Habib Siddiqui

For many Christians around the globe, Christmas is linked with the birthday of their lord Jesus Christ. They believe that he was born on or around December 25 of 1 C.E. (Common Era). It is inconsequential to them that the story in the Gospels is often utterly divorced from all historical contexts.  There is often no awareness of the geographical and political relation between the places Jesus visits, e.g., Galilee, Judea and Jerusalem, how far they might be from each other, how long a journey from one place to another might take place. As Michael Baigent et al. (authors of the book - The Messianic Legacy ) puts it, “ For the lay [Christian] congregation, scriptural accounts are regarded as literal history, a self-contained story no less true for being divorced from an historical context. Never having been taught otherwise by his spiritual mentors, many a devout believer has had no need to question the problems posed by such a context .” In the Gospel accounts of the so-called ...

The Rohingya people of Myanmar (formerly Burma) are the most oppressed people in our planet. They face elimination in the Buddhist majority country, which is rightly called the ‘den of hatred and intolerance’ in our time. Not a single day goes by when their community members don’t face repeated persecution and harassment from not only the Gestapo-like members of the government but also from the fellow Buddhists who have swallowed Hitler’s poisonous pills of xenophobia and bigotry. Not surprisingly, in today’s Myanmar Nazi swastika and similar insignia are in great demand!  The two-year long pogrom against the Rohingya has resulted in the internal displacement of hundreds of thousands of their fellow men, women and children. Many have been slaughtered by blood-thirsty Buddhists. Others have been forced to live inside squalid camps that are described by independent fact-finding observers as worse than prison camps. Many of the desperate Rohingyas have braved the stormy seas and oc...

Minority problem is a recurrent issue in almost all parts of the world, including the more inclusive USA. On Thursday (Dec. 4) evening a 15-year-old Muslim boy of Somali descent - Abdisamad Sheikh-Hussein - was struck by a SUV intentionally as he was leaving the Somali Center of Kansas City after leading a prayer service there. He was a Hafiz (one who memorized the entire Qur’an by heart). The impact of collision pinned him down and killed him. Another Muslim teenager also sustained severe but not life-threatening injuries. Somali Center officials have said that a man has threatened the local Muslim community for months. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said the driver threatened the teen's family and other area Somali Muslims for months, even writing the anti-Islamic message "the Quran is worse than Ebola" on his own Chevrolet SUV. The driver was seen wielding a machete as he tried to flee the crash scene threatening other Somali-Americans. As to the m...