By Parvez Fatteh, Founder of http://sportingummah.com, sports@muslimobserver.com

File:  Amir Khan’s new coach Virgil Hunter

Ukranian boxer Vycheslav Senchenko has turned down a proposed fight with British-Pakistani boxing star Amir Khan. The two had been scheduled to fight on April 20th, but have now seen the engagement fall apart after a disagreement over the fighting weight. Senchenko refused to fight at Khan’s preferred weight of 144 lbs.

Khan’s American sponsor, the Showtime network, hopes that Khan will stay Stateside and accessible to the lucrative American market rather than fight in England. Richard Schaefer, CEO of Khan’s promoters Golden Boy, explained: “Showtime is open to doing a fight from England, but the question will then be the license fee and the opponent. When Amir entered into the multi-fight deal, it was tied to some pretty big names – but if you are fighting in the UK, it doesn’t make sense for the big names because of the time difference. The fee for an overseas fight will be less, so we are talking about it.”

Khan had hoped to avenge his friend Ricky Hatton, who had lost a bout to Senchenko. His record rose to 27-3-0 (19 KOs) after December’s demolition of previously unbeaten Mexican Carlos Molina, and the former champion will hope to maintain his momentum. The April fight will be Khan’s second with new coach Virgil Hunter, who replaced Freddie Roach after the devastating fourth-round knockout defeat to welterweight king Danny Garcia last July. He will now reportedly consider Mexicans Humberto Soto and Pablo Cesar Cano for a possible matchup. And if all goes well, Khan could well be on a path towards a rematch with Garcia himself.

File:  Boxer Amir Khan among reporters.

15-7

By Adil James, TMO

Traditional Islam is infrequently taught in the United States–frequently the focus of lectures at mosques is making money or seeking political power through elections or organization.
However this past weekend Shaykh Yahya Rhodus spoke on traditional spiritual issues, focusing on the tremendous stature and essential spiritual nature of Prophet Muhammad (s).
“He is a human being, but not like other human beings… Prophet (s) is unique in what he received–the summation of all other revelations… He didn’t ‘just leave’, he is harisun aleikum.” Understanding Muhammad (s) is understanding Allah, said Shaykh Rhodus. 

This speech at the Unity Center was the first of a Seerah series called The Razjan Tour, Fridays from 6:30pm to 10:30pm, February thru May. Admission is $50 for the entire series, which is not free although it is about Islamic knowledge.

15-7

By Samer Hijazi

DEARBORN — The class action lawsuit that went public last week against McDonald’s corp. and Ford Rd McDonald’s franchisee Finley’s Management Company has drawn a mixed reaction from the community, with rumors and misinformation leading to even more speculation about the facts of the case. The lawsuit stems from Dearborn Heights resident Ahmed Ahmed alleging that he purchased and ate a non-halal  McChicken® sandwich that was falsely advertised as halal. 

Ahmed, along with the class of people, are named as the plaintiffs in the case, represented by Michael Jaafar, Zakaria Mahdi and Kassem Dakhlallah, three partners of the Dearborn firm Jaafar & Mahdi Law Group, P.C. The parties have agreed to a $700,000 settlement from McDonald’s corp., on behalf of the entire class being represented in the suit. All parties involved agreed that $274,000 of that settlement would be donated to upgrading the HUDA clinic in Detroit, a free medical clinic for families with no health insurance. A second donation of $150,000 towards the Arab American National Museum (AANM) in Dearborn is also part of the agreement.

After the news went public, many residents in the area have expressed their dismay on Facebook, especially on the Dearborn Area Community Members page, where around 4,500 Facebook users discuss local news and events on a daily basis pertaining to the Arab American and Muslim community. Some individuals called for a boycott against McDonald’s, others expressed that the class of people should be entitled to more money from McDonald’s corp. and the Ford Rd. franchisee. Some even questioned why a donation would be made to the AANM when the lawsuit is based on religious dietary practices and not ethnicity.

The Law Offices of Majed Moughni, PLLC posted a public notice on the Facebook page asking residents who are unsatisfied with the current settlement to fill out a document with their name, address and signature by February 15, giving them the option to “intervene” into the Ahmed Ahmed v. Finley’s Management Company & McDonald’s corp. lawsuit, or to “opt out” of that lawsuit for those who are looking to file one of their own. Attorney Majed Moughni plans to object to the settlement agreement at the hearing taking place at the Wayne County Circuit Court on March 1, when the settlement is supposed to be made final. Still, there is no guarantee that the judge will take a different route with the case once hearing the objections.

