Starting Points: Muslims

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Jul 7, 2010

Kenya's constitutional vote on sharia courts pits Muslims against Christians

Kenyans protest the proposed constitution, which goes for a vote next month. Ten percent of the country is Muslim. (Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images)

By Sudarsan Raghavan
Wednesday, July 7, 2010; A01

NAIROBI -- For 13 years, Judge Mudhar Ahmed has worked in relative obscurity, issuing Muslim marriage certificates, divorcing Muslim couples and weighing in on Muslim inheritance disputes. Now, he's facing an issue unlike any he has seen. He has one word to describe it: "Islamophobia."

Ahmed is the head of Nairobi's Kadhis Court, one of 17 judicial bodies that administer sharia, or Islamic law, to Kenya's Muslim minority. The courts were enshrined in the nation's constitution decades ago, but Christian leaders are seeking to remove them from a proposed new constitution, scheduled for a referendum Aug. 4. They argue that Kenya is a secular state and that Muslims should not receive special privileges.

Muslim leaders say the maneuvers are part of an agenda to deny their community rights and undermine their beliefs. "They are creating hatred between Muslims and Christians," said Ahmed, his soft voice hardening.

The tussle portends a larger collision between Islam and Christianity in Kenya, a vital U.S. ally in a region where Washington is quietly fighting the growth of Islamic radicalism. Many Kenyans are concerned that the tensions, if not contained, could deepen political fissures and spawn the sort of communal upheaval that left more than 1,000 people dead in 2008 after elections.

In this predominantly Christian nation, Christians are worried about a Muslim community that is growing in numbers and influence, and they have been vocally backed by U.S.-based Christian groups. Muslims are wary of the rising power of fundamentalist Christian organizations backed by American Christians.

The 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania frayed relations between Christians and Muslims. Those links have further eroded in the decade since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as concerns about Islamic radicalization and terrorism grew in this East African country.

Many Kenyans today fear that the civil war in neighboring Somalia, where the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab militia is seeking to overthrow the U.S.-backed government, could spread into Kenya. A massive influx of Somali refugees, almost all Muslim, has spawned xenophobia and extended misconceptions of Islam.

"The kadhis courts issue is a red herring," said Rashid Abdi, a Nairobi-based analyst with the International Crisis Group. "They feed into historical prejudices on both sides and misperceptions which has increased in the last 10 years."

Centuries of tradition

The kadhis courts have existed in Kenya for centuries. Under Kenya's constitution, their jurisdiction is limited to matters concerning personal law, such as marriages, divorces and inheritances for Muslims, who form 10 percent of Kenya's population. The courts do not hear criminal matters and have far less power than Kenya's higher courts.

For decades, the courts operated without controversy, under the radar of most Kenyans.

But after the Sept. 11 attacks, church leaders grew concerned that the courts could breed extremism. In 2004, a group of churches filed a court case to remove the kadhis courts from the current constitution, but it languished for years in the judicial system. Some Christian leaders worry that the courts could be used to justify an expansion of sharia law in Kenya.

The proposed constitution is part of an effort to create a fairer balance of power among Kenya's ethnic groups. It was that perceived imbalance that led to much of the 2008 violence. While religion did not play a significant role in the violence, it is now dominating the debate on the upcoming vote.

The U.S. ambassador to Kenya has publicly urged Kenyans to vote in favor of the proposed constitution, including the kadhis courts, arguing that passage is key to keeping Kenya stable. But on Web sites and in opinion pieces, conservative U.S. Christian groups have denounced the proposed constitution. They are opposed to the kadhis courts provision, and they see other aspects of the constitution as being pro-abortion. Some have organized petition drives against the courts.

The American Center for Law and Justice, founded by evangelical Pat Robertson, opened an office in Nairobi this year to oppose the new constitution. On its Web site, the group says that the "high number of Muslims in the slums and a significant increase in the number of Somalis" have brought the kadhis courts issue into "sharp focus."

"There are those who believe there is an overall Islamic agenda geared towards the Islamisation of the country," the group says.

Last month, Kenya's high court ruled that the kadhis courts provision should be removed from the draft constitution. That decision is being appealed. Some senior politicians have railed against removing the courts from the draft constitution, partly because Muslims have become a powerful voting bloc.

'We want unity'

On June 13, explosions ripped through a park in Nairobi during a demonstration against the constitution, killing five people and injuring dozens. No one asserted responsibility, but the assault deepened the suspicion among Christian groups.

"We want unity in Kenya, but not a unity that will compromise us," said Bishop Joseph Methu, a senior evangelical Christian leader. Christian leaders say they fear that if the courts are enshrined in the constitution, "sooner or later, you will find an enclave where they will say we are predominantly Muslim and Islamic laws rule here," said Oliver Kisaka, deputy general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Kenya. "You have created space for the creation of a nation within a nation."

As evidence, the Christian leaders point to an incident in April in which a group of Muslim clerics in the northeastern town of Mandera, near the Somalia border, imposed a ban on public broadcasts of films and soccer ahead of the World Cup.

Muslim leaders say the kadhis courts protect their community's rights and cultural values.

"A good constitution is gauged by the extent to which it protects minorities," said Abdalla Murshid, a Muslim lawyer and community leader.

Other Muslim leaders said the courts would stem Islamic radicalism in Kenya. Judges, not mosque imams, would regulate the uses of sharia law. Muslims would feel a deeper sense of national identity.

Kadhis courts are an entity that binds "Muslims to the Kenyan state," said Hassan Ole Naado, head of the Kenyan Muslim Youth Alliance. "It is for the best interests of Kenya to have such courts."

A recent public debate about the courts at a hotel in Nairobi quickly degenerated into a Muslim-vs.-Christian fight.

