Muslim World

Filmmakers Mostafa Heravi, Alka Sadat and Laila Hotait Salas may hail from three different countries ? Iran, Afghanistan and Lebanon ? and represent a cross-section of vastly divergent backgrounds. But they speak a common language: filmmaking. All three recently traveled to Los Angeles for "Women's Voices From the Muslim World," a screening of 63 shorts from 21 countries, last week at the Los Angeles Film School. The three-day event, however, was just the beginning: Films will remain viewable on the Web and the festival's parent organization, the nonprofit Women's Voices Now, plans a roster of screenings, panel discussions and other events throughout 2011 both domestically and abroad.

CAIRO - The men gathering outside the yellow mosque agreed: Adulterers should be stoned to death, the hands of thieves cut off. "But not now," said Kareem Atta, waiting in a cool breeze for the sheik's car to roll up next to the Koran sellers. " Sharia law must be gradually put into place so it doesn't shock the system. You can't cut people's hands off if you first don't give them financial justice. " The young students, engineers and laborers are followers of Hazem Salah abu Ismail, a lawyer and holy man whose poetic blend of populism and ultraconservative Salafi Islam has turned him into a leading presidential candidate.

Confidence in President Obama among the world's Muslims is slipping, according to a poll of global attitudes that also found widespread concern that the United States remains a go-it-alone nation even under the new administration. The survey, by the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project, found support for Obama strong in most nations, even as his rating at home has slipped. But in five of seven Muslim-majority nations that were polled, his popularity slid over the last year, winning approval ratings from about one-third or less of respondents.

A Quiet Revolution The Veil's Resurgence From the Middle East to America Leila Ahmed Yale University Press: 352 pp., $30 When I was 13, one of my classmates came to school one morning wearing a beige head scarf. This was in the 1980s, in Morocco. Surprised by her attire, I joined a group of girls who gathered around her, watching them pepper her with questions. Our classmate calmly replied that she had decided to wear the hijab because that was what a "true" Muslim girl should do. This struck us as strange.

Osama bin Laden, slain in a U.S. raid Sunday, had been losing support in the Muslim world in recent years, and his terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, had been declining in popularity, according to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. The decline came as pro-democracy demonstrations and even, in some cases, revolution swept through the Islamic world. Both trends, the fall in Bin Laden’s standing and the growth of pro-democratic forces, perhaps represent a shift away from the terrorism-based political action of  small, violent groups toward mass movements.

Paul Johnson's article ("The Pressure Is on Europe Again," Commentary, Dec. 18) is yet another case of a commentary in The Times viewing the Muslim world from a non-Muslim point of view. In telling the world to fear Muslims, Johnson's message is one of ignorance, contributing to why Islam is probably the most misunderstood of all the world's great religions. As an American-born Muslim, I tell many of my Christian and Jewish friends that Islam teaches peace and harmony with all faiths.

President Obama on Saturday named White House lawyer Rashad Hussain a special envoy to the Muslim world. The president announced the appointment during a video address to the seventh U.S.-Islamic World Forum meeting in Doha, Qatar. Hussain is the second special envoy named to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The group, with more than 50 member-states, is the world's second-largest intergovernmental body after the U.N. (The first envoy, Sada Cumber, was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2008.

Wake-UP calls from abroad have made this a turbulent millennium for Americans. We remain stubbornly indifferent to much that occurs beyond our borders, however, even as American culture is exported globally through the media, along with Starbucks and McDonald's, requiring others to take note of us. It's bracing when TV occasionally dents systemic U.S. ethnocentrism instead of nourishing it. Yet talk about a worthy concept getting clobbered by bad timing and the thunder of events.

Rhetorically, at least, President Obama moved mountains in the land of Muhammad. Speaking from Cairo University to the world's estimated 1.5 billion Muslims, the American president made a frank appeal for a new relationship based on mutual respect. Language matters, and this was an eloquent address of historic and moral importance meant to turn the page on strong-arm politics and ultimatums. The first U.S.

When President Obama declared Monday that the United States "is not, and will never be, at war with Islam," he was addressing Turkey's parliament. But his audience was the wider Muslim world. The president's ringing affirmation of partnership with Turkey, which he described as a vital bridge between East and West, was interwoven with a highly personal appeal for a change in the tone of discourse between the United States and the world's Muslims.

