Students, extremists stone, beat and burn her after ‘desecration’ of yet unfound Quran.

GOMBE, Nigeria, March 27 (Compass Direct News) - Christianah Oluwatoyin Oluwasesin, a teacher at Government Secondary School of Gandu in this northern Nigerian town, was in high spirits last Wednesday (March 21) as she made her way to school where she teaches government. She was happy that, after the last day of exams, she would be joining her husband in their hometown of Abeokuta, where he had taken a new position. But Muslim students along with outside Islamic extremists murdered Oluwasesin on March 21 over claims that she desecrated the Quran. They beat, stoned, and clubbed her to death, then burned her corpse. Aluke Musa Yila, a fellow teacher at the school, told Compass that Oluwasesin had collected papers, books and bags before the exam in accordance with school procedures to prevent cheating. “Soon after the bags collected by Oluwasesin were dropped in front of the class, one of the girls in the class began to cry,” Musa said. “She told her colleagues that she had a copy of the Quran in her bag, that Oluwasesin touched the bag, and that by doing so she had desecrated the Quran, since she was a Christian.”

Egypt is to hold a controversial referendum on constitutional amendments on Monday 26 March.

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The following are excerpts from an interview with Egyptian women’s rights activist Nawal Al-Sa’dawi, which aired on Al-Arabiya TV on March 3, 2007.

Interviewer: “Whatever the reason you are leaving [Egypt] may be, this, according to some people, does not change the fact that you are being accused of despising the monotheistic religions, including Islam, and of blasphemy. Isn’t that true?”

Nawal Sa’dawi: “By Allah, I am nauseated by these accusations. Enough. If this is what we have come to in our country, the Arabs will become extinct, Allah willing. They will be defeated and cease to exist. We find ourselves at the tail-end of all nations, in the name of falsified and commercialized religion. Enough with that. Enough with religion, we want a livelihood.”
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By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani

CAIRO, Mar 21 (IPS) - Another constitutional debate has erupted this month after a number of academics and rights activists called for the amendment of Article 2 of the national charter that defines a role for Islam.

The Article states that “Islam is the religion of the state” and that “Islamic Law constitutes the principle source of legislation.”

Critics of the amendment proposal say the demand will only serve to inflame passions between the country’s minority Christian community and its Muslim majority.

Safwat el-Sherif, head of the Shura Council (the consultative house of parliament), said that diluting the role of Islam in the constitution “would only lead to sectarian strife” between Muslims and Christians.

“Islam is the religion of the state, but that doesn’t mean that it is forced on non-Muslims,” El-Sherif said in on state television.
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By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service

CAIRO — On June 20, 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stepped onto the arabesque campus of the American University in Cairo, built around a former pasha’s palace, and delivered a call to action that overturned decades of American policy in the Arab world.

“For 60 years,” she said, “my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.” For five paragraphs of her speech, diplomatic niceties made way for a series of declarative “musts” directed at Egypt’s government: It must give its citizens the freedom to choose, Egyptian elections must be free, opposition groups must be free to assemble and participate. The Egyptian government, Rice said, “must put its faith in its own people.”

The language was black-and-white, but America’s relationship with Egypt — with President Hosni Mubarak and with the reform movement — never is.

Nearly two years later, the legacy of Rice’s words is intimately tied to the fate of Egypt’s democracy movement, divided and withering under unrelenting repression by a government that remains one of America’s key allies in the region. What began as a test of American mettle ended in failure to bring about far-reaching change in a country that has received more per capita U.S. aid than Europe did under the post-World War II Marshall Plan. In the eyes of activists and, at times, the government itself, that failure stands as a narrative of misperception about the people Americans sought to court, and of naivete about those the Americans wanted to reform.
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Ten Questions to Challenge and Encourage

An expert on Christian education in the United States recently said, “Our culture has lost the love of learning.” The statement seems especially true regarding how much we know about Christians who suffer for their faith. Despite the wealth of information that is available and the blazing speed of access, Christians who worship in freedom continue to demonstrate an amazing lack of awareness of the Persecuted Church. Are you ready to test your knowledge of the status of Christian persecution in 2007? If so, answer the following 10 questions as best you can. But be warned: Some are not as straightforward as they seem.

By Ramadan Al Sherbini, Correspondent

Cairo: As Egypt is debating constitutional changes, touted as the largest in decades, Coptic Christians, who make up an estimated 10 million of the country’s 75 million population, are pushing for wider political representation.

“Representation of Copts in Egypt’s assemblies has been narrow since 1924,” said Samir Morocos, a Coptic researcher. He told a recent seminar in Cairo that political parties should field Coptic candidates for Parliament.

Very few Copts won seats in the 2005 parliamentary elections in which the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned-but-tolerated group, collected 88 seats in the 454-member legislature. In an apparent bid to allay fears of Christians about Islamists’ prominence, President Hosni Mubarak has appointed five Christians among ten MPs, a right given to him by the law.
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Egypt has reacted angrily to criticism of its human rights record by the United States - one of its main allies.
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Schoolbooks Present the Mosque as a Military Training Ground

In an article in the Egyptian Culture Ministry weekly Al-Kahira, Fawzi wrote: “[Egyptian] schoolbooks teach the pupil to regard the [Islamic] faith as his homeland, placing no value on Egypt [itself] apart from its religious significance as part of dar al-Islam [i.e. the region under Islamic rule]. For example, the fifth-grade textbook Islamic Religious Education includes a poem titled ‘Biladi’ [’My Homeland’], which teaches the pupils to associate their homeland with [the Islamic] religion, as though [Egypt] were not characterized by cultural and religious diversity. [One line in this poem reads]: ‘Islam is the most perfect religion’…

“In another part [of the book], the author lists the important aspects of the mosque. An examination of the [list] reveals that, in this book, the mosque has been transformed from a place of worship… into a venue for recruitment and training for war. According to a third-grade textbook, the mosque is ‘a school where Muslims learn about their religion and their world… and the place where Allah’s soldiers meet before every important operation…’
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After burning down the worship center three years ago, Islamists twice attempt arson.

ZARIA, Nigeria, March 7 (Compass Direct News) - Muslim students twice have set fire to a high school chapel here since it was rebuilt last August, after Islamists burned it down three years ago. In January, Islamic students at Government Science Secondary School in Kufena, in the Wusasa area of Zaria in the northern state of Kaduna, set fire to the Chapel of Adonai, which was rebuilt last year with services restored in September. The most recent arson attempt, as well as one in December 2006, failed when Christian staff members and students at the high school put out the fires. Pastor Samuel Nuhu, a teacher at the school, told Compass that in 2004 Muslim students burned down the chapel and attacked Christian students, many of whom had to be hospitalized. Previous to the most recent arson attempt, two letters were dropped into the chapel warning Christian students and staff members of an impending attack unless they left the school. The letter included derogatory comments about Jesus.