Muslims in eastern Pakistan went on a rampage over allegations that a Christian man had desecrated the Koran, demolishing the man’s house, burning churches and damaging several other homes, police and local Christians have said.

The scale of the violence prompted the government to deploy additional police forces and send in the army to help restore order.

The attacks in Jaranwala, in the district of Faisalabad in Punjab province, erupted after some Muslims living in the area claimed they had seen a local Christian, Raja Amir, and his friend tearing out pages from a Koran, throwing them on the ground and writing insulting remarks on other pages.

Police chief Rizwan Khan said this had angered the local Muslims.

A mob gathered and began attacking multiple churches and several Christian homes, burning furniture and other household items.

Some members of the Christian community fled their homes to escape the mob.

Police eventually intervened, firing into the air and wielding batons before dispersing the attackers with the help of Muslim clerics and elders.

Authorities also said they have started launching raids in an effort to find all the perpetrators.

Dozens of rioters were arrested.

Police chief Bilal Mehmood told reporters they were also looking for Mr Amir, who went into hiding to escape the mob, and would detain him to determine whether he had desecrated the Koran.

Videos and photos posted on social media show an angry mob descending upon a church, throwing pieces of bricks and burning it.

In another video, two other churches are attacked, their windows broken as attackers throw furniture out and set it on fire.

Several policemen are seen in the videos watching the situation without intervening to stop the vandalism.

In yet another video, a man is seen climbing to the roof of the church and removing the steel cross after repeatedly hitting it with a hammer as the crowd down on the road cheered him on.

Khalid Mukhtar, a local priest, said most of the Christians living in the area had fled to safer places.

“Even my house was burned,” he added.

Mr Mukhtar said there are 17 churches in Jaranwala and he believes most of them were attacked.

The authorities did not immediately confirm that figure.

Mr Khan said additional police forces were later deployed in Jaranwala and an investigation was under way.

He said all involved in the attack would be prosecuted.

“Our first priority was to save the lives of all of the Christians,” he said.

Later in the evening, troops started arriving in Jaranwala to help the police.

Angry Muslims were urged to go back to their homes, allegedly with promises that the man who allegedly desecrated the Koran would soon be arrested.

A delegation of Muslim clerics also arrived in Jaranwala from the city of Lahore to express solidarity with the Christians.

Blasphemy accusations are common in Pakistan.

Under the country’s blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam or Islamic religious figures can be sentenced to death.

While authorities have yet to carry out a death sentence for blasphemy, often just the accusation can cause riots and incite mobs to violence, lynching and killings.

In one of the worst attacks on Christians, a mob in 2009 burned an estimated 60 homes and killed six Christians in the district of Gojra in Punjab, after accusing them of insulting Islam.

Wednesday’s attack drew nationwide condemnation from top leaders and major political parties.

Caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar said he was “gutted” by the images coming out of Faisalabad.

“Stern action would be taken against those who violate law and target minorities. All law enforcement has been asked to apprehend culprits & bring them to justice,” he tweeted.

A senior Christian leader, Bishop Azad Marshall, appealed for help on social media and said he was “deeply pained and distressed”.

“We cry out for justice and action from law enforcement and those who dispense justice and the safety of all citizens to intervene immediately and assure us that our lives are valuable in our own homeland that has just celebrated independence and freedom,” he tweeted.

Former prime minister Shehbaz Sharif also condemned the rampage, saying: “There is no place for violence in any religion.”

In the southern port city of Karachi, the capital of southern Sindh province, dozens of Christians rallied to denounce the attacks in Jaranwala.

Domestic and international human rights groups say blasphemy allegations have often been used to intimidate religious minorities in Pakistan and settle personal scores.

In December 2021, a Muslim mob descended on a sports equipment factory in Pakistan’s Sialkot district, killing a Sri Lankan man and burning his body publicly over allegations of blasphemy.

Read more: Man accused of blasphemy stoned to death by mob in Pakistan

The Liverpool bomber had been buying bomb components since at least April, police have revealed.

Assistant Chief Constable Russ Jackson said that Iraq-born Emad Al Swealmeen had rented a property in Liverpool seven months ago and had started making “relevant purchases” for his homemade bomb “at least” since that time.

