Syrian uprising

[retro]

The National Organisation for Human Rights said that in total 136 people had been killed in Hama and three other towns. Activists described a massacre after armoured units ended a month-long siege to smash through makeshift barricades around the city just after dawn on the eve of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

International media are still largely banned from Syria but citizen journalists ensured that the scale and brutality of the crackdown was visible to the outside world. Video clips posed on YouTube showed unarmed civilians taking cover from shelling and heavy machine-gun fire as hospitals struggled to cope with 200 casualties by mid-morning.

Bodies lay scattered on the streets, residents reported. "They started shooting with heavy machine guns at civilians, at the young men protecting the barricades," Omar Habal, a local activist, told the Guardian.

Syria, with a population of 23 million, is experiencing the bloodiest days yet of the Arab spring, which began with the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Assad, once hailed as a modernising reformist, has ruled since 2000.

Syria: 100 die in crackdown as Assad sends in his tanks | World news | The Guardian

[unknownprince]

These Muslim uprisings are changing the shape of the middle east, getting rid of dictators backed by the West.

These masses converge on the Friday prayer as they place to mark their rallying point.

Truly, Islam is great.

This Assad gave and imposed secularism on them, and now they are fed up with him and it.

[retro]

These Muslim uprisings are changing the shape of the middle east, getting rid of dictators backed by the West.

These masses converge on the Friday prayer as they place to mark their rallying point.

Truly, Islam is great.

This Assad gave and imposed secularism on them, and now they are fed up with him and it.

Syria may be a Sunni state. However it is a Iranian/Russian client and Assad isn't a Western puppet. What is more, the Arab spring isn't a Islamist uprising and the people of the region are calling for far greater representation.

[unknownprince]

There is a reason you hear "Allah hu Akbar" at these protests, and it has nothing to do with democracy or secularism.

There is a reason why Fridays are so important to these protests, and that is because of the Friday prayer, not a Britney Spears concert.

Its a movement against un-Islamic backed puppets (whether they serve the West as in Hosni Mubarak or Russia as in Assad).

[unknownprince]

Islamism And The Arab Spring: An Interview With Tariq Ramadan


Professor Tariq Ramadan discusses the misconceptions of Islamism and its role in the Arab Spring.
Article | 15 April 2011 - 6:30pm | By James Maxwell
Share |

Tariq Ramadan

If anyone can shed light on the role played by political Islam in the wave of democratic revolutions that have swept the Middle East these past three months, it is Tariq Ramadan. The 48-year-old is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the son of Saeed Ramadan, its delegate to the United States in the 1940s and 50s. Having received an intensive one-on-one education in classical Islamic scholarship at the renowned Al-Azhar University in Cairo, he is also currently Professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford University.
As one of the world's foremost public intellectuals, Ramadan has spent the last decade and a half trying to educate European and American audiences in the complex reality of Islamism, with its many stripes, shades and nuances, and about the relationship between religion and politics in the Muslim world more generally.
Although neo-conservative critics accuse him of harbouring extremist sympathies, he dismisses allegations of ‘doublespeak’ and ‘stealth jihadism’ as yet more evidence of how Western attitudes towards the Islamic ‘other’ are becoming increasingly crude and simplistic.

True to form, the first thing he tells me when we meet at the Mitchell Library in central Glasgow is that, contrary to widespread belief, Islamism is not a monolithic phenomenon. “You have leftist Islamists and you have rightists”, he says, with the thick continental inflection that betrays his upbringing in Geneva, the city to which his father fled following Nasser’s anti-dissident crackdown.

“There are Islamists who have no problem with the capitalist order and Islamists who are socialist. What we have to understand is that in the Muslim majority countries it is not a question of two choices only. This binary vision is very much a colonial inheritance.”

In characteristic professorial style – composed, intense, fluent – he explains that Islamism occupies a number of positions across a wide ideological spectrum, ranging from the constitutionally secular Turkish model to the authoritarian theocratic Saudi one, with myriad alternate variations. He insists that Western citizens, politicians, and opinion makers must recognise this if they are to have any hope of developing a meaningful understanding of political culture in Islamic countries of North Africa and the Middle East.

Egypt, of course, is perhaps the most geo-politically significant of those countries. What position does the Muslim Brotherhood, which may prove to be the critical influence on the nation’s future development, occupy on the spectrum?
“There is a young generation of Islamists (in Egypt) who are very close to the Turkish model. They offer an open version of Islam, although it still essentially accepts the capitalist order – which I am not happy with .”

But can they be reconciled to secular democracy? “If you listen to what they are saying, they can. Even if there is a covert agenda, though, we can’t just deny them the right to be involved in democratic processes because we suspect that among their political leaders there is something hidden or unspoken. We have to challenge them with critical assessments.”

