Most Muslims deplore violence. Most think homosexuality is wrong. They sound like Christians

The overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world reject violence.They also hold socially conservative views: 90 per cent think homosexuality is wrong, 84 per cent believe sex outside of marriage is a sin, and 77 per cent think abortion is wrong. Yes, the latest Pew Research could be shrunk to a soundbite: Muslims sound like conservative Christians.

It’s an enlightening survey –  showing just how varied, because widespread, Islam is. Look at the attitudes to polygamy: five per cent of Nigerians think it wrong while 85 per cent of those living in Bosnia-Herzegovina do. Again, more than 70 per cent of Saudis believe an apostate (someone who leaves their Muslim faith) should be executed while only 13 per cent of those in southeastern Europe do.

Talk of “Muslim” attitudes is tricky: a Muslim living in Beirut will have little in common with the mindset of the Muslim in Jedda. Similarly, a Muslim in Mali may harbour exactly the same hostility to gays as a Christian in Memphis. Every faith (and atheism is no exception) has its dark but deep-rooted prejudices – even in “tolerant” Britain. Mehdi Hasan has written about anti-Semitism among Muslims, while Baroness Warsi spoke out about Islamophobia at dinner parties among the bien-pensants. And we all know what secularists think of Christians.

More recently, in an address to the Board of Deputies a fortnight ago, Lady Warsi challenged the Muslim and Jewish communities to face their “wild” stereotypes about one another. Muslims should stop resenting Jewish success. Jews should stop suspecting that every statement against Israel masks an anti-Semitic attack. “To say so, would be like saying that any criticism of the politics of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was anti-Muslim.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE DAILY TELEGRAPH (UK)

Egyptian Activists: Our Religion Is None Of Your Business

Since Egypt’s revolution began, tensions among Egypt’s Muslims and Christians have only increased. Earlier this month, it once again turned deadly. Tit-for-tat killings left three Muslims and at least six Christians dead.

That and other religious violence is prompting a public debate about religious identity in Egypt. One group of young Egyptians wants to remove religious labels from national ID cards.

‘Where The Trouble Starts’

Aalam Wassef, one of those advocates, will gladly tell you he’s a video artist, a musician and a publisher. When it comes to his religion, though, he says it’s none of your business.

That’s the motto of his new campaign, too. Wassef, along with two other Egyptians, is calling on others to cover up their religion on their national ID card and start identifying as human first. They’re spreading the word on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

One of their videos plays images of a particularly bloody day for Christians last year, when the military — in power at the time — drove over Christian protesters, and state television called on “honorable” Muslims to come out and defend the troops from the Christians. Twenty-seven people were dead by the end of that day.

The lyrics sung to these images are just as chilling: “The racist republic of Egypt, the sectarian republic of Egypt. It’s ingrained on your ID, and this is where the trouble starts.”

“Egypt has a long history of sectarian violence and sectarian issues, which have always been covered up with this narrative of national unity,” Wassef says. “And so it’s a big lie, actually, because there’s a lot of embedded discrimination in the society.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM NPR 

Christian faith is source of Catholic priest’s passion for Islam

By James Martone
Catholic News Service

CAIRO (CNS) — On a recent afternoon in Cairo, Comboni Father Giuseppe Scattolin was delving into 13th-century Sufi poems at his desk in the single room he inhabits, on an upper floor of a building that also houses an Arabic language school and its related administrative offices.

The ancient odes he studied were written by Sufi Arab poet Umar Ibn al-Farid, who lived in Egypt eight centuries ago, leaving behind a trove of verse in Cairo when he died there in 1235.

They are little known in the Arab and Muslim world and even less so in the Christian West. Bringing such Muslim texts to a wider audience is not only Father Scattolin’s passion, but his duty as a Christian, he said from behind his open laptop and piles of books in Arabic, French, Italian and English.

“What does it mean to be Christian? To know the other! What is the identity of Christ … to put on those stupid garments of the cardinals? What does St. Paul say of Christ? ‘He emptied himself,’” Father Scattolin told Catholic News Service.

And so “emptying” himself is what the missionary has been doing for almost four decades now, in the form of numerous publications and studies, in multiple languages, on Islam’s different literatures and schools, and through dialogue and other interfaith activities with Muslims, aimed at furthering understanding among Muslim and Christian communities.

