Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Religion

  • America Goes the Way of Europe: Christians Becoming Minority

    America is going the way of Europe. There are fewer Christians. Young people in particular are losing faith. White Christians have become a minority.

    The Public Religion Research Institute interviewed more than 100,000 Americans across all fifty states and found that:

    • White Christians comprise only 43 percent of the population anymore. As recently as 1976, that was 81 percent.
    • Catholic and mainline Protestant churches have gradually lost flock. A decline in evangelical Christians — once thought to be bucking the trend — has been more sudden. They went down from 23 percent of the population in 2006 to 17 percent today.
    • The Catholic Church is undergoing an ethnic transformation. A quarter century ago, 87 percent of Catholics were non-Hispanic whites. Today that’s 55 percent.
    • 38 percent of Americans under the age of thirty call themselves unaffiliated with any church. Only 12 percent of seniors do. (more…)

  • Trump’s Ban: Alternative Facts Create Real-Life Policy

    Donald Trump has always had a difficult relationship with the truth. His sheer volume of daily falsehoods overwhelms an unprepared news media — and buries unsavory stories which the Republican would prefer to keep hidden.

    Trump even manages to construct entire narratives via a steady diet of alternative facts delivered to his supporters.

    This weekend, we saw something new: For the first time, those falsehoods came together to generate, enact and justify policy.

    Here is a brief overview of the alternative facts (previously known as lies) underpinning the travel ban which has thrown international travel into chaos and capriciously interrupted thousands of lives. (more…)

  • Merkel Proposes to Ban the Burqa: Why and Why Now?

    Angela Merkel’s proposal to ban the burqa has caught some of her foreign admirers by surprise.

    A headline at the left-leaning Vox reads, “Germany’s famously tolerant chancellor just proposed a burqa ban,” implying it is both intolerant and out of character for Merkel.

    Vox is right when it argues the timing is political. Merkel recently announced she will seek a fourth term as chancellor next year and is facing criticism of her immigration policy from the right.

    But this is not an about-face. If anything, her open-doors immigration policy was. (more…)

  • Muslim Registry Would Require Investigation of Thought Crimes

    As the Trump transition rolls along, the infamous “Muslim ban” has returned to the forefront.

    It all started on December 7, 2015, when then-candidate Donald Trump spoke to supporters after the San Bernardino mass shooting. He advocated a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” This proposal is still on his website.

    It has been willfully forgotten or explained away since, but the fact remains: Trump’s first instinct was to call for a Muslim ban of indeterminate length.

    It doesn’t stop there. Even in July, Trump said his plan had undergone an “expansion” and would bar individuals from places “compromised by terrorism.” This includes NATO allies like France and Germany. They “totally” meet this definition, Trump said, because they “allowed people to come into their territory.” (more…)

  • Crossed Swords? Rethinking the “Clash” of Christians and Muslims

    Two Faiths, One Banner: When Muslims Marched with Christians Across Europe's Battlegrounds

    Since Samuel Huntington unveiled his “Clash of Civilization” thesis in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article, a cottage industry of critiques have emerged to challenge it. Great thinkers, such as Amartya Sen, Amin Maalouf and Edward Said, have expended time and ink to refute Huntington’s controversial thesis. For the most part, these works have presented rationale critiques that focus on theoretical problems raised by Samuel Huntington’s board game like simplification of geopolitics and global history. Few of these critiques have, however, tried to counter Huntington’s argument with primary source research or been as readable as Ian Almond’s Two Faiths One Banner: When Muslims Marches with Christians Across Europe’s Battlegrounds (2011).

    In this slim book, Almond shows that European history is far more muddled than Huntington’s depiction of one overarching “clash” between two visions of Abrahamic monotheism. Indeed the individual motivations and allegiances proves far to complex to paint with even the most vivid neoconservative or Marxist brush strokes. In making this argument, Almond cuts across wide historical periods, as well as the politics of several different centuries, demonstrating a mastery of facts, figures and a flair for colorful details.

    The success of Almond’s argument lies in its exclusive focus on military campaigns and the colorful historical figures associated with these efforts. Beginning in eleventh century Andalusia and ending with the Crimean War in the mid-ninenteenth century, the book examines periods in which Muslim and Christian groups were fighting together rather than against one another in various battlefields. Rather than antagonistic civilizations, Almond’s reading of history suggests that individual units and individuals often had distinct allegiances that would surprise those eager to fit the world into neat left-wing or right-wing paradigms. (more…)

  • Morsi’s Downfall Forces Islamists to Rethink Strategy

    President Mohamed Morsi’s removal from office this week jeopardizes his Muslim Brotherhood’s goal of creating an Islamic state in Egypt. But the army’s political intervention might have an impact beyond the country.

    The Brotherhood’s experience in Egypt forces likeminded political groups across the Middle East to assess the value of obtaining their goals through a democratic process over means of armed aggression. Abiding by the democratic process got the Brotherhood ejected from the system while the Afghan Taliban’s commitment to armed resistance got them a seat at the negotiating table. (more…)

  • Escalating Sectarian Divide Threatens Post-American Iraq

    The fragile political power-sharing arrangement imposed by American forces during the Iraqi occupation is at a renewed risk of collapse. Recent moves by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Shiite backers have considerably threatened the state’s sensative coalition structure, which couples a Shia prime minister with Sunni and Kurdish deputies, a Sunni parliamentary speaker with Shia and Kurdish deputies, and a Kurdish president with Shia and Sunni vice presidents.

