“This is about the fundamental freedom to choose. Those who chose not to wear the Hijab have joined forces with those who chose to wear it.”
Speech by Abeer Pharaon (Coordinator of Assembly for the Protection of Hijab) at the fringe meeting organised by National Assembly Against Racism at the 2004 Labour Party Conference.
From the Pro-Hijab website.
Letters from the Mayor of London and anti-racism campaigners in the Guardian, 30 September 2004
MCB Deputy Secretary General Dr Abdul Bari met today, with Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) Minister of State Douglas Alexander to raise the grave concerns of the Muslim community about the detention of Yusuf Islam in the US.
Dr Abdul Bari said “Yusuf Islam is a deeply respected and very popular British Muslim figure and his detention by the US authorities is completely unacceptable.”
Mr Alexander assured Dr Abdul Bari that the British Government were taking these concerns seriously, and the Foreign Secretary, who is currently in the US, raised the issue with US Secretary of State Colin Powell. The Minister further stated that he understood from the US Authorities that Mr Islam would be departing from the US later today.
“If the US government is serious about winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world and avoiding a clash of civilizations, it might consider sitting down for lengthy discussions with Tariq Ramadan, rather than barring his entrance.”
Jane Lampman in the Christian Science Monitor, 21 September 2004
The Church of England said yesterday that police counter-terrorism operations were directed disproportionately against Muslims and risked alienating them. In a submission to the Commons home affairs committee, the church’s mission and public affairs council supported a proposed law against incitement to religious hatred, including towards Muslims, to preserve community relations.
Swiss Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan is at the center of a vile campaign by rightist French magazines and newspapers, which accuse him of spearheading what they called the political Islam drive in Europe.
Seeking to blemish his reputation after he had been catapulted into the limelight as a paradigm for moderate Muslims, L’Express magazine ran a front-page photo of Ramadan titled, “The man who wants to establish Islamism in France”. The ferocious attack came hard on the heels of Ramadan’s success in grabbing the attention of the third round of the European Social Forum, which concluded on October 17.
“Have you read or listened to any of my material? Can you prove your allegations?” Prominent Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan was left asking these questions when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security revoked his visa in August.
The accusation against Yusuf al-Qaradawi that he had called for the abduction and killing of US civilians in Iraq, during talk to the Egyptian Journalists’ Syndicate in Cairo at the end of August, has received widespread coverage, despite the fact that Dr al-Qaradawi himself immediately denied the accuracy of the report in an interview with Al Jazeera.
Abu Aardvark reveals that leading Egyptian journalist Fahmi Huwaydi obtained a recording of the Cairo meeting and was able to confirm the truth of Qaradawi’s denial. Abu Aardvark also complains that “a number of American magazines and newspapers have expressed no interest in this information when I presented it to them. As I feared, the conventional wisdom has congealed around a lie”.
See here.
The new school term in France is the first under the new law which bans Muslim girls from wearing a Muslim headscarf to school. The vast majority of the young women involved (in general between fourteen and eighteen years old) have agreed under duress to remove the headscarf in school. The hundred or so who have refused have been separated from their fellow-pupils and kept in a separate room (often with separate break-times, no right to use the library and no attention from teachers, despite the legal obligation to provide teaching). Over the next three weeks they will be called to disciplinary committees and expelled from schools. They will join an unspecified number who have been too intimidated to turn up at school since the passage of the law.
John Mullen (LCR Montreuil) on Socialist Unity Network website
Interview with Tariq Ramadan on Democracy Now! 13 September 2004