“They burned every single thing, there is nothing left inside, just ashes,” said Bashir, whose supermarket in Belfast was torched during attacks against foreign-owned shops and businesses.

A mosque in a town near Belfast was also targeted late Friday, August 9.

“We are scared at what may happen next, there is lots of hostility against the Muslim community,” said the 28-year-old from Dubai, who did not want to give his full name citing safety reasons.

Northern Ireland has seen nightly unrest, mainly in pro-UK loyalist neighborhoods, that began after an anti-immigration protest in Belfast on August 3.

The violence has mirrored disorder across England, spurred by misinformation spread on social media about the suspected perpetrator of a knife attack in Southport on July 29 which killed three children.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said Saturday, August 10, that 31 people have been arrested during the disturbances.

“On a fundamental level the Belfast attacks are similar in its dynamic to anti-immigration protests in white working class areas in England, the Republic of Ireland and elsewhere in Europe,” said Peter McLoughlin, a politics lecturer at Queens University Belfast.

“It is driven by racism and fear of the other, but in Northern Ireland it also interfaces with sectarian political dynamics,” he told AFP.

‘Under attack’

Three decades of violent sectarian conflict known as the “Troubles” largely ended in 1998, but bitterness and frictions persist between pro-UK Protestant loyalists and pro-Irish unity Catholic nationalists.

Outside Bashir’s smoke-scarred shopfront in the staunchly loyalist inner-city district of Sandy Row, British Union Jack flags flutter on lampposts and painted wall murals proclaim fierce allegiance to the UK.

“Within loyalism there is a sense that prevailed through Northern Ireland’s peace process that their community is in retreat, that their community and British identity is under attack,” McLoughlin explained.

Many loyalists feel they “must oppose outsiders coming into those areas, who are seen as taking supposedly Protestant jobs and houses, and encroaching on a community that was once dominant,” he added.

After last Saturday’s anti-immigration protest, rioters rampaged through streets looking for foreign-owned businesses to attack.

“What happened last week was crazy,” Yilmaz Batu, a 64-year-old Turkish chef who has been living in Northern Ireland for two years, told AFP.

“There was never any trouble before,” he said, sitting at the Sahara Shisha Cafe, one of several Middle Eastern and Turkish-owned businesses near Sandy Row that were hit.

The Northern Ireland Muslim Council said in a statement that “the vast majority of the violence has been whipped up and fueled by deliberate misinformation and disinformation on social media”.

“False and dangerous narratives” about Muslims who “constitute a small minority in Northern Ireland” led to the attacks, it added.

‘Extremely shocking’

Northern Ireland has low rates of immigration compared to the rest of the UK and the Republic of Ireland.

The 2021 census showed about six percent of the population were born outside the UK or Ireland, with around 97 percent describing their ethnicity as white.

The disorder was “extremely shocking for the wider community,” said Fiona Doran, chair of the United Against Racism group which co-organized a solidarity rally in Belfast on Saturday, August 10.

The demonstration, which drew several thousand people, gave people “a chance to come out on the streets, to show that Belfast is a welcoming city, it’s a city that says no to racism and fascism,” she told AFP.

At an anti-immigration rally the previous day in Belfast, around a hundred protestors carried British flags and placards reading “respect our country or leave!”

Some chanted the name of Tommy Robinson, a notorious anti-Muslim agitator who has been accused of helping to fuel the unrest in England through constant social media posts about the events.

Nearby, behinds ranks of armored police vehicles, more than 1,000 counter-protestors chanted “racists out!”

Bashir told AFP on Saturday, August 10, he is unsure if he will reopen his supermarket.

“My question is: are we able to do that? If we do, it will be because of all the people who came out to show us support,” he said following the solidarity demonstration.

Source: France24

Irish Muslim Peace & Integration Council is a non-sectarian body working for the common good without interfering in, displacing or isolating any existing Muslim work in the community. It is a broad-based, representative organization of Muslims in Ireland, accommodating and reflecting the variety of social and cultural backgrounds and outlook of the community.

