A video poking fun at an Islamic party went viral in Malaysia – but the journalist who made it is facing threats and a police investigation
Journalist Aisyah Tajuddin posted a video poking fun at Muslim fundamentalists.
It went viral.
Now she faces the inevitable backlash, rape threats, death threats, and even a police investigation for blasphemy.
She made the video as a response to proposals for implementing ‘hudud’ laws on Muslims in Kelantan, a rural state in the northeast of Malaysia. The laws would prohibit adultery, apostasy, robbery and theft, which would become punishable by public beatings, stoning, amputation and public execution.
The video shows her crossing an imaginary border into Kelantan, whereby a headscarf suddenly appears on her head. She then finds a rock instead of rice in a packet of food, which she throws away, accompanied by the comment: “Oh well, we have hudud, don’t we?”
Aisyah Tajuddin is a journalist with BFM, an independent radio station.
Typical of the threats is one posted on facebook: “Those who insult the laws of Allah, their blood is halal for killing.”
Islamists complain of Islamaphobia. And apologists for fundamentalists bleat in unison. No, the problem is their bastardisation of women.
Campaigner Michelle Yesudas was questioned after confronting police about the case
Aisyah wasn’t the only person to get caught up in the controversy. The issue touched off a row online between lawyer and activist Michelle Yesudas and the country’s top policeman, Inspector General Khalid Abu Bakar.
In a series of messages, Yesudas demanded to know what Khalid would do about the threats against Aisyah. “Because I am positively terrified that these crazy, rape-frenzied people are actually the majority in my country,” she wrote.
Any representation of the divine that leads people to murder each other deserves the maximum possible disrespect. — Giles Fraser, Parish Priest
The second of the Ten Commandments prohibits graven images – which is why there are no pictures of God in Judaism or Islam. — Giles Fraser, Parish Priest
Excellent, must watch, BBC Panorama last night on Muslims and extremists.
Renounce Islam, yes apply death sentence, says Muslim extremists.
Everything I have been saying, and more. And it is Muslims saying it.
Extremists now a very significant minority, if not a majority, and a very real threat.
A group of Muslims made a silly pop video. They were immediately attacked by extremists. Females in burkas attacking them.
If wearing a balaclava is offensive, then so is wearing a burka.
What everyone tends to forget, it is Muslims that bear the brunt of extremists.
Muslim TV channels beaming brainwashing propaganda into the UK.
The well rehearsed cry of Islamaphobia, victim culture, for which they have only themselves to blame.
Parish Priest Giles Fraser:
Rather disturbingly, one word seems to connect the activity of the Paris terrorists and that of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists: iconoclasm. I say disturbingly, because pointing out some common ground may be seen as blurring the crucial distinction between murderous bastards and innocent satirists.
Nonetheless, it strikes me as fascinating that the cartoonists were profoundly iconoclastic in their constant ridiculing of religion (all religions, it must be noted) – yet it is precisely this same ancient tradition of iconoclasm that inspires Jews and Muslims to resist representational art and, in its most twisted pathological form, to attack the offices of a Paris magazine and slaughter those whose only weapon was the pen. So what’s the connection?
In one sense an iconoclast is someone who refuses the established view of things, who kicks out against cherished beliefs and institutions. Which sounds pretty much like Charlie Hebdo. But the word iconoclast also describes those religious people who refuse and smash representational images, especially of the divine. The second of the Ten Commandments prohibits graven images – which is why there are no pictures of God in Judaism or Islam. And theologically speaking, the reason they are deeply suspicious of divine representation is because they fear that such representations of God might get confused for the real thing. The danger, they believe, is that we might end up overinvesting in a bad copy, something that looks a lot like what we might think of as god, but which, in reality, is just a human projection. So much better then to smash all representations of the divine.
And yet this, of course, is exactly what Charlie Hebdo was doing. In the bluntest, rudest, most scatological and offensive of terms, Charlie Hebdo has been insisting that the images people worship are just human creations – bad and dangerous human creations. And in taking the piss out of such images, they actually exist in a tradition of religious iconoclasts going back as far as Abraham taking a hammer to his father’s statues. Both are attacks on representations of the divine. Which is why the terrorists, as well as being murderers, are theologically mistaken in thinking Charlie Hebdo is the enemy. For if God is fundamentally unrepresentable, then any representation of God is necessarily less than God and thus deserves to be fully and fearlessly attacked. And what better way of doing this than through satire, like scribbling a little moustache on a grand statue of God.
