesthetic aimed more at the Jews who were then Spitalfields’ majority constituency. It was a commercial failure but now it has found a new market in the arts organisations sprouting across east London.
The only trace of Islam in the architecture of Brick Lane is to be found in an anorexic archway near the Whitechapel Gallery, a municipal gesture in sickly purple and green that falls in the no-man’s land between street furniture and lamp posts (the latter are also Islamicised here, in kitschy shapes and bright colours). This, it announces, is “Banglatown”, a south Asian riposte to the kitsch chinoiserie of Soho’s Chinatown.
With about a quarter of a million Muslims living in east London, the intriguing question arises of how the surge in the Islamic community (portrayed by alarmist tabloids as growing at 10 times the rate of the rest of the population) might begin to affect the physical fabric of the city. The question seems particularly pertinent to Britain as our model of the integration of immigrant communities, much questioned in the wake of the July 2005 bombings, has traditionally been multicultural, not the US melting-pot model in which everyone is subsumed into a wider American identity. There are some basic expressions of an Islamic presence, the primitive DIY Islamic of fibreglass domes and minarets tacked on to cheap brick boxes, but little else.
Is it, I wondered, that Muslims are wary of making their physical presence too visible, as were the Jews of Spitalfields still fearing anti-Semitism a century before them, or is it the tight planning restrictions of a heritage city? Perhaps architecture is unimportant to a community that has other things to worry about, from poverty and education to racism. Is it the difference between the conception of sacred space in Islam and Christianity, where to a Muslim, any space so designated becomes a space for prayer – a rug is enough? Or, perhaps, is it that the idea of an Islamic architecture is a patronising conceit? After all, the once booming Dubai has re-exported its glassy, brassy skyscrapers as a model for cities to the rest of the world. Perhaps architecture has globalised to the extent that the idea of an architecture of Islam is absurd. Or perhaps the wide spread of Islam, from Africa to China, has produced such a depth of architectures that the possibility of them merging into a coherent aesthetic is remote and a symptom of a condescending, colonial world view.
Spitalfields, with its mainly Bangladeshi, and still far from prosperous, community, represents one end of the social scale but it is hardly possible to blame a lack of Islamic buildings on poverty. From the 1970s London has been home – or second home – to some of the Arab world’s wealthiest figures. There are the big landmarks of Islam: the Regent’s Park mosque and the Ismaili Centre, both by establishment British modernist architects (Sirs Frederick Gibberd and Hugh Casson). There is even a lovely mosque, the Shah Jahan, at Woking, dating from 1889. All these were funded by wealthy donors, but what of buildings funded by local communities?
Dr Ahmed al-Shahi of St Antony’s College, Oxford, tells me: “Most of these mosques and community buildings have been built by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis from small villages. They are just recreating the modest structures they have at home; architecture is not a high priority.”
Dr Hassan Abedin of Oxford’s Centre for Islamic Studies agrees. “These are poor communities who put all their trust in their elders, who are often not aesthetically educated. They take a few motifs and apply them to a building. Buildings funded by local communities tend to be conservative.”
It is easy to attribute the lack of compelling modern Islamic buildings in western cities to poverty, to a lack of ambition or education or to conservatism. But is it also part of a desire to keep a low profile? Dr Omar Khalidi, librarian for the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says: “The great mosques of the Islamic world were a result of royal patronage. Mosques in the west are built by community subscription. They begin as an architecture of homesickness but, as Muslims have settled in, particularly in the US, the mosques tend to migrate with them to the suburbs, so they become less a part of the inner cities, more suburban in ambition.”
But the building of big mosques does still face startling opposition in western cities. Over the past couple of years there have been bitter battles across Europe – now home to an estimated 16m Muslims – as local communities have attempted to prevent major new Islamic structures. In 2007 the Swiss People’s party, part of the ruling coalition, called for a “minaret ban” in response to a wave of proposals for mosques in a country where more than 4 per cent of the population is Muslim. The motion was forcefully rejected in parliament earlier this year but not before it had prompted the Austrian right into similar attempts, taken up by the politician Jörg Haider before his death last year.
London generated controversy with a proposal for a “mega-mosque” at Abbey Mills near the 2012 Olympic site. Designed by young architects Mangera Yvars, covering 18 acres and able to accommodate 40,000 worshippers, it would have been the biggest mosque in Europe. A coalition of Christian groups and the far-right British National Party lobbied against it, citing its size, prominence and the way in which it would have overshadowed the architectural spectacle of the Olympics.
Then the sponsors were revealed to be the organisation Tablighi Jamaat, which had been linked by the FBI to the recruitment of members for al-Qaeda. The scheme was handed to another practice, downscaled to 12,000 capacity and seems to have quietly disappeared. Its website no longer exists and the new architects, Allies and Morrison, declined to talk to me about it.
Mangera Yvars, meanwhile, are planning a striking new building for an Islamic community centre in London’s Harrow. “At least the Abbey Mills plans shook up the scene and we’re now dealing with a new generation of more enlightened clients,” says founder Ali Mangera.
What the London mega-mosque did was to expose nervousness about the concretisation of the presence of the Muslim community. It was an insanely ambitious scheme but the vehemence of the opposition made it clear that there remains a significant residual fear of Islam.
The same symptoms appeared when another mosque, Germany’s largest with a 4,000 capacity, was proposed for the Ehrenfeld suburb of Cologne. The Turkish mosque association DITIB commissioned architect Paul Böhm to design the building. Böhm’s father and grandfather were the two most radical and admired church architects of their generations. His design is an amalgam of modernism and tradition. Its 34.5m-high dome resembles a Greek warrior’s helmet, while the 55m-tall minarets look like slender scrolls of scripture. The Catholic bishops, initially concerned that the mosque’s minarets were higher than the spire of the neighbouring church, to their great credit, ultimately supported the building and it is currently under construction, as are dozens of others across Germany, a country with around 3.2m Muslims.
One of the most recent to open was, uniquely in Europe, designed by a woman. Mubashra Ilyas, a German Muslim of Pakistani descent, is the architect of the Heinersdorf mosque in Berlin. A relatively modest building with a large, elegant dome, its construction was plagued with “accidents” and daubed with Nazi graffiti.
Of all the contemporary Islamic architecture in the west, the one most often cited as a success is the Institut du Monde Arabe (1988) in Paris. Jean Nouvel designed an unapologetically modernist building of steel and glass but relieved it with beautiful mechanical screens based on Islamic patterns that acted like the shutters of a camera lens, closing light out or letting it in.
But does that make it an example of Islamic architecture? Farshid Moussavi, the founder of Foreign Office Architects and a member of the steering committee of the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture, tells me: “There is no such thing now as an Islamic architecture. Is there such a thing as Christian architecture? Cultures are so complex and globalised that their expression is contemporary. The idea of applying Islamic ornament to a building relies on such a narrow definition of Islam.”
Hassan Abedin, though, is less dismissive of the idea. “There is a kind of Islamic pattern of living,” he says. “Architecture and public space are informed by notions of spirituality and community. The quadrangles of Oxford with their cloisters and foundations seem very familiar because they exist in this way.” The Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies is building its own new structure, designed by the traditionalist Egyptian architect Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil.
“There are also perhaps things we don’t see,” he continues, “[such as] adjacent terraced houses bought up and knocked together to create space for extended families, where the social dynamics inform the insides of the buildings more than the outside.”
Moussavi says that what we see as traditional Islamic architecture is often driven as much by climate as by culture. Yet historic Islamic cities, from the mud skyscrapers of Shebam in the Yemen to the awesome formal urbanism of Isfahan in Iran, have evolved the most beautiful, urbane, dense and most sustainable cities on earth. Surely we still have much to learn from them?
The history of Islamic architecture in the west is long and fraught. Racism, fear and conservatism conspire to make it a prickly subject. When the Ehrenfeld mosque in Cologne was proposed, the Holocaust survivor and usually impeccably liberal writer Ralph Giordano astonishingly called the project “a land grab of foreign territory”, and a monument to the failure of the integration of Muslims.
The motifs of Islam have become familiar in our cities through cultural theming. From cinemas to Masonic lodges, from the mongrel Mughal style of Brighton Pavilion to the Ali-Baba excess of the local Alhambra, a colonial version of Islam has been a constant presence. The question is when a genuine expression of Islamic culture will emerge in our cities.
The controversy may, perversely, help. Ìt may force architects to design beautiful buildings in an effort to assuage opposition, to use architecture, as did the Ottomans and the Moors in Europe, to persuade through the sublime. Perhaps the future lies also in commerce. We are enchanted as tourists by the buzz of the bazaar and the souk, exemplary forums for commercial and social life. Surely there is still much to learn about the infrastructure of an efficient trading city, from the earliest metropolises from Damascus to Baghdad.
There is a sundial on the façade of the grimy brick walls of Spitalfields’ Jamme Masjid, erected by its Huguenot builders. It is inscribed “umbra sumus”; “we are shadows”. The Huguenots came and went but still the shadows they left remain visible in their architecture, which has accommodated and welcomed generations of immigrants. Surely we can hope that Islam, too, can cast a similar legacy over London’s fluid fabric.
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture critic
..................................................
Islamic architecture in Britain: Arabian courtyards to Alhambra cinemas
The title of the oldest mosque in Britain is highly contested. The exquisite Shah Jehan mosque (pictured) in – of all places – Woking, is usually credited. Built in 1889 by architect WL Chambers, it is the country’s most beautiful mosque. It was commissioned by Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, a Hungarian linguist and founder of the University of the Punjab-Lahore as a place for students of the nearby Oriental Institute to worship. Executed in a kind of fantasy Saracenic-Mughal, it is closer to Brighton Pavilion than the Alhambra but remains a beautiful building.
The mosque at 2 Glynrhondda Street in Cardiff, founded in 1860 by Yemeni sailors, is earlier by several decades. A building at 8 Brougham Terrace, West Derby Street, in Liverpool, accommodated a mosque founded in 1889 – the same year as the Shah Jehan – by Muslim convert Henry William Quilliam. It was announced earlier this year that the now dilapidated Liverpudlian building would undergo a £3m rebuilding.
The earliest mosques were built not by immigrant communities but by western converts. Many Victorians were seduced by Islam and the impact of Islamic design could be felt beyond the few small mosques. When the painter and sculptor Lord Leighton rebuilt his house in London’s Holland Park in 1877, he put in an Arab hall, a space at the centre of the structure clad in 16th- and 17th-century Islamic tiles, with a fountain at its centre like an Arabian courtyard. Then there is the curious Sino-Islamic hybrid of the Prince Regent’s Mughal pleasure dome, the Royal Pavilion in Brighton (1815-1822) built by the architect of Regent Street, John Nash.
A taste for the exotic in entertainment saw the Arabian Nights style emerge in theatres, of which Leicester Square’s 1864 Alhambra was the best known. But it was with the coming of the picture palaces that it really reached the high street. Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheikh (1921) and Blood and Sand (1922) set a taste for the Islamic style that found expression in an emerging building type, the cinema. Alhambras, Meccas and Granadas, as they were then called, were a riot of onion domes and ogee arches. They still stand imposingly and incongruously at the hearts of our city centres, often turned (without apparent irony) into bingo halls and music venues.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/fb5744f4-8860 ... t=yes.html
Europe and Islam
A treacherous path?
Aug 27th 2009
From The Economist print edition
A pessimist’s view of what Islamic immigration may be doing to Europe
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West. By Christopher Caldwell. Doubleday; 422 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
IN APRIL 1968 Enoch Powell, a Tory cabinet minister, destroyed his political career when he denounced mass immigration as a disaster (“like the Roman”, he said, “I seem to see ‘the river Tiber foaming with much blood’”). Today Powell’s arguments, if not his classical allusions, are becoming dangerously mainstream.
Christopher Caldwell is an American journalist who writes for the liberal Financial Times as well as the conservative Weekly Standard. He has spent the past decade studying European immigration, travelling widely and reading voraciously in an impressive variety of languages. His controversial new book repeatedly echoes Powell’s warnings all those years ago.
Mr Caldwell argues that “Western Europe became a multi-ethnic society in a fit of absence of mind.” European policymakers imported people to fill short-term job shortages. But immigrants continued to multiply even as the jobs disappeared: the number of foreign residents in Germany increased from 3m in 1971 to 7.5m in 2000 though the number of foreigners in the workforce did not budge. Today immigrants account for about 10% of the population of most west European countries, and up to 30% in some of Europe’s great cities.
Policymakers were even more mistaken about culture than they were about numbers. They assumed that immigrants would quickly adopt the mores of their host societies. But a surprising number of immigrants have proved “unmeltable”.
Mr Caldwell argues that the reason why so many immigrants failed to assimilate can be summed up in a single word: Islam. In the middle of the 20th century there were almost no Muslims in Europe. Today there are 15m-17m, making up about half of all new arrivals in Europe.
For the most part European countries have bent over backwards to accommodate the sensibilities of the newcomers. A French law court has allowed a Muslim man to annul his marriage on the ground that his wife was not a virgin on their wedding night. The British pensions department has a policy of recognising (and giving some benefits to) “additional spouses”.
But European public opinion is tiring of such bending. Mr Caldwell cites a poll that shows that only 19% of Europeans think immigration to be a good thing for their country; 57% think that their country has “too many foreigners”. Such numbers have recently forced politicians to adjust their policies.
Many countries are tightening their immigration laws, shifting to a skills-based immigration system and setting citizenship tests for would-be immigrants. The French have banned girls from wearing veils in schools. British politicians, such as Tony Blair and Jack Straw, have denounced the veil as a symbol of separation. The old welcome-mat seems to have been replaced by a “Love it or leave it” sign.
For Mr Caldwell this is all a matter of too little too late. Europe’s indigenous population is ageing fast, with a quarter of it over 60. Immigrants have large families. Moreover, Europe is no match for Islamic self-confidence: “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”
Mr Caldwell’s unremitting pessimism about Europe raises all sorts of questions, both large and small. Are Europeans really as feeble as he asserts? They have discovered that some principles are non-negotiable in their relations with Islam, particularly women’s rights. And is Islam really as self-confident? The willingness of so many Muslims to take offence at any slight—a cartoon here, a novel there—could be a sign of profound cultural anxiety.
Mr Caldwell is also worryingly selective in his use of evidence. He all but ignores the multiple examples of upward mobility and successful integration. He dwells on the fact that many Muslim men feel emasculated by the success of their women without bothering to wonder why so many of the women are successful.
That said, this is an important book as well as a provocative one: the best statement to date of the pessimist’s position on Islamic immigration in Europe. Supporters of liberal policies need to sharpen their arguments if they are to prevent neo-Powellism from sweeping all before it.
http://www.economist.com/books/displays ... d=14302290
A treacherous path?
Aug 27th 2009
From The Economist print edition
A pessimist’s view of what Islamic immigration may be doing to Europe
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West. By Christopher Caldwell. Doubleday; 422 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
IN APRIL 1968 Enoch Powell, a Tory cabinet minister, destroyed his political career when he denounced mass immigration as a disaster (“like the Roman”, he said, “I seem to see ‘the river Tiber foaming with much blood’”). Today Powell’s arguments, if not his classical allusions, are becoming dangerously mainstream.
Christopher Caldwell is an American journalist who writes for the liberal Financial Times as well as the conservative Weekly Standard. He has spent the past decade studying European immigration, travelling widely and reading voraciously in an impressive variety of languages. His controversial new book repeatedly echoes Powell’s warnings all those years ago.
