Free Republic

ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani clerical panel has endorsed polygamy, saying a woman cannot object if her husband remarries. The body that advices the government on religious affairs has long been condemned for its retrograde and misogynist outlook. "A woman cannot demand a divorce over a second, third or fourth marriage of her husband. Islam has given a woman right to separate from her husband, but another marriage could not be a valid ground for doing so," local media reported Islamic Council of Ideology (CII) chairman Shah Ahmed Sheerani as saying. He observed the Muslim Divorce Act, 1939, was against the Sharia....

Islamic State militants have publicly crucified and murdered a teenager they accused of taking photographs of the terror group's headquarters in Syria. Sickening images purportedly taken in the central square of the extremists' de facto capital Raqqa show the battered and bloodstained body of an unnamed 17-year-old boy strapped to a cross. A handwritten placard hangs around the teenager's neck, accusing him of 'apostasy' - the abandonment of his religion - and says he had been crucified for three days after being caught receiving 500 Turkish lira for every photograph he took of an Islamic State military base. The image...

Really? Is there anything that doesn’t provoke Muslims?Dogophobia hits moderate Muslim Malaysia as a dog petting event stirs up controversy. Why? Because Mohammed hated dogs and ordered them to be killed.Also Muslims consider dogs and women to be unclean. And it’s hard to get a dog to wear a Burqa. It’s another episode in the long-running Islam Show where everyone is crazy. (The Religion of Peace) The “I Want To Touch A Dog” event should not have been held in Muslim-majority Malaysia as viral images of Muslims petting dogs have caused great uneasiness and public discomfort, an Utusan columnist claimed...

Every few years the debate over reforming Islam bubbles up from the depths of a culture that largely censors any suggestion that Islam needs reforming.

No doubt many of my readers know about the encounter about Islam [1] between Ben Affleck, the Hollywood actor, and Sam Harris, the “New Atheist” writer and neuroscientist, on Bill Maher’s show. I do not know Ben Affleck’s work as an actor, so I don’t know whether he is commonly cast in comic roles. He was pretty funny, in a slightly deranged sort of way, on Bill Maher’s show, but perhaps that is his usual modus operandi. I propose to leave the substance — if “substance” is the correct word — of Mr. Affleck’s effusions to one side. His performance...

The death sentence of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman and mother of five children, was upheld by the Lahore High Court in Pakistan on Thursday. Bibi has been convicted of blasphemy for drinking from the same bowl of water as Muslims and making derogatory comments about the prophet Muhammad. "The case against Asia Bibi is a great example of how Christians and other religious minorities are abused in Pakistan by fundamentalists wielding the controversial blasphemy laws. The blasphemy laws were originally written to protect against religious intolerance in Pakistan, but the law has warped into a tool used by extremists...

Meanwhile, even as – as some people claim – there are within the Church those who wish to bring her down. There are – as is patently clear to anyone with a brain – there are outside the Church those who wish to bring her down.Rather, chop off her head.I saw this at Tempi (Italian HERE): La bandiera nera sventola sull’Obelisco di San Pietro: la rivista dello Stato islamico festeggia la “crociata fallita”The black flag waves over the Obelisk of St. Peter: the magazine of the Islamic State celebrates the “failed crusade” The “crociata” in this case refers to the...

The deplorable state of religious freedom in the Islamic world came to the fore in May when news of the arrest, imprisonment, and death sentencing of a pregnant Christian wife and mother on the accusation that she had left Islam for Christianity reached the world. On May 15, Meriam Ibrahim of Sudan was sentenced to flogging followed by hanging for apostasy after she repeatedly refused to convert to Islam.

The four-part series is intelligent, balanced, and features good production values As a professor with an academic specialization in the crusades, I'd like to think that I would be well informed about the existence of a new documentary series on those medieval campaigns (especially when the program features several professors from the institution where I did my graduate degrees). However, if it was not for a few email alerts from my parents earlier this week, I would have been completely unaware of the four-part documentary series, “The Crusades,” that EWTN has been showing over the last several nights. The last...

Bill Donohue comments on apologists for Muslim violence:In the wake of an enfeebled attempt by Ben Affleck, Rosie O’Donnell, and Whoopi Goldberg—all Catholic bashers—rising to the defense of Muslims accused of barbarism, we now have the spectacle of Nicholas Kristof, a relentless Catholic critic, saying in the New York Times that Muslims had nothing to do with any bloodbaths in the 20th century.During and after World War I, Muslims murdered 1.5 million Christian Armenians out of a total population of 2 million. In 1971, 2.5 million Hindus were murdered by Muslims in E. Pakistan. Don’t these 4 million innocent men,...

