The Postnational Monitor

There is just too much going on right now so I will condense it into one post.

Ex-Muslims Get Threats After Forming Society in Germany

Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  The police are taking the threats seriously

A group of former Muslims in Germany who formed a non-religious society have been sent threatening letters, pronouncing them “fit for death.”

Mina Ahadi, an Iranian-born woman, founded the society in Cologne with 10 sympathizers several weeks ago and called it the National Council of Ex-Muslims. At the end of February she called a news conference in Berlin to publicly pronounce herself non-Islamic.

 

The police have assigned plainclothes bodyguards to protect her ever since.

 

“I’m a target,” said Ahadi, 50. She said members of her society had received letters telling them they would be shot in the back. When she went online with a fierce attack on Islamic organizations, somebody circulated a statement suggesting she was fit to be killed, she said.

 

Mainstream Muslims have not stooped to such behavior, but have coolly set out why they think Ahadi is wrong.

 

Ahadi, who has lived in Germany since 1996, has also received a degree of support.

 

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  Ahadi’s life has been threatened due to her views

“We are going to get involved in politics, oppose women wearing headscarves and oppose building plans for mosques,” she said.

Compelled to organize
 

Referring to practices many Germans believe are typical of Islam, she said, “We’ll stop honor killings, stop people being stoned to death… We want to make clear that the three million to three and a half million people from Islamic nations who live in Germany are people first and foremost, and should not be branded primarily as ‘Muslim,’” she said.

 

Ahadi — whose husband was executed by the Islamic rulers of Iran — is demanding that Germany do more to help women and girls, who she claims are oppressed, even in Germany, by “political Islam.”

 

“The girls are not allowed to have boyfriends,” she said. “They are forced to marry. They have to wear headscarves. If they get pregnant and are not married, people call them sluts,” she said.

 

Nur Gabbari, 40, a former Muslim and refugee from Iran who is on the society’s committee, said he knew it was dangerous to form such a group.

 

“But we cannot just stand on the sidelines and watch what religion is doing to people,” he said.

 

Calls for tolerance

 

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  The new group aims to be another voice for people of Muslim extraction

The National Council of Muslims, a Cologne-based group representing many of Germany’s mosque-going Moslems, says the new society should be tolerated, despite its cheeky parody of the mainstream group’s name.

 

“These people have the same rights as anyone else to establish a society,” said Ayyub Axel Koehler, the council’s German-born chairman. ”Everyone has a right to their own opinions, and of course they are entitled to express them publicly,” he said.

 

The new group has been criticized by Lale Akgun, a member of the German parliament who liaises with the Muslim community for the Social Democratic Party — one of the two parties in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition.

 

Akgun flatly rejected the claim that Islam and human rights are incompatible, and she said those who make that claim are stoking up latent Islamophobia, which is already present among some Germans.

 

“Why on earth do non-believers of Muslim extraction have to set up a society especially for themselves?” she asked.

 

Saying “no”

 

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  Ahadi says Islam is “anti-woman”

The ex-Muslim group said it wants to stop mosque groups speaking in the name of the entire community.

 

“If these organizations assert that three and a half million people are outraged by cartoons depicting Mohammed, or that schoolgirls should wear head-scarves or should be excused from swimming classes, we are going to say ‘No,’” Gabbari said.

 

Other ex-Muslims in Germany and abroad have rushed to join the group, according to Gabbari.

 

“In just a brief period of time, we have grown to more than 400 members and are getting daily contacts from places like Morocco, Iran, Egypt, Turkey and, of course, from Germany,” he said. “A lot of people have offered their help, or have even offered to protect us.”

 

The society has received assistance from a German atheist organization, the Giordano Bruno Foundation. It is also heeding police advice to rent office space at a safe location.

 

The society has recently announced it would hold a conference in May on the topics of sharia law and the German constitution.

DW staff / DPA (als)

 