It is those who question faith, who lead to a greater understanding of faith, but when they challenge the prevailing hypocrisy, they are branded as heretics and burnt at the stake, or have their offices fire bombed, or are gunned down in cold blood.
And well done Panorama, for featuring Charlie Hebdo cartoons. Unlike the cowardice of the rest of the mainstream British media.
A brilliant spoof issue, edited by the Prophet, if you do not laugh to death you will be lashed to death.
Three million copies are to be printed of the forthcoming issue of Charlie Hebdo.
Muslims who have problem with depiction of the Prophet need to re-set their calender to 2015. Or follow the advice of the Moroccan-born mayor of Rotterdam, son of an imam in northern Morocco.
Sunday saw the largest ever demonstration in Paris. But not only Paris, not only France, not only Europe, across the world, people took to the streets to show solidarity against Muslim extremists.
If we value our freedoms, then the world has to stand in solidarity against Muslim extremism.
We must draw a line between Islam the religion and Islam as a Fascist ideology.
Islam as a Fascist ideology is as much a threat to the world today as the Nazis were in the 1930s.
Al Qaeda has hit the West in its back garden, while we at ISIS have been attacking our own sheikhs. — ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammed Aladnana
They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body, but not my obedience. — Gandhi
I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it. — Voltaire
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. ― George Orwell
Two possibly three gunmen walked into the offices of French magazine Charlie Hebdo and carried out a massacre. Twelve killed, many injured.
ISIS has called upon its followers in the West to carry out revenge killings. This though does not appear to be carried out by amateurs, too professional, more likely battle-hardened ISIS fighters returning to France.
The rounds fired into a police car, were closely spaced, the work of a professional.
They also seemed to be well informed, or lucky. They got into a secure building, at a time an editorial conference was taking place.
Sick trolls are having a field day, tweeting racist and inflammatory tweets, which only serve to worsen the situation.
The one thing we do not wish to see, is Muslims being targeted, but that is not to say, a clampdown on religious fanatics who are stirring up hatred (and that includes vile trolls).
We are seeing a failure of immigration policy, or the lack thereof. Both France and England, have large numbers of disaffected young Muslims, ideal recruiting grounds for ISIS.
Muslim schools should not be permitted. This is the West, tolerant yes, but Islam is not a religion of the West. If they wish to go to Muslim schools, then live in a Muslim country. Cannot have it both ways.
Freedom to practise a religion, provided it does not impinge on the freedoms of others, is not the right to impose your religion on the rest of society.
Islamists have scored a massive own goal. But to be honest I do not think they will care as they do not care what we in the West think of them. All they wish to do is bastardise women and see the Black flag of Islam flying across Europe.
Sony showed cowardice when they were hacked, pulled a rubbish film. The French have taken to the streets to show solidarity that they will not be intimidated by Jihadists (assuming that is who it was).
Humility is supposed to be a Christian virtue, but it is one that has always evaded Tony Blair. Even so it was something of a shock to see his latest venture into print in the Mail on Sunday this week over the question of the Woolwich murder and Islam.
This article, judging by the comments beneath it, was too much for even the Mail’s conservative readers to stomach. Blair’s arrogant and pompous self-justification allows no element of regret for the wars into which he plunged millions of people, or for the instability in much of the Middle East and south Asia that his policies have helped create.
Blair’s thesis is that ‘there is a problem within Islam — from the adherents of an ideology that is a strain within Islam. And we have to put it on the table and be honest about it.’
He continues, ‘I’m afraid this strain is not the province of a few extremists. It has at its heart a view about religion and about the interaction between religion and politics that is not compatible with pluralistic, liberal, open-minded societies.’
The world of the Middle East according to Blair is divided into two sorts of Muslims:
‘On the one side, there are Islamists who have this exclusivist and reactionary world view. They are a significant minority, loud and well organised. On the other are the modern-minded, those who hated the old oppression by corrupt dictators and who hate the new oppression by religious fanatics.’
To unpack this: Blair is saying that there are fanatical and extremist Muslims, who are driven to commit acts like the murder of Lee Rigby through ideological hatred of ‘western values’, and who are given support and succour from much larger groups of Muslims who really should know better and who should embrace pluralistic and liberal values as exemplified by…Tony Blair.
