Westerners 'should stop making films about Islam'
By Ciar Byrne, Arts and Media Correspondent
Published: 10 November 2007
Western documentary makers should think twice about making films about Islam because they do not understand the issues as well as their Muslim counterparts, a leading Muslim film-maker has said.
Parvez Sharma, whose documentary about what it means to be gay and Muslim had its European premiere at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival last night, said Western non-Muslim film makers were jumping on the "Islamic bandwagon".
Sharma added: "Post 11 September, [Islam] is suddenly very hot", and he cited the "plane-loads" of documentary makers who flew from New York to Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
"For many documentary film-makers there's very little understanding of the complexities. Everyone has been jumping on the Islamic bandwagon. Very few of those films do justice [to Islam]. They suffer from a lack of comprehension. There's this need to cash in on the Islamic theme."
Sharma, whose documentary, A Jihad For Love includes emotional interviews with gay Muslims from around the world, torn between their homosexuality and their faith, said there was a "paucity" of Muslim film-makers and called on Islamic documentary producers to make their own voices heard to combat Islamaphobia. His Jihad, filmed over six years, reveals the often shocking treatment meted out to homosexuals in Islamic states such as Iran, where one of the men featured was flogged for attending a gay party, and in Egypt, where another interviewee was thrown into prison, where he was raped, then fled to France.
For Sharma, a gay Muslim from the north of India who now lives in the US, making the film was an intensely personal experience. "It was very important for me as a Muslim film-maker not to deal with Islam as a problematic monolith, which is how many people in the west see Islam," he said.
"I always knew Islam was diverse. It was important for me to present the diversity of the religion. I'm gay and Muslim, so it was an intensely personal film. So many films about Islam are mediated through Western eyes. It's really important for me as a Muslim to take up a Muslim camera. So few of us have taken responsibility to change the discussions about our own religion.
"It's critical to have Muslim voices in the arts, in documentary film-making, to tell the stories of Muslims as they see it. This climate requires Muslim film- makers to step up and tell stories."
The British film-maker Ruhi Hamid, who has been making documentaries for 12 years, identified herself as a Muslim on screen for the first time in her latest documentary, Inside A Sharia Court, set in Nigeria. She said: "There's been a kneejerk reaction over Islam. Western film-makers go for the obvious things: there's an obsession with women in the veil and with angry young jihadi men. The lives are much more complex than that."
The British film-maker, Ivan O'Mahoney, who made Baghdad High, a documentary also showing at Sheffield, in which four young students from an Iraqi boys' school film their own lives amid sectarian violence, said: "I thought of Iraq as a country where everybody to a certain degree had been radicalised. But with these kids we see almost the opposite. The more violence around, the more they tried to be normal teenagers. That filled me with hope."
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Gay Muslims Find Freedom, of a Sort, in the U.S.
From the New York Times - November 7, 2007
Gay Muslims Find Freedom, of a Sort, in the U.S.
By NEIL MACFARQUHAR
SAN FRANCISCO — About 15 people marched alongside the Muslim float in this city’s notoriously fleshy Gay Pride Parade earlier this year, with various men carrying the flags of Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Turkey and even Iran’s old imperial banner.
While other floats featured men dancing in leather Speedos or women with scant duct tape over their nipples, many Muslims were disguised behind big sunglasses, fezzes or kaffiyehs wrapped around their heads.
Even as they reveled in newfound freedom compared with the Muslim world, they remained closeted, worried about being ostracized at the mosque or at their local falafel stand.
“They’re afraid of the rest of the community here,” said Ayman, a stocky 31-year-old from Jordan, who won asylum in the United States last year on the basis of his sexuality. “It’s such a big wrong in the Koran that it is impossible to be accepted.”
For gay Muslims, change may come via a nascent body of scholarship in minority Muslim communities where the reassessment of sacred texts used to damn homosexuality is gaining momentum.
In traditional seats of Islamic learning, like Egypt and Iran, punishment against blatant homosexual activity, not to mention against trying to establish a gay rights movement, can be severe. These governments are prone to label homosexuality a Western phenomenon, as happened in September when Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, spoke at Columbia University. But far more leeway to dissect the topic exists in places where gay rights are more protected.
