After German voters sent the Christian Democrats -- led by Chancellor Angela Merkel -- back to power with 13 more seats, it seemed appropriate to ask: In a secular country, what exactly makes it "Christian?" 

The Christian Democratic Union says its "policies are based on theChristian view of Man and his responsibilities before God." HoweverGermans shy away from being connected with other versions of politicalChristianity.

Christianity Today recently interviewed Merke's minister of state on this issue. "Germans don't want to be called evangelical because theyare labeled by an image dominated by American evangelicals," Grohe said. He does want to see more German Christians discussing their faith in public, mixing personal with civil life, citing the United Kingdom as an example where religion and politics mix well.

Fighting abortion rights is an important issue for German Christians, but Grohe said fighting poverty and climate change are also imperative.

Talking about the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, Grohe said, "We are still struggling to put together two very different societies." This is especially evident looking at the electoral map from the recent election. (Sorry it is in French, scroll on the semi-circle to see how each party did in each region)

The former East Germany had the strongest support for The Left and the least support for the Christian Democrats. This is paralleled in East Berlin and West Berlin. The difference is more for political reasons than for religious reasons, but anti-religious feelings in Eastern Germany are prevalent.

"In East Germany, there's still a strong non-religious presence. Religion is for your grandma," Grohe said. "People say they forgot they forgot God."

Grohe said the pacifist aspects of the religion don't play much of a role in German politics, most people who want out of Afghanistan want out because they think it is unwinnable, not because of any feeling of religious necessity. However, a dislike for Islam is present in some German Christians.

"I'm very shocked when I see Christians talking hatefully about Muslims," he said. "When I talk about the need for freedom to build Islamic mosques, I receive shameful letters from Christians filled with hate." 

Update: The link to the Christianity Today interview is down, but should be working again soon. 

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It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a transnational, multi-denominational, interfaith co-op of superheroes? International diplomacy may well have found a new medium: the comic book -- forging inspired coalitions, and trumpeting unlikely champions. 

In anticipation of upcoming elections, a 64-page comic novel featuring heroine Angela Merkel has hit Germany's streets. As some critics are noting that it took three and a half years for the German chancellor to be satirized in this way is something of a compliment, especially when pitted against  similar works based on Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown. Indeed laughs wasn't the only aim with the Merkel bio-comic: "We wanted to both amuse and educate readers about the main points in her life," its creator told reporters.

And while Merkel may be giving Wonder Woman a run for her money, Batina the Hidden, the burka-wearing heroine of The 99, a Muslim comic book series, is suiting up to join forces. 

The United States' DC Comics and Kuwait's Teshkeel Comics will collaborate on an "unprecedented" miniseries collaboration expected to hit shops within the year.

Characters of The 99 anthology battle evil the "Islamic way," representing the 99 attributes of Allah. The 99 comic books "sell about 1m copies a year, enjoy a high profile in the Middle East. The adventures are to be made into an animated film, while the first of several 99-inspired theme parks has opened in Kuwait."

There's some question about how Wonder Woman's immodest getup will cross the cultural lines abroad while others are accusing the American creators of "Muslim pandering," but creators are optimistic that in a post-Bush world, the American superheroes will be welcome among Middle East readership. 

And so it would seem Obama will be adding international comic book alliances to his list of recent triumphs.  

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An attack on Algerian police by the militant group Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) was the latest in a wave of violence in North Africa this week. It followed two major incidents in Somalia.

On June 17, Mogadishu's police chief was among those killed in heavy fighting between hardline Islamic militia and pro-government forces in the city. The following day, the Somali security minister was killed along with at least 22 others in a car bombing of a hotel in Beledweyne, north of Mogadishu. The last month has seen a push in Mogadishu by anti-government forces like the man pictured above. 

Interestingly, while Somalia's rebels, including some hardline Islamists have often downplayed alleged Al Qaeda connections and told Osama bin Laden to stay out of their business, AQIM in Algeria was formed from extremist remnants from the country's civil war in the 1990s and explicitly joined Al Qaeda in 2006, showing their allegiance with the name change. 

Reuters has a timeline of insurgent attacks in Algeria over the past two years.  Earlier this month AQIM killed a British man they kidnapped in Niger. 

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Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney's new Washington Times column arguing that after the Cairo speech "there is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself," is not really worth much of a response.

But these two pieces of Gaffney's "evidence" did jump out at me:

Mr. Obama referred four times in his speech to "the Holy Koran." Non-Muslims -- even pandering ones -- generally don't use that Islamic formulation.

