FaithWorld

Pakistan Islamist accuses Obama of religious war on Muslims over hate video

One of Pakistan’s most feared Islamists accused President Barack Obama on Wednesday of starting a religious war against Muslims over his handling of a video that mocked the Prophet Mohammad.

Hafiz Saeed, accused by India of masterminding the 2008 attack by Pakistani gunmen on India’s financial capital Mumbai, said Obama should have ordered steps to remove the film from the Internet instead of defending freedom of expression in America.

“Obama’s statements have caused a religious war,” Saeed told Reuters in an interview. “This is a very sensitive issue. This is not going to be resolved soon. Obama’s statement has started a cultural war.”

The Obama administration has condemned the film, which ignited Muslim protests around the world as “disgusting”.

But Western countries remain determined to resist restrictions on freedom of speech and have already voiced disquiet about the repressive effect of blasphemy laws in Muslim countries such as Pakistan.

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Ad equating jihad with savagery debuts in New York City subway

An inflammatory ad equating Islamic jihad with savagery was posted Monday in 10 New York City subway stations, even as much of the Muslim world was still seething over a California-made movie ridiculing the Prophet Mohammad.

The ad, sponsored by the pro-Israel American Freedom Defense Initiative, appeared after the Metropolitan Transit Authority lost a bid to refuse to post it on the grounds that it violated the agency’s policy against demeaning language. In July, a federal judge ruled it was protected speech and ordered the MTA to place the posters.

The ad, featuring mostly black-and-white lettering on 46-by-30-inch (117-by-72-cm) cardboard posters, will remain posted for a month, MTA spokeswoman Marjorie Anders said.

“In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man,” the ad reads. “Support Israel/Defeat Jihad.”

Pamela Geller, executive director for the ad’s sponsor group, rejected the MTA’s assertion the posters were demeaning.

“There’s nothing either hateful or false about my ad,” Geller said in an email.

Despite the controversy, most subway riders who passed the ad in a tunnel at the Times Square station Monday failed to notice it. Those who did were generally critical.

U.S. says free speech is the best protection for religious dignity

The United States told a UN human rights body on Monday it considered freedom of religion inseparable from free expression, countering calls from many Islamic countries for a treaty outlawing blasphemy.

After two weeks of protests around the Muslim world over an online film mocking the Prophet Mohammed, Ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe told the UN Human Rights Council that religious dignity is best protected where there is free speech.

“The inseparable freedoms of expression and religion are important not for abstract reasons,” she told the Geneva body in an unscheduled intervention as world leaders arrived in New York for a General Assembly where some were expected to call for action against blasphemy.

Donahoe said that when the two freedoms were allowed to flourish, “we see religious harmony, economic prosperity, societal innovation and progress, and citizens who feel their dignity is respected.”

“When these freedoms are restricted, we see violence, poverty, stagnation and feelings of frustration and even humiliation,” she said.

Last week, the 56-nation Organisation of Islamic Cooperation signaled it wanted an international ban on blasphemy, echoing calls from many Islamic clerics and some government leaders adter the film, made with private money in the United States, sparked widespread anti-Western protests.

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German Catholic activists rap decree excluding church tax opt-outs

Tom Heneghan

Sep 25, 2012 10:55 UTC

Liberal and conservative Roman Catholic activists in Germany criticised a decree that came into effect on Monday to deny sacraments and religious burials to people who opt out of a “church tax”. The German bishops issued the decree last week warning Catholics who stop paying the tax they would be excluded from all religious activities, also including working in a church job, becoming a godparent or taking part in parish activities. “‘Pay and pray’ is a completely wrong signal at the wrong time,” the reformist movement We Are Church said on Monday. The decree “shows the great fear of the German bishops and the Vatican about further serious losses in church tax revenue.” A conservative group called the Union of Associations Loyal to the Pope asked why Catholics who stop paying the tax would be punished but those it called heretics could stay in its ranks. “So sacraments are for sale – whoever pays the church tax can receive the sacraments,” it said in a statement, saying the link the decree created “goes beyond the sale of indulgences that (Martin) Luther denounced” at the start of the Reformation. German tax offices collect a religious tax worth 8 or 9 percent of the annual regular tax bill of registered Catholics, Protestants and Jews and channel it to those faiths. An official declaration that one is leaving the faith frees the citizen from this tax. Defending the decree, bishops had earlier said they were spelling out the consequences of a worshipper choosing to leave the church to avoid paying. Some Catholics had tried to remain active in their parish despite officially quitting the church. But “it’s rubbish to assume one could leave the institutional Church and remain a Catholic,” said the secretary of the German Bishops Conference. “Whoever leaves the Church,” Rev Hans Langendörfer told the  Catholic radio station in Cologne, “leaves it completely.” The annual total of Catholic church leavers, usually around 120,000, rose to 181,193 two years ago as revelations about decades of sexual abuse of children by priests shamed the hierarchy and prompted an apology from German-born Pope Benedict.

