CA Coffee Shop Refused to Serve Christian Man Who Harassed Muslim Woman

A Christian man yelled at and harassed a Muslim woman while they were in line at a coffee shop in Riverside, Calif., and the barista and her supervisor stepped in.

Kathleen “Amina” Deady was wearing a niqab, a traditional Muslim head dress symbolizing modesty, when a still-unidentified man standing in front of her said, “Is this Halloween or something?” That would ultimately lead to the man yelling aggressively that he doesn’t “like” her religion, and then being denied service by staff at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.

The video can be found here:

CJ Werleman

✔@cjwerleman

“I’m a Muslim [woman].”

“I know your religion and I don’t want to be killed by you.”

This took place at a cafe in California yesterday.

11:15 AM – May 12, 2018

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The video of the interaction has gone viral, but in case you haven’t seen it, here’s what happened.

FULL ARTICLE FROM PATHEOS BLOGS

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Are you afraid of Muslims? This pastor says ‘Islamophobia’ is dangerous

PASCO, WA 

Hate groups in the U.S. spend millions of dollars each year whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment through websites, videos, white papers and the like, a Washington pastor said.

That industry — the “Islamophobia industry” — is a dangerous thing, Pastor Terry Kyllo told the Herald.

The Anacortes man is working with a Muslim leader from the west side to fight it. They’re bringing their “Faith over Fear: Standing with our Muslim Neighbors” event to Pasco on Tuesday.

Kyllo, a Lutheran pastor and founder of the group Neighbors in Faith, will speak alongside Aneelah Afzali, founder of the American Muslim Empowerment Network.

FULL ARTICLE FROM TRI-CITY HERALD 

 

UK: ‘Hello, I am Muslim’

International event aims to encourage mutual understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims.

An international event aiming to break fears and prejudices against Muslims and promote empathy has been launched in King’s Cross station in central London, the capital of Britain.

The event this week will see young Muslims promoting mutual understanding in public places in various countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, France and Austria.

‘Hello, I am a Muslim’

The Islamic Community Milli Gorus (ICMG) group said in a statement on Thursday that thousands of young Muslims living in Europe, Australia and Canada will take to the streets to deliver “their ‘Hello, I am a Muslim’ message to introduce themselves”.

“Contacting people individually is the most natural and the best way of promoting understanding and empathy,” the ICMG said.

“We have prepared the ‘Hello, I am a Muslim’ events to encourage mutual communication and cooperation between Muslims and non-Muslims,” said Kemal Ergun, the group’s president.

More than 500 mosques across Europe will also take part in the initiative, according to the ICMG statement.

FULL ARTICLE FROM AL JAZEERA 

Reports of Islamophobia: 1997 and 2017

THE ROAD TRAVELLED

Earlier this month the Runnymede Trust launched a new report, Islamophobia: Still a challenge for us all, to mark the 20^th anniversary of the publication of the landmark 1997 report, Islamophobia; A challenge for us all. The significance of the original Report is hard to over-estimate. While it is the case that it did not coin the term Islamophobia, it certainly gave it legs.  And while it is also true that the report did not end Islamophobia, it did indict it.

The 1997 report was the first comprehensive combined survey and policy intervention on an increasingly prominent phenomenon and against the context of heightened global problematisation of Muslims as Muslims. This is worth remembering for two reasons. Firstly, whatever its final form as a document, the consultative nature of the work which fed into its pages generated a momentum and a sense of stake-holding important to its reception and impact. Whether adopted as leverage or contested in whole or in part, the report and the momentum of its discussion produced Muslim agency over Muslim agendas. The publication of the report propelled Islamophobia into public consciousness. It shaped the national and global conversation, even if much of that conversation was only to contest the vocabulary that the report sought to establish. Second, because it is worth being reminded that already in 1997 the report was a response to diverse interrelated historical shifts, both local and transnational: the post third worldist and post-67 global resurgence of Muslims signified by the Revolt of Islam; the increasing debasement of the grand narratives of modernisation come-secularisation in the social sciences; cumulative postcolonial and post-cold war challenges to the Eurocentric world order; the identification and ascriptive reclassification of ethnically marked and immigrant populations as Muslim, and concomitant mobilisations over the way in which existing race-relations based anti-discrimination legislation afforded them only uneven and inadequate protection, recourse, and redress as Muslims. This isn’t just about recasting a twenty year view into a longer genealogy. Against presentist fixation on framing the Muslim Question in the horizon of 9/11, it bears remembering that the report was published four years before George W. Bush declared the ‘war on terror’, and that in some ways this never-ending war was as much a reflection of Islamophobia as it was its intensification.

