Muslims love Jesus. We also love Abraham, Moses, and Noah, to name just a few other Prophets Muslims revere. May God’s peace be upon all of these great messengers of God.- Muslims also love the mother of Jesus, the Virgin Mary. We believe she was a pious and noble woman chosen over all of the women of the world.
- Muslims believe that Jesus was born miraculously of a virgin mother and no father. His birth is miraculous like the birth of Adam, the first human being, who was created with neither mother nor father.
- Muslims do not believe that Jesus was the son of God. God is so powerful and self-sufficient that He does not need a son or any kind of partner.
Month: October 2016
Media guide to countering prominent anti-Muslim extremists
In response to the high levels of anti-Muslim extremists regularly provided a platform in the media and in the public eye, the Southern Poverty Law Center has partnered with Media Matters for America, ReThink Media and the Center for New Community to provide a resource on anti-Muslim public figures for reporters and media professionals.
The newly released Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists contains profiles of 15 prominent anti-Muslim extremists, many of whom are associated with organizations identified by the SPLC as hate groups.
“We wrote this manual because Muslims in America continue to be vilified by a network of anti-Muslim extremists spreading baseless and damaging lies and we think the media can play a role in helping to stop it,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
A shocking number of anti-Muslim, self-described “experts” are seen regularly in the media, where they spread falsehoods that too often go uncontested. Their rhetoric has toxic consequences, from promoting xenophobia, to poisoning democratic debate, to inspiring hate violence.
“We hope journalists will use this guide to learn more about these extremists and the damage they cause to society and either deny them a public platform altogether or be better prepared to publicly challenge their hateful rhetoric and misinformation,” Beirich said. “The public really should know who these extremists are and the damaging impact they have with a platform to spread hate and bigotry.”
Christians And Muslims Play Football To Combat Extremism
Christians and Muslims are working together for peace – through the medium of football, a British Muslim told a United Nations meeting in Istanbul.
British Pakistani professional footballer Kashif Siddiqi, co-founder of Football for Peace, told the United Nations Alliance of Civilisation how young footballers could be valuable in countering violent extremism among youth.
He was joined by Dutch footballer Wesley Sneijder, who plays for Turkish club Galatasaray and was named as one of the three best midfielders in the world by FIFA in 2010, as well as Turkish International player Oğuzhan Özyakup.
Siddiqi was in Istanbul after addressing a conference in Rome last week.
“Football is the one universal language that evaporates language, cultural and religious barriers the world over,” said Siddiqi. “It is fundamentally the greatest way to diffuse tensions and turn down the heat between competing factions.
FULL ARTICLE FROM CHRISTIAN TODAY
One Poll Suggests Arab-Americans’ Politics Are Similar To Other Minority Voters’
At FiveThirtyEight we process thousands of polls each year so we can power our election forecasts. While this gives us a general understanding of the opinions of the U.S. population in the aggregate, some groups are less surveyed than others. Take Arab-Americans: Most national polls don’t reach a large enough sample of Arab-Americans to reliably measure what their political beliefs are.
But Tuesday a poll crossed the FiveThirtyEight polling desk that helped shed some light on their beliefs. A survey by the Arab American Institutethat concentrated wholly on Arab-Americans showed that like other minority populations, they are mostly identifying as Democrats. Arab-Americans are, however, by no means a homogenous voting bloc. The poll of Arab-Americans shows many of the same partisan trends that we see in nationwide polls of all Americans, as you can see in this chart from the poll that shows Arab-American party identification:
Despite Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric towards minority populations and immigrants, such as his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., 77 percent of Arab-Americans who identified as Republican in this poll responded that they would vote for Trump. (Thirty percent of the 502 respondents self-identified as Muslim.) Sixty-two percent of Arab-Americans said that they are concerned about facing discrimination because of their ethnicity or country of origin. The number was even higher (78 percent), among Muslim Arab-Americans.
Who is God? Answers from Christianity and Islam
This is the third installment of my series on Faith and Families. These weekly videos are generally based on the lectionary passages for the upcoming Sunday and seek to find ways families can discuss passage, along with providing a family activity that relates to the message. This week we are going off lectionary to explore Christianity and Islam’s view of God.
Who is God?
Christianity and Islam have different, but not opposing, answers. In this video and in the text below, I explore the essence of their answers.
God in Christianity
There is a verse in the New Testament that claims “God is love.” It’s one of only two passages in the New Testament that define God. The other passage states, “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.”
Love is how Christianity defines God. For the New Testament, God’s love is universal. As Jesus says, it extends even to those we call our enemies.
God is defined as love in the New Testament, but how does the New Testament define love? If you’ve ever been to a wedding, you’ve heard 1 Corinthians 13. It goes like this:
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
MY MUSLIM FATHER’S FAITH IN AMERICA
When I was growing up, in the early nineteen-eighties, most of my fellow-Ghanaians viewed America as an evil empire that was bent on destroying our country. The Cold War was at its apogee, and the Ghanaian government, a military junta led by the strongman Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings, had quickly declared allegiance to the Soviet Union after seizing power on New Year’s Eve, 1982. As political hatred between the Reagan Administration and our dictatorship intensified, flamed by an intelligence leak exposing American plans for a coup to overthrow Rawlings, Ghanaians were all but mandated to hate the United States, the No. 1 enemy of the People’s Revolution.
