Saudi Arabia has increased the Hajj pilgrimage limit in the country to one million compared to last year’s 60,000 domestic pilgrims.
To combat the coronavirus pandemic, attendance at the Islamic event was drastically reduced in the past two years due to travel restrictions.
As per the latest notice, Pilgrims must be under the age of 65 and have received COVID-19 vaccinations that have been approved by the Saudi health ministry.
All pilgrims must present a negative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test report within three days (72 hours of departure time).
— Ministry of Hajj and Umrah (@MoHU_En) April 9, 2022
The move intends to accommodate the greatest number of pilgrims to perform Hajj while retaining the Kingdom’s health improvements in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the ministry.
Furthermore, the directives noted that the expansion will be based on the quotas decided for nations that will follow the Kingdom’s mandatory health recommendations.
As per the official figures, 58,745 pilgrims performed Hajj in 2021. The number of Hajj pilgrims often surpassed the two million count before the Covid-19 outbreak.
Federal Minister for Religious Affairs Noor-ul-Haq Qadri has reportedly written a letter to Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan and proposed to observe International Hijab Day on March 8 which is also celebrated as International Women’s Day, reports Jang.
The minister also sent a copy of his letter to President Dr Arif Alvi.
The letter states that Hijab Day would draw the world’s attention towards the discrimination happening against Muslim women in Indian-Occupied Kashmir (IoK) and India.
On the occasion of March 8, several women’s rights organisations organise Aurat March in form of rallies across the country to talk about the issues faced by women in the communities of Pakistan.
Afghan Prime Minister (PM) Mohammad Hassan Akhund has called on Muslim nations to be the first to officially recognise the government that seized power in Afghanistan in August.
“I call on Muslim countries to take the lead and recognise us officially. Then I hope we will be able to develop quickly”, Akhund said and stressed that it’s for the public.
No country has yet recognised the Taliban government. After they gained power, they promised rights for women but they are largely excluded from government employment, and secondary schools for girls are closed.
According to the recently released report by United Nations (UN), jobs have dried up and women’s employment levels are extremely low by global standards.
The lack of work also threatens to worsen child labour levels in Afghanistan, where only 40 per cent of children aged five to 17 years old attend school. Moreover, the UN has warned that half the population is threatened with food shortages.
Last month, a special meeting of the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) was held to discuss the Afghanistan crisis. However, Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister (FM) was excluded from the official photograph taken during the event.
Hindutva leader, Yati Narsinghanand Giri who incited hatred and called for ‘genocide’ of Muslims in a seminar, labelled by Indian media as “hate speech conclave”, was arrested by the police.
Senior Police Officer, Swatantra Kumar said that the Yati Narsinghanand Giri, a far right-right nationalist was initially arrested on Saturday on allegations of making derogatory remarks against Muslims and women during a meeting. He appeared in front of the court the next day and remained in custody for hate speech.
Kumar claimed that Yati Narsinghanand Giri is a repeated offender and was officially charged on Monday with promoting hatred between Hindus and Muslims based on religion. The charge can carry a five-year jail term.
In December, the three-day meeting “hate speech conclave” was organised by Hindutva leader Yati Narsinghanand in Uttarakhand’s pilgrimage city of Haridwar, India, where multiple calls to kill minorities and attack their religious spaces were made.
The gathering had speakers like Annapurna Maa, Dharamdas Maharaj from Bihar, Anand Swaroop Maharaj, Sagar Sindhuraj Maharaj, Swami Premanand Maharaj, and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Ashwini Upadhyay.
“If you want to finish them off, then kill them… We need 100 soldiers who can kill 20 lakh of them to win this,” said Annapurna Maa.
“If the governments do not listen to our demand [the establishment of a Hindu Rashtra through violence against minorities], we will wage a war far scarier than the 1857 revolt,” said Anand Swaroop Maharaj.
Recently, hate crimes against religious minorities including Muslims and Christians are increased in India with the alleged support of the ruling party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Several Indian celebrities raised their voices against hate crimes against certain communities based on the grounds of religion.
Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan during a discussion with top scholars on how the youth can be protected from the invasion of social media on faith, religious and ethical values said that corruption and sex crime s are two main evils of the Muslim world.
“There are two sorts of crime in society, one is corruption and the other is a sex crime. Sex crime has risen sharply in our society, i.e. rape and child abuse, and only one per cent of this is reported,” said PM Khan.
“The other 99 per cent, I believe, society has to fight it. The same is the case with corruption… society has to make corruption unacceptable. Unfortunately, when you have leadership which is corrupt over time, they make corruption acceptable,” he said.