“Here’s the biggest problem we had with the lawsuit, the people who were buying from McDonald’s are not being compensated. They have a right to object to the settlement and they have a right to tell the court they want the money that they were defrauded from. It belongs to the people who ate from there, and the majority of them are Dearborn-Dearborn Heights residents,” Moughni stated.
Moughni says there might be evidence which suggests that even while the lawsuit was pending in 2012, the McDonald’s location on Ford Rd. continued to sell non-halal chicken products while advertising them as halal.

One Ford Rd. McDonald’s customer who reached out to Moughni is claiming they had an incident at the location in the summer of 2012, when the customer attempted to purchase a halal  McChicken® sandwich that led to confusion with the cashier who took the order. The employee appeared to have not been properly trained or educated about halal meat and allegedly gave the customer a sandwich that did not meet their standard. The customer contacted Dearborn Police, who showed up to the location.  Two officers assessed that the clerk was a new employee who had made an honest mistake.

Moughni believes some inconsistencies may be showing based on what the clerk had told police officers during this incident.

“They would say all their meat is halal, but that’s not what the employee told the police. They were told they were selling two kinds of meat, but everything they were selling was supposed to be halal. If you can’t train your employees properly, then that presents a big problem,” Moughni added.

Moughni cited another example of when McDonald’s had to settle a lawsuit based on religious laws. In 2002, Hindu religious groups filed a lawsuit against the corporation for misrepresenting their french fries and hash browns to the public as vegetarian, when there was beef flavor in the ingredients. McDonald’s eventually settled the lawsuit by donating $10 million to Hindu groups and other organizations. Moughni believes McDonald’s is entitled to give the community more than just a $700,000 settlement.

Kassem Dakhlallah, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the current case, says there should be no comparisons between the Hindu case and the current non-halal case, because the circumstances and facts in the two cases vastly differ.

“The Hindu case with McDonald’s was a nationwide lawsuit that involved 15,000 McDonald’s stores regarding allegations that they were responsible for misleading not only Hindus but vegetarians. Our case only involves one store in Dearborn, Michigan. It’s not a case of McDonald’s deceiving every customer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at all of their locations. There’s been a lot of imagination of what this case could have been. But we know the facts of this case and everything else is just speculation,” Dakhlallah stated.

Dakhlallah says they’ve worked around the details of the case for 16 months and determined that this settlement would be the best route for the entire class. Additional people who would want to be named as plaintiffs in the case would need to prove that they purchased a meal from the location, and more importantly, would somehow have to prove that their sandwich was not halal when they purchased it. The attorneys believe that would be nearly impossible to prove considering the current case only alleges that the McChicken® sandwich and McNuggets® were only non-halal on some occasions.

“In reality the reason why we chose a class settlement was because of the inherent difficulty that anybody is going to face in proving that any sandwich was non-halal when they purchased it. If we had a class of 100 named plaintiffs that at various times said they bought non-halal food and they could prove it, then the case would have become a lot stronger. If we believe this existed, we would want it to come forward and we would want it to become part of the case, but there is no proof of anything,” Dakhlallah added.

Some confusion that Dakhlallah was able to clear up regarded the misinformation over whether or not the Ford Rd. location sells only halal chicken, or if it carries nonhalal chicken as well. According to their findings, the Ford Rd. location advertises that only their McChicken® and McNuggets® are halal. They do carry other chicken sandwiches that are not halal, including the Premium Crispy Chicken Club® which includes bacon. The McDonald’s Michigan Ave. location in Dearborn, not named as a defendant in the case, also carries halal McChicken® and halal McNuggets®, however they also carry non-halal McChicken® and non-halal McNuggets®. That location differentiates between the two meats by marking their halal items with a sticker.

Dakhlallah says the community should consider the $700,000 settlement as a victory since it’s only based on findings of one location. According to Dakhlallah, McDonald’s corp. was very co-operative with the settlement, and all parties involved agreed to donating money to the HUDA clinic and the Arab American National Museum after long hours of research and assessments. He asks residents to carefully read the details of the class notice that has been distributed to local mosques and published in The Arab American News before jumping to conclusions.

“People should really read the class notice. That provides all the information they need to know regarding the case. If they listen to people who don’t know the facts of this case, they are running the risk of seriously being mislead of what their rights are. We went toe-to-toe with one of the largest corporations in the world, and sixteen months later, after we went to mediation three seperate times in front of the Chief Judge of the Wayne County Circuit Court, we reached this settlement,” Dakhlallah stated.

