Inspired to look at the relationship between Muslims and the rest of society, photographer Marwan Bassiouni visited more than 70 mosques in the Netherlands, his adopted homeland, to create a series of landscape photographs, New Dutch Views, on show in Paris from 14 March to 10 May
Continue reading...Emmanuel Macron invites Christian who spent eight years on death row to live in country
Asia Bibi, the Pakistani Christian woman who spent eight years on death row on blasphemy charges, has filed an initial application for asylum in France and been invited to live in the country by Emmanuel Macron.
But speaking after a meeting with the French president in the Elysée palace on Friday, Bibi said she had not decided where she would settle. She was acquitted last year and granted a one-year leave of stay with her family in Canada.
Related: Asia Bibi, Pakistani accused of blasphemy, yearns to return home
Related: Asia Bibi, Pakistani accused of blasphemy, yearns to return home
Continue reading...Regular Friday prayers take place amid heightened sectarian tensions in India’s capital
Muslims in Delhi have held Friday prayers under the watch of riot police after a week in which 42 people were killed and hundreds injured during the city’s worst sectarian violence in decades.
Scores of mosques in the north-east of the Indian capital held their first sermons since mobs armed with swords, guns and acid razed parts of the district on Monday.
Related: Anti-Muslim violence in Delhi serves Modi well | Mukul Kesavan
Continue reading...The devotional singer is known to move audiences to a higher plane. Meeting her in Melbourne, Ben Eltham writes, time went ‘all bendy and loose’
Sufi superstar Abida Parveen – a giant of world music – is an arresting presence. Dressed in flowing robes and scarf, her hair a mass of handsome dark curls, she seems to carry a little bubble of grace around with her – despite being anchored by pink sneakers.
Best known for her command of the ghazal, kafi and qawwali – classic forms of Sufi music and poetry – the colossal artistic stature of Parveen in her homeland of Pakistan is hard to convey for the western reader. As Kamile Shamsie wrote in 2005, “you could find entire neighbourhoods, possibly towns, in Pakistan where the residents would be delighted to be kept up until dawn by the sound of Parveen”.
Related: Abida Parveen: 'I'm not a man or a woman, I'm a vehicle for passion'
Continue reading...As shocking as the outburst of hatred in Delhi has been, with the deadliest religious violence the capital has seen in decades, it cannot be understood either as an unforeseen eruption, nor as the ineluctable expression of centuries-old intercommunal hostility. Instead, the 24 deaths and hundreds of injuries seen as mobs set fire to mosques and businesses and invaded Muslim homes result from the slow accretion of loathing, indulged and fostered by political leaders. They are the latest step along India’s path away from its founding ideals of pluralism and equality, towards intolerance and hate.
The immediate causes of events are the fallout from Narendra Modi’s unjust Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the dangerous rhetoric employed by the ruling Bharatiya Janata party in Delhi’s city elections this month, and the mob incitement by BJP leaders like Kapil Mishra, to violently remove a group of Muslims who were blocking a road in the capital’s north-west to protest against the legislation. Scuffles quickly escalated. But it is clear that many defenceless Muslims were the primary targets and victims. Witnesses described the police simply standing by, joining crowds chanting nationalist slogans, or firing indiscriminately. BJP leaders were reportedly recorded encouraging crowds to chant “shoot the traitors” and accusing the peaceful protestors of being “rapists and murderers”. This is awful but unsurprising.
Continue reading...Since Sunday violent mobs in north-east Delhi have killed 21 people including a police constable, injured hundreds of others, burned motor vehicles, set fire to shops and homes, assaulted journalists, vandalised places of worship and destroyed a shrine.
The time-honoured convention for reporting on communal violence in India is to not name names. In news reports it is always “violent members of one religious community” attacking violent members of another. This anonymising ritual has the distorting effect of turning unequal violence into a symmetrical tug of war.
Related: How Hindu supremacists are tearing India apart
The new citizenship law provides a path to citizenship for religious minorities who have immigrated into India from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan before 31 December 2014. It explicitly lists Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians as being able to take advantage of the new provisions, excluding Muslims.
Related: India, Modi and the rise of Hindu nationalism
Continue reading...Christian woman who faced execution for blasphemy now lives in Canada
Asia Bibi, the Pakistani Christian who spent eight years on death row on blasphemy charges, has described trying to make a new life in Canada and her dreams of returning home.
While safe in Canada, which granted her a one-year stay after she was freed from jail, she has yet to taste true freedom. She does not speak either of Canada’s official languages, English or French, and is largely illiterate.
Related: Asia Bibi begins new life in Canada – but her ordeal may not be over
Continue reading...Samuel’s favourite Jewish festival is Pesach, or Passover, which commemorates the exodus of Israelites from slavery in Egypt. The 10-year-old enjoys taking part in the seder, or ritual feast, which marks the start of the holiday. “The food is nice, and we sing songs and tell stories,” he said.
This is unusual because Samuel comes from a Colombian Christian family. He and dozens of other non-Jewish children attend an orthodox Jewish school in north London, where he wears a kippah, learns Hebrew and says Jewish prayers day.
