In Texas, the Islamic Society of North America’s annual convention expects anti-fascist counter-protests
In Houston, an annual Islamic convention hosting presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Julian Castro is bracing for an armed far-right protest and a counter-demonstration.
Related: 'Tip of the iceberg': what a Nazi salute video says about Orange county
Patrick Strickland is a freelance reporter and author
Continue reading...Scientists say global heating could endanger pilgrims as soon as next summer. This must be our call to action
According to research published last week by US scientists, hajj is set to become a danger zone. As soon as next year, they say, summer days in Mecca could exceed the “extreme danger” heat-stress threshold. The news comes just weeks after over 2 million people completed their journey of a lifetime. The environmental threat to the holy pilgrimage is a panic button for British Muslims like me, signaling that the climate crisis is endangering an age-old sacred rite.
Hajj is a pillar of Islam that I’ve yet to undertake, and the physical endurance required will only become more gruelling in coming decades – scientists predict that heat and humidity levels during hajj will exceed the extreme danger threshold 20% of the time from 2045 and 2053, and 42% of the time between 2079 and 2086.
Too often 'saving the planet' is seen as something for the rich, a kind of green elitism
Related: My film is bridging cultural divides. This gives me hope in such polarised times | Sarfraz Manzoor
Continue reading...This documentary dared to do what politicians the world over would not, asking tough questions of Xi Jinping’s hardline rule
The drink Mihrigul Tursun’s captors offered her was strangely cloudy. It resembled, she said, water after washing rice. After drinking it, the young mother recalled in China: A New World Order (BBC Two), her period stopped. “It didn’t come back until five months after I left prison. So my period stopped seven months in total. Now it’s back, but it’s abnormal.”
We never learned why Tursun was detained – along with an estimated one million other Uighurs of Xinjiang province, in what the authorities euphemistically call re-education centres – but we heard clearly her claims of being tortured. “They cut off my hair and electrocuted my head,” Tursun said. “I couldn’t stand it any more. I can only say please just kill me.”
Continue reading...Richard Braine also said there are no ‘moderate Muslims’ as he is accused of stoking tension
Richard Braine, the new Ukip leader, has been accused of whipping up religious tensions and anti-Muslim prejudice after leaked emails showed he argued that people should no more want Muslims to settle in their country than Nazis.
Braine, who won the leadership after a campaign in which he expressed anti-Islam views, also suggested that non-Muslims needed to help Muslims to “cast out their demon” and argued there was no such thing as “moderate Muslims”.
Continue reading...I know it’s coming – the double-take at my face, the auxiliary taps on the keyboard, the indiscreet scribble on my boarding pass. I find myself thinking a familiar thought: thank God I came early.
On what seemed like a packed flight from London to Los Angeles – I was the only person pulled aside for “random additional security screening”.
Pushed and prodded, it can be difficult to remain patient and go the extra mile to be compliant
Related: Where is the outrage about the Tory party’s Islamophobia? | Owen Jones
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One Friday in February, I met with Ero Behrić and Alen Hebilović — two erstwhile figures in Berlin’s Balkan party scene — in a Turkish cafe on Oranienstrasse, half an hour before cuma — Friday prayers — at the Bosnian mosque on Adelbertstrasse near Kotti.
They always have cuma (Friday prayer) at 2 p.m. at the mosque, convenient for those who missed the usual noontime prayers elsewhere in the city.
Ero and Alen are Bosnians who came to Berlin from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. They threw themselves into the nightlife of Berlin with a vengeance, seeking to exorcise war traumas with large quantities of alcohol and Gypsy music, and were familiar faces in the Balkan party scene. And then, at a time when many people settle down and have families, they compensated for their extreme lifestyles by embracing Islam — the religion of their forefathers.
I knew Ero and Alen from when the Balkan wave was at its peak and both had whooped it up around the bars of Berlin in search of Gypsy music and good times. Ero was an old punk who had paraded his mohawk through the streets of suburban Zagreb at the end of the 1980s. Traumatized by his experiences while in military service in Kosovo in 1988 — he had “nightmares about flattening Albanians in his tank” — and lured by the mythos of Berlin, he came to this city in 1990, landing directly in Kreuzberg, on Oraniestrasse — “beng” — right into the cauldron.
