Prophet Muhammad refers to Islam as the religion that he and his companions promote. So he attracts attention to the Quran, sunnah and the righteous caliphs. We call the era where Islam was practiced well the age of happiness…
In our previous article, titled “How acts of ISIL, extremists have been securitizing ordinary Muslims,” we examined the impact of the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) on Muslim minorities in the West by analyzing some recent tragic events that occurred in Canada and the US.
The increasingly punitive and xenophobic discourse adopted by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in recent years has done a huge disservice to the fight against Islamophobia, dealing a blow to the decades-long efforts of organizations such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the Hizmet movement in international forums.
Many radical Islamists and Islamophobes are mirror images of each other. They want to divide the world into two diametrically opposing, antagonistic and constantly belligerent political camps: “dar al-Harb” and “dar al-Islam.” They hate co-existence. They hate interdependence…
The main factor fueling Islamophobia in the West is extremist elements in the Muslim world. But non-extremist Muslims as well as religious leaders representing and interpreting Islam also have a share in the problem. Muslim religious leaders, for instance, fail to stand up against extremism as strongly as necessary. A major exception in this regard is a person from Turkey: Fethullah Gulen.
An important person who was praising an intellectual in Northwest Africa said, “I wish we [Turkey] had such scholars with far-reaching foresight.” He was right, because the intellectual that he mentioned provides an excellent example for others in his works and lifestyle. But he was also wrong in a sense, because we have several scholars […]
A world-renowned scholar who has written numerous books on Islamophobia has urged Muslims living in the West to integrate into mainstream society, which he says is the most effective way to defeat the Islamophobia that is taking hold in the West, particularly in Europe.
GÖKHAN BACIK Islamists (or Islamic groups) have to face a simple reality: There are radical religious Muslim groups around the globe with false interpretations of Islam. The threat of religious radicalism is not simply Western imperialist jargon devised to benefit self-serving Western strategies. It is a fact that various radical Islamic groups have paradoxically served […]
We, the undersigned members of the Auburn Ministerial Association, wish to disassociate ourselves from the remarks made by the Rev. Rudy Tidwell about Islam and Muslims in the Sept. 20 edition of The Auburn-Opelika News for these reasons: Any religion that demands its members to pray five times a day and to fast for an […]
SEVGI AKARÇEŞME, İSTANBUL Gunnar Stalsett, the bishop emeritus of Oslo, warned about a hatred of Islam at a joint panel discussion organized by the Abant Platform and Fountain Magazine in İstanbul on Friday. “When I hear the word ‘Islamophobia,’ I think it is too mild. There is a hatred of Islam. It is not only […]
A conference hosted by the Catholic Academy in Stuttgart together with two associations of the Gülen movement (aka Hizmet movement) in Baden-Württemberg, “Süddialog” and “Begegnungen”, focused on Christian and Islamic initiatives in cooperative public welfare efforts. The story gives clues about Gulen movement’s role in Muslim’s integration and participation in Germany. While German politicians continue […]
Some 60 civil society groups have come together in a campaign to demand legislation to deal with hate crimes in Turkey. Although such crimes have reached unprecedented levels, with numerous incidents of murders and assaults motivated by prejudice and hostility toward an individual or a group, they commonly go unpunished. The campaign to introduce hate […]
I saw, once again, what it means to be “stuck in time.” Breivik looks only to the past and disregards the potential for the human will to create change. He claims, in opposition to Gülen, that the time for dialogue is over. “We gave peace a chance. The time for armed resistance has come,” he declares.