Mr Caldwell argues that “Western Europe became a multi-ethnic society in a fit of absence of mind.” European policymakers imported people to fill short-term job shortages. But immigrants continued to multiply even as the jobs disappeared: the number of foreign residents in Germany increased from 3m in 1971 to 7.5m in 2000 though the number of foreigners in the workforce did not budge. Today immigrants account for about 10% of the population of most west European countries, and up to 30% in some of Europe’s great cities.
Policymakers were even more mistaken about culture than they were about numbers. They assumed that immigrants would quickly adopt the mores of their host societies. But a surprising number of immigrants have proved “unmeltable”.
Mr Caldwell argues that the reason why so many immigrants failed to assimilate can be summed up in a single word: Islam. In the middle of the 20th century there were almost no Muslims in Europe. Today there are 15m-17m, making up about half of all new arrivals in Europe.
For the most part European countries have bent over backwards to accommodate the sensibilities of the newcomers. A French law court has allowed a Muslim man to annul his marriage on the ground that his wife was not a virgin on their wedding night. The British pensions department has a policy of recognising (and giving some benefits to) “additional spouses”.
But European public opinion is tiring of such bending. Mr Caldwell cites a poll that shows that only 19% of Europeans think immigration to be a good thing for their country; 57% think that their country has “too many foreigners”. Such numbers have recently forced politicians to adjust their policies.
Many countries are tightening their immigration laws, shifting to a skills-based immigration system and setting citizenship tests for would-be immigrants. The French have banned girls from wearing veils in schools. British politicians, such as Tony Blair and Jack Straw, have denounced the veil as a symbol of separation. The old welcome-mat seems to have been replaced by a “Love it or leave it” sign.
For Mr Caldwell this is all a matter of too little too late. Europe’s indigenous population is ageing fast, with a quarter of it over 60. Immigrants have large families. Moreover, Europe is no match for Islamic self-confidence: “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”
Mr Caldwell’s unremitting pessimism about Europe raises all sorts of questions, both large and small. Are Europeans really as feeble as he asserts? They have discovered that some principles are non-negotiable in their relations with Islam, particularly women’s rights. And is Islam really as self-confident? The willingness of so many Muslims to take offence at any slight—a cartoon here, a novel there—could be a sign of profound cultural anxiety.
Mr Caldwell is also worryingly selective in his use of evidence. He all but ignores the multiple examples of upward mobility and successful integration. He dwells on the fact that many Muslim men feel emasculated by the success of their women without bothering to wonder why so many of the women are successful.
That said, this is an important book as well as a provocative one: the best statement to date of the pessimist’s position on Islamic immigration in Europe. Supporters of liberal policies need to sharpen their arguments if they are to prevent neo-Powellism from sweeping all before it.
http://www.economist.com/books/displays ... d=14302290
Thursday, 3 September 2009
Shaykh Dr. Abdul Rahman Sudais at East London Mosque
I volunteer for the Second Extension of the Mosque -
Head Imam of Masjid Al-Haram
Dr. Mozammel Haque
LONDON: Shaykh DR. Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais, the Head Imam of the Masjid Al-Haram of Makkah al-Mukarramah, visited the East London Mosque this evening of Wednesday, the 5th of August, 2009 as part of a visit to the UK. “I volunteer for the second extension of the East London Mosque,” said Shaykh Al-Sudais while unveiling the plaque of the foundations for the second phase of the East London Mosque, Whitechapel, London.
After unveiling a plaque commemorating the laying of the foundations for Phase 2 of East London Mosque, the Head Imam of the Haram led the Maghreb prayer and gave a short speech to a congregation, with over 15,000 people. The Head Imam mentioned about Tauheed, the Oneness of Allah and said that we have to follow the Book of Allah the Almighty, The Holy Qur’an and to follow the Sunnah, the Traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him.) Allah the Almighty sent him to us as the Mercy for the whole Mankind. We have to follow his character.
The second point, the Shaykh Sudais mentioned, is that you are the Ummah of Akhlaq, the nation of good character. You have to cooperate and help each other in righteousness and fear of Allah and don’t help each other in sin and aggression. This cooperation and helping each other is both among Muslims as well as between Muslims and non-Muslims. These are all parts of Islamic Akhlaq; Islamic character. Muslims are always at peace with Muslims and peaceful to all human beings both by hands and by tongue.
The third point, the Head Imam of Baitullah mentioned, is that the Deen or Religion of Islam is the Deen or Religion of the Middle Path and the balance. This religion protects all our good deeds and good benefits and protects us from wrong doings against each other. Imam also mentioned that the Prophet (peace be upon him) used to visit the Jews and look after his neighbours.
The fourth point, the Head Imam of the Masjid al-Haram mentioned, is that we are Ummah of Unity. You should always have unity on the basis of the Book of Allah, the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet, peace be upon him.
The fifth point, Shaykh Sudais mentioned, is that we are Ummah of knowledge. The sixth point, the Imam of the Masjid al-Haram said about usra (Family) and mentioned about bringing up children, Hijab and the dignity of women.
The seventh point, the Head Imam of the Masjid-al-Haram, mentioned is to impart proper teachings and training of Islam, tarbiyyat-e-Shahih.
The eighth point, the Shaykh Sudais mentioned, is that you are the Ummah of Dawah to Allah. Preaching with wisdom. Islam is a religion of Dawah. Call people to Islam with wisdom.
The ninth point, Shaykh Sudais mentioned, is that we should be respectful to our parents, protect and safeguard our children and give them proper training and education.
The tenth point, the Head Imam of the Masjid al-Haram mentioned, is that we are Ummat-e-Taibah. In this connection, the Imam mentioned about the month of Ramadan which is approaching. Ramadan is the month of Taubah and forgiveness. This is also the month of khairat (charity) and barakat. So the Imam advised the audience, the Muslims to make taubah to Allah the Almighty.
In his speech he mentioned, that Muslims should be proactive positively in our communities and work for all humanity. He also mentioned that we should work to look after our family and that the community at the East London Mosque should trust the committee to build community for the future.
East London Mosque is one of the oldest Mosques in London. In 1910 some notable Muslim figures decided to build a mosque in London and established the London Mosque Fund. Initially, a small room was hired for Friday prayers. However, in 1926 the Fund had grown to a sizeable amount and a 'Deed of Declaration of Trust' was made.
In 1940 three houses were purchased in Commercial Road, London E1 and converted into a Mosque. It was opened on Friday 1 August 1941; Lt. Col. Sir Hussain Suhrawardy, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the London Mosque Fund, welcomed worshippers into the newly established East London Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre. The first Jumaah prayer was led by the then Ambassador for Saudi Arabia, His Excellency Shaikh Hafiz Wahab in 1941.
Over the years many distinguished personalities were associated with the London Mosque Fund. Among them, the Rt. Hon. Syed Ameer Ali, the first Indian Privy Counsellor, who was the Chairman of London Mosque Fund Executive Committee until his death in 1928. His Royal Highness the Aga Khan served as life President of the Board of Trustees. Among the earliest members of the Board of Trustees during the thirties and forties were the famous author of The History of Saracens and the Spirit of Islam, Ameer Ali; the author of the English Translation of The Holy Qur’an, Marmaduke Pickthall and the Meaning of the Translation of the Holy Qur’an, Abdullah Yousuf Ali.
The construction of the present structure of the Mosque was completed in 1985. The opening ceremony was led by Imam Muhammad Subayil, the then Head Imam of the Masjid Al-Haram. King Khaled of Saudi Arabia promised and then King Fahd bin Abdulaziz donated 1.1 million pounds sterling for the construction of the Mosque.
The first extension of the East London Mosque was completed in 2004 and King Fahd bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia donated one million US dollars for the construction of its first extension. The opening ceremony was led by Imam Abdul Rahman Sudais, the Imam of the Masjid Al-Haram.