To read the details of the class action notice regarding the Ahmed Ahmed v. Finley’s Management Company and McDonald’s corp. lawsuit, see pages 4 & 5 of this week’s issue of The Arab American News. The final approval of the settlement, opened to the public, is expected to take place on March 1 at 11 a.m. on the 11th floor of the Wayne County Circuit Court City-County Building located at 2 Woodward Avenue in Detroit. 

Arab American News

15-7

By Dr. Aslam Abdullah, TMO Editor in Chief

A Saudi preacher is accused of raping and torturing his five year old daughter to death. He admitted brutalizing her after suspecting her virginity.

He served a few months in jail and then a judge ruled that the prosecution could only seek blood money and not death penalty or life imprisonment. The scholar paid about $50,000 blood money to the mother of their daughter and was released from custody. (Thank God the judge did not allow the guilty preacher to keep the money under the pretext that he is the father of the girl.) Thus the value of a five year old was determined and that included compensation for rape and torture.

The judge based his ruling on Sharia, so is the claim. Does the Sharia want a murderer to get away with the crime? Does the Sharia offer no punishment for torture and rape? Does the sharia have no rulings on child abuse? Does the Sharia place a dollar value on torture, rape and human life? Does the Sharia absolve parents from abuses committed against their children or spouses? These questions must be asked honestly because the ruling given in the name of God and Islam does not make any sense no matter how the legal experts interpret the Qur`an and the Sunna of the Prophet (s).

If the Sharia is defined as a license to torture, murder or rape, then this is neither Divine nor Prophetic. It is simply a male-chauvinistic tribalism immersed in ignorance and total disregard to human life and dignity. This cannot be allowed in the name of God or Islam. Muslims in general and Muslim scholars in particular owe it to their Creator to question the legitimacy of this ruling and take a stand against it. Yet few would dare to do that. Most of them did not care about this case. Most of them didn’t bother to follow it and question the logic behind the verdict.

It is sad that despite the presence of so many learned scholars of Islam in the world, few are willing to condemn this verdict and openly distance themselves from this vulgar interpretation of Sharia. On the contrary, many are trying to justify this verdict.

Shame upon them.

The Qur`an demands equal rights for children, boys and girls included. The Qur`an does not give parents unlimited authority to do whatever they want to do with their children.

The Qur`an condemns rape, torture and abuse. There is no room for these things in a society that claims to follow Islamic precepts.

However, violations of these mandated Qur`anic rights do occur. It is in these circumstances that justice and those who are entrusted with the responsibility of preserving it must play their roles properly. If they do not then it is the duty of Muslim scholars to take a unified stand against this. Silence in these matters is, in its own right, like condoning and supporting the crime and injustice.

15-7

By Chas Freeman

CHAS W. FREEMAN, Jr., Chairman, Projects International; Former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia; Former President, MEPC

Thank you, Tom.  It’s a pleasure to be back with the Middle East Policy Council for this occasion.  I see many familiar faces and some new ones, and I’m very happy to be here.  I’m also glad that Tom opened by defining grand strategy.  Years ago there was an American diplomat, a very senior one, who was asked what American policy in the Middle East was, and his reply was, we don’t have one, and it’s a good thing that we don’t because if we did, they would probably be the wrong one.  So on that note, I will take off where Tom began.

Over the past half century or so the United States has pursued two main but disconnected objectives in West Asia and North Africa: on the one hand, Americans have sought strategic and economic advantage in the Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf, and Egypt; on the other, support for the consolidation of the Jewish settler state in Palestine. These two objectives of U.S. policy in the Middle East have consistently taken precedence over the frequently professed American preference for democracy.

These objectives are politically contradictory. They also draw their rationales from distinct moral universes. U.S. relations with the Arab countries and Iran have been grounded almost entirely in unsentimental calculations of interest. The American relationship with Israel, by contrast, has rested almost entirely on religious and emotional bonds. This disconnect has precluded any grand strategy.

Rather than seek an integrated policy framework, America has balanced the contradictions between the imperatives of its domestic politics and its interests. For many years, Washington succeeded in having its waffle in the Middle East and eating it too – avoiding having to choose between competing objectives. With wiser U.S. policies and more judicious responses to them by Arabs and Israelis, Arab-Israeli reconciliation might by now have obviated the ultimate necessity for America to prioritize its purposes in the region. But the situation has evolved to the point that choice is becoming almost impossible to avoid.

