Islam News

Reduced sentences in cases where a person claims the murder of a woman was committed in an effort to restore honour will no longer be allowed by Jordan's courts, a state official said Saturday.

"A crime is a crime. There will be no such things as honour crimes or exemptions for those who commit such crimes, because all people are equal before the law," said Nabil Sharif, minister of state for media affairs and communication. ...

The theist club is at it again. Now they’ve hijacked the power of television. As reported recently, a Turkish television station is creating a game show that will attempt to turn atheistic infidels into pious believers. The reward for conversion: A glorious afterlife, God’s love and forgiveness and, of course, a paid trip to a religious holy site.

If the show's title, Penitents Compete, leaves the intent ambiguous, the station’s chief executive, Seyhan Soylu, has made it clear: “God is great and it doesn't matter which religion you believe in ... the important thing is to believe ...”

On the Occasion of 11th of July, 2009

This is the European Khutba, prepared by the Mufti of Bosnia, on the occasion of the 11th July that was proclaimed by EU as a Day of Remembrance on Srebrenica genocide.

Concern is growing for Christians in Egypt following another attack on the homes of Coptic Christians. And a legal battle is taking place in Egypt to overturn a court ruling which denies the right of citizens to change their religious identity on their ID cards.

Former Muslims who have become Christians and who want to change the religion shown on their ID cards have been driven into hiding, along with their families and threatened with death ...

Following are excerpts from an audio recording titled (in English) "The Beginning of the End,” by Abu Mansour Al-Amriki ("The American"), an American commander in the Al-Qaeda-linked group Shabab Al-Mujahideen. The recording, which is in English, was posted on the Internet on July 9, 2009.

In the recording, Abu Mansour responds to U.S. President Barack Obama's Cairo speech last month, telling Obama that "we cannot and shall not extend our hand - rather we shall extend to you our swords" ... "one major miscalculation that has come from Obama and his tens of speech writers is their assumptions about the goals and aspirations of Muslims - a Muslim doesn’t look to peace, security, education, work, or the love of any other number of things as his ultimate goals ..."

A family in Saudi Arabia is taking a "genie" to court, accusing it of theft and harassment, reports say.

They accuse the spirit of threatening them, throwing stones and stealing mobile phones, Al Watan newspaper said.

The family have lived in the same house near the city of Medina for 15 years but say they only recently became aware of the spirit. They have now moved out.

A local court is investigating. In Islamic theology, genies are spirits that can harass or possess humans ...

A man who stabbed a pregnant Egyptian woman to death in Germany should be punished to the utmost extent of the law, Egypt's top cleric said on Monday as the woman was buried in her hometown.

Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier offered his condolences to his Egyptian counterpart Ahmed Ali Aboul Gheit on the death of Marwa El Sherbini.

Why did coverage of the murder of a pregnant Muslim woman merely record the outrage "in the Muslim world"?

Thousands of Egyptian mourners marched behind the coffin of the "martyr of the head scarf" on Monday _ a pregnant Muslim woman who was stabbed to death in a German courtroom as her young son watched.

There is no irony in the fact that Wedad Lootah has been fighting for women’s sexual rights from behind full niqab ...

On July 1st, Marwa El Sharbini did the right thing. She was doing the right thing in the eyes of any culture that recognizes that when we all come together we cannot just “do what we want to do” but we must try to resolve things through what laws and means we have that are trying to govern all of us as a global community.

Marwa was in a Dresden court pressing charges against a German man for insulting her and her religion. Her hajib was the focus of his anger. As the court ruled in Marwa El Sharbini’s favor, serving the side of justice, the man leapt up and stabbed her to death in the courtroom.

What a loss, for Marwa was not alone, she was pregnant.

And yet…you don’t see this story much in our media. You see the brilliant reviews of the film about the Iranian woman being stoned in an isolated incident in 1986.

Because isn’t that what is more important? Yet another thing to bolster our one sided view of things…

What horrible people Muslims are, no? What a nasty faith…oops…what’s that fly in the ointment? A woman dying in a courtroom and her child with her because somebody has only seen and chosen to believe the black and white things he is being told.

What is the real meaning, the true face of Islamophobia? On July 1st, 2009, this term took on a face – the face of a young, happy Muslimah whose only crime was that she was dressed the way a Muslim lady should dress outside her home – in her hijab. By now, the story has sent shockwaves across the globe, opening people’s eyes to the stark reality and result of undue aggression and hatred towards the Muslim community.

This week, more than 100 Muslims have died and thousands more have been arrested in China. Yet not a peep of protest has been heard on the streets of Cairo, Karachi or Tehran. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, it seems, is too busy imprisoning and herding Iranian Muslims to jail to hear the outcry in Xinxiang, while Egyptian religious leader, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, has also ignored the persecution of the Uighurs. China, after all is the trusted ally of the Arab world ....

Now that President Barack Obama has reframed U.S. policy on democratic development in the Arab world, the Islamist opposition movements of the region must decide how to react ...

The Muslim Uyghurs of China are, in many ways, losers. Not just because they are a suppressed and persecuted minority suffering from economic and political marginalization, and not just because most of them live in poverty while their ancestral home is being colonized by Chinese settlers exploiting the region's natural resources.

"Barbaric!" was the spontaneous reaction of a revulsed 30-something Farahnaz Moazzam, an Islamic scholar, reacting to the April 3 video, put out by private television channels, which showed the public flogging of a woman by Taliban militants in Pakistan's troubled Swat valley ...

Residents carried their own signs Wednesday evening calling for "peace not hate" in response to a northwest Gainesville church that recently posted a sign with an anti-Islamic message.

At least 80 people gathered on both sides of Northwest 37th Street in front of the Dove World Outreach Center for a prayer vigil organized after the church recently erected a sign proclaiming "Islam is of the devil" ...

THE UNTIMELY death of Michael Jackson became international news and it has affected many people, including my children and grandchildren.

I dedicate this column to the philosophical and spiritual turmoil I felt when I heard Jackson died June 25 of an apparent cardiac arrest.

He had an extraordinary charisma, absolute innocence and a childlike charm that never left him.

As his music spread all over the world, bringing him wealth and recognition, he slowly transformed his God-given African texture and features into something else. I could never explain this part of his life to my children ...

Pity the Uighurs -- the wrong kind of minority, the wrong kind of Muslims, fighting the wrong kind of enemy.