IMAM of Masjid Al-Haram led Friday Jumah
Prayer at the Central Mosque London
On Friday, the 7th of August 2009, the Imam of the Haram led the Jumah congregation at the Central Mosque, London and delivered his Khutbah, the Friday sermons to the Muslim worshippers of over 10, 000. In his Friday sermons, Shaykh Sudais was talking about the manners and tradition of Islam. He urged the Muslim community members to be good example of Islam; to be good members of the society where they live in, to listen and obey to the rules and regulations of the country where they live in.
The Imam of the Haram also talked about tolerance in Islam and he also talked about to abide the Islamic law.
Shaykh Sudais urged the Muslim community to take special care of education. The women, fathers and wives should give special care and more care about their children to be good members of the society in future.
Shaykh Sudais is loved by everybody of the community. Wherever he goes, whoever is organising the programme and event for him find always difficulties to control the people and the crowd. Everybody, men, women and children try to say Salaam Alaikum to Shaykh, request him to make Dua for them. And all these people try to do this at the same time. These people do this because they like him they respect him and they respect the Two Holy Mosques where it is.
Shaykh Sudais said, he was overwhelmed by the Muslim community after the Jumah prayer. The Imam of the Haram said, this is indeed a sign of love; a sign of the bond of brotherhood that binds people not only of this country but those who come from different parts of the world. He said that this is also the sign of the Muslim community loving of those who are coming from the Bilad al-Haramain and this has put a responsibility on myself as a Shaykh coming from Makkah that I should play a role like many other leaders to unite the Muslim community or to help the Muslim communities.
His Excellency Prince Mohammad Bin Nawaf, the Ambassadors of Saudi Arabia came to the Mosque and prayed his Jumah prayer. From time to time, His Royal Highness comes here to pray Jumah prayers and other ambassadors also come in the evening. It’s the Central Mosque of London as well as the Central Mosque for the community; so it is expected that some of the VIPs, some of the visitors to come to pray here.
Posted by Dr. Mozammel Haque at 16:45
Labels: East London Mosque, Imam and Khateeb of Masjid al-Haram, London, Shaykh Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais
http://islamicmonitor.blogspot.com/2009 ... -east.html
Shaykh Dr. Abdul Rahman Sudais at East London Mosque
I volunteer for the Second Extension of the Mosque -
Head Imam of Masjid Al-Haram
Dr. Mozammel Haque
LONDON: Shaykh DR. Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais, the Head Imam of the Masjid Al-Haram of Makkah al-Mukarramah, visited the East London Mosque this evening of Wednesday, the 5th of August, 2009 as part of a visit to the UK. “I volunteer for the second extension of the East London Mosque,” said Shaykh Al-Sudais while unveiling the plaque of the foundations for the second phase of the East London Mosque, Whitechapel, London.
After unveiling a plaque commemorating the laying of the foundations for Phase 2 of East London Mosque, the Head Imam of the Haram led the Maghreb prayer and gave a short speech to a congregation, with over 15,000 people. The Head Imam mentioned about Tauheed, the Oneness of Allah and said that we have to follow the Book of Allah the Almighty, The Holy Qur’an and to follow the Sunnah, the Traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him.) Allah the Almighty sent him to us as the Mercy for the whole Mankind. We have to follow his character.
The second point, the Shaykh Sudais mentioned, is that you are the Ummah of Akhlaq, the nation of good character. You have to cooperate and help each other in righteousness and fear of Allah and don’t help each other in sin and aggression. This cooperation and helping each other is both among Muslims as well as between Muslims and non-Muslims. These are all parts of Islamic Akhlaq; Islamic character. Muslims are always at peace with Muslims and peaceful to all human beings both by hands and by tongue.
The third point, the Head Imam of Baitullah mentioned, is that the Deen or Religion of Islam is the Deen or Religion of the Middle Path and the balance. This religion protects all our good deeds and good benefits and protects us from wrong doings against each other. Imam also mentioned that the Prophet (peace be upon him) used to visit the Jews and look after his neighbours.
The fourth point, the Head Imam of the Masjid al-Haram mentioned, is that we are Ummah of Unity. You should always have unity on the basis of the Book of Allah, the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet, peace be upon him.
The fifth point, Shaykh Sudais mentioned, is that we are Ummah of knowledge. The sixth point, the Imam of the Masjid al-Haram said about usra (Family) and mentioned about bringing up children, Hijab and the dignity of women.
The seventh point, the Head Imam of the Masjid-al-Haram, mentioned is to impart proper teachings and training of Islam, tarbiyyat-e-Shahih.
The eighth point, the Shaykh Sudais mentioned, is that you are the Ummah of Dawah to Allah. Preaching with wisdom. Islam is a religion of Dawah. Call people to Islam with wisdom.
The ninth point, Shaykh Sudais mentioned, is that we should be respectful to our parents, protect and safeguard our children and give them proper training and education.
The tenth point, the Head Imam of the Masjid al-Haram mentioned, is that we are Ummat-e-Taibah. In this connection, the Imam mentioned about the month of Ramadan which is approaching. Ramadan is the month of Taubah and forgiveness. This is also the month of khairat (charity) and barakat. So the Imam advised the audience, the Muslims to make taubah to Allah the Almighty.
In his speech he mentioned, that Muslims should be proactive positively in our communities and work for all humanity. He also mentioned that we should work to look after our family and that the community at the East London Mosque should trust the committee to build community for the future.
East London Mosque is one of the oldest Mosques in London. In 1910 some notable Muslim figures decided to build a mosque in London and established the London Mosque Fund. Initially, a small room was hired for Friday prayers. However, in 1926 the Fund had grown to a sizeable amount and a 'Deed of Declaration of Trust' was made.
In 1940 three houses were purchased in Commercial Road, London E1 and converted into a Mosque. It was opened on Friday 1 August 1941; Lt. Col. Sir Hussain Suhrawardy, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the London Mosque Fund, welcomed worshippers into the newly established East London Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre. The first Jumaah prayer was led by the then Ambassador for Saudi Arabia, His Excellency Shaikh Hafiz Wahab in 1941.
Over the years many distinguished personalities were associated with the London Mosque Fund. Among them, the Rt. Hon. Syed Ameer Ali, the first Indian Privy Counsellor, who was the Chairman of London Mosque Fund Executive Committee until his death in 1928. His Royal Highness the Aga Khan served as life President of the Board of Trustees. Among the earliest members of the Board of Trustees during the thirties and forties were the famous author of The History of Saracens and the Spirit of Islam, Ameer Ali; the author of the English Translation of The Holy Qur’an, Marmaduke Pickthall and the Meaning of the Translation of the Holy Qur’an, Abdullah Yousuf Ali.
The construction of the present structure of the Mosque was completed in 1985. The opening ceremony was led by Imam Muhammad Subayil, the then Head Imam of the Masjid Al-Haram. King Khaled of Saudi Arabia promised and then King Fahd bin Abdulaziz donated 1.1 million pounds sterling for the construction of the Mosque.
The first extension of the East London Mosque was completed in 2004 and King Fahd bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia donated one million US dollars for the construction of its first extension. The opening ceremony was led by Imam Abdul Rahman Sudais, the Imam of the Masjid Al-Haram.
IMAM of Masjid Al-Haram led Friday Jumah
Prayer at the Central Mosque London
On Friday, the 7th of August 2009, the Imam of the Haram led the Jumah congregation at the Central Mosque, London and delivered his Khutbah, the Friday sermons to the Muslim worshippers of over 10, 000. In his Friday sermons, Shaykh Sudais was talking about the manners and tradition of Islam. He urged the Muslim community members to be good example of Islam; to be good members of the society where they live in, to listen and obey to the rules and regulations of the country where they live in.
The Imam of the Haram also talked about tolerance in Islam and he also talked about to abide the Islamic law.
