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.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS