Cultural awareness of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan is growing in coastal communities, Muslim families have said.

Ramadan, the Islamic holy month, which this year began on Wednesday 22 March involves fasting during daylight hours.

The fast-breaking evening meals of Iftar in Haverfordwest mosque see Muslims and non-Muslims eat together.

Schools in Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire have been holding assemblies on Ramadan, with advice on how pupils can help their friends who are fasting.

During the month, Muslims fast – which involves abstaining from eating and drinking during daylight hours – as well as focus on self-improvement, self-reflection and giving to the less fortunate.

Sajida Madni, 43, from Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, said cultural awareness of Ramadan had increased in her local community over the last year following the opening of the first mosque in the town last Ramadan.

Mrs Madni said: “In this area there is generally less exposure to other cultures, so there were concerns when we first started up about what we would be doing at the mosque.

“So we invited all of the neighbours for Iftar to show them that we are regular people sharing food and coming together.

“We are part of a wider community, part and parcel of British society, and we should celebrate that.”

The mosque runs a youth club with a range of activities for the community which is attended by Muslim and non-Muslim people alike, and many people bring their friends to share in the evening Iftar meals during the month.

Mustafa Yunis, a trustee at Haverfordwest Central Mosque, said: “A mosque is meant to be a hub, a community centre where everyone is there and it’s brilliant to have representatives from our local community coming to eat together with us.

“We want people to feel that they are part of our community as well.”

Overcoming barriers

Mrs Madni also highlighted the level of support offered by her children’s school.

Mrs Madni’s daughter, Aayah Yunis, and two children who she is a guardian for – Aziza and Mariam Akhtar – are the only Muslims at their secondary school, but she says the school has been incredibly supportive with helping them celebrate the holy month.

Castle School in Pembrokeshire has held an assembly on Ramadan, giving tips to students about how they can help their school friends who are fasting, as well as provided the three children with a prayer room.

The assembly also helped break down barriers and open up conversations about the Muslim faith.

“So many of her friends were able to ask her questions after that assembly that they felt they couldn’t ask beforehand,” Mrs Madni said.

Describing the impact on her, Aayah said: ‘It’s really nice to teach people about it because it helps people learn new things and helps me express my Islamic identity.”

Castle School said that programmes that allowed pupils to interact with different cultures was “further enriching their learning experiences and broadening their horizons”.

‘A positive shift’

Sara Ahmed, 40, from Ceredigion said she had noticed a “positive shift” in her children’s school’s approach to Ramadan, which also proactively held an assembly on the tradition.

“Prior to this year I’ve usually had to call into school and explain that the kids will be fasting, and that they will not be having food or water during the day and that they may need breaks during PE. The school has always been fine and positive about this.

“It wasn’t anything that parents spurred on either – this was the first time in my experience that that has happened and I really appreciated that,” she said.

She said one of her son’s friends even contacted him and said she wanted to try and fast a day with him.

“In the kids’ school, there’s probably less than 10 Muslim pupils. But compared to other schools in the area that’s quite a high number,” she said.

“There aren’t that many Muslims in the community here and you can sometimes feel you stick out a bit. So it’s really great to see people taking an interest and embrace our culture.”

By Sanjana Idnani – BBC News

L’article Ramadan: Coastal communities help Muslims celebrate est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

Earlier this month, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) issued a scandalous ruling which practically made it legal for employers to discriminate against their  Muslim employees in workplaces across Europe.

In a July 15 decision, the court declared that companies in the European Union can legally ban their female Muslim employees from wearing a headscarf under certain conditions. The case was brought to the Luxembourg-based court by two women in Germany who were suspended from their jobs after they started wearing the hijab, a headscarf worn by many Muslim women who feel it is part of their religion.

The ruling not only added to the ever-growing concerns over the safety, freedoms and rights of European Muslims but also once again revealed the EU’s hypocritical approach to human rights, religious freedoms and equality.

The court’s verdict, however, did not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to Europe’s gradual descent into Islamophobia. Indeed, a systemic effort to demonise, marginalise and even criminalise Muslims has been under way in Europe for many years.

Islamophobia, which became more visible across the world after the 9/11 attacks and the beginning of the so-called “war on terror”, gradually penetrated into mainstream European politics in recent years. European politicians across the political spectrum started scapegoating Muslims for economic downturns, rising unemployment, irregular immigration, societal discontent and global terror.

The EU cannot claim to be a bastion of democracy and human rights while openly discriminating against its Muslim citizens.

While anti-Muslim sentiment has long been growing in Europe, the CJEU’s ruling still marked a significant turning point in the EU’s relationship with Muslims. By allowing companies to ban their Muslim employees from wearing headscarves, the court institutionalised, legalised and justified anti-Muslim discrimination in European workplaces.

Over the last five years, the number of racist and anti-Islam attacks in the West increased by 250 percent, and the rate of those who lost their lives in such attacks increased by 70 percent. During the same period, no less than 15,000 Islamophobic attacks have been documented in Europe’s five largest countries.

In the context of these devastating figures, the CJEU ruling sent a clear message to European Muslims: You can live safely and peacefully in Europe, but only if you agree to distance yourself from your religion and abandon all visible symbols of your religious identity.

Needless to say, the court’s move to legalise anti-Muslim discrimination not only increased the severity of the threats European Muslims are facing but also cast a shadow over the story Europe has long been telling the world about itself. Indeed, it is ironic that the top court of the EU – an organisation that never misses an opportunity to criticise Muslim countries for their alleged human rights misconduct – has ruled that an employee can be sanctioned and terminated for merely displaying a religious symbol in the workplace. It is also ironic that the court issued a ruling that targets women specifically, given the EU’s repeated declarations on its commitment to ensuring gender equality.

