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Thousands of British Muslims gathered near Downing Street to
protest against cartoons showing the prophet Muhammad and voice opposition to
“insulting” depictions.
A leaflet issued by the Muslim Action forum (MAF), who
organised the rally, said recent republishing of cartoons, caricatures and
depictions of Muhammad by satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and other publishers
is a “stark reminder” that freedom of speech is “regularly utilised to insult
personalities that others consider sacred”.
The group also expressed “deep regret” at the Paris terror
attacks, which included a massacre at Charlie Hebdo, saying they were a
“violation of Islamic law”.
The words “Charlie and the abuse factory” and “learn some
manners” were written on signs held by demonstrators. A number of speakers
addressed the crowd while there were communal prayers before a delegation took
a petition signed by more than 100,000 British Muslims to 10 Downing Street.
It calls for “global civility” and says the production of
cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad are “an affront to the norms of civilised
society”.
Shaykh Tauqir Ishaq, a senior spokesman for MAF, said:
“Perpetual mistakes by extremists, either by cold-blooded killers or uncivilised
expressionists, cannot be the way forward for a civilised society. The
peace-loving majority of people must become vociferous in promoting global
civility and responsible debate. At this time of heightened tension and
emotion, it is crucial that both sides show restraint to prevent further
incidents of this nature occurring.”
Shaykh Noor Siddiqi, another MAF representative, said: “The
actions of the UK media in not publishing the cartoons is highly appreciated by
British Muslims and we hope that this kind of self-restraint and mutual respect
will ultimately lead to a harmonious society.”
Across the street on Whitehall a handful of counter
demonstrators holding a Britain First banner gathered.
Scotland Yard said it was not aware of any arrests during
the protest.
Any married person wanting to embrace Islam will first have
to divorce his or her spouse, under a law to be introduced in Negeri Sembilan
which has been praised by rights groups.
The law aims to put a stop to the controversial practice in
Malaysia of an estranged parent converting to Islam so as to gain custody of a
child.
Menteri Besar Mohamad Hasan said the move was to safeguard
the sanctity of the religion as there have been "too many
controversies" surrounding this issue, The Star reported yesterday.
"It must stop," said Datuk Seri Mohamad.
"We cannot allow people to mock Islam or criticise
Islamic authorities because of the actions of a certain individual." He
added that this would ensure there were no aggrieved parties in the event that
an individual converted before dissolving his or her civil marriage.
"According to Islam, once you convert, you can no
longer live with a spouse who is a non-Muslim," said Mr Mohamad.
"So, if you are keen to convert, it makes sense for you
to do so the correct and legal way."
The controversy is a longstanding one in Malaysia because of
the country's dual-track legal system that is governed by civil law, yet allows
for the Syariah Court to adjudicate on civil matters for Muslims, who make up
60 per cent of the population.
Civil courts have largely deferred to Islamic courts even
where one party is non-Muslim, and the syariah judges have consistently granted
the Muslim parent custody of children, who are also converted to Islam.
This has angered many non-Muslims, resulting in the
government's announcement in 2009 that unilateral conversion of minors to Islam
is prohibited. But the practice still continued.
Last year, there were two high-profile cases where two
non-Muslim women's ex-husbands, who were Muslim converts, made away with their
children after gaining custody through the Syariah Court, while ignoring civil
court rulings in their ex-wives' favour. Both cases are still pending in court.
After the divorce, the new convert will also have to make a
statutory declaration that he or she was now a Muslim, said Mr Mohamad.
This is so that the rightful party would be able to claim
his or her body after death.
In the past, there have been cases where the non-Muslim
families of the deceased convert were involved in unnecessary fights with
Islamic authorities over the remains, he noted.
Mr Mohamad said the state Islamic council will be
incorporating these provisions into the state's Islamic laws and that the
state's sultan had consented to it.
The announcement has been praised by rights groups, who call
it a positive step forward, the Malaysian Insider reported.
Lawyer and opposition politician M. Kulasegaran called on
the federal government to advise other states to follow the lead of Negeri
Sembilan.
In an attempt to take Islamic knowledge to all nations, the
Muslim community in Malawi through Islamic Information Bureau (IIB) has
extended its operations to its Southern African neighbors, Zimbabwe and Zambia.