In an update issued on Wednesday he said: “A complex picture is emerging over the purchases of the component parts of the device, we know that Al Swealmeen rented the property from April this year and we believe relevant purchases have been made at least since that time.

“We have now traced a next of kin for Al Swealmeen who has informed us that he was born in Iraq.”

He also said that the 32-year-old asylum seeker had suffered from periods of mental illness that will “form part of the investigation and will take some time to fully understand”.

Mr Jackson added: “There is much comment in the media about Al Swealmeen and it is clear that he was known to many people. We continue to appeal for people who knew him, especially those who associated with him this year as we try and piece together the events leading up to this incident and the reasons for it.

“At this time we are not finding any link to others in the Merseyside area of concern but this remains a fast moving investigation and as more becomes known we cannot rule out action against others.”

Earlier, Home Secretary Priti Patel claimed that Al Swealmeen, who reportedly arrived in the UK from the Middle East in 2014 and had an application for asylum rejected the following year, had been able to exploit Britain’s “dysfunctional” immigration system by staying in the country.

She said the system was a “complete merry-go-round” with a “whole industry” devoted to defending the rights of individuals intent on causing harm.

Christian convert Al Swealmeen died in the blast in a taxi outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital shortly before 11am on Remembrance Sunday.

Concerns have been raised that some asylum seekers in the city may have pretended to convert to Christianity in order to bolster their visa applications.

Liverpool Cathedral, where Al Swealmeen was baptised in 2015 and confirmed in 2017, said that asylum seekers who convert would be expected to be “closely connected” with the congregation for at least two years before staff would support a visa application.

A spokesman said: “Liverpool Cathedral has developed robust processes for discerning whether someone might be expressing a genuine commitment to faith.

“These include requirements for regular attendance alongside taking part in a recognised Christian basics course. We would expect someone to be closely connected with the community for at least two years before we would consider supporting an application.”

According to newspaper reports, Ms Patel told reporters on her flight to the US capital that the case showed why the Government was right to reform the asylum system.

“The case in Liverpool was a complete reflection of how dysfunctional, how broken, the system has been in the past, and why I want to bring changes forward,” she was quoted as saying.

“It’s a complete merry-go-round and it has been exploited. A whole sort of professional legal services industry has based itself on rights of appeal, going to the courts day-in day-out at the expense of the taxpayers through legal aid. That is effectively what we need to change.”

A couple who took in Al Swealmeen after his appeal against the asylum ruling was rejected insisted that he had been an “absolutely genuine” Christian with a “real passion for Jesus Christ”.

Malcolm and Elizabeth Hitchcott said they had been contacted by Al Swealmeen, who also used the name Enzo Almeni, in 2017 when he was “desperate” for somewhere to stay.

Mr Hitchcott told BBC Radio Merseyside: “He arrived here on April 1 2017. He was with us then for eight months, and during that time we saw him really blossoming in regards to his Christian faith.

“He really had a passion about Jesus that I wish many Christians had, and he was ready to learn.

“He was keen on reading his Bible and every night we used to pray – my wife and him, and if there was anybody else in the house – we prayed for half an hour or so and studied the scriptures.

“He was absolutely genuine, as far as I could tell. I was in no doubt by the time that he left us at the end of that eight months that he was a Christian.”

It is understood however that an Islamist plot is one line of inquiry being considered by police, although investigators are keeping an open mind and the motivation is yet to be established.

Official sources told the PA news agency the current understanding is still that the hospital was the intended target.

The inquiry is examining, among other possibilities, whether the main charge on the device failed to explode and if the homemade explosive TATP was used.

Searches have been carried out at the property in Rutland Avenue that had been rented since April by Al Swealmeen, and a second property in Sutcliffe Street, where officers believe he previously lived.

The incident has been declared a terrorist attack and the UK terror threat level has since been raised from substantial to severe, meaning an attack is “highly likely” rather than “likely”.

A community of Syrians who converted to Christianity from Islam is growing in Kobani, a town besieged by Islamic State for months, and where the tide turned against the militants four years ago.

