Muslim cleric declares selfies a sin under Islamic law… and criticises women in particular for being so 'shameless'

Indonesian cleric Felix Siauw posted tweets about why selfies are so sinful. 

He said that those who take selfies are succumbing to pride and arrogance.

There was a huge Twitter backlash against his messages by Indonesians.

Hundreds have posted selfies using the hashtag #Selfie4Siauw

A Muslim cleric has declared selfies sinful, claiming that those who take them are succumbing to pride, ostentation and arrogance.

Popular Indonesian cleric Felix Siauw posted a series of tweets explaining why selfies should be avoided – but reserved most of his exasperation for women, who he said were being ‘shameless’ and ‘unpure’.

Siauw, who has over a million Twitter followers, wrote: ‘These days many Muslim women take selfies without shame. There are usually nine frames in one photo with facial poses that are just – My Goodness – where’s the purity in women?’

He also said that because selfie-takers are desperate for social media views, they’re being ostentatious, and because taking a selfie makes people feel ‘cooler’, we’ve ‘fallen into the worst sin of all – arrogance’.

However, there was a huge Twitter backlash against his messages by Indonesians. Hundreds have posted selfies on the social media site using the hashtag # Selfie4Siauw, Quartz reported.

Many were taken by women, dozens by men – and some purely for comedy purposes, with a camel and great white shark uploaded with the hashtag.

It follows a prominent religious scholar in Saudi Arabia giving the cold shoulder to snowmen – by issuing a fatwa against them.

A snowfall in the middle eastern country saw Saudis eagerly building snowmen and even snow camels.

However, Mohammed Saleh Al Minjed decreed that building snowmen – or indeed creating any living creature out of snow – was an insult to the Islamic religion.

He declared that inanimate objects such as ships and buildings could be imitated – or food – but not animals, according to Gulf News.

He wrote: 'God has given people space to make whatever they want which does not have a soul, including trees, ships, fruits, buildings and so on.'

The fatwa - or religious ruling - was given a frosty reception on social media sites by some people.

Blogger Mishaal complained that the ruling took the joy out of the unusual weather.

He said: 'We have snow for fleeting days, maybe even hours, and there is always someone who wants to rob us of the joy and the fun. It seems that the only thing left for us is to sit down and drink coffee.'

On Twitter users writing in Arabic and identifying themselves with Arab names joined in the debate.

'They are afraid for their faith of everything ... sick minds,' one Twitter user wrote.

Another posted a photo of a man in formal Arab garb holding the arm of a 'snow bride' wearing a bra and lipstick. 'The reason for the ban is fear of sedition,' he wrote.

A third said the country was plagued by two types of people: 'A people looking for a fatwa for everything in their lives, and a cleric who wants to interfere in everything in the lives of others through a fatwa,' the user wrote.

Sheikh Munajjid had some supporters, however. 'It (building snowmen) is imitating the infidels, it promotes lustiness and eroticism,' one wrote.

'May God preserve the scholars, for they enjoy sharp vision and recognise matters that even Satan does not think about.'

And blogger Al Marsad wrote: 'It has no value in our traditions… those fascinated by the West should emulate their inventions and sciences, not their culture,' according to Gulf News.

Snow has covered upland areas of Tabuk province near Saudi Arabia's border with Jordan for the third consecutive year.

Last year the General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment (GAIAE) in the UAE issued a fatwa against living on Mars.

The committee argued that an attempt to dwell on the planet would be so hazardous as to be suicidal and killing oneself is not permitted by Islam.

The astronauts, the committee said, would end up dying for no 'righteous reason' and would face the same punishment in the afterlife as someone who'd committed suicide.

The GAIAE has issued around two million Fatwas through its Official Fatwa Centre since its inception in 2008.

In Malaysia, meanwhile, Muslim clerics have issued fatwas banning everything from yoga to Valentines Day in a bid to stop the influence of Western culture.

To ensure Muslims can keep pace with the rules, an 'e-fatwa' site has been started the Globalpost reports. The issue recently came to a head at a dog-petting festival for Muslims, with the organiser receiving threatening phone calls.

Muslims are taught that canines are unclean.

