Free Republic

This is a tragic story, but child marriage is routine in the Muslim world. Islamic immigration means that little girls in Australia, America and through the West will be subject to Islamic norms.No amount of laws criminalizing child marriage can change that. Only immigration laws can. An Australian girl who was kidnapped, beaten and married off to her older cousin by her fatherÂ’s family in Syria at the age of 13 has spoken out about her horrific five-year ordeal for the first time.Ms Farrah, who grew up living in SydneyÂ’s southwest and is the daughter of a Syrian Muslim and...

A Catholic church in St. Paul, Minnesota, that closed last year has reopened its doors as a mosque. The 127-year-old Church of St. John closed in 2013 when it merged with another church due to declining membership. Last Friday the building reopened as Darul-Uloom Islamic Center. "There are a lot of East Africans in the area, and we want to give them a place to worship, a place to be educated, a community space," center spokesman Feisal M. Elmi told The Associated Press.According to a Pioneer Press story detailing the church's closure last year, "St. John once had 1,400 members. It...

Caliphate ("succession" in Arabic) is an institution first created in the 7th century after the death of the prophet Muhammad. Now revived by the jihadists of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis), this old-new political-religious entity has been given its own hashtag, #CaliphateRestored – a potent weapon in a digital propaganda war. Isis has shown itself to be a slick media operator in addition to its battlefield successes in Syria and Iraq. Other memorable hashtags –#SykesPicotOver and #BringbackmyHumvees – have encapsulated its achievements in erasing "artificial" colonial borders and humiliating both the US and Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's...

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — One of the oldest Catholic churches in St. Paul had to close down because of a dwindling congregation, but it's been given new life as an Islamic community center. The Church of St. John parish, built in 1886, closed in 2013. It reopened Friday as the Darul-Uloom Islamic Center, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported (http://bit.ly/1z0o5In ). "There are a lot of East Africans in the area, and we want to give them a place to worship, a place to be educated, a community space," center spokesman Feisal M. Elmi said. The former church held...

Reeling from regional developments and disillusioned with the West, some Iraqi Christians are looking to Russia for support.After a decade of church bombings, targeted killings, and anti-Christian workplace discrimination, Ramy Youssef has finally tired of Iraq’s halting progress and is intent on emigrating. “I don’t want to leave. I don’t want these terrorists to do what no one’s ever done before: push Assyrians out of our historic homeland, but I can’t work like this,” said the fresh-faced IT technician, his voice rising, as he sipped tea in his cousin’s Erbil liquor store a month after death threats forced him to...

The Persian Gulf island has had a Christian presence for over a centuryBahrain, the small island country nestled between Qatar and Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf, will gain a Catholic cathedral, a step some see as an increased interest in Christianity in the heart of the Islamic world. King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa donated land for the project recently — the only church he has done so for, Northern Arabia vicar Bishop Camillo Ballin told Real Clear Religion, though Bahrain's cathedral is not the first church that the country's rulers have supported. "The king has a special appreciation...

>On June 8, 2014 — Pentecost Sunday — the Vatican hosted an “interfaith event” that included prayers by Christian priests, a Jewish rabbi, and a Muslim imam. The occasion was well-publicized in advance by the Holy See as a “pause in politics” that would promote peace between the Israel and the Palestinians. During his visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority the previous month, Pope Francis had invited Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to attend the event. Both leaders accepted the invitation, and sat with the Pope while prayers were said and chanted in the...

Umno must emulate the bravery of a Middle Eastern militant group that defeated an Iraqi force outnumbering it nearly 30 to one if the Malay nationalist party is to survive, Datuk Seri Najib Razak said yesterday. The Umno president and prime minister was listing virtues that were needed to allow the Malay nationalist party to continue in power, during a dinner to commemorate the 20th anniversary of its Cheras branch yesterday. “For example, when someone dares to fight to their death, they can even defeat a much bigger team. “As proof — whether we agree or not is another matter...

My assessment of recent events in the Muslim world related to end times prophesies and the nation of Israel. Each Christian tries to see his generation and it's comparison to end times prophesies. Since my childhood, the writings of Hal Lindsay seemed to rule in Christian thought, the teachings of the rapture and the teachings of the Soviet Union invading Israel in the end times along with an Islamic invasion by Egypt, Syria, Iran, Ethiopia and Libya. The presence of Israel in the land was the final identifier for most Christians that the end times are upon us, so all...

My dear friend Ali Sina mentioned in his most recent article that a Muslim professor, Hossein Askari, believes that Western nations lead the World in “Islamic values” and that most Muslim nations practice the least Islamic values. I have heard such nonsense before from some Muslims, some of whom were my relatives. I will never forget the strange look on my Christian American husband’s face when an elderly Muslim man visiting from Egypt told him: “You are such a fine young man, you have the character of a true Muslim.” It is not unusual for Muslims to describe non-Muslims whom...