“The growth of Islam in Zimbabwe and Zambia has not been as
a robust as it's been here in Malawi,” Sheikh Dinala Chabulika, IIB National
Coordinator, told OnIslam.net.
“It's for this reason that we have been compelled to open
branches there, so that, we should be able to educate Muslim converts on
salient issues about Islam and enlighten other faith groups on what Islam is
and is not,” he added.
Through these offices, Chabulika said, Muslims in the
remotest parts of the two countries were able to access knowledge on Islam.
“Knowledge is very vital in the propagation of Islam. People
should fully understand what Islam is, before they make a decision to embrace
it,” he said.
“It is part of our mission to take Islamic knowledge to all
nations. We would like therefore through this initiative to enable our brothers
and sisters in the two countries to appreciate the beauty of embracing Islam.
If we make the knowledge available to people, we will have so many of them
embracing our religion.”
“And as long as there is adequate knowledge, people of other
faith groups, will be able to know what Islam is and is not. In that way, we
will avoid cases where Islam is put in
very bad light.”
Both Zambia and Zimbabwe are official Christian nations.
Only 2% of Zimbabwe's 15 million population are Muslims. While in Zambia, a
country with 13.1 million, only 1% of population are Muslims.
“In most parts of Zambia, Islam was almost non-existent, but
since the bureau was introduced here, we have witnessed many people embracing
Islam,” Suzgo Zimba, President of the Islamic Supreme Council of Zambia, told
OnIslam.net.
“After reading and understanding what Islam is all about,
many peole have been converted to Islam. This is one of the success stories of
the bureau herein Zambia.”
Zimba said the establishment of the bureau in the country
has been very vital to the spread of Islam da`wah campaigns.
“If the bureau was here before, the population of Muslims
here could have been far greater than it is today. However, I'm very optimistic
that with passage of time, the population will grow,” he said.
Appreciation
In Zimbabwe, Sheikh Abdul Rahman, President of Islamic
Da`wah Movement, attributed the current status of Islam in the country to the
introduction of the bureau.
“The growth of Islam here had stagnated over the years. We
have had a dwindling population of Muslims in the country, but following the
establishment of the bureau, there has been a rise in the number of Muslim
converts,” Sheikh Abdul Rahman told OnIslam.net.
“This is a development we greatly cherish about the bureau
here in Zimbabwe.”
Appreciating their effort to spread the message of Islam,
Zimbabweans praised the role played by their Malawian brothers in their
country.
“Malawian Muslims are highly regarded in Zimbabwe, because
they are among those who introduced the religion to this country,” Sheikh Abdul
Rahman said.
“Therefore, the bureau is a milestone in the propagation of
Islam in the country. The bureau is just solidifying the foundation already
laid down by our forefathers.”
The arrival of Islam in Zimbabwe dates back to a millennium
when Muslims established emirates on the coast of East Africa.
But a significant Muslim population only entered Zimbabwe
during the colonial period, primarily coming from the Indian subcontinent.
Other Islamic migrants came from the Yao tribe of
neighboring Malawi. There are a very small number of North African and Middle
East immigrants.
Islamic Information Bureau was established in 1990 to
provide knowledge on issues about Islam to both Muslims and non-Muslims. It has
offices spread across the country.
Unlike in Zambia and Zimbabwe, Islam in Malawi has witnessed
unprecedented growth over the years. Muslims in the country account for 36% of
the 16 million population. It is the second largest religion after
Christianity.
“We are very committed to take Islam to all part of Africa,”
said Chabulika.
“We will make sure that knowledge is made available to all
people regardless of distance. We are massively investing in knowledge.”
U.S. President Barack Obama has finally spoken out against
the forces of religious extremism that are threatening all of Western
civilization. In a speech to the
National Prayer Breakfast, Obama, who up to this point has stubbornly refused
to use the words Islamic and terrorism in the same breath, is finally
criticizing an entire terrorist movement for its religious extremism.
Which one, you ask? ISIS perhaps?
Well, not exactly.
While the leader of the free world could have aimed his
arrows at a long list of Islamic terrorist organizations that compete fiercely
in their barbarism – Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, and Islamic Jihad,
to name but a few – he instead decided to identify what he considers to be the
most shocking current manifestation of religious extremism, namely, the
Christian Crusaders!
