Palestinian Summer Camps in Israel

Great stuff from CT on the tension and practical difficulties in the Holy Land here, from CT:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0716/p06s04-wome.html

Enjoy.

I am off to California tomorrow with the wife and w/o the kids--they are staying with grandparents, thanks be to God. Pray for a fruitful time as I speak at a conference in the San Diego area on, what else, Islam and Christianity.

Salam,

Abu Daoud

New Martyrs of Yemen

Christian expatriates in Yemen were left shaken in June after six Christian aid workers and three children were abducted while on a day trip.

Shepherds found the bodies of two German nurses and a South Korean teacher in a riverbed in Saada, a mountainous province near Saudi Arabia known for tensions between Shiite Houthi rebels and the government. Still missing at press time were a British engineer, a German doctor, his wife, and their three children all under age 5.

The group was working at a Saada hospital through Worldwide Services, a Dutch charity that places medical personnel in developing countries. The charity is reevaluating its presence in Yemen. [...]

From here.

AD Says: Yemen is a rough country, but one in great need of Christian witness and just plain old skill and knowledge. Please pray for Yemen:

-That the remaining Christians would be brave and courageous.
-That the MBB's would be hopeful and effective in their witness.
-That the Muslim population would see the good deeds of these Christians and see the light of the Gospel.

More on the fake prosperity of the UAE

(HT to Secret Dubai Diary)

These days, despite defiant protestations of resilience, no one seems to know when the sweet breeze will return. The UAE is still in the doldrums. For the first time since the seven Gulf statelets joined together as a union in 1971, people are beginning to mutter—rather quietly, for sure— whether there may be something amiss with the autocratic, opaque system that hitherto seemed to work so well behind closed doors. “Nobody really knows what any of the statistics are,” says a Western analyst. “We haven’t seen the half of it yet,” says a Western banker, referring to the debt and the possible defaults. It is notable that almost nobody in business or government is prepared to talk publicly. Cohorts of public-relations people surround the bigwigs and shield them from scrutiny.

From The Economist

See also a previous story HERE.

Pray for The Episcopal Church USA (TEC)

It almost seems like a waste of time to pray for The Episcopal Church (TEC), which is canonically my province of residence (kyrie eleison). Anyway, the General Convention which meets every three years is going on now in Anaheim, California.

Dozens of conservative parishes have left over the last few years, and a few conservative dioceses have left, all of this means there is almost no voice advocating the positions of traditional evangelicalism or anglo-catholicism. There is nothing to hold back the impulses of revisionism and pan-sexuality and heresey. It is a sad day, but the Convention is still not over and perhaps something will happen to salvage the situation as the main decisions regarding non-celibate gay bishops, same-sex 'marriage', and the blessing of same-sex unions, have yet to be made.

Meanwhile, what I do I expect? Our conwardly bishops will continue to waffle, wanting everything gay while also wanting to remain part of the Anglican Communion.

My only consolation is the precipitous decline of membership and attendance for TEC. The branch that bears no fruit will be cut off and thrown into the fire. Almajdulillah!

Abu Daoud on the Isle of Skye

That's me on the left. Got to recently visit the Scottish Highlands and it was a wonderful experience. Also made some great friends there and enjoyed hanging out with Nessie ;-)

Problems with Shari'a in the UK

From Brussels Journal, on the implications of Shari'a in the UK:

The disparity between English and sharia law was highlighted only a month later, as the House of Lords passed judgment in the case of a Lebanese woman who had claimed the right to remain in the UK with her son. An earlier Lebanese court decision, under sharia law, meant that, despite a history of abuse, her former husband would get automatic custody of the child when he turned seven.

Lord Hope of Craighead observed that under the sharia judgment, “[…] there is a real risk of a flagrant denial of their article 8 rights [of the European Convention on Human Rights] if the appellant and her child were to be returned to Lebanon.” Lord Bingham of Cornhill added, rather triumphantly, that her case was supported “[…] by JUSTICE and Liberty.”

Justice and liberty, Lord Cornhill appeared to say, are not supported by sharia. Not even in civil cases.

Comments on Iran by Abu Daoud

What is special is not that there are protests. Clearly the vote was rigged, but Ahmadinejad could have probably won in a fair vote. He really shot himself in the foot. I mean, he says he got 60%+. Absurd.

Here are the things that caught my attention--and unless you have been keeping up to date on the events in Iran this will make little sense.

1) The protest movement has lasted so long. I thought it would be over after a few days.

2) Important clerics have opposed the Ahmadinejad-Khameini group. Very surprising. I thought they would be cowed into silence.

And here is what is missing:

3) No one from among the security forces (internal intel., army, police) has sided with the protesters. Until this happens the movement will be very limited in its influence to actually change the country.

Sincerely,

Abu Daoud

Claude Geffre on culture and religion

"The relationship between religion and culture is extremely complex, and the Westerners who pride themselves on the autonomy of a culture said to be atheistic often forget that is still a post-Christian culture."

Claude Geffre in Many Mansions? p 96

Anton Wessels on Syncretism

“…there is no religion without syncretism and no Christianity without syncretism[.]”

--Anton Wessels

Amjad-Ali: The Umma as a state-nation

Charles Amjad-Ali suggests that much of the difficulty faced by Muslim thinking today is because “Islamic political theory developed during the heyday of such an Islamic state with multi-cultural, social, national, and tribal affiliations, they have had difficulties with the ‘modern’ concept of nation-state for their emphasis has always been on state-nations­, i.e. a single Muslim state encompassing the entire umma with many nations in it. […] So one of the greatest difficulties Islamic theorists face is how to deal among the Muslim states themselves as this falls outside the pale of their doctrinal structures” (Amjad-Ali 9).

Two great books

Have been reading two books recently, both quite challenging and have learned a great deal. It is very important, I think, to get beyond the evangelical discussions of contextualization because really, once you read a few of those essays, you feel like a dog chasing his tail. I suspect that evangelicalism just does not have the historical and ecclesiological resources to address these questions in a robust manner, but I could be wrong. On the other hand, I am grateful that evangelicals are the only ones doing evangelism on any significant level among Muslims. It is easy to critique evangelical missiology, but at least they are risking something by trying to do the work, more than one can say for the Orthodox or Catholics.

The two books are:

Cornille, Catherine ed. Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity. New York: Orbis 2002.

Amjad-Ali, Christine ed. Developing Christian Theology in the Context of Islam. Rawalpindi: Christian Study Center 1996.

Islamic forced marriage in the UK

How do you say 'not surprised' in Pashto? Just curious...Check out the article HERE. Here is an excerpt:

...government figures released today suggest the true scale of Britain's forced-marriage problem is only now beginning to emerge. It is estimated that between 5,000 and 8,000 cases of forced marriage occurred in Britain last year, according to the Department for Children, Schools, and Families.

Most are teenage girls from Britain's large Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Indian communities. They're married off, according to the report, to bond the young women to their community, keep clan promises, or as a way to provide a British visa for a foreign family member or friend.

The figures have delivered a fresh jolt to Britain's multicultural paradigm, which until recently handled reports of forced marriage and associated "honor crimes" as cultural issues, beyond the remit of the justice system [...]

Contextualization

"Careful work on contextualization grows in us appreciation both for how culturally relative some forms are and how transcultural the Christian gospel is."

--John Witvliet