Islam

Far-right AfD says Islam not welcome in Germany

May 2, 2016 by Nasheman

Religion not compatible with constitution, says anti-immigration party which also proposes banning minarets and burqas.

Anti-immigration parties which regard Islam unwelcome in Germany have been buoyed by Europe’s refugee crisis [Reuters]

by Al Jazeera

Members of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) have backed an election manifesto that says Islam is not compatible with the constitution.

Delegates at the party’s conference on Sunday also supported a call to ban minarets on mosques and the burqa.

Set up three years ago, the AfD has been buoyed by Europe’s refugee crisis, which saw the arrival of more than one million, mostly Muslims, in Germany last year.

The party has no MPs in the federal parliament in Berlin but has members in half of Germany’s 16 regional state assemblies.

Opinion polls give AfD support of up to 14 percent, presenting a serious challenge to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives and other established parties in the lead-up to the 2017 federal election.

Most mainstream parties have ruled out any coalition with the AfD.

‘Islamic symbols’

In a noisy debate on the second day of a party congress, many of the 2,000 members cheered calls from the podium for measures against “Islamic symbols of power” and jeered a plea for dialogue with Germany’s Muslims.

“Islam is foreign to us and for that reason it cannot invoke the principle of religious freedom to the same degree as Christianity,” said Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, an AfD lawmaker from the state of Saxony-Anhalt, to loud applause.

Merkel has said freedom of religion for all is guaranteed by Germany’s constitution and has said on many occasions that Islam belongs to Germany.

Up to 2,000 leftwing demonstrators clashed with police on Saturday as they tried to break up the first full AfD conference.

About 500 people were briefly detained and 10 police officers were lightly injured, a police spokesman said.

The chapter of the AfD manifesto concerning Muslims is entitled “Islam is not a part of Germany”.

The manifesto demands a ban to minarets, the towers of a mosque from where the call to Muslim prayer is made, and the burqa, the all-encompassing body garment worn by some conservative Muslim women.

Germany is home to nearly four million Muslims, about five percent of the total population.

Many of the longer established Muslim community in Germany came from Turkey to find work, but those who have arrived over the past year have mostly been fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last month the head of Germany’s Central Council of Muslims compared the AfD’s attitude towards his community to that of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis towards the Jews.

US: More Latinos converting to Islam

January 1, 2016 by Nasheman

by Aaron Morrison, IB Times

By most official measures, Latinos in the U.S. are considered to be the fastest-growing demographic. They are also the fastest-growing group of Muslims in America, according to organizations that cater to Hispanics converting to Islam. Although the statistics haven’t been widely tracked, there are an estimated 150,000 Islam converts among the Latino community in the U.S., reported the Press-Enterprise, a California newspaper.

The trend of Hispanic converts to Islam has been tracked by the Islamic Society of North America, which in 2006 estimated there were roughly 40,000 Latino Muslims in the U.S., according to a report by National Public Radio. Some community leaders said the recent growth of the demographic has its roots in a shared experience of immigration and the negative political rhetoric that advocates have deemed as anti-Muslim.

Mark Gonzales, a Muslim poet and artist in California, told the Orange County Register that immigration officials’ targeting of Mexicans and Muslims after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks helped the two demographics find common ground. “Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world, and Latinos are converting to Islam at a rate higher than any other [ethnicity],” said Gonzalez, who is of Mexican-American and French-American heritage and converted to Islam 12 years ago.

Most Latino Americans belong to the Roman Catholic Church, according to religion data tracked by the Pew Research Center. But the Catholic share of the Latino population has declined, while the number of Latinos who are Protestant or report no religious affiliation has risen.

Jihad Turk, president of Bayan Claremont, an Islamic graduate school in California, told the Press-Enterprise that Islam is most similar to Catholic beliefs. Muslims believe in many stories contained in the Christian Bible, including the prophets, he said.

“Muslims not only believe in God and the Ten Commandments, but also in Jesus as Christ born to the Virgin Mary and her story is told in the Quran in more detail than it’s told in the Bible,” Turk said. Organizations have formed in the U.S. to help the merging of Latino and Muslim communities.

Rida Hamida, president of the Arab American Chamber of Commerce in Orange County, California, has been working with Latino Muslims to highlight the merging of cultures. A series of public events scheduled for next month will focus on a time of Muslim rule in Spain and Portugal, from 711 and 1492, when Muslims, Christians and Jews cohabited along the Iberian Peninsula, Hamida told the Orange County Register.