“Berlin is the first city before Slavic Europe and there is a marked Slavic influence here,” says Ero. “And then you had Kreuzberg, with its Turkish population — this Islamic aspect. I felt immediately at home here. Actually, it’s similar to Yugoslavia in a way, to Bosnia, because you have this Slavic touch and this Islamic touch. Like what I grew up with.”
Alen Hebilović
Back then, Ero took various jobs at bars and restaurants around Berlin, waiting tables and eventually putting on parties, ultimately luring other ex-Yugoslavs like Alen, a Bosnian from Prijedor who had been interred by Serbs at the infamous Trnopolje concentration camp.
Alen made it to Germany in 1993, where he was stuck in a refugee camp in Brandenburg, took up photography and eventually escaped to Berlin, where a social worker friend gave him the key to his flat and a bit of cash.
In the 1990s, when the war was raging in Yugoslavia, Berlin teemed with Bosnian refugees (35,000, to be exact, in Berlin and Brandenburg). While the old Gastarbeiter Yugoslavs stuck to their hermetic bars, cafes and social clubs, the new arrivals — many of them young, intellectual and artistically inclined — hung around scene-bars where this or that ex-Yugoslav waited tables or worked behind the bar, promising discounted drinks.
Oxymoron was one such place, a bar in the Hackesche Höfe in Mitte, where Ero, together with Robert Soko, put on Balkan Beats parties, forerunners of the famous monthly parties presided over by Soko in Kreuzberg.
Ero says Balkan Beats was about “trumpets and getting drunk and puking. That’s what it came down to.” But in the beginning, the parties had high cultural aspirations.
“Back then the Balkan Beats parties were together with slide shows and some exhibits,” says Alen. “They weren’t just pure parties and about playing music. There was a program along with it.”
“Someone shows up and says, look, my wife sings and I play the accordion, can we do something?” says Ero. “I said, why not? The goal was to bring people together with the idea of building something up.”
Soko and Ero eventually had a falling out. Soko, taking the label “Balkan Beats” for himself, put on his Balkan parties at the Mudd club in Mitte and later at Lido with great success. Ero opened a restaurant called Nosh in Prenzlauerberg, where he put on his own Balkan parties, called Zigeunergeschäfte, where many glasses and chairs were broken and where one guest remembers there being frequent “dancing on the tables and under the tables.”
Alen became a regular figure around Kreuzberg, reveling and raising hell with the likes of Birol Ünel, the hard-drinking leading man of Fatih Akin’s “Head On” and regular Kreuzberg barfly, while taking photos of Kreuzberg gangsters.
“I had an extreme lifestyle,” says Alen. “Ero also. Every night you were carousing around, looking for kicks. Sometimes I didn’t go home for a week. And then you have to ask yourself: Where is all this leading you? One morning I woke up and decided now it’s time to stop.”
“That’s exactly how it was with me,” recalls Ero. “I remember I said to the boys, ‘I will never drink again.’ And they were all like, ‘Eh, what’s that?’ In my head, in my soul, it happened two years earlier. But I had to distance myself from other things. If you drink six gin and tonics and the next day you go to the mosque, it won’t mean anything to you. One thing had to come to an end before another thing could start. And then it came to pass. I can’t really put it into words.”
Alen remembers one particular scene: coming home drunk at 5 in the morning and running into old Turkish men who had just finished morning prayers at Mevlana mosque on Skalitzer Strasse around Kotti.
“I had to ask myself, ‘Who has the better quality life? Them or me?’ ” says Alen. “Of course, they were better off. I had great respect for the people who decided to live that way: to be clean. Reality is totally psychedelic also when you are clean. You can have fun on that trip as well. Alcohol steers you in another direction. Many things remain invisible to you because you are blinded.”
Alen looks at his watch.
“It’s time,” he says. “Time to pray.”
And the two troop off to Friday prayers down Oranienstrasse, scene of many a drunken night in a not-too-distant past.
>Featured image courtesy of Alen Hebilović.