Except that isn’t how it looks to millions of people. The people of the Middle East and Afghanistan might be forgiven for asking which pluralistic and liberal values brought them the torture at Abu Ghraib, the use of depleted uranium in Iraq, the bombing of women and children in Afghanistan. They might wonder why when they ‘hated the old oppression by corrupt dictators’ they received no backing from the open minded Tony Blair or his fellow warmongers.
They might even wonder whether the spreading of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not an example of Jewish extremism, the whole Project for the New American century an example of Christian fundamentalism, or the massacres of Muslims Rohinga in Burma an example of Buddhist extremism?
Above all, we are all entitled to wonder just what deficiency in Blair’s mental image of the world allows him to consider that he has anything to contribute on this question? He has launched two major wars that are generally acknowledged to have been failures in their own terms and to have increased the likelihood of terrorism around the world. He lied in order to go to war in Iraq and will be the subject of criticism when the long delayed Chilcot report comes out.
The war was illegal under international law and in any fair society he would now be facing trial at The Hague, not posing as envoy for peace in the Middle East.
Rather than acknowledge any of this Blair’s brass neck leads him to advocate further wars, now against Syria and Iran, and to pose any opposition to him and his policies in terms of a ‘clash of civilisations’.
He talks about ideology driving terrorist attacks, but ignores his own dangerous ideology: the promotion of neo liberal free markets, the support for wars which protect those markets, and the defence of growing levels of inequality and misery caused by these policies.
The wars that he has done so much to promote have fuelled attacks on Muslims and a wave of Islamophobia, recently exacerbated by the events in Woolwich. Blair’s response? To attack Islam as a means of absolving his wars from any connection or responsibility. How much worse can he get?
We should never forget Stop the War Coalition is a Trotskyist front organisation, and in recent years has been hijacked by and become an apologist for Muslim fundamentalists. Nevertheless, that does not mean to say Tony Blair did not write a load of stomach churning garbage.
Contrary to what Lindsey German writes, there is a problem with Islamic extremists, Islamic fundamentalism does pose a threat, you only have to ask Nigerians what it is doing to their country, but a threat that is exacerbated by polices of US and UK and their support for Israel.
There is only one view of the murder of Lee Rigby: horrific. But there are two views of its significance.
One is that it is the act of crazy people, motivated in this case by a perverted idea about Islam, but of no broader significance.
Crazy people do crazy things. So don’t overreact.
The other view is that this act was indeed horrible; and that the ideology which inspired it is profound and dangerous.
I am of this latter view.
So of course we shouldn’t overreact. We didn’t after July 7, 2005. But we did act. And we were right to. The actions by our security services will undoubtedly have prevented other serious attacks.
The ‘Prevent’ programme in local communities was sensible. The new measures of the Government seem reasonable and proportionate.
However, we are deluding ourselves if we believe that we can protect this country simply by what we do here. The ideology is out there. It isn’t diminishing.
Consider the Middle East. As of now, Syria is in a state of accelerating disintegration. President Assad is brutally pulverising communities hostile to his regime. At least 80,000 have died. The refugees now total more than one million. The internally displaced are more than four million.
Many in the region believe that the Assad intention is to ethnically cleanse the Sunni from the areas dominated by his regime and then form a separate state around Lebanon. There would then be a de facto Sunni state in the rest of Syria, cut off from the wealth of the country or the sea.
The Syrian opposition is made up of many groups. The fighters are increasingly the Al Qaeda- affiliated group Jabhat al-Nusra. They are winning support, and arms and money from outside the country.
So I understand the desire to look at this world and explain it by reference to local grievances, economic alienation and of course ‘crazy people’. But are we really going to examine it and find no common thread, nothing that joins these dots, no sense of an ideology driving or at least exacerbating it all?
There is not a problem with Islam. For those of us who have studied it, there is no doubt about its true and peaceful nature. There is not a problem with Muslims in general. Most in Britain will be horrified at Lee Rigby’s murder.
But there is a problem within Islam – from the adherents of an ideology that is a strain within Islam. And we have to put it on the table and be honest about it.
Of course there are Christian extremists and Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu ones. But I am afraid this strain is not the province of a few extremists. It has at its heart a view about religion and about the interaction between religion and politics that is not compatible with pluralistic, liberal, open-minded societies.
