Islam

The Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is due to visit Australia in early March and will be addressing both houses of Parliament.

It’s not that common to have a foreign leader address the Australian Parliament but it will be repeated later in March when the US President Barack Obama is expected to do the same.

Australia-Indonesia relations are always complex. At the leadership and government level they remain strong as the Howard Government had left them, despite frustrations in official Indonesian ranks over the Rudd Government’s handling of the Oceanic Viking saga and the ongoing issue of the Sri Lankan asylum seekers that remain in limbo off a West Java port.

Continue reading "Our role in defending democracy in Indonesia" »

No matter what you think of Islamic veiling one thing is for sure – criminalising the women who wear the burqa or niqab is only going to render them more invisible.

France looks set to pass legislation that bans Islamic face covering. The discussion over how this law could be enforced has centred around punishing the veiled woman. She will be taken home, or fined.

This belies the true intentions of those calling for a ban – banning the burqa is less about liberating oppressed muslim women and more about making white people feel more comfortable.

Continue reading "Burqa ban is about our fears not their oppression" »

I probably should be writing this under a different name.  I’m an Australian woman with a Lebanese Christian heritage, who grew up amidst an invisible social war of Lebanese Christian vs Lebanese Muslim – right here in Australia.  And I’m genuinely concerned about how Muslim people are represented.

Polygamy is a contentious topic, Islam is feared and misunderstood by non-believers.  So naturally, a perfect fit for a festival of dangerous ideas at last week’s Sydney Opera House Event.  And man did they find the perfect speaker.

Kayser Trad.  Nice enough.  What I’ve seen of him anyway.  I reserve all judgement of him, his practises, his beliefs.  I write this based purely on his performance that day.  His topic was ‘Polygamy and other Islamic Values are good for Australia’.

Continue reading "Keysar Trad doesn’t do his fellow Muslims any favours" »

At 3pm on Sunday, Hazem El Masri will run onto the world’s worst footy ground to play his final home game. Sydney’s ANZ Stadium (Or Glebe Morgue, as we call it) is an embarrassing venue for such an occasion, but we’ll defer that argument for the sake of keeping the mood upbeat.

For the blue-and-white army in the distant stands, Hazem’s farewell will be something akin to the retirement of a beloved community leader.

Now in the month of Ramadan, Hazem will take no food or water between dawn and dark on game day.

Continue reading "Man of God whose greatest deeds are done off the pitch" »

If you really want to depress yourself, type the name Sheik Hersi Hilole into Google.

He’s an Islamic scholar and Somali spiritual leader who, almost two years ago when still based in Sydney, was howled down as a rabble-rouser for issuing what his (Islamic) critics dismissed as a reckless, baseless warning about the radicalisation of young Somali refugees in Melbourne.

Hilole is now living and working in Singapore as an academic. No doubt he watched the events in Melbourne this week with a sense of weary despair. For without wishing to prejudge the terror charges, the case which the prosecution will try to prove is pretty much a scene-by-scene enactment of the scenario painted by the cleric in 2007.

Continue reading "The decent Islamic leader whom we ignored at our peril" »

The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow with a local community church has opened a new exhibition that originally aimed to “reclaim the Bible as a sacred text”.

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In a somewhat unorthodox way of achieving this end they have left a Bible open at the exhibition inviting people to write whatever they want in it.

“If you feel you have been excluded from the Bible, please write your way back into it,” asks the gallery.

Continue reading "Bible bashing is easy, but would artists touch Islam?" »

Before this commentary gets underway, I feel that it is necessary to close the gate before the horse bolts. So first up, let me say that I am not anti-Islamic, I have lived as a Muslim woman from the age of seventeen until I was twenty two (and admittedly, found it not to my liking for a number of reasons).

Much of my professional life has been spent working with, and for Muslim people in the war zones of Bosnia Herzogovina, Kosovo and Albania as an humanitarian relief worker, and I have traveled and worked extensively in the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia - so I have seen quite a bit of the world and can compare how varying societies adapt the Islamic religion to the cultural morays and sensitivities of their regions.

Tory Maguire’s piece yesterday and the reader’s comments that followed had much to say on the reasons often cited by western media and society about what is believed to be the motivation for Muslim women to don the burqa and headscarves. 

The common, misinformed perception is that Muslim women mostly wear the burqa to express their religious devotion. 

Continue reading "The truth behind the burqa" »

If I was married to Carla Bruni I wouldn’t be a big fan of the burqa either, so it is perhaps no surprise that French President Nicholas Sarkozy is not in favour of women covering themselves from head to toe.

But Sarkozy’s forceful condemnation of the Islamic shroud as a symbol of female “subservience”, not religious faith, was absolutely right.

There is no greater way, other than locking the front door, to ensure a woman’s total invisibility in society - and thereby formalise her lack of worth - than to cover every inch of her, including her eyes, in heavy fabric.

Continue reading "Nicholas Sarkozy was right: the burqa is misogynist" »

In August 2007, Barack Obama promised that if he were elected president he would ‘travel to a major Islamic forum and deliver an address to redefine our struggle.’

His impressive speech in Cairo yesterday fulfilled that promise.

Obama is the finest orator in a generation. His national political career was kicked off by a single speech: his keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004.

Continue reading "The speech that could make the world a safer place" »