The post Two Muslim Reverts appeared first on The Islamic Monthly.
Once an obscure idea confined to the darker corners of the internet, the anti-Islam ideology is now visible in the everyday politics of the west. How did this happen? By Andrew Brown
In July 2011, a quiet European capital was shaken by a terrorist car bomb, followed by confused reports suggesting many deaths. When the first news of the murders came through, one small group of online commentators reacted immediately, even though the media had cautiously declined to identify the attackers. They knew at once what had happened – and who was to blame.
“This was inevitable,” explained one of the anonymous commenters. And it was just the beginning: “Only a matter of time before other European nations get a taste of their multicultural tolerance that they’ve been cooking for decades.”
Continue reading...I haven’t been able to hear the voices of my parents for more than a week now. We usually talk or exchange messages a few times during the day, mostly about their creeping health issues or about my children’s latest antics here in London. But now, not a peep. It’s because, like all Kashmiris, they’re under siege, experiencing the worst crackdown in three decades, imposed by the Indian government as it revoked the region’s autonomy by abrogating article 370 of the constitution.
Related: Why Modi’s Kashmir coup threatens India’s democracy
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Continue reading...Zamzam Ibrahim calls for the government’s Prevent strategy to be scrapped
The new president of the National Union of Students (NUS) has called for the government’s Prevent anti-radicalisation strategy to be scrapped and has urged universities to do more to tackle the black attainment gap and racism on campus.
In her first interview since taking up office last month, Zamzam Ibrahim said she had seen the impact of Prevent in universities first-hand, with events being cancelled and students being referred because of membership of the Palestinian or Islamic societies.
Continue reading...Malaysia’s Nor Diana, 19, says she becomes transformed in the ring, ready to take on her opponent – and conservative Islamic critics
Nor Diana can remember vividly the first time she stepped out to make her wrestling debut. Outside the ropes she had always been a quiet and studious hijab-wearing Malaysian woman, but here in the ring, dressed in black leather embossed with flames and as the crowd roared, she suddenly felt like a fire burst from inside her: here she was Phoenix.
Nor, who last month won Malaysia’s biggest wrestling tournament – defeating four men for the title – cuts an unlikely figure for a pro wrestler. A 19-year-old who is just 152cm (5ft) tall and weighs 43kg (94lbs), she speaks softly as she sits in her training centre in the town of Puchong, close to Kuala Lumpur, dressed in her hijab, wide glasses and floral baju kurung, traditional Malaysian dress.
Continue reading...The broadcaster edited the documentary due to be shown on BBC One on Monday night
The BBC has apologised and edited a Panorama documentary presented by Stacey Dooley after she inadvertently described a Muslim prayer sign as a terrorist salute.
Stacey Meets the IS Brides, which is due to be shown on BBC One on Monday night, features the presenter travelling to camps in Syria to meet women who left their own countries to join Islamic State.
Continue reading...Radical move to split state follows security crackdown and detention of politicians
India will attempt to withdraw the special status of the disputed territory of Kashmir, a decades-long demand of Hindu nationalists, and split the state in two – a dramatic move likely to face resistance in the Muslim-majority state and escalate tensions with Pakistan.
The proposal is the most radical change any government has suggested for Kashmir’s status since the region was granted autonomy in exchange for joining the Indian union after independence in 1947.
Continue reading...After Christchurch and El Paso we need an open discussion – without euphemisms and evasions – about what fascism is and how it works
“In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.”
That’s how the man accused of shooting at least 20 people in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, began the document he posted on 8chan.
Related: 175 people killed worldwide in last eight years in white nationalist-linked attacks
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Jeff Sparrow’s forthcoming book Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch massacre is published by Scribe.
Continue reading...Police and transport companies ignore ban on its first day in law, rendering it largely unworkable
The Netherlands’ “burqa ban” has been rendered largely unworkable on its first day in law after both the police and Dutch transport companies signalled an unwillingness to enforce it.
Under the terms of the Partial Ban on Face-Covering Clothing Act the wearing of ski masks, full-face helmets, balaclavas, niqabs and burqas is prohibited in public buildings, including schools and hospitals, and on public transport.
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