Clashes force 5,000 to flee after beheading in CAR

August 28, 2015 by Nasheman

Fresh violence in central town of Bambari comes ahead of planned presidential elections next month.

Over the past five months, thousands have been returning to CAR as the situation was seen to be improving [Getty]

by Azad Essa, Al Jazeera

Around 5,000 people have fled from their homes in Bambari following clashes between rival militias over the past few days, demonstrating how fragile the situation in the Central African Republic (CAR) remains ahead of next month’s presidential election, the UN refugee agency has said.

The latest flare-up in Bambari erupted after a 19-year-old Muslim was beheaded by fighters on August 20, according to the UNHCR.

In a town hit hard by violence, the new set of clashes around Bambari prompted the escape of almost 5,000 people in recent days, seeking shelter at the UN’s nearby base.

“We cannot say the country is at peace – because the events in Bambari show how fragile the situation remains,” Dalia al-Achi, spokesperson for the UNHCR, told Al Jazeera on Friday.

“They are living in a [former] cotton factory [at the UN base] where there is no sanitation, lights or any infrastructure. It is not fit for living,” she said.

On Friday, Diane Corner, deputy Special Representative of the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA), said in a tweet that 5,000 people had been displaced and that the protection of civilians remained the mission’s top priority.

With just over a month left before presidential elections are held in the country, experts are not convinced the country would be able to host credible polls.

More than one million people have been displaced since Muslim-led Seleka rebels took the capital, Bangui, in March 2013.

Following a spate of abuses by the Seleka, vigilante groups known as anti-Balaka (anti-machete), made up of animist and Christian fighters, emerged to fight off the new leadership.

They also targeted the country’s Muslim minority, seen as sympathetic to the Seleka.

The country has been run by a transitional government since January 2014, after the Seleka were forced out of the capital.

Over the past five months, thousands have been returning to CAR as the situation in the country was seen to be improving, but the recent violence is likely to undo a lot of the efforts being put into rebuilding the nation.

“More than half the districts of the Central African Republic continue to be controlled by the Seleka coalition and its allies, who have not allowed a return of the national administration to the areas they control,” Peter Bouckaert, emergency director at Human Rights Watch, said.

Bouckaert told Al Jazeera that the bloodshed may have reduced over the last twelve months, but attributed the drop in violence to the fact that most Muslims had been “forced to flee [and] not because the war is over”.

Bouckaert said that despite the obvious weaknesses of hosting presidential polls under the current conditions, the EU and France continue to push for the elections.

“The danger is that they see a quick and flawed election as an excuse to once again abandon the Central African Republic, with a claim that the country will then have made a ‘democratic transition’,” Bouckaert said.

“A very large percentage of the population, particularly Muslims living in refugee camps in Chad and Cameroon, but also many rural people, have not even been registered to vote yet, and preparation for a national vote has been minimal,” he said.

The UN says more than half the country’s population are still in need of aid, while 1.5 million people were affected by food insecurity.

In early August, the UN said that only 31 percent of the humanitarian appeal for the CAR had been secured. Aurelien Agbenonci, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in CAR, told Al Jazeera at the time that if more support was not forthcoming, the UN “won’t be able to continue humanitarian activities till the end of the year”.

Islamic declaration blasts short-sighted Capitalism, demands action on climate

August 19, 2015 by Nasheman

Ahead of UN summit in Paris, new document presents the moral case for Muslims and people of all faiths worldwide to mobilize against fossil fuel addiction and global warming

Released during an international symposium in Istanbul, the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change is signed by 60 Muslim scholars and leaders of the faith who acknowledge that—despite the short-term economics benefits of oil, coal, and gas—humanity’s use of fossil fuels is the main cause of global warming which increasingly threatens “a functioning climate, healthy air to breathe, regular seasons, and living oceans.” (Photo: JohnED76/flickr/cc with overlay)

by Jon Queally, Common Dreams

Just as scientists announced July was the hottest month in recorded history, and ahead of a major climate summit in Paris later this year, an international group of Islamic leaders on Tuesday released a public declaration calling on the religion’s 1.6 billion followers to engage on the issue of global warming and take bold action to stem its worst impacts.

Released during an international symposium taking place in Istanbul, the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change is signed by 60 Muslim scholars and leaders of the faith who acknowledge that—despite the short-term economic benefits of oil, coal, and gas—humanity’s use of fossil fuels is the main cause of global warming which increasingly threatens “a functioning climate, healthy air to breathe, regular seasons, and living oceans.”

