Shaykh Khalid Yasin is a U.S.-born Muslim convert, based in Atlanta, Georgia, who has been a popular guest speaker at Muslim Students Association (MSA) events on college campuses across the United States for some time.
Yasin has also lived in Britain from time to time. In the past, he has lectured with Omar Bakri Mohammed (the one-time leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir UK and founder of the pro Al-Qaida group, Al-Muhajiroun), who was banned from the United Kingdom because of his religious extremism in 2006.
One review of Yasin’s activities includes the following interesting report:
On September 11, 2001, Yasin was in Saudi Arabia soliciting the support of an al Qaeda front known as the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation – which eventually would be designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government – to help finance the creation of his proposed “Islamic Broadcasting Company” (IBC).
Hard on the heels of the recent internal coup-d’etat inside Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood comes the division of the spoils. The hard-liners, having rigged the elections to MB’s leading Guidance Bureau, have now to decide amongst themselves which one of them will be MB’s new Supreme Guide.
Leading contenders include Hussein Ibrahim (head of the MB parliamentary bloc), or one of his fellow hardliners, Mahmoud Ezzat, Gomaa Amin, Abdel Rahman Al Bar or Mohamed Badee’a. Outside runners include the deputy chairman of MB (recently removed from the Guidance Council in the rigged elections of December), Mohamed Habib – although the likelihood of Habib winning the post is remote in the extreme given the hard-liners complete grip on the reins of power inside MB.
Without a hint of irony, one new Guidance Council member, Saad El-Katatney, told Egypt’s Daily News:
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood are having a hard time of late, much to the delight of their many political opponents inside Egypt. On Tuesday, 22nd December 2009, MB announced the results of the first elections held in 15 years to its leading Guidance Bureau. Unfortunately for the Brothers, the results of the election were strongly contested by leading elements within their own organisations. Even worse, these dissident Brothers have chosen to do their dirty washing in public.
The vote by the 100 member Shura Council of the Muslim Brotherhood pitted two powerful internal factions against one another for control of the organisation. One faction, made up of significantly younger leaders of MB, are keen to play down the hard-line, clerical fascist core policies of MB, instead wishing to promote the Brotherhood as a “moderate” political force wedded to notions of democracy and social reform. The other faction, made up of older, “conservative” MB leaders take a less media-friendly line, demanding that the Brotherhood remain overtly committed to its clerical fascist principles and to the assertion of Islamist theocracy.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Detroit 253 bomber, has come under understandable scrutiny of late both here on The Spittoon and on Harry’s Place, as elsewhere. Here, on The Spittoon, Effendi has written of Adbdulmutallab’s links to the East London Mosque. On Harry’s Place, Habibi has drawn our attention to Abdulmutallab’s previously made public declarations on an Islamist forum of support for jihadi violence and his desire to engage in the same. Most recently, bloggers on Harry’s Place and The Spittoon have begun to scrutinise the role of UCL’s Islamic Society (of which Abdulmutallab served at one time as president) in the radicalisation of this young man.
On the last day of 2009 came the news that US authorities were reporting direct contacts between Abdulmutallab and Anwar al-Awlaki and were actively investigating the same (this is further explored in the excellent cross-post, here). At the very same time, CNN reported that:
About 15 million Christians continue to live in the Middle East, the biggest non-Muslim minority left in the Muslim-majority countries of the region. Yet every year, more and more leave their homelands for overseas; pressurised into flight by systematic economic and social discrimination on the basis of their faith.
Of course, the Christians of the Middle East have not been alone in this. Starting with the sometimes sizeable Jewish minorities of the Arab world, religious minorities have been more or less forced out of the region since the end of World War II. Together with the Jews, Zoroastrians, Mandeans, Bahai, Yazidis, and other, smaller groups have all left the region that gave birth to all the monotheistic faiths. Those that remain have often been reduced to what one Christian commentator has called an underground, “catacomb” faith, recalling the persecuted faith of the Early Church.
Nina Shea, in a recent article, comments:
It being nearly Christmas (in the Western Church) and not so nearly Christmas (for the Orthodox Faithful), I thought I would share this haiku sent to me by my poetry-obsessed mother:
O Joseph! Your love
For a pregnant girl has brought
Wise men to their knees.
Laurence Smith
Coptic Icon of the Holy Family
Nizar Rohana is a Palestinian oud player of the highest standards. His mastery of the Arab lute is phenomenal. His grasp of the intricacies of traditional Arab forms is masterful. When one hear his re-tuning of his often too delicate instrument in the middle of a performance, one feels it as part of the song – and one to be part of its whole, waiting.
Nizar Rohana was born in the village of ‘Esefya on Mount Carmel in 1975. He began his musical education at an early age and playing the Oud by the age of fifteen, and in 1996 he moved to Jerusalem to take up academic studies. Focusing his research on the music of the great Egyptian Composer Mohammad el-Qasabji, Rohana completed his Masters Degree in Musicology 2006. Today Nizar Rohana is a prominent Oud player in the Palestinian musical scene and he performs regularly for local and international audiences.
Christmas at 30C +, stuck in the middle of the Sahara Desert may not be everyone’s cup of tea. However, in the best traditions of the Stiff-Upper-Lip, one makes the best of things. The situation is greatly ameliorated by the discovery of vast lakes of the local tipple, a spirit derived from dates (and rumour has it, everything bar the kitchen sink), known as ‘araki… and the amusing finding that at least one person is breeding turkeys in Sudan.
A useful obituary of Grand Ayatollah Houssein Ali Montazeri, written by Muhammad Sahimi, has appeared on the Tehran Bureau website.
Montazeri was a leading light in the 1979 Revolution. Initially named as Khomeini’s successor, Montazeri soon turned against the regime, becoming one of its bravest and most consistent critics from within the Shi’a clerical elite. He remained under house arrest for much of the latter part of his life.
Montazeri will remain a controversial figure for everyone committed to secular democracy and the separation of religion and state. However, Montazeri’s personal bravery, integrity and commitment to human rights are surely without question. His early and consistent opposition to the tyranny of Khomeini’s regime and that of his successors marked the Grand Ayatollah out as an important opponent of the Islamist regime in Iran and, more broadly, the political realities and ambitions of clerical fascism.
Whilst leading Muslim clerics complained of the Swiss decision to ban the building of further minarets, there was not a word from the same for the continued denial of the right to worship freely for religious minorities across the Muslim-majority world.
In Egypt, the Coptic Orthodox Christian minority make up some 10% of the population; yet they continue to face hostility and persecution, largely whipped up by the Islamists. Writing in the New York Times, Daniel Williams observes the double-standards of the leaders of the Islamic community in condemning the Swiss referendum on minarets, whilst remaining silent about the continued denial of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority’s right to worship in peace:
On a side street in the far northeast Cairo suburb of Ain Shams, the door of a five-story former underwear factory is padlocked.