Malaysia's highest court on Monday rejected a challenge to a ban that in effect prohibits non-Muslims from referring to God as Allah. That ban has been in place since 2007 and, despite a series of appeals by the Catholic Church, will now remain. Malay-speaking Chrisians have long used the word "Allah" to signify God; the word entered the Malay language in the medieval era with the arrival of Arabic-speaking merchants. But in Malaysia's complex, fragmented social landscape, historic realities often rub up against modern politics. Malaysian authorities pursuing the case say that Christian usage of the term presents a dangerous...

Catholic bishops from Iraq are meeting this week to come up with a “rescue plan” amid growing fears that the ISIS Islamist attacks have put Christianity in danger of extinction from the country. The meeting of the Chaldean hierarchy, which starts today, comes after the military success of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) prompted yet another wave of displacement within a country which has already seen a dramatic decline in the Christian population over the past decade. Speaking to Catholic charity, Aid to the Church in Need, Chaldean Auxiliary Bishop Saad Sirop of Baghdad said that...

Islam's holy book is filled with intolerant, aggressive language that calls directly for violence against Christians Islam’s persecution of Christianity has reached a grotesque crescendo in the past few months. Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan, Egypt—the list goes on and horribly on. There is much that can be said—and I will not refrain from saying it—but if there is to be honest debate and discussion about the issue we have to admit what the Quran, the holy text of Islam, states about Muslim attitudes toward Christians. In a previous column I briefly mentioned one or two Quranic references to followers of Jesus,...

A project named "The House of One," looking to create the world's first ever church, mosque and synagogue in Berlin, Germany, where people of different faiths can worship under one roof, is currently raising donations. "Under one roof: one synagogue, one mosque, one church. We want to use these rooms for our own traditions and prayers. And together we want to use the room in the middle for dialogue and discussion and also for people without faith," explained Pastor Gregor Hohberg, a Protestant parish priest, according to a BBC News report. "Berlin is a city where people come together from...

THE Islamic call to prayer will be recited daily through loudspeakers at ­Scotland's ­largest mosque during the Commonwealth Games. Representatives from ­Glasgow Central Mosque have been given the go-ahead by ­Glasgow City Council to broadcast the two-minute call - known as the adhan - every evening, with the Games coinciding with Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting. The mosque in the Gorbals is just a short distance from the athletes' village and a number of the 72 ­countries taking part in the Games are Muslim or have a significant Muslim population. An estimated 400 athletes and their supporters will...

Captain Firaz Jacob knows he may well be mounting a last stand at the frontiers of the Christian settlement of Bartella on the outskirts of Mosul. Less than a mile down the road are the jihadists of Isis, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, and the portly, middle-aged Mr Jacob is aware that his home-grown militia are outnumbered.

Muslims in Nineveh, Iraq, have ordered Christians to keep their churches closed, and told them that if they open their churches, that they will burn them down.According to a native Iraqi pastor, named Majeed, described this destruction of Christian liberty: That they are not allowed to open their churches. And even if they open them they will burn the churches… And also the Christians have been requested — been asked to pay the tax [dhimmi, the tax for non-Muslims under Islamic rule]. …If not, they can leave Nineveh… And if they don’t leave and don’t pay the tax, they should...

That’s what everyone wanted to know about the notorious 18½-minute gap in Richard Nixon’s Watergate tape, for which Rosemary Woods eventually took the fall. Now it appears that something similar happened with the Vatican’s tape of the interfaith prayers-for-peace from last Sunday, giving us even more reason to dub this controversy “Imamgate”. As we reported in last night’s post about the imam’s prayer at the Vatican, there seems to be nothing controversial in the chanted Arabic in the prayer and that spoken in his subsequent remarks. However, a reader and commenter named ritamalik — who is a former Muslim and...

What Did the Imam Really Say? Posted on 13 June 2014 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf You probably know that, during the prayer for peace event in the garden’s behind St. Peter’s basilica, held by Pope Francis with the leaders of Israel, Palestinians and also the Ecumenical Patriarch, one of the invited guests, an Imam, reportedly prayed for Allah to grant victory over infidels.“No, he didn’t!”, say some.  ”Yes, he did!”, say others.I read at Gates of Vienna: In his own words in the end he asked god to assist those in the state of weakness. He said intasar al mustaDaafin fil ArD...

Mosul, Iraq’s second city, is now free of Christians for the first time in 1,800 yearsWar in Iraq has returned with dramatic speed, with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, a group extreme even by jihadi standards, having taken Mosul. Just 100 kilometres from Baghdad, ISIS also threatens the major city of Kirkuk and so bringing the Kurds into a wider war. Aid to the Church in Need is reporting that Mosul’s Christian population, which had declined from 30,000 to 3,000 in the years following the 2003 US invasion, is now down to virtually nothing. They fled, along...