Category Archives: Religion

Brazil’s first transgender pastor: ‘All humans have flaws, being trans isn’t one of them’

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In a country with shocking brutality against LGBTQ+ people, Alexya Salvador is using her faith to help others like her

Desperate calls from LGBTQ+ youths contemplating suicide or from their parents after they have made an attempt on their lives often punctuate Alexya Salvador’s day. When they do, she drops everything to talk.

As a transgender woman, she recognises the anguish in their voices. “I feel their pain in my body because I went through this,” she says. “My family went through this.”

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Meat-rich diet of 14th-century monks caused digestive issues, research finds

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Change in papal law in 1336 to allow twice-weekly consumption caused problems at Muchelney Abbey

It may have seemed a good day for medieval monks when a papal decree allowed them to start eating meat including mutton, beef, pork and venison. It was not so good for their bowels.

Research by English Heritage sheds light on the day-to-day lives and digestive troubles of monks at Muchelney Abbey in Somerset – in particular the consequence of a change in papal law, in 1336, which permitted the twice-weekly consumption of meat from four-legged animals.

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The woman on a mission to expose torture in Thailand’s troubled south

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Despite the risks, Anchana Heemmina wants justice for victims of the Malay Muslims’ decades-old insurgency – and for herself

Much of Anchana Heemmina’s work involves listening to stories of immeasurable pain, all part of her campaign to stop the cycle of violence that has long haunted Thailand’s troubled southern provinces.

Her work striving for human rights and to prevent torture by state authorities has put Heemmina’s life in danger.

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Bollywood’s Kareena Kapoor subject to online abuse over baby’s name

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Supporters say attacks over choice of name similar to 17th-century Muslim Mughal emperor rooted in prejudice against inter-faith marriage

Bollywood star Kareena Kapoor has received abuse online from extremists over her new baby’s name.

Kapoor has been attacked on social media for calling her second son Jehangir, the imperial name of the 17th-century Mughal emperor, which means “conqueror of the world”. Kapoor, a Hindu, and her husband, Saif Ali Khan, a Muslim and also a Bollywood star, have faced abuse for their marriage.

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Pakistan police drop blasphemy charges against eight-year-old

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Hindu boy, accused of urinating in madrassa library, was youngest Pakistani to be charged for the crime

Police in Pakistan have dropped blasphemy charges against an eight-year-old Hindu boy after media and government pressure over his arrest.

The boy, the youngest Pakistani ever to be charged with the crime, was accused of intentionally urinating on a carpet in the library of a madrassa, where religious books were kept, in July.

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The unravelling of a conspiracy: were the 16 charged with plotting to kill India’s prime minister framed?

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In 2018, Indian police claimed to have uncovered a shocking plan to bring down the government. But there is mounting evidence that the initial conspiracy was a fiction – and the accused are victims of an elaborate plot

In April 2018, a large group of policemen arrived at the Delhi flat of Rona Wilson, a 47-year-old human rights activist. They had travelled from Pune in the western state of Maharashtra, and appeared, accompanied by Delhi police officials, at Wilson’s single-room flat at 6am. For the next eight hours, they scoured the modest premises, searching the files on Wilson’s laptop and rifling through his books. Annoyed and short of sleep, he asked that they be put back in place after they had been scrutinised. When the police eventually left, they took away Wilson’s Hewlett-Packard laptop, a SanDisk thumb drive and his mobile phone.

Seven weeks later, the police were back at Wilson’s flat, this time to arrest him. He was accused of conspiring to assassinate the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and planning to overthrow the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. Evidence of these crimes had allegedly been found on his laptop. Wilson was flown to Pune, charged under India’s anti-terror law and incarcerated. More than three years after the arrest, he remains in prison.

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Peaceophobia: Muslim men who love their modified motors

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Mistaken for drug dealers? Monitored by police? A new play staged in a Bradford car park weaves stories of everyday racism, faith and petrolheads


“I don’t go out, I don’t really go clubbing, I don’t drink, I don’t do none of that,” says Sohail Hussain, who is explaining how all encompassing his hobby is. “All my money goes on cars – for me it’s an investment.”