    When American troops left Iraq less than a week ago, the long disgruntled Sunni establishment was on the defensive almost immediately, as deputy prime minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, leader of the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue, was issued a stop work order Monday by Maliki’s office. Citing only “administrative irregularities” and the ambiguous charge of traveling without informing the government, Mutlaq is now effectively barred from entering the cabinet.

    More recently, Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a former general secretary of the country’s largest Sunni Islamist bloc, the Iraqi Islamic Party, has fled to the semi-autonomous Kurdish north after being issued an arrest warrant for allegedly running a hit squad targeting government officials. Hashimi has called the allegations “absurd” and describes them as a smear campaign led by Maliki and his Shia backers who control the state’s Interior Ministry.

    While Prime Minister Maliki called Wednesday for Kurdish authorities to hand over Hashimi for trial, the Sunni leader thanked Iraq’s Kurdish president Jalal Talabani on Tuesday for a promise of security as he weighs leaving the country.

    The move puts Talabani in the middle of a renewed sectarian divide that has already seen the powerful Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc, which controls nine ministerial posts and 82 parliamentary seats, suspend its participation in national unity cabinet meetings. (more…)

  • When Religion Meets War

    What do you do when you know the exact location of a top level terrorist operative, but dropping a bomb on that location would cause a firestorm that could engulf an entire country into further chaos? Do you suck it up, assess the target and kill the people responsible for numerous attacks? Or do you take the high ground, consider the political context and wait to fight another day?

    These are the types of questions that American intelligence analysts are asking themselves in Pakistan today. The target in question is a recruitment and training center of the Haqqani network, an independent insurgent organization responsible for some of the deadliest attacks on American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. The American military believes that Haqqani leaders meet at this location on a near weekly basis, training new members and planning for the next operation.

    It sounds like a slam dunk case. The only problem is that this Haqqani compound is a mosque; the most potent and influential symbol in the Islamic world.

    Therein runs the conundrum which the United States face as its armed forces continue to take the fight to militants in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. In fact, therein lies the microcosm of America’s battle against extremism of the past ten years; what is normally a “no brainer” in conventional military terms quickly turns into a tricky situation in a counterinsurgency environment.

    The United States have run into a similar predicament before, when US Marines were heavily engaged with Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf. The battle lasted for weeks, Americans were suffering heavy casualties and the Iraqi population of the city was often caught in the crosshairs. But as the Marines cleared the city block by block, they found themselves closing in on Sadr’s whereabouts. At one point, they circled Sadr’s exact location, inside one of Shia Islam’s holiest of mosques.

    The Americans, faced with a choice of bombing the shrine or leaving it alone, wisely decided that the latter was the more plausible strategy. Surrounded from all sides, Sadr negotiated a ceasefire with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) at the time, promising to halt attacks against Americans. The United States withdrew and many conservatives became highly critical of the decision. Yet the ceasefire agreement saved the Unites States a lot of aggravation with the Muslim world (to put it mildly) at a time when the military was still grappling with the prisoner abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib detention center.

    Six years later, the United States are in much the same situation, this time in a country that has a nuclear weapons stockpile and a heck of a lot more people (approximately 170 million). Thus far, the CIA has concluded that bombing the madrassa in Miranshah is not the best approach, fearing a violent backlash from ordinary Pakistanis. Instead drones have taken another approach to the problem, bombing the suspected militants coming too and from the site.

    Coalition commanders who are eager for success in Afghanistan may be itching to pull the trigger on the mosque. But showing restraint, as the CIA is currently doing, may in fact be more effective in the long term rather than killing a few Haqqani militants now. If counterinsurgency depends on the support of the local population, the last thing the American image needs is another wave of angry protesters in South Asia.

    Showing restraint, on the other hand, is the best essence of what General David Petraeus so often refers to as “strategic patience.”

  • Radical Islamism on the Rise in Tatarstan?

    Even if youngsters in Tatarstan are becoming islamic, the authorities in this Russian republic have little reason to fear a surge in religious extremism. Persecution of pious Muslims would in fact only spur violence, not prevent it.

    I recently came across an article that argues that Tatarstan is facing an Islamization scenario akin to what has already occurred in Ingushetia and Dagestan. It reports on a talk given at a conference on ethnic and religious tolerance recently held in Kazan. Rais Suleimanov, the deputy director of the Center for Eurasian and International Studies at the Kazan Financial University, points out that youth comprise 40 percent of people who regularly attend mosque in the region. Yana Amelina, the head of the Caucasus department at the center and another conference participant, notes that radical Islam has over the last few years replaced ethnic separatism as the dominant anti-state ideology in the Caucasus and is now spreading into the Volga region.

