Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice, is celebrated throughout the Muslim world to mark Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son for God. Cows, camels, goats and sheep are traditionally slaughtered on this day
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Kurt Westergaard, Danish cartoonist behind Muhammad cartoon, dies aged 86
Westergaard was known for drawing a caricature of the prophet Muhammad which sparked outrage around the Muslim world
Danish artist Kurt Westergaard, known for drawing a caricature of the prophet Muhammad that sparked outrage around the Muslim world, has died at the age 86, his family told Danish media on Sunday.
Westergaard died in his sleep after a long period of ill health, his family told newspaper Berlingske.
Continue reading...Casablanca Beats review – Morocco’s answer to Fame strikes a chord
A group of talented teens push the boundaries of their religious society by putting on a concert in Nabil Ayouch’s earnest film
Franco-Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch has made a likable, high-energy youth movie that could almost be called the Moroccan answer to Fame and which features that time-honoured plot device: putting on a concert.
Using nonprofessionals playing docu-fictionalised versions of themselves, Ayouch has created a drama revolving around an arts centre for young people that he himself helped to set up in the tough district of Sidi Moumen, called by someone here the Bronx of Casablanca. The school includes a special programme called the Positive School of Hip-Hop. A crowd of smart, talented teens join the class and we watch as they find out the challenges, limits and opportunities of learning self-expression through western-style rap in a Muslim society.
Continue reading...French court convicts 11 of harassing teenager who posted anti-Islam videos
Case involving Mila, who was sent more than 100,000 abusive messages, has fuelled debate about free speech.
A French court has convicted 11 people for harassing a teenager online over her anti-Islam videos in a case that has led to a fierce debate about free speech and the right to insult religions.
The prosecutions were part of a judicial fightback against trolling and online abuse after the girl, known as Mila, had to change schools and accept police protection because of death threats.
Continue reading...Malawi Pride and press freedoms in Palestine: human rights this fortnight – in pictures
A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Chile to Cambodia
Continue reading...Beijing using its financial muscle to target Uyghurs living abroad – report
Cases of transnational repression found in 28 countries are ‘just the tip of the iceberg’, say rights researchers
China is using its unprecedented economic clout across vast swathes of Asia and the Middle East to target Uyghur Muslims living beyond its borders through a sprawling system of transnational repression, a new report says.
Beijing’s crackdown on Xinjiang province, where more than 1 million people are thought to have been detained in a network of internment camps in recent years, has coincided with a rise in efforts to control Uyghurs living overseas, the report found.
Continue reading...‘A haven for free-thinkers’: Pakistan creatives mourn loss of progressive arts space
‘Tragic’ closure of Sabeen Mahmud’s community venue T2F in Karachi comes as PM Imran Khan accused of fostering censorship and intolerance
Danial Shah turned to Sabeen Mahmud, for help with his first photo exhibition when all other organisations refused to show his work. Shah’s photographs cover political and cultural issues, such as local elections and women’s rights. Some refused to work with him on political grounds, while others did not reply at all.
After a meeting at Mahmud’s community space, T2F, in Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, she agreed to host his exhibition. But Mahmud, a 40-year-old human rights activist who oversaw a programme of progressive arts at T2F, did not get to see Shah’s first exhibition. She was murdered a few months after their meeting.
Continue reading...Sadia Hussein: the FGM survivor who is saving girls from the knife
Being cut, aged 10, led to extraordinary pain and complications in childbirth. Now Hussein’s campaign to end mutilation has led to a staggering change in attitudes
Sadia Hussein had been in labour for three days when she felt she could take no more. She could hear her mother crying in the distance, pleading with God to save her daughter’s life.
But even though things were clearly not progressing as they should have been, the women in her small Kenyan village were resistant to the idea of sending her to hospital. Her mother told her that doctors would “tear her apart” with a pair of scissors; that, at home, they could at least use a razor. “So now, on top of the overwhelming pain of labour, there was this continuous cutting,” Hussein recalls.
Continue reading...Les Hijabeuses: the female footballers tackling France’s on-pitch hijab ban
Young players excluded from matches because of their religious dress find a way to play on and encourage other hijab-wearing women into the sport
Founé Diawara was 15 years old when she was first told she could not wear her hijab in a football match.
It was an important game. She had recently got into the team of a club in Meaux, the town north-east of Paris where she grew up, and they were playing a local rival. Diawara had been wearing her hijab during training, but as she was about to walk on to the pitch, the referee said she must remove it if she wanted to play.
Continue reading...Hungary’s LGBT protests and Juneteenth Day: human rights this fortnight – in pictures
A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms from China to Colombia
Continue reading...Outcry as Saudi Arabia executes young Shia man for ‘rebellion’
Rights groups say Mustafa bin Hashim bin Isa al-Darwish was a minor when alleged offences committed
Saudi Arabia has executed a young man who was convicted on charges stemming from his participation in an anti-government rebellion by minority Shia Muslims. A leading rights group said his trial was “deeply flawed”.
It was unclear whether Mustafa bin Hashim bin Isa al-Darwish, 26, was executed for crimes committed as a minor, according to Amnesty International. The rights group said he was detained in 2015 for alleged participation in riots between 2011 and 2012.
Continue reading...Saudi Arabia bans foreigners from hajj over Covid concerns
Annual pilgrimage will be restricted to 60,000 vaccinated adults from within the kingdom
Saudi Arabia has announced that this year’s hajj pilgrimage will be limited to 60,000 vaccinated people from within the kingdom because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The kingdom ran a reduced pilgrimage last year, but still allowed a small number of people to take part in the annual event.
