The Arab Spring Brings Wave of Graffiti Art. Tariq Ramadan interviewed post-Arab spring. Heather McRobie: I’d like to begin with the concept of Islamic democratic secularism and the statement in your book, Arab Awakening, that, “at this precise moment Muslims will only have proven the singularity of Islam when they demonstrate its universality.” Could you explain what you mean by this, and the concept of Islamic democratic secularism? Tariq Ramadan: It’s part of a whole discussion about ethics in my work. I focus on Islamic applied ethics in many fields, and here I am saying that coming back to the Qu’ran and the sunnah as our reference point does not mean that we depend for our ethics on ‘Islam as opposed to the others’.
I look to Islamic ethics to find something that can provide the basis for shared values with other traditions, and ultimately universal values. Rosemary Bechler:In Arab Awakening those Islamic values are deployed both as a critique of western values and Arab worlds in their present state. RB: Don’t they talk about the need for redistribution? After Assad: the US tries to keep Islamists out of the picture in Syria | Paul Rogers. The pace of the conflict in Syria is accelerating. A series of military and political developments – reports that Bashar al-Assad's regime has fired Scud missiles at rebel-held areas, the encroachment of violence ever nearer to the centre of Damascus, and Russia's acknowledgment that a government defeat is possible – are in different ways signs that a decisive period may be approaching. If the Scud reports are true, this is certainly an escalation in the conflict that began in 2011.
Scuds are based on Soviet technology of the 1950s, are cumbersome to fire and highly inaccurate – but they carry substantial high-explosive warheads and can do serious damage if aimed towards large targets such as urban districts. Syria's rebel forces have made some advances in the last weeks of 2012, though their extent and rebel units' ability to hold on to new areas is open to question. The dynamic The first is that this group is but one of many that are motivated by varying degrees of Islamist thinking.
Muslim rage: Why they won’t calm down. Inside the strange Hollywood scam that spread chaos across the Middle East | Max Blumenthal. Did an inflammatory anti-Muslim film trailer that appeared spontaneously on YouTube prompt the attack that left four US diplomats dead, including US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens? American officials have suggested that the assault was pre-planned, allegedly by of one of the Jihadist groups that emerged since the Nato-led overthrow of Libya's Gaddafi regime. So even though the deadly scene in Benghazi may not have resulted directly from the angry reaction to the Islamophobic video, the violence has helped realize the apocalyptic visions of the film's backers. Produced and promoted by a strange collection of rightwing Christian evangelicals and exiled Egyptian Copts, the trailer was created with the intention of both destabilizing post-Mubarak Egypt and roiling the US presidential election.
As a consultant for the film named Steve Klein said: "We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen. " Who was Bacile? For Sadek, the chaos was an encouraging development. Islamist Déjà Vu: The Lessons of 1979 by Christian Caryl. The year 1979—when Iranian student revolutionaries stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took dozens of American diplomats hostage, and Muslim radicals in Saudi Arabia, a staunch US ally, brazenly laid siege to the Grand Mosque in Mecca—marked the debut of a new political phenomenon known as “Islamism.”
To be sure, the theorists and advocates of political Islam had been around for a while, and there was an extraordinary explosion of Islamic activism around the Muslim world in the 1970s; in some countries there was even talk of a sahwa, an “awakening” of Islamic political consciousness. But few people outside of the ummah, the global community of Muslim believers, were paying any attention, and the US was caught flatfooted as Ayatollah Khomeini proceeded to transform his theory of “Islamic government” into reality. “Political Islam” was no longer a theory. It had become an active, practical force in global politics. This is not to say that all Muslims necessarily embrace the purists. Riz Khan - Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Zizek on the future of Egyptian politics.