The declaration states there is deep irony that humanity’s “unwise and short-sighted use of these resources is now resulting in the destruction of the very conditions that have made our life on earth possible.”

“Our attitude to these gifts has been short-sighted, and we have abused them,” it continues. “What will future generations say of us, who leave them a degraded planet as our legacy? How will we face our Lord and Creator?”

The declaration by the Muslim leaders follows the widely lauded encyclical released by Pope Francis, leader of the Roman Catholic Church, earlier this summer in which he called for a drastic transformation of the world’s economies and energy systems in order to stave off the worst impacts of an increasingly hotter planet. Additionally, hundreds of Jewish Rabbis also released a Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis and dozens of other denominations and churches have joined the global movement to divest their financial holdings from the fossil fuel industry.

Fazlun Khalid, founder of the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences and a signatory to the declaration, said the unified statement “is the work of world renowned Islamic environmentalists” and that its goal is to trigger richer dialogue and further action. Khalid said he would be happy if other people adopt or improve upon the ideas contained within the document.

As with the papal encyclical, the Muslim scholars take special note of how global capitalism—namely the “relentless pursuit of economic growth and consumption”—has fostered an energy paradigm that now threatens the sustainability of living systems and human society.

With a focus on the upcoming Conference of Parties (COP21) talks in Paris, the declaration urges leaders to forge an “equitable and binding” agreement and called on all nations to:

Aim to phase out greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible in order to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere;
Commit themselves to 100 % renewable energy and/or a zero emissions strategy as early as possible, to mitigate the environmental impact of their activities;
Invest in decentralized renewable energy, which is the best way to reduce poverty and achieve sustainable development;
Realize that to chase after unlimited economic growth in a planet that is finite and already overloaded is not viable. Growth must be pursued wisely and in moderation; placing a priority on increasing the resilience of all, and especially the most vulnerable, to the climate change impacts already underway and expected to continue for many years to come.
Set in motion a fresh model of wellbeing, based on an alternative to the current financial model which depletes resources, degrades the environment, and deepens inequality.
Prioritise adaptation efforts with appropriate support to the vulnerable countries with the least capacity to adapt. And to vulnerable groups, including indigenous peoples, women and children.

When it comes to wealthier nations and the oil-rich states of the world, the declaration called on them to specifically:

Lead the way in phasing out their greenhouse gas emissions as early as possible and no later than the middle of the century;
Provide generous financial and technical support to the less well-off to achieve a phase-out of greenhouse gases as early as possible;
Recognize the moral obligation to reduce consumption so that the poor may benefit from what is left of the earth’s non-renewable resources;
Stay within the ‘2 degree’ limit, or, preferably, within the ‘1.5 degree’ limit, bearing in mind that two-thirds of the earth’s proven fossil fuel reserves remain in the ground;
Re-focus their concerns from unethical profit from the environment, to that of preserving it and elevating the condition of the world’s poor.
Invest in the creation of a green economy.

Additionally, focusing on the corporate sector and business interests who profit most from exploitative activities and the current burning of fossil fuels, the declaration argues those institutions to:

Shoulder the consequences of their profit-making activities, and take a visibly more active role in reducing their carbon footprint and other forms of impact upon the natural environment;
In order to mitigate the environmental impact of their activities, commit themselves to 100 % renewable energy and/or a zero emissions strategy as early as possible and shift investments into renewable energy;
Change from the current business model which is based on an unsustainable escalating economy, and to adopt a circular economy that is wholly sustainable;
Pay more heed to social and ecological responsibilities, particularly to the extent that they extract and utilize scarce resources;
Assist in the divestment from the fossil fuel driven economy and the scaling up of renewable energy and other ecological alternatives.

Such a rounded and full-throated declaration was met with applause by climate campaigners, anti-poverty advocates, and social justice voices from around the world.

“Today’s declaration is an unprecedented call by Muslim leaders to end the destruction of Earth’s resources,” stated Lies Craeynest, the food and climate justice director for Oxfam International. “Muslim leaders single out wealthy nations and oil producing states to lead on a fossil fuel phase out and provide support to those less well off to curb emissions and adapt to a changing climate. They also call on big business to stop their relentless pursuit of growth, change their extractive models and provide greater benefits for people and the climate.”

Referring to Pope Francis’ earlier declaration, Craeynest acknowledged the vital importance of religious leaders taking such bold and powerful stances. “As leaders of the two largest global faiths express grave concern about our fragile climate, there is no justifiable way political leaders can put the interests of the fossil fuel industry above of the needs of people, particularly the poorest, and of our planet.”