French official dismissed over resistance to Muslim school

Reuters

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

PARIS: The French government dismissed a top regional education official Wednesday for vigorously opposing a new Muslim school and publicly complaining about pressure from Paris to stop obstructing its opening.
The Al-Kindi high school, in a suburb of Lyon in eastern France, finally admitted its first 22 pupils on March 5 after an eight-month struggle with Alain Morvan, the head of the school board. The struggle ended only when Paris intervened to permit the school to open.
A government spokesman, Jean- François Copé, said Morvan was replaced because “his behavior was not that of a senior official, whose task is to carry out government policy.”
Morvan’s stubborn campaign had become a sore point for French Muslims, and they accused him of Islamophobia for refusing them the right to begin a religious school although about one-fifth of all high schools in France are private, mostly Catholic.
In rejecting three requests to open the school, Morvan accused its founders of being “fundamentalists” and said he would sign refusals to open it “down to the last drop of ink.”
Al-Kindi is the third Muslim school in France, whose five million Muslims make up 8 percent of the population. It only took in 22 sixth-grade pupils, because it opened halfway through the school year, but expects about 150 in September.
Several other Muslim groups around the country, spurred into action by France’s 2004 ban on Islamic head scarves in state schools, have also begun planning to open their own schools.
A private Muslim school can allow head scarves and teach Islam, but it must follow the state curriculum in all regular subjects if it wants state subsidies. A school must teach the state curriculum for five years before getting the subsidy.
Al-Kindi will be France’s biggest Muslim school by September.
The other two, located in the suburbs of Paris and Lille, have a few dozen pupils each.
Hakim Chergui, deputy head of the school association named after a ninth- century Arab philosopher, Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, said the curriculum reflected Muslim values but it was not “a Koran school.”
Head scarves are not obligatory, even if most girl pupils wear them, and religion class will be optional. Physical education classes will be mixed, but both boys and girls will wear modest sweatsuits rather than short gym attire.
“We do not stop classes for prayers,” he said. “Children who want to pray can do so during recreation periods.”
Among its special features will be a special emphasis on teaching languages, including Arabic, Turkish and Chinese, and courses on Islamic cultures.
The school project aroused some suspicion because its founders belong to the Union of French Islamic Organizations, a national body with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
But its organizers met the Education Ministry’s requirements for private schools, so education officials — except Morvan — gradually agreed it had to be allowed to open.

More than 100 killed in Pakistan tribal war

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

PESHAWAR, Pakistan: More than 100 people have been killed in fierce fighting the past three days between foreign militants and local tribesmen in northern Pakistan, security officials said Wednesday.
As of early Wednesday morning, the death toll had risen to 78 militants from Uzbekistan and 28 tribes people. About 67 Uzbek militants were captured by tribes people and local militants in the tribal region, the officials said.
It was not possible to confirm the death toll independently because phone lines to South Waziristan were down and journalists have minimal access to the lawless region, a possible hiding place of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The fighting, in the restive South Waziristan region, could signal a breakdown in relations between local tribal leaders and the Central Asian and Arab militants who had sought shelter in the tribal region near the Afghanistan border after United States forces routed the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001.
A security official said that the Pakistan Army stationed in Zari Noor, near South Waziristan’s capital, Wana, also began pounding Uzbek positions on hilltops to support the tribes people and local militants fighting the Uzbeks, and destroyed some bunkers. The spokesman for the army, however, has denied that the army was involved in the tribal feud.
The security official said that both sides were using heavy weapons, mortars and rockets. An attempt by influential pro-Taliban commanders to impose a cease-fire has failed, he said.
The fighting has spread to six areas of the Wana region. “The fighting is intense,” the official said.
The foreign militants, some of them linked to Al Qaeda, had enjoyed the support of the ethnic Pashtun tribes in remote villages where the authority of the Pakistani government had become almost nonexistent. Those relations have slowly frayed.
Pakistani government officials said on Tuesday that although they had no role in the latest fighting, they watched it with considerable optimism.
“Let the tribes people deal with the situation,” one government official said. “That’s the best way to deal with the problem. There is a groundswell of support for action against Uzbeks, and any attempt by the government to intervene in support of the tribal action would actually discredit it. There is tribal sensitivity involved here.”
In Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed concern that the Pakistani border region was a possible haven for terrorists but, in an apparent reference to the fighting in Waziristan, said that tribal groups had started to fight back against extremists.
“You have to separate the population from the foreign fighters,” she said. “And you do that through fighting — the Pakistani army fighting them, through the tribals fighting them. But you also do that by trying to improve the economic base and the modernization of that region.”
Experts, however, say militants with links to the Taliban and Al Qaeda are involved on both sides of the current conflict, which also pits local tribes against each other. That could fuel blood feuds and further deepen the insecurity in South Waziristan, they say.
The latest fighting began this month between loyalists of a pro-government tribal elder and Uzbek militants who had repeatedly tried to assassinate him. More than 150 tribal elders have been killed in the last three years.
Intelligence officials say the Uzbek militant group, known as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, led by Tahir Yaldashev, has a force of 800 to 1,000 fighters. Uzbeks and other Central Asians are thought to be the backbone of Al Qaeda in the region.$@