.jpg)
By Dr Salim Ibrahim: Religion is meaningful to us in so far as it makes a positive difference in the way we live. It becomes irrelevant when it becomes a cause for inconvenience to the civilised way of life. The re-emergence of terror in the streets of Europe is another wakeup call for the Western…
By Dr. Kamal Sido: Hassan Rohani, President of the Republic of Iran, is acknowledged as a reformer. Many even believe he will open his country. But since his accession to office the number of executions and the amount of human rights abuses has instead increased. Back in August 2013, when Hassan Rohani was elected as…
By Dr Jan Best de Vries: Religion Catholicism and Islam keep watch over two kinds of believers, perpetrators and accomplices. This having been said, the Vatican, France, Nazi Germany, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Islamic State are not that bad any more and one should not protest too much against their crimes against humanity. The…
By Lana Khalid: Baha’is living in Sulaimani, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, fear a tarnished reputation following the arrest of Hamed Kamal Muhammad bin Haydara in Yemen since December 2013.Hamid Kamal Bin Hadara, 50, was detained by the National Army and taken to Sanaa for imprisonment. He has been accused of spying for Israel,…
By Dr Jan Best de Vries: Now and then a bewildered Muslim in West Asia appears on Dutch TV saying “IS is not Islam”. It is a statement like “Adolf Hitler who murdered six millions Jews could not be a member of the Roman Catholic Church”. But he was. From my country, which is strongly…
By Dr. Jan Best de Vries: Winter has arrived in Kurdistan and many babies born in the cold tents of the fugitives from the killers of the “Islamic State” will die. My bodyguard Azad Kardoi and I visited in Erbil a camp of 62 tents within a church compound and are sure that the inhabitants…
Dr. Jan Best de Vries: I am grateful that, as an outsider from Europe, in December 2014 I had the opportunity to relate in broad terms, to staff and students at the Mesopotamia Academy in Qamishlo, the history of the Kurds. When combining all the data from archaeology, history and linguistics at our disposal, one…
By Ahmet Abidin Ozbek: ‘Give them the hope or occasion of a massacre, they will follow you blindly’.E. M. Cioran Whilst the ISIS name is everywhere, most people have already forgotten the deeper crisis in Islam and Muslim society. Unfortunately, if we look closely at history, we can see that every religion (particularly Islam) creates more…
By Goran Abdulla Zangana MBChB, MPH, PhD (Candidate): In an unprecedented decision, the Ministry of Health (MoH) of the Iraq Kurdistan Region (IKR) decided to ban travels by pilgrims to Mecca to undertake the Umrah as a precautionary measure to avoid an outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome-Coronavirus (MERS-CoV)[i]. The MoH is also considering…
By Ahmet Abidin Ozbek: Turkey is one of those contradictory countries officially described as secular and democratic. However, the real picture is more complex. It is very difficult to describe a country as truly secular and democratic when it lacks a humanistic outlook. Bookmark on Delicious Recommend on Facebook Share on Linkedin Tweet about it Subscribe…
By Dr F R Hilmi: The biggest argument against the existence of God is the fact that we cannot see or sense him and what we know about religion’s God is based on blind faith and ancient tales we are warned against questioning or disbelieving or even asking for evidence to support. Then a man…
By Ava Homa: David Hoffman, the American Film Producer, Calls for Solidarity between the Kurds and Baha’is A stigmatized Jewish child who is bullied for a religion he has only inherited and has not chosen and/or understood, David Hoffman turns into an atheist at age 12. “A God who lets people be violent towards each…
By Ahmet Abidin Ozbek: Part 2 of 2 “If we don’t know the past we don’t understand the present and we cannot try to influence the future”.Orianna Fallaci For thousands of years we have tried to answer questions about our existence. Perhaps more than ideology, science, dialectics, and even nationality, religion has – from an…
By Abdulla Hawez: As it becomes clear that one major outcome of the region’s revolutions will be the empowerment of Islamists, the Arab Spring threatens to become a nightmare for the Middle East’s Christian minority. Christians across the Arab world are afraid that a change of regime – specifically one resulting in a theocracy –…
