Religion Dispatches
…r. Because what the Secretary does not see at all, apparently, is what all Pakistanis see as we up the ante and use ever-more-lethal drone attacks to “take out” alleged bad guys. What they see is that we constitute our very own syndicate of terror within their national borders. In her brilliant reporting for the New Yorker, Jane Mayer continues to document why everyday Pakistanis and Afghanis would see it this way. They don’t see us rescuing them;…
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…ne precedent in U.S. legal history) warned that Adnan would likely flee to Pakistan; and the State’s direct examination of Yaser Ali, in which a teenage friend of Adnan’s testified about how “Islam”—monolithically conceived—punished premarital sex. These are just three examples of how Adnan’s Muslim faith and Pakistani dual-citizenship were used to cast doubt on his otherwise strong character. In the words of Rabia Chaudry in this excellent blog p…
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…ass status; the Ahmadiyya Community, a large Muslim minority victimized by Pakistan’s blasphemy laws; or revisionist legal scholars like Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, author of Islam and the Secular State. Their advocacy for equal treatment of the heterodox, if it succeeds, will improve the lot of unbelievers in the Muslim-majority countries, yet its animating, organizing principle is not unbelief but freedom of belief. To them, the doctrine that God…
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…defined.” The attack on UN’s advocacy for LGBT Human Rights continues on a number of fronts. On November 18, an effort by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation moved an amendment that would strip language regarding sexual orientation and gender identity from a resolution regarding “extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.” More from OutRight Action International: Today [November 18], the Third Committee of the United Nations General Assem…
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…put them there. The British littered their empire with blasphemy laws. In Pakistan, blasphemy laws date back to 1860 laws the colonial British introduced. In fact, England didn’t abolish blasphemy as a crime until 2008, and Ireland had criminal blasphemy laws on its books until January of 2020. No earthly penalties for blasphemy or apostasy are specified in the Qur’an. Under shariah, blasphemy is often conflated with apostasy, which is a crime in…
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…the Taliban are staging a fierce comeback in both Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan. The slaughter of children in Peshawar won’t be the end of it. In Northern Nigeria Boko Haram is determined to eliminate all non-Islamic schools and drive out the Christians. DIY jihadists commit random acts of violence everywhere from Ottawa to Sydney. And are there Christians anywhere who still wage war on non-Christians? We don’t see it, but in the eyes of many,…
Read More…majority of the world’s Muslims live in democracies. That includes Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mali, Tunisia, Nigeria, etc., most of which are Muslim-majority. Are these perfect? Of course not. But they are democracies, and they aspire to democracy. Many of the countries that aren’t democracies have attempted democratic transitions, and have been actively or indirectly blocked by our country. Which is a democracy. So,…
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…words could apply to most of Europe, facing a similar challenge from large numbers of refugees, many of them Syrian, but many from the Balkans, Iran, Afghanistan, or Pakistan. The key word here is “peacefully,” as in the likelihood of “peacefully absorbing a migration of that size and scale of cultural difference.” (I will overlook the use of the word “migration,” although Syrians, at least, are fleeing a war zone, not simply making a radical life…
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…with Armstrong at the forefront). To use yet another example, an attack on Pakistani schoolchildren by the Taliban, a conversation might go something like this: New Atheists: The Taliban just slaughtered those children in Pakistan. Crusaders slaughtered a bunch of people in the medieval era. The list goes on. Are you really saying religion had nothing to do with this? Ha, fat chance. If all religions just died tomorrow, good riddance. Defenders: S…
Read More…er and redeploying our energies to the true “front” in the terror-war, the Pakistan/Afghanistan border region. Senator Obama also reiterates what has perhaps been his most cogent strategic sound-bite: that “we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in.” But there is more in this text, and it is high time that a prominent Democrat stated the matter as clearly as he has done. Two sentences near the end of the essay make c…
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