Muslims

Рассматриваются концептуальные подходы и методы исследования религиозных сообществ и религиозности населения. Обозначаются перспективы использования метода учёта верующих, участвующих в религиозных практиках. Анализируются данные, полученные при подсчётах мусульман г. Тюмени, принимавших участие в коллективных пятничных молитвах и праздничных молитвах на Уразу-байрам с 2007 по 2011 гг.

"By James M. Dorsey

Flush with victory in Egypt's first-post revolt election, Islamists are vowing to initiate change that militant soccer fans and youth groups have failed to achieve in a year of bloody street battles with security forces.
In doing so, the Muslim Brotherhood is seeking to distinguish itself from more militant Islamists, including more radical Salafis who propagating emulating life in the 7th century at the time of the profit and fundamentalist Egyptian and Saudi clerics as well as the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Shabab militia in Somalia or factions of the Taliban in Afghanistan who denounce soccer as a game of the infidels and as a distraction from the obligation to worship Allah.

The dichotomy of the Islamists striving to achieve the militant soccer fans' sports-related goals while the two sides face off on the streets of Cairo is vividly on display this week as Egypt celebrates the first anniversary of the protests that last year ousted President Hosni Mubarak from 30 years in office.

Egypt's military that last year temporarily took power from Mubarak with a pledge to lead the country to democracy is seeking to undercut with anniversary celebrations this week that include concerts and soccer matches the youth and soccer fan groups that were at the core of last year's revolt and are now demanding the armed forces' immediate return to the barracks. The military effort is backed by the Brotherhood.

The militants have been campaigning in recent days in an unsuccessful bid to convince a public tired of political turmoil and frustrated that their revolt has produced few material benefits of the evil of the soldiers who responded increasingly brutally to their protests against the military and Mubarak era sports officials over the past year.

Youth activists and soccer fans in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis erected projector screens to show residents looking down from their balconies with little sense of engagement videos of what they see as the military's abuse of power "Why are you silent? Have you won your rights already?" the revolutionaries shouted at them in frustration.

Adding insult to injury, the Brotherhood is vowing to succeed where the militants have failed. Repeatedly the soccer fans demanded unsuccessfully with few exceptions the resignations of the Mubarak appointed boards of the Egyptian Football Association (EFA) and major soccer clubs. Some supporters of sports reform take heart in the recent replacement of the Mubarak-era heads of the national sports and national youth councils.

The Brotherhood, which last year briefly toyed with the idea of launching soccer teams of its own, has vowed to clean out the sports sector of Mubarak associated by removing the heads of associations starting with EFA president Sami Zaher as well as club board members linked to the ancien regime. Under pressure from fans and clubs, Mr. Zaher pledged last year to end his term early but has since given no indication that he intends to live up to his promise,

In their effort to distance themselves from the rejection of sports, and particularly soccer, by some Salafis and jihadists, Brotherhood members emphasize sport's health benefits. Some also stress the need for sports to stay in line with Islam.

"We support sports in general and encourage them. Sports flourished in the age of Islam, so why shouldn’t they under the Islamists? We are looking to encourage more sporting activities nationwide. ... Islam doesn’t have any problem with soccer and other sports," Al Akhbar el-Youm newspaper quoted Brotherhood spokesman Mahmoud Ghozlan as saying.

Mr. Ghozlan's statement is a far cry from a condemnation of soccer by Egyptian Salafi Sheikh Abu Ishaaq Al Huweni, an attempt by Saudi Salafi clerics to rewrite the rules of the game to allegedly Islamify it, and the outright banning of soccer by Al Shabab jihadists in Somalia.

“All fun is bootless except the playing of a man with his wife, his son and his horse… Thus, if someone sits in front of the television to watch football or something like that, he will be committing bootless fun… We have to be a serious nation, not a playing nation. Stop playing,” Sheikh Al Huweni said in a religious ruling published in 2009 on YouTube. Egypt's Salafist Al Noor party, which emerged as the country's second largest after the Brotherhood, has yet to distance itself from Sheikh Al Huweini.   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOE-tGmAI18

Al Noor has also yet to take issues with views such as those expressed in 2005 in a controversial ruling by militant clerics in Saudi Arabia, the world’s most puritanical Muslim nation where soccer was banned until 1951. The ruling denounced the game as an infidel invention and redrafted its internationally recognized International Football Association Board (IFAB) rules to differentiate it from that of the heretics. It banned words like foul, goal, and penalty and like shorts and T-shirts and ordered players to spit on anyone who scored a goal. 

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.



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In this article, I will provide a brief, recent history of clashes in Nigeria as they relate to issues of religion, family, and identity. I will then discuss some of the key features of Muslim-Christian contestation in Nigeria as revealed in the recent survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religious Life, titled Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa. I will then address the question of whether Muslim-Christian contestation in Nigeria should be construed as a matter of religion qua religion, or of “religion by proxy.” Finally, I will offer an analysis of what this contestation over religion, family, and recognition of identity augurs for the prospects for moderate shari’a and juridical pluralism in Nigeria.

"""L'émergence récente et en puissance montante de la modalité e-learning d'enseignement d'arabe constitue une sphère aussi nouvelle qu’effervescente et se décline en trois types de supports:

- Le e-learning stricto sensu : services et prestations d’instituts privés sans doute la facture la plus professionnelle qu’on puisse rencontrer sur le Net ;
- Les sites de partage (blogs ; forums ; réseaux sociaux ; partage vidéo) : domaine extrêmement mouvant ouvert à l’amateurisme. La plupart de ces sites portent essentiellement sur la prédication islamique et intègrent une dose variable d’enseignement de l’arabe ;
- Les ressources en ligne : souvent produites par d’anciens apprenants, elles se présentent selon des agencements plus rigoureux que les sites de partage et mettent à disposition des contenus didactiques (textes, documentation, liens, etc.) et parfois des cours plus ou moins élaborés.

En étudiant cette catégorie de sites de partage, on constate qu’ils sont largement le fruit d’initiatives de mères de famille soucieuses de tisser entre elles des dynamiques sororales et scolaires. La gageure poursuivie est ici de s’approprier avec le plus d’adresse possible les techniques d’autoformation sur internet, afin de développer une culture alternative à l’usage des foyers musulmans.

Pour ce public, il ne devient plus seulement un outil de formation à domicile mais il est aussi vécu comme une protection, ou du moins une sorte de circonvallation creusée autour du musulman et de son foyer, et censée lui épargner toutes les complications liées à la vie publique : rencontre physique avec des professeurs non-musulmans, obligation de se soumettre à des cursus de contenus non chariatiques, mixité, etc.

Comme le manuel papier, le principe des forums et des blogs est de s’adresser à un public internaute familial musulman et francophone, associant parents et enfants à l’apprentissage en autodidactie. Le registre d’arabe qui leur est proposé est ici fortement confessionnel et nourri de contenus traditionnels de cette veine, désignés par leurs termes d’origine arabe : ces matières seront par exemple ce que l’on appelle tağwîd (règle de psalmodie du Coran) ; un premier viatique de aḥādīṯ (enseignement prophétique) ; ḫuluq (morale); qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’ (prophétologie). Il s’entend bien cependant que la langue arabe est aussi l’une des matières d’étude proposée par ces sites, selon un alliage où les aspects doctrinaux et communicationnels s’entrecroisent fortement.
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The main sources for my article are the files concerning dispensations for mixed marriages held in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the Holy Office). My article analyses the tension between two Roman Catholic attitudes toward Catholic women in mixed marriages: the hope that they would serve a missionary role, on the one hand, and the fear that they would succumb to heresy, on the other. Debates within the Holy Office over granting these dispensations show that both conceptions had ancient roots, the first going back to the Roman era, the second to the twelfth century, and then particularly emphasised after the Council of Trent. Studies of mixed marriages in Protestant end Orthodox regions suggest many similarities to the Catholic policies examined here, both regarding the woman’s missionary function and especially regarding the risk of the woman’s apostasy and the meth-ods developed to avoid this.

Since 9/11, many Muslim women in the USA are in a similar predicament as what African American and Chicana women found themselves in decades ago during the Black Power and Chicano Power Movements. African American and Chicana women stood along side African American and Chicano men to fight against oppression and injustices against them by the power structure and the people in positions of power. In both movements, women’s issues were relegated to the sidelines; they were only visible in the periphery of decision-making. Both African American women and Chicanas decided that they had to stand up for themselves and call it like they saw it—they were being oppressed and marginalized in mainstream society because of their race and ethnicity and also within their racial group because of gender.

I’m a teacher’s assistant for an undergraduate course at New York University called, “What is Islam?” The other day in class, my professor asked the students whether or not the Qur’an is considered a “book”. Fraught with anxiety over inheriting such a problematic scholarly tradition of defining and delineating what “religion” is, I kept quiet. While my professor was aiming more for something sounding like, “a book is read, while the Qur’an is recited,” I kept thinking about the physicality and sacrality of the Qur’an (among other authoritative religious texts) and the way it is handled, revered, preserved, loved, an constantly under interpretation. It was about a week later when news broke out that U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan were guilty of burning several copies of the Qur’an on their military base, followed by an unfortunate slew of casualties including at least 30 Afghan deaths and five US soldiers.

The verbal exchange between Noah and his people in the Qur’an. The verbal exchange between Noah and his people in the Qur’an will be discussed. Within the story of Noah one can see two often opposite worldviews: monotheism and polytheism. The talk will explore this verbal exchange compared to principles associated with dialogue theory (constructive exchange; turn taking, etc.)