Islamism

A man armed with a knife has this morning attacked a soldier at a Paris metro station. It occurred outside Chatelet station but no-one was injured, French media report. The attacker didn’t cause any injuries to the soldier, and he was arrested shortly after. The soldier was deployed to the area as part of the army’s Operation Sentinel, established in the wake of the city’s 2015 terror attack.

Some denounce it as a violation of Islamic law, others embrace it as revolutionary: An initiative by Tunisia's president to make inheritance and marriage rules fairer to women is reverberating around the Muslim world.

Islamic State flags are not flying in Bosnia, Prime Minister Denis Zvizdic said on Tuesday, dismissing allegations by some European leaders that radical Bosnian Muslims in the Balkan country were posing a terrorist threat for Europe.

The so-called Arab Spring came to an end wherever it assumed to take place. It ended in Egypt with a military coup and drove Libya into a bloody chaos. Tunisia is presented as the only success story, but in fact it is far from having a happy ending but rather had a forced consensus. Last but not least, the debacle of Syria displays the dark side of the so-called "spring." 

On June 31, Mehmet Gormez, a Turkish cleric who headed the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), a government department that runs more than 85,000 mosques, bid farewell to his post he had occupied since 2010. Gormez’s term didn’t end until 2020, which is why his early departure triggered a heated discussion in the media and on social media.

Opposition circles, or the "other half of Turkey," are suffering from post-system change trauma. It is not just the end of the parliamentary system and the authoritarian sway that has been sealed after the July 2016 coup attempt and the April 2017 referendum, everybody feels a deeper transformation of the political regime underway.

The man who killed one person and injured six in a supermarket knife attack in Hamburg was a "known Islamist", police say, quoted by BBC.

"He was known as an Islamist but not a jihadist," police spokesman Andy Grote said, noting that the suspect also suffered from "psychological" issues.

The EU's highest court has maintained a ruling that Palestinian Islamist group Hamas is a terrorist organisation, in a blow to campaigners who have called for the militant organisation to be removed from Europe's blacklist, reported the Financial Times.

Photo: AP

The threat of violent Islamist extremism has been growing in Kosovo, the US State Department said in its latest annual report on global terrorism.

The threat of violent Islamist extremism has been growing in Kosovo, the US State Department said in its latest annual report on global terrorism.

This development in Kosovo is assisted in part by funding from foreign organizations that preach extremist ideologies and violent extremist groups actively using social media to spread propaganda and recruit followers, the report said.