The Middle East matters. It is where Africa, Asia, and Europe converge. In addition to harboring the greater part of the world’s conventionally recoverable energy supplies, it is a key passageway between Asia and Europe. No nation can hope to project its power throughout the globe without access to and through the Middle East. Nor can any ignore the role of the Persian Gulf countries in fueling the world’s armed forces, powering its economies, and setting its energy prices. This is why the United States has acted consistently to maintain a position of preeminent influence in the Middle East and to deny to any strategically hostile nation or coalition of nations the opportunity to contest its politico-military dominance of the region.

The American pursuit of access, transit, and strategic denial has made the building of strategic partnerships with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt a major focus of U.S. policy. The partnership with Iran broke down over three decades ago. It has been succeeded by antagonism, low-intensity conflict, and the near constant threat of war. The U.S. relationships with Egypt and Saudi Arabia are now evolving in uncertain directions. Arab governments have learned the hard way that they must defer to public opinion. This opinion is increasingly Islamist. Meanwhile, popular antipathies to the widening American war on Islamism are deepening. These factors alone make it unlikely that relations with the United States can retain their centrality for Cairo and Riyadh much longer.

The definitive failure of the decades-long American-sponsored “peace process” between Israelis, Palestinians, and other Arabs adds greatly to the uncertainty. Whether it yielded peace or not, the “peace process” made the United States the apparently indispensable partner for both Israel and the Arabs. It served dual political purposes. It enabled Arab governments to persuade their publics that maintaining good relations with the United States did not imply selling out Arab or Islamic interests in Palestine, and it supported the U.S. strategic objective of achieving acceptance for a Jewish state by the other states and peoples of the Middle East. Washington’s abandonment of this diplomacy was a boon to Israeli territorial expansion but a disaster for American influence in the region, including in Israel.

Over the years, America protected Israel from international rebuke and punishment. Its stated purpose was the preservation of prospects for a negotiated “two-state solution” that could bring security and peace to Israelis and Palestinians alike. A decade ago, every member of both the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation endorsed this objective and pledged normalization with Israel if Israeli-Palestinian negotiations succeeded. In response, Israel spun out its talks with the Palestinians while working hard to preclude their self-determination. It has now succeeded in doing so.

There has been no American-led peace process worthy of the name for nearly two decades. There is no prospect of such a process resuming. No one in the international community now accepts the pretense of a “peace process” as an excuse for American protection of Israel. Eleven years on, the Arab and Islamic peace offer has exceeded its shelf life. On the Israel-Palestine issue, American diplomacy has been running on fumes for some time. It is now totally out of gas and universally perceived to be going nowhere.

Sadly, barring fundamental changes in Israeli politics, policies, and behavior, the longstanding American strategic objective of achieving acceptance for the state of Israel to stabilize the region where British colonialism and Jewish nationalism implanted it is now infeasible. In practice, the United States has abandoned the effort. U.S. policy currently consists of ad hoc actions to fortify Israel against Palestinian resistance and military threats from its neighbors, while shielding it from increasingly adverse international reaction to its worsening deportment. In essence, the United States now has no objective with respect to Israel beyond sheltering it from the need to deal with the unpalatable realities its own choices have created.

The key to regional acknowledgment of Israel as a legitimate part of the Middle East was the “two-state solution.” The Camp David accords laid out a program for Palestinian self-determination and Israeli withdrawal from the territories it had seized and occupied in 1967. Israel has had more than forty-five years to trade land for peace, implementing its Camp David commitments and complying with international law. It has consistently demonstrated that it craves land more than peace, international reputation, good will, or legitimacy. As a result, Israel remains isolated from its neighbors, with no prospect of reversing this. It is now rapidly forfeiting international acceptability. There is nothing the United States can do to cure either situation despite the adverse consequences of both for American standing in the region and the world.

In the seventeenth century, English settlers in America found inspiration for a theology of ethnic cleansing and racism in the Old Testament. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Jewish settlers in Palestine have invoked the same scripture to craft a parallel theology. The increasingly blatant racism and Islamophobia of Israeli politics, the kafkaesque tyranny of Israel’s checkpoint army in the occupied territories, and Israel’s cruel and unusual collective punishment of Gaza have bred hateful resentment of the Jewish state in its region and throughout the Muslim world. One has to look to north Korea to find another polity so detested and distrusted by its neighbors and with so few supporters among the world’s great powers.

The United States has affirmed that, regardless of how Israel behaves, it will allow no political distance between itself and the Jewish state. In the eyes of the world there is none. Israel’s ill repute corrodes U.S. prestige and credibility not just in the Middle East but in the world at large.

