Ideas. Sufism. Culture. Musulmans. Renouncing Islamism: To the brink and back again - Johann Hari, Commentators. In the mosques across the city, I hear a fringe of young men talk dreamily of flocking to Afghanistan to "resist". Yet this whisper never has an immigrant accent. It shares my pronunciations, my cultural references, and my national anthem. Beneath the beards and the burqas, there is an English voice. The East End is a cramped grey maze of council estates, squashed between the glistening palaces of the City to one side and the glass towers of Docklands to the other.
You can feel the financial elites staring across at each other, indifferent to this concrete lump of poverty dumped in-between by the forgotten tides of history. This place has always been the swirling first stop for immigrants to this country like my father – a place where new arrivals can huddle together as they adjust to the cold rain and lukewarm liberalism of Britain. The Muslims who arrive here every day from Bangladesh, or India, or Somalia say they find the presence of British Islamists bizarre. I. It sounds familiar.
Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa. In little more than a century, the religious landscape of sub-Saharan Africa has changed dramatically. As of 1900, both Muslims and Christians were relatively small minorities in the region. The vast majority of people practiced traditional African religions, while adherents of Christianity and Islam combined made up less than a quarter of the population, according to historical estimates from the World Religion Database. Since then, however, the number of Muslims living between the Sahara Desert and the Cape of Good Hope has increased more than 20-fold, rising from an estimated 11 million in 1900 to approximately 234 million in 2010. The number of Christians has grown even faster, soaring almost 70-fold from about 7 million to 470 million. Sub-Saharan Africa now is home to about one-in-five of all the Christians in the world (21%) and more than one-in-seven of the world’s Muslims (15%).1 But how do sub-Saharan Africans themselves view the role of religion in their lives and societies?
Interactive: Bible and Quran: A Comparison of Words. In order to understand a religion, we can refer to its holy book, which establishes guidelines and principles for followers to adhere to. At the same time, followers, both radical and mild, interpret the holy text to provide a deeper and often more complex meaning of a particular verse, often to help explain issues that directly affect their personal beliefs. Unfortunately, people of one faith try to use the holy text of another faith to ridicule that faith or show its abominations by pointing to a particular text, often entirely out of context or misquoted.
One such example is the Quran burning controversy stirred by Terry Jones in Florida. While claiming the Quran is a violent book of terror, Jones failed to make a comparison to the Bible, which also contains many violent passages. Looking at the opposite end of the spectrum, we are also curious about how each passage mentions love, tolerance and friendship. Credits/Sources: Mohammed Image Archive. Mohammed Image Archive Depictions of Mohammed Throughout History The Mohammed Image Archive is a compendium of images that depict Mohammed (the 7th-century founder of Islam), spanning all historical periods, cultures and genres. The inspiration for this Archive came from the global controversy over the publication of Mohammed cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and the need for a comprehensive and even-handed look at the wide variety of Mohammed depictions in Islamic and Western societies from the Middle Ages until today.
It will remain online as a resource for those interested in freedom of expression. (Please note that the Arabic name "Mohammed" has over the years been transliterated into Western languages with several different spellings -- some of which you'll encounter on this site -- including Mahomet, Muhammad, and Mohamed.) The images in the Mohammed Image Archive have been divided into the following categories; click on these links to view the images in each section: