Rilek1Corner

Tag: tolerance

  • MND Plan For Integrated Multi-Religious Building May Cause Problems

    MND Plan For Integrated Multi-Religious Building May Cause Problems

    Small religious group to share places of worship will create more problems

    Very soon, small religious groups could find themselves sharing places of worship. In a land scarce country like Singapore, it seems just a matter of time.

    No doubt that you have guessed correctly, this idea came from the Ministry of National Development (MND) to accommodate several places of worship of the same religion in a multi-storey building, sharing common facilities. The purpose is to help these groups to cut rental costs. Off one glance, it seems like a fantastic idea for religious groups as they depend greatly on offerings and donations. Furthermore, every penny counts in one of the highest cost of living like Singapore.

    However, sadly to say, I hardly see this will be good for the religious groups in other areas. They will not have autonomy in operations over the place. This disempowered them in having the opportunity to be exposed to operations management and this will hinder them from moving to permanent place in future. More unforeseeable by MND, restriction in autonomy does more in depth damages. Small religious groups are impaired from building or maintaining their unique identity. For example, these could be decorations and extended worship services. Due to these, believers whether existing or new loses their sense of belonging. This bodes badly on small religious groups not only on struggle to keep the existing worshippers but also attracting new ones as well.

    In terms of proximity, religious groups will prefer sites of worship to be near from MRT / bus interchange and neighborhood malls due to convenience for their worshippers. But this is unlikely to be so as the MND announced that the facility is likely to be located within or at the fringe of industrial areas.

    Disruption to their worshippers’ plans will likely to reduce their attendance rate to these inconvenience sites. Poor attendance rates could be attributed to the timing of worship services. Instead of the regular worship timings, religious groups rents the facility based on a first-come-first served basis and many could find themselves with less prime timings. Fixed timings could also creates barriers as too often; worships can be longer than usual depending on the “holy” touch.

    The MND can also consider building a integrated facility building comprising meeting rooms, children’s play room etc. so that the spirit of bonding and communal are not sacrificed at the expense of cost. Come to think of it, since the community clubs are long established since post-independence, can’t they be used for religious purposes. This can also create inter-religious bonding indirectly too.

    As much as MND wants to save up the precious land for “others” developments, a discussion is needed between the MND and the various religious groups to sort things out as I believed any outcome will be much better than the one proposed by MND.

     

    Aaron Chan 

    *The author wishes to write regularly for TRS and he hopes to write for a better Singapore.

     

    Source: www.therealsingapore.com

  • Visit By The Pope To Turkey Puts UMNO To Shame

    Visit By The Pope To Turkey Puts UMNO To Shame

    KUCHING: The just-concluded Umno General Assembly was marked by racist slurs, religious intolerance and bigotry, observed Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim, while Christians and Muslims elsewhere in the civilised world are reaching out to each other in peace and tolerance.

    Anwar pointed out that Pope Francis, currently on a visit to Turkey, had been invited by Grand Mufti Rahmi Yaran of Turkey to pray at the famous Blue Mosque which was once a Cathedral when the country was part of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire.

    “The gesture by the Grand Mufti is unthinkable in Malaysia under Umno,” said Anwar who was on a visit to Kuching. “Umno leaders are taking backward steps in their relations with non-Muslims.”

    Anwar noted that the media had described the Pope’s visit to Turkey as demonstrating “a powerful vision of Christian-Muslim understanding at a time when neighbouring countries are experiencing violent Islamic assaults on Christians and religious minorities”.

    “There is a need to appreciate this move. It has relevance in terms of our attitude and the Umno General Assembly’s on relations with non-Muslims in this country,” Anwar said. “Pope Francis’ visit is a gesture that would go a long way towards blazing a trail for a new chapter on Christian-Muslim relations and mending the strained relations of the past.”

    “Once we get past theological polemics, which more often than not puts a strain on inter-religious relations, the matters that bind these two great faiths could be reason enough for cultivating tolerance and respect.”

    Pope Francis was radical, pointed out Anwar, as he preferred to relate rather than pontificate.

    “That has made all the difference. He goes to Turkey not to preach but to reach out, very much in the tradition of Christ, with humility and peace to the Muslim world,” said Anwar.

    Pope Francis’ genuine desire for understanding must be received warmly and reciprocated by leaders of the Muslim world, he added, but ruled out Umno taking a positive attitude on the Pope’s visit to Turkey.

     

    Source: www.freemalaysiatoday.com

  • Americans Protests Against Decision Not To Indict Offier Darren Wilson For The Shooting of Michael Brown

    Americans Protests Against Decision Not To Indict Offier Darren Wilson For The Shooting of Michael Brown

    Thousands of people rallied late Monday in U.S. cities including Los Angeles and New York to passionately but peacefully protest a grand jury’s decision not to indict a white police officer who killed a black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri.

    They led marches, waved signs and shouted chants of “hands up, don’t shoot,” the refrain that has become a rallying cry in protests over police killings across the country.

    The most disruptive demonstrations were in St. Louis and Oakland, California, where protesters flooded the lanes of freeways, milling about stopped cars with their hands raised in the air.

    Activists had been planning to protest even before the nighttime announcement that Officer Darren Wilson will not be charged in the shooting death of Michael Brown.

    The racially charged case in Ferguson has inflamed tensions and reignited debates over police-community relations even in cities hundreds of miles from the predominantly black St. Louis suburb. For many staging protests Monday, the shooting was personal, calling to mind other galvanizing encounters with local law enforcement.

    Police departments in several major cities braced for large demonstrations with the potential for the kind of violence that marred nightly protests in Ferguson after Brown’s killing. Demonstrators there vandalized police cars and buildings, hugged barricades and taunted officers with expletives Monday night while police fired smoke canisters and tear gas. Gunshots were heard on the streets and fires raged.

    But police elsewhere reported that gatherings were mostly peaceful following Monday’s announcement.

    As the night wore on, dozens of protesters in Oakland got around police and blocked traffic on Interstate 580. Officers in cars and on motorcycles were able to corral the protesters and cleared the highway in one area, but another group soon entered the traffic lanes a short distance away. Police didn’t immediately report any arrests.

    A diverse crowd of several hundred protesters marched and chanted in St. Louis not far from the site of another police shooting, shutting down Interstate 44 for a time. A few cars got stuck in the midst of the protesters, who appeared to be leaving the vehicles alone. They chanted “hands up, don’t shoot” and “black lives matter.”

    “There’s clearly a license for violence against minorities, specifically blacks,” said Mike Arnold, 38, a teacher. “It happens all the time. Something’s got to be done about it. Hopefully this will be a turning point.”

    In Seattle, marching demonstrators stopped periodically to sit or lie down in city intersections, blocking traffic before moving on, as dozens of police officers watched.

    Groups ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred people also gathered in Chicago, Salt Lake City, and Washington, D.C., where people held up signs and chanted “justice for Michael Brown” outside the White House.


    “Mike Brown is an emblem (of a movement). This country is at its boiling point,” said Ethan Jury, a protester in Philadelphia, where hundreds marched downtown with a contingent of police nearby. “How many people need to die? How many black people need to die?”

    In New York, the family of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man killed by a police chokehold earlier this year, joined the Rev. Al Sharpton at a speech in Harlem lamenting the grand jury’s decision. Later, several hundred people who had gathered in Manhattan’s Union Square marched peacefully to Times Square.

    In Los Angeles, which was rocked by riots in 1992 after the acquittal of police officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, police officers were told to remain on duty until released by their supervisors. About 100 people gathered in Leimert Park, and a group of religious leaders held a small news conference demanding changes in police policies.

    A group of about 200 demonstrators marched toward downtown.

    The marchers shut down the northbound and southbound lanes of Interstate 110 in downtown Los Angeles late Monday night, according to City News Service. People stood and lay in the northbound lanes and the center divider.

    Another splinter group of about 30 people marched all the way to Beverly Hills, where they lay down in an intersection.

    Chris Manor, with Utah Against Police Brutality, helped organize an event in Salt Lake City that attracted about 35 people.

    “There are things that have affected us locally, but at the same time, it’s important to show solidarity with people in other cities who are facing the very same thing that we’re facing,” Manor said.

    At Cleveland’s Public Square, at least a dozen protesters’ signs referenced police shootings that have shaken the community there, including Saturday’s fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who had a fake gun at a Cleveland playground when officers confronted him.

    In Denver, where a civil jury last month found deputies used excessive force in the death of a homeless street preacher, clergy gathered at a church to discuss the decision, and dozens of people rallied in a downtown park with a moment of silence.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Olga R. Rodriguez in San Francisco; Jim Salter and Alan Zagier in St. Louis; Tami Abdollah in Los Angeles; Kantele Franko in Columbus, Ohio; Sean Carlin in Philadelphia; Deepti Hajela in New York; Michelle L. Price in Salt Lake City; and Joshua Lederman in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

     

    Source: http://time.com

  • Islam A Religion of Peace: The Problem With Human Interpretation and Distortion of Religious Text

    Islam A Religion of Peace: The Problem With Human Interpretation and Distortion of Religious Text

    Many Muslims and non-Muslims alike claim that Islam is a religion of peace and that violence perpetrated in the name of Islam is actually due to distortions or misunderstandings of the religion.

    There are those, however, who would say that Islam is not innocent of its militant and murderous adherents.

    They often cite verses of the Quran, such as Al-Tawbah (9):5, which says: “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war).”

    To make matters worse, it is always possible to find historical cases of the brutal treatment of Christians by Muslims.