Israel does not seem to care what its neighbors or the world think of it. Despite its geographical location, it prefers to see itself as its neighbors do: as a Hebrew-speaking politico-economic extension of Europe rather than part of the Middle East. Nor does Israel appear concerned about the extent to which its policies have undermined America’s ability to protect it from concerted international punishment for its actions. The United States and Israel’s handful of other international supporters continue to have strong domestic political reasons to stand by it. Yet they are far less likely to be able to hold back the global movement to ostracize Israel than in the case of apartheid South Africa. America may “have Israel’s back,” but – on this – no one now has America’s back.

For a considerable time to come, Israel can rely on its US-provided “qualitative edge” to sustain its military hegemony over others in its region. But, as the “crusader states” established and sustained by previous Western interventions in the region illustrate, such supremacy – especially when dependent on external support – is inevitably ephemeral – and those who live exclusively by the sword are more likely than others to perish by it.  Meanwhile, as the struggle for Palestinian Arab rights becomes a struggle for human and civil rights within the single sovereignty that Israel has de facto imposed on Palestine, Israel’s internal evolution is rapidly alienating Jews of conscience both there and abroad. Israelis do not have to live in Palestine; they can and do increasingly withdraw from it to live in diaspora. Jews outside contemporary Israel are coming to see it less as a sanctuary or guarantor of Jewish security and well-being than as a menace to both.

The United States has made an enormous commitment to the success of the Jewish state. Yet it has no strategy to cope with the tragic existential challenges Zionist hubris and overweening territorial ambition have now forged for Israel. The hammerlock the Israeli right has on American discourse about the Middle East assures that, despite the huge U.S. political and economic investment in Israel, Washington will not discuss or develop effective policy options for sustaining the Jewish state over the long term. The outlook is therefore for continuing deterioration in Israel’s international moral standing and the concomitant isolation of the United States in the region and around the globe.

This brings me back to the other main objective of U.S. policy in the Middle East: the nurturing of strategic partnerships with the largest and most influential Muslim states in the region. Iran and Syria have proven to be lost causes in this regard. Iraq is now more aligned with them than with America. Turkey is still an important U.S. ally on many matters but, with the exception of some aspects of relations with Syria, Ankara is following policies toward the Middle East that are almost entirely uncoordinated with those of the United States. The two pillars of the U.S. position in the Middle East beyond Israel are Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Neither can now be taken for granted.

Egypt is in the midst of a transition from American-aligned autocracy to self-determination under Islamist populism. It is not clear what sort of domestic political order this populism will shape but it seems certain that future Egyptian governments will listen less to the United States and demand more of Israel. The diversion to Egypt of a portion of the U.S. government’s generous annual subsidies to Israel long sufficed to secure Cairo’s acquiescence in the Camp David framework. This enabled Israel to pretend that it had achieved a measure of acceptance among its Arab neighbors despite its default on its obligations to the Palestinians and its escalating mistreatment of them. More importantly, it gave Israel the strategic security from Egyptian attack it had been unable to obtain by force of arms.

Populist Egypt’s passivity is very unlikely to be procurable on similar terms. Enough has changed to put the Camp David framework at severe risk. (This is true for Jordan as well. Jordan made peace with Israel in response to the Oslo accords, which the ruling right-wing in Israel systematically undermined and finally undid.)

Since 1979, the U.S. relationship with Israel has been both a raison d’être and essential underpinning for U.S.-Egyptian cooperation. It is now reemerging as a point of division, irritation, and contention between Americans and Egyptians. Egypt is once again an independent Arab actor in the affairs of its region, including Israel and Iran. It is no longer a reliable agent of American influence. It reacts to Israeli actions and policies calculatedly, with much less deference to U.S. views than in the past.

Islamist parties now dominate Egyptian politics as they do politics in Tunisia and among Palestinians. It is very unlikely that post-Assad Syria will be democratic but it is virtually certain that it will be Salafist. The so-called Arab awakening has turned out really to be a Salafist awakening. There is a struggle for the soul of Islam underway between Takfiri Salafists and conservative modernizers. In the traditionally Islamist states of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, this struggle is being won by the forces of tolerance, reform, and opening up. Elsewhere, as in Egypt, the outcome remains in doubt, but nowhere are Muslim conservatives, still less Salafists, at ease with expansionist Zionism or the sort of aggressive anti-Islamism that the United States has institutionalized in its “drone wars.”

