Muslim Heretics Conference

Muslim watershed Germany’s biggest mosque opens

• Kate Connolly in Berlin
• The Guardian,
• Saturday October 25 2008
• Article history

It has a 34-metre minaret and a dome-shaped ceiling handpainted with floral patterns and verses from the Qur’an. Its crowning glory is a golden chandelier engraved with 99 epithets for Allah, and there is seating for 2,000 worshippers.

Germany’s biggest mosque opens tomorrow in the Ruhr valley city of Duisburg in what leaders of Germany’s 3 million Muslims have described as a watershed moment, bringing mosques out of the backyards and alleys and into the middle of urban life.

The multimillion-euro Merkez mosque in the working-class district of Marxloh, which was financed by private and public money, will transform the lives of the city’s Muslims. Their previous meeting place was the rundown canteen of a former mining company.

For some, its consecration is a sign that the country has finally integrated its Muslims, too long considered guest workers who would one day go home, while for others it shows that Islam is taking over the religious landscape.

“How many mosques can a country cope with?” the conservative newspaper Die Welt asked in a recent commentary.

For their part, Germany’s Muslims, of whom 70% are ethnic Turks, say they want their rightful place in a society they have been a part of for 50 years or more.

“The fact that we’ve been allowed to build a mosque is a sign for us that the community is telling us ‘you’re accepted’,” said Mustafa Kücük, a spokesman for the Merkez mosque.

However, there have been protests in Berlin, a citizens’ initiative was formed in Munich to prevent a mosque being built, and in Cologne rightwing populists used opposition to the building of a mosque to stoke Islamophobia.

Germany has 206 mosques, and more than 120 are under construction or in the planning stage.

Muslim watershed Germany’s biggest mosque opens | World news | The Guardian

A TRIPLE TRAGEDY

- Muslims in India have to contend with three major problems

Politics and play : Ramachandra Guha

An influential editor from Delhi, visiting Bangalore, hosted a dinner for some local politicians, and invited me along. Among the netas present was the Karnataka Youth Congress president, the spokesman for H.D. Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal (Secular), and an office-bearer of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The conversation turned to the history of communal violence in Karnataka. Someone mentioned that whereas the southern parts of the state had been mostly riot-free, towns on the coast had witnessed periodic bouts of Hindu-Muslim violence. Asked to explain this — since the coast is where his party has always been strong — the BJP man said that in those towns the Muslims were the ‘dominant community’, and it was when non-Muslims sought to challenge their hegemony that trouble broke out.

I asked the politician to explain what, precisely, this ‘dominance’ consisted of. How many district collectors and superintendents of police in coastal Karnataka were Muslim? And how many judges, professors, or vice chancellors? We knew of the achievements in the field of business of the Pais of Manipal — were there any Muslim entrepreneurs of comparable wealth and influence?

A few days after this exchange, I was driving through Kamaraj Road, in the heart of the city. To get to my home, I had to turn left onto Mahatma Gandhi Road, which is the busiest, most prestigious, road in Bangalore, somewhat like Chowringhee in Calcutta. Just ahead of me was a Muslim gentleman, who was attempting to do likewise. Except that he was making the turn not behind the wheel of a powerful Korean car but with a hand-cart on which were piled some bananas.

That the fruit-seller was Muslim was made clear by his headgear, a white cap with perforations. He was an elderly man, about 60, short and slightly built. The turn from Kamaraj Road into M.G. Road was made hard by his age and infirmity; and harder by the fact that the road slopes steeply downwards at this point, and by the further fact that making the turn with him were a thousand screaming motor vehicles. Had he gone too slow he would have been bunched in against the cars: had he gone too fast he might have lost control of his cart altogether, with the bananas intended for his paying customers instead consumed, gratis, by the wheels of cars — Japanese and German as well as Korean.

I was, as I said, right behind this Muslim fruit-seller, close enough to see him hunch his shoulders as he manoeuvred his cart leftwards, close enough to see those shoulders visibly relax as the turn was successfully made, with cart and bananas both intact.

One should not read too much into a single encounter, a single image, but it does seem to be that that perilous turn into M.G. Road was symptomatic of an entire life — a life lived close to the margins, at the edge of survival and subsistence, a life taken one day at a time and from one turn to the next. If anything, the life must have got harder over time. Back in the 1980s, there would have been more Bangloreans who ate bananas off a cart. (Too many of these, nowadays, would rather drink Coke from a can or eat chips from a packet.) Back in the 1980s, the fruit-seller would have been 20 years younger, more in control of his cart, and having to contend with far less traffic too.

