Sharia student loans: Will Muslim students avoid paying interest on finance for higher education?

UK: The Government is inviting responses to its consultation on whether or not to introduce a student loan that is compliant with sharia law, amid reports that the UK’s Muslim population is divided on the issue.
 

It comes after concerns were raised that the existing finance options on offer from the Student Loans Company were unsuitable for Muslims, with sharia law forbidding loans that involve the payment of interest.

Announcing the proposed new sharia-compliant scheme at the start of this month, the universities and science minister David Willetts said the loans would “ensure that anyone with the ability and desire can go to university”.

Under the new plans a special advisory committee would oversee a mutual fund pooling model (takaful), whereby those who have been to university and moved on to well-paid jobs help to pay for those who come along after them.

Funds would be withdrawn from the pool for prospective students, who would later make a series of repayments to pay for future generations.

The repayments would be set at a benchmark rate equivalent to that of conventional student loans, in a bid to alleviate the fears of some commentators that Muslim students would end up receiving a discount rate.

Yet in doing so the Government has been criticised for creating a scheme that is only superficially avoiding interest and hiding it behind the “smokescreen” of a fund pool system.

Sheikh Suhaib Hasan, from the UK Islamic Sharia Council, told BBC Asian Network: “By limiting the repayments to a benchmark similar to that of conventional bank interest rates, Sharia-compliant schemes I think are nothing but a smokescreen through which a prohibited matter turns into a permitted one, so it’s better to leave it as it is.”

But that solution will not provide an answer for people like Annesa Maryam, from Manchester, who was among 40 case studies collated in the past year by the Islamic organisation 1st Ethical.

She told the Guardian: “My religion has to be more of a priority to me than my education. It's a real shame, because just a couple of years ago [when fees were lower] I could afford to go to university without a loan. There is no way I could pay the amount needed now, coming from a low-income background.”

But Humarrah Sheikh, 19, said that for many Muslims the loans were not really that big a problem – particularly in comparison to the sheer amount of fees students are now expected to pay.

She said: “It hasn't been that big an issue for me, and I personally think that religion should be kept out of this area.”
 

Source: The Independent

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Halal Meat 101

Saudi Arabia's top cleric says Nigeria's Boko Haram smears Islam!
 

DUBAI (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's grand mufti, the top religious authority in the birthplace of Islam, has condemned Nigeria's Boko Haram as a group "set up to smear the image of Islam" and condemned its kidnapping of over 200 schoolgirls.

Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh said the radical movement, which says it wants to establish a "pure" Islamic state in Nigeria, was "misguided" and should be "shown their wrong path and be made to reject it."

His remarks came as religious leaders in the Muslim world, who often do not comment on militant violence, joined in denouncing Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau for saying Allah had told him to sell off the kidnapped girls as forced brides.

"This is a group that has been set up to smear the image of Islam and must be offered advice, shown their wrong path and be made to reject it," he told the Arabic-language newspaper al-Hayat in an interview published on Friday.

"These groups are not on the right path because Islam is against kidnapping, killing and aggression," he said. "Marrying kidnapped girls is not permitted."

Boko Haram militants kidnapped some 250 girls on April 14 from a secondary school in Chibok village, near the Cameroon border, while they took exams. Fifty have since escaped.

Shekau's video was released on Monday, sparking a wave of revulsion in Nigeria and abroad and prompting offers of help from countries such as the United States, Britain and France to search for them.

Boko Haram has led a five-year-old insurgency with the stated aim of reviving a medieval Islamic caliphate in modern Nigeria, whose 170 million people are split roughly evenly between Christians and Muslims.

Its violent attacks have become by far the biggest security threat to Africa's top oil producer and it has spread out to menace the neighboring countries of Cameroon, Niger and Chad.

On Thursday, Islamic scholars and human rights officials of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the world's largest Muslim body representing 57 countries, denounced the kidnapping as "a gross misinterpretation of Islam".

This week, Al-Azhar, the prestigious Cairo-based seat of Sunni learning, also said that the kidnapping "has nothing to do with the tolerant and noble teachings of Islam."

Source:  Reuters

Top Chelsea FC striker to build mosque in Senegal

Demba Ba is among 40 top footballers playing in the English premier league who openly practice their faith as Muslims.

UK: Chelsea football player Demba Ba has offered the money to build a mosque in his hometown in Senegal.

The premier league strike and Senegal international player, who is known to be a devout Muslim, often celebrates his goals with a prostration.

Speaking to the Independent on Friday, sen24heures quoted Ba saying “a good Muslim is a good person, so I try to be a good person," after news broke out about his donation in the Senegalese media last week.

Ba is among 40 top footballers playing in the English premier league who openly practice their faith as Muslims, with the increasing recruitment of talented players of West African origin breaking down the barriers that once held Muslim players back from reaching the top flight.

In 1992, Tottenham Hotspur FC's Nayim was the only Muslim player in the English top division.

In 2007, Mali international Frederic Omar Kanoute, who also used to play for Tottenham, put forward US$700,000 out of his pocket to buy a mosque in Seville, Spain, after the contract on the premises had expired.
    

Source: World Bulletin

Islam, Saudi and apostasy

SAUDI ARABIA: Does Islamic law really proscribe the death penalty for apostasy?

Just when we thought the term "terrorism" could not become more meaningless or manipulated, Saudi Arabia's government seems to have proved us wrong by recently adding atheism under the charge. Based on polls revealing that self-identified atheists constitute 5 percent of Saudi population, this makes for a staggering number of terrorists in the kingdom, most of whom maintain external religious observance in society while using online anonymity to express their true beliefs.

However, this matter is not so straightforward. Nesrine Malik highlights in a recent article an often-ignored distinction between the private, and public, more political forms of atheism. Indeed, as Malik points out, in an ultraconservative country like Saudi Arabia where religion, tribe, family and politics, are interlinked and of utmost importance, to take an antagonistic stance against Islam necessarily entails an antagonistic stance against the fabric of society.

It is a commonly held belief that Islamic law dictates the death penalty as an absolute punishment for apostasy. However, this reading of the Islamic Tradition relies on restricting the role of the Prophet Muhammad to that of a religious figure issuing timeless decrees. Such a restriction of the Prophet's role will undoubtedly give rise to numerous paradoxes, as it will decontextualise all his statements and actions in a way that not only makes Islam incoherent as a religion, but also incompatible with certain societal developments.

Interpreting the scriptures......
 

AlJazeera

Crusade against British Muslims in education 

 By Ibrahim Hewitt, Senior Editor of the Middle East Monitor
 

The 'Trojan Horse' plot allegations in British media aim at discrediting the work of Muslim educationalists.

UK: Many Muslims in Britain are convinced that there is a witch-hunt against them headed by government officials and the right-wing media; a non-Muslim friend of mine called it a "crusade". Equally, right-wing "think-tanks" have weighed in with their comments to stir up an evil brew that threatens community relations.

Attacks include scurrilous media articles and the so-called Trojan Horse plot in Birmingham, which sees Muslim educationalists and school governors accused of plotting to "Islamise" state schools in the city. The real Trojan Horse plot is the planting of neo-conservative apparatchiks in key positions within government departments and quasi-governmental bodies. The Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, is himself an avowed neoconservative.

Although nominally expressing concern about the education of Muslim children, the real motive of such attacks has nothing to do with improving the education of Muslim children, but with controlling it. In doing so, Britain's new crusaders seek to discredit decades of hard work and sincere community efforts to improve our children's life chances as they face the future in an increasingly hostile atmosphere.

A few years ago, one religious affairs correspondent for a well-known newspaper told me that a senior Church of England figure was very calm about the upsurge of mosque planning applications in the 1960s: "Let them have their mosques. We have their children in our schools." What we are seeing today is nothing less than an ideological struggle for control of the education of Muslim children.

The crusaders are not satisfied that all schools, including independent Muslim schools, are inspected regularly; we must have "investigations" and "commissions" as well. Character assassination is a common tactic and no Muslim with any track record of community service can feel secure. It seems, at times, that the more successful you have been in getting Muslims involved in voluntary roles, including school governors, the more likely it is that you will be targeted.

Lies and half-truths buried in text with very little context form the backbone of such attacks; never let the facts get in the way of a good story. So one school in Leicester with which I am associated is accused, for example, of gender segregation when, in fact, such segregation has never been a policy there.
 

Indeed, for two years until last July, Al-Aqsa School (pictured above right) had boys and girls of secondary age being taught together, probably a unique situation among Muslim schools in Britain. This was dropped only due to a lack of demand for places and parental preference for single-sex provision. Parental choice, it is worth noting, is supposed to be a cornerstone of the Secretary of State's wildly expensive Free School programme.