In the wake of Washington’s abandonment of the effort to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the impact of 9//11, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the transformation of a punitive raid in Afghanistan into a long-term attempt to preclude an Islamist regime there, the U.S. – Saudi relationship, once an example of broad-based strategic partnership, has markedly weakened. American Islamophobia has erased much of the previous mutual regard between the two countries. The United States continues to be the ultimate guarantor of the Saudi state against intervention from foreign enemies other than Israel. There is no alternative to America in this role. Nor, even when it regains energy self-sufficiency, will the United States be able to ignore Saudi Arabia’s decisive influence on global energy supplies and prices. But U.S. – Saudi cooperation is no longer instinctual and automatic. It has become cynically transactional, with cooperation taking place on a case-by-case basis as specific interests dictate.

Policy convergence between Washington and Riyadh continues but sometimes conceals major differences. This is clearly the case with Iran, where Washington’s interest in non-proliferation and desire to preserve Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East overlap but do not coincide with Riyadh’s concerns. If Tehran does go nuclear, Saudi-American disharmony will be glaringly apparent in very short order . Similarly, in Syria, the common desire of Americans and Saudis to see Syrians overthrow the Assad government masks very different visions about what sort of regime should succeed it and what the stance of that regime should be toward Israel, Lebanon, or Iraq.

The bottom line is this. U.S. policies of unconditional support for Israel, opposition to Islamism, and the use of drones to slaughter suspected Islamist militants and their families and friends have created an atmosphere that precludes broad strategic partnerships with major Arab and Muslim countries, though it does not yet preclude limited cooperation for limited purposes.  The acceptance of Israel as a legitimate presence in the Middle East cannot now be achieved without basic changes in Israeli attitudes and behavior that are not in the offing.

U.S. policies designed, respectively, to pursue strategic partnerships with Arab and Muslim powers and to secure the state of Israel have each separately failed. The Middle East itself is in flux. America’s interests in the region now demand fundamental rethinking, not just of U.S. policies, but of the strategic objectives those policies should be designed to achieve.

Thank you.  (Applause.)

15-7

WASHINGTON – The Justice Department today announced a settlement with the city of Lomita, Calif., resolving allegations that the city violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA) when it denied the Islamic Center of the South Bay’s application to build a new mosque on its property.  The settlement, which still must be approved by the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, is in the form of an agreed order and resolves a lawsuit filed today by the United States against the city. 

The case arose from the Lomita City Council’s 2010 denial of an application by the Islamic Center to take down the aging, separate structures on its property, which it has been using for worship and various other religious activities since 1985, and construct a single building that would serve its needs.  The government’s complaint, which was filed with the court along with the agreed order resolving the lawsuit, alleges that the structures currently being used by the Islamic Center are insufficient to enable the community to come together for worship and fellowship or to perform religious rituals properly.  The lawsuit alleges that the city’s denial of the Islamic Center’s application to construct a new center in place of these inadequate facilities imposed a substantial burden on the religious exercise of the Islamic Center and its members. 

“Religious freedom is among our most fundamental rights, and there are few aspects of that right more basic than the ability of a religious community to come together for worship and fellowship in a decent and appropriate setting on its own property,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.  “With RLUIPA, Congress has sought to ensure that this basic right is protected from encroachment by unjustified local zoning actions.”  

“The right to religious freedom includes the ability to build places of worship and to assemble at those places,” said U.S. Attorney André Birotte Jr. “This settlement will ensure that worshippers at the Islamic Center will be able to exercise their rights and enjoy the cherished freedoms in our Constitution.”

As part of this settlement, which incorporates portions of a related agreement between the city and the Islamic Center, the city has agreed to consider a renewed application by the Islamic Center on an expedited schedule.  The city also agreed that its leaders and employees who make land-use decisions will attend training on the requirements of RLUIPA.  In addition, the city periodically will report to the Justice Department. 

RLUIPA prohibits land use decisions that discriminate based on religion or impose substantial and unjustified burdens on religious exercise. Persons who believe their rights under RLUIPA have been violated may contact the Housing and Civil Enforcement Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division at 1-800-896-7743.   More information about RLUIPA, including a report on the first 10 years of its enforcement, may be found at www.justice.gov/crt/about/hce/rluipaexplain.php. 

15-7

By Catrin Nye–BBC Asian Network

World Hijab Day calls on non-Muslim women to try out life under the traditional head scarf. Can it lead to more religious tolerance and understanding?

“Because I’m not very skilled I’m wearing what you could call a one-piece hijab – you just pull it over your head. But I’ve discovered the scope is endless. There are all sorts of options.”

So says Jess Rhodes, 21, a student from Norwich in the UK. She had always wanted to try a headscarf but, as a non-Muslim, didn’t think it an option. So, when given the opportunity by a friend to try wearing the scarf, she took it.

