EU-DIGEST

Florida authorities' investigation into a teenager's claims that her life is in danger for converting from Islam to Christianity found no credible threats to 17-year-old Rifqa Bary, according to a newly unsealed report. The high school student is in foster care in Orlando after fleeing to Florida from her home in Ohio because, she said, she feared being killed by her family for switching religions.

Rifqa ran away from her parents' house in suburban Columbus in July after her parents, Sri Lankan immigrants Mohamed and Aysha Bary, learned she had been baptized a Christian without telling them.She has said she is afraid of becoming the victim of an "honor killing" if she stays with her father and mother. Her parents have said they have no intention of harming their daughter. The girl fled to the home of the Rev. Blake Lorenz, pastor of the Orlando-based Global Revolution Church — whom she befriended on Facebook. Her father says he believes Rifqa has been brainwashed by fundamentalist Christians.

Labels: Christian, Musllim

CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM MARRIAGES

Gé Speelman of Utrecht University in the Netherlands spoke on Christian-Muslim marriages during the Graz European Ecumenical Assembly in 1997. By clicking on the above link you can read a shortened version of her paper. The Muslim partner is often confronted with what most people around him think is natural, obvious, self-evident; he/her is the other, the one who has to prove him/her self. Many Muslim partners find they have to defend their faith against attacks which associate Islam with intolerance, backwardness and irrationality. In reaction, many Muslims become very much aware of their cultural and religious heritage. As one Muslim man said: “I would never have known so much about Islam if I had stayed at home and married an Egyptian girl.”

Another factor is that interfaith partners are seen as representatives of their communities. The Turkish Muslim represents the “terrible Turks” who have shaped the history of so many Eastern European countries. The German wife is the “imperialist European” whose community has been responsible for so much repression and bloodshed. Many problems in an interfaith marriage are exactly the same as those experienced by many other couples. But in their case, family and friends are looking out for problems; when they occur, they are defined as arising from differences in culture. A Dutch woman said she did not want to recognize the serious communication problem in her relationship because she was determined to prove to those who said it would never work that her marriage was fantastically successful. The partners had put off talking about their problems until it was too late.

Loved ones want to be more than merely “that Christian”, or “that Muslim”. Of course, they are also “a Christian” and “a Muslim” – much of what we are ties up with our religious traditions. German theologian Ulrich Dietzfelbinger, who described, in a lecture he gave in 1989, his relationship with his Turkish Muslim wife. He describes his tendency to reduce the differences in their beliefs to minor points, the pull to reduce their faith to the lowest common denominator. “After all, we both believe in Almighty God.” In the end, he recognizes that this way of reducing their differences is a way of denying them, leaving both partners with very little faith at all. What he learns is that one should not try to make the other the same as oneself. With new eyes he looks at the doctrine of incarnation. It is strange that God has community with a human being (and therefore with all human beings) in such a way that God is in his/her utmost being qualified by that humanity, while at the same time human beings are not deified and God remains God. Is there not in this strange incarnation something analogous to his marriage, where only love is the guarantor that he respects his partner as being inalienably other, different, and yet at one with himself? Maybe we should just let this question stand.