We need to expose children to different viewpoints and beliefs to prepare them to become positive global citizens
Continue reading...Ryanair boss called for racial profiling at airports in an interview with The Times
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary has said terrorists “will generally be males of a Muslim persuasion”.
The 58-year-old told the Times that families with young children should be waved through airport security because there was “virtually” zero chance of them being bombers. “Who are the bombers? They are going to be single males travelling on their own,” he said.
Continue reading...For seven decades, India has been held together by its constitution, which promises equality to all. But Narendra Modi’s BJP is remaking the nation into one where some people count as more Indian than others. By Samanth Subramanian
Soon after the violence began, on 5 January, Aamir was standing outside a residence hall in Jawaharlal Nehru University in south Delhi. Aamir, a PhD student, is Muslim, and he asked to be identified only by his first name. He had come to return a book to a classmate when he saw 50 or 60 people approaching the building. They carried metal rods, cricket bats and rocks. One swung a sledgehammer. They were yelling slogans: “Shoot the traitors to the nation!” was a common one. Later, Aamir learned that they had spent the previous half-hour assaulting a gathering of teachers and students down the road. Their faces were masked, but some were still recognisable as members of a Hindu nationalist student group that has become increasingly powerful over the past few years.
The group, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (ABVP), is the youth wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Founded 94 years ago by men who were besotted with Mussolini’s fascists, the RSS is the holding company of Hindu supremacism: of Hindutva, as it’s called. Given its role and its size, it is difficult to find an analogue for the RSS anywhere in the world. In nearly every faith, the source of conservative theology is its hierarchical, centrally organised clergy; that theology is recast into a project of religious statecraft elsewhere, by other parties. Hinduism, though, has no principal church, no single pontiff, nobody to ordain or rule. The RSS has appointed itself as both the arbiter of theological meaning and the architect of a Hindu nation-state. It has at least 4 million volunteers, who swear oaths of allegiance and take part in quasi-military drills.
Related: 'We are not safe': India's Muslims tell of wave of police brutality
Continue reading...Twelve men believed to have been planning simultaneous mass-casualty assaults
Members of a German far-right group arrested last week are believed to have been plotting “shocking” large-scale attacks on mosques similar to the ones carried out in New Zealand last year, a government spokesman has said.
Investigations into 12 men detained in police raids across Germany on Friday had indicated they planned major attacks, officials said, following weekend media reports that the group aimed to launch several simultaneous mass-casualty assaults on Muslims during prayer gatherings.
Related: German police arrest 12 over far-right plot to spark 'civil-war-like situation'
Continue reading...Judgment leaves many Muslim women without redress at end of relationship, lawyers say
Islamic faith marriages are not valid under English law, the court of appeal has ruled in a blow to thousands of Muslim women who have no rights when it comes to divorce.
The judgment, delivered on Friday, overturned an earlier high court ruling that an Islamic marriage, known as a nikah, fell within the scope of English matrimonial law.
Related: The Guardian view on Muslim marriage: one way forward | Editorial
Related: British law must recognise Muslim marriage ceremonies | Bilal Hassam
Continue reading...This powerful documentary delves into the lives of Colleen LaRose and Jamie Paul Ramirez who were involved in a plot to murder a controversial cartoonist
‘She seemed like a normal country girl.” That’s Kurt speaking, ex-boyfriend of Jihad Jane, a blond, blue-eyed woman from suburban Philadelphia, real name Colleen LaRose, convicted in 2014 of conspiracy to murder a Swedish artist who drew a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad. What emerges in this fascinating documentary, made with sensitivity by Irish film-maker Ciarán Cassidy, is that LaRose was anything but normal, after a childhood scarred by horrific abuse.
Cassidy also profiles Jamie Paul Ramirez, dubbed “Jihad Jamie”, another vulnerable woman convicted on terrorism charges in connection with the same plot. The two women became radicalised in much the same way, watching YouTube clips of Israeli air raids on Gaza with a growing sense of anger and outrage. Both joined online jihadi chatrooms where they met an Algerian man, Ali Damache, who lived in Ireland where he claimed to be the leader of a jihadist group. Separately, they flew out to join him, Ramirez bringing her six-year-old son with her. She arrived on a Sunday and married Damache the next day.
Continue reading...Schoolgirl Mila received death threats after posting anti-religious diatribe on Instagram
Emmanuel Macron has waded into a row over a schoolgirl whose attack on Islam has divided France, insisting that blasphemy is “no crime”.
The French president defended the teenager, named only as Mila, who received death threats and was forced out of her school after filming an anti-religious diatribe on social media.
Continue reading...A network of profit-driven pages fuelling anti-Islamic sentiment was exposed two months ago but is still operating
Facebook has failed to stop a coordinated far-right operation profiting from disinformation and anti-Islamic hate almost two months after it was publicly exposed.
The Guardian revealed in December that a network of Facebook’s largest far-right pages were part of a coordinated commercial enterprise that for years had been harvesting Islamophobic hate for profit, prompting promises from the social media giant that it would crack down on the network.
Related: Mark Zuckerberg: being popular is so over. It’s about winning now | Rebecca Nicholson
Related: The hate factory: inside a far-right Facebook network
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