Dec 9, 2013 | News & Press
On Tuesday 1st October 2013, The Cordoba Foundation hosted a closed-door high-level roundtable on the crisis in Egypt. The roundtable brought together representatives from the High Commissions of several Southeast Asian countries, and expert political reporters and analysts. The aim of the roundtable was to discuss the current situation in Egypt and to explore the role that the international community, in particularly Southeast Asian countries, could play.
The roundtable opened with an update on the current political and social situation in Egypt and a briefing on the key events which led up to the current crisis. Starting from the 25th January 2011, a series of protests were held across Egypt which called for social justice and demanded the overthrow of the regime of Hosni Mubarak. The ‘Revolution of the 25 January’, as it came to be known, resulted in the formation of a civilian state which was later dissolved on 3rd July 2013 when the opposition, fronted by the military,overthrew President Mohamed Morsi. Most recently events have included: a court ruling to dissolve the Muslim Brotherhood as an NGO and banning it from carrying out any activity in Egypt (which includes the social services that the socio-political group provide: schools, hospital and charities), and the freezing of all Muslim Brotherhood assets. For further details about this, please click here
There has also been a clampdown on freedom of expression: the detaining of anyone calling for democracy which includes the detaining of at least 70 minors (Human Rights Watch); freedom of assembly: a series of attacks carried out by security forces on Muslim Brotherhood led protests which were held under the banner of the ‘Anti-Coup Alliance’in which over 6.000 people have been killed and over 15,000people have been injured; and freedom of press: 7 media outlets have been shut-down.Participants highlighted that the acute humanitarian conditions are indicative of the return of both a security state and an oppressive regime.
Participants in the roundtable applauded the role of The Cordoba Foundation in facilitating forums for such discussions, and pointed out that peace in Muslim countries would mean prosperity for the entire Muslim Ummah who, as a demographic, represent amajority in a number of Southeast Asian countries.
The representatives from High Commissions of the Southeast Asian countries expressed their hopes that the Egyptian military would carry out the road map that they proposed: which promised fair elections and a new and more inclusive government. However, they added that if the military failed to deliver on this then the international community would have the scope to change their stance. It was pointed out by participants that at this moment in time the military were not showing any goodwill signs to fulfilling their promised road map which is illustrated by not inviting the Muslim Brotherhood to join any ministry or the constitutional committee.
Participants expressed the was a need for key regional players, like Saudi Arabia, to change their political positions on Egypt in order to ensure a more unified international approach. It was mentioned that from the outset Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states miscalculated and antagonized the Muslim Brotherhood. Participants put this down to a number of reasons including: the superficial reading of the ‘Islamist’ label which generalised political Islam and the threat that democracy posed to the Gulf monarchs who, because they feared their own demise, took an active role in reversing the progress of the elected Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It was argued that such regional players may reconsider their viewpoints if they were made aware of the real situation ion the ground in Egypt andobjections to their stance on Egypt by the public and key religious leaders. However, by taking local politics into consideration, one can question the impetus with which to work to muster people; Saudi Arabia, like many Gulf states, have large repression campaigns in which many people have been imprisoned because of their freedom of expression on social media. For more information, please click here
Participants of the roundtable acknowledged that there has been a muted response by the international community, which could be partly down to turn of events in Egypt occurring at a time when many governments had adjourned for their summer recesses. In addition, participants also expressed the importance of the international community to agree on and address the following issues:
– Failures in human rights and the need for investigations into the atrocities committed
– The freedom to protest
– The safety of president Mohamed Morsi, protesters and political prisoners
– Release of imprisoned academics
– Media control
– The freezing of the assets of the Muslim Brotherhood as a political group, and their freedom to campaign
– Promise of fair and free elections
– The fear of the revolution of the poor because of the state of the economy
Nov 5, 2013 | News & Press
On Wednesday 23rd and Thursday 24th October 2013, the University of Wroclaw in Poland hosted a public conference, titled “Exclusive Citizenship and Contemporary Theories of Transnational Justice,
Multiculturalism, Neutrality, Contract, Free Speech, Neo-racism and Deliberation”.
