Muslims

• This came a week after the junta moved her into house arrest following a year in solitary confinement.
• But it still leaves Aung San Suu Kyi facing a 27-year jail term on bogus charges.
• The junta also lopped four years off former president Win Myint’s sentence, and reportedly released more than 7,000 other prisoners.

Determined resistance

• Under these volatile conditions, people have been voting with their feet by fleeing abroad or taking up arms in a revolutionary mobilisation.
• The junta’s leader, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, reportedly told the National Defence and Security Council that elections couldn’t be conducted due to continued fighting in several regions.
• While aerial bombardments by regime aircraft might set back the resistance, the strategy is hardly a way to win hearts or minds.
• Diplomatic efforts to maintain Myanmar’s territorial integrity jostle with the discomfort felt almost everywhere about doing business with a blood-splattered regime.

An unnecessary crisis

• It’s a precipitous erosion of what was, until the coup, a relatively positive story for most Myanmar people.
• Before the coup, the most problematic issue was the military’s abuses of the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority living in westernmost Myanmar.
• That political and social infrastructure, and the emerging civil society it helped sustain, has now crumbled.
• Some speculate the whole system will collapse, making it impossible for powerbrokers to keep up the increasingly flimsy charade of state power.

No way out

• But it does reveal the fragility of the military system and the paranoia of the men in charge.
• It’s also further evidence that nobody can trust the junta.
• Still, there’s no obvious path to fuller inclusion in ASEAN while the generals unleash such violence against their own people.

• The fundamental distinguishing feature of an Islamic bank is its adherence to Islamic, or Sharia, law.
• Why do these rules and conventions exist, and how do they work in practice?

1. No interest

• For devout Muslims, conventional banking services are problematic because of the main way most banks make profit – by charging interest on loans.
• Islam’s holy book, the Quran, prohibits all transactions associated with interest.
• Usury refers to lending money at unreasonable interest rates, but the term is sometimes used to mean any charging of interest at all.
• Similarly, deposits with the bank don’t earn interest, but instead they earn a return that will rise or fall in line with the bank’s overall profits.

2. No speculative assets

• From this, Islamic scholars infer that purchasing land or property purely for speculation is not permissible, but buying it to undertake economic activities is allowed.
• This means Islamic banks cannot engage in the kind of debt-based financing that underpins the home or business loans offered by many Australian banks.
• Similarly, Islamic banks can provide loans to buy land that will be used for economic activities, but cannot profit purely from land price appreciation.

3. No ‘socially harmful’ business

Sharia law does not allow an Islamic bank to finance economic sectors that are deemed harmful to people’s wellbeing, such as alcohol, tobacco, gambling, adult entertainment, pork products, or arms production.

4. Islamic corporate governance

Islamic banks typically appoint two boards: a regular board of directors similar to those that govern most banks, and a Sharia supervisory board to oversee compliance with Islamic laws.

What are Islamic Bank Australia’s prospects?

• The main challenge for Islamic Bank Australia will be to gain accreditation from the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA), which regulates Australia’s commercial banking industry.
• In many Muslim-majority countries, such as Malaysia for example, a separate Sharia Advisory Council, typically appointed by the country’s central bank, oversees the Islamic finance industry.
• Islamic Bank Australia’s Sharia committee has three members: Malaysia-based Ashraf Md Hashim, who also sits on that country’s Sharia Advisory Council; Mohamed Ali Elgari, an Islamic economics academic in Saudi Arabia; and Australia-based Islamic banking scholar Rashid Raashed.
• A related issue is the question of how Islamic Bank Australia will interact with Australia’s existing banks.

• Recently, Logos Olori – a Nigerian singer who is signed to Afrobeats superstar Davido’s music label – released a video with supposedly Muslim men dancing to his song Jaye Lo in front of a mosque.
• After an outcry, the controversial video had to be taken down by Davido because it sparked the ire of Muslims in Nigeria.
• There were public burnings of Davido’s image on posters in the Muslim north and fervent calls to have him remove the video.

Religious tensions

• Nigeria, a largely Muslim-dominated country, has been plagued by religious conflicts in contemporary times.
• The religious uprising, which resulted in thousands of deaths, was an attempt to impose a “purer” version of Islam.
• The country is governed by powerful religious sentiments – both Islamic and Christian – that make it, at most times, ultra-conservative.

Freedom of expression

• A sophisticated way of assessing the Logos Olori controversy is to state that it’s about the right to freedom of expression.
• But on the streets, it’s often unveiled as a tussle to establish “purer” standards of religious practice.

Art or gimmick?

• But there is also a larger question; is this really art or a lowbrow attention-seeking gimmick?
• But young African-American women who twerked atop the Elmina Castle in Ghana were criticised for bringing the slave dungeon into disrepute.
• In the elevation of the risqué and the substituting of art with entertainment there is also a blurring of the distinction between the sacred and the profane.
• In my view, Logos Olori’s portrayal wasn’t conceived as a piece of art but a gimmick (and perhaps a form of cultural appropriation) that ultimately backfired.

The common good

• Most entertainment clearly isn’t art and the limits of individual rights and freedoms are often defined by the effects they have on the common good and social cohesion.
• For a polity as diverse as Nigeria in ethnic, cultural, religious and political terms, the issue of freedom of expression and individual liberties in relation to the common good has been problematic.
• And for the good of all, it’s better we take heed.

• These ideas date back to the British colonial era and have far-reaching implications for people’s everyday lives.
• The trailer claimed 32,000 Hindu girls had been converted to Islam by Muslim men with the intent of recruiting them to ISIS.
• Once the film came out, citizens tried to get it banned by sending a petition to the India’s Supreme Court.

Political fallout

• The figure of 32,000 women in the film’s trailer was immediately challenged by Indian political leaders and also debunked by fact-checkers from the website, Alt News.
• The filmmakers agreed to change the number and a new trailer was released.

Challenges in the Indian Supreme Court

• Some politicians decried the propagandist nature of the movie and in West Bengal, it was banned by the government.
• Politicians there said the film “manipulated facts and contains hate speech in multiple scenes” and they banned the film to “avoid violence and hatred.” The Indian Supreme Court lifted the state ban though agreed that a disclaimer on the film was necessary.
• The disclaimer indicated that the film provides “no authentic data” to support the 32,000 figure and that it presents fictionalized accounts.

Islamophobia from the 19th century

• In the 19th century, Hindu scholars and new religious organisations (like Arya Samaj and Hindu Mahasabha) began producing a new Hindu-centric version of Indian history.
• This history grew in response to British colonialism but at the same time, shared similarities with British colonial ideas.
• By the late 19th century, India was constructed around Hindu heterosexual relationships and family values in opposition to Muslim sexual deviance and rampant Muslim sexuality.

Challenges to interfaith marriage

• Love jihad’s centrality to Hindu nationalist politics has led to specifically stringent laws focused heavily on sexuality and marriage.
• Read more:
  India’s 'love jihad' anti-conversion laws aim to further oppress minorities, and it's working

  Hindu vigilantes, in partnership with the police, launch missions to separate interfaith couples.

• One response to the chatter about “love jihad,” is an Instagram channel called India Love Project launched to celebrate stories of interfaith love and marriages.