Readers of the Telegraph read on April 26 that "the alleged ringleader of the Trojan Horse plot wrote a detailed blueprint for the radical "Islamisation" of secular state schools which closely resembles what appears to be happening in Birmingham."

In fact, Tahir Alam (pictured left) co-authored in 2007 a book for the Muslim Council of Britain intended to act as a guide for schools with advice about making suitable and adequate provision for their Muslim pupils.

The real scandal is that such a guide was needed 20-odd years after the Muslim Educational Trust's British Muslims and Schools which covered much of the same territory. Many state schools simply do not cater to their Muslim pupils and their achievements suffer as a result. Happy pupils are happy learners, but too many people in positions of authority put political dogma over pupil achievement when those pupils are Muslim.

Claims that the government is pursuing an "anti-extremism" agenda are wearing thin; it is anti-Islam, period. It's fine for Muslims to have their faith as long as they keep it to themselves and out of the public domain. In other words, the neo-conservatives want Islam to be shorn of its "complete way of life" guidelines. This is dangerous territory.

Look at the former Yugoslavia; Muslims were given the green light to register themselves as an "ethnic minority" even if they didn't pray or, as Professor Ernest Gellner wrote in Nations and Nationalism, didn't even believe in Allah and His Messenger. Many had assimilated to such a degree that they were indistinguishable from their neighbours, but they were still raped and killed for being Muslims when the state broke up.

Is that what the neocons want for British Muslims? Such people have succeeded in marginalising religion in schools - faith is often the only forbidden f-word therein - and while they claim that Britain is a Christian country the reality is that they don't want to see anyone practising a faith on their own terms, Christian or otherwise. Muslims, as far as they are concerned, need a "reformation" to secularise our practises, or face unspecified consequences. The threat is clear.

It looks as if the education dispute in Birmingham has much wider connotations and is spreading to other cities. We must expect more alarmist articles in a media intent on sensationalising issues and creating rifts in British society. The people behind them want to weaken the Muslim community and while we may have our mosques and a relative handful of schools most of our children are indeed in "their" schools. That is reason enough in the twisted logic of the neocrusaders to target any Muslim who works to improve the lot of Muslim children in the education system. The writing is on the wall.

Ibrahim Hewitt is the Senior Editor at Middle East Monitor (MEMO) in London and has worked with and for Muslims schools in Britain for more than 30 years.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
 

Source: AlJazeera

An Open Letter to Bill Maher From a Muslim American

By Rabia Chaudry

The problem isn't Islam. It's your movement to demonize Islam in the liberal left.

US: Hey there, Bill. You hate religion. You particularly hate Islam. We get it. Your liberal bigotry against Muslims and Islam is no secret. For a while now I’ve just avoided watching your show, which kind of stinks because for many years I was a great fan and really loved it. I wasn’t even bothered when you called out Muslims doing stupid, criminal or horrific things. You do that with a lot of groups, and it’s important to do. But I stopped watching when it became clear that you loathed a faith I was devoted to.

On your show you recently discussed the kidnapping of hundreds of girls by Boko Haram, followed by the new sharia laws in Brunei, and rounded out the segment with a nod to your buddy Ayaan Hirsi Ali—quite the trifecta of examples to support your conclusion that Islam itself is, as you said, “the problem.” Your reasoning is essentially that Muslims are doing many horrible things around the world, and they all believe in Islam, so naturally Islam is the nonnegotiable culprit.

Let’s ignore for now the numerous logical fallacies in your premise and instead follow your exact line of reasoning. If we are to accept your rationale, we have to also accept that, if many Muslims are doing good things around the world, and they all believe in Islam, then Islam is responsible for the good that they do. We also accept, given that Ali’s criticism of Islam is based on her personal experience, that the positive personal experience of other Muslims, including converts, are just as valid reflections on the faith.

For the sake of argument, and being as generous as possible, let’s say Islam has been a force of destruction for 50% of Muslims and a source of empowerment, peace and comfort for the other 50%. Where exactly does that leave us? Whose experience of Islam is legitimate? If Boko Haram is, in your estimation, an authentic expression of Islam, what do you make of the hundreds of Nigerian Muslim families who were sending their daughters to school? Why isn’t their dedication, like Malala Yousafzai’s dedication, to girls’ education an authentic expression of Islam? What do you deduct from the fact most Muslim women in the world are not circumcised?

Are they just doing Islam wrong? Are all the good, peaceful Muslims doing Islam wrong?