“EXCOMMUNICATION LITE” Church taxes brought in about 5 billion euros ($6.5 billion) for the Roman Catholic Church and 4.3 billion euros for the Protestant churches in 2010, according to official statistics. With such full coffers, the German Church runs a large network of schools, hospitals and charity organisations at home and is one of the biggest contributors to the Vatican and to Catholic projects worldwide. Some commentators suggested the bishops issued their decree to sidestep a looming legal case by a retired theology professor challenging the right of the Catholic Church to excommunicate those who opt out of the tax. The German bishops had long told Catholics they would be excommunicated from the Church if they officially declared they were leaving it. But the Vatican ruled in 2006 that a simple declaration to a tax office that one was leaving the Church was not enough to justify excommunication, Rome’s stiffest punishment. The church leaver must also declare this to a priest, it said. That prompted retired canon law professor Hartmut Zapp to file a legal case against the German Church, saying it could not excommunicate him for leaving simply to avoid paying the tax if the Vatican did not agree he deserved that punishment. After contradictory lower court rulings, Zapp’s case will go on Wednesday before the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig. A ruling in his favour could throw into doubt Germany’s whole church tax system, which was introduced in the 19th century. The bishops’ decree, described as “excommunication lite” by the German media, could however undercut Zapp’s case because the exclusions it listed were not described as a formal excommunication. The German bishops are due to open their autumn plenary meeting in Fulda on Tuesday and the issue is expected to play a part in the discussions over the following three days. Follow all posts on Twitter @ RTRFaithWorld

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from Felix Salmon:

Can progressive economists join forces with the church?

Felix Salmon

Sep 24, 2012 17:37 UTC

Last week I was invited to hear Joe Stiglitz talk on "God, hope, happiness, death, suffering, values, grace, and evil" at Union Theological Seminary. With a menu like that, how could I resist?

The event was billed as an "innovative lecture series" combining, essentially, God and mammon: it was organized in large part by INET, an organization devoted to "new economic thinking" and backed -- to the tune of $75 million -- by George Soros and Bill Janeway. But, frankly, it was an inauspicious beginning, and although in principle I'm a big fan of making economics much more interdisciplinary, I think the idea of connecting it with theology, in particular, is not going to be easy or even particularly helpful.

One of the problems was that this was not a lecture: Stiglitz just sat and answered open-ended questions, and most of the time, when he did so, he talked about his latest book. The book is about inequality, and religious types tend to care a lot about inequality, but they tend to look at economics in very different ways.

Stiglitz's conception of inequality is very much at the macroeconomic and the political level: he's still thinking about things in terms of maximizing utility, right here on our mortal coil. Stiglitz has a broader conception of utility than most, but he still found time to get very excited about the way in which he had the empirical evidence to prove that he was right and the IMF was wrong during the famous Stiglitz-Rogoff debates in 2008. More generally, his book's whole thesis is built around the empirics of inequality, and the empirics of inequality are pretty much all financial. How much money do the rich have, relative to the poor? How much do they earn, relative to the poor? How likely is it that a poor person will become rich, or vice-versa? And which patterns of wealth and income distribution end up being the most effective, in terms of creating broad-based prosperity?