Shaykh Sudais urged the Muslim community to take special care of education. The women, fathers and wives should give special care and more care about their children to be good members of the society in future.
Shaykh Sudais is loved by everybody of the community. Wherever he goes, whoever is organising the programme and event for him find always difficulties to control the people and the crowd. Everybody, men, women and children try to say Salaam Alaikum to Shaykh, request him to make Dua for them. And all these people try to do this at the same time. These people do this because they like him they respect him and they respect the Two Holy Mosques where it is.
Shaykh Sudais said, he was overwhelmed by the Muslim community after the Jumah prayer. The Imam of the Haram said, this is indeed a sign of love; a sign of the bond of brotherhood that binds people not only of this country but those who come from different parts of the world. He said that this is also the sign of the Muslim community loving of those who are coming from the Bilad al-Haramain and this has put a responsibility on myself as a Shaykh coming from Makkah that I should play a role like many other leaders to unite the Muslim community or to help the Muslim communities.
His Excellency Prince Mohammad Bin Nawaf, the Ambassadors of Saudi Arabia came to the Mosque and prayed his Jumah prayer. From time to time, His Royal Highness comes here to pray Jumah prayers and other ambassadors also come in the evening. It’s the Central Mosque of London as well as the Central Mosque for the community; so it is expected that some of the VIPs, some of the visitors to come to pray here.
Posted by Dr. Mozammel Haque at 16:45
Labels: East London Mosque, Imam and Khateeb of Masjid al-Haram, London, Shaykh Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais
http://islamicmonitor.blogspot.com/2009 ... -east.html
Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam could be the reason for Pope Benedict XVI’s outreach to Anglicans.
October 26, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Benedict’s Gambit
By ROSS DOUTHAT
The Church of England has survived the Spanish Armada, the English Civil War and Elton John performing “Candle in the Wind” at Princess Diana’s Westminster Abbey funeral. So it will probably survive the note the Vatican issued last week, inviting disaffected Anglicans to head Romeward, and offering them an Anglo-Catholic mansion within the walls of the Roman Catholic faith.
But the invitation is a bombshell nonetheless. Pope Benedict XVI’s outreach to Anglicans may produce only a few conversions; it may produce a few million. Either way, it represents an unusual effort at targeted proselytism, remarkable both for its concessions to potential converts — married priests, a self-contained institutional structure, an Anglican rite — and for its indifference to the wishes of the Church of England’s leadership.
This is not the way well-mannered modern churches are supposed to behave. Spurred by the optimism of the early 1960s, the major denominations of Western Christendom have spent half a century being exquisitely polite to one another, setting aside a history of strife in the name of greater Christian unity.
This ecumenical era has borne real theological fruit, especially on issues that divided Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation. But what began as a daring experiment has decayed into bureaucratized complacency — a dull round of interdenominational statements on global warming and Third World debt, only tenuously connected to the Gospel.
At the same time, the more ecumenically minded denominations have lost believers to more assertive faiths — Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, Mormonism and even Islam — or seen them drift into agnosticism and apathy.
Nobody is more aware of this erosion than Benedict. So the pope is going back to basics — touting the particular witness of Catholicism even when he’s addressing universal subjects, and seeking converts more than common ground.
Along the way, he’s courting both ends of the theological spectrum. In his encyclicals, Benedict has addressed a range of issues — social justice, environmental protection, even erotic love — that are close to the hearts of secular liberals and lukewarm, progressive-minded Christians. But instead of stopping at a place of broad agreement, he has pushed further, trying to persuade his more liberal readers that many of their beliefs actually depend on the West’s Catholic heritage, and make sense only when grounded in a serious religious faith.
At the same time, the pope has systematically lowered the barriers for conservative Christians hovering on the threshold of the church, unsure whether to slip inside. This was the purpose behind his controversial outreach to schismatic Latin Mass Catholics, and it explains the current opening to Anglicans.
Many Anglicans will never become Catholic; their theology is too evangelical, their suspicion of papal authority too ingrained, their objections to the veneration of the Virgin Mary too deeply felt. But for those who could, Benedict is trying to make reunion with Rome a flesh-and-blood possibility, rather than a matter for academic conversation.
The news media have portrayed this rightward outreach largely through the lens of culture-war politics — as an attempt to consolidate, inside the Catholic tent, anyone who joins the Vatican in rejecting female priests and gay marriage.
But in making the opening to Anglicanism, Benedict also may have a deeper conflict in mind — not the parochial Western struggle between conservative and liberal believers, but Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam.
Here Catholicism and Anglicanism share two fronts. In Europe, both are weakened players, caught between a secular majority and an expanding Muslim population. In Africa, increasingly the real heart of the Anglican Communion, both are facing an entrenched Islamic presence across a fault line running from Nigeria to Sudan.
Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam’s compatibility with the Western way of reason — and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.
By contrast, the Church of England’s leadership has opted for conciliation (some would say appeasement), with the Archbishop of Canterbury going so far as to speculate about the inevitability of some kind of sharia law in Britain.
There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict’s approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.
This could be the real significance of last week’s invitation. What’s being interpreted, for now, as an intra-Christian skirmish may eventually be remembered as the first step toward a united Anglican-Catholic front — not against liberalism or atheism, but against Christianity’s most enduring and impressive foe.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/opini ... nted=print
October 26, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Benedict’s Gambit
By ROSS DOUTHAT
The Church of England has survived the Spanish Armada, the English Civil War and Elton John performing “Candle in the Wind” at Princess Diana’s Westminster Abbey funeral. So it will probably survive the note the Vatican issued last week, inviting disaffected Anglicans to head Romeward, and offering them an Anglo-Catholic mansion within the walls of the Roman Catholic faith.
But the invitation is a bombshell nonetheless. Pope Benedict XVI’s outreach to Anglicans may produce only a few conversions; it may produce a few million. Either way, it represents an unusual effort at targeted proselytism, remarkable both for its concessions to potential converts — married priests, a self-contained institutional structure, an Anglican rite — and for its indifference to the wishes of the Church of England’s leadership.
This is not the way well-mannered modern churches are supposed to behave. Spurred by the optimism of the early 1960s, the major denominations of Western Christendom have spent half a century being exquisitely polite to one another, setting aside a history of strife in the name of greater Christian unity.
This ecumenical era has borne real theological fruit, especially on issues that divided Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation. But what began as a daring experiment has decayed into bureaucratized complacency — a dull round of interdenominational statements on global warming and Third World debt, only tenuously connected to the Gospel.
At the same time, the more ecumenically minded denominations have lost believers to more assertive faiths — Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, Mormonism and even Islam — or seen them drift into agnosticism and apathy.
Nobody is more aware of this erosion than Benedict. So the pope is going back to basics — touting the particular witness of Catholicism even when he’s addressing universal subjects, and seeking converts more than common ground.
Along the way, he’s courting both ends of the theological spectrum. In his encyclicals, Benedict has addressed a range of issues — social justice, environmental protection, even erotic love — that are close to the hearts of secular liberals and lukewarm, progressive-minded Christians. But instead of stopping at a place of broad agreement, he has pushed further, trying to persuade his more liberal readers that many of their beliefs actually depend on the West’s Catholic heritage, and make sense only when grounded in a serious religious faith.
At the same time, the pope has systematically lowered the barriers for conservative Christians hovering on the threshold of the church, unsure whether to slip inside. This was the purpose behind his controversial outreach to schismatic Latin Mass Catholics, and it explains the current opening to Anglicans.
Many Anglicans will never become Catholic; their theology is too evangelical, their suspicion of papal authority too ingrained, their objections to the veneration of the Virgin Mary too deeply felt. But for those who could, Benedict is trying to make reunion with Rome a flesh-and-blood possibility, rather than a matter for academic conversation.