A Muslim woman named Fatima said that removing the courts from the constitution would make it too easy for Christian members of parliament to get rid of them altogether.

"That's what we want," muttered a man in the audience.

Then a Christian said: "Who are the Muslims? Are they Kenyan or non-Kenyan? If they are Kenyan, they should be satisfied with only one court."

"The Christian clergy have a problem with Islam," said Hussein Mahad, a sheik from the northeastern town of Garissa. "But we are here to stay. We are not going anywhere."

Afterward, he declared: "This is a Christian agenda to keep Islam contained. They think we are all terrorists."

Jun 4, 2010

Obama needs to support Egyptians as well as Mubarak

Image by riacale via Flickr

By Michele Dunne and Robert Kagan
Friday, June 4, 2010; A17

When President Obama called for a "new beginning" in U.S. relations with the Muslim world a year ago, he picked Cairo as the setting for his speech. It was a provocative choice, the capital of a close ally of the United States but also of the three-decades-old autocracy of Hosni Mubarak.

When Obama declared his commitment to "governments that reflect the will of the people" and said that leaders "must maintain your power through consent, not coercion," Egyptians thought they heard a not-so-subtle reference to their aging leader. One enthusiastic Egyptian shouted, "Barack Obama, we love you!" -- the only such interjection during the address.

A year later, Egyptians are scratching their heads about why Obama came to Cairo. In meetings in Cairo this week, Egyptian civil society and political activists across the spectrum voiced their disappointment, asking, "I know they're busy, but can't the Obama administration spare any time at all for what is going on inside Egypt?" and saying resignedly of the president, "He seems like a nice guy, but I guess he's just not going to do anything for us."

The disappointment is understandable. As Egypt heads into controversial parliamentary elections in fall 2010 and a presidential election in 2011, the Obama administration has been tone-deaf, intent on continuing to improve relations with the increasingly brittle and unpopular Mubarak regime. It has cut democracy assistance spending in Egypt by half, agreed to forbid assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development to groups that lack the government's stamp of approval, and is discussing a future "endowment" that would commit the United States to years of assistance with diminished congressional oversight. When administration officials have privately raised questions about democracy or human rights with the Egyptian government, their carefully calibrated "quiet diplomacy" has been dismissed or ignored. Obama himself politely asked Mubarak during an August 2009 Oval Office meeting to fulfill his 2005 pledge to lift the state of emergency under which Egyptians have been repressed since 1981. Mubarak brushed him off. Last month, Mubarak renewed the state of emergency for another two years, conveniently the period during which parliamentary and presidential elections will occur. The Obama administration called it "regrettable."

Meanwhile, Mubarak is in ill health and may not even make it to the next presidential election. His regime has systematically excluded or discredited new leaders who enjoy any public support, leaving the field of potential successors depressingly impoverished. One would think that under the circumstances both Egyptians and the U.S. government would be working to put in place an open political process so that any new leader could win the support of the people and thus ensure order in this important nation. But the Egyptian government is paralyzed by the aging Mubarak's refusal to look beyond his own rule. And the Obama administration, in pursuit of an illusory stability, stands mute and passive as the predictable train wreck draws nearer.

This administration prides itself on its progressive approach to this post-Cold War world, but it is repeating the mistake that Cold War-era administrations made when they supported right-wing dictatorships -- right up until the point when they were toppled by radical forces.

Obama's Cairo speech had the admirable goal of improving relations with the Muslim world, but the manner in which the administration has pursued this goal has been flawed from the beginning. It has focused almost exclusively on building bridges with leaders and governments. Yet in Egypt, and in Iran, a gulf has opened between the government and the citizenry. Obama has strengthened ties with the aging Mubarak while ignoring the concerns of Egypt's increasingly restive population. "What about us?" one prominent democracy activist asked. "Do we count for anything in this U.S.-Egypt relationship?"

When rebels ousted the corrupt government in Kyrgyzstan in April, they noted angrily that the United States had never stood up for their rights in the face of rigged elections and human rights abuses, placing a clear priority on strategic cooperation with the government. Watch out. If the Obama administration does not figure out how to make clear that it supports the political and human rights of Egyptian citizens, while cooperating with the Egyptian government on diplomatic and security affairs, people will be saying that about the United States in Cairo one of these days -- and maybe sooner than we expect.

There is still time to turn around this failing policy. Vice President Biden visits Egypt next week. There are, as always, numerous crises on the agenda. But if the administration wants to try to head off the next crisis, in Egypt, then Biden should use the opportunity to have a frank talk with Mubarak and other senior officials. In private, he can explain why it is so important, for both Egypt and the United States, that Mubarak take immediate steps to open the political process in this difficult period of transition. In public, Biden needs to make clear that the United States stands for free, fair and competitive elections -- for Egyptians, just as for everyone else.

Given the sorry history of the United States supporting the oppressors rather than the oppressed in that part of the world, such a commitment would be the kind of "new beginning" the Egyptian people seek.

The writers, senior associates at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, are members of the nonpartisan Working Group on Egypt, a consortium of policy experts from Carnegie, the Council on Foreign Relations, Human Rights Watch, the Center for American Progress, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Foreign Policy Initiative and Freedom House.

May 19, 2010

Compassion, prejudice and American Muslims

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Walied Shater
Saturday, May 15, 2010; A15

I woke up early on Sept. 12, 2001, to get ready for work. I put on my best suit, my only custom-made shirt, my most expensive Nordstrom tie. I shined my shoes. I was tense and nervous and did not know what to expect from my co-workers. I had, by chance, been off duty the day before, the day of the horrific attacks on the United States, and of course by late evening on Sept. 11, the names of the suspected hijackers began to come out. All were Arabic or Muslim names like mine.

Since January 2000, I had been assigned to the most important division in the U.S. Secret Service: the Presidential Protective Division, commonly known as PPD. I held a top-secret clearance, reported to the White House daily, and traveled routinely on Air Force One or Marine One with the president. I loved the experience. I had never felt discriminated against at work or socially, except for a few "terrorist" jokes. I was a welcomed and trusted member of the division.

Sept. 12 was different, though. Nineteen men had killed close to 3,000 Americans the day before in the name of my religion.

As I entered the White House, I prepared myself mentally for the verbal barrage to come. I had grown up a tough kid in Brooklyn and had been raised a proud American Muslim.

As I walked to the office for agents on the president's detail, I was intercepted by a supervisor named Ron. When he asked to speak with me, I said I had to put my equipment bag in the office and would come right back. I was trying to buy time to get ready for what might come. As I approached Ron, a tall and strong man in his early 50s, I thought, "Here it comes, stay cool."

Image via Wikipedia

Ron put his hand on my right shoulder and said: "Walied, I am glad you are here with us today." My defenses crumbled, and my eyes welled up at this simple act of compassion. I said thanks and excused myself.

Ron stood up as a preemptive strike to anyone who might have said something to me that day. He told me I belonged. He embodied what was great about America. As the day went on I felt ashamed of the fears I had felt earlier.

When I concluded my five-year assignment on the PPD in 2005, managers told me I had led more presidential security advance teams than any other agent since 2000. My wife and I were proud of my work and proud for a nation in which an American Muslim can achieve anything. That is America.

Today, though, American Muslims feel under siege. Too many feel the American dream is not for them. For a few, radicalization is the next step. Anti-Muslim rhetoric has reached epic proportions in broader U.S. society -- largely tolerated, rarely condemned. While "terrorism experts" cite frequent travel to Muslim countries or Internet videos as primers for radicalization, the core primer, which is largely unremarked upon, is the siege mentality surrounding American Muslims.

Many factors contribute to this mentality, including rhetoric from fringe hate groups, the demonization of Muslims by Hollywood and repeated questions of loyalty by (conservative)

commentators. Nothing is more debilitating to the psyche of American Muslims than to have those in positions of authority remain silent after such

comments or, worse, contribute to the hostility.

American Muslims notice when, as happened last week, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service stopped using an anti-Muslim film "Obsession: Radical Islam's Obsession with the West" to train agents. But American Muslims also notice when a Florida Republican candidate for Congress, Dan Fanelli, runs television ads in which he points to a white man and asks, "Does this look like a terrorist?" and then turns to an Arab-looking man and asks, "Or this?"

Or when Congress invites the preacher Franklin Graham to speak at the National Day of Prayer event on Capitol Hill despite Graham's infamous remarks about Islam as a "very evil and wicked religion."

U.S. leaders need to do much more to help bring American Muslims into the mainstream. The president and others should follow the example set by former secretary of state Colin Powell when he endorsed then-candidate Barack Obama on "Meet the Press." Reacting to assertions that Obama was Muslim, Powell asked, "Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president?"

Not just American Muslims but all Americans need to see and hear examples of people like my former supervisor and Colin Powell.

The writer served as a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service from 1995 to 2007.

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Apr 19, 2010

White House Quietly Courts Muslims in U.S. - NYTimes.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By ANDREA ELLIOTT

When President Obama took the stage in Cairo last June, promising a new relationship with the Islamic world, Muslims in America wondered only half-jokingly whether the overture included them. After all, Mr. Obama had kept his distance during the campaign, never visiting an American mosque and describing the false claim that he was Muslim as a “smear” on his Web site.

Nearly a year later, Mr. Obama has yet to set foot in an American mosque. And he still has not met with Muslim and Arab-American leaders. But less publicly, his administration has reached out to this politically isolated constituency in a sustained and widening effort that has left even skeptics surprised.

Muslim and Arab-American advocates have participated in policy discussions and received briefings from top White House aides and other officials on health care legislation, foreign policy, the economy, immigration and national security. They have met privately with a senior White House adviser, Valerie Jarrett, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to discuss civil liberties concerns and counterterrorism strategy.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The impact of this continuing dialogue is difficult to measure, but White House officials cited several recent government actions that were influenced, in part, by the discussions. The meeting with Ms. Napolitano was among many factors that contributed to the government’s decision this month to end a policy subjecting passengers from 14 countries, most of them Muslim, to additional scrutiny at airports, the officials said.

That emergency directive, enacted after a failed Dec. 25 bombing plot, has been replaced with a new set of intelligence-based protocols that law enforcement officials consider more effective.

Also this month, Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Muslim academic, visited the United States for the first time in six years after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reversed a decision by the Bush administration, which had barred Mr. Ramadan from entering the country, initially citing the U.S.A. Patriot Act. Mrs. Clinton also cleared the way for another well-known Muslim professor, Adam Habib, who had been denied entry under similar circumstances.

Arab-American and Muslim leaders said they had yet to see substantive changes on a variety of issues, including what they describe as excessive airport screening, policies that have chilled Muslim charitable giving and invasive F.B.I. surveillance guidelines. But they are encouraged by the extent of their consultation by the White House and governmental agencies.

“For the first time in eight years, we have the opportunity to meet, engage, discuss, disagree, but have an impact on policy,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington. “We’re being made to feel a part of that process and that there is somebody listening.”

Image by IIOC via Flickr

In the post-9/11 era, Muslims and Arab-Americans have posed something of a conundrum for the government: they are seen as a political liability but also, increasingly, as an important partner in countering the threat of homegrown terrorism. Under President George W. Bush, leaders of these groups met with government representatives from time to time, but said they had limited interaction with senior officials. While Mr. Obama has yet to hold the kind of high-profile meeting that Muslims and Arab-Americans seek, there is a consensus among his policymakers that engagement is no longer optional.