At the extreme end of the spectrum are terrorists, but the world view goes deeper and wider than it is comfortable for us to admit. So by and large we don’t admit it. This has two effects. First, those with that view think we are weak and that gives them strength.
Second, those within Islam – and the good news is there are many – who actually know this problem exists and want to do something about it, lose heart. All over the Middle East and beyond there is a struggle being played out.
On the one side, there are Islamists who have this exclusivist and reactionary world view. They are a significant minority, loud and well organised. On the other are the modern-minded, those who hated the old oppression by corrupt dictators and who hate the new oppression by religious fanatics. They are potentially the majority, but unfortunately they are badly organised.
The seeds of future fanaticism and terror, possibly even major conflict, are being sown. We have to help sow seeds of reconciliation and peace. But clearing the ground for peace is not always peaceful.
The long and hard conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have made us wary of any interventions abroad. But we should never forget why they were long and hard. We allowed failed states to come into being.
Saddam was responsible for two major wars, in which hundreds of thousands died, many by chemical weapons. He killed similar numbers of his own people.
The Taliban grew out of the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and made the country into a training ground for terror. Once these regimes were removed, both countries have struggled against the same forces promoting violence and terror in the name of religion everywhere.
Not every engagement need be military; or where military, involve troops. But disengaging from this struggle won’t bring us peace.
Neither will security alone. We resisted revolutionary communism by being resolute on security; but we defeated it by a better idea: Freedom. We can do the same with this.
The better idea is a modern view of religion and its place in society and politics. There has to be respect and equality between people of different faiths. Religion must have a voice in the political system but not govern it.
We have to start with how to educate children about faith, here and abroad. That is why I started a foundation whose specific purpose is to educate children of different faiths across the world to learn about each other and live with each other.
We are now in 20 countries and the programmes work. But it is a drop in the ocean compared with the flood of intolerance taught to so many. Now, more than ever, we have to be strong and we have to be strategic.
— Tony Blair
This self-justifying stomach churning garbage from war criminal Tony Blair was originally published in The Mail on Sunday. From the comments on-line, it was more than even Mail readers could stomach.
The Woolich killings can be see in two different lights. Either a senseless killing on the streets, no different apart from its brutality to other street killings, or an act of terrorism.
It was treated as the latter by David Cameron, which has the downside of elevating the killers to martyrs. Though if David Cameron had not reacted as he did, and it was the start of a wave of killings, he would have been rightly criticised.
How does a war criminal become a Middle East Envoy? One only has to look at Iraq today, to see the legacy of Tony Blair.
The Blair article is riddled with errors.
Do many in the Middle East believe the aim of Butcher Assad is to cleanse the region of Sunni Muslims? Yes, it has descended into sectarian violence, as has Iraq (the Blair legacy), but that is not how it started. It started with Assad gunning down peaceful protesters. Only later did the opponents of this repressive regime take up arms to defend themselves. And shame on Putin for supporting Assad.
Blair claims Assad has used chemical weapons. What is his evidence? The UN says there is suspicion, but have not been allowed in to collect evidence.
Blair claims he sees at first hand what is happening in the Middle East, and specifically Israeli occupied Palestine. He sees, does he, Israeli settlers destroying olive trees, of occupying land that is not theirs?
Blair claims the ‘Taliban grew out of the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and made the country into a training ground for terror’. This is to completely rewrite history. The Americans provoked the then USSR to invade Afghanistan to create their own Vietnam. It was the CIA and MI6 and Pakistani ISI, with the help of Saudi money that created the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets, that morphed into the Taliban. Bin-Laden was our creation. The extreme form of Islam in Afghanistan was exported from Saudi Arabia, but still we arm the Saudis.
Blair claims Afghanistan was a terrorist training ground. It was not, but it is now, as is Iraq and many other parts of the world. The Taliban were willing to hand over Bin Laden, were they given the evidence to justify doing so. Afghanistan is now a major poppy producer, bogged down in corruption, women have no rights.
Blair mentions Pakistan, but does not mention the drone strikes by the Americans, and now the British, and the impact that is having. He does not mention the rampant corruption and cronyism in Pakistan.
There is a problem with Muslim extremism, that is not rooted in the Koran, with ignorant preachers of hate who should be kicked out of the country.