Wael Hmaidan, international director of the Climate Action Network, called the declaration a potential game changer and said, “Civil society is delighted by this powerful Climate Declaration coming from the Islamic community as it challenges all world leaders, and especially oil producing nations, to phase out their carbon emissions and supports the just transition to 100% renewable energy as a necessity to tackle climate change, reduce poverty and deliver sustainable development around the world.”

Celebrating the growing call among faith communities and religious scholars for bold climate action, Hoda Baraka, the global communications director for the climate action group 350.org, said the Islamic declaration reveals the important ways in which international consensus is solidifying across cultures. “With the end of the fossil fuel era approaching,” declared Baraka, “we have a moral responsibility to expedite the transition to clean energy protecting those most impacted from the climate crisis. The declaration’s call for divestment reinforces the moral impetus behind the fast-growing movement to divest from fossil fuels and helps expand its reach in faith communities around the world.”

Speaking for the UN climate body, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres also welcomed the declaration.

“A clean energy, sustainable future for everyone ultimately rests on a fundamental shift in the understanding of how we value the environment and each other,” Figueres said. “Islam’s teachings, which emphasize the duty of humans as stewards of the Earth and the teacher’s role as an appointed guide to correct behavior, provide guidance to take the right action on climate change.”

Muslims being ‘erased’ from Central African Republic

July 31, 2015 by Nasheman

Amnesty International says Muslims living in rural areas especially targeted as militias undertake “ethnic cleansing”.

by Azad Essa, Al Jazeera

Militias have taken advantage of the political vacuum in Central African Republic (CAR), engaging in ethnic cleansing of Muslims in a bid to erase the community from the country, human rights group Amnesty International has said.

Discussing Friday’s report, entitled “Erased identity: Muslims in ethnically cleansed areas of the Central African Republic,” Joanne Mariner, a senior crisis response adviser at the UK-based organisation, told Al Jazeera that Muslims in the western half of the country were being repressed and forced to abandon their religion.

More than 30,000 Muslims are living in seven enclaves, guarded by UN troops, across the country, but for those living outside, especially in rural areas, they are being targeted with impunity, the report found.

“They not allowed to express themselves as Muslims; if they are outside the enclaves, they cannot pray, dress in any way that identifies them as Muslim,” Mariner said.

“Their survival depends on a daily routine of negotiation with anti-Balaka fighters.”

Mariner said that many had been forced convert to Christianity or face persecution from the community

‘Failed state’

More than one million people have been displaced since Muslim-led Seleka rebels took control of Bangui, the capital, in March 2013.

Following a spate of abuses by the Seleka rebels, vigilante groups known as anti-Balaka (anti-machete) emerged to fight off the new leadership.

But the anti-Balaka, made up of animist and Christian fighters, also targeted the country’s Muslim minority, seen as sympathetic to the Seleka.

Amnesty’s report, based on a series of interviews with residents across CAR, says militias “unleashed a violent wave of ethnic cleansing aimed at forcing Muslims to leave the country”.

“The continued insecurity and threat from the anti-Balaka comes from there being an absence of a state,” Mariner said.

Though violence in CAR has tapered off since late 2014, the country remains largely insecure.

The collapse of the state apparatus and the fragility of the transitional government have left parts of the country to the mercy of militia groups in the hinterlands.

Concerns remain that despite the perceived calm, the root causes of the crisis have yet to be addressed.

Amnesty’s report comes just days after the International Rescue Committee said CAR “needs a new start, or it will become the case study of a failed state”.

Destruction of mosques

In April, a US envoy said that almost all of the 436 mosques in CAR have been destroyed in the violence. Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN, called the devastation “kind of crazy, chilling”.

Amnesty said in Friday’s report that none of the mosques outside Bangui, and the town of Carnot, have been repaired or rebuilt.

One of the “clearest signs of the intensity of sectarian animus was the destruction of the country’s mosques”, the organisation said.

More than 6,000 people have been killed since the crisis began in March 2013.

“The key challenge is a lack of security. The government understands they have a long way to go [but] they need to be able to assert control over these far flung areas,” Mariner said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said this week that more than 1,000 people were still looking for their loved ones, a year after after being separated from them during the wave of violence.

“In this part of the country, very few families have been spared the pain and uncertainty of being separated from loved ones,” Scott Doucet, head of the ICRC sub-delegation for the west of the country, said.

