Lawmakers in Australia's most populous state voted against banning the burka Thursday, with one accusing the Christian MP who moved the bill of stigmatizing Muslims, as city authorities in Brussels banned a protest against a ban against wearing the full-face Islamic veil in public.
Fred Nile, of the right-wing Christian Democrats Party, urged the New South Wales parliament to vote in favor of banning the full Islamic veil for security reasons and to "set women free from domination of males."
But his bill was quashed in the state's upper house by 26 to three votes, with the center-left Labor and more radical Greens parties condemning it as racist.
"Stigmatizing entire community"
"There is no urgency in spreading further fear and hatred in our community," said Islamic Labor MP Shaoquett Moselmane.
Nile's real intent was "stigmatizing an entire community," added Greens MP John Kaye.
It follows heated public debate sparked earlier this month by calls from conservative national Senator Cory Bernardi for a ban on the burka, which he claimed was "emerging as the preferred disguise of bandits and ne'er-do-wells."
Bernardi's comments, prompted by the use of the Islamic veil in an armed robbery in Sydney, led both Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his opposition counterpart Tony Abbott to declare that such a ban was not current policy.
Muslims make up about 1.7 percent of Australia's heavily Christian population of 22 million, and religious tensions have run high in recent years.
Anti-Muslim sentiment flared on Sydney's southern Cronulla Beach in December 2005 when mobs of whites attacked Lebanese Australians there in a bid to "reclaim the beach."
The race riots, the country's worst of modern times, sparked a retaliatory campaign in which churches, shops and cars were attacked.
The French cabinet on Wednesday approved a draft law to ban the Muslim full-face veil from public spaces, paving the way for a parliamentary vote in July.
Protest banned
City authorities in Brussels meanwhile banned a planned protest against a looming ban against wearing the burka in public, speaking of "public order problems."
An organization called Sharia4Belgium, whose website includes videos by Islamists including Britain's Anjem Choudary, called last week for a protest this coming Saturday in the Belgian capital after the national parliament backed moves to ban the burka.
In Brussels, police and the organ evaluating public threat drew up a "totally negative report" as the planned protest represented a "too big risk of public order troubles," said Nicolas Dassonville, spokesman for the Brussels mayor's office.
Therefore mayor Freddy Thielemans had decided to ban the protest, he said.
The application to hold a protest has been signed by a "guerrilla pseudonym" and the people backing the call "are well known for their very bellicose past," said Dassonville.
On top of that the protest would have taken place at the same time as the traditional "Zinneke Parade", a sort of carnival parade expected to attract tens of thousands to the center of Brussels.
Last month Belgian deputies backed a draft law banning the wearing of the Muslim veil in all public places, including on the streets, creating a controversial first for Europe.
The text must still be adopted by the upper house Senate before it can come into effect
http://islamonline.com/news/articles/2/Australia-lawmakers-vote-down-burka-ban.html
Brooklyn, New York - Last Thursday, on the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, I found myself thinking back to my first hiking trip to New York’s Bear Mountain. I was six years old. Having grown up in Brooklyn, New York, I thought the entire world was a sea of concrete buildings. But that trip changed my reality. I remember moss growing on rocks, small streams of water and fresh air.
When it came time to pray, my father, a convert to Islam, shared with me a saying of the Prophet Muhammad: “The earth is a mosque.”
Ever since that hiking trip, I have contemplated the sacred nature of the earth. The entire planet is meant to be a place for worship of its Creator. Anyone can kneel down in prayer on the grass, on the sand, on a mountain or in a cornfield. Our planet, because it serves as a medium to reach God, deserves to be protected.
I believe my faith is intrinsically connected to the environment and that people of all faiths can be great advocates of the earth. In Arabic, deen is defined as a religion or a creed, a faith or a belief, a path or a way. Christianity is a deen. Judaism is a deen. Buddhism is a deen. Islam is a deen.
Along these lines, I would like to propose a “Green Deen”, the choice to practice one’s religion while affirming the synergies between faith and the environment.
Islam is what motivates me to be a “steward of the earth.” But this role is not limited to me. In Islam, all humans are considered “stewards of the earth” and, in the Qu’ran, God sets forward clear principles about this stewardship that include taking care of one’s self, others and the planet. These principles can be adopted by anyone trying to live a Green Deen.
Today, more than ever, people of faith need to join the global conversation on climate change. Too often we get caught up in the details of the debate. Some just plain don’t believe in climate change. Some say it’s about politics, others say it’s about facts.
I say: it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter to me if climate change is a fact or façade. It doesn’t matter to me if science has proven that the ozone layer is deteriorating or not; and it certainly doesn’t matter to me who is ultimately to blame.
What matters is that the way we treat our planet affects our ability to live here, together. Our patterns of over-consumption – buying things and throwing them away – is creating massive amounts of waste that is becoming a burden on landfill sites and a drain on resources.
America leads the world in this waste production. Americans make up less than 5 per cent of the world’s population and we create over 25 per cent of the world’s waste.
As a Muslim living in America, this concerns me, especially since Islam speaks out against waste: “O Children of Adam! Wear your beautiful apparel at every time and place of prayer; eat and drink; but waste not by excess, for Allah loveth not the wasters” (7:31).
Islam respects the cycle of life and encourages humanity to do the same. The Prophet Muhammad once said, "Muslims will always earn the reward of charity for planting a tree, sowing a crop and then birds, humans and animals eat from it."
I have a desire to connect Muslims with people of other faiths, not to debate the intricacies of theology, but to recognise that collectively, grounded in spirituality, we can work together to protect the planet.
source : islamonline.com
