I was struck today by a comment from a Maldives women's rights activist about the direction her nation is taking. In a report published the Melbourne Age, which discussed female circumcision and the local practice of flogging female adulterers, Shadiya Ibrahim remarked: "Being a woman is...
Things are not going well for lovers of freedom in Egypt. Egypt is under a moral and spiritual siege. Freedom of speech is deteriorating rapidly, because of rather than in spite of the 'Arab Spring'. A recent incident illustrates the critical state of affairs for free-thinking...
This past week, as I read the grim news of Christmas killings in Nigeria, there came back to me the words of Shaikh Khalid Yasin, an African-American convert to Islam and globe trotting preacher, who visited Australia back in 2003. The context was an interview...
mypeace.com.au is an Australian dawah (i.e. missionary) website. It is designed to invite people to convert to Islam. Disingenuously it states that it exists to "address the many misconceptions about Islam". MyPeace is unashamed in declaring the superiority of its beliefs. For example mypeace.com.au characterizes Christian...
In my last blog post I emphasized the role of the Egyptian military in killing Copts last Sunday. However it seems that most of the killings may have been done by gangs of Muslim men who took to the streets. In my previous post I...
Over the weekend, violence on Cairo's streets resulting in the deaths of dozens of Copts and the wounding of hundreds more. The killings occurred when the Egyptian military dispersed a protest against a recent incident of church destruction in Elmarinab village, in Aswan province. Videos,...
“Do we worship the same God?” This has become a hotly contested and divisive question, posed in these troubled days by many Christians about Muslims and Islam. Influential theologian Miroslav Volf, who is Henry B. Wright professor of Systematic Theology at Yale, offers an answer...
In a lecture presented to a young Muslim audience at the University of Western Sydney on Friday 30 March 2001, the prominent Australian Muslim leader Dr Zachariah Matthews was discussing the role of 'migration' (Hijrah) in the 'phases' of dawah (i.e. the stages involved in...