Continue reading...China’s Uyghurs living in a ‘dystopian hellscape’, says Amnesty report
Widespread internment, torture and rights abuses have been claimed by former detainees as Beijing continues a policy of denial
Amnesty International has collected new evidence of human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region of China, which it says has become a “dystopian hellscape” for hundreds of thousands of Muslims subjected to mass internment and torture.
The human rights organisation has collected more than 50 new accounts from Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities who claim to have been subjected to mass internment and torture in police stations and camps in the region.
Continue reading...Ratko Mladić: life in prison is as close to justice as his victims will get
Analysis: upholding of genocide conviction for 1995 atrocities is a victorious end to a process few thought would succeed
When Ratko Mladić’s life sentence for genocide and crimes against humanity was confirmed, marking the end of the road for the Bosnian Serb general 10 years after his capture, Munira Subašić was in The Hague courtroom to watch.
In July 1995, Subašić was outside a UN compound, a disused battery factory near Srebrenica, appealing for protection from Dutch peacekeepers along with thousands of other terrified Bosnian Muslims.
Continue reading...After Love director Aleem Khan: ‘I walked around Mecca and prayed not to be gay’
The director’s debut feature draws on his experiences of loss and identity confusion, with a memorable role for Joanna Scanlon as a fictionalised version of his white English Muslim-convert mother
Mary, the central character of Aleem Khan’s debut film After Love, is a white English woman who met her Pakistani husband as a teenager on the London housing estate where they both lived. After they got married, they moved to the Kent coast. Mary converted to Islam, started to wear traditional dress, learned how to cook curries from scratch and to speak Punjabi.
It does not take an enormous amount of detective work to understand from where Khan drew inspiration: his mother is a white English woman who met her Pakistani husband as a teenager on the London housing estate where they both lived. After they got married, they moved to the Kent coast; she converted to Islam, started to wear traditional dress, learnt how to cook curries from scratch and to speak Punjabi.
Continue reading...Trouble in paradise: Indian islands face ‘brazen’ new laws and Covid crisis
‘Authoritarian’ rules upset sleepy Lakshadweep’s Muslim majority while Covid cases soar from zero to 10% of population
According to local people, the problems for Lakshadweep, an archipelago of paradise islands in southern India, began the day the new government-appointed administrator, Praful Khoda Patel, landed on a charter flight.
The Lakshadweep islands, an Indian union territory off the coast of Kerala, have a population of just 64,000 and are renowned for their crystal-blue waters, white sands and relatively untouched way of life. They had, up to that point, also remained completely unaffected by the pandemic, due to strict controls on movement and enforced quarantine.
Continue reading...Thirteen on trial over online threats to French teen who insulted Islam
Social media rants by 16-year-old named Mila fuelled debate about right to offend people’s religious beliefs
Thirteen people have gone on trial in France charged with online harassment, including death threats, against a teenage girl who was placed under police protection after posting anti-Islam rants on social media.
The girl, named only as Mila, was forced to change schools over her expletive-laden videos, and the episode fuelled a debate about the right to offend people’s religious beliefs.
Continue reading...Model behind ‘hands off my hijab’ post is named Vogue Scandinavia editor
Rawdah Mohamed’s Instagram image opposing a proposed hijab ban in France went viral in April
Rawdah Mohamed, the Somali-Norwegian model whose protest against a proposed ban on the hijab in France went viral, has been announced as editor of the soon-to-be-launched Vogue Scandinavia.
Mohamed will become the first hijab-wearing editor of colour at a fashion magazine in the west.
Continue reading...Indian mosque bulldozed in defiance of high court order
Local officials in Uttar Pradesh demolish mosque that had stood since time of British rule
A local administration in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has defied a state high court order and bulldozed a mosque, in one of the most inflammatory actions taken against a Muslim place of worship since the demolition of the Babri Mosque by a mob of Hindu nationalist rioters in 1992.
The mosque, in the city of Ram Sanehi Ghat in Uttar Pradesh, had stood for at least six decades, since the time of British rule, according to documents held by its committee.
Continue reading...A Jewish case for Palestinian refugee return
As fraught and imperfect as efforts at historical justice can be, consider what happens when they do not occur. The crimes of the past, when left unaddressed, do not remain in the past
Last Saturday was Nakba Day, which commemorates the 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled by Israel – or who fled in fear – during the country’s founding in 1948. The commemoration had special resonance this year, since it was Israel’s impending expulsion of six Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah that helped trigger the violent struggle currently engulfing Israel-Palestine. For many Palestinians, that imminent expulsion was evidence that the Nakba has still not come to an end.
Every year, commemorating the Nakba represents a kind of mental struggle to remember the past and sustain the hope that it can be overcome – by ensuring that Palestinian refugees and their descendants can return home. In my own community, by contrast, Jewish leaders in Israel and the diaspora demand that Palestinians forget the past and move on. In 2011, Israel’s parliament passed a law that could deny government funds to any institution that commemorates the Nakba. Israeli teachers who mention it in their classes have been reprimanded by Israel’s Ministry of Education. Last year, two Israeli writers, Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, published an influential book, The War of Return, which criticised the Palestinian desire for refugee return as emblematic of a “backward-facing mode” and an “inability to reconcile with the past”.
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