The news media have portrayed this rightward outreach largely through the lens of culture-war politics — as an attempt to consolidate, inside the Catholic tent, anyone who joins the Vatican in rejecting female priests and gay marriage.
But in making the opening to Anglicanism, Benedict also may have a deeper conflict in mind — not the parochial Western struggle between conservative and liberal believers, but Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam.
Here Catholicism and Anglicanism share two fronts. In Europe, both are weakened players, caught between a secular majority and an expanding Muslim population. In Africa, increasingly the real heart of the Anglican Communion, both are facing an entrenched Islamic presence across a fault line running from Nigeria to Sudan.
Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam’s compatibility with the Western way of reason — and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.
By contrast, the Church of England’s leadership has opted for conciliation (some would say appeasement), with the Archbishop of Canterbury going so far as to speculate about the inevitability of some kind of sharia law in Britain.
There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict’s approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.
This could be the real significance of last week’s invitation. What’s being interpreted, for now, as an intra-Christian skirmish may eventually be remembered as the first step toward a united Anglican-Catholic front — not against liberalism or atheism, but against Christianity’s most enduring and impressive foe.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/opini ... nted=print
Swiss vote to ban new mosque minarets
Last Updated: Sunday, November 29, 2009 | 12:21 PM ET
CBC News
Voters in Switzerland have approved a proposal to ban the construction of minarets on mosques, according to early results of a referendum.
In this Oct. 26, 2009, file photo, pedestrians walk in Zurich below posters promoting a "Yes" to the initiative banning the construction of minarets in Switzerland. (Steffen Schmidt, Keystone/AP)
Projections based on partial returns show support for the ban rose from only 37 per cent a week ago to 59 per cent in Sunday's voting, paving the way for a constitutional amendment.
The nationalist Swiss People's Party, the largest party in parliament, had pushed for the national vote after labelling the mosque towers as symbols of militant Islam.
Walter Wobmann, president of a committee that backed the initiative, said its aim is not to stop people from practising their religion, but to stop political Islam and the "further Islamization of Switzerland."
Supporters of the ban claim that allowing minarets would represent the growth of an ideology and the Islamic legal system Shariah, which they claim are incompatible with Swiss democracy.
Amnesty International, though, has warned that such a ban would violate Switzerland's commitment to religious freedom.
Swiss Muslims say the recent construction of Sikh temples and Serbian Orthodox churches is proof that Islam is being singled out for discrimination.
"The initiators have achieved something everyone wanted to prevent, and that is to influence and change the relations to Muslims and their social integration in a negative way," said Taner Hatipoglu, president of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Zurich.
The seven-member Swiss cabinet also spoke out against the initiative, put to a referendum after members of the Swiss People's Party and the Federal Democratic Union collected 100,000 signatures from eligible voters who said they were in favour of a nationwide vote.
The Swiss government argued a construction ban would cause "incomprehension overseas and harm Switzerland's image" and it reminded voters that Swiss mosques currently do not broadcast the call to prayer outside their buildings.
In the country of 7.5 million people, about 400,000 are Muslims, most of them immigrants from Turkey or the Balkans. Fewer than 13 per cent actively practise their religion, the Swiss government says.
Only four of the country's estimated 150 mosques have a minaret, while a fifth tower has recently been approved for construction.
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/11/2 ... arets.html
Last Updated: Sunday, November 29, 2009 | 12:21 PM ET
CBC News
Voters in Switzerland have approved a proposal to ban the construction of minarets on mosques, according to early results of a referendum.
In this Oct. 26, 2009, file photo, pedestrians walk in Zurich below posters promoting a "Yes" to the initiative banning the construction of minarets in Switzerland. (Steffen Schmidt, Keystone/AP)
Projections based on partial returns show support for the ban rose from only 37 per cent a week ago to 59 per cent in Sunday's voting, paving the way for a constitutional amendment.
The nationalist Swiss People's Party, the largest party in parliament, had pushed for the national vote after labelling the mosque towers as symbols of militant Islam.
Walter Wobmann, president of a committee that backed the initiative, said its aim is not to stop people from practising their religion, but to stop political Islam and the "further Islamization of Switzerland."
Supporters of the ban claim that allowing minarets would represent the growth of an ideology and the Islamic legal system Shariah, which they claim are incompatible with Swiss democracy.
Amnesty International, though, has warned that such a ban would violate Switzerland's commitment to religious freedom.
Swiss Muslims say the recent construction of Sikh temples and Serbian Orthodox churches is proof that Islam is being singled out for discrimination.
"The initiators have achieved something everyone wanted to prevent, and that is to influence and change the relations to Muslims and their social integration in a negative way," said Taner Hatipoglu, president of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Zurich.
The seven-member Swiss cabinet also spoke out against the initiative, put to a referendum after members of the Swiss People's Party and the Federal Democratic Union collected 100,000 signatures from eligible voters who said they were in favour of a nationwide vote.
The Swiss government argued a construction ban would cause "incomprehension overseas and harm Switzerland's image" and it reminded voters that Swiss mosques currently do not broadcast the call to prayer outside their buildings.
In the country of 7.5 million people, about 400,000 are Muslims, most of them immigrants from Turkey or the Balkans. Fewer than 13 per cent actively practise their religion, the Swiss government says.
Only four of the country's estimated 150 mosques have a minaret, while a fifth tower has recently been approved for construction.
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/11/2 ... arets.html
December 1, 2009
Editorial
A Vote for Intolerance
Disgraceful. That is the only way to describe the success of a right-wing initiative to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland, where 57 percent of voters cast ballots for a bigoted and mean-spirited measure.
Under Switzerland’s system of direct rule, the referendum is binding. Switzerland’s 400,000 or so Muslims, most of whom come from Kosovo and Turkey, are legally barred from building minarets as of now. We can only hope that the ban is quickly challenged, and that the Swiss courts will find a way to get rid of it.
But the vote also carries a strong and urgent message for all Europe, and for all Western nations where Islamic minorities have been growing in numbers and visibility, and where fear and resentment of Muslim immigrants and their religion have become increasingly strident and widespread. The warning signs have been there: the irrational fierceness of official French resistance to the shawls and burkas worn by some Muslim women; the growing opposition in many European quarters to Turkish membership in the European Union.
Terrorist attacks by Islamic militants, notably 9/11 and the attacks on London, Madrid and Mumbai, have played a role in the perception of Muslims as a security threat. But the worst response to extremism and intolerance is extremism and intolerance. Banning minarets does not address any of the problems with Muslim immigrants, but it is certain to alienate and anger them.
In Switzerland, Muslims amount to barely 6 percent of the population and there is no evidence of Islamic extremism. If its residents can succumb so easily to the propaganda of a xenophobic right-wing party, then countries with far greater Muslim populations and far more virulent strains of xenophobia best quickly start thinking about how to counter the trend.
If left unchecked, xenophobia spreads fast. Already right-wingers in the Netherlands and Denmark have called for similar measures, and others are bound to be encouraged by the success of the Swiss People’s Party.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/opini ... nted=print
Editorial
A Vote for Intolerance
Disgraceful. That is the only way to describe the success of a right-wing initiative to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland, where 57 percent of voters cast ballots for a bigoted and mean-spirited measure.
Under Switzerland’s system of direct rule, the referendum is binding. Switzerland’s 400,000 or so Muslims, most of whom come from Kosovo and Turkey, are legally barred from building minarets as of now. We can only hope that the ban is quickly challenged, and that the Swiss courts will find a way to get rid of it.
But the vote also carries a strong and urgent message for all Europe, and for all Western nations where Islamic minorities have been growing in numbers and visibility, and where fear and resentment of Muslim immigrants and their religion have become increasingly strident and widespread. The warning signs have been there: the irrational fierceness of official French resistance to the shawls and burkas worn by some Muslim women; the growing opposition in many European quarters to Turkish membership in the European Union.