You noted that women are treated at best like second-class citizens, but most often like property in Islam. The first Muslim woman, Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, a successful businesswoman, boss-lady and wife to the Prophet Muhammad, and the other Muslim women of his time would have snickered at you. Women of the region were chattel before Islam, treated and traded as such, until the Quran freed them through revelations such as “O you who believe! You are forbidden to inherit women against their will.”

I could tell you that Islam was the first system to establish women’s property rights, inheritance rights, the right to education, to marry and divorce of their free will, to be religious scholars, business owners, soldiers. I could tell you that while Christianity was debating the status of women’s souls and declaring them a source of sin, Islam had already established authoritatively the spiritual equality of men and women and absolved Eve, and womankind at large, of sin. I could tell you that the world and history is full of highly educated, successful Muslim women who are empowered by their faith, not debilitated by it. I could tell you terrorism is categorically forbidden in Islam, and that between 1970 and 2012, 97.5% of terror attacks in the U.S. were carried out by non-Muslims. I could tell you that female genital mutilation is never mentioned in the Quran; the only reference to it is found in a weak narration, and scholars find it objectionable to the point of being classified as impermissible.

Nothing I tell you would matter, though. The facts are irrelevant. That’s how bigotry operates. It’s both telling and troubling that you referred to these issues as “the Muslim question.” The reference didn’t escape me and it’s hard to believe it was anything but deliberate. Think for a second about what was unleashed by the “Jewish question” in Europe. Bigotry sometimes does that, too.

So while I support you in continuing to expose Muslims and others who shock the conscience of decent people, who destroy lives, and who wreak havoc, I caution you on the anti-Islam rhetoric. You have a massive following and are successfully leading a movement to demonize Islam in the liberal left, a place many American Muslims call home. You are leading people into rocks and hard places when you posit that Islam is the problem. You are putting Muslims up against a wall and pushing those who fear us further into spaces where little choice is left. As the mother of two American-born daughters, and a Muslim who calls the U.S. her home, I worry deeply about the solutions your followers may propose to your “Muslim question.” You should too.

Rabia Chaudry is an attorney and the founder and president of the Safe Nation Collaborative. 

Source: Time

The random Muslim scare story generator: separating fact from fiction 

By Nasrin Malek

Halal meat is on every menu; sharia law is taking over; the niqab is undermining the nation. Ever noticed how often the same old stories keep appearing about Muslims in Britain? Here's the truth about these and other media myths

UK: In Britain, there is now a cycle of Islamic scare stories so regular that it is almost comforting, like the changing of the seasons. Sadly, this rotation is not as natural, or as benign, although it is beginning to feel just as inevitable. We had the niqab winter last year, as the country lurched into the niqab debate for the second time in three years. Now we are in the spring of halal slaughter.

Add to this schedule the routine reports about gender segregation in UK universities and Muslim schools (as if the concept of gender segregation was somehow exotic to non-faith schools in the UK), claims of grand plans to "overthrow" non-Muslim heads of certain schools and you have a steady flow of creeping sharia messages, stoking a fear of a stealthy, incremental Islamicisation.

Channel 4's Ramadan coverage last year drew 2,011 complaints, the majority objecting to the broadcast of the call to prayer, a two-minute transmission. This reflects an increasing nationwide umbrage towards visible British Muslims, informed by repetitive stories that inaccurately amplify their religiously motivated activity.

Underpinning it is a common theme: that there is an ever more muscular and intimidating Muslim minority demanding special rights from a cowed and pandering, lily-livered body politic muzzled by "multicultural Britain" – rather than simply attempting to adapt and integrate, as immigrants of all religions have been doing in the UK for centuries. It's not hard to see how this constant blurring of facts generates the mood music of anti-immigration rightwingers and establishes common misconceptions about Muslims.

But the threat of a creeping sharia never seems to materialise. It seems to be more of a crawling sharia, so slowly has the Islamist takeover of Britain been, in contrast to the constant media warnings of its imminent arrival.

The focus far outstrips the size and political activity of the minority, which number 2.7 million (less than 5% of the population), not all of whom are practising Muslims. The Islamic scare story plays to a nexus of easy media sensationalism, a portion of the public primed and ready to believe the worst, and an interested rightwing element for whom it is a convenient vehicle for their anti-immigration views, xenophobia, or just Islamophobia.

But with each reincarnation of a creeping Islamic threat, the gulf between the facts and what is reported widens. The following are some of the most popular examples – and the facts that discredit them.
 

The Guardian