Sunday, August 22, 2010

PRESS RELEASE
AHMADIYYA MUSLIM COMMUNITY CONDEMNS PLANS TO BURN HOLY QUR’AN IN UNITED STATES

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community condemns in the strongest terms reports that the Dove World Outreach Center, based in the United States, is planning to burn copies of the Holy Qur’an on 11 September. This would be a most provocative act and would achieve nothing but to cause distress and anger to millions of peace loving persons worldwide. Burning any religious scripture is a horrific act and is directly contrary to the teachings of all the world’s major religions.

Speaking about this issue from London, the Head of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, His Holiness, Hadhrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad said that religious extremism of all kinds had to be eradicated. He said:

“Religious extremism, be it Christian extremism, Muslim extremism or any other kind is never a true reflection of the religion. Indeed a number of churches have condemned this act. There is nothing wrong with intellectual or theological debate but this should be conducted within the bounds of decency and tolerance. Instead what we are seeing is hatred being spread.”

It is most unfortunate that some so called Muslims have tarnished Islam’s name with their cruel and hate filled acts. Those who perpetrate such acts fail to realise the true teachings of Islam. The Holy Quran was sent as a gift to mankind and its teachings are filled with love, tolerance and respect. However the evil acts of the extremist minority have led to a belief that it teaches hatred, killing and intolerance.

His Holiness continued:

“The world needs peace, love and brotherhood. The world needs an end to wars. Instead of walls of hatred being erected we need peace to prevail and for this to occur people of all faiths must join together. As I said there is nothing wrong with debates but they should take place in a peaceful and respectful environment.”

Hadhrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad also spoke with regret of the killings of two innocent Ahmadi Muslims in Sindh Province earlier this week. Dr Najam al-Hasan and Pir Habib-ur-Rehman were both martyred due to their faith. Thus the number of Ahmadi Muslims killed in Pakistan so far this year is 95.

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community expresses its hope that the Dove World Outreach Center withdraws its plans to burn copies of the Holy Qur’an. If they fail to do so then it is hoped that such an act is not allowed to take place by local authorities.

If however the event does take place the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community will conduct its protest in a peaceful and law abiding manner. Fanaticism should not be responded to in a like manner but instead in a reasoned and peaceful way.
End
Further Information:


Friday, August 20, 2010

Stand-up and Preserve Freedom of Religion

A police officer shows guns and ammunition recovered from Taliban insurgents
who storm Ahmadiyya mosque and massacred 86 worshipers. - Photo by AP
Muslim fundamentalist elements of Pakistan were so threated by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community's message of 'Love for All Hatred for None' that they brutally massacred 86 worshipers during Friday Prayer services May 28, 2010, at two mosques in Lahore. 


The attacks are the culmination of years of un-policed persecution of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, which is a minority sect in Pakistan. In 1974 government legislation was passed that declared Ahmadiyya Muslims to be 'non-Muslim' and in 1984 further legislation was passed in which the practice of their faith was outlawed. At regular intervals since then Ahmadiyya Muslims have been attacked, but the May 28th massacre is the most cruel and barbaric.  The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, who are based in 195 countries, are peace loving and tolerant people and yet they are continually targeted by extremist factions.   


In America, the opium of religious intolerance has once again addicted her right-wing Christian fundamentalist elements. Their irrational attacks on American Muslims by the GOP's leadership not only runs counter to the American ideal of religious tolerance, but poses a threat to our national security. Rants by the GOP leadership have instigated a fire storm of hatred, fear and religious bigotry from the likes of Joe, the Plumber to Mary, the Cashier. This xenophobic behavior reinforces the perception that the U.S. is obsessively anti-mosque, anti-Muslim, and anti-Islam


Christian Fundamentalism is to America what the Muslim Fundamentalist is to Pakistan. Muslim Fundamentalist in Pakistan spawned the Taliban insurgents, which massacred 86 Ahmadiyya Muslims in a fit of religious intolerance. Likewise, in America, the day will not be far off when the flames of religious intolerance incite individuals and groups of Christian zealots to murder in the name of God unless people speak out and act out against Islamophobia


America is a multicultural society; Its religious landscape is diverse and the people are encouraged to exhibit the will to frame America's future in the light of its founding principles. The principles that support freedom of religion are more relevant now than ever. The notion that America is a Christian centered nation, when viewed in the light of its religious diversity, is the thinking of theorist. In practice America strives when it rises to meet the standards of its founding principles. Its greatness rest on its ability to shape a future where its citizens have freedom of religion. We must "try real hard to understand that bumping into your neighbor’s customs and faith ought to bring you a sense of warmth, curiosity, and compassion—not fear, not revenge ..." 


Above it all we don't want America to be reduced to a Pakistan. Pakistan, a country founded on noble principles, but after 60 years its government has made it a capital crime for its religious minorities to practice their religion. 