These are important questions, no doubt, and religious types do worry about them. But rather than looking for high levels of GDP or productivity growth, or worrying about the effects of international capital flows on domestic interest and exchange rates, the kind of people who hang out at places like Union Theological Seminary tend to have their eyes on a greater and much more eternal prize. Economists, especially on the left, love to quote Keynes's dry statement that "in the long run, we're all dead"; you can imagine how far that kind of rhetoric will get you in a church or mosque or shul. Religious leaders  don't tend to rely very heavily, if at all, on empirical data; few of them feel the need to prove that they are right. And as a result, when Stiglitz took his passionately-argued economics a few hundred feet from the east side of Broadway to the west side, he entered a world which was much more alien to him than the conferences he attends in Shanghai or Dubai or Davos.

Stiglitz is constitutionally incapable of talking about economics without bashing right-wingers, and hilariously, even in a chapel, he decided to keep to his standard criticism that the economics spouted by Republicans was essentially "theology" rather than anything scientific or empirical. I have numerical proof that I'm right, he said; my opponents only have faith!

German bishops get tough on Catholics opting out of their church tax

Tom Heneghan

Sep 21, 2012 14:29 UTC

Germany’s Roman Catholic bishops have decreed that people who opt out of a “church tax” should not be given sacraments and religious burials, getting tougher on worshippers who choose not to pay.

Alarmed by a wave of dissenting Catholics quitting the faith, the bishops issued a decree on Thursday declaring such defection “a serious lapse” and listed a wide range of church activities from which they must be excluded.

Germans officially registered as Catholics, Protestants or Jews pay a religious tax of 8 or 9 percent of their annual tax bill. They can avoid this by declaring to their local tax office that they are leaving their faith community.

The annual total of church leavers, usually around 120,000, rocketed to 181,193 two years ago as revelations about decades of sexual abuse of children by priests shamed the hierarchy and prompted an apology from German-born Pope Benedict.

“This decree makes clear that one cannot partly leave the Church,” a statement from the bishops conference said. “It is not possible to separate the spiritual community of the Church from the institutional Church.”

Church taxes brought in about 5 billion euros ($6.5 billion) for the Rom

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Guestview – Prophet Mohammad endured personal insults without retaliating – grand mufti

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Ali Gomaa is the Grand Mufti of Egypt.

By Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa

With the publication of yet another set of insulting cartoons against the Prophet of Islam, it is becoming increasingly obvious that we are living through dangerous times, in which the world has becoming alarmingly polarized and obstinate. The current crisis has been precipitated by a number of factors. There is no one single cause to which we can point, in the hopes that eradicating it will magically solve our problems. Rather, this is a complex matter, involving the inability of each side to misunderstand the worldviews and commitments of the other. The particulars of the events of the past week are known to all, but the underlying causes are deeper and more intractable, and cannot simply be wished away.

To properly understand them necessarily means taking seriously the politics that obtain between Islam and the West at this point in history. It is naive to simply point to individual films, cartoons, or writings which explicitly seek to provoke and insult Muslims as the motivating cause of these conflagrations. Rather, one must keep in mind the many points of conflict between Muslims and Westerners that obtain all over the world today. One need only scratch the surface to uncover grave violations associated with the war on Iraq, regular drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistan, the treatment of often innocent Muslims in Guantanamo, the demonization of Muslims by far-right European parties and the banning of their symbols by European legislatures, and the conflict that has persisted for decades in Palestine. To turn a blind eye to these serious and enduring conflicts is to remain wilfully oblivious to the underlying factors which make coexistence and rapprochement between Islam and the West so difficult.

In such a context, to then insist on igniting these simmering tensions by publishing hurtful and insulting material in a foolhardy attempt at bravado – asserting the superiority of Western freedoms over alleged Muslim closed-mindedness – verges on incitement. Of all Muslim symbols, there is perhaps none more sacred than the Prophet Muhammad himself. Muslims can barely utter his name before their conscience obliges them to pray for God to bless him and grant him peace. Hundreds of millions of Muslims revere not only the Prophet, but the very city of Medina which he made his home, and ardently aspire to visit it at their first opportunity. It is no exaggeration to say that Muslims love the Prophet more dearly than their own selves, as the Qur’an characterizes them. To imagine then, crude representations of a man so dear to them is unbearable to the vast majority of Muslims.

