A day after making national headlines for allowing Muslims to broadcast a call to prayer declaring Allah to be the only God, Duke University reversed course and said they will not allow the broadcast to take place.
The University said their plan met with “unintended backlash.”
“The idea was conceived with the best of intentions and the greatest of intentions to create unity,” Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations, told WNCN. “It turned out to have the opposite effect and it was actually creating divisiveness that was neither intended nor valuable.”
The University will allow members of the Muslim community to gather outside the chapel before moving to its regular location in the chapel basement.
Many Christian leaders spoke out against Duke’s proposed action, including Rev. Franklin Graham.
“First of all, this chapel was given by donors, Methodists, from across this state and other areas, so that there would be a Christian chapel on the campus so that the students would have a place to worship the God of the Bible,” Graham said. “What I have the problem is using the chapel that was built to be a house of worship — to worship Jesus Christ as the Son of God — that they’re using this now so that they can put loud speakers and use it as a minaret.”
Duke, a private school founded by Methodists and Quakers, has a divinity school connected to the United Methodist Church.
Duke University will start broadcasting the Muslim Call To Prayer declaring “Allah Is Great” from their bell tower.
“Members of the Duke Muslim Students Association will chant a weekly call-to-prayer from the Duke Chapel bell tower beginning Friday, Jan. 16,” Duke Today outlined in a report on Tuesday. “The chant, called the ‘adhan,’ announces the start of the group’s jummah prayer service, which takes place in the chapel basement each Friday at 1 p.m.”
The university said that while the adhan is usually played five times a day for Muslims to pray, they’re doing it only once a week for the Friday high prayers.
“I bear witness that there is none worthy of being worshiped except Allah,” the adhan declares. “I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. … Allah is most great.”
University officials said the broadcasting of the Muslim prayer demonstrates the University’s diversity.
Local Christian leaders are asking Duke why they don’t permit Christians to recite the Lord’s Prayer from the university bell tower once a week.
Muslim leaders from around the U.S. will be heading to Texas for a rally called “Stand With the Prophet in Honor and Respect.” The event is being called “a movement to defend Prophet Muhammad, his person and his message.”
The event seeks to combat “Islamophobes in America” who have, in their words, have turned Muhammad “into an object of hate.”
The event comes a week after Islamists killed 17 people in France for mocking Muhammad.
One of the scheduled speakers at the event is Siraj Wahhaj, the man called an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.
“Frustrated with Islamophobes defaming the Prophet?” the event materials ask. “Fuming over extremists like ISIS who give a bad name to Islam? Remember the Danish cartoons defaming the Prophet? Or the anti-Islam film, ‘Innocence of Muslims’?”
“When real events warrant, like the Danish Cartoon controversy, Sharia ban, Quran burning, Boko Haram kidnappings. [Islamic State] brutality, etc., we articulate fresh talking points and content quickly, and in a timely manner, working with professionals to disseminate it through community spokespersons and our allies,” organizers state on their website.
Two pastors in Bangladesh are facing two years in prison because they were preaching Christ where Muslims could hear them.
Arif Mondol of the Faith Bible Church of God in Lalmonirhat and his co-pastor were conducting a baptism with their congregation of 40 residents when a mob of about 200 Muslims stormed into their building and began attacking the pastors.
“More than 100 Muslims headed by local Jamaat-e-Islami party members and Muslim clerics gathered at the house and started barking questions at the pastors: why did they propagate Christianity in the locality and convert some of them,” a source told Morning Star News. “The pastors replied that it did not take any permission from any authority to propagate any religion and convert people to any religion.”
Local police arrested the pastors and every Christian in the building while doing nothing to the Muslims who caused the incident.
Mondol and his co-pastor have been released on bail pending a trial.
Bangladesh does not have laws against evangelism, so the pastors are being charged with “Hurting Religious Sentiments.”
Muslims throughout Indonesia are furious over the swearing in of Jakarta’s first Christian governor in nearly 50 years.
Basuki Tjahaja Purnama had been acting governor since Joko Widodo stepped aside to become the country’s President.
Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population and has been experiencing a wave of religious intolerance from Muslim hard liners angered that other religions have been given freedom to worship. The new president has vowed to protect religious minorities.
“I don’t need to be approved by everyone,” Purnama told reporters. “The ones that deny me aren’t Jakartans. They come from Bekasi, Depok, Bogor, which are not in my territory.”