FULL ARTICLE FROM CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE 

Five Egyptians killed in clashes between Christians, Muslims

By Ulf Laessing and Omar Fahmy, Reuters

Five Egyptians were killed and eight wounded in clashes between Christians and Muslims in a town near Cairo, security sources said on Saturday, in the latest sectarian violence in the most populous Arab state.

Christian-Muslim confrontations have increased in Muslim-majority Egypt since the overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 gave freer rein to hardline Islamists repressed under his rule.
Four Christians and one Muslim were killed when members of both communities started shooting at each other in Khusus outside the Egyptian capital, the sources said.

State news agency MENA put the death toll at four.

The violence broke out late on Friday when a group of Christian children were drawing on a wall of a Muslim religious institute, the security sources said. No more details were immediately available.

FULL ARTICLE FROM NBC NEWS

Attack on Christians in Egypt Comes After a Pledge

CAIRO — Police officers firing tear gas joined with a rock-throwing crowd fighting a group of Christian mourners Sunday in a battle that escalated into an attack on Egypt’s main Coptic Christian Cathedral that lasted for hours.

It was the third day of an outburst of sectarian violence that is testing the pledges of Egypt’s Islamist president to protect the country’s Christian minority. By nightfall, at least one person had died from the day’s clashes, bringing the weekend’s death toll to six.

Later Sunday, President Mohamed Morsi called the Coptic pope, Tawadros II, to reassure him. “I consider any aggression against the cathedral an aggression against me personally,” Mr. Morsi said, according to state media.

The president ordered an investigation of the violence and instructed security forces “to protect the citizens inside the Cathedral,” state media reported, and he pledged to protect both Muslims and Christians.

The violence began Friday when a sectarian dispute in the town of Khusus outside Cairo escalated into a gunfight that killed four Christians and a Muslim — the first major episode of deadly sectarian violence since Mr. Morsi’s election last year. Hundreds of Christians and sympathetic Muslims gathered at the cathedral Sunday for the four Christians’ funeral, chanting for the removal from power of Mr. Morsi and his Islamist allies.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES 

Christian Church Opens its Doors to Muslims

The familiar sounds of Christian hymns have been replaced with Islamic prayer in the chapel this Friday lunchtime and the church priest with the imam from the neighbouring mosque.

Muslims from the Syed Shah Mustafa Jame Masjid mosque next door share this church with Christian worshippers up to five times a day.

Church leaders believe this may be the only place in the country where Christian and Muslim worshippers pray side by side.

The rector at St John’s has opened his doors to Muslims because there was not enough space for them to pray in their own mosque and many were forced to worship outside on the street.

The Reverend Isaac Poobalan, who grew up in Southern India surrounded by Islam, said he would not have been true to his faith if he did not help his neighbours.

“It was a very cold day, like today, and when I walked past the mosque I saw dozens of male worshipers praying outside, on the streets, right near the church.

”Their hands and feet were bare and you could see their breath in the freezing cold.

”Jesus taught his disciples to love your neighbour as yourself and this is something I cannot just preach to my congregation, I had to put it into practice.”

Reverend Poobalan adds: ”I felt very distressed when I saw my neighbours praying out in the cold and I knew I needed to do something to help.”

”I know I cannot solve the world’s problems, but when there is a problem I can solve, I will.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE BBC NEWS 

Pope Hopes to Strengthen Christian-Muslim Dialogue

Pope Francis is to celebrate his first Easter vigil on Saturday after praying for peace in the Middle East and stronger Christian-Muslim dialogue at a torch-lit ceremony for Good Friday.

The newly elected Argentine pope will preside over a mass at St Peter’s Basilica from 1930 GMT, baptizing four adult converts — an Albanian, an Italian, a Russian and a U.S. national.

The ceremony will wrap up a series of intensive preparations leading up to Easter Sunday – the holiest day in the Christian calendar – by the first non-European pope in nearly 1,300 years.

Tens of thousands of people are expected at mass on Sunday when the pope will issue a special blessing from the same balcony of St Peter’s Basilica where he appeared on the night of his election.

Giovanni Maria Vian, editor of the Vatican’s official daily Osservatore Romano said seeing the new pope during Easter helped explain the timing of his predecessor Benedict XVI’s resignation.

“Thanks to the timing chosen for this decision, his successor has managed to make the start of his service as successor of St Peter coincide with this most important celebration,” he wrote.

