Dynastie: L'Aga Khan, milliardaire et prince des pauvres

Dynastie
L'Aga Khan, milliardaire et prince des pauvres

Il est à la fois imam suprême et milliardaire, homme d'affaires et pionnier de l'aide aux plus démunis. Le 11 juillet 2007, Karim Aga Khan IV fêtera son jubilé d'or: cinquante ans à la tête d'un empire qui est aussi l'un des réseaux de développement les plus efficaces de la planète. continue...

Les 10 hommes les plus riches

Le Top 10 des milliardaires, recensés par le magazine américain Forbes, est à forte coloration américaine - Bill Gates en tête - mais le Vieux Monde est aussi représenté, notamment avec le Français Bernard Arnault à la septième place. En images, le palmarès des nantis 2007 Continue...

How to Convert to Islam and Become a Muslim

How to Convert to Islam and Become a Muslim

Balancing the Prophet

By Karen Armstrong
Published: April 27 2007 15:43

Ever since the Crusades, people in the west have seen the prophet Muhammad as a sinister figure. During the 12th century, Christians were fighting brutal holy wars against Muslims, even though Jesus had told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. The scholar monks of Europe stigmatised Muhammad as a cruel warlord who established the false religion of Islam by the sword. They also, with ill-concealed envy, berated him as a lecher and sexual pervert at a time when the popes were attempting to impose celibacy on the reluctant clergy. Our Islamophobia became entwined with our chronic anti-Semitism; Jews and Muslims, the victims of the crusaders, became the shadow self of Europe, the enemies of decent civilisation and the opposite of ”us”. continue...

Shouldn't we drop the name 'War on Terror?'

COMMENTARY | April 23, 2007

Bush's favorite phrase has created a culture of fear -- but beyond that has no useful function. And while we're at it, what's the right way to describe what the U.S. is doing in Iraq? continue...

By Dan Froomkin
froomkin@niemanwatchdog.org

Back in November, when NBC announced that it would start calling the conflict in Iraq what it is -- a civil war – the White House howled in protest and the Washington establishment belittled it as a semantic sideshow.

But I think it made a difference. Watching a major media institution assert its right to its own word choice (rather than letting the White House set the terms of the debate) emboldened the rest of the press corps. It ushered in a period of greater truth-telling. And after a while, even the White House was forced to admit that Iraq was indeed in a state of civil war – among other things.

TV: "Arts with Religion" on CBS today

From SAJA E-mail Lists @ http://www.saja.org

Bharata Natyam and SAJA Lister Swati Bhise are among the features of this program. Questions to producer Bruce Wallace <bruce.wallace@gmail.com>

THE ARTS WITHIN RELIGION, an interfaith religion special, will be broadcast
Sunday, April 22 on the CBS Television Network.  Please check your local
station for exact time.  (For those of you in New York City, it will air on
WCBS at 11:30 Sunday morning.)

    This special  profiles an Islamic Hip-Hop group called Native Deen, who
use rap music to promote a message of tolerance and understanding while
maintaining their religious and cultural identity. The members, Joshua
Salaam, Naeem Muhammad and Abdul-Malik Ahmad call themselves "Native Deen"
drawing from the Arabic word "deen" meaning Religion.

    The program also looks at 'Bharata natyam,' the classical dance of South
India. This art form originated five thousand years ago in the temples of
ancient India. The roots of this tradition are from the Hindu Vedas, the
holy books of India. Through a performance and interview with Swati Gupte
Bhise, the program explains how this colorful dance is a reflection of the
religious and cultural history of India.

    The program also features The Church of Holy Apostles soup kitchen,
where a weekly arts program was created to foster a sense of community and
provide those in need a chance to express themselves through music and art.
We hear from the program's founder, Marion Williams, an artist and a student
at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

John P. Blessington is the executive producer of the special, Liz Kineke is
the producer. The special is produced with the cooperation of the National
Council of Churches, The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops , The Islamic
Society of North America, and a consortium of Jewish organizations.

Blooming Islam changing Russia » Kuwait Times Website

Published Date: April 10, 2007

MAKHACHKALA, Russia:  Ask Khadji Gasan Gasanaliyev, imam of an independent mosque in this North Caucasus city, what's wrong with Russia, and he tells how a three-year-old held a gun to his head. The bearded, excitable imam sprawled face-down on the floor, imitating a friend's young son who threw a tantrum when Gasanaliyev was trying to lead the namaz, or daily prayer devout Muslims perform five times a day. Gasanaliyev dragged the boy up from the floor, and in return the boy got a toy gun and pressed it to the kneeling imam's temple.

"A three-year-old boy! Where did he learn this?" Gasanaliyev asked, his eyes wide behind a pair of thick glasses. "There is no pity, there is no kindness here.... Look at this civilisation: Women going around naked on television, even on the street, violence everywhere. This is civilisation?" Muslims all across the country are asking similar questions about the nature of contemporary Russian society - even as their rapid rise is transforming not only the face of this traditionally Orthodox Christian country, but its culture. continue...

Divisive Scholar Draws Parallels Between Islam and Democracy

Ramadan Says Tensions Are Rooted in History, Not Incompatibility

By Pamela Constable

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 11, 2007; Page B06

Tariq Ramadan has a huge following in Europe but a controversial profile in the United States. The Islamic scholar has been barred from entering the country since 2004, when he was denied a visa he needed to accept a professorship at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Yesterday, however, students at Georgetown University heard and questioned the influential Egyptian-born writer as he gave the first of three public lectures to be delivered on the campus by satellite video hookup from London. For 90 minutes, he appeared on a large screen in Gaston Hall, seated and wearing a sports jacket and open shirt, with Big Ben in the background. continue...

Will American Bombs Kill My Iranian Dream?

Tomgram: Yaghmaian, Will American Bombs Kill My Iranian Dream?

Like a giant piece in an intricate, if ugly, jigsaw puzzle, the aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, and its strike group are now sailing toward the Persian Gulf. On arrival, they will join the strike groups of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (which it is officially replacing) and the USS John C. Stennis patrolling the region, as stunning an example of "gunboat diplomacy" as we've seen in our lifetimes. I think it's a fair guess that, like most Americans, few, if any, of the Nimitz strike group's 6,000 sailors and Marines, who may become part of a massive Bush administration air assault on Iranian nuclear and other facilities, know much about modern Iranian history. Most may be unaware of the CIA/British coup d'état in Iran, in 1953, that overthrew the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (which had just carried out the nationalizing of Iranian oil), reinstalled the Shah, and ushered in a long, contentious relationship between the two countries -- with all the "unintended consequences" that may end, whether through miscalculation or cold calculation, in a devastating war. conitnue...

The Pope and Islam

Is there anything that Benedict XVI would like to discuss?
by Jane Kramer April 2, 2007
 

Benedict wants to purify the Church, to make it more observant, obedient, and disciplined-more like the way he sees Islam

These are fierce theological times. It should come as no surprise that the Vatican and Islam are not getting along, or that their problems began long before Pope Benedict XVI made his unfortunate reference to the Prophet Muhammad, in a speech in Regensburg last September, and even before the children of Europe’s Muslim immigrants discovered beards, burkas, and jihad. There are more than a billion Catholics in the world, and more than a billion Muslims. And what divides the most vocal and rigidly orthodox interpreters of their two faiths, from the imams of Riyadh and the ayatollahs of Qom to the Pope himself, is precisely the things that Catholicism and Islam have always had in common: a purchase on truth; a contempt for the moral accommodations of liberal, secular states; a strong imperative to censure, convert, and multiply; and a belief that Heaven, and possibly earth, belongs exclusively to them. continue...

Whatever It Takes

The politics of the man behind “24.”

by Jane Mayer February 19, 2007

Joel Surnow calls the show he helped create “patriotic.” Photograph by Martin Schoeller.