Malaysian activist Zainah Anwar, recently wrote that Muslims are 'sick and tired of being told, yet again, of more categories of Muslims and practices to be denounced, hated and declare deviant'.

Her women's rights group, Sisters in Islam, has also been targeted. It was issued with a fatwa for pushing 'liberalism'. It had pushed for Muslim women to be able to enter beauty pageants.

The group were challenging the ruling.

The list of fatwas now includes, Halloween, which is said to be too Christian and black metal because it is 'powerful enough to force a Muslim to forsake his faith'.

Botox is banned, but can be used if medically necessary. 

Credit to DailyMail

The Mill of Muslim Radicalism in France

 

 The typical trajectory of most French Islamist terrorists follows four steps: alienation from the dominant culture, thanks partly to joblessness and discrimination in blighted neighborhoods; a turn to petty crime, which leads to prison, and then more crime and more prison; religious awakening and radicalization; and an initiatory journey to a Muslim country like Syria, Afghanistan or Yemen to train for jihad.

Stints in prison were seminal for Chérif Kouachi, Amedy Coulibaly and other major figures of French jihadism in recent years — Mohammed Merah, Mehdi Nemmouche, Khaled Kelkal — as both a rite of passage and a gateway to radicalism.

Muslims account for about 7-10 percent of France’s total population but around half of its prison population of 68,000. Muslims are even more numerous in facilities near large cities, particularly in maisons d’arrêt, which hold prisoners serving shorter sentences.

Precise figures are unavailable because laïcité, France’s strict form of secularism, prohibits officially asking and collecting data about people’s religious preferences. These estimates are based on research I conducted in French prisons in 2000-3 and again in 2011-3, when I interviewed some 160 inmates and many guards, doctors and social workers in four major facilities, some among the largest in Europe. Fifteen of those inmates had been sentenced for terrorist acts.

Many Muslims feel marginalized when they get to prison, due to exclusion and bigotry from the white majority in mainstream society, and their own counterracism. Although in urban prisons they are a majority, they continue to feel victimized and trapped. Very few guards are Muslim, and prison officials, who tend to be hypersecular, have little understanding of Islam, for example confusing fundamentalism with extremism.

“Look at how a Catholic or a Jew is treated, and look at how we are treated,” Abdelkarim, a Frenchman of Italian origin in his late 20s who was serving a five-year sentence for armed robbery, told me in 2012. “They have their weekly prayers; in this prison we don’t have Friday prayers. Their rabbi can go to all the cells; our Muslim minister cannot. There’s kosher food, but no halal meat. They despise us, and they call that laïcité.”

In fact, Muslim ministers can visit Muslim inmates in their cells but usually don’t do it for lack of time, and halal meat is increasingly available. But such misperceptions are common, and they only reinforce the appeal of Islam as the religion of choice for the stigmatized and the oppressed. Unlike Christianity, it has an anti-Western and anti-imperialist bend.

One young French inmate of Algerian origin told me in 2013, “If you are a Muslim and ask to participate in the Friday prayers, they take your name down and hand it over to the Renseignements Généraux.” (The Renseignements Généraux is the French equivalent of the FBI.) He added: “If I try to take my prayer carpet to the courtyard, they prohibit it. If I grow a beard, the guards call me Bin Laden, smiling and mocking me. They hate Islam. But Islam can take revenge!”

Adherence to radical Islam is largely the transfer into the spiritual realm of that particular combination of indignation, rancor and wholesale rejection encompassed by the expression, widespread among prisoners, “avoir la haine” (to have hate). For some inmates, especially those who were only nominally Muslim and nonpracticing, violent aspirations emerge first, with religiosity — and often a very approximate understanding of Islam — grafting itself onto to them later.

Abdelkarim, who converted to Islam (and adopted an Arabic name) about a decade before I met him, acted as an informal Salafist chaplain; his prison counted about 1,000 Muslim inmates and just one Muslim minister, an older gentleman from North Africa out of touch with the young prisoners’ concerns. Each time Abdelkarim sang the call to prayer at dawn he would be sent to solitary confinement for a few days; eventually he was transferred to another jail. Nationwide, there is only about one Muslim minister for every 190 inmates, leaving self-proclaimed ulama to proffer their own religious guidance.