As an Israeli Jew with an acute sensitivity to what was done
to my people throughout the ages, I am certainly aware of the extreme acts that
were committed in the name of Christianity by the Crusaders. Yes, the Crusades
were launched as a response to the brutal Muslim conquests, but many Jews were
slaughtered as well. Furthermore, the Crusades led to centuries of
religiously-justified persecution of the Jews all across Europe, including the
Inquisition, when Jews suffered from mass expulsions, forced conversions, and
far worse, and all in the name of Christianity.
However, the Crusades ended some 700 years ago. Furthermore,
it must be said that unlike Jihadist Muslims who are emulating the ways of
Muhammad, such Christians weren’t emulating Jesus, who wasn’t known for
beheadings or violent rampages.
Jumping back to the present, we see that the free world is
being confronted with a variety of violent Islamic movements that have in
common a strict adherence to the Islamic doctrine of Jihad, or holy war against
non-Muslims (the unbelievers), which is arguably the highest precept in Islam,
with abuse of woman and children coming in a close second and third place.
While many Christians in our times still believe that proselytizing is
important, very few, if any, would call for the violent conversion of those who
disagree with them, and certainly no Jews believe in such an intolerant,
violent doctrine.
Barack Obama appears to have been so scarred from the
unfortunate loss of his Muslim father at a young age that he can’t recognize,
nor admit, the real and present danger of the intolerant, violent Jihadist
ideology and its deep roots in the core of Islam. It seems to be almost an
infantile mantra: Islam not bad… Islam not bad… Islam not bad!
The problem is that as the leader of the free world,
President Obama needs to be leading the fight against Islamic terrorism from
ISIS to Iran, but not only is he not doing it adequately, but he also gets in
the way of those who are willing to lead. Rather than face the painful demons
in his past, it’s perhaps easier for him to point to the Crusaders of 700 years
ago or to reference violent incidents in the Book of Deuteronomy (which he has
done) to prove his specious point that Islam is no more dangerous than all the
others. To face the “in your face” challenges of ISIS, Al Qaeda, Iran, Hamas,
Taliban, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, Boko Haram, Hezbollah, and all the others, is
much more difficult, and perhaps for Barack Hussein Obama, emotionally
unbearable.
In recent months, a street movement called Pegida—Patriotic
Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident—has emerged from nowhere in
Germany, seeking to “protect Judeo-Christian culture” and halt to what it calls
the spread of Islam. Though it denies being xenophobic or racist, its leader
quit after being pictured dressed as Hitler. Pegida’s rallies have attracted
tens of thousands of people in Germany.
And now the group is spreading abroad. Pegida held its first
march in Vienna and is to hold its first British rally in the city of Newcastle
on Feb. 28, with more planned in the UK. Britain already has anti-Islamic
groups such as the English Defence League, a small but vocal force. Only this
weekend, the EDL attracted as many as 1,000 people to a march against the building
of a mosque.
Time will tell how popular Pegida will be outside of
Germany—only a few hundred people showed up in Vienna—but its rising profile is
a small part of the growing shift into the mainstream of far-right groups that
would have once been shunned.
1
Britain is also coping with the rise of the anti-immigration
UK Independence Party, whose leader has blamed immigrants for his being late to
his own campaign events. In France, the Front National is a more organized and
established version of much the same sentiment. In 2002, the Front National’s
overtly-racist leader at the time, Jean-Marie Le Pen, shocked many by getting
to the run-off in the presidential election, and the whole of the French
establishment united against him. His daughter, Marine Le Pen, now runs the
Front National, which was the most popular party in the last nationwide
elections held in France and has become so prominent that she was invited to
speak at the Oxford University student union last week (link in French)—her
speech was delayed by three hours due to protests. She even gets to write
editorials in the New York Times now.
Even Britain’s Prince Charles, who rarely speaks on
political matters, is worried about the radicalization of Muslim youths within
his future kingdom. The growing acceptance of far-right subject matter as part
of political discourse in Europe may just be a sign of our more polarized
times—similar things are happening on the far-left in Greece and Spain, for
example.
But it could also mean that Europe will have to come to
accept voices like Pegida in the mainstream for the foreseeable future. If
nothing else, it is a test of the region’s tolerance for dissent. As Germany’s
vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel suggests:
Whether you like
it or not, people have a democratic right to be right-wing or nationalist.
People also have a right to spread stupid ideas, such as the notion that
Germany is being Islamicized.
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.
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.
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."
