The visit to Britain of Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, from the Cordoba Initiative in New York, resonates not just with our reflections on the impending tenth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy, but with the continuing quest for interreligious understanding in a conflictual world, says Professor Hugh Goddard.
Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, the American Muslim leader, author and activist at the centre of the recent storm about plans to build an Islamic community centre near Ground Zero in New York, arrives Scotlan
In his speeches at the demonstrations of the citizens’ protest movement in the Kurdish Region of northeastern Iraq, Mullah Kamaran has called for a revolution without violence—a jihad. He has urged the armed militias to put down their guns. He appealed to the demonstrators to see the soldiers as their brothers and not throw rocks or hurt them, and has twice been arrested for his stand. Peggy Gish of Christian Peacemaker Teams reports.
The World Council of Churches has condemned religious violence and provocation in sending condolences to the UN over the recent killings in Afghanistan.
Indonesia has been urged to repeal its blasphemy laws and provide greater protection to minorities, including Christians and the Muslim Ahmadiyya sect.
Western stereotypes frequently cast Muslims as either "good" (quietist) or "bad" political, with Sufis wholly identified with the former camp, says Omid Safi. This dichotomy ignores a third group of Muslims: Those who, whether mystically inclined or not, want to neither destroy the world nor acquiesce to the wishes of the Empire, but rather seek to redeem the world by speaking truth to power.