Irish Muslim Peace & Integration Council is pledged to work for the common good of society as a whole; encouraging individual Muslims and Muslim organizations to play a full and participatory role in Irish public life. It is a democratic body, built on consultation, co-operation and co-ordination among concerned Muslims throughout the Island of Ireland.

 Aims

• To promote co-operation, consensus and unity on Muslim affairs in Ireland
• To promote Peace & Integration in Ireland and facilitate a positive integration experience for Muslims in Ireland
• To prevent extremism and isolation in the Muslim community
• To promote unity and solidarity among all communities in Ireland
• To work for a more enlightened appreciation of Islam and Muslims in wider society
• To promote inter and intra faith dialogues in the promotion of tolerance and mutual respect in a diverse society
• To liaise with Government bodies and NGO’s on matters related to the Muslim community.
• To foster better community relations and work for the benefit of the society as a who through promoting the concepts of social inclusion, active citizenship and equality
• To organize, and coordinate, humanitarian relief efforts in Ireland and abroad

Objectives

• Act as a voice for the Irish Muslims so as to enable them to highlight both to Development Boards and to other relevant agencies the issues affecting the delivery of services within the County for the Muslim community.
• Act as a support mechanism to strive to improve the conditions for the Muslim community within the country.
• To influence the policies, strategies and overall decision-making process of all relevant agencies operating in the county.
• Act as a conduit for information and feedback to and from the Network in relation to specific policies and initiatives, thereby ensuring that the concerns of Muslim community are heard at local and national level.
• Act as a lobby group for Muslims in the Island of Ireland in relation to issues that affect them.

Contacts

• Address: 8 Coolmine Industrial Estate, Blanchardstown, Dublin 15, Ireland
• Phone: +353 (0) 1 5156206
• Email: info@impic.ie
• Website: http://www.impic.ie

Originally from Belarus, Alexandr Ruzmatovich Bekmirzaev (45) was arrested by the Kurd-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) just before the New Year. He holds an Irish passport and was being closely monitored as a suspected Islamic extremist by the Garda Special Branch before he left the country in 2013 and travelled to Syria.

Roehampton University’s Prof. Michael Barnes SJ told The Irish Catholic that de-radicalization strategies that treat people such as Mr Bekmirzaev as if they are mentally ill or brainwashed are “barking up the wrong tree”, and that solutions to extremism need to be sought within Islam itself.

Trinity College lecturer and Muslim scholar, Dr Ali Salim of the Islamic Cultural Centre, said that tackling extremism is down to education. “The way we counter radical thinking is by education, we educate our community here about their religion and the spirit of peace in their religion,” he said.

Source: The Irish Catholic

CEC president Rev. Christian Krieger stated: “We are aware that in Europe, when we talk about justice for minorities, we also look for everyone to have the status of equal citizens. This point, as our partners in the Middle East have stressed, requires more attention and clarification.”

The conference also addressed other concrete challenges and opportunities in countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria.

Participants stressed that education is one of the key elements in overcoming prejudices.

In his greetings, Patriarch John X of Antioch said, “By the grace of God, we, as Christians, have been living in the East for two thousand years, and we have coexisted with our Muslim brothers and sisters for many centuries. Differences of religion do not separate us, but rather enrich us in many areas of life.”

Participants released a communiqué regarding the avenues they explored towards peaceful coexistence in the Middle East.

Source: World Council of Churches

The 51-year-old wrote: “This is to announce that I am proud to have become a Muslim. This is the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian’s journey. All scripture study leads to Islam. Which makes all other scriptures redundant. I will be given (another) new name. It will be Shuhada.” O’Connor also revealed she had received her first hijab with the help of a friend in Dublin. “My best friend, Elaine just gave me my 1st Hijab and she got chills all over her body when I put it on,” she wrote.

American theologian, Dr Yasir Qadhi was one of the first to offer his congratulations.

He said: “I’m very happy to hear Sinead O’Connor, the famous singer from Ireland, has converted to Islam…  May Allah bless our sister Shuhada and make her a role model for her people, and all of us!”

