Islam-Muslims

Religion's mysterious role in Egypt

We’ve had many days of protests and the conditions are dramatically different now than even yesterday. Protesters, police and military are on the streets of cities throughout Egypt, despite a curfew and unbelievable crackdown on communications. News outlets are reporting that their staff are being beaten up, arrested, or thwarted in their attempts to get the news published and broadcast. There was a surreal moment when Al Jazeera was broadcasting while police were trying to shut them down. Reuters reports that more than 400 have been wounded, some with bullets.


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Unrest in Egypt

Anti-government protests are shaking Egypt right now. It’s incredibly hard to get good information about what is going on there since the U.S.-backed Mubarak government (we give them over $1.3 billion annually, I believe) has shut down social media and regular media. Here’s just one recent example:


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Crusaders and conspiracy theories

More than a few GetReligion readers dropped us a line or two to mention the Foreign Policy report about a recent Seymour Hersh speech. The Washington Post took interest in the speech, too. Here’s how reporter Paul Farhi covered it in his article “Hersh rebuked on ‘crusaders’:


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"Far right" or "mainstream" angst?

I get most of my foreign religion news from Reuters. They consistently report on stories of global interest with an eye toward religious details. But this story left me a bit cold. It promises a lot with the headline “In France, far right seizes on Muslim street prayers.” But I never quite understood what that meant, much less whether “far right” was an accurate description of who we were talking about. It begins by describing how streets and intersections in Paris are flooded with Muslim worshipers on Fridays. They don’t have room in buildings so they pray in the street, rain or shine. No big deal to the locals, we’re told:


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Tunisia's Islamist-free revolution?

Al Jazeera was the only outlet heavily covering the growing protests in Tunisia over the last month. But the news that its president had fled the country on Friday night has been widely reported. If your knowledge of Tunisia doesn’t extend past something related to Carthage or Star Wars, there’s a lot of catching up.


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Chaos, alternate realities and media narratives

Some of the journalism being produced in the wake of the Tucson tragedy had been terrific. Much, of course, has been abysmal. I’m still trying to wrap my head about just what went wrong and why it continues. To that end, a few thoughts on how the media choose to frame different issues.


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Meditation: Moral equivalency in Egypt (updated)

Once again, we head back into my stash of GetReligion guilt, that hefty folder of stories that I know I need to address but I am not sure what I need to say. In this case, I am talking about one of the early “what is this all about” stories linked to the rising violence in Egypt.


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Religious liberty threats rise?

Christians are by no means the only ones targeted by Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Agence France-Presse informs readers that an imam and his son were recently convicted under the law:


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