Articles in this category were in Latest IRENICA but are now no longer current news.
WCC News, May 16, www.oikoumene.org/en/news/news-management/eng/a/browse/1/article/1634/interfaith-bible-study-fo.html
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Muslims, Christians and people of other faiths should witness together to God’s compassion in a world where too many suffer destitution and injustice, a Muslim scholar and a Christian leader agreed during an interfaith conversation and Bible study held at a 12-16 May German church convention (Kirchentag) in Munich.
Squad Mekhennet writing in the New York Times, May 15, www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/world/europe/16imam.html
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Hesham Shashaa looked twice at the display on his cellphone, staring at the number. “It’s either a person who needs help or someone who wants to kill me,” he said. Mr. Shashaa, an imam at the Darul Quran mosque in Munich, follows the strictest form of Islam, Salafi. But the people who want to kill him are Muslims. “They use the religion for their personal aims and declare war on Jews and Christians, but I want people to follow what Islam really says,” said Mr. Shashaa, who with his beard and traditional clothes has sometimes been likened to Osama bin Laden. But his philosophy is quite different.
A growing number of imams in Europe and the Middle East have denounced suicide missions and terrorist acts. Many of these imams, however, still view Al Qaeda, the Taliban or Hamas as legitimate resistance movements, while Mr. Shashaa openly declares that they are violating the tenets of Islam. A growing number of imams in Europe and the Middle East have denounced suicide missions and terrorist acts. Many of these imams, however, still view Al Qaeda, the Taliban or Hamas as legitimate resistance movements, while Mr. Shashaa openly declares that they are violating the tenets of Islam.
Tyler Olsen writing in the Delta Optimist (Canada), May 14, www.delta-optimist.com/life/Religious+conference+brings+many+faiths+together/3028151/story.html
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Forget what you see on the news or read about in the (other) papers. According to Rizwan Peerzada, faith is a unifying force, even among different religions. Peerzada’s Ahmadiyya Muslim Community will host its first World Religions Conference on Saturday at the University of the Fraser Valley’s Chilliwack Campus.
Representatives of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam will discuss the weighty question of whether there is life after death. (Organizers sought, but did not find, Jewish and atheist representatives to take part). Peerzada hopes that the free conference will show that different religions have much in common. “We want to bring that unity in the religion that yes, OK, we have the differences but we can co-exist together in spite of the differences,” he told the (Chilliwack)Times.
The Times, May 12, www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7124082.ece
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This was a day-long workshop for Muslim and Christian youth workers was held at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in London on May 15. The aim of the training day was to “dispel prejudice” and foster Christian-Muslim dialogue, said Julian Bond, director of the Christian Muslim Forum, an interfaith group devoted to fostering positive Christian Muslim relationships, which began in response to Archbishop George Carey’s call in 1997 for regular, structured meetings between members of both faiths
“There is negativity in reporting about Muslims and Christians in the media, and at times people’s ideas about other religions are shaped by the media rather than personal experience,” he said.
John Hughes writing in the Christian Science Monitor, May 13, www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/John-Hughes/2010/0513/Muslim-women-find-an-ally-for-more-rights-the-Koran
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Indonesia’s Siti Musdah Mulia is a name to remember. That’s because she is showing Muslim women how to break out of bondage by using the words of the Koran. Dr. Mulia was raised in a traditional Indonesian Muslim home and an Islamic boarding school. She was barred from contact with men. She was not allowed to laugh out loud. If she socialized with a non-Muslim, she was made to shower afterward.
Growing up, she travelled to other Muslim countries and found ways to understand Islam other than the rigid orthodoxy of her upbringing. Having earned a PhD in Islamic political thought, she has become a significant force in Indonesia and elsewhere for Muslim women’s rights. In 2007 she received the International Women of Courage award from then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Mulia is one of several courageous Muslim feminists who are challenging conservative male interpretations of Islam. As Isobel Coleman, a leading American authority on Islamic feminism and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me: “Half of those men have never read the Koran in their own language.”
Alexander Goldberg writing in The Guardian, May 11, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/11/campus-conflict-universities-middle-east
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The interfaith work I am involved with at my university is helping to push for peace and coexistence – others should follow suit. The “campus conflict” over the problems in the Middle East has been going on for almost 40 years. That’s right, 40 years. But it does not have to be that way: there is no reason why there can not or should not be a place for a discourse on the Middle East conflict without the need for conflict here in Britain.
What’s more, there needs to be a place for Jews, Muslims and Christians to build relations. The three Abrahamic faiths have much in common and do work together to build a better society. We have a shared sense of moral and social responsibility. Our common cause is to develop the societies in which we live and to ensure social justice.
