Word: islamics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...photographs to identify the dean. After a grueling but fair selection process, Pilbeam’s picture was placed among those of British actor Sir Ian Holm (Bilbo Baggins in “The Lord of the Rings”), musician Elvis Costello, and folk-singer-turned-fundamentalist Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens). The results? While 55 percent of students polled correctly identified the dean, 25 percent chose Costello, with 12.5 percent and 7.5 percent choosing Holm and Islam respectively. It was clear, however, that much of the accuracy was due to certain “give-aways...
Four days after she was spared the lash but jailed by a Sudanese court for insulting Islam, British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons received a presidential pardon Monday and was deported from the country. But while her alleged crime - permitting her primary students to name a Teddy bear Mohammad - garnered the Khartoum regime a good deal of international condemnation for its radical justice, the charges against Gibbons and her famous bear were incidental to a larger struggle playing out in Sudan - the manipulation of Islam in the pursuit of personal and political power...
From the beginning, in fact, the case against Gibbons was never really about her alleged insensitivity to Islam. Western and Sudanese sources tell TIME the ordeal began from an employment dispute at the school where Gibbons worked. Sarah Khawad, a former secretary at the school who had recently lost her job, allegedly dug up a letter Gibbons had sent to her students' parents in September informing them that each child would take home a teddy bear and record the evening in a diary. The class had named the bear Muhammad, Gibbons wrote. According to the sources, Khawad, a Sudanese citizen...
...Islam is a double-edged sword in Sudan. In many instances, the regime harnesses it to advance its own power - witness the decades-long war successive Arab regimes in Khartoum waged against non-Muslim Africans in the south. Then, too, there are the regime's frequent charges of anti-Islamic bigotry against the West for its diplomatic pressures on Khartoum...
...just as often, as the controversy surrounding Gibbons illustrates, it is Islam that harnesses the Sudanese regime. Far from being a radical Islamic autocracy, the Khartoum government is a tenuous regime riven with factions and dissent...