The converts say the experience of war and the onslaught of a group claiming to fight for Islam pushed them towards their new faith. After a number of families converted, the Syrian-Turkish border town’s first evangelical church opened last year.

Islamic State militants were beaten back by U.S. air strikes and Kurdish fighters at Kobani in early 2015, in a reversal of fortune after taking over swaths of Iraq and Syria. After years of fighting, U.S.-backed forces fully ended the group’s control over populated territory last month.

Though Islamic State’s ultra-radical interpretation of Sunni Islam has been repudiated by the Islamic mainstream, the legacy of its violence has affected perceptions of faith.

Many in the mostly Kurdish areas of northern Syria, whose urban centres are often secular, say agnosticism has strengthened and in the case of Kobani, Christianity.

Christianity is one of the region’s minority faiths that was persecuted by Islamic State.

Critics view the new converts with suspicion, accusing them of seeking personal gain such as financial help from Christian organisations working in the region, jobs and enhanced prospects of emigration to European countries.

The newly-converted Christians of Kobani deny those accusations. They say their conversion was a matter of faith.

“After the war with Islamic State people were looking for the right path, and distancing themselves from Islam,” said Omar Firas, the founder of Kobani’s evangelical church. “People were scared and felt lost.”

Firas works for a Christian aid group at a nearby camp for displaced people that helped set up the church.

He said around 20 families, or around 80 to 100 people, in Kobani now worship there. They have not changed their names.

“We meet on Tuesdays and hold a service on Fridays. It is open to anyone who wants to join,” he said.

The church’s current pastor, Zani Bakr, 34, arrived last year from Afrin, a town in northern Syria. He converted in 2007.

“This was painted by IS as a religious conflict, using religious slogans. Because of this a lot of Kurds lost trust in religion generally, not just Islam,” he said.

Many became atheist or agnostic. “But many others became Christian. Scores here and more in Afrin.”

MISSIONARIES AND CRITICS

One man, who lost an arm in an explosion in Kobani and fled to Turkey for medical treatment, said he met Kurdish and Turkish converts there and eventually decided to join them.

“They seemed happy and all talked about love. That’s when I decided to follow Jesus’s teachings,” Maxim Ahmed, 22, said, adding that several friends and family were now interested in coming to the new church.

Some in Kobani reject the growing Christian presence. They say Western Christian aid groups and missionaries have exploited the chaos and trauma of war to convert people and that local newcomers to the religion see an opportunity for personal gain.

“Many people think that they are somehow benefitting from this, maybe for material gain or because of the perception that Christians who seek asylum abroad get preferential treatment,” said Salih Naasan, a real estate worker and former Arabic teacher.

Thousands of Christians have fled the region over decades of sectarian strife. From Syria they have often headed for Lebanon and European countries.

U.S. President Donald Trump in 2017 banned entry for all Syrian refugees indefinitely and imposed a 90-day ban on travel from several other predominantly Muslim countries.

“It might be a reaction to Daesh (Islamic State) but I don’t see the positives. It just adds another religious and sectarian dimension which in a community like this will lead to tension,” said Naasan, a practicing Muslim.

Naasan like the vast majority of Muslims rejects Islamic State’s narrow and brutal interpretation of Islam. The group enslaved and killed thousands of people from all faiths, reserving particular brutality for minorities such as the Yazidis of northern Iraq.

Most Christians preferred not to give their names or be interviewed, saying they fear reaction from conservative sectors of society.

The population of Kobani and its surroundings has neared its original 200,000 after people returned, although only 40,000 live in the town itself, much of which lies in ruins.

The Zion Church in Beijing, one of the city’s largest unofficial Protestant “house” churches, has operated with relative freedom for years, hosting hundreds of worshippers every weekend in an expansive, specially renovated hall in north Beijing.

But in April, city authorities asked the church to install 24 closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in the building for “security”, Zion’s head pastor, Jin Mingri, told Reuters.

“They wanted to put cameras in the sanctuary where we worship. The church decided this was not appropriate,” Jin said over tea in his spacious, book-lined office. “Our services are a sacred time.”

