Early on Thursday morning a swastika was found on the front of the Muslim prayer hall in the Rue de Suisse in the centre of Nice. Ramzan Magamadov, the president of the city centre Muslim association that manages this place of worship, said he was “very shocked by this racist act” and has filed a complaint.
At first, feminist religion scholar Leila Ahmed was alarmed by the growing visibility of young American Muslim women wearing headscarves. She feared that a politicized, male-dominated fundamentalism had migrated from her native Egypt to her adopted United States.
Instead, Ahmed reached what she admits was an “astonishing” conclusion: “Islamists and the children of Islamists … were now in the vanguard of those who were most fully and rapidly assimilating into the distinctively American tradition of activism in pursuit of justice,” Ahmed wrote in her book, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America.
Many women who wore the hijab, or headscarf, “now essentially made up the vanguard of those who are struggling for women’s rights in Islam,” Ahmed wrote.
For her 2011 book documenting a century of trends in the politically and socially loaded question of the hijab, Ahmed has received the 2013 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil liberties organization, said today that it is calling on the SUBWAY restaurant chain to apologize to a Louisiana Muslim allegedly locked out of a sandwich shop in that state because of his faith.
Plans to build Britain’s biggest place of worship – a “monolithic, overly dominant and incongruous” mosque in east London – are set to be thrown out despite 25,000 letters in favour.
The mosque, which could take 12,000 people – four times as many as St Paul’s Cathedral – would be as big as Battersea power station and become the HQ of Islamic sect Tablighi Jamaat. However, officers for Newham council recommend the plan is refused.
Earlier this month Anjem Choudary announced his latest publicity stunt – a conference at the Lal Masjid in Islamabad on 30 November, where fatwas would be issued against Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah, its current president Asif Zardari, and Malala Yousafzai, the young woman shot by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan last month.
Choudary of course has a long history of announcing provocative plans that he has no intention of actually carrying through, and then, having milked the resulting outrage for all the publicity he can, calling them off at the last minute. These non-events have included a March for Shari’ah in London in 2009, a demonstration at Wootton Bassett in 2010 where his followers were to carry 500 coffins to symbolise the deaths of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, a rally outside the White House the same year to advocate sharia law in the US, and a protest against the royal wedding in April 2011. So nobody had any excuse for falling for Choudary’s latest con-trick.
Organizations using fear and anger to spread negative messages about Muslims have moved from the fringes of public discourse into the mainstream media since the Sept. 11 attacks, according to new research by a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sociologist.
Titled, “The Fringe Effect: Civil Society Organizations and the Evolution of Media Discourse about Islam since the September 11th Attacks,” the study appears in the December issue of the American Sociological Review.
English Defence League leader Stephen Lennon has been charged with mortgage fraud, Bedfordshire Police say.
He was among six people to be charged following a fraud investigation by the force.
Mr Lennon, 30, also known as Tommy Robinson, is currently on remand in Wandsworth Prison for a separate, unrelated offence.
A police spokesman said he had been charged with three counts of conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation in relation to a mortgage application.
Authorities said a man vowed to shoot up a San Antonio mosque and then turn the gun on himself, but law enforcement foiled the violent plot before it ever materialized.
Worshippers prayed Tuesday night at the Islamic Academy of San Antonio amid an atmosphere of concern. “Very bad news for us,” said Solomon Hamideh, president of the Islamic Academy of San Antonio.
According to an affidavit, Christopher Bane “had intentions of going to a mosque in the Medical Center area and was going to shoot as many people” as he could, and then shoot himself. A witness, who police are not identifying for safety concerns, said Bane told him he had a .45 caliber handgun and ammunition.
Newham council officers have recommended that councillors reject controversial plans for a so-called mega mosque in West Ham.
The plans to erect the Riverine Centre, also known as Abbey Mills Mosque put forward by trustees following the Tabilighi Jamaat movement, are due to be heard by the Strategic Development Committee at Newham Council on Wednesday (December 5) of next week.
The meeting will be held at the Main Hall at the Old Town Hall in Stratford.
Jewish, Hindu and Muslim leaders from Queens gathered with lawmakers to denounce the possible hate crime committed at a Kew Gardens Hills Mosque earlier this month, and city Comptroller John Liu suggested some of the NYPD’s policies could make bias crimes more common.
“An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us,” said Imam Shamsi Ali, of the Jamaica Muslim Center, who gathered religious leaders from around Flushing in the wake of the Nov. 18 attack.