A bleak picture of weakness and disarray in the Muslim world was painted by foreign ministers meeting in Putrajaya, Malaysia, yesterday ahead of the biggest Islamic summit since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the US.
Islamic countries stand accused of terrorism and are threatened by sanctions, plagued by economic problems and ethnic strife, while some are under foreign occupation, speakers said at the opening session of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) meeting.
OIC Secretary-General Abdelouahed Belkeziz warned that the "dangers" confronting Muslims were "unprecedented in [their] contemporary history."
"Muslims are filled with feelings of impotence and frustration as some of their countries are occupied, others are under sanctions, a third group threatened and a fourth group accused of sponsoring terrorism," he said.
"Muslims abroad are considered with suspicion, besieged, deprived of their rights," Belkeziz said.
He also pointed to the economic weakness of Islamic states, many of which depend heavily on oil revenue that can no longer meet the needs of their growing populations, causing rising unemployment and poverty.
"Our economic conditions are fragile and weak compared to large economic blocs and we cannot achieve minimum economic coordination," he said.
The world seemed to have forgotten about the high values of Islam, stressing only the violence perpetrated by extremists, Belkeziz added, deploring the inability of politicians and the media to correct this image.
"Islam itself is being accused in its culture, civilization and mes-sage. Our religion is a religion of peace and tolerance ... it stresses the sanctity of human life, it upholds the noble values and calls for welfare," he said.
"Our media is unable to confront the false accusations and joint Islamic political action is unable to confer to us protection and pride," he said.
Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar said "the threat of unilateralism, globalization and terrorism, the precarious situation in the Middle East and the uncertain future of Iraq ... have only served to threaten our very survival."
He called on the leaders of the Islamic states, who are to meet at the summit in Putrajaya on Thursday, to end the paralysis of the OIC and give it a political mandate and financial means to forge closer cooperation between its 57 members and 1.3 billion people scattered on four continents.
"Malaysia believes that we need to move away from mere rhetoric," he said, calling for closer cooperation to "close the gap of economic disparities" between OIC members.
Qatari Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabr Al-Thani said the Islamic world needed "a general renaissance."
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the