The administration’s approach has been understated. Many meetings have been private; others were publicized only after the fact. A visit to New York University in February by John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, drew little news coverage, but caused a stir among Muslims around the country. Speaking to Muslim students, activists and others, Mr. Brennan acknowledged many of their grievances, including “surveillance that has been excessive,” “overinclusive no-fly lists” and “an unhelpful atmosphere around many Muslim charities.”

“These are challenges we face together as Americans,” said Mr. Brennan, who momentarily showed off his Arabic to hearty applause. He and other officials have made a point of disassociating Islam from terrorism in public comments, using the phrase “violent extremism” in place of words like “jihad” and “Islamic terrorism.”

Image by IIOC via Flickr

While the administration’s solicitation of Muslims and Arab-Americans has drawn little fanfare, it has not escaped criticism. A small but vocal group of research analysts, bloggers and others complain that the government is reaching out to Muslim leaders and organizations with an Islamist agenda or ties to extremist groups abroad.

They point out that Ms. Jarrett gave the keynote address at the annual convention for the Islamic Society of North America. The group was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal case against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a Texas-based charity whose leaders were convicted in 2008 of funneling money to Hamas. The society denies any links to terrorism.

“I think dialogue is good, but it has to be with genuine moderates,” said Steven Emerson, a terrorism analyst who advises government officials. “These are the wrong groups to legitimize.” Mr. Emerson and others have also objected to the political appointments of several American Muslims, including Rashad Hussain.

In February, the president chose Mr. Hussain, a 31-year-old White House lawyer, to become the United States’ special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The position, a kind of ambassador at large to Muslim countries, was created by Mr. Bush. In a video address, Mr. Obama highlighted Mr. Hussain’s status as a “close and trusted member of my White House staff” and “a hafiz,” a person who has memorized the Koran.

Within days of the announcement, news reports surfaced about comments Mr. Hussain had made on a panel in 2004, while he was a student at Yale Law School, in which he referred to several domestic terrorism prosecutions as “politically motivated.” Among the cases he criticized was that of Sami Al-Arian, a former computer-science professor in Florida who pleaded guilty to aiding members of a Palestinian terrorist group.

At first, the White House said Mr. Hussain did not recall making the comments, which had been removed from the Web version of a 2004 article published by a small Washington magazine. When Politico obtained a recording of the panel, Mr. Hussain acknowledged criticizing the prosecutions but said he believed the magazine quoted him inaccurately, prompting him to ask its editor to remove the comments. On Feb. 22, The Washington Examiner ran an editorial with the headline “Obama Selects a Voice of Radical Islam.”

Muslim leaders watched carefully as the story migrated to Fox News. They had grown accustomed to close scrutiny, many said in interviews, but were nonetheless surprised. In 2008, Mr. Hussain had co-authored a paper for the Brookings Institution arguing that the government should use the peaceful teachings of Islam to fight terrorism.

“Rashad Hussain is about as squeaky clean as you get,” said Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who is Muslim. Mr. Ellison and others wondered whether the administration would buckle under the pressure and were relieved when the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, defended Mr. Hussain.

“The fact that the president and the administration have appointed Muslims to positions and have stood by them when they’ve been attacked is the best we can hope for,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America.

It was notably different during Mr. Obama’s run for office. In June 2008, volunteers of his campaign barred two Muslim women in headscarves from appearing behind Mr. Obama at a rally in Detroit, eliciting widespread criticism. The campaign promptly recruited Mazen Asbahi, a 36-year-old corporate lawyer and popular Muslim activist from Chicago, to become its liaison to Muslims and Arab-Americans.

Bloggers began researching Mr. Asbahi’s background. For a brief time in 2000, he had sat on the board of an Islamic investment fund, along with Sheikh Jamal Said, a Chicago imam who was later named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case. Mr. Asbahi said in an interview that he had left the board after three weeks because he wanted no association with the imam.

Shortly after his appointment to the Obama campaign, Mr. Asbahi said, a Wall Street Journal reporter began asking questions about his connection to the imam. Campaign officials became concerned that news coverage would give critics ammunition to link the imam to Mr. Obama, Mr. Asbahi recalled. On their recommendation, Mr. Asbahi agreed to resign from the campaign, he said.

He is still unsettled by the power of his detractors. “To be in the midst of this campaign of change and hope and to have it stripped away over nothing,” he said. “It hurts.”

From the moment Mr. Obama took office, he seemed eager to change the tenor of America’s relationship with Muslims worldwide. He gave his first interview to Al Arabiya, the Arabic-language television station based in Dubai. Muslims cautiously welcomed his ban on torture and his pledge to close Guantánamo within a year.

In his Cairo address, he laid out his vision for “a new beginning” with Muslims: while America would continue to fight terrorism, he said, terrorism would no longer define America’s approach to Muslims.

Back at home, Muslim and Arab-American leaders remained skeptical. But they took note when, a few weeks later, Mohamed Magid, a prominent imam from Sterling, Va., and Rami Nashashibi, a Muslim activist from Chicago, joined the president at a White-House meeting about fatherhood. Also that month, Dr. Faisal Qazi, a board member of American Muslim Health Professionals, began meeting with administration officials to discuss health care reform.

The invitations were aimed at expanding the government’s relationship with Muslims and Arab-Americans to areas beyond security, said Mr. Hussain, the White House’s special envoy. Mr. Hussain began advising the president on issues related to Islam after joining the White House counsel’s office in January 2009. He helped draft Mr. Obama’s Cairo speech and accompanied him on the trip. “The president realizes that you cannot engage one-fourth of the world’s population based on the erroneous beliefs of a fringe few,” Mr. Hussain said.

Other government offices followed the lead of the White House. In October, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke met with Arab-Americans and Muslims in Dearborn, Mich., to discuss challenges facing small-business owners. Also last fall, Farah Pandith was sworn in as the State Department’s first special representative to Muslim communities. While Ms. Pandith works mostly with Muslims abroad, she said she had also consulted with American Muslims because Mrs. Clinton believes “they can add value overseas.”

Despite this, American actions abroad — including civilian deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan and the failure to close Guantánamo — have drawn the anger of Muslims and Arab-Americans.

Even though their involvement with the administration has broadened, they remain most concerned about security-related policies. In January, when the Department of Homeland Security hosted a two-day meeting with Muslim, Arab-American, South Asian and Sikh leaders, the group expressed concern about the emergency directive subjecting passengers from a group of Muslim countries to additional screening.

Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, pointed out that the policy would never have caught the attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid, who is British. “It almost sends the signal that the government is going to treat nationals of powerless countries differently from countries that are powerful,” Ms. Khera recalled saying as community leaders around the table nodded their heads.

Ms. Napolitano, who sat with the group for more than an hour, committed to meeting with them more frequently. Ms. Khera said she left feeling somewhat hopeful.

“I think our message is finally starting to get through,” she said.

Apr 5, 2010

For Moscow's Ethnic Minorities, A Fresh Sense Of Fear - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

Moscow's Muslim community is concerned about an increase in racist attacks.

April 01, 2010

By Brian Whitmore

In the aftermath of this week's twin suicide bombings in Moscow, Uzlipat Gebekova is very careful about what she wears in public.

A resident of Makhachkala, the capital of the North Caucasus republic of Daghestan, Gebekova is living in Moscow temporarily while she studies jewelry-making. And she doesn't want anybody associating her with the two female suicide bombers who wore long black skirts to cover the explosive belts they detonated on the Moscow Metro, killing 39 Monday-morning commuters.

"The situation is very dangerous for us," Gebekova says. "Wearing a head scarf is a risk. I think even wearing a skirt would be dangerous. It's best just to wear trousers. To come here [to Moscow] now -- whether for business, education, or medical treatment -- is dangerous."

Life in Moscow is never easy for ethnic minorities, particularly people from the Caucasus. They are routinely subjected to discrimination, harassment, attacks, and humiliating document checks by police. But their situation gets even worse when terrorism strikes, returning the public focus to Russia's long-simmering conflict in the North Caucasus, and heightening resentment between ethnic Slavs and other city residents.

The Moscow-based Sova Center, which monitors racially motivated attacks, has recorded assaults on five members of ethnic minorities in three separate incidents since the March 29 attacks. Among those attacked were three females, including a 17-year-old Armenian girl and two Muslim women who were wearing head scarves.

For them, it doesn't matter where in the Caucasus somebody is from.

The Sova Center's deputy director, Galina Kozhevnikova, says the number of actual attacks is undoubtedly much higher, since minorities are often afraid to report such attacks and police are reluctant to investigate them.

"We know that many people who don't have a Slavic appearance have consciously avoided going out in public in the days following the attack. They are afraid of attacks," Kozhevnikova says.

Stress, Fear, And Grief

Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov has claimed responsibility for the March 29 suicide bombings in a video posted on the Internet and said attacks on Russia would continue.

And with Moscow bracing for possible follow-up attacks, some politicians are making pointed statements that it is time for the government to take the gloves off and deal harshly with those responsible for plotting and carrying out terrorist attacks.

In remarks reported by the website gzt.ru, State Duma Deputy Aleksandr Gurov claimed that concerns over political correctness were preventing the authorities from dealing with terrorism effectively. "How much can we play with this so-called tolerance?" he said.

But tolerance is the last thing ethnic minorities are experiencing, according to Abdullah Duduyev, editor of the Chechen-language magazine "Dosh."

Duduyev says he and other Chechens in Moscow are "saddened by what happened," adding that those who perished in the blasts were "innocent people." He adds that "now it is the Chechens who will suffer, as they always do" in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.

"Attitudes toward us have gotten worse," Duduyev says. "When two Muslim women were beaten in the metro, not a single person in the crowded wagon stuck up for them. This shows the mood of society. Stress, fear, and grief are visible on people's faces. It is impossible to hide the aggression people feel toward outsiders."

The twin suicide bombings killed 39 people

Central Asians living in the Russian capital are also fearful. "The atmosphere for our compatriots in Moscow is depressing. People are afraid and are going out less. We canceled a meeting two days ago due to security concerns," says Abdullo Davlatov, a leading member of Moscow's Tajik migrant community. "Police are checking documents more, but we have not yet had any complaints about attacks by nationalists or skinheads."

Outhouses And Sewers

Aleksandr Verkhovsky, director of the Sova Center, says the rhetoric used by the authorities has contributed to the climate of fear among minorities. This includes recent remarks by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who pledged on March 30 to "drag" terrorists "from the depths of the sewer." The comments were an echo of his notorious pledge in 1999 to "wipe out" terrorists while they were sitting "in the outhouse."

Verkhovsky says that instead of such provocative phrases, Putin should be using language that unites society.

"So this time the prime minister isn't going to wipe out terrorists in the outhouse. Instead he is going to get them in the sewer," Verkhovsky says. "Of course you need to go after the terrorists, but this over-the-top rhetoric is destructive. It encourages negative emotions. This is the prime minister speaking, not some common citizen talking in the kitchen."

Initially, Russian officials said they were focusing on the North Caucasus, where Moscow has been battling separatists for nearly two decades, to find those involved with the recent attacks. But Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the National Security Council, suggested that Georgian involvement in the attacks "could not be excluded."