Young men are being fed poison in the Mosques, but what is then ignored by both the media and the mainstream political class, not just Blair, is self-brainwashing. Young men are fed poison in the Mosques, but they do not then have to watch videos on the net (though there are many to watch), they simply watch the mainstream news. They see the drone strikes in Pakistan, they see the ethnic cleansing and genocide committed by Israel against Palestinians, a few like the Glasgow car bombing, the 7/7 London Bombings, the brutal killing on the streets of Woolwich, are spurred to act, to attack what they see as the enemy slaughtering fellow innocent Muslims.
For nearly a decade, the British security services have been warning governments about the growth of terrorism as a result of disaffection in relation to the Afghan and Iraq wars. Former head of MI5 Dame Eliza Manningham Buller told the Chilcot inquiry that she had given such a warning to Tony Blair’s government over Iraq. We have evidence from these latest attackers and from those previously charged with terrorist offences that the wars are one of their major grievances.
Our wars, have destabilised large parts of the world, turning them into terrorist training grounds, into which head brainwashed angry young men, who came back primed and loaded as killing machines.
People didn’t accept the idea that Salafi guys could sit and drink in Costa Coffee. Everybody was unfriendly. It’s because they have a perception that Salafis don’t go for coffee in such places. — Mohamed Tolba, co-founder of Salafyo Costa
Through our Facebook page and our videos we are trying to tell them: Hear from us rather not about us. — Ahmed Samir, co-founder of the Facebook group
Do you guys sit in Costa? People would look at us in bafflement because they had a perception that Salafis don’t drink coffee in such places. It’s what I call visual abuse. It’s sad but funny. — Mohamed Tolba, co-founder of Salafyo Costa
Costa Salafists are quite literally, Salafists who meet in Costa coffee shops.
The Arab Spring kicked off in Tunisia, then spread to Egypt.
If you watched closely, as I did, you would have seen people on the streets, in Tahrir Square, many ages, but many young people, many young females, young females who were treated as equals, small groups forming, engaging in articulate, animated, but above all informed discussion and debate.
Move forward, the toppling of dictators, then elections.
All then seemed to have been lost, in Tunisia what could be called a soft Muslim party took power, in Egypt a harder Muslim Party the Muslim Brotherhood took power and behind them the hard line Salafists.
It seemed as though all had been lost, lives sacrificed for nothing. But all may not be as it seems from a superficial glance.
To topple a dictator is to question power. Power is usually toppled at the top, to be replaced by the same for example as we see in Animal Farm.
Tahrir Square was grass roots, question from the bottom. Once that genie is out of the bottle it is impossible to squeeze back in. Something Putin need to understand with his imprisonment of Pussy Riot and clampdown on opposition.
Girls who were not allowed out of the house, took to the streets. They now question. They are no longer prisoners in their own house.
Students question their teachers. Bribes are no longer paid to policemen.
We take reading for granted. If you cannot tread, how can you travel around, how do you know which street to find, how can you catch a bus if you cannot read the number?
Costa Salafists are so named because they quite literally meet in Costa coffee shops. A pity they cannot find local indie coffee shops in which to meet.
Costa Salafists would appear to be an oxymoron. Are Salafists not hard line intolerant bigots and Islamic fundamentalists, is not Costa a Western imposed coffee chain, the last place Salafists would meet? It is exactly because of that perception why they meet in Costa coffee shops. They even count Coptic Christians among their core supporters.
Nada Zohdy:
When I met Mohammed Tolba, the founder of this initiative, many of my own assumptions of Salafis were fundamentally challenged; to be frank, I didn’t realize Salafis could be so light-hearted and tolerant. Mohammed emphasised some basic struggles that the group faces: reminding themselves and other Salafis that they do not have an absolute monopoly on religious truth, and encouraging Salafis to have regular and meaningful interactions with other Egyptians rather than isolating themselves as they have for many years (which in part was a result of the discrimination they faced under former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak).
They believe in the authority of the Koran, but in a living interpretation of the Koran, an interpretation that your heart tells you is correct.
The Prophet warned, only heed a fatwa if your heart tells you it is correct.
The Old Testament was never meant to be written down as to do so would be to set it in stone. It was a living document that was interpreted to suit the present day. Later prophets constantly reinterpreted that which went before.
During Occupy St Paul’s, there often seemed as many clergy as there were occupiers at St Paul’s in-the-Camp. They were going back to original teachings of Jesus.