The 2017 report does not repeat the impact of the original report; perhaps never could. In any case, it is a very different document.  The 1997 report was the work of a commission; the present report is an edited collection. It is based neither on community consultation, nor on new research and evidence into the policy areas it covers, but rather on commissioned chapters by academics summarising their research in different registers. Each chapter, as their bibliographical references mostly attest, speaks in an individual voice, and the volume makes little effort to engage let alone convey or build upon the mounting and increasingly diverse body of academic scholarship on Islamophobia produced across the world, including in two specialist journals, and numerous reports.  Even its most significant departure from the 1997 report, that of defining Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism, is eroded by this lack of engagement. There is something to be said for an edited collection of single-theme focused chapters, but the absence of connection and engagement across the chapters is problematic.

FULL ARTICLE FROM CRITICAL MUSLIMS STUDY (UK)

HOW MUSLIM AMERICANS ARE DEFENDING THEMSELVES AND THEIR COMMUNITIES AGAINST BIGOTRY

Islamophobia is becoming more widespread and systemic throughout the U.S., but Muslim Americans aren’t idly awaiting their ruin.

On an early morning last summer, Ajeyo Yusuf got the fright of his life. “I get a little bit jittery when I talk about this,” he says, recalling the incident.

That morning, the 26-year-old from Bangladesh woke up around 5 a.m. at his family’s home in Queens, New York. He was answering emails before heading into work at the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, when he saw out the window “a few burly white guys” descend the stairs to his family’s basement apartment. The men knocked on the front door and identified themselves as police, which was also emblazoned across the back of their jackets. Yusuf, though, could see through this ruse. “I knew who they were,” he says. “They had to be ICE agents.”

Yusuf and his family are just a few of the more than three million Muslims in the United States who now find themselves in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump‘s controversial immigration policies, as well as the hate groups and individual bigots who have been incited by the president’s rhetoric.

FULL ARTICLE FROM PACIFIC SOUTH MAGAZINE

 

Islam’s contribution to Europe

There is a widespread belief, especially among right-wing politicians in Europe, that Islam is incompatible with Western civilization and has contributed nothing to it. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders captured this perception when he described Islam as a ‘culture of backwardness, of retardedness, of barbarism.’ It is worth our while therefore to investigate whether this assertion is, in fact, correct. If it is not, the basis of the Islamophobia of Islam’s critics like Wilders collapses like a house of cards. They will then have to use some other arguments against Islam or their racial prejudices will stand exposed; they will be naked without benefit of a niqab to cover their modesty.

The impact of Muslims on European culture is deep and extensive. I will use material from my book Journey into Europe to illustrate the assertion over the next few weeks. Perhaps Islam’s greatest contribution was to introduce the idea of a unified understanding of our spiritual universe, which was reflected in the art, architecture, literature, and society in Andalusia based in religious pluralism and acceptance, one that valued learning and the ilm ethos. It is this society that produced an Ibn Firnas, who attempted flight, and religious philosophers like Maimonides and Averroes, who sought to balance reason and faith. Andalusian society, in turn, sowed the seeds for what would become the European Renaissance, which would lead to the Enlightenment and go on to shape our modern world.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE DAILY TIMES 

American Evangelical Islamophobia: A History of Continuity with a Hope for Change

From Fuller Seminary’s reflections on Christian-Muslim relations

Colonial Americans had no idea that many of the slaves on their shores were actually Muslims. The famous Boston pastor Cotton Mather once quipped, “we are afar off, in a Land, which never had (that ever heard of) one Mahometan breathing in it.”² Yet they felt themselves to be knowledgeable about Islam through the proliferation of sermons and books on that topic. The other source was the reality of Americans, along with Europeans, who were enslaved by the “Barbary Pirates” of North Africa.³ Already in the 1670s, several stories of North American captives caught the attention of the colonists, but especially that of the appointed royal governor of Carolina, who was abducted in 1679 and later freed by ransom. His narrative has only survived in fragments, but what stands out is “the cruelties of the Muslims” and the power of his prayers, which also influenced his captors.⁴

Captivity stories from North Africa were so common that many beggars on the streets of colonial America claimed to have been captured by the Barbary pirates, hoping to elicit more sympathy. Yet these stories also fueled a longstanding industry within Christendom including polemical writings about Muslims and Islam. One particularly influential book, Humphrey Prideaux’s, The True Nature of Imposture Fully Displayed in the Life of Mahomet, was published in London in 1697, with seven subsequent editions. Years later, American editions appeared in Philadelphia (1796) and Fairhaven, Vermont (1798), no doubt connected to the nascent U.S. government’s troubles with the Barbary powers at that time.⁵

We know that Prideaux’s book was widely read in the American colonies, because from the early 18th century on, and for the first time, Muhammad’s name in print rarely appeared without the epithet “impostor.” Prideaux’s message was hardly new, but this Anglican theologian’s main target was the Deists, whose central critique of Christianity was that it was fraudulent. By holding up Islam as a plain case of religious forgery, he hoped to defend Christianity’s integrity. From the start he anticipates accusations of demonizing Islam, but he promises to “approach Islam judiciously.”⁶ That said, he had little first-hand knowledge, and what he did think he knew was often wrong—but wrote he did, and people on both sides of the Atlantic absorbed it as truth.

FULL ARTICLE FROM FULLER STUDIO