Post-Ramadan Reflections on the Muslim World

by Salim Mansur • June 19, 2018 at 5:00 am

Muslims, in effect, are trapped in a state of bewilderment over how to repair their broken cultures, or how to build them anew -- when they are full of doubts about what is new, what is modern and what has been built by others belonging to a different faith and culture.
Muslims in general are a "third world" people whose understanding and practice of Islam remain fixed in their pre-modern cultures. To many Muslims, due to their pre-modern worldview, this paradox is mostly incomprehensible. It is also hugely obstructive in easing their transition to modernity.
The fury of the internal upheaval inside the Muslim world will eventually exhaust itself when a sufficiently large segment of the Muslim population reconciles reason and revelation to discover that God never meant any religion, including Islam, to be a burden preventing man from threading a relationship with Him in harmony with human nature. Embracing modernity does not mean abandoning God.

In Baghdad, the Arab capital of the Abbasid rulers as Caliphs of Islam during the early Middle Ages, inquiry and debate took place about revelation and reason. Pictured: An image from an Abbasid manuscript, produced in the year 1237. (Image source: Académie de Reims/Wikimedia Commons)

As Ramadan drew to a close this year, the spectacle of a contrived Muslim rage on the last Friday of Islam's sacred month -- branded "Al- Qud's [Jerusalem] Day" by Iran's late leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – was on display across the Muslim world and in the West.

The Qur'an, Islam's sacred text, calls upon Muslims to fast during Ramadan as part of prayers and quiet reflection "to ward off evil." Extremist Muslims, instead, call upon their co-religionists to display their rage against their real and imagined enemies, especially Jews. Most Muslims, however, steer away from such angry demonstrations, which degrade the meaning and purpose of their devotion to fasting and prayers during the month in which the Qur'an was first revealed to Muhammad.

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Turkey: Glorification of Murder, Martyrdom and Child Soldiers

by Uzay Bulut • June 19, 2018 at 4:00 am

The celebrations are not just about the glorification of guns and killing for national or religious purposes. The events are also marked by historic revisionism in which the genocide victims are blamed for their own extermination.
There are many factors that drive the hysteria in Turkey extolling deaths, killings and attempts to brainwash children and turn them into "voluntary martyrs": Systematic racism, ultra-nationalism, Islamic jihad and belief in martyrdom as well as the denial of the Christian genocide combined with pride in having waged it.
The 2015 "Islam Law" of Austria, which Erdogan was protesting, states that "The freedom of religion is secured in the Austrian Constitution – individually, collectively and cooperatively" -- and that this freedom should not be allowed to be exploited by those who incite hate or violence for any group.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned the Austrian government that "...measures taken by the Austrian chancellor are, I fear, leading the world towards a war between the cross and the crescent." (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz recently announced that the government was shutting down a Turkish nationalist mosque in Vienna and dissolving a group called the Arab Religious Community that runs six mosques, according to the Associated Press. "Parallel societies, political Islam and tendencies toward radicalization have no place in our country," Kurz told reporters.

"The move comes after images appeared on Twitter in April of children in a Turkish-backed mosque playing dead and reenacting the World War I battle of Gallipoli (in which an allied invasion of Ottoman Turkey was defeated). Their "corpses" were then covered in Turkish flags. The mosques association called the event 'highly regrettable,'" according to the CBN News.

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