It's not just East and West that are divided over the controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Two of the most popular Muslim preachers on Arab television are feuding bitterly over whether dialogue or protest is the best approach in the clash of civilizations.
In the pro-dialogue corner is Amr Khaled, who has become wildly popular among young Muslims and women for his youthful style and his sermons applying Islam to the day-to-day cares of modern life.
The 38-year-old Khaled is heading to Denmark -- the heart of the controversy -- for a conference today between Christian and Muslim religious leaders aimed at discussing the fallout of the prophet cartoons.
But for Sheik Youssef el-Qaradawi -- a 79-year-old cleric who hosts a weekly show on the Arab satellite station al-Jazeera -- the trip to Copenhagen looks like a surrender.
"Dialogue about what?" el-Qaradawi said on al-Jazeera. "You have to have a common ground to have a dialogue with your enemy. But after insulting what is sacred to me, they should apologize," he added.
"The dialogue that Amr Khaled and his group, the so called new preachers, is breaking with the consensus," he said.
The split between the two prominent tele-clerics has touched a wider debate over how to deal with the West and promote the Islamic world's interests.
The cartoons -- first published in a Danish paper last September then reprinted in European papers in January and last month -- sparked a wave of protests around the Arab and Islamic world. Some turned violent, with protesters killed in Libya and Afghanistan and several European embassies attacked.
The cartoons were seen as an insult to Mohammed, depicting him as violent and primitive. Sunni Muslim tradition bans any image of the prophet, since depicting him risks insulting him or encouraging idolatry.
The protests have largely subsided amid calls by Islamic and Western leaders for a stop to violence. But the bitterness remains on both sides: Some Muslim feel the West intentionally sought to insult Islam's most revered figure, while some in the West see Muslims as violently seeking to stifle free speech.
Last month, Khaled and a conference of some 40 Islamic scholars said the time for protests had passed and now it was time to "move on to the stage of discussion."
"The deep-rooted solution of this problem is through dialogue to reach an understanding and coexistence between the nations," Khaled said.
For Khaled -- a 38-year-old Egyptian -- the cartoons controversy is an opportunity to engage with the West rather than continue longtime clashes over the grievances many Muslims feel toward Europe and the US.
"We have to lay a future base to build our own renaissance," Khaled said in a telephone interview from London on Wednesday.
"God be with you Amr Khaled," the Egyptian weekly al-Dustour said in a front-page headline in support of his trip to Denmark.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema