Other Muslim News
Canada's Arctic Muslims buy land for town's first mosque
2 Apr 2008
Two empty, snow-covered lots in the small town of Inuvik, in Canada's Northwest Territoritories, could soon be home to Canada's most northerly mosque. The Muslim association in the Arctic town of 3,500 recently purchased the lots, after three years of fundraising.
"It's suited for a mosque or for a church or for a religious place," association president Said Daher told CBC News in an interview.
For the past eight years, Inuvik's Muslims have prayed in a converted one-bedroom trailer. But space in the makeshift mosque is getting tight — Friday prayers can attract up to 25 people. By comparison, Daher said the proposed mosque will hold up to 100 people, and have space for activities beyond prayer.
There are no current statistics on the number of Muslims in Inuvik, but census data from 2001 show 45 Muslims in the community that year. The Northwest Territories had 175 Muslims in the 2001 census.
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be on him) said, "Wherever you may be when the time for prayer comes, you may pray in that place because the whole earth is a mosque."
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Jordan's Queen Using 'YouTube' to Change Minds About the Middle East
1 Apr 2008
Queen Rania of Jordan has launched an official YouTube page in an effort to dispel stereotypes of the Arab and Muslim world.
Do all Arabs hate Americans? Can Arab women work? Are there any YouTubers in Jordan? The queen said questions like that are what she seeks to address. "In a world where it's so easy to connect to one another, we still remain very much disconnected. There's a whole world of wonder out there that we cannot appreciate with stereotypes, so it's important for all of us to join forces, come together, and try to bring down those misconceptions," she said in her YouTube posting.
"I want people to know the real Arab world -- to see it unedited, unscripted and unfiltered -- to see the personal side of my region -- to know the places and faces and rituals and culture that shape the part of the world I call home," she said in her first official YouTube clip.
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Dutch YouTubers disassociate themselves from Quran-Bashing Film 'Fitna'
31 Mar 2008
Dutch people eager to dissociate themselves from the anti-Quran film Fitna have taken to the web to apologize for the controversial video.
Hundreds of Dutch citizens have uploaded videos to YouTube showing themselves holding signs with apologies for the film. In other anti-Fitna clips, the subjects simply say the words, "I'm sorry."
Fitna, a 17-minute film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, juxtaposes passages from the Islamic holy book with graphic footage of terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe. In one scene, the sound of paper ripping can be seen as a reader pages through the Quran.
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Islam overtakes Roman Catholicism in number of adherents
30 Mar 2008
Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world, the Vatican said on Sunday.
Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican's 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world's population and Catholics 17.4 percent.
"For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us," Formenti told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, saying the data referred to 2006.
He said that if all Christian groups were considered, including Orthodox, Anglicans and Protestants, Christians made up 33 percent of the world's population, or about two billion people. The Vatican recently put the number of Catholics in the world at 1.13 billion. It did not provide a figure for Muslims, generally estimated to be around 1.3 billion.
Formenti said that while the percentage of Catholics in the the world's population was fairly stable, the percentage of Muslims was growing because of higher birth rates. He said the data on Muslim populations had been compiled by individual countries and reported by the United Nations. The Vatican, he said, could only vouch for its own statistics.
In a nushell:
Roman Catholics, 1.13 billion; Other Christians 0.87 billion
Total number of Christians, 2 billion
Total number of Muslims 1.3 billion
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