When the request was refused, police and state security agents started harassing churchgoers, calling them, visiting them, contacting their workplace and asking them to promise not to go to church, according to statements from the church and interviews with attendees.

China’s constitution guarantees religious freedom, but since President Xi Jinping took office in 2012, Beijing has tightened restrictions on religions seen as a challenge to the authority of the ruling Communist Party.

China’s religious affairs bureau and the public security ministry did not respond to faxed requests for comment.

The Chinese government says greater oversight of religious activities is needed in order to regulate believers and facilitate worship, as well as to prevent foreign forces from influencing China’s internal affairs using the guise of religion.

HOUSE OR OFFICIAL

China’s Christian believers are split between those who attend unofficial “house” or “underground” churches and those who attend government-sanctioned places of worship.

The unofficial establishments, which range from small living room-gatherings to large, professional operations like Zion, had in recent decades been tolerated by authorities.

They were often able to rent large spaces, though these are rarely identifiable from the outside. The only church exteriors in China adorned with steeples or crosses are officially sanctioned.

In February, new legislation increased oversight of religious education and practice, with harsher punishment for practices not sanctioned by the authorities.

In addition to being asked to install security cameras, some unofficial churches have been asked by police to take detailed lists of attendee IDs and phone numbers, churchgoers and activists say.

Some who push back have been visited by police and asked to switch places of worship to officially sanctioned churches, they added.

The Zion church, which occupies an office building floor that was previously a nightclub, is now being evicted despite previous verbal assurances from its landlord that it could rent the location until 2023, Jin said. The landlord could not be reached for comment.

Jin does not expect to be able to find a landlord that would rent the church another suitable location.

RARE PROTEST

There are roughly 60 million Christians in China, most of them Protestant, with about 10 million Catholics, according to independent estimates.

The Vatican and Beijing are locked in talks to resolve a decades-long dispute over appointing bishops in China that, if resolved, could make underground Catholic churches official, with Holy See-approved bishops.

On July 23, more than 30 of Beijing’s hundreds of underground Protestant churches took the rare step of releasing a joint statement complaining of “unceasing interference” and the “assault and obstruction” of regular activities of believers since the new regulations came into effect, according to a copy of the statement seen by Reuters and confirmed by Jin.

“We call on the government to respect history and the current situation of house churches, respect the means and practices of religious work, and respect citizens’ basic freedoms and rights to believe,” the letter said.

Wang Yu, a prominent rights lawyer who has defended Christians from harassment and was recently baptised at Zion after years of worship there, said she believes the pressure on believers is an attempt to force the church to close.

“The authorities hope numbers will dwindle till it becomes impossible to continue, but in recent months ever-more churchgoers have been attending service,” she said.

Wang fears, however, the situation will worsen, given the authorities have started describing the church as a “cult” when pressuring churchgoers. In one of its statements, Zion also says authorities have called the church a cult.

“Being labelled a cult was how it all started for the Falun Gong in 1999,” Wang said, referring to the spiritual movement the Communist Party banned that year.

The new regulations have increased government pressure on the churches to “sinicize” – to be culturally Chinese and submit to oversight from the Communist Party – but many have resisted, saying this would be a fundamental betrayal of their faith.

“House churches believe that our spiritual needs and the content of our faith is ruled over by God,” Pastor Jin said.

“What we need is the freedom to believe. Without this, it is not real faith.”

An Indonesian court sentenced a Buddhist woman to 18 months in prison for blasphemy on Tuesday, after she was accused of insulting Islam for complaining that neighbourhood mosque was too loud.

Meiliana, a 44-year old ethnic Chinese Buddhist had complained the Muslim call to prayer, repeated five times a day, was being played too loudly at the mosque near her house in North Sumatra.

Indonesia has the world’s largest population of Muslims and sizable Buddhist, Christian and other religious minorities. Recent years have seen a rise in conservative and hardline interpretations of Islam, prompting fears that the secular nation’s long-standing reputation for tolerance and diversity was being eroded.

“She had said something that insulted religion, in this case Islam,” said Jamaluddin, spokesman of the Medan district court, adding the defendant had “showed remorse and apologised”.