Radical preaching catches on because it offers young Muslim prisoners a way to escape their predicament and develop a fantasy of omnipotence by declaring death onto their oppressors. During my research in 2000-3, the prisoners idolized Khaled Kelkal, whose network killed eight people in a Paris subway station in 1995 to punish the French government for backing a military coup against an Islamist party in Algeria. A decade later their new icon was Mohammed Merah, who in 2012 shot down seven people, including soldiers and Jewish children, in the name of radical Islam; some inmates even impersonated him. Now the new celebrities will be the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly.

About three months ago, the authorities at Fresnes, a very large prison known for its strict discipline, started experimenting with separating suspected Muslim radicals from the general population, grouping them in special cells. Although it is too early to assess the measure’s effectiveness, the provisional results are mixed.

The prisoners’ segregation at Fresnes is incomplete, owing to the shape of the 19th-century building. With rows of cell blocks branching out perpendicularly from a central corridor, the inmates can communicate with each other simply by shouting. The radicalized prisoners now have less influence on other inmates, especially ones who are impressionable or have mental disorders. But they are in closer contact with one another, allowing them to organize and make plans.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls announced recently that the quarantine program would be expanded in several prisons around Paris. The proposal needs to be refined. Seasoned jihadists must be separated from untested radicals and the returnees from, say, Syria and Iraq, who may have been traumatized or disappointed by their experience of jihad and still stand a chance of being reintegrated into mainstream society.

More must also be done to address the legitimate claims of Muslim inmates. Collective Friday prayers should be allowed in all French prisons, for example. The government announced last week that 60 Muslim ministers would be trained to supplement the 182 or so currently in service. This is a welcome proposal. But at least three times as many ministers are needed, and they must be more uniformly distributed throughout the prisons. Above all, they will need to be coached to better understand and address the concerns of disaffected young Muslim prisoners.

Indeed, reform must begin with respect. For if French prisons have become a breeding ground for radicalism, it is partly because they mistreat the Islamic faith itself.

 

Credit to Farhad Khosrokhavar

ISIS is Not a State, Not Justified by Islam

Egypt's Grand Mufti Sheikh Shawky Allam tells public forum in Singapore that ISIS is not considered a state and is not justified by Islam.

ISIS fighters parade in the northern Syrian city of Tel Abayd, Jan. 2, 2014

Islamic State, which has sown a trail of terror across Syria and Iraq, is neither a state nor justified by Islam, Egypt's top Muslim cleric said Monday.

"We have already asserted that we should never use the term Islamic State for ISIS," Egypt's Grand Mufti Sheikh Shawky Allam said at a public forum in Singapore.

"It is not a state in the first place, neither is it justified by any Islamic justification," he told the packed gathering, which was organized by the city-state's Islamic Religious Council.

"The establishment of any Islamic state will need to go to its roots, its basis and foundations," he said through an interpreter when asked if the formation of the group, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), was in line with Islamic law.

Since the group emerged in its current form in 2013, its militants have captured large swathes of territory in both Syria and Iraq.

It has declared an Islamic "caliphate" in territory under its control, and gained a reputation for brutality, including torture and beheading of its captives.

In its latest act of brutality, the group said Sunday it had executed one of two Japanese hostages it has been holding, apparently by beheading him.

Sheikh Allam said the group was misrepresenting Islam.

"The main intention of Allah is certainly not the destruction, killing or war," he said.

"What we seek is stability. If these people are there to only cause destruction, and you say you do it in the name of Islam, certainly this is not what Islam is about."

Sheikh Allam also said the publication of Mohammed cartoons by the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo "affected our emotions deeply" but stressed that "we have to deal with this issue in a rational manner."

Two Islamist gunmen this month attacked the Paris office of the magazine, leaving 12 people dead, including some of Charlie Hebdo's top cartoonists. Five more people were killed in related attacks by a separate gunman.

"When someone has committed a crime in any country, there are ways to ensure this matter is raised through proper channels," the cleric said.

"Anything we do must be just -- that is the basis of Islam."

Credit to By Arutz Sheva Staff