None of this is to condone violence of any sort. Indeed, the example of the Prophet and his Companions – the greatest sources of Muslim normativity – bear witness to their enduring the worst insults from the non-believers of his time. Not only was his message routinely rejected, but he was often chased out of town, cursed at, and physically assaulted on numerous occasions. But his example was always to endure all personal insults and attacks without retaliation of any sort. There is no doubt that, since the Prophet is our greatest example in this life, this should also be the reaction of all Muslims. As the Qur’an instrucus, “Be patient, as were the great prophets.”

The call of all Muslim leaders must be to protest these instances of hate speech in only the most peaceful manner. Violence of any sort must be condemned outright. Here it is equally important to point out that some self-appointed religious leaders have failed to act responsibly. In the tense environment that currently prevails in the Muslim world, to display these provocations and to speculate on the supposed conspiracies behind them is to act recklessly. Unfortunately, the proliferation of satellite channels and other media have opened the door to all sorts of people who have only the advancement of their own interests and popularity in mind, and not the wellbeing of the Muslim nation, the Middle East, or the world at large.

Tunisian artists cry for help against Islamist extremists agitating against them

A few hours before Lotfi Abdeli was due to stage his play “Made in Tunisia, 100 percent halal” last month, hundreds of Salafi Muslims who believed the show was offensive to Islam occupied the open air theatre and began to pray.

The play, a satire about politics and religion, was cancelled.

It was not the first time religious hardliners have stopped the plays of Abdeli, a Tunisian actor and playwright known for criticizing ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben-Ali before last year’s revolution.

At last week’s Hammamet festival, Abdeli, whose life has been threatened, was accompanied by personal guards.

“I am not afraid of threats or assault, but I do really fear for our freedom of expression and creativity, which is the only thing that we got out of the revolution,” Abdeli told Reuters.

“I am unhappy with the current situation for intellectuals in Tunisia: threats, beatings and being prevented from performing. I feel boxed into a tight corner but I will not remain silent.”

The role of Islam in government and society has emerged as the most divisive issue in Tunisia in the wake of the popular uprising against secular strongman Ben Ali that sparked last year’s “Arab Spring”.

No rules and no regrets for French cartoonists in Prophet Mohammad storm

Sometimes funny, often crass, always irreverent. Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical weekly that has published lewd cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad is a serial offender and proud of it.

As copies of the magazine priced at 2.50 euros ($3.25) flew off French news stands on Wednesday, its publishers insisted as always on their right to poke fun at all symbols of political and religious authority in the name of freedom of expression.

Several of the caricatures relied on drawings of genitals to mock the furor over a film made in the United States that depicts the Prophet as a lecher, confirming Charlie Hebdo’s reputation for no-limits satire.

“To me, these religious hardliners who protest and kill over a crappy film are no different to the people who made the crappy film. They’re all the same pack, a bunch of assholes,” editor Stephane Charbonnier, under police protection since printing similar caricatures last November, told Reuters.

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“Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” is first record of claim that Christ married, scholar says

Philip Pullella

Sep 19, 2012 19:57 UTC

An ancient Coptic papyrus whose scribe quotes Jesus referring to “my wife” is the first clear recorded statement of a claim that he was married, the Harvard scholar who unveiled the 1,700-year-old fragment said on Wednesday.

But Karen King, Professor at Harvard Divinity School, said the landmark discovery of the fragment still provided no definitive historical answer to the question of whether Jesus had a spouse.

“This is no silver bullet regarding that question,” King told Reuters in an interview in Rome, where she presented her findings.

The fragment, which measures 8 cm by 4 cm (3.1 by 1.6 inches) includes words in ancient Coptic in which a scribe writes: “Jesus said to them, my wife …”.

Another section of the fragment, contains the phrase “she will be able to be my disciple”.

“I think the fragment itself is discussing issues about discipleship and family. But certainly the fact that this is the first unequivocal statement we have that claims Jesus had a wife, is of great interest,” she said.

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