“It is in these crucial liturgical days that we have heard the strength of the voice of a pope who has come for the first time almost from ‘the ends of the world’ as he himself said,” Vian wrote.

“In all his life as priest and bishop he has always shown a special concern for material and spiritual peripheries,” he said, underlining the pope’s Holy Week message of bringing the troubled Roman Catholic Church closer to the needy.

Francis marked Good Friday with a traditional ceremony at the Colosseum in Rome, presiding over the re-enactment of Jesus Christ’s last hours.

“Christians must respond to evil with good, taking the cross upon themselves as Jesus did,” said Francis, who followed the ceremony from under a canopy overlooking the 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheater.

FULL ARTICLE FROM AL ARABIYA 

Muslim Youth Leader Says: Evangelicals Can Grow to Love Muslims

by Eboo Patel

Editor’s Note: Eboo Patel is founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core. His new book is called “Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice and the Promise of America.”

By Eboo Patel, Special to CNN

Paul Ryan has set off joyous cheers in the land of conservatives largely because of his fiscal views but also because of his Catholic faith.

He is just the most recent member of his church – think House Speaker John Boehner, Republican runner-ups Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, and Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia – to be viewed as a flag-bearer for the conservative cause, a movement whose foot soldiers are largely evangelical Protestants.

The dynamic of evangelicals cheering for Catholics is one of the most stunning shifts in American political history. Just 50 years ago, evangelicals were ringing the alarm about the rising prominence of Catholics in American politics, not falling in line behind them.

FULL ARTICLE FROM CNN 

Can a Muslim be God’s Voice to an Evangelical Christian?

I once lived with a Muslim family for two years. It was extremely challenging, but not in the ways I expected it would be.

I lived with the Muslim family in their house near the center square of the capital city of Albania. There were nine of us in a relatively small space. Added to the cramped conditions was the fact that running water flowed only a few hours a day, electricity was intermittent, and food variety was limited. But I found none of this too difficult, even though Albania (Muslim, Balkan, post-Communist, poor, Mediterranean) could not have been more jarring to my affluent, American, “white,” Baptist upbringing.

What I found most challenging was this: They loved me. They loved me not only in a pat-you-on-the-back landlord sort of way. My Muslim family loved me like a son, which included caring for me as their spiritual responsibility.

This took particular force in the person of my hunched and humming Albanian grandmother. She was the first face I saw each morning, and at night she would lovingly touch my shoulder and say “sweet sleep.” She also pastored me. She encouraged me when I was low, blessed me as I went about my work (which, by the way, was Christian missionary work) and she told me about God’s love for me. She challenged my Christian training and my American pragmatism. She was a dawdling, superstitious Muslim. How could I allow her to be God’s voice in my life?

Tough questions

What am I to do? Seriously.

How do I understand all the folks who cross my path and don’t fit my theological categories? As a devout Christian, what am I supposed to do with the non-Christians I have known who are kinder than most Christians, purer than most Christians, and seemingly more connected to God than most Christians? Even more troubling, what am I to do with religious outsiders who are spiritually wise and speak that wisdom into my life? Am I allowed to accept their wisdom or am I required to sit in perpetual suspicion?

FULL ARTICLE FROM LEADERSHIP

‘Let’s Start Over’: Muslims Hope Pope Francis will Salvage Relations

By Kari Huus, Staff Writer, NBC News

Catholics and Muslims have come a long way since the Crusades, but during the tenure of Pope Benedict XVI, relations between the world’s two largest religions hit the skids.

So it was with relief and renewed optimism that prominent Muslims and interfaith advocates cheered the newly anointed Pope Francis.

“We are hoping for better relations with the Vatican after the election of the new pope,” Mahmud Azab, adviser for inter-faith affairs at Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s highest seat of learning in Cairo, told AFP. “We congratulate the Church of St. Peter and all Catholics around the world.”

From the start, Benedict put less energy in reaching out to other religions than his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, who blazed the trail for Catholic relations with Muslims and other religions through his tireless travels and scores of meetings and prayer with imams around the world.

Under John Paul, the Vatican launched the World Day of Prayer for Peace in 1986, which was at first a hard sell for prominent Muslims, said Father Thomas Michel, who has a PhD in Islamic studies and headed John Paul’s office for Islam for 13 years.

FULL ARTICLE FROM NBC NEWS