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Search Results: qur'an

  • RELIGION

    Christianity tells stories; Islam finds designs

    • Michael McGirr
    • 31 October 2018
    21 Comments

    My year ten class studies Islam, one of the most formative influences in the world that my students will inhabit and hopefully improve. I have a profound respect for Islam. Westerners often fail to acknowledge the debt they owe to Islam, a tradition that had a huge role in bringing Europe through the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance.

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  • RELIGION

    What religions really say about suicide

    • Rachel Woodlock
    • 15 June 2018
    14 Comments

    Amid the shock and grief for Anthony Bourdain's death, one blue-tick Twitterer attempted to capture five minutes of shameful fame, declaring that religious people believe hell or purgatory is his afterworld destination. While all the great religious traditions generally proscribe suicide, they also contain nuanced views of the suicide's fate.

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  • RELIGION

    Australia's gay Muslims face a double bind

    • Rachel Woodlock
    • 18 January 2018
    9 Comments

    Nur Warsame hopes to open a gay-friendly mosque, quite a feat, in a country where mosque applications often face fierce resistance from non-Muslim locals. Gay Muslims are mostly rejected by the Muslim community for being gay and stigmatised by the wider community for being Muslim. Many cannot reconcile the two identities.

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  • RELIGION

    Pondering Palestine at a Tokyo Christmas Mass

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 14 December 2017
    4 Comments

    Last year I spent Christmas at St Andrew's. There was incense, holy communion and a whole heap of stuff that would horrify many Sydney Anglicans. Which is their bad luck because this St Andrew's was the Cathedral Church of the Tokyo Diocese of the Nippon Sei Ko Kai. I doubt Henry VIII imagined a diocese with a name like that!

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Ramadan: the fast and the flatulent

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 29 May 2017
    12 Comments

    You need not believe everything you read in the Herald Sun or an ISIS press release. Islam isn't just about armed jihad and violence against infant genitalia. Islam does have a spiritual side, and Ramadan is inherently spiritual, full of prayer and fasting and hardly any horizontal bedtime action. The theory behind all this deprivation is that if you're hungry and thirsty and sex-deprived between sunrise and sunset for an entire month, you'll gain a spiritual high that should last you the rest of the year.

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  • RELIGION

    Sheikh Fehmi talked me out of going to war

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 04 October 2016
    11 Comments

    Fehmi Naji El-Imam, the former Grand Mufti of Australia who died last month, taught us at a time when we had no internet and books on Islam were limited. Politicised religion was all the craze. In Afghanistan, a coalition of local militias and foreign fighters, the Mujahideen, were receiving support from Western leaders. Conservative politicians praised them for taking on those nasty Soviet Communists. It was easy to be carried away, to have one's faith shaped by overseas events. I almost did.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Husic feels the chill of Australia's racist winter

    • Ellena Savage
    • 05 July 2013
    11 Comments

    The media response to the racial abuse Ed Husic suffered after the Qur'an affair in Parliament was as troubling as the abuse itself. Labor MP Stephen Jones called Husic an immigration success story. I wonder what an immigration disaster story would look like. Perhaps the British-descendent bullies who spat on a 14-year-old, headscarved girl in 2004.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Farewell to the concierge of Pitt Street

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 08 August 2012
    24 Comments

    Yassin made sure the bins were out for the garbage collectors, and that people had parking tickets on their cars in case the rangers passed by. He looked after the area so well that we nicknamed him 'the concierge'. Last Monday a security guard found him lying unconscious and without a pulse.

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  • MEDIA

    'Perverted' Sharia slaps artistic freedom

    • Ellena Savage
    • 14 October 2011
    3 Comments

    Marzieh Vafamehr, the Iranian actor awaiting corporal punishment in Iran for acting in a subversive Australian film, is the victim of a legal system that has abandoned any pretence to public interest. I'm drawn to this case as I, too, am a young woman forging my own way in the arts.

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  • RELIGION

    Vindicating Islam

    • Herman Roborgh
    • 30 March 2011
    9 Comments

    Two political leaders in Pakistan were murdered for speaking out against blasphemy laws that had been used to oppress religious minorities. Disturbingly, many Muslim intellectuals stayed silent regarding this injustice. Why were they so defensive?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A Muslim's view of Jesus the refugee

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 22 December 2010
    17 Comments

    Jesus was born into a family of internal refugees. His mother had to seek refuge, fleeing Herod's nasty dictatorship. It's uncertain whether she used the services of satanic people smugglers.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Cat Stevens' call to prayer

    • Anne Doyle
    • 24 June 2010
    17 Comments

    In 1975, during a near death experience, Cat Stevens called out to God. 'The moment I became a Muslim I found peace,' says the man now known as Yusuf Islam. He appears, solitary at the microphone, and begins an older man's rendition of a younger man's songs.

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