To Say That Religion Is Divisive Is To Attempt No Analysis of the Problems At Hand: Religion Is Not to Blame

By Soumaya Ghannoushi 29/10/2015 If I got a penny for every time I was told that religion is the cause of all trouble, I'd be a rich woman by now. If only we had John Lennon's religionless world, there would be no war, or conflict and everyone would love their neighbor. If only the theologians, clergymen, mullahs and priests could get on, the world's problems would be resolved at a stroke. No doubt, religion does play a part in many of the crises and conflicts raging around us. But more often than not, these problems take on a religious name and speak through the medium of religion, while having their roots in socio-political factors. Examples are found in the Northern Ireland dispute as in the Middle East conflict. Though those...

Religion’s View on Earthquakes

 By Kunwar Khuldune Shahid October 29, 2015 When the 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck at the heart of Nepal in April this year, leaving over 9,000 dead and injuring over 2,300, orthodox Buddhists and Hindus blamed karma and the ‘sinfulness’ of people for the disaster. Rituals were organised to please the deities, with many focusing on Brahma, who ‘created the world’ and hence ‘can save lives as well’. Orthodox Buddhists sought Avalokiteshvara’s help with the ‘heart mantra’ Om mane padme hum ubiquitously recited. Clearly, there was a significant chunk of the Nepalese population that was busy pleasing ostensibly infuriated deities, when a lot of that effort could’ve been dedicated to work on minimising the damage through awareness...

Ali al-Nimr,the Shia Cleric: Sentenced to Be Crucified

By Nicholas Kristof OCT. 29, 2015 Any day now, our Saudi Arabian allies may behead and crucify a young man named Ali al-Nimr. His appeals following his court sentence for this grisly execution have been exhausted, so guards may lead Nimr to a public square and hack off his head with a sword as onlookers jeer. Then, following Saudi protocol for crucifixion, they would hang his body as a warning to others. Nimr’s offense? He was arrested at age 17 for participating in anti-government protests. The government has said he attacked police officers and rioted, but the only known evidence is a confession apparently extracted under torture that left him a bloody mess. “When I visited my son for the first time I didn’t recognize him,” his...

Anti-Muslim Paranoia Could Still Derail Myanmar’s Journey To True Democracy

 By Martin Woollacott 29 October 2015 Race and religion are casting a dark shadow over Myanmar as it moves toward critical elections next month. The elections would have been difficult enough for the country if confined to the issues of what degree of democracy can now be introduced, and what role should be played by the iconic leader Aung San Suu Kyi. But it has been made more divisive and dangerous by an insidious emphasis on national identity that threatens to further open up the fault line between ethnic Burmans and the country’s minorities, in particular the Muslim community. A campaign to portray Aung San Suu Kyi as pro-Muslim, and to label her National League for Democracy the “Muslim party” is under way. Its public...

Is it Humanly Possible to be Honest?

By Mohammad Badrul Ahsan October 30, 2015 HONESTY is the best policy, but where does it begin? When leaders are liars, lawmakers are lawbreakers, teachers are tricksters and others aren't who they say they are, it's impossible to find honesty at its registered address. Honest individuals don't steal, lie or fail to keep promises. They are honourable people, who are comparable to goods made to specification or sold in exact weight. Nobody can be true to others unless, first, they are also true to themselves. Thus being honest is all about being truthful, although it's not enough to speak the truth unless one also lives by its example. Anybody telling the truth but not practicing it is a hypocrite, while cowards hide the truth out of...

Islam and Education

By Hamid Naseem Rafiabadi 30/10/2015 We can now discuss the thoughts of Said Nursi’s in the universal context as he has given his most holistic harmonious universal approach to various problems about educational empower¬ment and integration of religion and science and the reflec¬tion on thinking of Nursi on these civilization challenges for Muslims are very appropriate and most rewarding. On educational front, efforts of Nursi’s contemporary and successor visionaries of Islam like Shibli, Maududi, Sir Syed and Ismail Raji Faruqui have met but with very less success in convincing the traditional Muslim clergy about the tenacity of modern sciences like religious sciences. But Madrasah Zahra model presented by Nursi stands for “in¬tegration of knowledge”, and his view that religious subjects...

Is ISIS Failing? 8 Questions to Consider

 By Ronald Tiersky 30/10/2015 Once-fearsome ISIS/Islamic State is largely off the front pages these days. The main news from the Syrian battlefield is Russia's air campaign to prop up the Assad regime by attacking various rebel groups including, as a second thought, Islamic State, and to construct durable air and naval facilities on the Mediterranean coast. Targeting the other groups first, Moscow claims to have destroyed dozens of Islamic State manpower, storage, resupply and training targets but Vladimir Putin's credibility is zero. In any case, in Syria/Iraq, Islamic State's ground war has stalled. Its recent successes are far-away suicide bombings that may be more inspired by ISIS than organized by it. Claims that Islamic...

Is Islam Compatible with Our Modern Way of Life?

By Seidu Malik October 20, 2015 Experience has shown that many natural phenomenon or processes are initially discovered with limited understanding or benefit to society. However, with pain staking effort and unbiased approach to the phenomenon, many of the unknown qualities that were initially observed as bad turn out to be good upon further examination. A case in point is the annotation of human genome sequence. Many of the genes with seemly-unknown functions decades ago were classified as “junk” but recent studies have proved otherwise. In a similar fashion, severe misunderstanding and ignorance exist with Islam, a revealed religion from God Almighty that is a reflection of nature based on human conscience. Groups like Al-Qaeda, ISIS and ignorant clerics with a twisted understanding...

Why Islam Doesn’t Need a Reformation

 By Mehdi Hasan 17 May 2015 15 In recent months, cliched calls for reform of Islam, a 1,400-year-old faith, have intensified. “We need a Muslim reformation,” announced Newsweek. “Islam needs reformation from within,” said the Huffington Post. Following January’s massacre in Paris, the Financial Times nodded to those in the west who believe the secular Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, “could emerge as the Martin Luther of the Muslim world”. (That might be difficult, given Sisi, in the words of Human Rights Watch, approved “premeditated lethal attacks” on largely unarmed protesters which could amount to “crimes against humanity”.) Then there is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The Somali-born author, atheist and ex-Muslim has a new...

A Modest Proposal for Eliminating Terrorism

By Haroon Moghul OCTOBER 26, 2015 They make us arrive really early at the airport. They’ve turned our terminals into their victory mosques, forcing us to march barefoot, with arms upraised, through radioactive, carcinogenic or far too intimate machines. They frighten armed white Americans. They refuse to accept being bombed, oppressed, attacked or insulted. They try to impose Shariah in Oklahoma, keystone of the modern American economy, anchor of the free world. They flee wars rather than die in them. They have the audacity to seek asylum from armed gangs that we regret funding. They are overly fond of Toyota pickups, though American alternatives are superior. Some of them turn to violence, and that violence can be terrible. Those...