Russia and Georgia fought a bitter five-day war in August 2008 and relations between the two neighbors remain tense. The Georgian government -- which immediately condemned the attacks, offered condolences to the victims, and said it was prepared to assist in any investigation -- denied Patrushev's claim.

Johny Karatskhelia, president of Lazare, a Moscow-based Georgian community organization, says Patrushev's remark shows that all people from the Caucasus living in Moscow are under suspicion -- and therefore in danger.

"For them, it doesn't matter where in the Caucasus somebody is from. They don't make a distinction between a Chechen, an Ingush, a Georgian, or an Abkhaz," Karatskhelia says. "All Georgians and all people from the Caucasus are afraid of what will happen next."

RFE/RL's North Caucasus, Russian, Tajik, Georgian, and Echo of the Caucasus services contributed to this report

Mar 31, 2010

BBC News - Twelve killed by twin bombings in Russia's Dagestan

Image by Bolshakov via Flickr

BBC News - Twelve killed by twin bombings in Russia's Dagestan

Mar 12, 2010

A Christian Overture to Muslims Has Its Critics

Image via Wikipedia

By MARK OPPENHEIMER

January was an ugly month in Malaysia. At least 10 churches were firebombed or vandalized, as was a Sikh temple. Severed boars’ heads — particularly offensive to Muslims, who are not supposed to eat pork — were found on the grounds of two mosques. The cause of this inter-religious strife was a court battle over whether non-Muslims may use the Arabic word “Allah” to refer to God.

The reports from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, described events that we imagine could never happen in the United States, where the First Amendment is supposed to guard against such conflict. But we have fights over religious language, too, even if the violence rarely rises above name-calling.

On Feb. 3, Ergun Caner, the president of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, in Lynchburg, Va., focused attention on a Southern Baptist controversy when he called Jerry Rankin, the president of the denomination’s International Mission Board, a liar. Dr. Caner has since apologized for his language, but he still maintains that the “Camel Method,” a strategy Dr. Rankin endorses for preaching Christianity to Muslims, is deceitful.

Instead of talking about the Jesus of the New Testament, missionaries using the Camel Method point Muslims to the Koran, where in the third chapter, or sura, an infant named Isa — Arabic for Jesus — is born. Missionaries have found that by starting with the Koran’s Jesus story, they can make inroads with Muslims who reject the Bible out of hand. But according to Dr. Caner, whose attack on Dr. Rankin came in a weekly Southern Baptist podcast, the idea that the Koran can contain the seeds of Christian faith is “an absolute, fundamental deception.”

David Garrison, a missionary who edited a book on the Camel Method by Kevin Greeson, the method’s developer, defends the use of the Koran as a path to Jesus. “You aren’t criticizing Muhammad or any other prophets,” Dr. Garrison said, “just raising Jesus up.”

He explained that after reading the sura in which Maryam, or Mary, gives birth to Isa, a missionary might ask a Muslim, “Do you know of any other prophets born of a virgin?”

And, Dr. Garrison continued: “It says in that passage that Isa would be able to cleanse the leper, even raise the dead. At that point in the conversation with Muslims, we say, ‘Isn’t it interesting that Isa had this tremendous power that God gave to him? Even death was under his power.’

“Then you ask the question, ‘Is there any other prophet that had this kind of power?’ And in Islam, there isn’t.”

“Camel” is not (readers might be gladdened to learn) a reference to a beast of burden in Arab lands. Rather, it is Mr. Greeson’s acronym — Chosen Angels Miracles Eternal Life — to help missionaries remember aspects of Isa’s story.

While Dr. Rankin, who said that he had received Dr. Caner’s letter of apology, would not offer a specific number of souls won to Christ, he said there was anecdotal evidence that the Camel Method was an important innovation in reaching the Muslim world.

“We have just heard amazing reports all over South Asia, India, Pakistan, North Africa, where people have found a receptivity to the Gospel,” he said.

Christians have long known that there is a Jesus in the Koran, but missionaries have only sporadically made use of that story.

Gabriel Said Reynolds, who teaches Islamic theology at the University of Notre Dame, said that Christians in eighth-century Baghdad defended their faith by pointing to passages in the Koran. “But that was never with an eye toward converting Muslims,” Dr. Reynolds said. “Such a thing would have been unthinkable. It was only a way of gaining legitimacy in intellectual conversations.”

In recent years, however, missiologists — scholars of mission work — have begun urging “insider” evangelism and “contextualization”: placing the Gospel in an indigenous context, to reach those from alien cultures.

“At the extreme,” Dr. Reynolds said, “these Christian missionaries will grow beards like Muslims, give up pork, even say that they are ‘muslims’ — lower-case ‘m’ — in the Arab-adjective sense of ‘submissive to God.’ ”

The danger, critics of the Camel Method say, is twofold: exploitation of Muslim culture and infidelity to the Christian message. According to Dr. Caner, missionaries who say the Koran can be a “bridge” to Christianity risk obscuring real differences between the two traditions.

For example, the missionary board recommends that in some cases missionaries use “Allah” to refer to God. As Dr. Garrison explains it, “there is only one God, the God who created the heavens and earth,” so talking about the Christian God as “Allah” is not misleading. But Allah is also the specific god of the Koran, who says things the New Testament God would not. And the Isa of the Koran, while based on the Jesus of the New Testament, is quite different.

“You can ask any Muslim,” said Dr. Caner, a Turkish-American from a Muslim family who became a Christian in high school. “ ‘Do you think that the Allah of the Koran had a son?’ The most important sura in the entire Koran, sura 112, the pre-eminent chapter of the Koran, says explicitly, ‘Allah does not beget, nor is he begotten.’ ”

The missionaries’ use of “Allah” to refer to the Christian God thus strikes Dr. Caner as an error both semantic and theological. In good Baptist missionary fashion, he contextualizes his argument with a culturally relevant, if antiquated, example: the song “My Sweet Lord,” by George Harrison.

