MUSLIMS IN THE WEST

A venture capital firm is raising funds to launch Europe's first industrial park for Islamic goods, tapping an under-served market worth up to 4 billion pounds ($6.27 billion) a year in Britain, its chairman said.

A successful first project could lead to further launches across Europe, possibly France and Germany and emerging Europe.

"We would prefer to go to places like Bosnia, where there's a large Muslim population and... we could seek EU grants," said Mahesh Jayanarayan, chairman of Halal Industries.

The Super Halal Industrial Park (SHIP) will be based in South Wales and will take three to five years to launch, reported Jayanarayan, who chose Wales for the project because of its meat industries and affordable land prices.

The cost of the project would be 150 million pounds -- a sum he plans to raise in the capital markets, by sourcing government grants and by finding anchor-partners like supermarket chains and multinational food manufacturers to "cement the deal", he said.

"If you look at some figures, the halal sector in the UK is worth between 2 to 4 billion pounds, the majority of that is imported," Jayanarayan said at the Reuters Islamic Banking and Finance Summit in London.

"You have 2.5 billion people on the planet eating halal food, directly or indirectly ... This halal market is not going away, it is not some fad," he said.

The global industry is worth an estimated $2.1 trillion, and is expected to grow as the Muslim middle class grows richer.

Europe has no Halal industrial parks, despite being home to millions of Muslims. SHIP will help to make the UK a landmark Halal centre for the region, Jayanarayan said.

Halal Industries has partnered with the Penang International Halal Hub (PIHH), the agency set up by the Malaysian state to promote halal-related industries. PIHH will provide advisory and development support throughout the project.

The park would provide services such as storage, product packing, meat selection and processing as well as research and development.

"This would be a private equity play but also a property play, purely because we are trying to pre-sell the project to industrial people to come in," said Jayanarayan.

Halal Industries is a newcomer with no projects yet off the ground, and is backed by Scandinavian investors through Jayanarayan's UK-based partnership Bergstrom Associates.

BOURSE PLANNED
The firm is also planning to set up an Islamic stock exchange in either London or Luxembourg to try to encourage the development of Islamic enterprise.

"We have a technical partner, a sharia board and we have identified a board of directors, but there is still a lot of work to be done (on the exchange)," said Jayanarayan.

The exchange would abide by Islamic law by restricting practices such as short-selling and the use of leverage.

(Source: Reuters, Balkans.com Business News)

A German academic advisory council has suggested that those who teach Islam at schools should hold a university theology degree as a minimum qualification, a proposal welcomed by the government and others.

"More than four million Muslims live in Germany and their children have a right to be taught their religion at school," Peter Strohschneider, head of the German Council of Science and Humanities, told reporters on February 1 following release of their new report.

The report says Germany has 700,000 Muslim pupils who would need 2,000 teachers of Islamic theology if all states offer religious education for them.

"The teachers for these classes must receive academic training," Strohschneider said.
For that purpose the Council, comprising senior government officials and professors, proposed establishing Islamic theology departments at two to three public universities initially.

It wants advisory groups from the Muslim community formed to decide upon content and hiring professors to avoid concerns that non-believers might be hired to teach courses.

The Council supports that the Muslim community should have the right to veto potential professors.
Currently, many German universities teach about Islam in Middle Eastern studies or history courses, but none teaches its theology, law and languages in an academic curriculum similar to that used in their Christian theology faculties.

But a department has been set up at one German university in the western city of Muenster to train schoolteachers to teach Islam to children, offering courses on the Quran and other topics.

Not all Muslims view it favourably. Some say such a large structure is needed by the French Government to project its cosmopolitan character.

France's second largest city and the country's gateway to north Africa and the Mediterranean, Marseille, is home to almost a quarter of a million Muslims.

But for years, this ever-growing community has had to make do with a haphazard collection of makeshift mosques housed in shops, offices, basements, garages and rented rooms for their daily worship. There are as many as 2,500 of them across the country.

Several decades in the planning, the Grand Mosque of Marseille, at 92,500 square feet by far the largest mosque in the country, is due to break ground in April on the north side of the city's old port.
Donors from Saudi Arabia and Algeria have contributed more than $60 million. Marseille's mayor has issued building permits. At least two lawsuits filed by groups attempting to block its construction have been scuttled.

The mosque's vast prayer hall will hold up to 7,000 people, but in deference to local sensitivities, it will sport no blaring loudspeaker -- no muezzin, neither live nor recorded -- to summon the faithful to prayer throughout the day. Instead, it will have a powerful purple light, which will blink five times a day at prayer times. For many, the building of the mosque is a tangible sign of both the growing numbers of Muslims in France -- and all of western Europe -- and the groups' increasing desire to live in France but by its own cultural and religious mores.

"In my opinion, this is much more of a political sign within the Muslim community to say 'finally we recognize the importance of Islam as a part of French culture, and not just as an imported religion," Abdessalem Souiki, a local imam, told CNN.

There has been a long-running national debate in France as to how far it is willing to accommodate its growing Muslim identity without undermining the separation of church and state. In a bid to defend secularism, the French government passed a law in 2004 banning head scarves or other "conspicuous" religious symbols in state schools. Last month the Government also proscribed the full veil.

Relations between Muslims and Europeans have generally been good. But attacks associated with Islamic terrorism in France in 1995, the United States in 2001, Spain in 2004 and Britain in 2005 have resonated both within the community and beyond.

Marseille's Muslims are split over the construction of the mosque. According to a recent newspaper poll, only 57 per cent support the building of the mega-mosque, due to be completed by 2011.
Youcef Mammeri, a prominent member of the some 200,000-strong community and a writer on Islam in France, objects to its location, on a site known as the "abattoir," where an old slaughterhouse once stood in one of the port city's poorest neighborhoods.

He told CNN the mega-mosque "will not have anything to do with spirituality anymore." He predicts it will "capture all the attention, but at the same time gather a lot of opposition and conflict."

He says the local Muslim community would prefer more and smaller neighborhood mosques, rather than the city's first purpose-built place of worship.

Mammeri, a member of the Joint Council of Muslims of Marseille, doubts the mosque will ever get built, saying there have been plans for a grand mosque in the city since 1937, when a monument to honor France's Muslim war veterans was constructed on the Marseille shore.

"It's not Muslims that need a big mosque," Mammeri told CNN. "It's the government that needs a big mosque, so its reputation as a cosmopolitan, diverse and harmonious city lasts.”

Obama administration intends NASA to become as much a tool of international diplomacy as it is an agency that furthers science, commerce, and the national security needs of the US. It has asked NASA to start an outreach to the Muslims world.

"Specifically, he talked about connecting with countries that do not have an established space program and helping them conduct science missions. He mentioned new opportunities with Indonesia, including an educational programme that examines global climate change."

While a number of Muslim countries have space agencies, and even home built satellites, primarily communication and weather satellites, only Iran has its own capability to launch things into low Earth orbit. The US thinks that Iran's space programme has military designs.

International cooperation in space is not new. The International Space Station has Russia, the European Union, Japan, and Canada among its partners. American instruments have flown on foreign space probes such as the Indian Chandrayaan-1 and visa versa. International astronauts have flown on numerous space shuttle missions. It was contemplated even during the Bush administration that astronauts from other countries would fly on planned flights back to the Moon and to other destinations.

But each of these arrangements was with countries with the technical acumen and the economic strength to contribute something to the effort. The soft power, diplomatic effects have certainly been a consideration in previous joint space projects. But in most cases, NASA has been the primary partner, the leader, taking on only international partners that had something to contribute.