With this month’s CJEU ruling, the EU has effectively embraced a stance on religious freedoms that is more fitting to extreme far-right movements than a self-proclaimed “champion of democracy, human rights and freedom”.

Let us engage in a thought experiment to develop a better appreciation of the EU’s hypocrisy: How would European leaders have reacted if the top court of a Muslim-majority country, such as Turkey, issued a similar ruling against its Christian, Jewish or Hindu citizens? The answer, of course, is quite obvious. They would have condemned the court for undermining religious freedoms and human rights. They would have called on international institutions to sanction the country for discriminating against its own citizens. They would have called the verdict unjustifiable and unacceptable. But when it is the EU’s top court that is discriminating against European Muslims, they seem to have very little to say.

In Turkey, we are hardly surprised by the hypocrisy Europe’s leaders have demonstrated on this issue. Turkey has been subjected to all types of double standards in its decades-long journey to join the EU, mostly due to it being a Muslim-majority country. Certain European politicians have even publicly acknowledged that the primary obstacle to Turkey’s membership was the religious affiliation of its population. As such, we know better than to expect the EU to act morally on any issue concerning Muslims – in Europe or beyond.

Still, we could not help but expect some kind of a reaction from European leaders in the face of a court ruling that makes a mockery of the EU’s own claims of being a bastion of human rights and democracy. After all, such a discriminatory verdict undoubtedly undermines Europe’s standing in the international community. That reaction, however, never came, confirming our worst fears – that the EU is concerned about human rights and freedoms only when it suits its interests.

Perhaps the leaders in Europe chose to remain silent on the CJEU verdict because they saw it as a step towards establishing a “European Islam” – a hypothesised new “branch” of the faith that would have its roots in “European” values, and that would supposedly help European Muslims to fully assimilate into European societies.

Indeed, many European politicians believe that by institutionalising discrimination against Muslims and forcing them to adapt their behaviour and religious expression to accommodate the baseless fears and prejudices of the wider population, they could bring an end to deep-rooted societal problems like xenophobia, Islamophobia and racism.

Of course, in reality, the forced establishment of a less visible and more obedient “European Islam”, through discriminatory policies like the one that received the CJEU’s stamp of approval earlier this month, would achieve nothing other than depriving European Muslims of their cultural roots and identity. Furthermore, by cutting Muslims’ links to their culture and erasing their religious identities, such policies would pave the way for radicalisation.

We have already seen the disastrous results of such policies in the mid-2010s when global terror groups were working hard to add young, impressionable Europeans to their ranks. These groups could not radicalise European Muslims who preserved their links to their ancestral homelands and attended religious services at mosques linked to respected foreign organisations, such as the Turkish Diyanet, because they had trustworthy venues to obtain accurate information about their religion from. By contrast, countless young Europeans, who have been deprived of such support and kept away from legitimate organisations that could give them reliable religious guidance, ended up being radicalised and joining terrorist groups like ISIL.

In short, the EU’s attempts to forcefully assimilate Muslims, erase their religious identity and prevent them from engaging with their culture openly harm not only European Muslims but the wider European society.

The deafening silence of the EU officials and leaders in the face of this month’s anti-Muslim CFEU ruling, however, demonstrates that Europe’s elites are still too myopic to see the damage they are inflicting on their own people through such policies.

The EU cannot establish itself as a true champion of human rights and freedoms in the international arena if it continues to turn a blind eye to discriminatory, harmful and outright racist policies and practices within its own borders.

The EU officials and leaders must therefore stop with the theatrics and urgently live up to their responsibilities towards Europe’s Muslim citizens. Failure to act now will not just result in Islamophobia and xenophobia deepening the lurking security crisis at the heart of Europe. It will also deepen the crisis of legitimacy the EU is currently facing.

Fahrettin Altun is the communications director of the Turkish presidency / Aljazeera

L’article The CJEU’s ruling on hijab exposed Europe’s hypocrisy est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

Fatima Salman, 43, a social worker and a Muslim American from Detroit, Michigan says she is “definitely” voting for Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee challenging the re-election of United States President Donald Trump.

“I have three children and I worry about their future if Trump gets re-elected,” Salman says. “It’s a matter of our own existence and the future of this country as a whole.”

With early voting already well under way nationwide, there is evidence that in this election, Salman’s vote and that of other Muslim Americans, are well placed to be a significant factor in deciding the winner of the November 3 United States presidential election.

There are an estimated 3.45 million Muslims in the US – only about one percent of the country’s total population – but their concentrations in key swing and battleground states, such as Michigan, Florida, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, could make their vote especially impactful.

Women putting on “I Voted” stickers after casting their ballots for the state’s primary inside of a polling station in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, US [File: Lucas Jackson/Reuters]

The stakes are particularly high in Michigan, a state with 270,000 registered Muslim voters, says Mohamed Gula, organising director of Emgage, a Muslim American advocacy group. Hillary Clinton, in 2016, lost the state to Trump by less than one percentage point – a little over 10,000 votes.

“When it comes down to the value of the Muslim vote, we could easily swing the election,” Gula says.

Top issues for Muslim Americans, Gula says, include healthcare, education and criminal justice reform.

“Obviously, we will hear foreign policy issues being centred,” Gula says, “but a lot of the issues that we hear today, in regards to what has really impacted the Muslim community are some of the same issues that average Americans are also impacted by.”

By Jihan Abdalla – aljazeera.com

L’article Muslim American votes may carry outsize weight in US election est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.