“There’s the word ‘Lord,’ ” Dr. Caner said. “Do you go, ‘Oh look, he’s a worshipper of God?’ ‘Lord’ is an English term, but is he talking about the same Lord” — the ones Christians worship?”

“Of course not,” Dr. Caner said, since at the time Mr. Harrison wrote the song, he was interested in Hare Krishna theology.

“Is it fair to use the George Harrison song and say he’s talking about the same god?” Dr. Caner asked. “My answer is no.”

Mar 11, 2010

Nigerians Recount Night of Their Bloody Revenge

Image by Travelling Steve via Flickr

By ADAM NOSSITER

JOS, Nigeria — Dispassionately, the baby-faced young man recounted his killings: two women and one man, first beaten senseless with a stick, then stabbed to death with a short knife.

The man, Dahiru Adamu, 25, was crouching on the floor in the sprawling police headquarters here, summoned to give an accounting of the terrible night of March 7, when, he said, he and dozens of other herdsmen descended on a slumbering village just south of here and slaughtered hundreds with machetes, knives and cutlasses in a brutal act of sectarian retribution.

On Monday and Tuesday, 332 bodies were buried in a mass grave in the village of Dogo Na Hawa, the Nigerian Red Cross said Wednesday. Human rights groups and the state government say that as many as 500 people may have been killed in the early hours of Sunday morning, in three different villages.

Sunday’s killings were an especially vicious expression of long-running hostilities between Christians and Muslims in this divided nation. Jos and the region around it are on the fault line where the volatile and poor Muslim north and the Christian south meet. In the past decade, some 3,000 people have been killed in interethnic, interreligious violence in this fraught zone. The pattern is familiar and was seen as recently as January: uneasy coexistence suddenly explodes into killing, amplified for days by retaliation.

Mr. Adamu, a Muslim herder, said he went to Dogo Na Hawa, a village of Christians living in mud-brick houses on dirt streets, to avenge the killings of Muslims and their cattle in January.

The operation had been planned at least several days before by a local group called Thank Allah, said one of Mr. Adamu’s fellow detainees, Ibrahim Harouna, who was shackled on the floor next to him. The men spoke in Hausa through an interpreter.

“They killed a lot of our Fulanis in January,” Mr. Adamu said, referring to his ethnic group. “So I knew that this time, we would take revenge.”

His victims were sleeping when he arrived, he said, and he set their house on fire. Sure enough, they ran out.

“I killed three people,” Mr. Adamu said calmly.

He and the other detainees showed no sign that they had been maltreated; some confessed to killings, and others denied them, speaking in front of the police.

The police quickly arrested about 200 people in connection with the killings, and many of them were crouching anxiously in rows on a bare concrete floor, outside the police headquarters on Wednesday morning. The police have confiscated 14 machetes, 26 bows, arrows, 3 axes, 4 spears and 44 guns. Victims, many of them women and children, were cut down with knives, short and long; few survived.

Usually in such attacks, there are twice as many injuries as deaths, said Ben Whitfield of the Doctors Without Borders team in Jos. “It’s unreal,” he said. “These people were definitely caught in the middle of the night and meant to be killed.” Like others in Jos, police officials say they are hoping for peace after years of sectarian killings in the region.

But they are not sure they will get it. The streets in this metropolis of several million were largely deserted Wednesday. Residents spoke of fear and anger, and about 4,300 have fled.

Christians, in interviews, voiced suspicion of the intentions of Muslims and associated them with the taint of terrorism. The state attorney general, Edward Pwajok, a Christian, said that on Wednesday morning he had prosecuted a Nigerian Muslim man living in a Jos suburb who had “acknowledged” being “a member of Al Qaeda.”

Mr. Pwajok said there was no indication that the man, Samsudeen Sahsu, was connected to the killings; he said DVDs of Al Qaeda’s activities had been discovered in the man’s home. The group is not previously known to have penetrated Nigeria, though Mr. Sahsu, in a written confession provided by the attorney general, named other members of the “AlKaida Islamic Association.”

He said the headquarters were in Maiduguri, where last summer a radical Islamic sect, Boko Haram, was bloodily suppressed by Nigerian security forces.

“Suspicion is still rife,” the state police commissioner, Ikechukwu Aduba, said in an interview in his office in Jos. “We are appealing to the youth to sheath their swords and give peace a chance.”

Mr. Aduba sharply disputed the elevated death toll reported by others, saying that the police could confirm only 109 deaths.

But a Nigerian Red Cross official in Jos, Adeyemo Adebayo, deputy head of disaster management, said that the number of dead was “possibly” even greater than the 332 buried in the mass grave, since many fled into the bush and could have been cut down there by their attackers. A respected Nigerian human rights group, the Civil Rights Congress, said Monday that its members had counted 492 bodies.

Their attackers had come on foot from nearby villages and had made no preparations for a getaway, said Adebola Hamzat, chief superintendent of the Jos police. “Many of them were still running around,” he said, when they were picked up by the security forces. And many were carrying “cutlasses” — long lethal-looking knives that the police produced for visitors on Wednesday — still stained with blood, he said.

“The person was coming toward me; I killed him with a cutlass,” said the young man next to Mr. Adamu, Zakaria Yakubu, 20, insisting that he was defending a fellow Fulani who had been shot. His victim “did not die right away,” Mr. Yakubu said. “When we got to Dogo Na Hawa, we were just looking for our cattle.” He was clutching some bread distributed by the Red Cross.