President Obama on Thursday called out American friends in the Middle East for their treatment of peaceful protesters, naming Bahrain and Yemen along with Syria as states he said must yield to the aspirations of their people. While explicitly stating an American commitment to the security of Israel, Obama also called upon Israelis and Palestinians to swap land along the general lines of the borders that were in place before the 1967 war in the interests of achieving peace.

Osama bin Laden, slain in a U.S. raid Sunday, had been losing support in the Muslim world in recent years, and his terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, had been declining in popularity, according to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. The decline came as pro-democracy demonstrations and even, in some cases, revolution swept through the Islamic world. Both trends, the fall in Bin Laden’s standing and the growth of pro-democratic forces, perhaps represent a shift away from the terrorism-based political action of  small, violent groups toward mass movements.

Filmmakers Mostafa Heravi, Alka Sadat and Laila Hotait Salas may hail from three different countries ? Iran, Afghanistan and Lebanon ? and represent a cross-section of vastly divergent backgrounds. But they speak a common language: filmmaking. All three recently traveled to Los Angeles for "Women's Voices From the Muslim World," a screening of 63 shorts from 21 countries, last week at the Los Angeles Film School. The three-day event, however, was just the beginning: Films will remain viewable on the Web and the festival's parent organization, the nonprofit Women's Voices Now, plans a roster of screenings, panel discussions and other events throughout 2011 both domestically and abroad.

The Obama administration is drawing careful limits on its potential military involvement in the increasingly bloody struggle between the Libyan government and rebel forces, despite growing calls for Western intervention. Administration officials, while stepping up efforts to help refugees fleeing Libya, say they will provide only secondary military aid to the rebels, such as electronic jamming of government communications, unless an increase in civilian killings by Moammar Kadafi's forces prompts an international consensus for stronger steps.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday joined the debate about the motive in the shootings in Arizona that targeted U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, comparing the shooter with an ideologically driven terrorist. Appearing on "Sweet Talk," a satellite-TV show for Arab women, Clinton said American society, like the Muslim world, suffered from extremism and cited the shootings Saturday in Tucson. "Look, we have extremists in my country," Clinton said while taping the show at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi.

Tehran and Washington are seeking to expand their regional influence ahead of another round of talks over Iran's nuclear program, which has become a source of widespread international concern. On Saturday, Iran feted its newly designated caretaker foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, with a reception in Tehran. Salehi announced that he would seek to strengthen ties with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, a Sunni Arab-led power that has bristled at Shiite Iran's growing influence in the Middle East.

It is difficult to overstate the anticipation awaiting Barack Obama's speech to the Muslim world Thursday. The prospect of an American president who represents a break from the recent past journeying to Cairo has stirred optimism in a region accustomed to viewing U.S. power with hostility. White House advisors have warned that few detailed proposals will be forthcoming when Obama comes to this ancient city of mosques.

When President Obama takes the podium in Cairo this week for his much-anticipated speech to the Muslim world, he'll stand before them as an American leader born of an African Muslim father and raised partly in Indonesia, as well as a politician who cut his political teeth in an Illinois political culture that has a sizable Muslim population. And he will talk, aides say, about those roots he shares with the Muslim world.

President Obama said Tuesday that Israel is not helping the cause of peace by restarting home construction in territory claimed by both Arabs and Israelis, a development that jeopardizes his efforts to ease tensions between the sides at a crucial moment. "This kind of activity is never helpful when it comes to peace negotiations," Obama said. "And I'm concerned that we're not seeing each side make the extra effort to get a breakthrough that could finally create a framework for a secure Israel living side by side in peace with a sovereign Palestine.

A World Without Islam Graham Fuller Little, Brown: 336 pp., $25.99 One of the sadder consequences of the near decade of war and violence that has followed the attacks of 9/11 is that so many people are convinced that we are in a clash of civilizations divided along religious fault lines. The concept was popularized by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington in the mid-1990s, but he didn't invent the idea; he gave it a name. Until 9/11, however, it was both debated and debatable.