The office desk of Joel Surnow—the co-creator and executive producer of “24,” the popular counterterrorism drama on Fox—faces a wall dominated by an American flag in a glass case. A small label reveals that the flag once flew over Baghdad, after the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003. A few years ago, Surnow received it as a gift from an Army regiment stationed in Iraq; the soldiers had shared a collection of “24” DVDs, he told me, until it was destroyed by an enemy bomb. “The military loves our show,” he said recently. Surnow is fifty-two, and has the gangly, coiled energy of an athlete; his hair is close-cropped, and he has a “soul patch”—a smidgen of beard beneath his lower lip. When he was young, he worked as a carpet salesman with his father. The trick to selling anything, he learned, is to carry yourself with confidence and get the customer to like you within the first five minutes. He’s got it down. “People in the Administration love the series, too,” he said. “It’s a patriotic show. They should love it.” continue...

A country-western Muslim

from the April 4, 2007 edition

Muslim cowboy: Kareem Salama grew up in Oklahoma and Texas, where his Egyptian parents settled. He says thethemes he sings about - unadulterated love, family, and religion - areas key to Islam as they are to country music. photo courtesy of kareem salama

With Egyptian roots and a southern drawl, Kareem Salama sings at a very American crossroad.

By Tom A. Peter | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Cambridge, Mass. - Kareem Salama – the main act on this evening's Muslim Student Association program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – nervously sips a bottle of water backstage as his guitarist/producer tunes a 12-string guitar.

The crowd buzz softens to a deferential hush as a bearded student takes the stage to start the evening with readings from the Koran in an Arabic melody that sounds like a medieval hymn.

It's Koranic recitations like these that inspired Mr. Salama, the son of Eygptian immigrants, to become a musician. But it's the peculiarly American circumstances of his life that drove this devout Muslim with a Southern drawl to his musical passion – country.

And so on this evening Koranic verse dissolves into the main act: the upbeat twang of what is perhaps the first Muslim country singer. In a down-home sound that seems at total odds with his look – an elegantly built man with a goatee style popular with young Arabs in his parents' Middle Eastern homeland – Salama croons to the enthusiastic audience. "Baby, I'm a soldier and I hear those trumpets calling again ... It's time for this simple man to be one of the few good men," go his original lyrics to a war ballad about the shared humanity of two soldiers on opposing sides. continue...

ITALY: AGA KHAN'S ISLAMIC TREASURES GO ON SHOW

Parma, 23 March (AKI) - The Italian city of Parma, better known for its fine foods and tradition of opera, is for two months hosting an exhibition of some of the finest Islamic art collection of the Aga Khan, the spiritual head of the Ismaili sect and international businessman. "Splendours of the Court" which opened Friday is being housed in the Palazzo della Pilotta and contains the basis of what will be displayed in a new museum to be built in Toronto, Canada in 2009. The show in Parma is part of a wider cultural programme "Arts and Music from the Islamic World" which runs through May... more

