IslamicLawBlog

Ground Zero's Slave Graves By Jen Phillips | Wed Aug. 25, 2010 4:32 PM PDT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The outrage about the "ground zero mosque" has turned very ugly, as this video [1] of this recent protest shows. People are calling Mohammed a pig. A New York City cab driver was stabbed today [2] after his passenger asked him if he was Muslim. But I find the righteous outrage of those contending the former World Trade Center site is "hallowed ground" amusing, because they have no idea just how right they are. Before the World Trade Center was even designed (with Islamic architectural elements [3], incidentally), the ground was indeed sacrosanct: The bones of some 20,000 African slaves are buried 25 feet below Lower Manhattan. As at least 10 percent [4] of West African slaves in America were Muslims, it's not out of bounds to extrapolate that ground zero itself was built on the bones of at least a few Mus...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Volume 27 - Issue 10 :: May. 08-21, 2010 INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE from the publishers of THE HINDU • Contents -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Act of Transition ANITA JOSHUA in Islamabad A YEAR and a half after he negotiated his way into Aiwan-e-Sadar (the President’s House) from Zardari House as the “custodian” of the Bhutto legacy, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has made his own place in the nation’s tumultuous political history – courtesy the 18th Amendment, which restores parliamentary democracy and the federal structure envisaged by the 1973 Constitution. A Pakistan President surrendering power caught the imagination of the domestic and international media as well as the public to such an extent that the Constitutional Reforms package – which has suggested close to 100 amendments as part of a mega exercise to overhaul the country’s structure ...

PHILADELPHIA: Federal agents detained and interrogated a US college student at the Philadelphia airport simply because we was carrying a set of English-Arabic flashcards, a lawsuit alleged on Wednesday. The American Civil Liberties Union said it filed the suit on behalf Nicholas George, 22, a language student at Pomona College in California who was held at Philadelphia International Airport for nearly five hours in August 2009. George, a US citizen from the Philadelphia suburb of Wyncote, was on his way back to college when airport security officers found him carrying the flashcards, each of which had an English word on one side and its Arabic equivalent on the other, the ACLU said. The US Transportation Security Administration questioned him, and a TSA supervisor asked him how he felt about the Sept. 11 attacks, whether he knew “who did 9/11,” and whether he knew what language Osama bin Laden spoke, the ACLU said. He was handcuffed and left in a locked cell for two hours before being ...

Challenging the culture of denial From John McHugo From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949, Victor Kattan Pluto Press, London, 2009, £22.99 ISBN: 9780745325781 A legal historian cannot bring a murder victim back to life, but what they write may have a powerful impact on how attitudes change or unresolved disputes are reassessed. This is particularly so when (as in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute) the issues are emotive and the parties have a desperate need to believe that their positions rest on firm moral foundations. In From Coexistence to Conquest, Victor Kattan takes international law as his standpoint from which to examine the issues of the Palestine problem up to the 1949 armistices and the failure to resolve the dispute at that time. The book includes chapters on the relationship between Zionism, colonialism and anti-Semitism, the scramble for the Ottoman Empire (which Kattan sees as essentially part of the same pro...

A Casualty of US Foreign Policy The United States has adopted an invasive foreign policy that violates the sovereignty of many Muslim nations. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter promulgates: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” Territorial integrity and political independence are the principles of national sovereignty -- key principles of the UN Charter and post-colonial international law – which empower nations to freely determine their political, social, economic, and religious institutions, without external coercion, diplomatic pressure, war threats, and economic sanctions. Philosophically, these principles respect human diversity and presume that no system, including liberal democracy, can be the singular model for all nations. The principles caution against any mindless importation...