As a rule, gay Muslim activists lacked the scholarly grounding needed to scrutinize time-honored teachings. But that is changing, activists say, partly because no rigid clerical hierarchy exists in the West to bar such research.
Nonetheless, gaining acceptance remains such a hurdle that Muslims in the United States hesitate. Imam Daayiee Abdullah, 53, a black convert to Islam, was expelled from a Saudi-financed seminary in Virginia after the school found out he is gay. His effort to organize a gay masjid, or mosque, in Washington failed largely out of fear, he said.
“You have these individuals who say that they would blow up a masjid if it was a gay masjid,” he said. Mr. Abdullah and other scholars argue that there is no uncontested record of the Prophet Muhammad addressing homosexuality and that examples of punishment would surely exist had he been hostile.
Mirroring the feminist school of Islam, gay advocates pursue a holistic interpretation that emphasizes accepting everyone as equally God’s creation.
Most Koranic verses treating same-sex relations are ambiguous, said Omid Safi, an Islamic studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They are talking about an ‘abomination,’” Professor Safi said, “but what an abomination is remains open to interpretation.”
Since the primary Koranic verses used to condemn homosexuality also suggest male rape, the progressive reading is that the verses revile using sex as domination, said Scott Kugle, an American convert and university professor who specializes in the topic. The arguments are not entirely modern; some are drawn from a medieval scholar in Andalusia, once a seat of enlightened Muslim governance, he said.
The classical attitude toward lesbians is even murkier, Mr. Kugle added, because sex was defined as penetration.
Hostility is rooted in the Koranic story of Lot, which parallels the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. At Al-Tawhid Mosque in San Francisco, the imam, Hassan al-Jalal, a Yemeni with a short beard, printed a sheaf of Koranic verses that he said condemned homosexuals.
“This is the main sin in Islam,” Mr. Jalal said, describing how the town housing Lot’s tribe was lifted high into the sky and then dropped, killing all in the town before they were buried under what is now the Dead Sea. “He sent the flood to clean the earth from AIDS. There were no doctors at that time, but God knew they had a virus.”
All sects mandate capital punishment, he argued, although others differ. “Sunni, Shiite, they all agree that they have to be killed. But who does it? Not me or you, only by law.”
Muslim clerics reject being gay as biologically coded and advise anyone with homosexual stirrings to avoid temptation. They see America as rife with it given practices like open gym showers.
The hostility pushes some gay Muslims to interpret for themselves or to withdraw from the faith. For Rafique, a 56-year-old Southeast Asian Muslim in San Francisco, resolution came through a combination of medieval mystic poetry and individual spiritual efforts endorsed by Sufi Muslim traditions.
Renowned poets wrote odes glorifying handsome boys. Some were interpreted as metaphors about loving God, but some were paeans to gay sex. Rafique and others argue that homosexuality became criminalized only under European colonialism.
“From the 10th to the 14th century, Muslim society used to be a far richer mix of the legal, the rational and the mystic,” said Rafique, an anthropologist. “They looked at sexuality as one aspect of life’s many possibilities, and they saw in it the hope for spiritual insight. I came across this stuff, and it helped me reconcile the two.”
Some mosques with a Sufi orientation extend a rare welcome to gay Muslims.
Ayman, the parade organizer, said his previous life in Jordan was marked by fear. Arrested at 17 after a sexual encounter in a public building, he said the police wrote “manyak,” a homosexual slur, into his file. He denied being gay, but the word resurfaced whenever the police stopped him. He worried that one day it would happen around a relative.
He is convinced that a 22-year-old gay friend who died after a fall from an apartment building was the victim of an “honor” killing meant to clean the family’s reputation. “I still feel like I’m a Muslim; I don’t accept that anyone insults the faith,” said Ayman, who avoids attending mosque. “When I read what it says in the Koran, then I fear Judgment Day.”
A 26-year-old from Saudi Arabia who took the first name Liam after rejecting his faith said that as a teenager he fought his homosexuality by becoming a religious zealot. He eventually accepted his sexuality while at college in Colorado, but moved to the Bay Area because gay life in the kingdom was too depressing.