    When I was last in Kazan two years ago, I was struck by the sheer number of young women wearing “Islamic” clothing and young men with those beards that act as markers of Islamic identity in the former Soviet Union. This was in stark contrast to previous visits, when everyone (and especially young people) wore European style clothing and hair styles. The number of people with such Islamic markers was also much higher in Kazan two years ago than in my visit to Baku last week.

    Of course, wearing traditional clothing or a beard is not a sign that one is a Wahhabi extremist (though it might be interpreted as such a sign by the local authorities). But I think there is no doubt that young people are more religious now than they were five to ten years ago and that the religion they are following is not the “traditional (Hanafi) Islam” of the area but less moderate imports from the Middle East.

    But this does not mean that they are all ready to take up arms against the government or support some kind of Islamic Caliphate. The authorities would take that interpretation at their own peril — if they start repressing religious Tatars, they may end up promoting more violence than if the people were left alone to worship as they please.

    The proposal in the article that the government should reject any attempts at dialog with the “Wahhabi lobby” in Russia and instead ban all “Wahhabi activity” seems to be particularly counterproductive in this regard. This is the kind of thing that was tried in places like Kabardino-Balkaria five, six years ago and only led to more people taking up arms against the authorities, because of a desire for revenge against the very people who humiliated them or repressed their relatives. Those who follow this topic may well remember the story about Russian Interior Ministry operatives going into mosques and forcibly shaving people or carving crosses into their hair. The net result of these actions was a rapid increase in anti-government attitudes, followed by Islamic radicalism, then a spike in violence in the region.

    The regional authorities could shoot themselves in the foot by taking excessively harsh measures against nonviolent but pious Muslims who reject the traditional Islamic leadership in the region in favor of strands of Islam imported from the Middle East. In that case, one could see the formation of violent bands whose goal is revenge against those who humiliated or hurt them.

    If, on the other hand, followers of Salafi Islam in Tatarstan are monitored but not persecuted, the chances for a significant surge of religiously based violence in the region is pretty remote.

    Violence in the Caucasus is due to a combination of religious extremism, a hopeless economic situation, and a perception that the local authorities are all crooks. Tatarstan may have more religious extremists than it used to, but its economic situation is pretty good by Russian standards and its authorities are less blatantly corrupt than those in the North Caucasus. Unless we start seeing massive unemployment among young Muslim men in the Volga region, I don’t think we should worry about the kind of violence and instability that we see in Dagestan or Ingushetia spreading to Tatarstan.

    There will be occasional disenchanted Tatar extremists who want to fight, but they will continue to do what they have been doing for the last decade — they’ll go off to the Caucasus, or to Afghanistan, and fight there. Tatarstan itself, as well as the entire Volga region, will become more religious, to be sure, but will nonetheless remain fairly stable and non-violent for the foreseeable future.

  • Building a Mosque in Election Time

    The newest political hot spot in America is the mosque slated to be built near Ground Zero, the site of the Trade Towers bombing of 2001, in New York City. Politicians are lining up and taking sides in the countdown to elections this fall. Even President Barack Obama voiced his ambivalent and unclear opinion, noting that America’s commitment to religious freedom must be “unshakable.” That includes, according to the president, “the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan.” The next day though, he backpedaled and declared that while people have a right to build mosques in America if they want to, he isn’t quite sure about the wisdom of this particular location.

    As always politicians are using the controversy first stirred up by conservative talk radio hosts to make election bids. Some are saying that they believe in freedom of religion; others that they believe in zoning laws and the sacredness of this particular site. And surprisingly, unlike most issues, this one is not split down party lines.

    For one thing, mere months from November’s midterm elections for Congress, no one can afford to disenfranchise his or her electorate. According to a recent CNN poll 68 percent of Americans are opposed to the mosque being built at Ground Zero. Even politicians not up for election this cycle have to watch their step or risk losing votes for their party. Many lawmakers have decided that silence, at least on this issue, is golden. Whatever they say, they’re bound to insult either their political base or their political party. We are way past the days of actual integrity and principle, if ever those days have existed in Washington.

    What are the principles behind the issue? America certainly is a place of freedom, including religious freedom. Yet there are lines. Your freedom to do what you like cannot infringe on another’s for example. And no matter your religious preferences they cannot suspend the laws of the land, thus polygamy, human and animal sacrifices and honor killings are all illegal notwithstanding your religion.

    To say the mosque should be built because of religious freedom is an emotional response and not an analytical one. There are already many mosques in America and none have ever been controversial as this one is. It’s not the mosque; it’s the location. The truth is that the building of this mosque in this neighborhood in New York is a local issue and has nothing to do with the federal government or the nation as a whole at all, at least under normal circumstances. With this in mind President Obama’s initial refusal to comment was the appropriate one since this has nothing to with him nor his branch of government. But these are not normal circumstances.

    In this particular case even though the planes blew up and destroyed buildings in New York the attack was made on the whole of the United States and its people. Muslims made the attack. Perhaps not these Muslims, but the mosque’s intended location is certainly politically provocative and intended to be so. So the people of the United States and at length their president, after due consideration, do have every right to weigh in on this debate. Whatever the outcome, the mosque controversy will certainly affect the November elections and perhaps even those of 2012.