Turkish Government to Return Seized Property to Religious Minorities

By SEBNEM ARSU

Published: August 28, 2011

ANKARA, Turkey — The Turkish government said it would return hundreds of properties that were confiscated from religious minorities by the state or other parties over the years since 1936, and would pay compensation for properties that were seized and later sold.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan made the announcement on Sunday to representatives of more than 150 Christian and Jewish trusts gathered at a dinner he hosted in Istanbul to break the day’s Ramadan fast. The government decree to return the properties, bypassing nationalist opposition in Parliament, was issued late Saturday.

The European Union, which Turkey has applied to join, has pressed the country to ease or eliminate laws and policies that discriminate against non-Muslim religious groups, including restrictions on land ownership. Many of the properties, including schools, hospitals, orphanages and cemeteries, were seized after 1936 when trusts were called to list their assets, and in 1974 a separate ruling banned the groups from purchasing any new real estate.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

 

Muslim Leaders in Washington Say Bin Laden’s Death a Relief

WASHINGTON — The leaders of Muslim groups in Washington said Monday that the death of Osama bin Laden has brought their community a sense of relief and hope.

Bin Laden was never a “Muslim leader” and didn’t represent the Muslim community, various leaders said, but they added that they hope his death will put to rest any incorrect associations between their community and bin Laden’s anti-American views.

“American Muslims want to see: How will our neighbors respond to us now?” said Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, former chairman of the Council of Muslim Organizations for the Washington area. “Will they have learned enough to know that we are not part of al-Qaida — we are part of the United States of America.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE WASHINGTON POST

Rebellions: Smashing Stereotypes of Arab Women

The Arab revolutions are not only shaking the structure of tyranny to the core – they are shattering many of the myths about the Arab region that have been accumulating for decades. Topping the list of dominant myths are those of Arab women as caged in, silenced, and invisible. Yet these are not the types of women that have emerged out of Tunisia, Egypt, or even ultra-conservative Yemen in the last few weeks and months.

Not only did women actively participate in the protest movements raging in those countries, they have assumed leadership roles as well. They organised demonstrations and pickets, mobilised fellow citizens, and eloquently expressed their demands and aspirations for democratic change.

Like Israa Abdel Fatteh, Nawara Nejm, and Tawakul Karman, the majority of the women are in their 20s and 30s. Yet there were also inspiring cases of senior activists as well: Saida Saadouni, a woman in her 70s from Tunisia,  draped the national flag around her shoulders and partook in the Qasaba protests which succeeded in toppling M. Ghannouchi’s provisional government. Having protested for two weeks, she breathed a unique revolutionary spirit into the thousands who congregated around her to hear her fiery speeches. “I resisted French occupation. I resisted the dictatorships of Bourguiba and Ben Ali. I will not rest until our revolution meets its ends, for your sakes my sons and daughters, not for mine,” said Saadouni.

Whether on the virtual battlefields of the Internet or the physical protests in the streets, women have been proving themselves as real incubators of leadership. This is part of a wider phenomenon characteristic of these revolutions: The open politics of the street have bred and matured future leaders. They are grown organically in the field, rather than being imposed upon from above by political organisations, religious groups, or gender roles.

FULL ARTICLE FROM AL JAZEERA (ENGLISH) 

Controversial Florida Pastor Denied Protest at Michigan Mosque

A U.S. jury  has banned Pastor Terry Jones from staging a protest in front of the largest mosque in North America in the U. S. state of Michigan.  The jury in Dearborn, home  to one of the country’s largest Muslim communities, said such a protest would disturb the peace. Jones, pastor of a small evangelical church in the southern state of Florida, made international headlines last year when he threatened to burn the Quran, the Islamic holy book. Jones eventually did burn the Quran March 20 and posted video on his church’s website.  The move caused widespread violence in Afghanistan, and scores of people were killed including U.N. personnel.  The controversy that surrounds Terry Jones followed him into a courtroom Friday, when concerns about public safety intersected with Jones’s desire to stage the protest.  The jury’s decision puts an end, for now, to Jones’s plans.

FULL ARTICLE FROM VOA NEWS

Islamists in Egypt seek change through politics

Reporting from Alexandria, Egypt—

Nageh Ibrahim once spoke of slaying infidels and creating an Islamic state that would stretch from the Nile Delta to the vast deserts ofEgypt’s south. Today he lives in a high-rise with a view of the Mediterranean Sea and has the soothing voice of a man who could lead a 12-step program on rejecting radicalism.

