A Somali migrant has admitted to setting two Norwegian churches on fire earlier this year, claiming that he committed the arson attacks as revenge for a burning of a copy of the Qur’an late last year.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has ordered that a second ancient Christian church be turned into a fully functioning mosque, just one month after a similar decision to convert Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia for Muslim worship.
Swedish police have intervened in plans by a street artist to burn a copy of the Quran outside a mosque in Malmö’s notorious Rosengård no-go area.
A local official in Atush, Xinjiang, confirmed to Radio Free Asia (RFA) in an interview published Thursday that Chinese officials had built a public toilet at the site of a demolished Uyghur mosque.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to withdraw his ambassador from Abu Dhabi on Friday as retribution for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) establishing diplomatic ties with Israel this week.
CAIRO — The woman accosted Yasmeen Samir as she swam with her family at a pool in a resort on the North Coast, a stretch of Mediterranean beaches reserved for Egypt’s upper echelons. The reason: Samir was wearing a burkini, a swimsuit worn by conservative Muslims to cover the entire body.
A judge has sentenced a musician in northern Nigeria’s majority-Muslim Kano state to death by hanging for blasphemy against Islam’s Muhammad, Nigeria’s Premium Times reported this week.
Three people were killed in the Indian city of Bengaluru on Tuesday night when riots broke out over a Facebook post that some Muslims denounced as offensive and blasphemous.
Thousands of women are trapped in “marital captivity” in the United Kingdom as the government has refused to make the registration of sharia marriages mandatory out of fear of appearing “Islamophobic”, a report has found.
A Qatari sociologist says “blasphemy” in Lebanon – including an anti-Islamic culture of gays, promiscuous women, and plastic surgery – is to blame for last week’s port explosion in Beirut.
Radical Muslims in Pakistan are praising a teenage boy who allegedly gunned down a U.S. citizen accused of blasphemy in court last month, hailing him as a “holy warrior” for the killing, Reuters reported on Sunday.
A court in Pakistan ruled on Tuesday that 14-year-old Christian girl Maira Shahbaz voluntarily converted to Islam and is legally married to an older Muslim man named Mohamad Nakash, even though Maira and her family say Nakash kidnapped her at gunpoint with two accomplices during the coronavirus lockdown in April.
A video recorded by a young male model inside a Chinese Uyghur detention facility in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region and published this week provides new insight into the country’s concentration camps for ethnic minorities.
A Muslim resident of the southern French city of Nice recorded himself slaughtering a sheep in his bathtub for the Islamic Eid al-Adha holiday and posted the video on social media.
Belgian authorities seized around 70 sheep in total in the provinces of Brabant and Hainaut, preventing the animals from being illegally slaughtered for the Islamic Eid al-Adha holiday.
The local government in Turin, Italy, has allowed Muslim groups to publicly celebrate an Islamic holiday while still restricting other gatherings due to the Wuhan coronavirus.
An American Muslim man on trial for blasphemy in northwestern Pakistan was shot dead in a courtroom Wednesday.
Mina (Saudi Arabia) — Muslim pilgrims took part Friday in the “stoning of the devil”, using sanitised pebbles in the last major ritual of the scaled-down hajj as Saudi authorities seek to prevent a coronavirus outbreak.
Saudi authorities arrested 936 people Thursday for allegedly trying to enter Islamic holy sites during the hajj pilgrimage “without prior authorization,” Saudi news outlet al-Arabiya reported.
The Hajj, Islam’s annual pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, began Wednesday with strict government imposed social distancing measures severely limiting attendance of the event — 1,000 pilgrims participated compared to last year’s 2.5 million.
A court in Egypt recently sentenced five female social media influencers to two years in jail each on charges of “violating public morals,” Al Jazeera reported on Monday.
CAIRO — An Egyptian court sentenced several young women to two years in prison Monday for posting “indecent” dance videos on TikTok in a fraught case that critics describe as a further crackdown on self-expression in the conservative society.
Islamist Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan confessed on Friday, attending the first Islamic prayers at the Hagia Sophia in 86 years, that converting the ancient Christian cathedral to a mosque was his childhood dream.
Thousands of Muslim faithful gathered outside the historic Hagia Sophia site in Istanbul on Friday ready for the first prayers since Turkish authorities ruled the building’s rich Christian heritage could be overturned and the building reconverted into a mosque.
Police in the United Kingdom are considering dropping the terms “Islamist terrorism” and “jihadis” out of fearing to appear Islamophobic, in the latest politically correct push in British institutions. British police are reportedly looking to use the Doublespeak-Esque terms such
Joe Biden told a Muslim group on Monday he wishes schools would teach more about the “Islamic faith.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited the Hagia Sophia on Sunday shortly before the newly reconverted mosque opens to Muslim prayer on Friday, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
This year’s hajj, which has been scaled back dramatically to include only around 1,000 Muslim pilgrims as Saudi Arabia battles a coronavirus surge, will begin on July 29, authorities said Monday.
A majority of Greeks have expressed dissatisfaction with the international response to the Turkish regime announcing it would be converting the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.
Turkey’s Culture and Tourism Ministry says it is setting up “a new museum” to house the Hagia Sophia’s “portable icons and Holy relics” indicating that the former cathedral’s Christian relics and iconography will be removed from the site, the Greek City Times reported Friday.
Iran’s Justice Minister for Human Rights said that people who knowingly spread coronavirus should be sentenced to death, based on the Islamic law precept of an eye for an eye, Radio Farda reported on Tuesday.
Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet) announced in a Tuesday statement that it would cover up images of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ in the Hagia Sophia, one of the holiest sites in Christianity, now that it has been converted into a mosque.
At least 356 Nigerian soldiers fighting Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria have reportedly requested retirement citing “loss of interest,” Sahara Reporters revealed on Sunday.
Boston Celtics star Enes Kanter condemned the conversion of the Hagia Sophia, once one of the most important Christian cathedrals in the world, in an interview Sunday, accusing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of converting what was officially a museum in a desperate bid to win votes.
EU foreign ministers on Monday criticized Turkey for changing the status of Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque.
A report compiled by members of the French Senate has detailed the spread of political Islam across France and listed 44 proposals to combat radical Islamist ideology.
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) – The interim secretary-general of the World Council of Churches has written to Turkey’s president expressing his “grief and dismay” over Turkey’s decision to change the status of Istanbul’s landmark Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque.
When four Muslim suicide bombers blew themselves up during the infamous 7/7 atrocities of 2005, 52 people died and more than 700 were injured.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Saudi Arabia has issued guidelines for about 1,000 pilgrims who will be allowed to perform the hajj pilgrimage in Mecca later this month, an experience that will be unlike any before because of the coronavirus pandemic.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) revealed Wednesday that it had seized a shipment in Newark, NJ, containing $800,000 worth of human hair originating in Xinjiang, China, where the Communist Party maintains concentration camps.