But a 39-year-old burly, bearded computer consultant who left Saudi Arabia to live in the United States said the cosmopolitan city of Jidda had a thriving gay underground. In other Arab states, he said, it is rare to find men who are both religious and gay, but the high numbers in Jidda made them relax somewhat. “They don’t care about sex and alcohol, but they do avoid pork,” he said.
The consultant, trying to reconcile being gay and Muslim, divides his sins into the redeemable and those warranting hellfire. “Anal sex for either a man or woman is wrong, so when I really think about it, I tell myself not to have sex,” he said, describing a failed four-year experiment with celibacy. “I live with what I am doing, but I don’t want to live in a double standard, I don’t want to go through life unhappy.”
Gay Muslims Find Freedom, of a Sort, in the U.S.
By NEIL MACFARQUHAR
SAN FRANCISCO — About 15 people marched alongside the Muslim float in this city’s notoriously fleshy Gay Pride Parade earlier this year, with various men carrying the flags of Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Turkey and even Iran’s old imperial banner.
While other floats featured men dancing in leather Speedos or women with scant duct tape over their nipples, many Muslims were disguised behind big sunglasses, fezzes or kaffiyehs wrapped around their heads.
Even as they reveled in newfound freedom compared with the Muslim world, they remained closeted, worried about being ostracized at the mosque or at their local falafel stand.
“They’re afraid of the rest of the community here,” said Ayman, a stocky 31-year-old from Jordan, who won asylum in the United States last year on the basis of his sexuality. “It’s such a big wrong in the Koran that it is impossible to be accepted.”
For gay Muslims, change may come via a nascent body of scholarship in minority Muslim communities where the reassessment of sacred texts used to damn homosexuality is gaining momentum.
In traditional seats of Islamic learning, like Egypt and Iran, punishment against blatant homosexual activity, not to mention against trying to establish a gay rights movement, can be severe. These governments are prone to label homosexuality a Western phenomenon, as happened in September when Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, spoke at Columbia University. But far more leeway to dissect the topic exists in places where gay rights are more protected.
As a rule, gay Muslim activists lacked the scholarly grounding needed to scrutinize time-honored teachings. But that is changing, activists say, partly because no rigid clerical hierarchy exists in the West to bar such research.
Nonetheless, gaining acceptance remains such a hurdle that Muslims in the United States hesitate. Imam Daayiee Abdullah, 53, a black convert to Islam, was expelled from a Saudi-financed seminary in Virginia after the school found out he is gay. His effort to organize a gay masjid, or mosque, in Washington failed largely out of fear, he said.
“You have these individuals who say that they would blow up a masjid if it was a gay masjid,” he said. Mr. Abdullah and other scholars argue that there is no uncontested record of the Prophet Muhammad addressing homosexuality and that examples of punishment would surely exist had he been hostile.
Mirroring the feminist school of Islam, gay advocates pursue a holistic interpretation that emphasizes accepting everyone as equally God’s creation.
Most Koranic verses treating same-sex relations are ambiguous, said Omid Safi, an Islamic studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They are talking about an ‘abomination,’” Professor Safi said, “but what an abomination is remains open to interpretation.”
Since the primary Koranic verses used to condemn homosexuality also suggest male rape, the progressive reading is that the verses revile using sex as domination, said Scott Kugle, an American convert and university professor who specializes in the topic. The arguments are not entirely modern; some are drawn from a medieval scholar in Andalusia, once a seat of enlightened Muslim governance, he said.
The classical attitude toward lesbians is even murkier, Mr. Kugle added, because sex was defined as penetration.
Hostility is rooted in the Koranic story of Lot, which parallels the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. At Al-Tawhid Mosque in San Francisco, the imam, Hassan al-Jalal, a Yemeni with a short beard, printed a sheaf of Koranic verses that he said condemned homosexuals.
“This is the main sin in Islam,” Mr. Jalal said, describing how the town housing Lot’s tribe was lifted high into the sky and then dropped, killing all in the town before they were buried under what is now the Dead Sea. “He sent the flood to clean the earth from AIDS. There were no doctors at that time, but God knew they had a virus.”