SAJA-NY: author William Dalrymple at Asia Society - Monday, March 26th

Terrific event, folks. When Dalrymple spoke on his last book tour, many of you attended his wonderful NYC talk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art... You will learn a lot from him (bio below) From: Aseem Chhabra Asia Society, South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) New York Chapter and the Indo American Arts Council (IAAC) present Meet the Author - William Dalrymple "The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty Delhi, 1857" Monday, March 26 at 6:30 pm Reception and Book signing follows. Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue at 70th St New York City $7 Student w/ID, Seniors; $10 Members (including SAJA members); $15 Nonmembers To register ONLINE CLICK HERE To register by PHONE call (M-F 10am to 5pm): 212-517-ASIA To register by FAX (credit card orders only please): 212-517-8315 About the book: From the author of The City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi and The White Mughals comes the compelling story, drawn from a treasure trove of Indian historical documents, of Bahadur Shah II the last Mughal emperor and the final days of his capital Delhi before its ignominious destruction by the British in 1857. Dalrymple will be interviewed by historian and author Maya Jasanoff (Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850). About the author William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He wrote the highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu when he was twenty-two. The book won the 1990 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award; it was also shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. In 1989 Dalrymple moved to Delhi where he lived for six years researching his second book, City of Djinns, which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. From the Holy Mountain, his acclaimed study of the demise of Christianity in its Middle Eastern homeland, was awarded the Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award for 1997; it was also shortlisted for the 1998 Thomas Cook Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. A collection of his writings about India, The Age of Kali, won the French Prix D'Astrolabe in 2005. White Mughals was published in 2003, the book won the Wolfson Prize for History 2003, the Scottish Book of the Year Prize, and was shortlisted for the PEN History Award, the Kiryama Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. William Dalrymple is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Asiatic Society. In 2002 he was awarded the Mungo Park Medal by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his ‘outstanding contribution to travel literature’. He wrote and presented the television series Stones of the Raj and Indian Journeys, which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002. His Radio 4 series on the history of British spirituality and mysticism, The Long Search, won the 2002 Sandford St Martin Prize for Religious Broadcasting and was described by the judges as 'thrilling in its brilliance... near perfect radio. In December 2005 his article on the madrasas of Pakistan was awarded the prize for Best Print Article of the Year at the 2005 FPA Media Awards. June 2006 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of St Andrews “for his services to literature and international relations, to broadcasting and understanding”. In 2007, The Last Moghal won the prestigous Duff Cooper Prize for History and Biography. William is married to the artist Olivia Fraser, and they have three children. They now divide their time between London and Delhi.
Reviews from abroad:
[Dalrymple] builds an urban narrative [of Delhi] as evocative as Richard Cobb's depiction of Revolutionary Paris . . .
There is so much to admire in this book - the depth of historical research, the finely evocative writing, the extraordinary rapport with the cultural world of late Mughal India. It is also in many ways a remarkably humane and egalitarian history. . .
This is a splendid work of empathetic scholarship. As the 150th anniversary of the uprising dawns there will be many attempts to revisit these bloody, chaotic, cataclysmic events; but few reinterpretations of 1857 will be as bold, as insightful, or as challenging as this.- David Arnold, Times Literary Supplement
Brilliantly nuanced . . . Dalrymple has here written an account of the Indian mutiny such as we have never had before, of the events leading up to it and of its aftermath, seen through the prism of the last emperor's life. He has vividly described the street life of the Mughal capital in the days before the catastrophe happened, he has put his finger deftly on every crucial point in the story, which earlier historians have sometimes missed, and he has supplied some of the most informative footnotes I have ever read. On top of that, he has splendidly conveyed the sheer joy of researching a piece of history, something every true historian knows . . . I had thought that Dalrymple would never surpass his performance in writing From the Holy Mountain, but The Last Mughal has caused me to think again. - Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Guardian.
A riveting account . . . It is neither wholly a biography of Zafar, nor solely the story of the siege and capture of Delhi. Instead Mr. Dalrymple charts the course of the uprising and the siege, weaving into his story the unfolding tragedy of Zafar's last months. The animating spirit of the book is Delhi itself . . .
It is here that the originality of [Dalrymple's] new book lies. - The Economist

[The Last Mughal] shows the way history should be written: not as a catalogue of dry-as-dust kings, battles and treaties but to bring the past to the present, put life back in characters long dead and gone and make the reader feel he is living among them, sharing their joys, sorrows and apprehensions . . .
Dalrymple's book rouses deep emotions. It will bring tears to the eyes of every Dilliwala, among whom I count myself. - Khushwant Singh, Outlook India

ReligionLink - Islam: a guide to U.S. experts and organizations

AUG. 7, 2006

ISLAM
Islam: a guide to U.S. experts and organizations

Islam was put under a microscope by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Before that, although there were more than 1,200 mosques and more than 1 million Muslims regularly worshipping in the United States, Islam seemed a distant, foreign faith to many Americans.

Since then, the demand for accurate, nuanced and balanced information about Islam and Muslim people has grown, as has the number of scholars in the field. There is no official count, but scholars say demand and opportunity for academics who study Islam has risen significantly since 2001. Some say that jobs now outnumber qualified applicants, but note that a whole new generation of scholars is in graduate school. Job postings for scholars of Islam in American colleges and universities numbered 50 in 2002, 50 in 2003, 71 in 2004 and 67 in 2005, according to the American Academy of Religion, which runs an online employment service.