Ramadan sees his role as helping to advance that challenge. “I am not a member of the Brotherhood. My vision is completely different. My aim is to be critical of what they say about Sharia – how it should be implemented and how it should not.”
Somewhat surprisingly for someone so heavily steeped in the discourse of the post-modern European left, his main criticism of the Brotherhood is that it has strayed too far from the principles on which it was originally founded more than seven decades ago. “My grandfather was a legalist who fought for the anti-colonialist movement. He argued that we had to go back to our culture, but he was not at all of the view that everything that came from the West was bad. He believed Egyptians could take the British parliamentary model as their own. Mainly, he was against foreign occupation – for coming back to the soil. But this has all changed now.”

According to Ramadan, the crucial distinction between the Brotherhood of the mid-twentieth century and that of the early twenty-first is that where the former subscribed to an Islam-oriented pan-Arab nationalism, the latter – despite the apparently moderate tendencies of its younger members – nurtures an aggressive religious absolutism.
It is this absolutism which is partly responsible for the acute dilemma the West now finds itself in with regard to the Arab Spring. For the sake of moral consistency, Europe and the United States are obliged to offer at least nominal support to the region’s nascent democratic uprisings. But for the sake of their notional interests, they must ensure that free, open elections do not result in a renewed or enhanced Islamist threat.
In the Arab states of North Africa, the military has often acted as the principal bulwark against that threat, ruthlessly suppressing extremist elements when they begin to gain popular political traction, even if the result is to seriously undermine or circumvent the rights of ordinary citizens.
Nonetheless, many Egyptians continue to view the army high command as a potential force for democratic reform. Ramadan, however, contends that its contribution to the revolt that toppled Hosni Mubarak was at best ambiguous. “The army in Egypt is not at all neutral”, he explains. “They are neutral during the right times, just to ensure they have a role in the future. You can’t rely on the army to go toward a civil democratic process. We are too accepting of the line that this is a ‘transitional period’, but in fact it is critical. This is why protests in Egypt continue today – the people are saying ‘no, we won’t accept this’.”

Part of the challenge that faces the people of Egypt and the Maghreb as they struggle to establish for themselves a genuinely representative political system is to successfully balance the conflicting forces of Islamism, the West, and the military.

Of course at this stage there is no way of predicating exactly how things will play out. But Ramadan at least is optimistic: “In Egypt, the people rejected dictatorship in a peaceful way. And it was not just leftists or atheists or Islamists or religious people. It was Coptic, Muslims, and non-Muslims. This is something which we have to celebrate and pay tribute to.” On this we should be willing to follow the Professor’s lead. After all, he should know.

[retro]

There is a reason you hear "Allah hu Akbar" at these protests, and it has nothing to do with democracy or secularism.

There is a reason why Fridays are so important to these protests, and that is because of the Friday prayer, not a Britney Spears concert.

Its a movement against un-Islamic backed puppets (whether they serve the West as in Hosni Mubarak or Russia as in Assad).

I know why you think this way. However Friday prayers are gathering/rallying points and in places like Egypt. The clerics where not working the mob into a frenzy, jumping up and down and inciting sedition.

Whilst in Egypt little has changed, as the military and secuity forces are still running the country. The Egyptians are holding presidential election later this years and they have already made major constitutional changes by referendum.

Although the Egyptian pro-democracy camp will have to build democratic, institutions from scratch and implement further reforms. The pro-democracy candidates will win by a land slide and they will have a very strong mandate to implement sweeping reforms.

The Muslim Brotherhood (a terrorist entity) are now forced to insidiously, portray themselves as moderates and reformers. Which as we know they most certainly are not. However it won't help them, as they don't have anything like enough public support to win at the polls.

Egyptian constitutional referendum, 2011

A constitutional referendum was held in Egypt on 19 March 2011, following the 2011 Egyptian revolution. More than 14 million (77%) were in favour, while around 4 million (23%) opposed the changes; 41% of 45 million eligible voters turned out to vote.

The approved constitutional reforms included a limitation on the presidency to at most two six-year terms, judicial supervision of elections, a requirement for the president to appoint a deputy, a commission to draft a new constitution following the parliamentary election, and easier access to presidential elections by candidates—via 30,000 signatures from at least 15 provinces, 30 members of a chamber of the legislature, or nomination by a party holding at least one seat in the legislature.

The reforms were recognised by both sides to increase democratic safeguards, but opponents argued that they did not go far enough and that an election held too soon could favour the well-organised Muslim Brotherhood and members of the former ruling National Democratic Party of Hosni Mubarak. Supporters cited concerns that waiting too long could increase the chances of the military regaining power or risk destabilisation before an election.

A parliamentary election is planned within the next six months, with groups already working to create new political parties, promote candidates and increase turnout among their supporters.

Egyptian constitutional referendum, 2011 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[AFG21]

In this country the resistant begins in mosques because there is no athore places those dictatores have baned any form of gathering so thats way it always begins after the frieday prayers and not somewhere else.