Labels: Christian, EU, Marriage, Musllim, Religion

For the complete report from Radio Netherlands click on this link

The Netherlands - Europe should explain Wilders to world - by Erik Hesen

Dutch MP Alexander Pechtold wants the Netherlands to form a common front with other European countries to explain to Muslims around the world why the anti-Qur'an film by right-wing MP Geert Wilders has not been banned. The leader of the democrat party D66 wants the Dutch government to do more to spell out what democracy and freedom of expression exactly stand for in Europe. The debate surrounding Mr Wilders' anti-Islam movie focuses too much on the Dutch context, according to Mr Pechtold. "The cabinet constantly warns Mr. Wilders about the film's consequences. We should address ourselves more to other countries. Here we are accustomed to democracy and freedom of expression but not everyone abroad is. Elsewhere fundamentalists seize on these sort of films to preach hatred against the West. We have to explain what our fundamental rights represent. Maybe the prime minister should explain the matter on Al Jazeera. Or Mr Ahmed Aboutaleb [the deputy minister for social affairs], who speaks Arabic. Maybe things won't be so bad, because we are dealing with them now. It's hard to say. It all depends on how foreign regimes will exploit the movie. Foreign regimes often have double agendas. Iran's authorities are using this incident to try and counter economic sanctions. The thing to do, therefore, is to reach people directly, bypassing governments, to explain what democracy entails. I really regard democracy as an export product. We shouldn't just pursue economic interests but also strive to make people aware of our democratic values." Mr Pechtold stresses, however, that it's Mr Wilders' own responsibility to decide whether or not to broadcast the film. The Public Prosecutor only can determine whether the film breaches any constitutional rights once it has been shown. Mr Wilders appears undeterred by all the commotion. He dismissed the prime minister's warnings accusing the cabinet of capitulating to Islam, something he vowed he will never do.

Note EU-Digest: Mr. Pechtold is right. Freedom of expression and tolerance is the issue, not what is being said. Blackmail is not acceptable.

Labels: EU, Geert Wilders, Islam, Musllim, Netherlands

Christian women in Basra forced to wear Islamic headscarf - by Daniel Blake

”Christian women in Basra are being threatened and intimidated into wearing the traditional Muslim headscarf, or hijab. The Times has reported on the case of Zeena, 21, who on her first day at Basra University was met by a man who told her, along with three other Christian girls, to cover their heads with the hijab.Graffiti adorns the city warning women not to go outside without following Islamic dress codes. According to the newspaper, one such message said, “Whoever disobeys will be punished. God is our witness that we have conveyed this message.”

Labels: Christians, Iraq, Musllim

From Born Again To Muslim in Under Twenty Years - by Jeff Gibbs

"I’m not sure I will ever go much deeper into Islam. Like many Americans my age and younger, I tend to play in religions. I’ve done Buddhist meditations, Tibetan and Thai. I’ve attended Quaker services and Russian Orthodox, read the Bhagavad Gita and Vedas. And so my ablutions in the ocean that day on Cape Ann, I think, was not so much a ritual to remember God, as a ritual in the face of the awful power of time and a struggle to preserve a friendship.

My time in Turkey had been magical, and already, my memories of it came in fits and starts, breaking into pieces–the emotions I’d felt praying next to him in the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, the tears that came to my eyes when once, standing on one of the red cliffs of Cappodocia, we heard the call to prayer drift out from village after village over the long, quiet valleys of red stone. One day soon, Turkey would perhaps just be another set of pictures I ran across sometimes and Ekrem and his family less and less vivid until all I could remember were the photos. And so this ablution was to him as well. A space set aside to revere that memory and his continued living presence, and to remember and bring to life all that I had lost and stood to lose and wanted to feel again." Note EU-Digest: "Maybe we can also get the viewpoint of someone out there in the "Cyber World" who went from Muslim to Born Again."

Labels: Christianity, EU, Musllim

Turkey: Muslim Democracy in Action - by Jackson Diehl

The notion that democracy and Islam are fundamentally incompatible is about to get a resounding rebuke, just at the moment it is threatening to congeal as conventional wisdom in Washington. Barring a last-minute surprise -- such as a military coup -- a liberal and pro-Western politician named Abdullah Gul will be elected president of Turkey by the country's parliament tomorrow. Gul speaks fluent English and has been a steady if somewhat quiet friend of the United States during more than four years as foreign minister. He also identifies himself as a religious Muslim in a country with an 85-year history of militant secularism. His wife wears a headscarf, which is banned from public offices, universities and -- until now -- the president's Cankaya Palace in Ankara.

Labels: Democracy, EU, Musllim, Turkey