Honor killings are murder not an Islamic teaching

Leading Muslim thinkers wholeheartedly insist that “honor murders” have no place and no support in Islam. “There is nothing in the Quran that justifies honor killings. There is nothing that says you should kill for the honor of the family,” said Taj Hargey, director of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford in England. “This idea […]

Arab Spring certainly not the first democratic movement in Muslim world

The Arab-Islamic world has a long history of democracy –democracy which is regularly crushed by western force. In 1953 Iran had a parliamentary system, the US and Britain overthrew it. There was a revolution in Iraq in 1958, we don’t know where it would have gone, but it could have been democratic. The US basically […]

Occupation of Afghanistan biggest boon for Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda strategists believe that foreign occupation of Afghanistan has been the biggest factor in generating Muslim support for uprisings against their governments, according to the just-published book by Syed Saleem Shahzad, “Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban”. Shahzad had been the Pakistan bureau chief for the Hong Kong- based Asia Times, and had unique access to […]

Osama bin Laden burial at sea unacceptable to Muslims

Excerpt of a CNN Opinion by Abdal Hakim Murad, a lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University, England. In 2010 he was voted Britain’s most influential Muslim thinker by Jordan’s Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center. The burial at sea of Osama bin Ladin was a sad miscalculation. It is not clear […]

Revolution 2.0 more secular than Islamic

February 11 will be remembered as Egypt’s Fourth of July, now that Hosni Mubarak has stepped down from his 30-year presidency. February 11 is also Victory Day in Iran: a national holiday commemorating the Iranian Revolution in 1979. [Iran] hoped for its model to spread … a domino effect in the region, seeding Islamic republics […]

Simon Wiesenthal Center to be built on Muslim cemetery

A coalition of four Jewish groups, backed by a wide array of peace and justice organizations, held a demonstration outside the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in New York, denouncing the organization’s opposition to the Islamic community center in lower Manhattan. Demonstrators walked in front of the museum in midtown Manhattan, chanting “Islamophobia isn’t pretty, it […]

Mainstream Christian denominations condemn rising tide of Islamophobia

Leaders of some three dozen mainstream U.S. religious denominations condemned what many commentators have called a rising tide of Islamophobia touched off by the recent controversy over the construction of a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan. “As religious leaders in this great country, we have come together in our nation’s capitol to denounce categorically […]

Anyone got a problem with an 80-year War?

Tom Hayden, 60’s civil rights leader, who served 18 years in the California legislature, and is now a professor at Occidental College, contributed the following to the L.A. Times (excerpts only): Without public debate and without congressional hearings, a segment of the Pentagon and fellow travelers have embraced a doctrine known as the Long War, […]