All sects mandate capital punishment, he argued, although others differ. “Sunni, Shiite, they all agree that they have to be killed. But who does it? Not me or you, only by law.”
Muslim clerics reject being gay as biologically coded and advise anyone with homosexual stirrings to avoid temptation. They see America as rife with it given practices like open gym showers.
The hostility pushes some gay Muslims to interpret for themselves or to withdraw from the faith. For Rafique, a 56-year-old Southeast Asian Muslim in San Francisco, resolution came through a combination of medieval mystic poetry and individual spiritual efforts endorsed by Sufi Muslim traditions.
Renowned poets wrote odes glorifying handsome boys. Some were interpreted as metaphors about loving God, but some were paeans to gay sex. Rafique and others argue that homosexuality became criminalized only under European colonialism.
“From the 10th to the 14th century, Muslim society used to be a far richer mix of the legal, the rational and the mystic,” said Rafique, an anthropologist. “They looked at sexuality as one aspect of life’s many possibilities, and they saw in it the hope for spiritual insight. I came across this stuff, and it helped me reconcile the two.”
Some mosques with a Sufi orientation extend a rare welcome to gay Muslims.
Ayman, the parade organizer, said his previous life in Jordan was marked by fear. Arrested at 17 after a sexual encounter in a public building, he said the police wrote “manyak,” a homosexual slur, into his file. He denied being gay, but the word resurfaced whenever the police stopped him. He worried that one day it would happen around a relative.
He is convinced that a 22-year-old gay friend who died after a fall from an apartment building was the victim of an “honor” killing meant to clean the family’s reputation. “I still feel like I’m a Muslim; I don’t accept that anyone insults the faith,” said Ayman, who avoids attending mosque. “When I read what it says in the Koran, then I fear Judgment Day.”
A 26-year-old from Saudi Arabia who took the first name Liam after rejecting his faith said that as a teenager he fought his homosexuality by becoming a religious zealot. He eventually accepted his sexuality while at college in Colorado, but moved to the Bay Area because gay life in the kingdom was too depressing.
But a 39-year-old burly, bearded computer consultant who left Saudi Arabia to live in the United States said the cosmopolitan city of Jidda had a thriving gay underground. In other Arab states, he said, it is rare to find men who are both religious and gay, but the high numbers in Jidda made them relax somewhat. “They don’t care about sex and alcohol, but they do avoid pork,” he said.
The consultant, trying to reconcile being gay and Muslim, divides his sins into the redeemable and those warranting hellfire. “Anal sex for either a man or woman is wrong, so when I really think about it, I tell myself not to have sex,” he said, describing a failed four-year experiment with celibacy. “I live with what I am doing, but I don’t want to live in a double standard, I don’t want to go through life unhappy.”
Friday, November 09, 2007
Allah Lightens Your Burdens
Allah wishes to lighten your burdens, for man was created weak.
-Qu'ran, An-Nisa, Surah 4:28
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
My Jihad in America and Beyond
From the Huffington Post
Talking about a life left behind in Iran, my friend had tears in his eyes. But also a steely resolve that one day he would be back. He also reminded me that a Basij -- a member of the volunteer force of religious vigilantes or guardians of morality, thoughtfully supplied by the powers that are -- had openly expressed a desire to be with him and they had gone home together, not too far from Vali Asr Avenue, and spent a night of passion, the likes of which he has never had since, in each other's arms.
Given the national obsession with Hafez and his poetry, whose homoeroticism many have claimed and studied, I have always felt that the young gentleman who found passion in the park speaks to me in beautiful Farsi, almost in haiku. His language gives him the facility to always sound like he is speaking in poetry. I also assume that President Ahmadi Nejad has probably not wandered into those dark corners of Daneshju Park, a park not that different from the Rambles in the heart of New York, or Nehru Park in Delhi, where I grew up. All of these hidden spaces have been the dark and often depressing settings for so many of us seeking to meet others like us: "homosexuals," in any of the contexts we have existed in.
Continued...
