Islam

There was a rally in Paris on Sunday at which a couple of hundred protestors vented their anger at the French government's 'anti-separatist bill' which was passed by the National Assembly on Tuesday. It was a disparate but predictable gathering of what one broadcaster described as ‘anti-racism, left-wing, pro-Palestinian and other activist groups’. The demonstrators were repeating the claims made by some left-wing politicians that the bill will stigmatise the country's Muslims. On the contrary, retort the government, who define the bill as a 'Respect for Republican values'. They say it will protect the majority of Muslims from the minority of extremists whose objective is to create a separate society in France in which Islamist values take precedence.

Last week, Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered the release of UK born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh who was accused of kidnapping and beheading the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The verdict came after Sindh High Court overturned the death penalty for Sheikh and three alleged abettors last year, ruling that there was insufficient evidence to find them guilty of murder and stating that they had served their sentence for their role in the kidnapping. The decision has outraged Washington, with Joe Biden’s new State Department chief Antony Blinken dubbing it an ‘affront to terrorism victims everywhere’ and announcing his readiness to prosecute Sheikh in the US.

Coca-Cola’s most controversial bottling plant is a huge factory located in an industrial zone just outside the city of Urumqi in western China. Logistically, the factory is well situated: the international airport is a short drive away, as is the high-speed train station close to the fashionable Wyndham hotel. But the problem for Coca-Cola — and other western companies such as Volkswagen and BASF, which operate plants in the same region — is the existence of hundreds of facilities not mentioned on any official map. The Cofco Coca-Cola plant, a joint venture with a Chinese state company, is surrounded by prisons and re-education camps in which China suppresses local ethnic minorities, according to human rights experts.

After becoming the latest Arab state to formalise ties with Israel, the fourth in as many months, Morocco has gone a step further; it will start teaching Jewish history as part of the school curriculum. Morocco is now the first modern Arabic state to embrace its tradition of religious pluralism — a pluralism that has over the decades faded into mono-cultural Sunni Islam. Over the last 70 years, the number of Jews living in Morocco has fallen from half a million to just 2,000. In January, Moroccan King Mohammed VI visited a Jewish museum and synagogue in Essaouira to celebrate the country’s pluralistic past as well as the Moroccan monarch’s recent attempts to restore Jewish heritage sites.

The war of words between Pakistan and France – sparked by president Macron's comments about radical Islam – rumbles on. But the latest skirmish has led to an embarrassing climbdown from one of Pakistan's top politicians. 'Macron is doing to Muslims what the Nazis did to the Jews – Muslim children will get ID numbers (other children won’t) just as Jews were forced to wear the yellow star on their clothing for identification,' wrote Pakistan's federal minister for human rights Shireen Mazari. Mazari's tweet was quickly picked up by those who have suggested there is something sinister to Macron's recent interventions. But there was a problem: it was nonsense. France soon hit back, calling out Mazari’s 'fake news'.

To complete the Hajj is the pinnacle of Islamic worship, required once in the lifetime of every able-bodied Muslim who can afford the journey. In its 1,400-year history, the annual pilgrimage has been cancelled dozens of times, by wars, political strife and pandemics. As I found out when I made the journey, it is a swirling sea of humanity: some 2.5 million visiting Mecca over a few days, from all over the world. When the Covid crisis came, worship was suspended. But then something was attempted that would have once seemed impossible: carrying on the tradition, but under digitally monitored social distancing. The results were extraordinary.

It is official: Hagia Sophia, for a thousand years the world’s largest cathedral, and since 1934 a museum, is to be turned back into a mosque. Ever since I heard of the possibility, I have been praying it would not be so because of the impact it will have on Muslim-Christian relations in Turkey, the Middle East and beyond. A suitably purged and compliant judiciary, however, has bowed to the wishes of the authoritarian President Erdogan that Turkey should become more Islamic and less secular. There has been a church on the site since 360 ad and the present building dates from the reign of Justinian in the mid-sixth century.