The life of that solitary fruit-seller is very representative of the life of Indian Muslims in general. Far from being ‘dominant’ or hegemonic, most Muslims are poor farmers, labourers, artisans, and traders. They are massively under-represented in the professions — few, too few, of India’s top lawyers, judges, doctors, and professors are Muslim. The proportion of Muslim parliamentarians and of Muslim civil servants has been steadily declining over time.

One reason that there is no substantial Muslim middle class is the creation of those two new nations in August 1947. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, the thinking elite of cities such as Mumbai, Lucknow, Delhi and Calcutta counted many Muslims in their ranks. In time, however, these liberal and cosmopolitan Muslims came to support Jinnah’s Pakistan movement. These bureaucrats, lawyers, teachers, and entrepreneurs hoped that in a Muslim state they would be free of competition from the more populous Hindus.

The migration of a large chunk of the Muslim middle class to Pakistan did not work out well for them. Migrating to escape the Hindus, they found themselves encircled and subordinated by the Punjabis. But their flight was also a disaster for India. For the Muslims left behind in this country have since lacked an enlightened and educated leadership.

If the first tragedy of the Indian Muslim was Partition, the second has been the patronage by India’s most influential political party of Muslims who are religious and reactionary rather than liberal and secular. This was not always so. Jawaharlal Nehru had placed much faith in two outstanding, and progressive-minded, Muslim politicians, Sheikh Abdullah and Said-ud-din Tyabji. However, the Sheikh fell prey to his own ambition, seeking to become the king of an independent Kashmir rather than the democratic leader of all of India’s Muslims. And Tyabji died young.

While Nehru at least sought to cultivate the modern Muslim, the Congress of Indira, Rajiv, and Sonia Gandhi has consistently favoured the conservative sections of the community. When one of his members of parliament, Arif Mohammed Khan, was willing to bat in public for the reform of Muslim personal laws, Rajiv dumped him in favour of the mullahs. The trend has continued, with the current Congress leadership likewise choosing to offer subsidies and sops to Muslim religious institutions rather than encourage them to engage with the modern world.

The third tragedy of the Indian Muslim is that India’s other professedly national party has never really treated them as full-fledged citizens of the land. For the members and fellow travellers of the BJP, the Parsi is to be tolerated, the Christian distrusted, and the Muslim detested. One form this detestation takes is verbal — the circulation of innuendos, gossip and abuse based on lies and half-truths (as in the case of the Karnataka BJP man and the Muslims of the coast). Another form is physical — thus, the hand of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad lies behind some of the worst communal riots in independent India, for example, Bhagalpur in 1989, Bombay in 1992, and Gujarat in 2002, when, in all cases, an overwhelming majority of the victims were Muslims.

Prima facie, the justice system appears to be biased against the Muslims. The number of Muslim judges and senior police officers is miniscule. Again, while acts of violence by Muslims are quickly followed by the arrest and trial of the perpetrators (real or alleged), Hindus who provoke communal riots are treated with far greater indulgence by the law. This discrimination is violative of the rights of equal citizenship, and altogether unworthy of a country calling itself a democracy.

It is fashionable in some quarters to blame the Indian Muslims for their predicament. In my view, while the absence of a credible liberal leadership has contributed, a far greater role in their marginalization has been played by the malevolent policies of our major political parties. The Congress seeks to exploit the Muslims, politically. The BJP chooses to demonize them ideologically (but also with a political purpose in mind). The Congress wishes to take care of the (sometimes spurious) religious and cultural needs of the Muslims, rather than advance their real, tangible, economic and material interests. The BJP denies that they have any needs or interests at all.

ramguha@vsnl.com

The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Opinion | A triple tragedy

U.S. Muslim voters are election-year outcasts

Civil rights lawyer: ‘American Muslims feel slightly politically radioactive’

Faiza Ali, center, from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, helps Muslims register to vote in Brooklyn, N.Y., on July 11.

View related photos

Todd Heisler /The New York Times / Redux Pictures file

  Video: Faith  

More video

Church sign: ‘Annihilate Islam’
Oct. 23: The ‘annihilate Islam’ sign outside a Texas Catholic church is causing a stir, but a church spokesman says the sign is not advocating violence, just conversions. KWES’s Wyatt Goolsby reports.

---

updated 7:21 p.m. ET, Thurs., Oct. 23, 2008

Lepers. Untouchables. Politically radioactive.