UAE Female Pilots Take to the Skies
UAE female pilots take to the skies
Dubai (PTI): Two UAE women are set to make aeronautical history as they prepare to become the first female UAE pilots to take to the skies.
Salma Mohammad Al Baloushi from Al Ain and Aisha Hassan Al Mansouri from Khor Fakkan said they cannot wait to graduate as pilots for UAE carrier Etihad Airways. "We are very proud to be representing the female population in the UAE."
"I was studying to be a nurse, but something just didn't feel right. I didn't have a real passion for what I was doing and that made studying to become better hard work. It made me stop and look at life and I decided to follow my childhood dream of becoming a pilot. I am hard-working and have found a passion in life again," said Salma.
Aisha was inspired to become a pilot after a zero gravity experience at the Al Ain Airshow. "I loved being up in the sky and knew instantly that I wanted to become a pilot. My family is so proud of what I am doing," she said.
Dubai (PTI): Two UAE women are set to make aeronautical history as they prepare to become the first female UAE pilots to take to the skies.
Salma Mohammad Al Baloushi from Al Ain and Aisha Hassan Al Mansouri from Khor Fakkan said they cannot wait to graduate as pilots for UAE carrier Etihad Airways. "We are very proud to be representing the female population in the UAE."
"I was studying to be a nurse, but something just didn't feel right. I didn't have a real passion for what I was doing and that made studying to become better hard work. It made me stop and look at life and I decided to follow my childhood dream of becoming a pilot. I am hard-working and have found a passion in life again," said Salma.
Aisha was inspired to become a pilot after a zero gravity experience at the Al Ain Airshow. "I loved being up in the sky and knew instantly that I wanted to become a pilot. My family is so proud of what I am doing," she said.
The New Gulf Woman: Rich And Powerful
© XPRESS/Randi Sokoloff
HRH Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein with other dignitaries at The New Gulf Woman Forum, in Dubai.
The New Gulf Woman: Rich and PowerfulBy Nirmala Janssen, Editor XPRESS
October 22, 2007
Gulf women have a savings portfolio of $100b.
Out of this, $10b belongs to Emirati women who have used their constitutional right to work, social insurance, property ownership and managing their own businesses and finances it was revealed at The New Arab Woman Forum in Dubai on Sunday.
The two day forum on leadership and social responsibility, which is slated to become an annual affair, was officially opened at the Jumeirah Emirates Towers by HRH Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein, wife of HH Sheikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and the ruler of Dubai.
The key note address was delivered to the audience of over 200 of the Arab world’s most successful women by Mrs. Rajaa Al Gurg, President of the Dubai Business Women’s Council and CEO of Al Gurg group.
She made it crystal clear that after decades of under representation in public and business life the Arab woman, but more specifically the woman of the Arabian Gulf, is slowly emerging as a force to be reckoned with in education, the workplace and in the social structure.
With 45,000 listed successful business women and 35 per cent of the overall population listed as employed the Gulf woman is slowly beginning to play an effective role.
Quality education, healthcare, social services and the right to equal pay for equal work, has also permitted Emirati women to play a larger role in both politics and business, Raja Al Gurg said.
25 per cent of the UAE Federal National Council are women, 10 per cent are in the Diplomatic Corps, 30 per cent are in leadership positions related to decision making and around 66 per cent work in the public sector, Al Gurg said.
There are 11,000 businesswomen listed in the UAE, of which 4.5 per cent are in liberal professions, 15 percent as directors and 30 per cent in small and medium enterprises.
The panellists listed to speak at the two day forum showed a broad representation of women from the GCC, North Africa and the Levant but guests at the forum in a particularly heated Q and A session criticized the organizers Al Iktissad Wal-Amal and Lebanon’s century old Al Hasnaa women’s magazine for bringing in women representatives of the various Arab governments and not enough members in opposition.
A heated bout also ensued when younger women in the audience objected to some representatives wearing the Niqab while espousing more rights and freedoms to all Arab women while another called it a personal attack and had nothing to do with the New Arab Woman.
Level heads eventually resolved the issue by reminding everyone that the biggest freedom was the freedom to choose.
