A Veiled Movement for Women's Rights Sweeps Iran, Islamic World News, NewAgeIslam.com

Islamic World News

A Veiled Movement for Women's Rights Sweeps Iran

Iran's Green Movement has embraced a new symbol of protest: the woman's veil. In an unprecedented show of support for women's rights, Iranian men have posted photos of themselves wearing the head covering typically worn by Muslim women. The images show hundreds of men clad in bright green headscarves posing mockingly for the camera.

This campaign was sparked by the government's attempt to humiliate leading student activist Majid Tavakoli. Authorities arrested Tavakoli after he delivered a fiery anti-government speech during Iran's Student Day demonstrations on December 7th. Following his detention, the semi-official Fars News Agency published photos of him wearing a woman's veil, claiming that he had been found trying to escape from campus using it as a disguise. Many members of the opposition believe the photos were fabricated to discredit and disgrace the young activist.

Once again, Iran's young and tech savvy opposition has cleverly utilized new media to bypass government censorship and laugh in the face of authority. The online campaign highlights the absurdity of the regime's attempts at character defamation. A similar strategy was used after the government subjected hundreds of reformers to show trials following the disputed June election. People posted YouTube videos of themselves confessing to the most ridiculous things in order to show how baseless and empty the government's forced confessions and accusations against its critics have become. By co-opting the government's own tools of repression, the opposition has rendered such tactics ineffectual.

Given the politically fraught history of the veil, this campaign is deeply symbolic. In 1935, Reza Shah Pahlavi banned women from wearing a head covering in public in an attempt to move Iran away from what he considered religious backwardness and toward modernity. Prior to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, there was a revival of social traditionalism and women would don the veil to reaffirm their Iranian-Islamic identity against the perceived onslaught of Western influence. Today, young women flout Islamic dress codes by exposing their hair from under colorful headscarves in mass defiance of the Islamic Republic.

http://newageislam.com/a-veiled-movement-for-women-s-rights-sweeps-iran/islamic-world-news/d/2244

The Lashkar-e-Taiba’s army in India, Islam,Terrorism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam,Terrorism and Jihad

The Lashkar-e-Taiba’s army in India

By Praveen Swami

But the most pressing threat to India comes from Lashkar operatives who will not have to cross the oceans or scale the mountains across the Line of Control. Key leaders of Indian Mujahideen — the terrorist network responsible for a string of urban bombings since 2005 — escaped a nationwide police hunt which led to the arrest of over 80 of its operatives in six states.

If the Indian Mujahideen is indeed planning further strikes, two men are most likely central to its plans: Riyaz Bhatkal, who organised the quasi-industrial production of the ready-to-assemble ammonium nitrate-based ‘u’-shaped bombs used in its bombing campaign, and the man tasked by the Lashkar’s central commanders to link these units together, Mumbai-based SIMI operative Abdul Subhan Usman Qureshi.

Bhatkal—the son of the owner of a leather-tanning factory in Mumbai’s Kurla area — was part of the circle of student Islamists who joined the Students Islamic Movement of India around 1998. Like others in SIMI, Bhatkal believed that the problems confronting India’s Muslims were the consequence of secular modernity — and that the answer lay in fighting to create an Islamic state. Along with his elder brother Iqbal Bhatkal, a qualified cleric who also practised Unani medicine, Bhatkal became a key figure at SIMI’s Mumbai office.

http://newageislam.com/the-lashkar-e-taiba%E2%80%99s-army-in-india--/islam,terrorism-and-jihad/d/1126

Jamiat Ulema should come clean on its past resolutions on Jihad, Islam,Terrorism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam,Terrorism and Jihad

Jamiat Ulema should come clean on its past resolutions on Jihad and Islam-supremacism that have spawned the Taliban

For Clarity's Sake: Jamiat Ulema should come clean on its past resolutions on Jihad and Islam-supremacism that have spawned the Taliban

By Arif Mohammad Khan

10 Nov, 2008

The Jamiat had rallied around Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress during the freedom movement and opposed the creation of Pakistan. But there was a sizeable group of the Deoband ulema like Mau-lana Ashraf Ali Thanvi who did not endorse the politics of the Jamiat. The differences led to split and a parallel organisation headed by Mufti Shabbir Usmani was established in 1946 that actively supported the Muslim League and the demand for a separate state of Pakistan.

The Jamiat described participation in freedom movement a religious duty and not a national obligation asserting that “religious freedom was more important than political emancipation”. So much so that it claimed that its flag was a “replica of the flag carried by the Prophet and his companions”. It exhorted Muslims to support the Khilafat movement as a religious duty, to boycott foreign goods as enjoined by the sharia and to fight the British as ordained by God.

It was this practice of invoking religion in every affair that irked Maulana Azad to say “the effect which the words ‘nation’ and ‘motherland’ have on the rest of the world is produced on the Muslims by the words God or Islam. You can stir the hearts of thousands simply with one word — nation — but in the case of Muslims the only comparable word for the purpose is God or Islam”.

http://newageislam.com/jamiat-ulema-should-come-clean-on-its-past-resolutions-on-jihad-and-islam-supremacism-that-have-spawned-the-taliban--/islam,terrorism-and-jihad/d/971

Welcoming Terror on Campus: UC Irvine Invites Muslim Brotherhood Leader to Speak, Islam,Terrorism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Welcoming Terror on Campus: UC Irvine Invites Muslim Brotherhood Leader to Speak

By Jacob Laksin

FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, October 09, 2008

As the fountainhead of global Islamic terrorism, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has long had a public-relations problem. For years the Brotherhood has struggled to veil its reputation as a violent and reactionary religious movement without moderating the substance of its politics, which continue to include support for terror attacks and the institution of hard-line Sharia law. At the University of California at Irvine (UCI), the Brotherhood has now found an audience receptive to its efforts.

This Wednesday, four separate UCI programs – including the department of history; the Center for Research on International and Global Studies at UCI’s School of Social Sciences; the school’s Middle East Studies Student Initiative and its Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies – will host Ibrahim el-Houdaiby, a young member of the Muslim Brotherhood and the leader of its new generation of self-styled “moderate Islamist” activists. Still in his twenties, the Cairo-based Houdaiby has a long lineage in the Brotherhood: His grandfather was Hassan el-Houdaiby, a prominent Brotherhood ideologist. Houdaiby has carried on the family tradition, writing a column for the Brotherhood’s official English-language website, IkhwaWeb.com, and generally trying to arouse foreign sympathy for a movement still regarded as dangerous in the West.

http://newageislam.com/welcoming-terror-on-campus--uc-irvine-invites-muslim-brotherhood-leader-to-speak--/islam,terrorism-and-jihad/d/865

Lecture 6: The Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam, Books and Documents, NewAgeIslam.com

Books and Documents

Lecture 6: The Principle of Movement in the Structure of Islam

It seemed then that the great civilization that it had taken four thousand years to construct was on the verge of disintegration, and that mankind was likely to return to that condition of barbarism where every tribe and sect was against the next, and law and order were unknown . . . The old tribal sanctions had lost their power. Hence the old imperial methods would no longer operate. The new sanctions created by Christianity were working division and destruction instead of unity and order. It was a time fraught with tragedy. Civilization, like a gigantic tree whose foliage had overarched the world and whose branches had borne the golden fruits of art and science and literature, stood tottering, its trunk no longer alive with the flowing sap of devotion and reverence, but rotted to the core, riven by the storms of war, and held together only by the cords of ancient customs and laws, that might snap at any moment.

http://newageislam.com/lecture-6--the-principle-of-movement-in-the-structure-of-islam/books-and-documents/d/215