In the words of Rabia Munawar Mir, contributing writer for the Muslim Sunrise magazine, "Pakistan is a nation in turmoil. It is a nation condemned by the international community for harboring extremists in its borders. It is a nation condemned by its citizens for being unable to provide basic public security services. It is a nation condemned by democratic standards wherein a running candidate's assassination becomes a rouse for giving power to her poorly educated husband. It is a nation condemned by human rights groups that constantly scream "wolf" loud and clear and without the fear of threat to their own lives. And though every time there is a wolf, they go unheard, ignored, their voices suppressed beneath a deluge of political excuses and administrative flaws" (Muslim Sunrise, Fall 2010, page 13). 


We can not just standby and watch this happen to America. Every American citizen has the responsibility to preserve our religious freedom and our collective dignity as a nation. 


Freedom of Religion Means Any Religion 






Monday, August 16, 2010

Shameless Schemers like Sarah Palin, the Tea Partiers and Right-Wing Christians Trying to Start a New Religious War Against Muslims CounterPunch / By David Rosen

 

The building of a Muslim community center two blocks from the site of the WTC has become the latest controversy in America's long fought religious wars.
August 15, 2010 


     Baitul Hafeez  Masjid,  ST. Louis, MO


The building of a Muslim community center in an abandoned building two blocks from the site of New York’s former World Trade Center has become the latest controversy in America’s long fought religious wars. The construction of the center, often referred to as a mosque, has become the latest rallying issue for the Christian right, Tea Party proponents and Republican operatives in their war to impose moralistic and corporatist values on America.