The UN says that that 2.7 million people, more than half the population, are still in need of aid, while 1.5 million people were affected by food insecurity.

The global body’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says humanitarian needs continue to exceed resources available.

Meanwhile Doctors without Borders (MSF) has previously described the country to be in a state of a protracted chronic health emergency.

CAR has been led by a transitional government since January 2014. The country is scheduled to hold presidential and parliamentary elections on October 18.

Muslim inventions shaped the modern world: CNN Report

July 23, 2015 by Nasheman

by Olivia Sterns, CNN

London: Think of the origins of that staple of modern life, the cup of coffee, and Italy often springs to mind.

But in fact, Yemen is where the ubiquitous brew has its true origins.

Along with the first university, and even the toothbrush, it is among surprising Muslim inventions that have shaped the world we live in today.

The origins of these fundamental ideas and objects — the basis of everything from the bicycle to musical scales — are the focus of “1001 Inventions,” a book celebrating “the forgotten” history of 1,000 years of Muslim heritage.

“There’s a hole in our knowledge, we leap frog from the Renaissance to the Greeks,” professor Salim al-Hassani, Chairman of the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation, and editor of the book told CNN.

“1001 Inventions” is now an exhibition at London’s Science Museum. Hassani hopes the exhibition will highlight the contributions of non-Western cultures — like the Muslim empire that once covered Spain and Portugal, Southern Italy and stretched as far as parts of China — to present day civilization.

Here Hassani shares his top 10 outstanding Muslim inventions:

1. Surgery

Around the year 1,000, the celebrated doctor Al Zahrawi published a 1,500 page illustrated encyclopedia of surgery that was used in Europe as a medical reference for the next 500 years. Among his many inventions, Zahrawi discovered the use of dissolving cat gut to stitch wounds — beforehand a second surgery had to be performed to remove sutures. He also reportedly performed the first caesarean operation and created the first pair of forceps.

2. Coffee

Now the Western world’s drink du jour, coffee was first brewed in Yemen around the 9th century. In its earliest days, coffee helped Sufis stay up during late nights of devotion. Later brought to Cairo by a group of students, the coffee buzz soon caught on around the empire. By the 13th century it reached Turkey, but not until the 16th century did the beans start boiling in Europe, brought to Italy by a Venetian trader.

3. Flying machine

“Abbas ibn Firnas was the first person to make a real attempt to construct a flying machine and fly,” said Hassani. In the 9th century he designed a winged apparatus, roughly resembling a bird costume. In his most famous trial near Cordoba in Spain, Firnas flew upward for a few moments, before falling to the ground and partially breaking his back. His designs would undoubtedly have been an inspiration for famed Italian artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci’s hundreds of years later, said Hassani.

4. University

In 859 a young princess named Fatima al-Firhi founded the first degree-granting university in Fez, Morocco. Her sister Miriam founded an adjacent mosque and together the complex became the al-Qarawiyyin Mosque and University. Still operating almost 1,200 years later, Hassani says he hopes the center will remind people that learning is at the core of the Islamic tradition and that the story of the al-Firhi sisters will inspire young Muslim women around the world today.

5. Algebra

The word algebra comes from the title of a Persian mathematician’s famous 9th century treatise “Kitab al-Jabr Wa l-Mugabala” which translates roughly as “The Book of Reasoning and Balancing.” Built on the roots of Greek and Hindu systems, the new algebraic order was a unifying system for rational numbers, irrational numbers and geometrical magnitudes. The same mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi, was also the first to introduce the concept of raising a number to a power.

6. Optics

“Many of the most important advances in the study of optics come from the Muslim world,” says Hassani. Around the year 1000 Ibn al-Haitham proved that humans see objects by light reflecting off of them and entering the eye, dismissing Euclid and Ptolemy’s theories that light was emitted from the eye itself. This great Muslim physicist also discovered the camera obscura phenomenon, which explains how the eye sees images upright due to the connection between the optic nerve and the brain.

7. Music

Muslim musicians have had a profound impact on Europe, dating back to Charlemagne tried to compete with the music of Baghdad and Cordoba, according to Hassani. Among many instruments that arrived in Europe through the Middle East are the lute and the rahab, an ancestor of the violin. Modern musical scales are also said to derive from the Arabic alphabet.

8. Toothbrush

According to Hassani, the Prophet Mohammed popularized the use of the first toothbrush in around 600. Using a twig from the Meswak tree, he cleaned his teeth and freshened his breath. Substances similar to Meswak are used in modern toothpaste.