Demonization and vilification is bad for community relations on campus and society at large. It does not have to be this way. In the past seven years at the University of Surrey, we have worked on a project that has seen students from different faiths plan a multi-faith centre together. This centre has a Muslim prayer hall, synagogue and gurdwara and chapel under one roof. In designing it, we have learned why different faiths have different needs: religious, dietary, social and cultural. Students have compared different ideas around ritual ablution and had to work together how to orient so many rooms eastwards (as seems to be the prayer orientation of so many of our communities). Over 1,000 students were involved in this project and most will not directly use the centre, but they did benefit from it: they learned how to work together on a complex project that aims to change societal perceptions.
Lisa Calderone-Stewart writing in US Catholic, May 10, www.uscatholic.org/blog/2010/05/interfaith-dialogue-youth-lifes-end
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I became involved with interfaith dialogue in 2001, after the events of September 11. Locally, the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee began holding adult dialogues, and over punch and donuts, I met a physician who worked with Muslim teenagers. When he found out I worked with Catholic teenagers, we both had the same idea at the same time. We said to each other in unison, “We should do something like this with young people!”
Our first event was called, “Sons and Daughters of Abraham.” It was an all-day youth forum for Muslims, Catholics, and Jews; it took almost a year of planning. Our team included 18 young people – six from each faith group. Three teenagers acted as the emcees; three teenagers each gave ten-minute presentations (with power point slides) about his or her faith – Islam, Catholicism, and Judaism; and twelve teenagers were table leaders for the participants.
Eventually, there was a call to bring in more faith groups. After a retreat, we began our current program – the Interfaith Youth Cafés. Three or four times a year, a different congregation hosts a café, and teenagers gather, discuss certain conversation questions around a theme, reconvene with their own group, and report about what they learned. At the end, the groups each take a turn saying a prayer for everyone from their own tradition. There’s something about this experience that’s quite transformational. It becomes impossible to hate an entire group of people once you have eaten and laughed and especially prayed with them.
I would dare say it’s the best way to prevent religion-based terrorism. At every café, there seems to be at least one young person who comes for the first time, admits to past prejudice, admits he or she had been so wrong about people of another faith, and is so glad to have learned so much.
(Lisa has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer)
Amira Nowaira writing in The Guardian, May 10, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/may/10/islam-freedom-expression
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Freethinking is perhaps not one of the strongest suits of modern Islam. For one thing, the list of books that have been banned for challenging prevalent religious orthodoxies and sensibilities during the past hundred years is disconcertingly long.
Modern Islamic clerics and scholars in various Muslim countries are often highly selective of which part of the Islamic heritage to emphasise and bring to light. Out of the countless and varied sources from centuries of vigorous debates, commentaries and controversies, they seem to dig out, and revel in, interpretations that are hopelessly conservative or frustratingly and grotesquely at odds with the life of modern Muslims.
It may therefore come as a surprise to many people that there is a long and vibrant intellectual tradition of dissidence and freethinking going back to the Middle Ages. The Islamic thinkers of the early medieval period expressed ideas and engaged in debates that would appear strangely enlightened in comparison with the attitudes and views adopted by modern Islamic scholarship.
Kathleen Parker writing in the Washington Post, May 9, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/07/AR2010050704065.html
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As thousands prayed across the nation on May 6 in celebration of the US National Day of Prayer, the Rev. Franklin Graham held his own vigil in the Pentagon parking lot. Oh well, it doesn’t matter where one prays, right? All prayers lead to heaven. Or do they?
Not if you’re Graham, who lost his place at the Pentagon altar after he mocked other religions, specifically Islam and Hinduism. A plea to President Obama to reinstate him apparently fell on pitiless ears. Graham’s offense was expressing his belief that only Christians have God’s ear, that Islam is evil, and that Muslims and Hindus don’t pray to the same God he does.
“No elephant with 100 arms can do anything for me,” Graham said in a USA Today interview, referring to one of the five main Hindu deities. “None of their 9,000 gods is going to lead me to salvation. We are fooling ourselves if we think we can have some big kumbaya service and all hold hands and it’s all going to get better in this world. It’s not going to get better.”
It’s not? If the whole world prays for a common good, will no good come of it? If so, then what’s the point of a National Day of Prayer? Oh ye of little faith.
Graham isn’t alone in his views. A survey of 1,000 Protestant pastors, conducted by an evangelical polling firm, found that 47 percent agree that Islam is “a very evil and a very wicked religion.” But such opinions may be confined mostly to an older generation. Evangelicals under 30 believe that there are many ways to God, not just through Jesus.
John Hooper writing in The Observer, May 9, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/09/muslim-women-italy-veil
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Veiled Muslim women have become the true upholders of western traditions of female dress, says Italy’s top imam, who angrily condemned the decision to fine a woman in Italy for wearing a veil that completely covered her features. The incident, which took place in the northern Italian town of Novara, was the first of its kind in Europe.
Izzedin Elzir, the president of the Union of Islamic Communities in Italy (UCOII) and a former fashion designer, said: “If we go and see the beautiful artistic representations of the Madonna, we see her with the veil. We don’t see her semi-naked, I think. For that reason, I believe it is the Muslims who are protecting the traditions of our country.”
