Lebanese town bans Muslims from buying, renting property

Beirut, June 26 

Mohammed Awwad and his fiancee, both Muslims, recently found an affordable apartment for rent online in a town in Lebanon, southeast of Beirut. The 27-year-old journalist called the number and asked the owner when they could drop by to take a look. He was stunned by her response: Muslims are not allowed to settle in the town, she said.

The apartment owner apologised to Awwad, saying she wouldn’t mind renting to people of any sect but officials in the town of Hadat issued orders that only Christians be allowed to buy and rent property from the town’s Christian residents.

The young Shia Muslim man could not believe what he heard and asked his fiancee, Sarah Raad, to call the municipality and she, too, was told that the ban had been in place for years.

Hadat is a small example of Lebanon’s deeply rooted sectarian divisions that once led to a 15-year civil war that left more than 100,000 persons dead. Christian communities feel under siege as Muslims, who tend to have higher birth rates, leave overcrowded areas for once predominantly Christian neighbourhoods.

The ban only applies to Christian property, a Muslim landowner of Hadat is allowed to sell or rent his property to Muslims from outside the town or to whomever he wants. — AFP

Phone users in Thailand’s Muslim-majority south told to submit photos 

• An order for mobile phone users in Thailand’s restive south to submit a photo of themselves for facial recognition purposes is causing uproar from opponents who see it as further curtailing the rights of the Muslim-majority population
• But an army spokesman on Wednesday defended the move, saying the facial identification scheme is needed to root out insurgents deploying mobile phone-detonated home-made bombs
• Thailand’s three southernmost states-Yala, Pattani, and Narathiwat-have since 2004 been rife with conflict between Malay-Muslim rebels and the Buddhist-majority Thai state, which annexed the region around a century ago
• Now telecoms companies are requiring all users of the region’s 1.5 million mobile numbers to submit a photo of themselves for facial recognition purposes following orders from the army, a move that is drawing anger from rights groups