Religious Extremism

Pakistan Widening Its Use of Blasphemy Laws for Censorship

December 10, 2014

Human rights experts have detailed how Pakistan's notorious blasphemy laws, which criminalize insults of Islam's prophet and of Islam, have long been used to justify state impunity and societal violence against the country's religious minorities and economically disenfranchised strata, but a high-profile police investigation of a superstar Muslim singer suggests that blasphemy laws are beginning to be applied more broadly as a censorship tool.
Saudi Arabia and IS Push Alternative Versions of Radical Islamism

December 10, 2014

The proclamation of a transnational caliphate by The Islamic State (“IS”) represents a direct challenge to Saudi Arabia's efforts to claim global primacy as the purveyor of the definitive pan-Islamist ideology, and recent IS-sponsored attacks inside Saudi Arabia point to the growing confrontation between two authoritarian ideologies operating in the name of Islam.
UK Legal Group Steps Back from Sharia Practice Rules

December 04, 2014

The United Kingdom (U.K.) Law Society, an independent regulatory and standards association for U.K. attorneys, has withdrawn its formal practice note on "sharia succession rules," following a reexamination of the note prompted by criticism from other legal professional societies, which pointed out that sharia inheritance practices discriminate along gender, faith, and age lines.
Saudi Arabia Facing Blowback from Radical Islamist Sectarianism

December 03, 2014

Saudi Arabia's government has had a longstanding policy of supporting radical Sunni Islamists in characterizing Shiites as heretical Muslims who must be repressed, but rising incidents of Sunni-Shiite violence and social unrest inside the Kingdom suggests that playing the sectarian card is causing dangerous blowback.
Turkish Prime Minister Rewriting American History for Islamist Audiences

November 19, 2014

Turkey's Islamist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan expanded the pretensions of global Islamists to shaping world historical events, telling a recent summit of Latin American Muslim leaders that Muslim explorers discovered the Americas well before Columbus's arrival in the New World.
North America Gets First Islamic Art Museum in Canada

November 12, 2014

The politics of art are on full display in North America's first Muslim art museum, recently opened in Canada and funded entirely by the internationally renowned Agha Khan Foundation, whose leader represents an offshoot of Shiite Islam and who identifies the museum's mission as showing a kinder, gentler version of Islam that rejects the violent extremism of global Islamism.
Sharia Courts and Islamists Gaining Ground in Malaysia

November 12, 2014

The growing influence of sharia courts, supporting forced conversions to Islam of minors and child abductions by Muslim parents from non-Muslim parents, reflects the country's divided religious-civil judicial system and the strong leverage of Islamist groups in Malaysia's government.
Pakistan's Blasphemy Laws Generate Mob Violence in Name of Islam

November 05, 2014

A Christian couple in Pakistan was beaten and burned to death by a Muslim mob who accused the couple of Koran desecration, yet another incident reflecting the climate of extreme societal impunity generated by the country's Islamist blasphemy laws.
Extremist Islamism Gains Ground in Pakistan Textbook Changes

October 31, 2014

Education remains the battleground for struggles between extremist Islamists and their opponent in Pakistan, evidenced by public outcry over provincial government officials' announcement to change school textbooks in geography, history, and science to reflect Islamic ideas about jihad, blasphemy, and gender.
Saudi Islamism Used by Judiciary to Silence Free Speech

October 29, 2014

A court in Saudi Arabia sentenced three lawyers to extended imprisonment for criticizing judicial corruption and bias, only days after the country's top Muslim cleric condemned social media as "the source of all evil and devastation."