Political activists have said the country’s stringent blasphemy laws are being used to bully minorities and violate religious freedoms.

Last year, the former ethnic Chinese governor of Jakarta was tried and jailed for blasphemy after several Muslim groups accused him of insulting Islam when he said his political rivals were using the Koran to deceive voters.

The ruling was widely condemned and believed to be politically motivated. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama also lost his re-election bid because of the accusations.

There are hundreds of thousands of mosques across the vast archipelago and most use loudspeakers to play the ‘azan’ or call to prayer, which lasts a few minutes. But many also play lengthy versions of prayers or sermons lasting over 30 minutes, which has been deemed unnecessary by the Indonesian Mosque Council.

Vice President Jusuf Kalla, who is also a member of the Council, formed a team in 2015 to review mosques’ use of loudspeakers and regulate their use and volume. He has previously called on mosques to use their public address systems “wisely”.

Kalla’s spokesman did not respond to requests for comment on Meiliana’s conviction.

Meiliana’s lawyer, Ranto Sibarani, said they would appeal the verdict, according to The Jakarta Post.

]]> 7821 https://www.faith-matters.org/video-of-muslim-hijab-wearing-female-singing-ave-maria-goes-viral/ Sun, 12 Nov 2017 19:32:16 +0000 https://www.faith-matters.org/?p=6947

The video of a Muslim female in white singing ‘Ave Maria’, has gone viral. 

The Muslim female was seen singing a rendition of the Catholic prayer at the Bogor Cathedral in West Java, Indonesia on Monday November the 6th 2017. The rendition of ‘Ave Maria’ was at a funeral for her friend, Chatarina Suliyanti, according to another attendee at the funeral. 

Several version of the singing have circulated online, with one of the having been viewed more than 1.5 million times. 

Pope Francis on Saturday criticised the naming of the U.S. military’s biggest non-nuclear explosive as “the Mother of All Bombs”, saying the word “mother” should not be used in reference to a deadly weapon.

The U.S. Air Force dropped such a bomb, officially designated as the GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) on suspected Islamic State fighters in eastern Afghanistan last month. The nickname was widely used in briefings and reporting on the attack.

“I was ashamed when I heard the name,” Pope Francis told an audience of students on Saturday. “A mother gives life and this one gives death, and we call this device a mother. What is happening?”

Pope Francis is set to meet U.S. President Donald Trump on May 24 in a potentially awkward encounter given their opposing positions on immigration, refugees and climate change.

I cannot deny what is patently obvious. That the story of Jesus (Iesu) is one that is compelling, energising and deeply inspirational and one that is a story of rebellion through self-introspection, love and through God’s grace. As a Muslim, this compelling story has a narrative that I hold dear and it is one of a man born into poverty who changes the world through love and the human spirit to create change.

The story of Jesus is also moving in many instances. It is the story of poverty that leads to a valuation in life by Jesus and his disciples, that the spirit is the most important. It is set against the Roman background of materialism and comfort and where Jesus is framed to be a rebel, someone who goes against the grain and who rejects materialism for selflessness. Allied to that is a fierce independence and libertarianism that courses through the story of Jesus. His is a story of a spiritual radical who questions the norm and reframes morality through a desire to sacrifice for others.

The story is also laced with huge symbolism. Images of Mary and the baby Jesus play to every mother and woman who has ever held their child in their hands. It is of maternal love, yet one which we all know, leads to the death of the child through his crucifixion some 30 years later.

Jesus’s story is also one of salvation through forgiveness and through self-sacrifice. ‘A lamb to the slaughter’ plays on the theme of a man caught up in the machinery of war through the Roman occupation. It is as if God is keeping score and the slate is wiped clean through the sacrifice of Christ, only to reset in a world of change, turmoil and persecution of the followers of Christ.

As a Muslim, Christ’s story is refreshing since it challenged the status quo. It gives hope to those who believe that they cannot change things for the better and it empowers the human spirit to challenge, not through physical violence but through persuasion and hope.