Mr. Obama established his firsthand knowledge of Islam (albeit without mentioning his reported upbringing in the faith) with the statement, "I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed." Again, "revealed" is a depiction Muslims use to reflect their conviction that the Koran is the word of God, as dictated to Muhammad. 

After about 30 seconds of Googling, I present the venerable Islamic theologian George W. Bush:

The Islam that we know is a faith devoted to the worship of one God, as revealed through The Holy Qu'ran. 

In his speech in Cairo today, Barack Obama addressed the militant group and political party Hamas directly, acknowledging the support it receives from many Palestinians, but urging it to “put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel's right to exist.”

Shortly after the speech, Hamas’s political leader Khaled Meshaal shared his reactions with freelance journalist Helena Cobban in Damascus. It's reprinted here with her permission:

Of course I listened to the speech. The words are different from those used by Bush. The speech was cleverly written in the way it addressed the Muslim world-- using phrases from the Holy Kor'an, and referring to some historical events. And also, in the way it showed respect to the Muslim heritage. But I think it's not enough!

What's needed are deeds, actions on the ground, and a change of policies.

For example, if the Palestinians today don't find a real change from the situation of siege in Gaza, there's no point; the speech by itself doesn't help them. What they're looking for is an end to the siege and an end to occupation.

We want to see practical steps by the United States such as ending Israel's settlement activity, putting an end to Israel's confiscation of Palestinian land and its campaign to Judaize Jerusalem; an end to its demolitions of Palestinian homes; and the removal of the 600 checkpoints that are stifling normal life in the West Bank.

Rather than sweet words from President Obama on democratization, we'd rather see the United States start to respect the results of democratic elections that have already been held. And rather than talk about democratization and human rights in the Arab world, we'd rather see the removal of General Dayton, who's building a police state there in the West Bank.

In the speech, Obama talked about the Palestinian state, but not its borders. He didn't mention whether it should comprise all the Palestinian land that was occupied in 1967, or just part of it, as Israel demands.

He made no mention of Jerusalem or the Right of Return.

Yes, he spoke of an end to settlement activity; but can he really get them to stop?

Without addressing these issues, the speech remains rhetoric, not so very different from his predecessor's.

The U.S. military today denied the allegation made in this Al Jazeera piece that evangelical chaplains are urging U.S. toops in Afghanistan to protelytize for Christianity:

The reporting here does seem a little dodgy. The piece implies that this line from a U.S chaplain's sermon is a violation of U.S. policy:

"The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down."

But it's not at all clear that this refers to converting Afghans and this seems like a line that one could hear in any evangelical sermon in the United States. None of the officers "caught on camera" in the segment ever actually instruct troops to proselytize, in fact the only discussion of the practice is about how it's against military rules. 

As for the bibles in Dari and Pashto, the conversations in the video actually seem to better support the military's explanation that a soldier had "showed them to the group and the chaplain explained that he cannot distribute them."

Afghanistan's former prime minister has called for an investigation after seeing the segment. This is a serious issue and one that has gotten the military into trouble before. But without more evidence, this particular case seems like a manufactured controversy.

Malaysian Christians have long referred to Jesus as the "son of Allah." Their government, it seems, has a problem with that:

Malaysian Muslim activists and officials and they see using the word Allah in Christian publications including bibles as attempts to proselytize.

Those concerns led to the ban on the Catholic Herald newspaper's use of "Allah" to denote God. The Herald is now suing the government to overturn the ruling, made after it appeared the paper would be allowed to use "Allah" provided it stamped "For Christians" on the front page of the paper.

"Allowing Christians to use the word is dangerous because it's attacking the sole religion of the Malays," said Yusri Mohamad, president of the influential Muslim Youth Movement.

"We have to question Christians' motive for wanting to use this obviously Muslim word. It appears to be for conversions. All Muslim Malays in Malaysia are against this."

"It is always a pleasure to cross a border without being sent back on the first plane," quipped Geert Wilders at the start of his talk at the National Press Club today. The Dutch MP should know. He was recently denied entry into Britain on the grounds that we would "threaten community harmony and therefore public safety."

What's so dangerous about this guy? Wilders is a leading campaigner against the "Islamization" of Europe. He has called for a moratorium on Islamic immigration into the Netherlands and pushed to classify the Koran -- which he has compared to Mein Kampf -- as hate speech. Thanks to his film Fitna, a 15-minute documentary that intersperses verses from the Koran with graphic footage of Islamic terrorism, he has received death threats and is under prosecution for hate speech in his own country.