A cultural shift is taking part. At Occupy it was to question what was happening, the way our economy and financial systems function. In Greece and Spain that shift is of necessity as there are no jobs or at least no jobs in the formal economy.
When Super Storm Sandy struck New York, Mitt Romney saw it as a photo opportunity. Occupy New York got their hands dirty, Occupy Sandy was born, they were out helping people, feeding people.
Poem about the EDL man Catherine Brogan met on the train. Video recorded in empty train on Crewe change over.
It is not the EDL man Catherine met on the train that breed intolerance (as no one takes them seriously), cause religious strife and hatred. It is Islamist extremists spewing hate.
When the Danish cartoons were published, there was no reaction, they were even published in an Egyptian newspaper. The hatred was stirred up many months later by Islamist extremists.
We are seeing exactly the same today with a video published on youtube, a reaction stirred up many months later.
In Pakistan, a girl who may or may not have burnt pages of the Koran, facing charges of blasphemy, at risk of being killed by mobs.
In the Middle East, Christians being slaughtered simply for being Christian.
Were the fundamentalists to read the Koran (assuming they can read), they would find they are acting contrary to the Koran.
Turkish composer and international classical and jazz pianist Fazil Say has been charged by a court in Istanbul in Turkey of insulting Islam via a series of messages on twitter.
He is one of several artists facing similar charges. Meanwhile the West is turning a blind eye to a hard-line Islamic government and the creeping Islamisation of what has been a secular society in Turkey.
Fazil Say faces 18 months in prison for ‘publicly insulting religious values that are adopted by a part of the nation’. It is unusual for twitter posts to be the subject of an indictment in Turkey. Some were original messages, others re-tweets.
One re-tweet poked fun at an Islamic vision of the afterlife, likening heaven’s promise of rivers of wine to a tavern and of virgins to a brothel. It referred to a poem by the 11th-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam.
Another tweet joked about a muezzin’s rapid delivery of the call to prayer, asking if he wanted to get away quickly for a drink.
Many intellectuals and writers have faced similar charges in recent years, including Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, who last year was fined $3,700 for saying in a Swiss newspaper that Turks ‘have killed 30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians’, a simple statement of fact which successive Turkish regimes have refused to acknowledge.
Orhan Pamuk was forced to flee Turkey. Attacks on him led to an international outcry.
Turkey is to be commended for sheltering refugees from the brutal Assad regime in Syria, but we should not let this hide human rights abuses within Turkey itself.
Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God. — Matthew 5:9
Today I met with some of the most senior clerics in Iraq under the auspices of the Society of Iraqi Islamic Scientists (the senior Sunni Clerics Society). Some of them also came to Najaf with us on Friday. The main issue on the agenda was finding ways to stop the sectarian violence against the Shia. They also delivered a Fatwa (Islamic) injunction against all sectarian violence and publicly declared that most sectarian violence was coming from the Sunni community. Tomorrow the Fatwa will be discussed with the Iraqi Vice President and the British Ambassador.
— Canon Andrew White
The Fatwa
THE IRAQI SOCIETY OF ISLAMIC SCIENTISTS FATWA
In the name of God the Merciful
Under the conditions experienced by Iraqis and many Middle Eastern people at the present time and in the light of the increase in the level of Iraqi sectarian violence and the volatile situation, we believe that the deteriorating political condition calls upon us as Sunni religious scholars to together as a group to issue a Fatwa.
We wish to declare the sanctity of all Iraqi blood wether Shia, Sunni or Christian. We call for a mechanism to educate the Iraqi Society in order to renounce all sectarian violence and instead create an environment of cooperation with civil society organizations and institutions of civil jurisdiction so not to allow our people in Iraq to divide into sectarian conflicts. We must work towards national unity amongst all Muslims (Sunni and Shia) and Christians; we all have the duty and right to live together in unity in our country Iraq.
Dr Sheikh Khaled Abdul-Wahab Mullah, Leader, Sunni Cleric Baghdad + Basrah
Shekh Saadi Mehdi Qutaiba Alindaoui Sunni Leader Al Anbar
Sheikh Maher Al Jubori Sunni Cleric Fullujah
Dr Sheikh Kubaisi Jalal Sunni Cleric Rammadi
Sheikh Marwan Al Araji Sunni Cleric Baghdad
Sheikh Hasham Al Dulami Sunni Cleric Fullujah
I was talking with my friend Margaret this evening who works in Triangle (Christian tea shop cum bookshop) and we both agreed that if anyone was going to have an impact on the sectarian violence in Iraq it was Canon Andrew White.