The conference was organised jointly with the University of Tromsø, Norway. The aim of the conference was together authors approaching the problem of transnational justice on local, state, regional and global perspectives, using a range of approaches including socio-political, cultural and religious.
This is a summary of the proceedings of that timely conference.
The conference was attended by William Barylo, Research Assistant at The Cordoba Foundation
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Oct 4, 2013 | News & Press
Each year the International Day of Peace is observed around the world on 21 September. The General Assembly of the United Nations declared this as a day devoted to strengthening the ideals of peace, both within and among all nations and peoples. The International Day of Peace was established in 1981.
During the International Day of Peace, local schools, churches, synagogues, temples, gurdwaras and community organisations are invited to observe the day by accepting visitors. Last year, thousands of Islamic centres in the UK and overseas led their local communities in observing the day.
This year, on Friday 20 September, the London Muslim Centre and The Cordoba Foundation invited visitors from various organisations after Friday Prayers (Salaatul-Jumu’a) to exchange messages of peace, to celebrate local peace-building activities and to enjoy the hospitality offered.
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Sep 30, 2013 | News & Press
Announcing the latest edition of, the MENA Report, providing insights and analysis of events and developments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
This edition provides an insight into the Saudi state and its Salafi trends\
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Sep 21, 2013 | News & Press
The Cordoba Foundation is pleased to share a message from the Grand Mufti of Bosnia on the occasion of the International Day of Peace.
The message reminds us of the unity of human beings and the need to preserve this.
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Sep 18, 2013 | News & Press
To commemorate the International Day of Peace, The Cordoba Foundation shares messages of peace from different religious traditions
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Sep 10, 2013 | News & Press
In a thought-provoking lecture Sri Lanka’s internationally-renowned jurist, academic and author, Prof. Christie Weeramantry warned that if the 21st continued in its destructive and bungling ways there would be no 22nd century
Describing the modern day as the most rapacious in history Prof. Weeramantry blamed the power of money, the power of science and the military for pillaging the earth.
He said that thousands of years-old religious teachings that called on rulers and the ruled to protect and preserve the environment and safeguard natural resources are being neglected or rejected, breaking the age-old nexus that existed between religion and human conduct.
A former Judge of the International Court of Justice in the Hague, a professor of law at Monash University in Australia and a justice of the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka, Prof. Weeramantry was speaking to an audience of barristers, solicitors, law students and others in London last week on global religious wisdom as an enrichment of international law and an aid to the solution of current conflicts.The lecture was organised by the Association of Sri Lankan Lawyers in the UK and The Cordoba Foundation.
Referring to the world’s major religions- Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and Judaism- he said that the wisdom expressed by these religions and the religious leaders 3000-4000 years ago had anticipated today’s international law.
Whereas the wisdom of those religions should have formed the foundations of international law and the conduct of countries and rulers, those wise words are in reality ignored or relegated to the background despite the lip service paid to religion.
Prof Weeramantry also debunked the belief among some in the western world that international law was essentially a creation of the west. Such a conclusion, he said, is untenable because several thousand years earlier all major religions had reflected on and pronounced on a whole gamut of human activities.
Citing various religious teachings Prof. Weeramantry showed modern international law had already been anticipated by these religions which originated in Asia.
Drawing on his experience as a teacher and an international judge Prof. Weeramantry lamented that the teaching of law today remained an arid discipline and appealed to the legal profession to help rebuild the bridge between religion and international law.
Aug 29, 2013 | Views
A recent post in the Colombo Telegraph by the ‘PM of the TGTE’ expressed solidarity with the Muslim community whilst “extending our fullest support to the Muslim people, we also extend our solidarity to the Muslim community, as a community whose mother tongue is also Tamil, asking them to join the Tamils in their struggle to build a secure future for all in the Tamil state”. The article was written on the back of rising incidents of attack against the Muslim community by extreme Buddhist groups.