These are ways American Muslims describe their status in an election year when Barack Obama’s opponents are spreading rumors that he is Muslim, when he is Christian, and linking him to terrorists.

So when Colin Powell, a Republican, condemned using Muslim as a smear — a tactic he said members of his own party allowed — there was an outpouring of gratitude and relief from American Muslims.

“That speech really came out of left field and really shocked us,” said Wajahat Ali, 27, an attorney and playwright from Fremont, Calif. “The sense is that it’s about time. He said something that needed to be said.”

The retired general, who was President Bush’s first secretary of state, made the comments on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” as he broke with his party to endorse the Democratic nominee for president. Powell noted in last Sunday’s broadcast that Republican John McCain did not spread rumors about Obama’s faith, but Powell said he was “troubled” that others did.

“The correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America,” Powell said. “Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, ‘He’s a Muslim and he might be associated (with) terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”

Powell said he felt especially strongly about the rumors because of a photo he saw in The New Yorker magazine of the mother of a Muslim soldier in Arlington Cemetery embracing her son’s grave, which was marked with a Muslim crescent and star. The soldier, Kareem R. Khan of New Jersey, was 20 when he was killed in Iraq.

“We American Muslims have talked about our patriotism and the heroism of some American Muslims till we were blue in the face, and neither the media nor the people listen,” said Seeme Hasan, a Pueblo, Colo., Republican whose family has given tens of thousands of dollars to the GOP.

“Gen. Powell made people listen and at a very humane level,” said Hasan, who is backing McCain. “More people in leadership positions need to say this and recognize this — that American Muslims have worked very hard to fight this war on terror.”

Combating claims
The inaccurate claims that Obama is secretly Muslim started as soon as he was mentioned as a potential presidential candidate. There were false rumors that he was educated at a radical Islamic school as a child in Indonesia and that he was sworn into the Senate on the Quran.

His opponents emphasized his middle name — Hussein — and circulated a photo of him wearing traditional Somali garb on a 2006 visit to Kenya.

Kari Ansari, a mother of three from Villa Park, Ill., said the allegations upset her 10-year-old son.

“It sort of made him feel like, ‘If they won’t elect him president just for trying on Muslim clothes, they will never elect me because I’m a real Muslim,’” said Ansari, a founder of America’s Muslim Family, a quarterly magazine. “That’s heartbreaking for us as Muslim parents.”

Obama has combated the claims in speeches and on a campaign Web site dedicated to debunking inaccuracies about him. But the belief persists.

A poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found 12 percent of voters believed the Illinois senator is Muslim. That poll was released Tuesday — coincidentally, the same day the head of a New Mexico Republican women’s group called Obama a “Muslim socialist” and said “Muslims are our enemies.” County and GOP officials condemned the statements.

“Muslims feel jaded by the 2008 election precisely because they see the smearing of their identity,” Ali said. “Muslim or Arab is seen as a scarlet letter, political leprosy, kryptonite. There is that taint there. We’re the lowest of the low.”

The experience isn’t entirely new for American Muslims, who have struggled for acceptance in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The major parties have quietly courted them for years, yet presidential candidates have refused to publicly associate with them, leaders say.

The exact number of U.S. Muslim voters is not known. But many are wealthy professionals who came to the country to earn graduate degrees in engineering, medicine and business. They settled in significant numbers in key states including Michigan and Florida.

Presidential candidates “are not willing to have their photo taken, they don’t meet with Muslim organizations, and they shy away from any issue that may link them to the Muslim community,” said Salam al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a Los Angeles advocacy group leading a national Muslim voter registration campaign.

“We’re treated as untouchables in politics,” al-Marayati said.

Yet, this year has been especially painful because of the attacks on Obama.

‘Anti-Muslim rhetoric’
Hesham Hassaballa, a physician and author from Chicago, said this month he formally left the GOP, partly because of the allegations.

Like many other Muslims, Hassaballa had joined the Republican Party because of its small-government philosophy, social conservatism and pledge to limit taxes. In 2000, he supported McCain in the primaries, then Bush in the final election. Four years later, he backed Democrat John Kerry for president, partly to protest Bush policies on detaining and interrogating terror suspects, but remained Republican.

Now, he says the party has abandoned its principles.

“The McCain of 2008 is not the McCain of 2000,” Hassaballa said. “With the way the campaign has been going and a lot of the anti-Muslim rhetoric, just how the McCain campaign has conducted itself, just really turned me off.”

The McCain campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

In defending himself, Obama has rejected the idea that being called Muslim is an insult. His campaign also has an outreach coordinator to the Muslim community.