It is too early to know how the Muslim center issue will be resolved, but it is clear that the rantings of Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Abe Foxman (of the Anti-Defamation League) and others have played an important role pushing a local issue into the center-stage of national politics. Since the horrendous attacks of 9/11, Muslims in general and American Muslims in particular have been the targets of an undeclared religious war promoted by Christian fundamentalists and self-serving Republicans. For some among these religious zealots, Islam is a threat to their belief that the U.S. is a white Protestant nation. Over the last four centuries, Quakers, Mormons, Catholics, Jews and many others have been targets of religious persecution, often the victims of imprisonments, hangings, lynchings and other acts of violence.
Rightwing ranters might well not know the history of religious intolerance in America, but they are surely aware that they are fueling a deep-seated rage among a certain scary segment of the Christian populous. This round in the ongoing religious culture wars has yet to explode into the ugly violence that took place in the aftermath of 9/11, and one can only hope that the current controversy will not lead to attacks on Muslims.
Sadly, like the attacks that followed 9/11, rightwing ranters like Palin and Gingrich will act “shocked” by the violence if it occurs and will claim innocence as to their roles fomenting it. With a knowing sneer, they will wash their hands of the blood they have caused and seek out other innocent victims.
* * *
In an excellent article on Tomdispatch, Stephen Salisbury details the current Manhattan Muslim center controversy and the spreading anti-Muslim hysteria being whipped up around the country over the opening of new local mosques. As Salisbury opines, “The angry ‘debate’ over whether the building should exist has a kind of glitch-in-the-Matrix feel to it, leaving in its wake an aura of something-very-bad-about-to-happen.” [tomdispatch.com, August 11, 2010]
Salisbury discusses the ongoing protests against mosques also taking place in New York’s Brooklyn and Staten Island as well as in California, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee and Wisconsin. He connects these controversies to the headline-grabbing opportunist comments by Palin (in true Palin-speak, “peaceful Muslims” need to “refudiate” the center) and Gingrich (who calls on Saudi Arabia to open churches and synagogues).
He also draws attention to the pernicious role played by Rick Lazio, New York State Republican gubernatorial candidate, who assails the center as subverting the right of New Yorkers “to feel safe and be safe.” Because New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York State Attorney General (and likely Democratic gubernatorial candidate) Andrew Cuomo have come out in support of the Muslim center, it will like be a major issue in the November election.
Most importantly, Salisbury provides an invaluable overview of the anti-Muslim campaign that arose in the wake of 9/11, reminding readers just how alarmingly vicious good-old Christian love can be.
* * *
Part of the “glitch-in-the-Matrix feel” that Salisbury notes is the absence of a recognition that the current Muslin center controversy is part of a long history of religious intolerance in America.
In the days following the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush, a born-again Christian, in a spontaneous and unscripted statement blurted out the unspoken truth that guided the U.S.’s initial military counter-attack campaign in Afghanistan: "This crusade," he said, "this war on terrorism." While Bush’s admission was later repudiated and disappeared from the public discourse, it define the unstated goal of the ultra-reactionary Christians who were his core-constituency and knew full well what he meant.
At the heart of Bush’s crusade agenda was an invocation of the "shock and awe" tradition that defined religious wars since the grand crusades of the Middle Ages and an acknowledgement that they needed to be applied in Afghanistan. The grand crusades waged by the Roman Church were against Muslims and Jews to capture and hold ancient Jerusalem and the Holy Lands, and to defeat Orthodox or Eastern Christianity. Many perished. Similar, crusaders were waged against Christian heretics, including early Protestants, and done so in the name of their absolutist god.
This tradition was brought over to the New World with the Pilgrims and other early British settlers. The worst and most sustained form of religious war in America has been waged against the Native people. For all the annual whitewashing that takes place at Thanksgiving Day parades, early Puritans fought the Pequot Indians in Eastern Connecticut until 1637 when the General Courts of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Colony launched a war of extermination against them. (Native people found that the Pilgrims stunk, literally; Europeans rarely bathed, believing it unhealthy, and seldom were naked, believing it immoral.) The white Christian race and religious crusade against Native North American people persisted for centuries.
Pilgrims also imposed religious intolerance on themselves. Early Massachusetts Bay Colony settlers were aligned with the Church of England and looked badly upon those who contested their orthodoxy. Those challenging Calvinist dogma were subject to banishment, whipping, branding, ear-lobbing and even hanging. Early leaders like Thomas Hooker, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were banished. Early Quaker settlers in Plymouth were also banished and four were hung publicly.
Over the subsequent centuries, Americans have witnessed repeated bouts of religious intolerance. Not surprisingly, these episodes were often accompanied by the same shrill rhetoric we find shouted today by those opposing the Muslim center.
The Know Nothing movement grew out of the Second Great Awakening or the Great Revival of the 1830s and became the American Party that flourished during the late-‘40s and early-‘50s. It got its name when members where asked the party’s positions and simply said, "I know nothing." It drew together Protestants who felt threatened by the rapid increase in European immigrants and, most especially, Catholics, flooding the cities. It felt that Catholics, as followers of the Pope, were not loyal Americans and were going to take over the country. It had strong support in the North that witnessed large-scale Irish immigration after 1848. The American Party captured the Massachusetts legislature in 1854 and, in 1856, backed Millard Fillmore for president, who secured nearly 1 million votes, a quarter of all votes cast.
The Ku Klux Klan was established in 1866 and, during Reconstruction, began a systematic campaign against freed African Americans. However, by the ‘80s, it had lost its way as a racialist organization. It was revitalized in the wake of the Atlanta trial of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman who had been falsely charged and convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old white Christian girl, in 1913. In 1915, after the Georgia governor commuted his sentence, Frank was forcibly removed from the state penitentiary where he was being held by a mob of white Christians and lynched. Subsequently, many of those who participated in Frank’s murder came together to re-launch the Klan.
In the late-‘10s, the Klan aligned with nativists, eugenicists and the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) to not only promote temperance but racialist and anti-immigrant policies. As WWI hysteria mounted, ASL’s New York representative, William Anderson, equated being pro-German with being anti-American: German beer, saloons and breweries were the unnamed enemy. He had a deep antipathy toward Catholics, accusing the Church of mounting an “assault on law and order,” of opposing Prohibition because it was promoted by Protestants and accusing it of engaging in “efforts to destroy [the Prohibition] victory and bring back the saloons.” Anti-Catholic antipathy contributed to the defeat of the country’s first Catholic nominee, Al Smith’s, in the 1928 presidential election.
Many other episodes of religious intolerance have taken place since the ‘20s. However, John Kennedy’s 1960 presidential victory marked the moment in American history when anti-Catholic appeals in national election were no longer acceptable. Similarly, the growing acceptance among Christian evangelicals of the notion of the “last days” has lead to a weird embrace of Jews and Israel and may have contributed to a moderation in anti-Semitism.
* * *
In the days before 9/11, most informed people accepted Islam as a variant within the Abrahamic tradition. However, in the aftermath of the attacks, even this claim came under suspicion. Earlier this summer, Ron Ramsey, a Republican candidate for governor of Tennessee, claimed that Islam is a “cult” that did not deserve First Amendment protection: “You can even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, a way of life, or a cult -- whatever you want to call it... .” Challenged by a diverse assortment of Tennesseans, including traditional conservatives, Ramsey has backed off this assertion.
If truth be told, the Manhattan Muslim center is both a real issue and a fictitious spectacle. It is real in the sense that its being built at the designated site on Park Place will be a victory for religious tolerance. America is undergoing a profound economic and cultural realignment. Traditional white society is giving way to a truly multi-cultural America; conventional Protestantism is giving way a significant increase in the Catholic populous (mostly Hispanics) and growing Muslim, Hindu and Sekh communities.
The Muslim center story, like that of Michelle Obama’s holiday in Spain, is a false issue, a spectacle promoting social deception. Since Obama’s victory, the Republican right has implemented a very effective wrecking-ball strategy, attempting to destroy every issue considered. Its guiding principle is simple: Obama and the Democrats can do no right. To realize this goal, it did anything and everything in its power to make sure as little as possible got through Congress, got honestly assessed in the media and got to help ordinary Americans. Sadly, the Christian Republican right is succeeding and the Obama leadership remains clueless.
A century-and-a-half ago white Protestants came to accept Irish immigrants as white. While hard to imagine today, early Irish immigrants, those who came to America in the wake of the 1848 famine, were seen by many traditional Protestants as “n------,” not really different from African Americans. Faced with the inevitabilities of post-Civil War modernization, old-world Protestants changed. And with it, racism changed.
The challenge that faces today’s Anglo-American Protestant descendents, those who see Muslims as “n------,” is whether then can change and accept America as a multi-cultural society.