The prime minister stressed the need to save the Muslim youth from being inundated with obscenity and pornographic material available on the internet.
A three-day “hate speech conclave” was organised by Hindutva leader Yati Narsinghanand in Uttarakhand’s pilgrimage city of Haridwar, India, where multiple calls to kill minorities and attack their religious spaces were made, reports The Quint.
The gathering had speakers like Annapurna Maa, Dharamdas Maharaj from Bihar, Anand Swaroop Maharaj, Sagar Sindhuraj Maharaj, Swami Premanand Maharaj, and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Ashwini Upadhyay.
“If you want to finish them off, then kill them… We need 100 soldiers who can kill 20 lakh of them to win this,” said Annapurna Maa.
Dharamdas Maharaj from Bihar said: “If I was present in the parliament when Prime Minister (PM) Manmohan Singh said that minorities have first right over national resources, I would’ve followed Nathuram Godse, I’d have shot him six times in the chest with a revolver.”
“If the governments do not listen to our demand [the establishment of a Hindu Rashtra through violence against minorities], we will wage a war far scarier than the 1857 revolt,” said Anand Swaroop Maharaj.
According to the report, religious leader Swami Anandswaroop gave an example of how Muslim street vendors should be treated. “The street in which I live, every morning I used to spot a mullah with a big beard and nowadays they keep a saffron beard. This is Haridwar, Maharaj. There is no Muslim buyer here, so throw him out,” he said.
Videos of the event have been circulating on social media and people are reacting to the threats being directed towards the minorities in India.
A Thread with **TRIGGER WARNING*** A three day hate speech conclave was organized by hate monger Yati Narsinghanand. At the event, multiple calls to k!ll minorities and attack their religious spaces were made.#HaridwarHateAssembly Thread
I have faced religious discrimination and communal violence in the past. But as an Indian Muslim I have never felt as unsafe and alienated as I do today. The threat to our lives is real and it’s frightening to feel the fear and anger that comes with it.
Every single video in this thread is more disturbing than the other.This hate will destroy us.Action needs to be taken against such open threats & call for violence.This must stop!
PS: Yati Narsinghanand is the man behind vulgar comments on the women leaders of BJP. No action. https://t.co/xYK54OTwxF
After an official ban on Muslim prayers at open places in India’s Gurugram city near New Delhi, a local organisation taking care of gurdwaras, holy places of the Sikh religion, has announced opening the doors of a gurdwara for Muslims.
Hindu extremists have been protesting against the Muslims’ act of offering Friday prayers at open places outside mosques for the last several weeks. As Muslims in larger numbers swarm to mosques to say their weekly Friday prayers, mosques mostly cannot accommodate these big numbers of worshipers and they have to use the open places outside the mosques to say their prayers.
Keeping in view the protests by Hindu extremists, the local authorities in Gurugram city have stopped Muslims from using the open places outside the mosques to offer their Friday prayers and cancelled the permission letters issued earlier in this regard.
Hindu extremists have also been disrupting the Muslim Friday prayers at open places by raising their religious slogans.
Last week, Hindu extremists filled an open place with cow dung where Muslims were going to say their Friday prayers the next day. They said they wanted to turn that place into a volleyball court.
Against this backdrop, an organisation associated with gurdwaras of the Sikh religion has come forward and announced opening a gurdwara in Gurugram so that Muslims can offer their Friday prayers there.
Harteerath Singh, Community Development Director at Hemkunt Foundation, wrote on Twitter, “Gurgaon’s Sadar Bazaar Gurudwara is now open for our Muslim brothers to offer their daily namaz keeping in mind the recent events that took place in the city.”
Despite of death threats, he said that he will “always stand up for truth and sewa (help).”
In another tweet, he added: “The best part is tomorrow is Guru Nanak Dev jis Gurpurab and Friday namaaz too. What a spectacular sight it will be tomorrow- prime example of brotherhood and humanity!”
The best part is tomorrow is Guru Nanak Dev jis Gurpurab and Friday namaaz too. What a spectacular sight it will be tomorrow- prime example of brotherhood and humanity! https://t.co/EDa3IDDwjO
Thousands of Sikh pilgrims will attend the 552nd birth anniversary commemorations in Kartarpur today. An 18-member delegation led by Indian Punjab Chief Minister Charanjit Singh entered Pakistan from the Kartarpur corridor on Thursday.
Prime Minister Imran Khan has also extended felicitations to Sikhs.