Terrorist attacks by Islamic militants, notably 9/11 and the attacks on London, Madrid and Mumbai, have played a role in the perception of Muslims as a security threat. But the worst response to extremism and intolerance is extremism and intolerance. Banning minarets does not address any of the problems with Muslim immigrants, but it is certain to alienate and anger them.
In Switzerland, Muslims amount to barely 6 percent of the population and there is no evidence of Islamic extremism. If its residents can succumb so easily to the propaganda of a xenophobic right-wing party, then countries with far greater Muslim populations and far more virulent strains of xenophobia best quickly start thinking about how to counter the trend.
If left unchecked, xenophobia spreads fast. Already right-wingers in the Netherlands and Denmark have called for similar measures, and others are bound to be encouraged by the success of the Swiss People’s Party.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/opini ... nted=print
December 7, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Europe’s Minaret Moment
By ROSS DOUTHAT
They toasted to progress in Europe’s capitals last week. On Tuesday, the Treaty of Lisbon went into effect, bringing the nations of the European Union one step closer to the unity the Continent’s elite has been working toward for over 50 years.
But the treaty’s implementation fell just days after a milestone of a different sort: a referendum in Switzerland, long famous for religious tolerance, in which 57.5 percent of voters chose to ban the nation’s Muslims from building minarets.
Switzerland isn’t an E.U. member state, but the minaret moment could have happened almost anywhere in Europe nowadays — in France, where officials have floated the possibility of banning the burka; in Britain, which elected two representatives of the fascistic, anti-Islamic British National Party to the European Parliament last spring; in Italy, where a bill introduced this year would ban mosque construction and restrict the Islamic call to prayer.
If the more perfect union promised by the Lisbon Treaty is the European elite’s greatest triumph, the failure to successfully integrate millions of Muslim immigrants represents its greatest failure. And the two are intertwined: they’re both the fruits of the high-handed, often undemocratic approach to politics that Europe’s leaders have cultivated in their quest for unity.
The European Union probably wouldn’t exist in its current form if the Continent’s elites hadn’t been willing to ignore popular sentiment. (The Lisbon Treaty, for instance, was deliberately designed to bypass most European voters, after a proposed E.U. Constitution was torpedoed by referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005.) But this political style — forge a consensus among the establishment, and assume you can contain any backlash that develops — is also how the Continent came to accept millions of Muslim immigrants, despite the absence of a popular consensus on the issue, or a plan for how to integrate them.
The immigrants came first as guest workers, recruited after World War II to relieve labor shortages, and then as beneficiaries of generous asylum and family reunification laws, designed to salve Europe’s post-colonial conscience. The European elites assumed that the divide between Islam and the West was as antiquated as scimitars and broadswords, and that a liberal, multicultural, post-Christian federation would have no difficulty absorbing new arrivals from more traditional societies. And they decided, too — as Christopher Caldwell writes in “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe,” his wonderfully mordant chronicle of Europe’s Islamic dilemma — that liberal immigration policies “involve the sort of nonnegotiable moral duties that you don’t vote on.”
Better if they had let their voters choose. The rate of immigration might have been slower, and the efforts to integrate the new arrivals more strenuous. Instead, Europe’s leaders ended up creating a clash of civilizations inside their own frontiers.
Millions of Muslims have accepted European norms. But millions have not. This means polygamy in Sweden; radical mosques in Britain’s fading industrial cities; riots over affronts to the Prophet Muhammad in Denmark; and religiously inspired murder in the Netherlands. It means terrorism, and the threat of terrorism, from London to Madrid.
And it means a rising backlash, in which European voters support extreme measures and extremist parties because their politicians don’t seem to have anything to say about the problem.
In fairness, it isn’t clear exactly what those leaders could offer at this point. They can’t undo decades of migration. A large Muslim minority is in Europe to stay. Persisting with the establishment’s approach makes a certain sense: keep a lid on prejudice, tamp down extremism, and hope that time will transform the zealous Islam of recent immigrants into a more liberal form of faith, and make the conflict go away.
Or least keep it manageable. Caldwell’s book, the best on the subject to date, has a deeply pessimistic tone, but it shies away from specific predictions about the European future. Other writers are less circumspect, envisioning a Muslim-majority “Eurabia” in which Shariah has as much clout as liberalism.
But even a decadent West is probably stronger than this. The most likely scenario for Europe isn’t dhimmitude; it’s a long period of tension, punctuated by spasms of violence, that makes the Continent a more unpleasant place without fundamentally transforming it.
This is cold comfort, though, if you have to live under the shadow of violence. Just ask the Swiss, who spent last week worrying about the possibility that the minaret vote might make them a target for Islamist terrorism.
They’re right to worry. And all of Europe has to worry as well, thanks to the folly of its leaders — now, and for many years to come.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Europe’s Minaret Moment
By ROSS DOUTHAT
They toasted to progress in Europe’s capitals last week. On Tuesday, the Treaty of Lisbon went into effect, bringing the nations of the European Union one step closer to the unity the Continent’s elite has been working toward for over 50 years.
But the treaty’s implementation fell just days after a milestone of a different sort: a referendum in Switzerland, long famous for religious tolerance, in which 57.5 percent of voters chose to ban the nation’s Muslims from building minarets.
Switzerland isn’t an E.U. member state, but the minaret moment could have happened almost anywhere in Europe nowadays — in France, where officials have floated the possibility of banning the burka; in Britain, which elected two representatives of the fascistic, anti-Islamic British National Party to the European Parliament last spring; in Italy, where a bill introduced this year would ban mosque construction and restrict the Islamic call to prayer.
If the more perfect union promised by the Lisbon Treaty is the European elite’s greatest triumph, the failure to successfully integrate millions of Muslim immigrants represents its greatest failure. And the two are intertwined: they’re both the fruits of the high-handed, often undemocratic approach to politics that Europe’s leaders have cultivated in their quest for unity.
The European Union probably wouldn’t exist in its current form if the Continent’s elites hadn’t been willing to ignore popular sentiment. (The Lisbon Treaty, for instance, was deliberately designed to bypass most European voters, after a proposed E.U. Constitution was torpedoed by referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005.) But this political style — forge a consensus among the establishment, and assume you can contain any backlash that develops — is also how the Continent came to accept millions of Muslim immigrants, despite the absence of a popular consensus on the issue, or a plan for how to integrate them.
The immigrants came first as guest workers, recruited after World War II to relieve labor shortages, and then as beneficiaries of generous asylum and family reunification laws, designed to salve Europe’s post-colonial conscience. The European elites assumed that the divide between Islam and the West was as antiquated as scimitars and broadswords, and that a liberal, multicultural, post-Christian federation would have no difficulty absorbing new arrivals from more traditional societies. And they decided, too — as Christopher Caldwell writes in “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe,” his wonderfully mordant chronicle of Europe’s Islamic dilemma — that liberal immigration policies “involve the sort of nonnegotiable moral duties that you don’t vote on.”
Better if they had let their voters choose. The rate of immigration might have been slower, and the efforts to integrate the new arrivals more strenuous. Instead, Europe’s leaders ended up creating a clash of civilizations inside their own frontiers.
Millions of Muslims have accepted European norms. But millions have not. This means polygamy in Sweden; radical mosques in Britain’s fading industrial cities; riots over affronts to the Prophet Muhammad in Denmark; and religiously inspired murder in the Netherlands. It means terrorism, and the threat of terrorism, from London to Madrid.
And it means a rising backlash, in which European voters support extreme measures and extremist parties because their politicians don’t seem to have anything to say about the problem.
In fairness, it isn’t clear exactly what those leaders could offer at this point. They can’t undo decades of migration. A large Muslim minority is in Europe to stay. Persisting with the establishment’s approach makes a certain sense: keep a lid on prejudice, tamp down extremism, and hope that time will transform the zealous Islam of recent immigrants into a more liberal form of faith, and make the conflict go away.