Ibrahim’s group, Gamaa al Islamiya, plotted notorious attacks, including the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat and the massacre at an ancient Luxor temple that killed 62 people, mostly tourists, in 1997. He spent 24 years in jail reading the Koran and tempering the rage of his youth.

“We were young and we took extreme measures. But now we’re old men and our time in prison has made us wiser,” he said. “Al Qaeda and Islamic militancy have lost their glamour. Look at what has happened. The young saw that violence didn’t bring change to Egypt, a peaceful revolution did.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE LA TIMES

Countering Irrational Attacks on Islam: A religion Pop Quiz

OK, put your books away. We’re having a pop quiz.

Below are four quotes. Each is from one of two sources: the Bible or the Quran, although, just to make things interesting, there’s also a chance all four are from one book. Two were edited for length and one of those was also edited to remove a religion-specific reference. Your job: identify the holy book of origin. Ready? Go:

— “… Wherever you encounter (nonbelievers), kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every lookout post. …”

— “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

— “If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’ … do not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death.”

— “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”

All right, pens down. How did you do?

FULL ARTICLE FROM DNJ.COM (AND THE ANSWERS!)

 

Nearly 7 in 10 Americans OK with Mosque in Their Community

A new poll shows that a majority of Americans would be okay with a mosque in their community.

 

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(Photo: AP/Rockford Register Star, Scott Morgan)

This photo taken Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2010, shows the Muslim Association of Greater Rockford mosque being built in Rockford, Ill. Muslims have been a part of the Rockford community for at least 20 years, but they haven’t had a prominent physical structure on the city’s landscape that visibly symbolizes their presence. The brick octagon-shaped building topped by a gold dome and featuring a green and gold minaret is the latest addition to the Muslim Community Center. It is the result of a 10-year fundraising campaign and a growing Muslim community.

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Sixty-nine percent of surveyed Americans agreed while 28 percent disagreed, according to the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, released Thursday.

Opposition mainly comes from the South where half of the rural population is against mosques in their area.

Muslims make up 0.8 to 2.6 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. In recent years, particularly since the proposal of an Islamic center near the site of the September 11, 2011, terrorist attacks in New York, Muslims have been met with increasing fear and opposition to their attempts to build mosques.

The American Civil Liberties Union has documented anti-mosque activity in 21 states over the past five years.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE CHRISTIAN POST

Muslim, Christian groups rally against US pastor

LAHORE: Several religious groups held protests on Wednesday against the reported burning of the Holy Quran by an American pastor in a Florida church in the United States.

Besides parties affiliated with the Deobandi and Wahabi schools, the protestors included a Christian organisation as well. The speakers at rallies organised by the former urged the people to prepare themselves for jihad against America. The Christians rally, however, also voiced opposition against the misuse of blasphemy laws in the country.

Addressing protesters in front of the US consulate, leaders of different religious parties vowed to struggle for strengthening the blasphemy laws, particularly Section 295-B (defiling of the Holy Quran) of the Pakistan Penal Code.

FULL ARTICLE FROM INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

 

Democracy in the Arab World?

AMMAN, Jordan — The cry first rang out from the fed-up people of Lisbon and Madrid: “Basta!”

It echoed across South America, to the banging of pots and pans. It resounded in the old capitals of a new Asia, was taken up in a Polish shipyard, awakened a slumbering Africa. And now, a generation later, it’s heard in the city squares of the Arab world: “Kifaya!”

Enough.

From Morocco in the west to Yemen in the east, the sudden rising up of ordinary Arabs against their autocratic rulers looks like a belated postscript to the changes that swept the globe in the final decades of the last century — a period scholars dubbed the “third wave of democracy.”

“Now we’re witnessing the fourth wave of democracy,” a smiling Oraib al-Rantawi, Jordanian political activist, assured a visitor to Amman. “We’re lucky to live to see it.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE WASHINGTON POST

Faith Under Fire: A 9/11 Muslim Chaplain’s Response to the King Hearings

The recent hearings on “Radical Islam” are not going to strengthen us, they are just going to push us further apart, says Imam Khalid Latif, a Muslim chaplain at New York University and with the New York Police Department. Demonizing a group isolates them from the rest of society, he says, and prevents us from being able to understand the qualities and values that we do share. He also talks about standing with families of 9-11 victims, as a Muslim chaplain with the New York Police Department, and how the families have accepted him although the Secret Service has not always been as welcoming. Learn more about Imam Khalid Latif.

VIDEO CLIP FROM ODYSSEY NETWORKS