Hussain is one of three actors starring in Peaceophobia, a piece from collaborative theatre company Common Wealth and Fuel that interweaves stories about Islam, faith and modified car culture. Set in a car park in Bradford, the three drivers – Casper Ahmed, Mohammad Ali Yunis and Hussain – chat pistons and prayer over the constant hum of engine noise and tension.

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French police question man who reportedly admitted killing priest

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Father Olivier Maire had offered a home to the accused who was awaiting trial for cathedral arson

A man is being questioned by police after he reportedly admitted killing a priest who had offered him a home while awaiting trial for arson.

The suspect walked into a gendarmerie in the Vendée in western France on Monday morning and allegedly told officers he had killed the cleric, the head of a Catholic religious order.

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Even a priest in Brazil is not spared rage of Bolsonaro supporters

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Far-right congregants fumed at clergyman after he criticised president over Covid in his service

The toxic politics bedevilling Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil swept into Father Lino Allegri’s sacristy one Sunday in July, just after the octogenarian priest delivered a homily lamenting the president’s role in the Covid catastrophe that has killed more than half a million Brazilians.

As Allegri removed his white cassock, eight enraged congregants stormed into the rectangular backroom, past a portrait of Mother Teresa bearing the words: “The most dangerous person: the lie. The worst feeling: hate.”

“Go back to Italy! We don’t want you here!” witnesses remember one of the Bolsonaro-supporting intruders ranting at the Verona-born priest, a naturalised Brazilian citizen who has lived in the South American country for more than 50 years.

“Our president is a Christian! A good man! An honest man!” fumed another, jabbing a finger into the 82-year-old clergyman’s face.

Allegri said he had never suffered such an aggressive post-service diatribe.

“We felt bewildered,” he recalled on a recent Sunday as he sat in the same vestry where he had been harangued by the pro-Bolsonaro mob. Three armed police officers loitered on the street outside to deter another breach.

Another church member shook their head sorrowfully as they remembered watching the Bolsonarista churchgoers berate the elderly priest. “It’s fanaticism, there’s no other word for it … an incomprehensible fanaticism,” said the witness, who asked not to be named out of fear for their own security.

“Father Lino is so loved by all of us here. He brings us peace,” they added. “I just felt so utterly sad at the point our country has reached.”

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Anger as Poland plans law that will stop Jews reclaiming wartime homes

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Daughter of Holocaust survivor pledges to continue her fight for family property seized by Nazi occupiers

A few years ago, Shoshana Greenberg stood outside a building in Lodz, Poland, once owned by her family, with an old photograph in her hands and tears running down her face.

Greenberg, now 74 and living in Tel Aviv, was on a quest to reclaim property lost during the Holocaust. Her father was head of a prominent, wealthy Jewish family in Lodz that owned industrial buildings, residential homes and holiday properties.

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Tibet and China clash over next reincarnation of the Dalai Lama

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The spiritual leader has mused that he may return as a woman. But his succession has turned into a political battle

A couple of years ago, during a meeting of Tibetan leaders in Dharamshala in India, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, was asked about his reincarnation. Addressing the room of monks, religious teachers and Tibetan politicians, the Dalai Lama asked them to look into his eyes. “Do you think it’s time now?” he asked.

It was a meeting that would end with the Tibetan leaders agreeing that the issue of reincarnation was one that would be decided only by the Dalai Lama himself. But China, which annexed Tibet in 1951 and has retained tight control over the region ever since, has other ideas. It insists that the choice of the next Dalai Lama lies only with China, and have even enshrined this right into Chinese law.

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Lucia Mantione: murdered Sicilian girl finally given funeral after 66 years

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Catholic church had denied 13-year-old girl sexually assaulted and killed in 1955 a funeral due to arcane rule

There had never been so many people at a funeral in the history of Montedoro, a village suspended in time among wheat fields and abandoned sulphur mines in central Sicily.

Its 1,500 inhabitants had waited for this moment for more than half a century, and on Wednesday gathered in hundreds in solemn prayer in the village church around a small white coffin.