Purnama is also the first ethnic Chinese governor of Jakarta. He is known as a transparent, no-nonsense leader who focuses on elimination of corruption in government.
A Muslim worship service being held at the National Cathedral was interrupted by a Christian protester offended by the Christian church being used for worship by those who deny the divinity of Christ.
“Jesus Christ died on that cross over there!” Christine Weick yelled after the announcements at the start of the service. “He is the reason why we are to worship only him. Jesus Christ is our lord and savior!”
Weick continued to yell her objections as she was being removed from the church.
“We have built, and allowed you here in mosques across this country. Why can’t you worship in your mosque, and leave our churches alone?”
The National Cathedral’s website said “Leaders believe offering Muslim prayers at the Christian cathedral shows more than hospitality. It demonstrates an appreciation of one another’s prayer traditions and is a powerful symbolic gesture toward a deeper relationship between the two Abrahamic traditions.”
One of the Cathedral’s officials has previously said she believes Muslims and Christians worship the same God.
A video has been posted online showing Muslim men near Atlanta beating themselves bloody to commemorate the death of Mohammad’s grandson.
The acts come on the Day of Ashura, marking the death of the son of Mohammad’s daughter during a battle in 680 A.D.
The video and photos of the Muslims outside Atlanta shocked viewers with images of infants having their heads cut with knives and men beating themselves until they bleed. They would whip themselves with chains.
“We’ve been doing this since we were kids. I started when I was three,” Mahmoud Jaber, 43, told the Associated Press in 2007. “It doesn’t hurt because the cry of pain goes away with the faith.”
Critics have been demanding to know why the government is not stepping in to protect children who are being cut and beaten.
“If this were happening in the home of an Atlanta resident, the department of child services would take the child from that home as quick as they could. If a family in Atlanta were encouraging their child to beat themselves or cut themselves… the state would not allow it!” writer Onan Coca said. “Yet, because Islam has strangely become some kind of protected cult in our society, we allow these children to be abused right in front of us— in view of the public and even our legal authorities.”
An Islamic worship service is scheduled at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. for the first time in American history.
The national cathedral has been historically an Episcopalian site. Interfaith events have been hosted at the cathedral but there has never been an event where Christians are not part of the event until now.
“Leaders believe offering Muslim prayers at the Christian cathedral shows more than hospitality,” representatives for the National Cathedral wrote in a press release about the matter. “It demonstrates an appreciation of one another’s prayer traditions and is a powerful symbolic gesture toward a deeper relationship between the two Abrahamic traditions.”
“This is a dramatic moment in the world and in Muslim-Christian relations,” added South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool. “This needs to be a world in which all are free to believe and practice and in which we avoid bigotry, Islamaphobia, racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Christianity and to embrace our humanity and to embrace faith.”
Leaders at the national cathedral have been criticized over the last few years as moving away from Christian teachings and working to oppose teachings of the Bible.
The government followed through on their proclamation they would find the people responsible for the mob murder of two Christians on false charges of blasphemy.
However, the local officials tried to deny that Muslims were behind the attack.
“We have arrested 44 people, it was a local issue incited by the mullah of a local mosque,” said Jawad Qamar, a regional police chief from Kot Radha Kishan, Punjab province, according to The Guardian. “No particular sectarian group or religious outfit was behind the attack.”
A Muslim mob attacked Shahzad Masih, 28, and Shama Bibi, 25, because someone found a burned Koran and claimed the Christian couple had burned it in a brick kiln before throwing it away.
The mob then beat the couple and threw them alive into the brick kiln to cremate the bodies.
“The Pakistani state has to act proactively to protect its minorities from violence and injustice,” Pakistan Prime Minster Nawaz Sharif said.
In the latest round of Christian persecution in Pakistan, a Christian couple was falsely accused of desecrating a Koran and then murdered.
The murder took place in Kot Radha Kirshan, a village about 40 miles from the city of Lahore according to the BBC.
The married couple, identified only as Shama and Shehzad, had worked at a brick kiln. A desecrated Koran was found in the area of the kiln earlier in the day and a Muslim mob decided it had to be the Christian couple. So they killed them and stuffed their bodies into the brick kiln.
The chief minister of the region has said he will investigate the killings.
The American Center for Law and Justice, who has been raising the alarm about Asia Bibi, a Christian woman sentenced to death on false accusations of blaspheming Mohammed, is calling for the U.S. to end foreign aid to Pakistan until they take steps to stop the killing of Christians.