Classes – particularly those on politics, gender and contemporary Islam – are full, giving more students at more universities background in Islam. Knowledge matters, whether these students move on to careers in business, medicine, education or other fields. According to a 2005 Pew Research Survey, people who are most knowledgeable about Islam express more favorable opinions of Muslim-Americans and Islam than people who are less familiar with it........ More

Child Reciting from the Holy Qur'an

  Recitation of the Qur'an

The Authoritative and the Authoritarian

This Conference thrives on the provocation of complexity. Muslims, nowadays, are provoked by complexity. This Conference exists, marginalized by obscurity. Muslims are obscured by their marginality. Meanings and concepts are aggravated by words and phrases. Ideas are imprisoned by the very words that express them. This Conference is injected in the midst of clichés, sales pitches, and gross oversimplifications. Chaos and complexity are the stuff of creation, but order and stability is the craving of life. The authoritative directs the complex and stabilizes the chaotic, but the authoritarian dooms all to death.
    Your book, The Authoritative and the Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses, has been published and you remember the days when you thought that a single book could change the world. You remember your short jalabiyya, and patchy beard, your miswak in the upper pocket a re-affirmation of power and triumph. The sparkling white head cover limited your range of vision and provided you with such unencumbered clarity. Back then a single book, Riyad al-Salihin (The Gardens of the Righteous) symbolized all the world had to say to you and all that you had to say to others. Parts of Hayat al-Sahaba (The Lives of the Companions) would be read in the mosque and visions of a perfectly ordered, perfectly structured society would relieve the stresses of your mind. When you bought a copy of Sahih al-Bukhari, you believed that all the problems and answers of existence were contained therein. Any contradiction was a challenge and any challenge was a negation of your existence. Everytime you would assure yourself, "I will commit the whole of Bukhari to memory and then..."
    You remember a world stremlined into self-invented categories --- simple and yielding to a perfect causality. You believed that if you do your du'a' well on Friday, the rest of the week would be perfect, but if you would forget a single verse or phrase, then the order would unfold and collapse. A simple world --- an authoritarian world, comfortable with its delusions, submerged in immaturity.
    You remember the day you seized your sister's cassette tapes and destroyed them. Music is haram,  you declared. When your mother punished you, you declared that your mother was living in haram as well. Your mother never listened to music either. The only thing she listened to was Qur'an, but you did not get the point. It took you years to get the point.
    What a world --- a world streamlined and in its dimensions, fed by ignorance and sheltered by arrogance. An authoritarian world where you are the authority. A world where the magnificence of God is represented through the authoritarian voice of a self-righteous self. A world where the Divine voice becomes imprisoned by a human voice and the human voice ascends to the throne. An essentially God-less world.
    Now years later, you publish The Authoritative and the Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses. God's Will must be discovered through its evidence and signs. The voices aspiring to comprehend the Divine Will are authoritative indicators, but they never become the embodiment of the Divine. These voices might be authoritative but they must never become authoritarian. Riyad al-Salihin and Sahih al-Bukhari are raw materials --- raw indicators to the Will of the Divine. The materials could be used to construct either the authoritative or the authoritarian. If the authoritarian is constructed, the text is rendered subservient and submerged into its representer and reader. If the authoritative is constructed, the text survives unencumbered and unlimited by its representer and reader.
    It was the endless spew of contemporary oral gyrations that once rendered your world uni-dimensional and linear. But the day came when you abandoned the contemporary apologetics and the rot of the modern decay in Islamic discourses and embraced the wonders of a bygone civilization. You read Imam al-Haramayn al-Juwayni (d. 478/1084) explaining that the purpose of a Shari'a inquiry is not to reach the  right result but the inquiry itself. You read Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (d. 911/1505) arguing that God's Will is not the ruling reached but the search for the ruling. The result of a search is not the point --- the point is the search. A life consumed by the search for the Divine Will is the divine Will and is the ultimate morality.
    In short, you grew up and your conscience grew. You are no longer as threatened, but you are no longer as confident and secure. You realize that while we seek to discover the Divine will, we never come to embody it. While we search the truth, we are not the truth. From this came the Conference, from this came the book. The child of the Conference, for the sake of the Conference, in the way of Allah --- May He accept.

May 1997
Khaled Abou El Fadl
Conference of the Books
Chapter 13.