The issues covered at the two day conference will include:
* Women in Public Affairs
* Women in Media and Communication
* Women and Education
* Motherhood: Same Fight, different weapons
* Women and Beauty
* Women and Money: Investing in social change
* Women in Business
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
The Dancing Girls of Islam
Istanbul’s female dervishes are dividing Muslims.Report and photos by iason athanasiadis
In a cultural centre in Istanbul's Fatih district, nine Mevlevi dervishes, clad in the distinctive long gowns of their mystical order, revolve rhythmically in a sacred dance.
It is a scene that has been repeated since the order was founded in Turkey's sacred city of Konya in the late 13th century. But there is one controversial innovation that would outrage most Islamists: no less than four of the participants are women.
"The Mevlevis are an exception," says Carole, a convert to Islam who has lived in Istanbul for the past 20 years. "They allowed the sexes to mingle even at a time when men and women were not allowed to be buried in adjoining tombs."
Male-female segregation continues to this day, notably in the cemeteries of the Islamic Republic of Iran. While Shia Muslim tradition allows men's representations to be drawn on their tombstones, the same does not apply for women. They are absent and invisible in death, as they were covered in life.
Mystical Muslims have always departed from orthodox Islam's stern script. In formerly Christian lands, suddenly Islamised, Sufism was the natural continuation of ascetic tradition. Placing an emphasis on spirituality over religious protocol, the men who came to be called dervishes developed a pantheon of saints, challenging Islam's strict monotheism.
In the secular republic of Turkey, at the heart of the old Ottoman empire, political Islam was dealt a death-blow by modernising leader Kemal Ataturk (right). In the 1920s he instituted the separation of mosque from state and abolished the Islamic Caliphate and its edict that the Sultan was also Allah's representative on earth. Sufi orders, including the Mevlevis, were terminated: the new state padlocked their lodges, razed them to the ground or reopened them as museums.
 |
 |
| The name of Kemal Ataturk is invoked as the saviour of Sufism in the Mevlevi lodges |
Which is why the portrait of Ataturk hanging alongside icons of revered early Muslim figures Ali and Hussein in every Mevlevi lodge in Istanbul is so astonishing. Ataturk's name
is invoked during prayers as the saviour of Sufism from the deracinating effect of politics.
Hassan Dede, spiritual leader of the Mevlevi Order, has a youthful face framed by smiling white eyebrows, alert eyes and a moustache. In 1993, he declared that men and women should be free to worship alongside each other - in one stroke up-ending the taboo that for centuries consigned women to the first floor of a mosque, peering down through wooden latticework at the shaykh and his male devotees.
Unsurprisingly, women outnumber men in Dede's gatherings. Many of them were secular and had never attended a mosque in their lives before coming across the Mevlevi Order. "It is wonderful, seeing men and women praying together," says Deniz Evreng, a 28-year-old female follower who was attracted back to Islam after she attended a Mevlevi ceremony. "Young people go to Dede and ask him about their love problems and get advice from him."
In another break with mainstream Islam, hardly any of the 60-something women attending Dede's gatherings are veiled. One attractive woman wears red Capri pants. Many are successful, unmarried professionals and look as if they have come straight from the office. The painting of pre-restoration Mecca that hangs above them seems more art exhibit than religious article.
In nearby Saudi Arabia, or neighbouring Iran, where the state presumes to be the protector and definer of religion, Sufism is scorned by Sunni and Shia alike. The fact that Dede allows females to participate in the sacred dance - an innovation that orthodox Muslims abhor, even when practised by men - could earn him a fatwa.
But Hassan Dede has no time for Islamic Republics, divine monarchies or official Islams. His Islam has been shaped by 500 years of the multicultural Ottoman Empire; it was and is an Islam that stresses inclusiveness and flexibility.
"Mevlana didn't come from Arabia," says Dede. "Mevlana said: 'Come unto me, even with blood on your hands, but without making rules or laws.' As for the other orders, I say they are Arab-based and dependent on legalism."
 |
|
| The American neo-cons may regard Dede as an ally but he calls President Bush ‘the only terrorist’ |
With statements like this, it is little wonder that Dede is perceived as a potential ally by the Bush Administration in its struggle to reshape Islam. But Dede makes it clear that he will not be made the political pawn of any master. "The only terrorist is Bush," he declares, when asked about his views on Osama bin Laden.