I not only found this article laughable but highly delusional in the assumptions that the Muslim community would entertain any notion of an alliance with the TGTE, whose singular premise has been to extend the LTTE mantra and campaign on a separate Tamil state. Making this statement, the TGTE was not necessarily ‘concerned’ about the Muslim community per se, but it was aimed at showing the ‘intolerance’ of Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism. At quite a crucial time for Sri Lanka, during the anniversaries of the Black July pogroms 30 years ago, the article aims to draw parallels with then and now and to show that nothing has changed. Yet interestingly it seems to have taken the TGTE 4 years since the end of the conflict (and the occasions of these incidents) to publicly reach out to the Muslim community
To read more, please click here
Aug 20, 2013 | Views
If there is one thing that consistently defines this era that we are living in, it is the role of the media in how it not only shapes our politics, ideology and world view but also how it seeks to manipulate issues and narratives for its own goals. We all remember the concerted media campaign that preceded the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The political establishment and a large proportion of the general public were convinced that Iraq had a viable nuclear and chemical arsenal. The orchestrated media campaign by traditionally respectable media outlets like the BBC and the Sky Middle Eastern coverage tended to stoke-up fear in the hearts of the population. Some politicians genuinely believed that unless there was a pre-emptive attackon Saddam Hussain, our civilisation and our way of ’’life’’ were in mortal danger. We all know too well the consequences of the invasion. Likewise the Leveson Inquiry in the UK has called to question media ethics.
With the crises and incidents unfolding in Egypt, truth is once again the main victim — in the absence of real democratic institutions and an inherently-corrupt and unprofessional media. The loss of life over the past week — whilst utterly shocking — veers into insignificance compared to the web of lies that have been spun around to justify these killings by the government officials and those who back the military operation. What is even worse is the reception these lies seem to be getting in the West as figures are misquoted and justifications reiterated.
The flow of information from the official sources should not be taken at face value. Western leniency with the coup leaders in Egypt encouraged the army and security services to massacre hundreds of demonstrators in the streets of Cairo. These crimes were preceded by an unbelievable array of propaganda willingly reiterated by American and British officials in their briefings in the past few weeks. Take for example the American official who reaffirmed the outrageous Egyptian claim that 30 million people took to the streets of Cairo on the eve of June 30th to call for a military intervention and end Morsi’s rule.
The influence of the mass media on ordinary people in the Middle East is widely acknowledged. In the Egyptian case, money from the UAE and Saudi Arabia has fuelled a frenzied media attack on the nascent democratic institutions in Egypt to the extent that ordinary citizens were willing to sacrifice theirvote and political freedoms in order to end their miserable economic and social situation, so they were led to believe. Paradoxically the Saudi and the Arab Gulf states concentrated in their media campaign on the issue of the Western conspiracy with the Muslim Brotherhood to destabilise Egypt and sell its assets to foreign investors. They played on the ordinary people’s sentiments and religious sensitivities. They even claimed that the new democratic government in Egypt is in cahoots with the West and the Israelis.
Unfortunately most of the information about opposition movements in the Arab and Muslim world available to Western circles was amassed from security services and academic institutions linked to it. It was only in the last 30 years when large number of political activists and academics took refuge in the West that we saw certain changes in attitude towards a relative understanding of political Islam. At the same time the exposure to Western political theory and practice had a huge influence on the politics of the proponents of contemporary political Islam. The same strategy is followed by monarchic regimes and sheikhdoms in the Arab Gulf region. Although these regimes are considered pro-West, they support and give sustenance to religious clergy faithful to the regimes to demonise all what the Western democracies stand for. In the case of Egypt, we have witnessed how traditionally apoliticaland rejectionist trends like the Salafists have been used to defend and justify the military coup. Similarly, the head of Al-Azhar University, the most prestigious religious institution in the Muslim world, has not been spared. Here again, Western political, cultural and ethical ideals are the target. A barrier is erected between their people and international concepts such as democracy and free will.
The Egyptian military and the Gulf regimes used religious and cultural cleavages with the West to end the infant democratic experience. Unfortunately, they succeeded with an undeniable tacit approval by democratic governments in the West. This is evident of Western ancient religious sensitivities being undoubtedly intertwined with their contemporary politics.
Dr Fareed Sabri is head of the Middle East and North Africa Programme for The Cordoba Foundation