9. The crank

Many of the basics of modern automatics were first put to use in the Muslim world, including the revolutionary crank-connecting rod system. By converting rotary motion to linear motion, the crank enables the lifting of heavy objects with relative ease. This technology, discovered by Al-Jazari in the 12th century, exploded across the globe, leading to everything from the bicycle to the internal combustion engine.

10. Hospitals

“Hospitals as we know them today, with wards and teaching centers, come from 9th century Egypt,” explained Hassani. The first such medical center was the Ahmad ibn Tulun Hospital, founded in 872 in Cairo. Tulun hospital provided free care for anyone who needed it — a policy based on the Muslim tradition of caring for all who are sick. From Cairo, such hospitals spread around the Muslim world.

For more information on muslim inventions go to: muslimheritage.com.

Fragments of what could be world’s oldest Quran have been found in the U.K.

July 22, 2015 by Nasheman

The university’s academics were “startled” when the radiocarbon dating tests showed it was so old.

by Sean Coughlan, BBC

What may be the world’s oldest fragments of the Koran have been found by the University of Birmingham.

Radiocarbon dating found the manuscript to be at least 1,370 years old, making it among the earliest in existence.

The pages of the Muslim holy text had remained unrecognised in the university library for almost a century.

The British Library’s expert on such manuscripts, Dr Muhammad Isa Waley, said this “exciting discovery” would make Muslims “rejoice”.

The manuscript had been kept with a collection of other Middle Eastern books and documents, without being identified as one of the oldest fragments of the Koran in the world.

Oldest texts

When a PhD researcher, Alba Fedeli, looked more closely at these pages it was decided to carry out a radiocarbon dating test and the results were “startling”.

The university’s director of special collections, Susan Worrall, said researchers had not expected “in our wildest dreams” that it would be so old.

“Finding out we had one of the oldest fragments of the Koran in the whole world has been fantastically exciting.”

The University of Birmingham’s manuscript was in a collection brought back from the Middle East

The tests, carried out by the Oxford University Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, showed that the fragments, written on sheep or goat skin, were among the very oldest surviving texts of the Koran.

These tests provide a range of dates, showing that, with a probability of more than 95%, the parchment was from between 568 and 645.

“They could well take us back to within a few years of the actual founding of Islam,” said David Thomas, the university’s professor of Christianity and Islam.

“According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet Muhammad received the revelations that form the Koran, the scripture of Islam, between the years 610 and 632, the year of his death.”

Prof Thomas says the dating of the Birmingham folios would mean it was quite possible that the person who had written them would have been alive at the time of the Prophet Muhammad.

“The person who actually wrote it could well have known the Prophet Muhammad. He would have seen him probably, he would maybe have heard him preach. He may have known him personally – and that really is quite a thought to conjure with,” he says.

First-hand witness

Prof Thomas says that some of the passages of the Koran were written down on parchment, stone, palm leaves and the shoulder blades of camels – and a final version, collected in book form, was completed in about 650.

Prof Thomas says the writer of this manuscript could have heard the Prophet Muhammad preach

He says that “the parts of the Koran that are written on this parchment can, with a degree of confidence, be dated to less than two decades after Muhammad’s death”.

“These portions must have been in a form that is very close to the form of the Koran read today, supporting the view that the text has undergone little or no alteration and that it can be dated to a point very close to the time it was believed to be revealed.”

Susan Worrall says the university wants to put this internationally significant discovery on public display

The manuscript, written in “Hijazi script”, an early form of written Arabic, becomes one of the oldest known fragments of the Koran.

Because radiocarbon dating creates a range of possible ages, there is a handful of other manuscripts in public and private collections which overlap. So this makes it impossible to say that any is definitively the oldest.

But the latest possible date of the Birmingham discovery – 645 – would put it among the very oldest.

‘Precious survivor’

Dr Waley, curator for such manuscripts at the British Library, said “these two folios, in a beautiful and surprisingly legible Hijazi hand, almost certainly date from the time of the first three caliphs”.

The first three caliphs were leaders in the Muslim community between about 632 and 656.

Dr Waley says that under the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, copies of the “definitive edition” were distributed.

“The Muslim community was not wealthy enough to stockpile animal skins for decades, and to produce a complete Mushaf, or copy, of the Holy Koran required a great many of them.”

Dr Waley suggests that the manuscript found by Birmingham is a “precious survivor” of a copy from that era or could be even earlier.