(CNSNews.com) – The atmosphere in the land’s highest court on Tuesday took on a lighter note during oral arguments over a prisoner’s petition to justices over his right to grow a half-inch beard in observance of his Muslim faith. An attorney arguing on behalf of the Arkansas maximum security prison where Gregory Holt, or Abdul Maalik Muhammad, is serving a life sentence for slitting his girlfriend’s throat, said beards are forbidden for security reasons. At issue for the court is whether that rule violates the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act passed by Congress and signed into law in...

(CNSNews.com) – “Christians must do everything within their powers to protect their lives from being snuffed off by Satanist-driven Islamic organizations,” Bishop Joseph Bagobiri, the Roman Catholic head of Nigeria’s Kafanchan Diocese, said Sunday, according to Nigeria's Vanguard newspaper. Bishop Bagobiri also noted, according to the Vanguard, that Christians have a "grave duty" to use “moderate and proportionate force” to defend their families against Islamic groups such as Boko Haram, which is responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians since 2009. Boko Haram became internationally known after it staged a mass kidnapping of more than 250 Nigerian schoolgirls in...

Prominent Anglican Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali has said that the Catholic Church must use its global power to protect Christians threatened by Islamic militancy and secularism. In a talk to the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham at St Patrick’s Church in Soho Square last Thursday the former Bishop of Rochester said the Church potentially had “a great future and a huge opportunity” in the emerging world order and that it now had allies in upholding orthodoxy, even in unexpected quarters. Speaking on the subject of “A Global Christianity in the Making”, he said that how effective the Church would...

(Martin Rhonheimer, a brave Christian. More of them, please!) Translation via 10news. For more translation, newsletter and support: 10news.dk. Where is the border between Islam and Islamism? The media says that the two are different as night and day; Islam is a religion of peace, and the Islamists have stolen the name. Others believe that Islamism represents the traditional, pure Islam, true to the Koran. This latter view is advanced, remarkably enough, by a theologian Martin Rhonheimer from a university endorsed by the Pope. He is a professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome and wrote...

Is Islam a destructive force in the world?

The Huffington Post interviewed the chief Imam of a notorious northern Virginia mosque who argued that Muslims should not be obligated to criticize the Islamic State. Current Dar Al-Hijrah Imam Johari Abdul-Malik said in an interview with the Huffington Post that “it sounded like they were apologizing for something they haven’t done, like they were running for cover.” The Imam’s frustrations and grievances would be perfectly understandable were his mosque not associated with a plethora of Islamic terrorists. Nowhere in the Huffington Post piece does it mention that Dar Al-Hijrah is the mosque with arguably the most convicted terrorists associated...

In my last article, I explained the Judeo-Christian understanding of the Antichrist, and that he will somehow be intertwined with Israel, and more specifically, Jerusalem.Because Islam borrowed a great deal from Judaism and Christianity, it is not surprising that they too have a figure with a messianic complex—the Mahdi, or the Guided One.Muslims see the Mahdi as a savior who will lead a global revolution and establish a worldwide Islamic empire. The Mahdi will rule the earth as the final Caliph of Islam (a caliph is both a political ruler and a spiritual representative of Allah on earth).Muslims revere Jesus...

Many people—religious and non-religious—are asking questions about a word they hear the media use when referring to ISIS and other Islamist jihadists. That word is apocalyptic, which is used when specifically referring to the fatalism of Islamists. People wonder, why do so many Muslims (both Sunni and Shiite) operate with such an “apocalyptic,” end-of-world mindset?Our secular society, however, coupled with the media’s carelessness, is bandying about words like apocalyptic without using them properly and without explanation. That creates a great deal of confusion for some, many of which just throw up their hands in resignation and say, “I don’t understand...

Why has it become so maddeningly difficult to make judgments about other people? About the actions especially of people who want to kill us? Indeed, whose stated aim is to bring the Great Satan (i.e., America) to its knees, and then to cut off its collective head?

Islamic State fighters stand guard at a checkpoint in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul (CNS) When Christian villagers from the Iraqi town of Caramles fled advancing IS forces, 80-year-old Victoria was among a dozen or so unable to leave. The widow, a Chaldean Catholic, knew nothing about the sudden evacuation that had suddenly emptied this ancient village she had known for so long. Next morning she went to church – St Addai’s – as she did every day. She found the place locked; the streets deserted. She knew IS had come.We met Victoria on our first evening in Erbil...