Fourteen people went on trial in Spain this week on charges of involvement with Islamic terrorist groups and recruiting extremists to fight in Iraq. The fourteen, all men and mostly of Moroccan background, are charged with collaborating with Islamic terrorist groups and for helping several suspects flee the March 11, 2004 Madrid bombings. The prosecution…
Thousands of Spaniards, especially academics, intellectuals, and anti-globalization activists are finding solace in Islam. “Embracing Islam is on the rise despite ferocious Western media campaigns,” Abdul-Nour Brado, the head of the Islamic Society of Catalonia. It is estimated that three to four thousand Catalonians have accepted Islam recently, with some suggesting that the numbers are…
A dozen Muslim entities congregated in Barcelona on a platform called Muslims and Muslim communities of Catalonia for equality. The initiate comes with the aim to combat fundamentalist readings of Islam and promote gender equality in Spanish Muslim communities. It stems from an initiative of the Catalan Islamic Board and eight other Muslim, immigrant, and…
The recent arrests of 12 Pakistanis and two Indians in Barcelona have sparked a mixture of disbelief, indignation, and sadness among the city’s 25,000 Pakistanis. Since 2004, more than 70 people, including a number of Pakistanis, have been arrested in Catalonia on suspected Islamist militant links. The Pakistani community is worried that the message that…
The result of the research done by the anthropologist Jordi Moreras, about the imams of Catalonia reveals that contrarily to what society believes they are not so influent among the Muslim community. One of the arguments Moreras presents is their poor labour conditions as their religious function is not officially recognised and they have no…
