"Al Gharam mamn’uh, al Gharam kufr," screamed the self-declared cleric in al-Ansar’s chat room this Friday. “Love is forbidden, love is infidel†-- said the online fatwa about the “legitimacy of loving and being in love.â€
We lost more than a million jobs in the past few months, the headlines remind us. So last month's story about a Dutch court's ruling that Geert Wilders was "inciting hatred and discrimination" - and that "it is in the public interest to prosecute" him - understandably didn't make the American news.
Maher al-Gohary has converted from Islam to Christianity. In spite of facing death threats, he's engaged in a legal battle to have his changed religion recognised on his official Egyptian documents.
Unless you are an Arab, or someone who speaks Arabic very well and have lived in Saudi Arabia for a while, you might not be aware of the following facts and practices from Saudi Arabia and Wahhabi communities across the globe.
Lebanon's minister of the Interior issued a decree Wednesday that would allow Lebanese citizens the choice of removing their religion from national ID cards. Interior Minister Ziad Baroud issued a circular on giving each person the right to erase any mention of religious affiliation on civil registry records.
Egyptian Attorney-General accepted the application for the judicial review filed by the mother of twins Andrew and Mario, with the solidarity of 22 human rights organizations, of the court ruling which granted custody of the Christian boys to their Muslim Convert father. This application is now pending an urgent judicial hearing, which is expected to be set latest within a month.
Extending the emergency law, canceling al-Hiwar (the dialogue) TV channel from the list of NileSat companies, the Audio-Visual Transmission and Monitoring the Internet, the prohibition of publication in the case of Suzanne Tamim, and the imprisonment sentence against Adel Hamouda, chief editor of Al-Ahrar daily, in the case of the libel and slander against Al-Azhar Grand Sheikh.
The Assyrian Universal Alliance wrote the following letter to President Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden to appeal for an Assyrian autonomous state in Iraq. The Assyrian Christians of Iraq continue to struggle for their indigenous rights in their ancestral homeland, Iraq. As Christians, Assyrians are the most persecuted nation in Iraq and the UN has reported the number of Assyrian refugees who fled to Syria and Jordan in the hundreds of thousands, and rising daily.
A delegation from MARED 'Egyptians against Religious Discrimination', an anti-religious discrimination group, delivered a Note of Urgency to the Minister of Interior Habib el-Adli on February 9th, 2009, requesting the release of Coptic Munir Guirgis, detained since July 2007, after a dispute with some Muslims.
Mariam Azmy Fouad, a Christian secondary school student in the satellite city of Tenth of Ramadan east of Cairo, narrowly escaped death when she attempted suicide