Wishing 552nd Guru Nanak Dev Ji Jayanti to all Sikhs around the world. On this auspicious occasion, we welcome thousands of Sikhs to visit their religious sites in Pakistan. I reiterate my govt’s commitment to continue facilitating them to perform their religious rituals.
British-Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed has expressed his views on the way Muslims are portrayed on screen internationally.
“The game right now is messed up. The game right now is rigged,” Ahmed said in a new interview with news outlet Muslim. “Muslims are either not on screen or they are [and] they’re the bad guys. They’re perpetrators or victims of violence. We’re either invisible or we’re villainized, cause the stories we tell about our community affect the laws that get passed, the people that get attacked, the people that get invaded.”
Watching a clip form the 2014, Clint Eastwood-directed blockbuster film American Sniper, in which star Bradley Cooper shoots a Muslim child during the Iraq War, Ahmed shook his head.
“”It’s actually hard to watch this and not get angry, It’s crazy to think that, like, how many people had to say this was OK for this to be made. It’s just super racist.”
He pointed out that most of the Muslim people featured were terrorists.
“[We’re] gonna look back on that and look at it with the same cringe as we look at, you know, films that had blackface in them. Or films with, like, you know, cowboys and Indians, [where] the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” said Ahmed, who’s been outspoken about the importance of diversity and his experiences with racism. “Really, that’s what you’re saying, the only good Muslim is a dead one. This stuff’s so dangerous, because it enables the invasion of countries. It enables hate crimes. It enables discriminatory and racist laws being passed.”
He pronounced such style of film “wack, outdated, racist” and said such carelessness “costs lives.”
The Rogue One: A Star Wars Story actor implored filmmakers to show a Muslim community that’s more diverse, when it comes to race, geography, gender, sexuality and abilities. In June, Ahmed and his film company, Left Handed Films, partnered with the University of Southern California’s Inclusion Initiative and others to address the problem of underrepresentation through grants and mentorships to Muslim filmmakers. This followed the university’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism’s report that, of the top-grossing movies from 2017-2019, just 10 percent had any type of Muslim character, while fewer than 2 percent of those characters had dialogue. In real life, Muslims comprise nearly a quarter of the world’s population.
Ahmed also co-wrote and starred in the new movie MogulMowgli, about a British Pakistani rapper, which is a background strikingly similar to Ahmed’s own. (He was born in Britain to a Pakistani family and has performed as a musician.) The character’s name is actually Zaheer, but he goes by Zed, and that’s also a situation familiar to the man who played him. Ahmed’s first name is actually Rizwan.
“Zaheer has changed his name to Zed and the question is, is that a choice he made or is that something he was forced to do, because [he wanted] to fit in, because people couldn’t pronounce his name,” Ahmed explained. “And I sometimes ask myself that question. I have kind of censored my full name, and on some level, I wonder whether it’s just got too much weight and too much history.”
On that subject, Ahmed had clearly made a decision.
“One thing I’ll say is, after this film, I introduce myself as Rizwan,” he said.
Indian retailer Fabindia, which sells home furnishings, furniture, clothes and food, has withdrawn an ad about a new Diwali line after backlash from right-wing Hindu groups, reported BBC.
Social media users accused the ad of using Urdu — a language spoken by many Muslims in India — to celebrate a collection for the Hindu festival of Diwali.
#BoycottFabIndia trended on Twitter in India on Monday after Fabindia called Diwali “Jashn-e-Riwaaz” (celebration of tradition) in a tweet. Following the tweet, many social media users called for a boycott of the company, claiming that the Urdu phrase had been used to hurt sentiments of the Hindu community.
A spokesperson from Fabindia told the Times of India newspaper that Jashn-e-Riwaaz was not its Diwali collection.
The tweet, which went viral on Monday, said: “As we welcome the festival of love and light, Jashn-e-Riwaaz by Fabindia is a collection that beautifully pays homage to Indian culture.” The tweet has since been deleted and the ad has also been withdrawn.
Fabindia’s deleted tweet
This is not the first time an Indian brand had to withdraw ads following backlash from right-wing Hindu groups. Last year in October, popular Indian jewellery brand Tanishq had to withdraw an advertisement featuring an interfaith couple after a right-wing backlash on social media.
A recent advert by clothing brand Manyaavar featuring Bollywood actor Alia Bhatt in a wedding attire also caused a social media furore. The ad, which appeared to question an old tradition (Kanya Daan), received widespread backlash as it was seen as an attack on Hindu wedding rituals.