Next to him, Ibrahim Harouna, also 20, would say only that he had “killed some of the people’s pigs,” though the police said he was also suspected of having taken part in the killings.

On Wednesday, the mood in Jos was tense among Muslim traders, who complained of a sharp drop in business, and it was anything but forgiving among Christians. They complained that Muslims wanted to supplant “indigenes” — Christians long native to the region.

“Some people want to be rulers everywhere,” said Yohanna Yatou, a businessman. “It’s the Muslims. They said they are born to rule.” Williams Danladi said that Muslims “believe that if they die during this war, they will go to heaven.”

“We Christians, we don’t believe this,” he said.

Others expressed puzzlement and exasperation with the never-ending conflict. “This is a Christian, an indigene,” said Moussa Ismail, pointing to his friend sitting next to him on a downtown stoop, Jacob Ayuba. “We have done business for more than 20 years. How would I attack him?”

Mar 8, 2010

Death Toll From Nigeria Violence Hits 500

Image by missbax via Flickr

By ADAM NOSSITER

DAKAR, Senegal — Officials and human rights groups in Nigeria sharply increased the count of the dead after a weekend of savage ethnic violence, saying Monday that as many as 500 people — many of them women and children — may have been killed near the central city of Jos, long a flashpoint for tensions between Christians and Muslims.

The dead were Christians and members of an ethnic group that has been feuding with the Hausa Fulani, Muslim herders who witnesses and police officials identified as the attackers. Officials said the attack was a reprisal for violence in January, when dozens of Muslims were slaughtered in and around Jos, including more than 150 in a single village.

Early Sunday, the attackers set upon the villagers with machetes, killing women and children in their homes and ensnaring the men who tried to flee in fishnets and animal traps, then massacring them, according to a Nigerian rights group whose investigators went to the area. Some homes were set on fire.

The latest attacks were “a sort of vengeance from the Hausa Fulani,” said the Rev. Emmanuel Joel, of the Christian Association of Nigeria in Jos.

After the January attacks, “the military watched over the city, and neglected the villages,” he said. The attackers, said Mr. Joel, “began to massacre as early as 4 a.m. They began to slaughter the people like animals.”

The police said Monday that they had made 95 arrests, including a number of Hausa Fulani. The clothes of many of the suspects were blood-stained, said Mohammed Larema, a police spokesman in Plateau State.

Image by MikeBlyth via Flickr

The mood in Jos was tense Monday, as troops were deployed in the streets, shops closed early, and residents remained indoor. A few miles south of the city nearly 400 of the victims were buried in a mass grave in Dogon Na Hauwa, the village that was the site of the worst violence. Some of the bodies had been mutilated.

There, women cried unconsolably amid crowds of mourners, and the thick smell of burnt and decomposing flesh hung in the air. Officials meanwhile combed a large area around the village, continuing to find bodies of victims during the day.

Shehu Sani of the Nigerian Civil Rights Congress said in a telephone interview on Monday that members of his organization had counted 492 bodies, mainly in Dogon Na Hauwa. He said that security forces had not been much in evidence in the “vulnerable areas” south of Jos. Mr. Sani said that the attackers were motivated at least in part by a large-scale theft of cattle by members of the same Christian ethnic group as the victims.

“We were at the scene of the violence,” Mr. Sani said, suggesting that the local government figure of 500 was not an exaggeration. “We have counted as many bodies as that,” he said. “There are not enough functional mortuaries to take them. It’s possibly even more than that because many were buried without documentation.”

Mr. Sani said the latest violence strongly resembled the killings in January. One predominantly Muslim village of several hundred, Kuru Karama, was virtually wiped out, and bodies were thrown into pits and latrines.

Mr. Sani said he was not optimistic about an early end to the deadly cycle of violence. “Most likely there will be continuous acts of reprisal,” he said.

Jude Owuamanam contributed reporting from Dogon Na Hauwa and Jos, Nigeria.

Jan 21, 2010

Americans' bias against Jews, Muslims linked, poll says

Image by Tony the Misfit (taking a break) via Flickr

By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 21, 2010; A03

A poll about Americans' views on Islam concludes that the strongest predictor of prejudice against Muslims is whether a person holds similar feelings about Jews.

The Gallup poll, released Thursday, also finds that people who report going to religious services more than once a week are less likely to harbor bias against Muslims.

The poll, conducted in the fall, is the latest large-scale survey to find a high level of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a poll in September showing that Muslims are thought to suffer more discrimination than any other U.S. religious group, by a wide margin. Jews were second.

The Gallup poll asked Americans about their views of Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism and found that 53 percent see Islam unfavorably.

There is no consistent data over time about Americans' views on Islam or Muslims. Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, said that Americans' attitudes toward Muslims generally seem to be improving but that "changes are not dramatic."

The Pew poll found that Americans' views on whether Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence -- a question Pew first asked after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- have fluctuated dramatically.

In the Gallup poll, respondents who said they feel "a great deal" of prejudice toward Jews are very likely to report feeling the same level of bias toward Muslims.

Mogahed, who is on a board that advises President Obama on faith-based issues, said the Gallup poll was prompted partly by Obama's outreach to Muslim-majority societies and a desire to understand more about what shapes Americans' views on Islam.

In a note accompanying the poll results, Gallup makes the argument that Americans' prejudice against Muslims is at least partly fueled by misinformed beliefs. For example, people who believe Muslims worldwide oppose equal rights for men and women tend to be much more likely to report prejudice against Muslims.

Data from other Gallup interviews that were not part of the most recent poll show that majorities of Muslims in Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, among other places, say that women and men should have equal legal rights.

Poll results will be available at muslimwestfacts.com at 10 a.m. Thursday.