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‘Nobody can gaslight us’: the rappers confronting Canada’s colonial horrors

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The recent discovery of unmarked graves at residential schools is the latest incident in decades of trauma for Indigenous Canadians, who are using lyricism to process it

After the recent discovery of hundreds of Indigenous children’s unmarked graves at former Canadian residential schools, Drezus – an rapper of Cree and Ojibwe heritage from the Muskowekwan First Nation in Saskatchewan province – grew unsure about his longstanding plans to release a new music video, Bless. He starts the song by calling the atrocities his people have faced “an act of war”, then follows that with bar after bar of Indigenous empowerment. Unsure if that would be appropriate while his people grieved, he turned to his mother, who had attended one of those schools. Her advice? “Release it, son. We need it now.”

This government-funded, Christian church-administered boarding school system was established in Canada in the late 1800s. Its founders’ intent: to forcibly remove Indigenous children from their “savage” parents and impose English and Christianity. Some 150,000 Indigenous children attended these schools before the last one closed in 1997. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report detailed nearly 38,000 sexual and physical abuse claims from former residential school students, along with 3,200 documented deaths. The mortality rate for those children was estimated to be up to five times higher than their white counterparts, due to factors including suicide, neglect and disease.

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‘I felt violated by the demand to undress’: three Muslim women on France’s hostility to the hijab

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In France, a new law could seriously restrict women’s rights to wear headscarves in public, and there are fears that it will entrench Islamophobia

Last October, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, laid out the vision behind a new, deeply controversial bill. The government claimed a minority of France’s estimated 6 million Muslims were at risk of forming a “counter-society” and the bill was designed to tackle the dangers of this “Islamist separatism”.

It is meant to safeguard republican values, but critics, including Amnesty International, have raised serious concerns that it may inhibit freedom of association and expression, and increase discrimination. The new law, say critics, will severely affect the construction of mosques, and give more discretion to local authorities to close local associations deemed in conflict with “Republican principles”, a term often wielded against Muslims specifically. But one of the most controversial points is extending the ban on women wearing headscarves in public sector roles, to private organisations that provide a public service. Further amendments were tabled prohibiting full-length swimsuits (“burkinis”), girls under 18 from wearing the hijab in public, and mothers from wearing hijabs on their children’s school trips. These were subsequently overturned, but the stigma they legitimise lives on.

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Revealed: the secrets of Seville cathedral’s banquet set in stone

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Painstaking research deciphers carvings of religious bounty dating back almost five centuries

For almost 500 years, the arch that connects the largest Gothic cathedral in the world with its Renaissance sacristy has offered visitors a sumptuous, if little glimpsed – and even less studied – vision of religious bounty.

The 68 beautifully carved plates of food that adorn the archway in Seville’s cathedral offer rather more than bread and wine.

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Vatican reveals it owns more than 5,000 properties

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Real estate holdings published for first time show it owns 4,051 properties in Italy, 1,120 abroad

The Vatican has released information on its real estate holdings for the first time, revealing it owns more than 5,000 properties, as part of its most detailed financial disclosures ever.

The information released on Saturday was contained in two documents – a consolidated financial statement for 2020 for the Holy See and the first ever public budget for the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (Apsa).

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‘I shoot for the common man’: the photographs of Danish Siddiqui

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The photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was shot dead last week while documenting the Taliban offensive in Afghanistan. His award-winning work for Reuters spanned some of the world’s most era-defining crises.
He said: ‘I shoot for the common man who wants to see and feel a story from a place where he can’t be present himself.’
Siddiqui leaves behind his wife, Rike, and two children. And a breathtaking body of work

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Casablanca Beats review – Morocco’s answer to Fame strikes a chord

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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.

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EU companies can ban employees wearing headscarves, court rules

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Prohibition can only be implemented against all religious symbols as part of a policy of neutrality

Private employers in the EU can ban people from wearing religious symbols, including headscarves, in order to present an image of neutrality, the bloc’s highest court has ruled.

Companies can ban headscarves provided such a prohibition is part of a policy against all religious and political symbols, the court said on Thursday, reaffirming a 2017 ruling. The latest judgment went further by examining the grounds employers can use when making such prohibitions.

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