Wilders got a relatively warm welcome in in the U.S., where his trip is being sponsored Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy. He was invited by U.S. Senator Jon Kyl to show Fitna on Capitol Hill, and met with a number of VIPs including former U.N. ambassador John Bolton.

At the talk I attended today, Wilders was pulling no punches against Islam or its "cultural relativist" defenders, calling the religion "the communism of today" in terms of its threat to the West.

Our Western culture based on Christianity, Judaism and humanism is in every aspect better than the Islamic culture. Like the brave apostate Wafa Sultan said: it's a comparison between a culture of reason and a culture of barbarism."

The crowd, mostly affiliated with right-wing think tanks and organizations, treated Wilders like a rock star, even verbally attacking a few Dutch journalists who dared to ask him some hostile questions about the money he was raising for his defense in the United States.

While it can't be easy for him personally, Wilders' prosecution in the Netherlands and banishment from the U.K. has done wonders for his cause. As long as his legal troubles continue, Wilders can quite reasonably claim to be the victim of a society in which political correctness has gone too far and authorities are terrified of offending Muslim sensibilities. 

Take away the persecution and Wilders' argument is pretty thin gruel. The Koran verses cited in Fitna aren't much worse than some passages of the Bible. Unlike communism and fascism, his two favorite historical comparisons for Islam, there aren't a huge number of non-Islamic citizens in Western countries rushing to join the jihad.

His call to ban all immigration from Islamic countries belies his claims that he is not a racist and has no quarrel with Muslims who successfully assimilate. It's a bit strange to see Americans responding so positively to Wilders' message since this country would seem to be proof that under the right conditions, Muslims can assimilate just fine. 

Europeans are actually avoiding this debate by denying him access to the public space. By, as he says "accepting the free spech standards of Saudi Arabia," the Dutch and British are allowing Wilders to take on the role of free speech martyr and defender of enlightenment values. He seems to have the European left right where he wants them.

In the end, democracy and the Enlightenment are strong enough that they should be able to survive the threat from Islamic radicalism without banning any book or keeping anyone out. That being said, I would hope they're more than strong enough to withstand Geert Wilders. Those who would try to legally silence him show curiously little faith in the values they're defending.

VALERIE KUYPERS/AFP/Getty Images

Encouraging news from the kingdom:

An expert on girls' education became Saudi Arabia's first woman minister on Saturday as part of a wide-ranging cabinet reshuffle by King Abdullah that swept aside several bastions of ultra-conservatism.

Nora bint Abdullah al-Fayez, a US-educated former teacher, was made deputy education minister in charge of a new department for female students, a significant breakthrough in a country where women are not allowed to drive.

Abdullah also sacked the head of Saudi Arabia's despicable Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the religious police who once prevented a group of girls from escaping a school fire because they were improperly dressed. It's about time. We can only hope the beatdowns will continue until the commission is dismantled entirely.

This week, Muslims from Belarus to Indonesia are celebrating the holiday Eid al-Adha, in which an animal -- typically a cow, goat, or sheep -- is slaughtered to commemorate Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son for God. A portion of the meat is distributed to the poor.

In India this year, however, Eid is taking a largely quiet tone, the Washington Post reports, in respect for those victimized in late November's terrorist siege of Mumbai. Leaders of the All India Organization of Imams of Mosques requested the country's 140 million Muslims -- about 13 percent of the population -- to wear black bands on their shoulders to show solidarity. Muslim leaders have also requested that cows not be slaughtered in order to show sensitivity to Hindu beliefs against killing cows.

Indian Muslims -- some photographed praying Dec. 9 at the Jama Masjid mosque in Delhi, in the image above -- for the most part seek to distance themselves from the allegedly Islamist terrorists who attacked Mumbai, and they have drawn attention to the fact that about one third of the 171 victims killed were Muslims. Additionally, Muslim leaders have refused to permit the nine terrorists killed during the siege to be buried in Islamic cemeteries.

"It's not a happy Eid," Ahsaan Qureshi, a famous Indian comic, told the Post.

Photo: MANPREET ROMANA/AFP/Getty Images

In Iran, health experts have issued warnings on TV and radio discouraging people from overeating during the holy month of Ramadan.