Some American Muslims said they wished the Democratic nominee would say more forcefully that their religion should not be used as a smear, but said they understood that it could damage his presidential bid in this political climate.

“I don’t think there could have been any better messenger than Colin Powell, being someone who is a well-respected Republican, a former secretary of state and an army general,” said Arsalan Iftikhar, a Washington, D.C., civil rights lawyer and writer who supports Obama. “American Muslims feel slightly politically radioactive at this time. This sends a resounding message of inclusiveness.”

U.S. Muslim voters are election-year outcasts - Faith- msnbc.com

By Michael Conlon, Religion Writer

CHICAGO (Reuters) - These are uneasy times for America’s Muslims, caught in a backwash from a presidential election campaign where the false notion that Barack Obama is Muslim has been seized on by some who link Islam with terrorism.

The Democratic White House candidate, who would be the first black U.S. president and whose middle name is Hussein, is a Christian. Son of a Kenyan father and white American mother, he spent part of his childhood in largely Muslim Indonesia.

The idea Obama is Muslim has circulated on the Internet for months, presented by some as a fact to reinforce the position that Obama is not a suitable candidate for the White House.

Not since the election of John Kennedy as the first Catholic U.S. president in 1960 has the faith of a White House hopeful generated so much distortion, said about 100 “concerned scholars” and others who have signed an October 7 proclamation aimed at countering Islamophobia they say is on the rise.

In recent weeks:

– More than 20 million video disc copies of a film called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” were included as advertising supplements in newspapers across the country, many in battleground states where Obama is in a close fight with Republican candidate John McCain. The film, distributed by a private group unaffiliated with the McCain campaign, features suicide bombers, children being trained with guns, and a Christian church said to have been defiled by Muslims.

– A city council candidate in Irvine, California, who is a Muslim convert, said he got a telephone call saying “I want to cut your head off just like all the other Muslims deserve,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

– A mosque in a suburb of Chicago, Obama’s home city, was vandalized four times in less than two months, with anti-Islamic messages left on its outer walls, and windows and doors broken.

– An account of an Ohio rally for McCain running mate Sarah Palin, filed by Al Jazeera and posted on YouTube, shows a woman saying “he is not Christian, and this is a Christian nation,” and a second woman saying she opposes Obama because of “the whole Muslim thing. A lot of people have forgotten about 9/11 (the September 11, 2001, attacks). It’s a little unnerving.”

“It is frightening to see at this point the label ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’ being used de facto as an insult,” said Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (C.A.I.R).

There is a feeling, he said, that hate crimes increase as Islamophobia rises in public discourse, including that going on peripherally in this election campaign.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican crossing party lines to endorse Obama on Sunday, made a demand for tolerance when he referred to Obama-is-a-Muslim rumors.

“Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?” he asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion ‘he’s a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America,” Powell said, while making clear such sentiment was not coming from McCain himself.

Muslims make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population of 305 million, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, though some believe that number is low. About a third of the world’s population is Christian, another 21 percent Muslim.

Daniel Varisco, anthropology chair at Hofstra University, said he wrote the “statement of concerned scholars” after seeing Islamophobia on the rise.

“The attempts to label Senator Obama a terrorist or rhyme his name with Osama (bin Laden) or accent his middle name (Hussein), as well as false claims about his being sworn into (U.S. Senate) office on a Koran, demonstrate how near to the surface anti-Islamic sentiment is in the United States,” he said.

Circulating such falsehoods “avoids playing the race card directly but at the expense of Muslims,” he said.

The Clarion Fund, which distributed the film “Obsession,” through a huge newspaper advertising buy, says it is an independent education group focused “on the most urgent threat of radical Islam” and that placing the film in the hands of readers in battleground election states was an attempt to grab attention.

Spokesman Gregory Ross said, “we have no political or religious affiliations to any group whatsoever.”

The Islamic Circle of North America has meanwhile opened an offensive of sorts — a campaign promoting Islam and seeking converts. It said it placed advertising signs inside 1,000 cars in New York’s subway network.

In Chicago the group had a number of city buses adorned top to bottom with pro-Islam advertising, headlined “Islam: The Way of Life of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.”

Rehab of the Chicago C.A.I.R. office said that kind of approach may work to a limited degree, “but really the crux of the issue is not learning about the details of a religion but rather interacting with and understanding that the average Muslim is no different than yourself.”

(Editing by Andrew Stern and Frances Kerry)

Sour note for American Muslims in election campaign | Politics | Reuters