    A case in point is the 11th century Fatimid ruler, Abu Ali Mansur Tariq al-Hakim. Al-Hakim was known in the West as the “Mad Caliph” because of the brutal manner in which he treated religious minorities. The persecution of Christians and Jews began under his reign in AD1004 when he decreed that Christians would no longer be allowed to celebrate Easter.

    Al-Hakim is also known to have forced Jews and Christians to become Muslims at the point of a sword, and to have destroyed numerous churches and other Christian holy sites in Palestine and Egypt, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 1009.

    But Al-Hakim was thought to be mentally unstable and his reign was seen by even Western historians to be a departure from the norm on how Christians and Jews were treated in Islamic empires.

    We are reminded of this barbarism today by the actions of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) under Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. After capturing large areas of Iraq and Syria earlier this year, ISIS began to target Christians and other religious minorities, subjecting them to harassment, arrest, violence and conversion on pain of death. Archbishop Athanasius Toma Dawod of the Syriac Orthodox Church said that ISIS had burned churches and old religious texts, damaged crosses and statues of the Virgin Mary, and converted churches into mosques.

    It is also important to point out that ISIS also targets Muslims who run afoul of the authorities. It was reported that a man who was caught eating during the fasting month was crucified for three days while a woman who committed adultery was stoned to death.

    How do we reconcile the idea of Islam as a religion of peace, with the verses of the Quran that appear to support the violence perpetrated against Christians, such as those during the reigns of Al-Hakim and Al-Baghdadi?

    There are two ways to deal with this question. One is to show that these verses are to be interpreted in their historical contexts. The other is to demonstrate how Muslims in history were guided by Islamic ideals and acted towards non-Muslim minorities.

    The Quran in Al-Tawbah (9):13 asks: “Will ye not fight people who violated their oaths, plotted to expel the Messenger, and took the aggressive by being the first (to assault) you?” This makes it clear that the exhortation to fight mentioned a few verses earlier referred to cases of defence against aggressors. However, even this was highly regulated as Muslims were forbidden to fight during four sacred months.

    Furthermore, the historical fact is that Muslims in general adhered to the Quranic ideal of showing tolerance and compassion to Jews and Christians who lived in Muslim-ruled lands. The Quran in Al-Mumtahanah (60):8 says: “Allah forbids you not, with regard to those who fight you not for (your) Faith nor drive you out of your homes, from dealing kindly and justly with them: for Allah loveth those who are just.”

    It was in this spirit that the Prophet Muhammad dealt with the Christians of his time.

    Any Muslim who fails to protect the life, property and honour of Christians is not only acting in contrast to Islamic tradition but is also violating the oath made by the Holy Prophet Muhammad.

    This was stated by the Prophet himself in the Ashtiname or Covenant, a kind of charter that he signed which granted protection to the monks of Saint Catherine’s Monastery.

    In fact, the Prophet said: “(W)hosoever of my nation shall presume to break my promise and oath… destroys the promise of God… (and) becomes worthy of the curse, whether he be the King himself, or a poor man, or whatever person he may be.”

    The Prophet had made many such covenants with Christians.

    Another historical event worthy of mention is the surrender of Jerusalem to the Caliph Omar in AD637. The Caliph travelled to Jerusalem in order to accept the surrender of the city from the Patriarch Sophronius. Sophronius then invited Omar to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Omar declined the invitation for fear that his praying there may set a precedent that may eventually lead to the conversion of the church to a mosque.

    These early historical examples of the gracious treatment of Christians by Muslims were not exceptions, but the rule. They continued throughout Islamic history.

    Spain under Muslim rule, Al-Andalus, particularly between the 8th and 11th centuries, was known as a golden age of Jewish history, when Jewish philosophy and culture made advances. At a time when Jews were persecuted elsewhere in Europe, Andalusia’s Jews flourished, even taking up high positions in government.

    The Ottoman Empire (1299-1023) went beyond tolerance and accepted non-Muslim minorities, granting them protection and religious freedoms. By the 16th century, the Ottomans established control over large parts of Europe, ruling over large Christian populations. Sultan Mehmed developed a system in which each religious community, or millet, elected its own leader and enforced its own religious laws. Orthodox Christians constituted a millet; the Jews another.

    A proper approach to the interpretation of Quranic texts, involving a correct contextual understanding of its meanings, and the study of Islamic history, will reveal that tolerance and acceptance of non-Muslim minorities were the norm.

    While Muslim empires were not liberal according to the standards of modern democracies, they were certainly progressive in comparison to their contemporaries when it came to dealing with religious minorities. Deviations from the norm were treated as violations by most Muslim themselves. This was true of Al-Hakim and is certainly the case with ISIS today.

    The problem lies not with Islam the religion, but with ideological interpretations of it. The purest of ideas in a text can be reinterpreted in line with evil interests. All ideologies, religious or secular, have been subjected to this.

    [email protected]

    The writer, Syed Farid Alatas, is an associate professor in the Departments of Sociology and Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore.

     

    Source: www.straitstimes.com