It was in the midst of this hostility that my father placed me, in October of 1988, on a plane bound for New York City. My final destination was northern Michigan, where he had enrolled me to study creative writing at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy. I would have expected my father, the emir of Ghana’s Muslim Zongo people, to harbor anti-U.S. sentiments even stronger than those of his average countryman—if not for American political and economic bullying then at least for the “hedonistic and immoral” behavior depicted in the news and in Hollywood movies. He had sponsored two of my older cousins to study at the Islamic University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; I wondered quietly why he didn’t also choose a Muslim site of education for me, his first son. But I was eager to become a Yankee man, and, afraid of jinxing my trip, I kept my thoughts to myself.
Clinton says Muslims have been in America since George Washington
A Muslim woman at the second presidential debate asked Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton how they would help millions of Muslims in the United States “deal with the consequences of being labeled as a threat to the country.”
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, said that Muslims have to report problems, because “if they don’t do that, it’s a very difficult situation for our country.” And Clinton, his Democratic rival, won’t use the term “radical Islamic terrorism,” Trump said, which we have said is misleading.
Clinton said she wanted Muslims to feel included in the country, “part of our homeland security.”
“We’ve had Muslims in America since George Washington,” Clinton said. “And we’ve had many successful Muslims. We just lost a particular well-known one with Muhammad Ali.”
We wondered about Clinton’s remarks about Muslims being in America since the nation’s first president, more than 200 years ago.
There are about 2.75 million Muslims in America, according to estimates by Pew Research Center. Islam is the second-largest religion in the world after Christianity and the fastest growing.
Kansas Christians rally in support of Muslims
Residents of Kansas city rallied to show support for the local Muslim community after federal investigators uncovered a plot by the local militia members targeting Muslims.
According to US law enforcement agencies, three men were arrested on October 14 and charged in a domestic “terrorism plot” to bomb an apartment complex in Wichita suburbs, home of several Somali immigrant families.
First grade Pakistani boy beaten on US school bus for ‘being Muslim’
Pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Garden City, Reverend Denise Pass organised the rally after she heard of the “terrorism plot”
“When I heard this tragic news, it came to my mind that we – as members of this community and as Christians – should support and protect the local Muslim community,” she told Al Jazeera.
Further, Pass said: “The actions of few racist individuals should not be taken to represent the whole community, just as the Muslim community should not negatively labelled or held responsible for the actions of the very few terrorists who happened to be Muslims.”
Being Muslim American in the year of Donald Trump
Muslim Americans describe the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a seminal moment that painfully altered their place in American society.
But when CNN interviewed American Muslims about the presidential election, we heard a startling message: 2016 is worse.
CNN traveled last month to three growing Muslim communities — in Minneapolis, Northern Virginia and Staten Island — which represent the diversity and increasing political engagement of Muslims in the United States. The majority of people we spoke to said it is harder to be a Muslim American today than it was even after 9/11.
“I have never thought I would hear my young daughter say, ‘Dad, people were asking me about my scarf in the school,’ ” said Hamse Warfa, a Somali refugee who immigrated to the US as a teenager and now lives in the Minneapolis suburbs. “After 9/11, there was no ring-leader, so to speak, who was championing, mainstreaming, hate.”
That “ring-leader” Warfa was referring to is Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president.
Trump has run a hardline, anti-immigration campaign built on promises to erect a wall and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Last December, he announced a proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country. And he has suggested that profiling would be an effective strategy to prevent terrorism.
CNN interviewed more than 40 Muslim Americans who expressed raw emotions ranging from disbelief to anger to fear. Perhaps most disturbing about this election, many said, is the perception that Trump has helped to normalize animosity toward and suspicion of Muslims in the US.
Meet The Muslim Woman Running For State Legislature In Minnesota
ihan Omar is a former refugee, a Somali-American activist, and a proud Democrat.
On November 8, the 33-year-old is poised to become one of the few Muslim women ever elected to a state legislature in the country.
Omar is on the path towards winning a spot on the Minnesota State Legislature, after defeating a 44-year incumbent during the state’s primary election. Her Republican opponent in the heavily Democratic House District 60B suspended his campaign in August.
Born in Mogadishu, Omar was forced to flee her home when she was about eight years old, after war broke out in Somalia. Her family lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for several years. She was 12 years old when she arrived in in the United States, soon becoming part of a wave of Somalis who settled in Minnesota during the 1990s. Her political conscience was awakened when she was 14, after she began attending local Democratic caucus meetings with her grandfather and acting as his translator.
Omar worked in community health and then as a senior policy aide for a Minneapolis City Council member before deciding to run for Minnesota’s state House of Representatives herself.
The Huffington Post caught up with Omar to talk about her remarkable story, her activism, and her faith.
A Center of Christian-Muslim Engagement for Peace and Justice: 