faith diplomacy

The facility will provide leadership training, with programs on public diplomacy and pro-Israel advocacy, officials say, equipping young Jews in a fight against the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. The movement, launched by Palestinians a decade ago, calls for greater Palestinian rights.

Shila Amzah is a Malaysian pop star famed as much for her fashion sense as for her powerful voice […] These days, though, she sings primarily in Mandarin […] In a country wary of Islam — the Chinese government has a fractious relationship with its ethnic Uighur minority in the western province of Xinjiang […] her rise is attributable to […] a rapidly evolving cultural relationship between China and Malaysia.

Following the miraculous success of this year’s Giant Lantern Festival in the City of San Fernando, more good news arrived as the City Government received letters of thanks and positive publicity from the various consulates and embassies of the Philippines abroad where the San Fernando lantern has been making rounds as an iconic symbol of Filipino Christmas.

By building ever larger institutions, non-profits, regional religious federations, and promoting cooperation between the democracies of the West, you can (and you must) model a new form of Muslim unity, one which enables Muslims to pool their resources without setting them at odds with each other, or holding one another hostage to mutually exclusive claims. That can be your answer, your way forward, your way of empowering your community, and your country.

Shahzia Sikander and Jim Shaw are two artists who keep accounts of the visual tropes that faith-based systems employ to disseminate, legislate and perpetuate the cultural codes prescribing and proscribing human behavior, yet react to these systems by breaking up the prescribed regiments that religious imagery imposes.

For many Muslim women, the decision to don the hijab […] is born of private self-reflection [...] But [Yusof's] choice soon became something else, as well: a lucrative source of attention for herself and her multimillion-dollar online-retail startup, FashionValet […] In Malaysia women are free—even encouraged—to inject glamor and prestige into the hijab, and to make money from it.

December 21, 2015

Some have called it “dargah diplomacy”; you could also describe it as the trans-border politics of pilgrimage. By whatever name it goes, the welcome emphasis on “religious tourism” is one of the more interesting features of renewed engagement between India and Pakistan. 

After the Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump called for a ban on the entry of Muslims into the United States, [...] the Dubai based Landmark Group, responded by removing all Trump branded products from the shelves of its Lifestyle retail stores […]  the value of the Trump name in the world’s vast Muslim population has been thrown into question since he made his comments.

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