“She assured me that I didn’t need to be Muslim, that it was just about modesty, although obviously linked to Islam, so I thought, ‘why not?’”

Rhodes is one of hundreds of non-Muslims who will be wearing the headscarf as part of the first annual World Hijab Day on 1 February.

Originated by New York woman Nazma Khan, the movement has been organised almost solely over social networking sites. It has attracted interest from Muslims and non-Muslims in more than 50 countries across the world.

For many people, the hijab is a symbol of oppression and divisiveness. It’s a visible target that often bears the brunt of a larger debate about Islam in the West.

World Hijab Day is designed to counteract these controversies. It encourages non-Muslim women (or even Muslim women who do not ordinarily wear one) to don the hijab and experience what it’s like to do so, as part of a bid to foster better understanding.

“Growing up in the Bronx, in NYC, I experienced a great deal of discrimination due to my hijab,” says organiser Khan, who moved to New York from Bangladesh aged 11. She was the only “hijabi” (a word for someone who wears the headscarf) in her school.

I figured the only way to end discrimination if we ask our fellow sisters to experience hijab themselves”

“In middle school I was ‘Batman’ or ‘ninja,’” she says.

“When I moved on to college it was just after 9/11, so they would call me Osama Bin Laden or terrorist. It was awful.

“I figured the only way to end discrimination is if we ask our fellow sisters to experience hijab themselves.”

Khan had no idea the concept would result in support from all over the world. She says she has been contacted by people in dozens of countries, including the UK, Australia, India, Pakistan, France and Germany. The group’s literature has been translated into 22 languages.

It was social networking that got Jess Rhodes involved. Her friend Widyan Al Ubudy lives in Australia and asked her Facebook friends to participate.

“My parents, their natural reaction was to wonder if this was a good idea,” says Rhodes, who decided to wear her hijab for a month.

“They were worried I would be attacked in the street because of a lack of tolerance.”

Rhodes herself was concerned about the reaction, but after eight days of wearing the headscarf she has actually been surprised by how positive it has been.

Muslim headscarves

The word hijab comes from the Arabic for veil and is used to describe the headscarves worn by Muslim women. These scarves come in myriad styles and colours. The type most commonly worn in the West is a square scarf that covers the head and neck but leaves the face clear.

“I can’t explain it really but people have been really very helpful, especially in shops,” she says.

Esther Dale, 28, lives in the US state of California and is another non-Muslim trying out the headscarf for the day. The mother-of-three was told about the event by a friend of hers who is a “hijabi”.

As a practising Mormon, Dale understands the importance of faith in daily life, and the judgement that can come with the associated clothing.

She says she knows the stigma that surround the headscarf and hopes this is an opportunity to help combat that.

“I knew that it’s about modesty of behaviour, not just clothing, and that it’s a faulty assumption that women only wear it if they’re forced to – especially in the US. That’s not at all the truth,” she says.
“It’s a good chance to educate people that you can’t make an accurate judgement about someone based solely on what they’re wearing,” says Dale.

The hijab has been a frequent target of criticism from people like Maryam Namazie, a vocal ex-Muslim and campaigner, who sees the garment as a form of oppression.

“Millions of women and girls have been harassed, fined, intimidated and arrested for ‘improper’ veiling over the past several decades,” she wrote in a blog post about the Iranian women’s football team’s hijabs.

“Anyone who has ever taken an Iran Air flight will verify how quickly veils are removed the minute the airplane leaves Iranian airspace.

“And anyone who knows anything about Iran knows the long and hard struggle that has taken place against compulsory veiling and sex apartheid.”

Organisers of this event say they were fed up with seeing the words “oppressed” or “subjugated” when it came to discussing the Muslim head-covering.

They reject the notion that women only wear hijabs at the insistence of a father or a radical member of the family.

This day, then, is about showing the world that women can choose the hijab willingly.

Rhodes says it’s a choice she will continue to make.

“I will wear it from time to time,” she says of her hijab. “I’m saying to the world, my beauty is for my family and my partner. Any woman can wear this.”

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By Marshall Breger

like Jewish law, Islamic law is worthy of protection in the United states

Similarities between Judaism and Islam are easy to see. Both are monotheistic religions for whom the Lord is One. Both are religions based on revelation. In both, law is central, and personal and social existence is governed by a divinely ordained legal system.