Over the last few days he has been talking to Sunni religious leaders, the outcome a fatwa against the sectarian violence.
Now we need a similar fatwa from the Shia clerics.
He has recently been awarded the highly prestigious First Freedom Award.
A three-day International Peace Conference on Iraq, Light in Darkness, is to be held in Brighton, Thursday 6 September to Saturday 8 September at the City Coast Church. It is hoped to bring young people from Iraq but this will depend upon how generous are donors. Speaker will include Canon Andrew White. For more information and for donations, please contact FRRME.
Faith Under Fire has been shortlisted as the Christian Book of 2012. It is open to vote on-line for your favourite book, but somewhat dumb you have to vote for a childrens book too even though you may have no views. Also badly designed website, link does not go direct to voting form.
At two thousand years old, Christianity is a relativity new religion. Far older, Judaism, Hinduism. Far older still, the spirits of the forest, of the trees, the wind.
A recent find in France is of a small figurine, typical of the Middle East, a Mother Earth figurine, large breasts, large hips. Thought to date from somewhere between 4300 and 3600 BC
The Somme “earth mother” appears to have broken into five or six parts while she was being fired between 4300 and 3600 BC. She was found in the ruins of a neolithic kiln at a French government “preventive” archaeological dig near Villers-Carbonnel on the banks of the river Somme in the département of the same name.
After the Romans left, Christianity has a struggle regaining a foothold in what is now England. Paganism was the dominant religion. Eventually rather than trying to defeat it was assimilated, many Pagan Temples became churches or their scared sites became Holy Sites, the festivals were adopted.
A man lives in a cave. All he sees is the shadows. One day he comes out. Who are these people? He does not recognise them for all he has seen are their shadows.
We are arrogant when we think our religion is superior to another.
Religion is man made, an attempt to know the unknowable.
John 1:1-5
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
The light was not brought to Christians, it shone on men.
Or as made more explicit in other translations
New Living Translation: The Word gave life to everything that was created, and his life brought light to everyone.
International Standard Version: In him was life, and that life brought light to humanity.
GOD’S WORD Translation: He was the source of life, and that life was the light for humanity.
Good News Bible: The Word was the source of life, and this life brought light to mankind.
The light was not reserved exclusively for Christians, it was for everyone.
In the Koran is recognised that there are many religions and they are to be treated with respect, especially those who are the descendants of Abraham.
The Jewish sect established by the followers of Jesus was just that, a Jewish sect, but it was not exclusively Jewish, it welcomed Gentiles.
Rich poor, black white, gay straight, male female, war criminal genocide victim, we are all members of the human race, part of humanity, there are no outsiders. All are God’s children.
What I do effects those around me, what they do effects me. As individuals we are networked to form families, communities, society. In turn these networks sustain us and provide the environment in which we grow.
No one religion has absolute truth, though they may think they do. They may even claim what they say is superior to others. They may even tell you that you will go to Hell if you do not accept what they tell you. They of course always being by their own definition of the Chosen Few.
God, or G-d as some would write out of respect, is no more Christian than he is the old man sitting on a cloud answering prayers like a friendly old grandfather handing out sweets to the children.
An infinite entity cannot be known by a finite mind any more than by a finite man-made religion.
Those who try to tell us otherwise are at best misguided, at worse bigots and fundamentalists.
Sacred text were not set in stone, they were written by man, rewritten by man.
Most people recognise the Dalai Lama as the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi led what could be seen as a moral enlightenment, he influenced Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela. He was also a Hindu.
Rob Bell writes of an art exhibition where someone posts a note that Gandhi in Hell. Are they sure? How do they know? How kind of them to tell us.
There are those who see it as some sort of failing that Dalai Lama has not converted to Christianity.
Does God, the Christian God, have a conversation and say, sorry guys, I know you have done a lot of good in the world, but not quite good enough, you are not Christian, you belong to the wrong club, so you have to be sent to the fires of Hell for all eternity?
Complete and utter nonsense, but that is what Christian fundamentalists, bigots by any other name, would have us believe.
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