They are right to worry. Some Iranians actually gain weight during this time because they overindulge at iftar, the evening feast when Muslims break their daily fasts, National Geographic News reports:

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Steve Clemons gives the Barack Obama campaign a good thrashing from the left today for the candidate's willingness to accept the resignation of his Muslim outreach coordinator, Mazen Asbahi. The Wall Street Journal reports that Asbahi, a Chicago lawyer, resigned because of questions about his ties to an Illinois-based Imam named Jamal Said who has been accused (though not indicted) of fundraising for Hamas. The two served together for a few weeks on the board of an Islamic investment fund back in 2000. Predictable smug outrage has followed on right-wing blogs.

According to the Journal, the tenuous connection between Asbahi and Said was first noted by the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report, a subscription-only Web site that tracks the international activity of that Islamic party and its supporters. The WSJ says the Report is published by a "Washington think tank," but there doesn't seem to be any author or organizational affiliation mentioned on the site, and a Whois lookup yields no clues.

The Report employs a fairly loose definition of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates that includes fairly mainstream organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Amusingly, recent FP contributors Graham Fuller and Marc Lynch are also described as Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers. As Passport readers know, Lynch has indeed met with senior Brotherhood leaders in Cairo, but they hardly see eye to eye. Fuller's supposed ties are of the six-degrees-of-Mahdi Akef variety.

By the standards of this site, you are not only a fellow traveler of the Muslim Brotherhood if you have defended them or recommended dialogue with them, you need only have been loosely associated with people who held those views. By this standard, there probably isn't one prominent Muslim-American in the country that Obama could hire for the campaign. Anyone he could find who has never participated in an event that includes people with sympathies Obama might not agree with is probably not actually influential enough to win him any votes.

Even in a campaign full of trumped-up outrage and guilt by association, the Asbahi affair is pretty absurd. This is roughly the equivalent of Obama throwing Chris Rock under the bus because he once appeared in a movie with the anti-semitic Mel Gibson. If nothing else, it's an indication of how rattled the Obama campaign is by all the Muslim rumors.

Update: ABC's Jake Tapper has much more:

As long as we're playing the guilt by association game, we should note that Karen Hughes, back when she worked for the State Department, spoke before an ISNA conference and was honored with an ISNA dinner, and both former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have met with ISNA leadership.

Also check out the comments on this post for some more investigation into the mysterious Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report website.

CRIS BOURONCLE/AFP/Getty Images

Egyptians have a love-hate relationship with the hordes of wealthy tourists who flock to Cairo and Alexandria every summer, seeking to escape the stifling heat and cultural climate of the Gulf.

On the plus side, these khaleegis, as they are somewhat derogatorily called, are willing to pay top dollar for apartments and other goods and services (including, all too often, prostitutes). But they also bring a stricter form of Islam that sometimes clashes with Cairo's (relatively) libertine ways. As more businessmen from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries also sink their petrodollars into Egypt, they are trying to redefine the social order -- by, for instance, investing in films but demanding that directors excise any whiff of sexual activity.

The latest example of what many in Egypt see as khaleegi meddling? A Saudi sheikh named Abdel Aziz Ibrahim bought the five-star Grand Hyatt hotel (on an island just a few blocks from the U.S. Embassy) and promptly banned the sale of alcohol. Employees reportedly had to dump bottles of liquor into the river. One Egyptian commentator complained that the ban "deprived foreign guests from finding the alcoholic beverage which they wanted, and forced it upon the Muslim fish of the Nile."

The good news is that you can still quench your thirst at the Hard Rock Cafe on the Grand Hyatt grounds. Prominent shareholder Hassan bin Laden, the half brother of you-know-who, doesn't seem to mind serving booze. And with its Cairo franchise rapidly losing customers, the hotel chain's management is pressuring Ibrahim to change his mind. It may not be long before rich folks in Cairo can drink themselves silly in the revolving bar atop the hotel once again. Inshallah.

Amr Khaled, an Egyptian televangelist and media celebrity across the Arab and Muslim worlds, jumped dramatically in the rankings today of the world's Top 100 Public Intellectuals.

Why is that?

His fans have begun a vote drive on AmrKhaled.net and on Facebook, which FP noted earlier this year was a surprising force for activism in the Arab world. Interestingly, the more controversial Yusuf al-Qaradawi saw a boost in his numbers as well, even though Khaled and Qaradawi haven't always seen eye to eye. Qaradawi and Khaled got into a huge spat over the Danish cartoons issue, with Khaled calling for dialogue and Qaradawi basically calling him a big pansy.