The International Union for Muslim Scholars looks East for religious dialogue, Islamic World News, NewAgeIslam.com

Islamic World News

The International Union for Muslim Scholars looks East for religious dialogue

The International Union for Muslim Scholars (IUMS) will hold an international seminar on dialogue between Islam and the major Oriental religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism, on February 19 and 20, the renowned Islamic scholar Sheikh Yousuf al-Qaradawi said.

Addressing a press conference, Dr Qaradawi, who is the chairman of the IUMS, said the seminar aimed to promote understanding between Muslims and the followers of the Oriental religions as well as to remove the barriers which, he said, could create misgivings between the two sides.

“Dialogue with the other is a basic principal of Islam that was called for by the Holy Qur’an and the seminar is one step ahead in this regard. According to Islam, all humans are one family that should peacefully co-exist and interact with one another,” he said.

Dr Qaradawi added that the seminar would be part of a process in which the IUMS would reach to followers of Oriental religions, which he said, constitute the majority of the world population.

“We have plans to launch similar dialogue with African religions,” he added.

When asked why he boycotted the recent interfaith dialogue meeting held in Doha between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the scholar said that the fact that Israel was still occupying Palestine and the current Vatican Pope Benedict’s critical remarks on Islam and Prophet were among the reasons behind the boycott.

The seminar will be held in New Delhi under the aegis of India’s Vice President Mohamed Hamid Ansari, who will open the event.

http://newageislam.com/the-international-union-for-muslim-scholars-looks-east-for-religious-dialogue/islamic-world-news/d/2438

Obama’s world and Pakistan’s war on terror, Radical Islamism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Radical Islamism and Jihad

Obama’s world and Pakistan’s war on terror

By Praveen Swami

Even as the Second World War raged on, the General Officer-Commanding of Imperial Britain’s Indian Army Eastern Command had begun work on the making of a new nation. Hindu-majority India, Sir Francis Tucker had come to believe, was dangerously mired in “superstition and formalism;” ripe to be seized by “a material philosophy such as Communism.” For this calamity to be averted, he argued, it was “very necessary to place Islam between Russ ian Communism and Hindustan.”

By 1944, Tucker was advocating the need for “a new Muslim power supported by the science of Britain.” “If such a power could be produced,” he wrote in his memoirs, India’s Partition and Human Debasement, “and if we could orient the Muslim strip from North Africa through Islamia Deserta [sic.], Persia and Afghanistan to the Himalayas, upon such a Muslim power in northern India, then it had some chance of halting the filtration of Russia towards the Persian Gulf.”

Pakistan lived up to Tucker’s hopes, allying itself with the anti-Communist powers during the Cold War and offering its services to the United States of America’s war-by-proxy against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Now, the enemy flies the stark, black-and-white banners of the al-Qaeda and the Taliban but Tucker’s vision of Pakistan continues to influence the geo-strategic imagination of the U.S. policy establishment.

http://newageislam.com/obama%E2%80%99s-world-and-pakistan%E2%80%99s-war-on-terror--/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/1450

Senegal’s Quranic schools: a horror story, Islamic Society, NewAgeIslam.com

Islamic Society

Senegal’s Quranic schools: a horror story

Associated Press

August 18, 2008

But what is most significant is that the boy’s father — a poor farmer who sold part of his harvest to pay for the bus fare to the hospital — filed the charges against the teacher himself. In doing so, this man with cracked lips and bloodshot eyes braved the wrath of his entire village, including his own father, who considers all teachers in Senegal’s Islamic schools to be holy.

In hundreds of these schools in the mostly Muslim West African country, children are made to beg in the streets and are beaten if they don’t bring back enough money. One 10-year-old was beaten to death with his hands tied behind his back and his mouth stuffed with rocks. Despite laws passed to protect children, the courts have convicted only a handful of Quranic teachers and quickly cave in the face of powerful clerics.

The biggest obstacle to justice is the families themselves, who are unwilling to speak out against the teachers. Government officials say they cannot think of another case where the family has brought charges.

http://newageislam.com/senegal%E2%80%99s-quranic-schools--a-horror-story/islamic-society/d/589