“In any case, this – along with the sheer beauty of the content and the surprisingly clear Hijazi script – is news to rejoice Muslim hearts.”

Muhammad Afzal of Birmingham Central Mosque said he was very moved to see the manuscript

The manuscript is part of the Mingana Collection of more than 3,000 Middle Eastern documents gathered in the 1920s by Alphonse Mingana, a Chaldean priest born near Mosul in modern-day Iraq.

He was sponsored to take collecting trips to the Middle East by Edward Cadbury, who was part of the chocolate-making dynasty.

The local Muslim community has already expressed its delight at the discovery in their city and the university says the manuscript will be put on public display.

“When I saw these pages I was very moved. There were tears of joy and emotion in my eyes. And I’m sure people from all over the UK will come to Birmingham to have a glimpse of these pages,” said Muhammad Afzal, chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque.

The university says the Koran fragments will go on display in the Barber Institute in Birmingham in October.

Prof Thomas says it will show people in Birmingham that they have a “treasure that is second to none”.

Ramadan fasting ban: China Uighur Muslims forced to skip fasting during Holy Month

June 17, 2015 by Nasheman

by Mugdha Variyar, IBT

China is reportedly forcing officials in the restive Xinjiang region to swear that they will not fast during the holy month of Ramadan, which begins on Thursday.

Xinjiang is home to Uighur Muslims, and China has cracked down on the region ever since Islamist militants carried out deadly terror attacks in the recent years.

In continuation of last year’s ‘ban’ on Ramadan fasting, state websites have been putting up notices asking officials and civil servants, and even students and teachers, to not observe Ramadan, according to Reuters.

In some particularly restive counties in Xinjiang, officials have been asked to give assurances, orally and in writing, “guaranteeing they have no faith, will not attend religious activities and will lead the way in not fasting over Ramadan”, Reuters reported citing state media.

Ramadan is the holiest month of the year for Muslims around the world, which involves fasting from dawn to dusk and offering prayers and reading the Quran over 30 days.

Apart from a ‘ban’ on fasting, China is also stoking religious sentiments by ordering halal restaurants to remain open during the day in the Jinghe county, while also ordering shops to continue selling cigarettes and alcohol.

China’s clampdown on the month of Ramadan in the restive region is being seen as a provocation for more unrest in the region.

“China is increasing its bans and monitoring as Ramadan approaches. The faith of the Uighurs has been highly politicized, and the increase in controls could cause sharp resistance,” Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the exiled Uighur group, the World Uyghur Congress, was quoted saying.

China already ruffled feathers by imposing a ban on burqas in Xinjiang’s capital of Urumqi in December last year.

Around 20 million Muslims live in China, with eight million Uighur Muslims, who speak Turkish, concentrated in the Xinjiang region in the country’s northwest.

China orders Muslim shopkeepers to sell alcohol, cigarettes, to ‘weaken’ Islam

May 19, 2015 by Nasheman

This photo taken on April 16, 2015 shows Uighur men praying in a mosque in Hotan, in China’s western Xinjiang region. (Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images)

by Simon Denyer, The Washington Post

Chinese authorities have ordered Muslim shopkeepers and restaurant owners in a village in its troubled Xinjiang region to sell alcohol and cigarettes, and promote them in “eye-catching displays,” in an attempt to undermine Islam’s hold on local residents, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported. Establishments that failed to comply were threatened with closure and their owners with prosecution.

Facing widespread discontent over its repressive rule in the mainly Muslim province of Xinjiang, and mounting violence in the past two years, China has launched a series of “strike hard” campaigns to weaken the hold of Islam in the western region. Government employees and children have been barred from attending mosques or observing the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. In many places, women have been barred from wearing face-covering veils, and men discouraged from growing long beards.

In the village of Aktash in southern Xinjiang, Communist Party official Adil Sulayman, told RFA that many local shopkeepers had stopped selling alcohol and cigarettes from 2012 “because they fear public scorn,” while many locals had decided to abstain from drinking and smoking.

The Koran calls the use of “intoxicants” sinful, while some Muslim religious leaders have also forbidden smoking.

Sulayman said authorities in Xinjiang viewed ethnic Uighurs who did not smoke as adhering to “a form of religious extremism.” They issued the order to counter growing religious sentiment that was “affecting stability,” he said.

“We have a campaign to weaken religion here, and this is part of that campaign,” he told the Washington-based news service.

