The Muslim Student Association @ UConn

The latest talks focus on how to foster religious harmony [EPA]

Senior Vatican and Muslim scholars have opened their first Catholic-Muslim Forum to improve relations between the world's two largest faiths.

The three-day meeting beginning on Tuesday comes two years after Pope Benedict angered the Muslim world with a speech that many felt implied that Islam was violent and irrational.

In response, 138 Muslim scholars invited Christian churches to a new dialogue to foster mutual respect through a better understanding of each other's beliefs.

In their manifesto, "A Common Word", the Muslims argued that both faiths shared the core principles of love of God and neighbour.

The talks focus on what this means for the religions and how it can foster harmony between them.

The meeting, including an audience with Pope Benedict, is the group's third conference with Christians after talks with Protestants and Anglicans in the United States over the last few months.

BARGUNA, Bangladesh (AP *) -- Survivors of a powerful cyclone that devastated Bangladesh and killed more than 2,400 people grieved and buried their loved ones Monday as they waited for aid to arrive.

In Galachipa, a fishing village along the coast in Patuakhali district, Dhalan Mridha and his family had ignored the high cyclone alert issued by authorities.

"Nothing is going to happen. That was our first thought and we went to bed. Just before midnight the winds came like hundreds of demons. Our small hut was swept away like a piece of paper, and we all ran for shelter," said Mridha, a 45-year-old farm worker, weeping.

On the way to a shelter, Mridha was separated from his wife, mother and two children. The next morning he found their

Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research Al-Habib Al-Malki argued that the move came to fight extremism.

IslamOnline.net RABAT — The Ministry of Education in Morocco has omitted from preparatory school curricula a Qur'anic verse, hadith and a photo of a hijab-clad girl, claiming that it moved to nip extremism in the bud.

"They omitted verse no. 31 of surat An-Nur, which reads: "And tell the believing women to lower their gaze and be modest, and to display of their adornment only that which is apparent, and to draw their veils over their bosoms…..," Abdul Kareem Al-Howeshri, the head of the non-governmental Islamic Education Association, told IslamOnline.net Tuesday, October 3.

He said they also erased a hadith narrated by Abu Dawood that Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) cursed men dressing up in women's clothes and women putting on men's clothes.

"The Revival of Islamic Education textbook has been withdrawn from schools and distributed after the omissions," Howeshri said.

The ministry has further removed a photo of a girl wearing hijab and kissing her mother's hands from Al-Waha textbook, which also has to do with Islamic education.

Admitting the omissions at a recent parliamentary interpellation, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research Al-Habib Al-Malki argued that the move came to fight hardliners.

Howeshri blasted the minister's justification as unacceptable and implausible.

"The minister wants to impose a fait accompli though such a move negates the very sense of Islamic identity and the Constitution, which says that Islam is the official religion of the state and all laws should be in harmony with Shari`ah," he fumed.

Pressure

Howeshri, also the chairman of the Moroccan committee for Islamic subject teachers, said the government must have come under pressure to omit subjects from curricula already approved by specialized ministerial committees.

IslamOnline and News Agencies

"I think it's preposterous. From the beginning this is a plan that cannot be achieved," said Maher.

CAIRO — US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's vision of a new Middle East she expects to emerge from the Israel-Hizbullah war is nothing but chimera and will backfire at the end of the day, former Arab diplomats and experts have agreed.

"I think it's preposterous. From the beginning this is a plan that cannot be achieved," Egypt's ex-foreign minister Ahmed Maher told Reuters.

"In fact what the United States wants to have is a tame Middle East," insisted Maher, who served for years as ambassador to Washington.

"That's what they call a new Middle East."

Rice, leading the first high-level US diplomatic mission since Israel unleashed its military juggernaut against Lebanon on July 12, reiterated on Tuesday, July 25, her new Middle East cliché.

"It is time for a new Middle East," she told a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

"It is time to say to those that don’t want a different kind of Middle East that we will prevail. They will not."

On Friday, July 21, Washington's top diplomat rejected international calls for an immediate ceasefire, saying the world is witnessing "the birth pangs of a new Middle East" in the current fighting between Israel and Hizbullah.

More than 400 people in Lebanon, the overwhelming majority are civilians, have been killed in unrelenting and shambolic Israeli strikes since July 12.

The hard-won infrastructure of the tiny Arab country has been left in ruins, with Israel knocking out Beirut international airport, bombing ports, destroying bridges, setting power stations set ablaze and reducing houses to rubble.