It is true Dede cuts an unorthodox figure in the world of Sunni Islam. But what he and others wish Bush and his neo-con supporters would understand is that there are many 'unorthodox' Islamists throughout the Muslim world, far more moderate than the combative, anti-Western strand currently parading the streets of Cairo, Karachi or Gaza.
Dede, surrounded by his whirling dervishes, claims an aversion to politics. It's a pity the same cannot be said for the Bush neo-cons and their absurd Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week which starts on US campuses today, aimed at 'defending' America from the Muslim hordes.
Link to photos.
Reuters.com - FACTBOX: Milestones in Roman Catholic-Muslim relations
| QMA (queermuslimrevolution@gmail.com) has sent you this article. |
| Personal Message: |
 |
| FACTBOX: Milestones in Roman Catholic-Muslim relations | ||
| Tue Nov 06 15:18:03 UTC 2007 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict met Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah on Tuesday -- the first meeting between a Pope and a Saudi monarch, custodian of two of Islam's holiest shrines. Here are some recent milestones in relations between their two faiths: * THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL: -- The council declaration "Nostra Aetate" (1965) was mainly a positive re-evaluation of Judaism but it also included a section on Islam and noted that Muslims adored God, revered Jesus as a prophet and honored his mother, the Virgin Mary. -- "The Church regards with esteem also the Muslims," it said, urging sincere work for mutual understanding. * POPE JOHN PAUL II: -- Morocco's King Hassan became the first Muslim head of state to receive a Pope, when John Paul II made a two-day visit in 1985. -- In 1996 John Paul used a 10-hour visit to Tunisia to call for dialogue and tolerance between Christians and Muslims after centuries of persecution and distrust dating back to the crusades. -- In 2001 John Paul became the first Pontiff in history to visit and pray in a Muslim place of worship, visiting the ancient Great Umayyad Mosque in Syria's capital, Damascus. * POPE BENEDICT: -- In a lecture in Regensburg, Germany, in September 2006, Pope Benedict quoted the 14th-century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus and implied he thought Islam was a violent and irrational faith. Amid a storm of outrage from the Islamic world, the head of the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood called on Islamic countries to threaten to break relations with the Vatican unless he withdrew his remarks. -- Benedict's trip to Turkey in November 2006, which included prayers with an imam at Istanbul's Blue Mosque, did much to repair relations between the two faiths. -- Last June, Benedict restored the status of the Vatican's Council for Interreligious Dialogue with the appointment of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran as its head, to improve relations with the Muslim world. He had downgraded it in 2005, but the uproar after his speech prompted him to reconsider. (Writing by David Cutler, London Editorial Reference Unit) | ||
| | ||
| This service is not intended to encourage spam. The details provided by your colleague have been used for the sole purpose of facilitating this email communication and have not been retained by Reuters. Your personal details have not been added to any database or mailing list. If you would like to receive news articles delivered to your email address, please subscribe at www.reuters.com | ||
| | ||
| © Copyright Reuters 2006All rights reserved. Users may download and print extracts of content from this website for their own personal and non-commercial use only. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world. Quotes and other data are provided for your personal information only, and are not intended for trading purposes. Reuters, the members of its Group and its data providers shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the quotes or other data, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. © Reuters 2006. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world. | ||
BBC E-mail: Historic Saudi visit to Vatican
QMA saw this story on the BBC News website and thought you
should see it.
should see it.
** Historic Saudi visit to Vatican **
Pope Benedict hosts King Abdullah for the first meeting between a Saudi monarch and the Roman Catholic leader.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7080327.stm >
** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/email >
** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have been verified.
If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm
BBC E-mail: Emerging voice of mainstream Islam
QMA saw this story on the BBC News website and thought you
should see it.
should see it.
** Emerging voice of mainstream Islam **
The Muslim leader' letter to the Pope creates a new lobby for Islam, writes Robert Pigott.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7040774.stm >
** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/email >
** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have been verified.
If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)