The notice, obtained by RFA and posted on Twitter, ordered all restaurants and supermarkets in Aktash to sell five different brands of alcohol and cigarettes and display them prominently. “Anybody who neglects this notice and fails to act will see their shops sealed off, their businesses suspended, and legal action pursued against them,” the notice said.

Radio Free Asia, which provides some of the only coverage of events in Xinjiang to escape strict Chinese government controls, said Hotan prefecture, where Aktash is located, had become “a hotbed of violent stabbing and shooting incidents between ethnic Uighurs and Chinese security forces.”

China says Uighur militant groups based abroad are using the Internet to inspire local Muslims to take up violent jihad against the state. Critics say China’s long repression of Uighur rights and nationalist sentiment has pushed people toward Islam as the only permitted assertion of their community’s identity, and pushed a minority toward a violent form of Islam. Clumsy attempts to promote alcohol or forbid beards and veils may prove counterproductive, they warn.

James Leibold, an expert on China’s ethnic policies at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, said Chinese officials were “often flailing around in the dark” when tackling extremism. An acute lack of understanding leads them to focus on visible, but imprecise, perceptions of radicalism such as long beards, veils and sobriety, he said.

The result is often “crude forms of ethno-cultural profiling,” Leibold said.

“These sorts of mechanistic and reactive policies only serve to inflame ethno-national tension without addressing the root causes of religious extremism, while further alienating the mainstream Uighur community, making them feel increasingly unwelcome within a hostile, Han-dominated society,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Sulayman said around 60 shops and restaurants in the area had complied with the government order, and there were no reports of protests. But in an unrelated incident in neighboring Qinghai province on Friday, an angry crowd of Muslims smashed windows of a supposedly halal store in Xining city, after pork sausages and ham were found in a delivery van, according to the local government and photographs on social media

Four arrested in Germany over 'plot against Muslims'

May 7, 2015 by Nasheman

Three men and a woman held for possession of explosives and for planning attacks on mosques and leading Muslim figures.

A report links the increase in anti-immigrant attacks to the rise of right-wing groups in the country [Reuters]

by Al Jazeera

German authorities have conducted raids across the country, seizing explosives and arresting four people accused of founding a right-wing group to attack mosques and housing for asylum seekers.

Police arrested three men and a woman accused of leading the group during raids by some 250 investigators on homes in Saxony and four other states, the federal prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

Prosecutors allege the four helped found the “Oldschool Society” (OSS) group and were planning to attack asylum-seeker housing, mosques and well-known members of the Islamic community in Germany.

The four arrested, identified only as Andreas H, 56, Markus W, 39, Denise Vanessa G, 22, and Olaf O, 47, in line with German privacy laws, are being held on terrorism charges and are also accused of having procured explosives.

The statement identified Andreas H and Markus W as the group’s president and vice president.

The North Rhine-Westphalia state interior ministry said Olaf O was from the western city of Bochum and had been under observation since November as “a leading member of the OSS”.

“According to current investigations, it was the group’s goal to conduct attacks in smaller groups inside Germany on well-known Salafists, mosques and asylum-seeker centres,” the statement said.

“For this purpose the four arrested procured explosives for possible terror attacks by the group.”

Inquiries made by the Associated Press news agency to an apparent cell phone number and email address for the group were not immediately returned.

Attack plans

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the Oldschool Society appeared to be a newly formed group.

Rhineland-Palatinate interior minister Roger Lewentz, at the same news conference, held up what appeared to be the group’s logo – a white skull on black background framed by bloody butcher’s cleavers with lightning bolts resembling the runes of the Nazi SS.

“The SS rune is in there – that’s not for nothing,” Lewentz said.

Prosecutors said they are still trying to determine whether the group had concrete attack plans and refused to comment beyond their written statement.

There have been conflicts in recent years between far right groups and the Muslim community in North Rhine-Westphalia that have escalated into violent street fights.

In 2013, authorities said they foiled a plot to assassinate a high-ranking member of a far-right party in the state.

Right-wing groups have been a renewed focus for German intelligence agencies after it came to light that a neo-Nazi group calling itself National Socialist Underground, or NSU, allegedly killed eight Turks, a Greek and a policewoman between 2000 and 2007. It is also believed to be behind two bombings and 15 bank robberies.

De Maiziere said statistics released Wednesday showed a sharp increase of 22.9 percent in violent crimes by right-wing extremists in 2014 to 1,029, three times the number in 2013.

Anti-Semitic attacks have also reportedly increased.

The report suggested the rise could be linked to months of non-violent anti-Islam protests by a group calling itself Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West, or PEGIDA.