Source: 5pillarsuk.com

This pattern is evident across several different questions the Center asked of non-Muslim Europeans to gauge attitudes toward Muslims, including whether they think Islam is compatible with their country’s culture and values and whether they would be willing to accept a Muslim as a member of their family.

One question asked non-Muslim Western Europeans if they agree or disagree with the statement “In their hearts, Muslims want to impose their religious law on everyone else in the country.” In Switzerland – which has a relatively large Muslim population (about 6% of the total population) – those who say they personally know a Muslim are 37 percentage points more likely than those who do not to disagree with this statement. More than eight-in-ten (85%) of those who say they know a Muslim disagree with the statement, compared with just 48% of those who do not know a Muslim.

Large gaps also exist in the UK (37 percentage points), Austria (35 points), Germany (34 points), Ireland (29 points), Italy (27 points), Denmark (26 points) and France (24 points).

By contrast, there is less of a difference on this question between those who say they know “a great deal” or “some” about Islam and those who know “not very much” or “nothing at all.” Regardless of their level of knowledge about Islam, similar shares of people in most surveyed countries disagree with the statement that Muslims “want to impose their religious law on everyone else in the country.”

While knowing a Muslim is prevalent in most countries across Western Europe, it is less common in the United States, where 45% of adults know someone who is Muslim, according to a separate Pew Research Center study.

Source: Pew Research Center

The Chester Beatty Library contains a world famous collection of manuscripts, prints, miniature paintings, early printed books and objets d’art from countries across Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. The Collection is principally focused on the written word and its associated painted and printed images.

The Chester Beatty Library is one of Ireland’s national cultural institutions. It is a public charitable trust established under the will of the late Sir Alfred Chester Beatty and is governed by a Board of Trustees.  Our mission is to maintain and preserve the Library’s collections and to make them available in the most appropriate ways for the use and enjoyment of the public and for scholarly study and research, in order to promote a wider appreciation and understanding of the international cultural heritage embodied in the collections and to foster relations between Ireland and the peoples whose cultures are represented in the collections.

The Islamic Collections include over 6,000 individual items, mainly manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Turkish and single-page paintings and calligraphies, supplemented by a small assortment of objects, dating from the late eighth to the early twentieth century. They include some of the greatest documents of Islamic art and culture ever produced.

The Library’s Islamic manuscripts are amongst the finest in existence and are internationally renowned for the overall high quality and scope of the material. Together they illustrate in exquisite form and detail the history and development of all aspects of the Islamic book: calligraphy, illumination, miniature painting and bookbinding.

Overview of the Project

Seal impressions provide valuable information on the history of a manuscript and this database is intended as a convenient means by which to find or share that information. We hope the database will serve as a useful resource for anyone working on Islamic manuscripts.

Seals are usually inscribed with the name of an individual, often in conjunction with a pious phrase, and are used in manuscripts to denote ownership. Knowing who the individual named is and when and where that person lived can help one to trace the history of a manuscript, which may in turn shed light on notes and commentaries added or other alterations made to the manuscript since it was first produced. However, the individual or institution named is often unknown to the researcher or the text may not be easily deciphered: the ink may be smudged or otherwise unclear or the script itself might be difficult to read. Therefore, as a visitor to the site, you are invited to participate in deciphering the seals, identifying the individuals or institutions named, and adding information such as other sources of the same seal impression or other seals that name the same individual or institution.  As there is currently no convenient means by which to find or share information on seal impressions, we hope that this database will be a useful resource for anyone working on Islamic manuscripts.

Scope of the Project

Initially the database will contain mainly images of seal impressions found in the more than 2600 manuscripts that make up the Chester Beatty Library’s Arabic Collection. The number of images will increase steadily until the seals in all of these manuscripts are included as well as all of those found in the Library’s other Islamic manuscripts (those in its Qur’an, Persian, Turkish and Mughal-era Indian Collections). We are happy to include seals from other collections if proper permission to do so and photographs are provided. We may be contacted at islamicseals@cbl.ie.

The initial phase of the project has been generously funded by The Islamic Manuscript Association.

For more information on the Chester Beatty Library, its holdings and a full schedule of events and activities please visit www.cbl.ie