There are also many obvious parallels between Judaism’s legal system, known as halacha, and the Islamic legal order of sharia. Both purport to instruct us in how to attend to every aspect of one’s life: one’s getting up and one’s going out, one’s sexual practice and one’s business practices. For some adherents of each, religious law also dictates political life, such as for whom to vote.
Despite this kinship, there are those in the Jewish community who would condemn Islam and sharia, arguing that, un-like Judaism, Islam is not worthy of the protections of American law.
David Yerushalmi, author of a model  law banning sharia, argues that sharia differs from halacha because of its different “threat matrix.” Sharia, he tells us, requires faithful Muslims to impose Islamic law on the world “violently,” and its adherents should be charged with sedition against the United States. Rabbi Jon Hausman, a self-styled “warrior rabbi” from Massachusetts, tells us that in Judaism, unlike Islam, the law of the state is the law (in Aramaic, dina d’malchuta dina) so you don’t have to worry about such religious “imperialism.”

These commentators’ understanding of both sharia and halacha is markedly defective.

1. As Hausman surely knows, the reach of dina d’malchuta dinais debated among rabbinic commentators. Some limit the application of the Jewish legal system to property issues, others extend it to apply to all secular law that does not violate Jewish law. In any case, Hausman’s suggestion that halacha is a personal legal system—not relevant to civic life and politics—neglects both Jewish history and halacha itself. In Baghdad during the Middle Ages and in Poland during the time of the Council of the Four Lands, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, for instance, Jewish communities had their own courts, and Jewish law was enforced by secular authorities. And even today, thousands of Jews in both the United States and Israel look to rabbinic courts and halacha to resolve all manner of civil disputes.

While clearly some Muslims do view sharia as a hegemonic political force, the vast majority of Muslims, especially those living in the West, view sharia no differently from the way Jews view the halachic system: as an overarching guide to ordering one’s life. Muslim jurists have always drawn on sharia to mandate that fellow Muslims obey the laws of the land in matters that sharia does not prohibit. In numerous instances (see Koran 5:11), Muslims are told to “honor their contracts” and so to honor the “social contract” represented by the law of the land. The Fiqh Council of North America, the leading interpreter of Islamic law in the United States, ruled as recently as September 2011 that “there is no inherent conflict between the normative values of Islam and the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

2. Daniel Pipes recounts in a 2009 article an incident in England when the Indian Muslim owner of an old age home near Manchester proposed to switch to serving only halal food in the facility. After residents complained, the owner retracted the policy.

To Pipes, the owner’s desire to remove pork from the menu, even though apparently not implemented, is proof that Islam wishes to impose itself on all around it. But is this drive for “imperium” the only explanation?

Indeed, Jewish law would have great sympathy for the position taken by the Indian entrepreneur. Though there are gray areas, Jewish law generally holds that one cannot benefit (or profit) from the sale of mixed milk and meat products. The legal compendium theShulhan Aruchforbids Jews from selling non-kosher products on a regular basis (Yoreh De’ah 117.1). And anyone who has read Daphne Barak-Erez’s 2007 monograph Outlawed Pigs: Law, Religion, and Culture in Israelwill appreci-ate the difficulties of commerce in pork products (or “white meat” as it is politely called) in Israel.

3. Critics of Islam make much of the Shiite legal doctrine of taqquiaand the related concept of kitman, which allow one to dissemble or evade by misdirection in order to save a life or community from imminent destruction (see Koran 16:106). For these critics, the takeaway is that Muslims lie when it is in their interest, so we cannot trust their promises or make treaties with them.

But numerous Koranic references tell the believer to “mix not the truth with falsehood nor conceal the truth when you know what it is” (2:42). And further, “Conceal not [the truth]; for whomever conceals it is burdened with sin” (2:283).

Again, we must look to Jewish law analogues. Even the Chofetz Chaim, the rab-binic scholar most associated with truth-telling, allows “white lies” when they will produce social and interpersonal peace. (No threat of imminent destruction is required.)

Maimonides allows one to lie about one’s religion to save one’s own life. And does anyone remember the Marranos?

My point is not to analyze the nuances of halacha, let alone sharia, but rather to underscore the inconsistency of attacking Islam for activities that Jewish law and prac-tice would also permit, or even require.

These broadside attacks on sharia are reminiscent of Jewish polemical literature after the rise of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries designed to show Judaism as superior. Later scholars such as the Meiri, though, moved on from polemics to classify Islam as a monotheistic religion close to Judaism. While there are certainly fundamentalist interpretations of Islam that we rightfully find dangerous and deplorable, it is time that Jews in America go be-yond “gotcha” polemics and stop treating sharia and Islam as illegitimate expressions of man’s search for the divine.

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