Or least keep it manageable. Caldwell’s book, the best on the subject to date, has a deeply pessimistic tone, but it shies away from specific predictions about the European future. Other writers are less circumspect, envisioning a Muslim-majority “Eurabia” in which Shariah has as much clout as liberalism.
But even a decadent West is probably stronger than this. The most likely scenario for Europe isn’t dhimmitude; it’s a long period of tension, punctuated by spasms of violence, that makes the Continent a more unpleasant place without fundamentally transforming it.
This is cold comfort, though, if you have to live under the shadow of violence. Just ask the Swiss, who spent last week worrying about the possibility that the minaret vote might make them a target for Islamist terrorism.
They’re right to worry. And all of Europe has to worry as well, thanks to the folly of its leaders — now, and for many years to come.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/opini ... nted=print
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Cologne: Catholics and Muslims To Co-Operate
http://islamineurope.blogspot.com/2009/ ... to-co.html
Cologne is home to large number of Christians and Muslims as well as controversial plans to build a mosque that will be Germany's biggest. While some fear an Islamic incursion, other Catholics are donating Sunday's collection to the mosque building project.
If there was a religious conflict in Germany, then it would surely be visible Cologne -- the city is the capital of Germany's religious Turkish population as well as a bastion of Catholicism. Because here, Catholic numbers are dropping and Catholic churches appear to be turning into retirement homes while Muslim numbers are growing and Muslim followers are building one of the largest mosques in the country.
The mosque, which has been a subject of controversy because of its size, will be able to accommodate up to 1,200 worshippers. The Oriental-style building itself, which was designed by a Christian architect, will measure consist of two minarets, each 55 meters (180 feet) high. These will flank a dome that is a stylized version of the globe. It is likely to be Germany's biggest mosque as well as one of the most controversial sacred structures in the country. Protest groups have campaigned against the mosque and controversial Jewish intellectual Ralph Giordano has even described it as a Muslim "colonization of foreign territory."
From the offices of Werner Höbsch, 58, director of the church's department for interreligious dialogue and proclamation you can see the Cologne Cathedral. And with his white beard and blue sweater, Höbsch himself looks a little bit like a sea captain on shore leave. In many ways he is something of a captain -- one who is seeking to chart the course of Christianity through a stormy sea of religious diversity: Höbsch's task is to define how Christians and Muslims can live together in this cathedral city. And in his line of business he has managed to compile some interesting figures. The city is home to 120,000 Muslims and 400,000 Catholics. Last year, 2,500 Catholics left the church, there were 3,588 burials and only 2,965 baptisms. If these trends continue, then by the end of the century, Islam could be the strongest religion in Cologne.
Höbsch, however, does not fear Islam. On the contrary, he believes that Christians could learn a thing or two from Muslims -- for example, reverence and self-assurance in one's own faith. As he sees it, the real adversaries to his faith do not come out of Islam. No, his real adversaries are indifference and lack of belief.
Meurer has produced nativity plays starring only Muslim students and he once sent a samba band to perform at a music festival in the Turkish city of Izmir. "And what did they bring back? Two liters of holy water from Ephesus (editor's note: water from the house in Ephesus where the Virgin Mary supposedly last resided)," he says triumphantly. "Our Catholic kids wouldn't even have thought of doing that."
All by himself, the pastor removed a sign erected in front of his church by Pro Cologne, a group that opposes the mosque project. He was slapped with a €600 ($880) fine for doing so. "Ecumenism (or unity) strengthens religion," he notes. And that is one reason that he is not concerned about the end of Catholicism in the city. "Once upon a time, one in three people here were monks or nuns. That was too much for the rest of the city -- that's why they cheered Napoleon when he marched into the city. And that's just how things go -- sometimes up, sometimes down."
It is this sort of outlook that prompted the pastor to start donating his Sunday collections to the mosque project two years ago. The archdiocese reprimanded him, noting that there were plenty of impoverished Catholic congregations that could use the cash. Then, when the Muslim writer Navid Kermani received his quarter of the Hessian Culture Award worth around €10,000 (around $14,300) at the end of November, he donated the money to Father Meurer's congregation.
In his acceptance speech, Kermani quoted from the Koran. " If Allah had willed, He would have made you one nation," Kermanis said. "But that He may (test) you in what has come to you. So strive in a race in good deeds."
(more)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/ger ... 76,00.html
Cologne: Catholics and Muslims To Co-Operate
http://islamineurope.blogspot.com/2009/ ... to-co.html
Cologne is home to large number of Christians and Muslims as well as controversial plans to build a mosque that will be Germany's biggest. While some fear an Islamic incursion, other Catholics are donating Sunday's collection to the mosque building project.
If there was a religious conflict in Germany, then it would surely be visible Cologne -- the city is the capital of Germany's religious Turkish population as well as a bastion of Catholicism. Because here, Catholic numbers are dropping and Catholic churches appear to be turning into retirement homes while Muslim numbers are growing and Muslim followers are building one of the largest mosques in the country.
The mosque, which has been a subject of controversy because of its size, will be able to accommodate up to 1,200 worshippers. The Oriental-style building itself, which was designed by a Christian architect, will measure consist of two minarets, each 55 meters (180 feet) high. These will flank a dome that is a stylized version of the globe. It is likely to be Germany's biggest mosque as well as one of the most controversial sacred structures in the country. Protest groups have campaigned against the mosque and controversial Jewish intellectual Ralph Giordano has even described it as a Muslim "colonization of foreign territory."
From the offices of Werner Höbsch, 58, director of the church's department for interreligious dialogue and proclamation you can see the Cologne Cathedral. And with his white beard and blue sweater, Höbsch himself looks a little bit like a sea captain on shore leave. In many ways he is something of a captain -- one who is seeking to chart the course of Christianity through a stormy sea of religious diversity: Höbsch's task is to define how Christians and Muslims can live together in this cathedral city. And in his line of business he has managed to compile some interesting figures. The city is home to 120,000 Muslims and 400,000 Catholics. Last year, 2,500 Catholics left the church, there were 3,588 burials and only 2,965 baptisms. If these trends continue, then by the end of the century, Islam could be the strongest religion in Cologne.
Höbsch, however, does not fear Islam. On the contrary, he believes that Christians could learn a thing or two from Muslims -- for example, reverence and self-assurance in one's own faith. As he sees it, the real adversaries to his faith do not come out of Islam. No, his real adversaries are indifference and lack of belief.
Meurer has produced nativity plays starring only Muslim students and he once sent a samba band to perform at a music festival in the Turkish city of Izmir. "And what did they bring back? Two liters of holy water from Ephesus (editor's note: water from the house in Ephesus where the Virgin Mary supposedly last resided)," he says triumphantly. "Our Catholic kids wouldn't even have thought of doing that."
All by himself, the pastor removed a sign erected in front of his church by Pro Cologne, a group that opposes the mosque project. He was slapped with a €600 ($880) fine for doing so. "Ecumenism (or unity) strengthens religion," he notes. And that is one reason that he is not concerned about the end of Catholicism in the city. "Once upon a time, one in three people here were monks or nuns. That was too much for the rest of the city -- that's why they cheered Napoleon when he marched into the city. And that's just how things go -- sometimes up, sometimes down."
It is this sort of outlook that prompted the pastor to start donating his Sunday collections to the mosque project two years ago. The archdiocese reprimanded him, noting that there were plenty of impoverished Catholic congregations that could use the cash. Then, when the Muslim writer Navid Kermani received his quarter of the Hessian Culture Award worth around €10,000 (around $14,300) at the end of November, he donated the money to Father Meurer's congregation.
In his acceptance speech, Kermani quoted from the Koran. " If Allah had willed, He would have made you one nation," Kermanis said. "But that He may (test) you in what has come to you. So strive in a race in good deeds."
(more)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/ger ... 76,00.html