Who knows the truth of the facts that took place 2,000 years ago, but one thing is clear. The story of Jesus is relevant today but it should be seen through the prism of challenge. Jesus challenged, argued and harried those in power within institutions. If we are to value religion and belief, we must understand the story of Jesus, whether Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Sikh and Hindu. If we fail to do so, we will fail to understand how truly radical and outspoken Christ was against injustice, power and intolerance.

Fiyaz Mughal OBE is the Founder and Director of Faith Matters.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, a nun who dedicated her life to helping the poor, will be made a saint of the Roman Catholic Church at a Vatican ceremony on September 4th.

Pope Francis cleared the way for sainthood for her last December. Teresa’s compassion reached out to slum-dwellers, famine sufferers and AIDS victims, and won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

Born in Yugoslavia in 1910, Teresa traveled to India at age 18 and taught geography at a convent school. Twenty years later she opened her first school in the Calcutta slums.

She was honored by many world and religious leaders including the Pope, Indian Premiers Indira Gandhi and Narasimha Rao, and British Queen Elizabeth II.

Anyone reading the Sun newspaper a few days ago would have thought that the end of the world had arrived since the ‘Muslim’ Head of Religion and Ethics, Aaqil Ahmed, had simply made a comment. So, what was that comment that the ‘Muslim’ Head of Religion and Ethics had made – (apologies for stressing the ‘Muslim’ element, though you see it is precisely what the Sun article casually threw into their piece on him.)

“the corporation’s (religious) output should be measured against the “religious make-up” of Britain.”

Sounds logical. Well quite, but not according to the Sun piece that decided to snipe from the sidelines as to the professionalism and judgement of Aaqil Ahmed. Not to be outdone in the, ‘we have an opinion and we will fit what we believe are facts to the story we want to spin stakes’, the Sun decided to open its frontal attack with fears of the Adhan or the Call to Prayer being commissioned by someone who was Muslim. Not exactly what Aaqil Ahmed had said, but what better way to generate some fear than to suggest to Middle England that they will be shaken out of their slumber because of those muezzins and mullahs, all blasting out some Arabic sounding calls to prayer.

This was followed by the ‘how dare he’ framing of the Commissioner as the person,

“who previously compared Mary and Joseph to illegal migrants.”

Just in case, you missed it, the (Muslim) Commissioner who simply mentioned that programming should reflect the audience, was now insulting Mary and Joseph, as though they were those pesky, dark looking and ‘foreign’ illegal migrants.

Which then led onto the Sun’s strategy of suggesting that Aaqil had a secret bias for Islam, as thought he could not set aside his judgement at work from his faith. The salvo’s on his judgement were summed up in the following statements,

“Mr Ahmed — whose appointment in 2009 was criticised by the Archbishop of Canterbury of the time Rowan Williams,”

“While working for Channel 4, Mr Ahmed upset Roman Catholic priests by commissioning documentaries that appeared to contain a pro-Islam bias.”

“One series, called Christianity: A History, was criticised by Church figures for trivialising the religion.”

Judging by the comments made by the Sun, you would think that the mild-mannered and introspective Aaqil Ahmed was a raging Islamist with undertones to attack Christianity and secretly create the conditions for a favourable treatment of Islam. Well, doesn’t that sound like promotion of anti-Muslim tropes, we think so.

Lost to the Sun

What has been lost in the Sun piece has been the variety of programmes about other faiths that have been commissioned by Mr Ahmed during his tenure, including programmes that have challenged rigid doctrinal thinking in faiths, including Islam. Hardly the image that the Sun portrays, which in reality is of a professional man who is willing to challenge issues within faith, including his own. Nor does the Sun want to consider the challenging work that he has commissioned in order to highlight how some people are treated just because they are fleeing from wars and turmoil and who are refugees.

The issue here is whether the Sun would run such a story against any other Commissioner from another faith? All of this just because Mr Ahmed suggested that programming should reflect the variety of audiences in the UK. So, next time any Commissioner makes a suggestion that is vaguely in line with this comment, we are assuming that their past will be dredged up, suggestions of bias made and their faith brought into the equation.

The post Shock, Horror, How Dare Top Commissioning Editor Question the Status Quo appeared first on TELL MAMA.