Sophisticated Purity....

Al Mahabbah Awards

2012-02-08T07:11:00.000-08:00

Poem on the Prophet SAW by Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi

2012-02-06T07:24:00.000-08:00

Poem on the Prophet SAW by Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi

I desired to praise the Chosen One and was hindered

By my own inability to grasp the extent of his glory.

How can one such as I measure an ocean, when the ocean is vast?

And how can one such as I count the stones and the stars?

If all of my limbs were to become tongues, even then –

Even then I could not begin to praise him as I desired.

And if all of creation gathered together in an attempt

To praise him, even then they would stint in his due.

I have altogether ceased trying – awestruck, clinging to courtesy,

Tempered by timidity, glorifying his most exalted rank.

Indeed, sometimes silence holds within it the essence of eloquence,

And often speech merely fodder for the faultfinder.

http://sandala.org/blog/2012/02/05/if-you-don%E2%80%99t-like-the-mawlid-watch-out/

The Critical Importance of Al-Ghazali in Our Times

2012-01-05T12:42:00.000-08:00

Hamza Yusuf - "The Critical Importance of Al-Ghazali in Our Times" (Fons Vitae Press) from Fons Vitae

Lesley Hazleton: On reading the Koran

2011-12-30T16:28:00.000-08:00

My Journey to Islam: Dr Muhammed As'ad (Michael D. Berdine)

2011-12-30T05:49:00.000-08:00

Dr. Muhammad As‘ad (Michael Berdine)
Director of Cambridge Muslim College

It might have started with the adhan, the call to prayer, that always fascinated that five-year-old boy, and then led him to accept Islam after a long trip across time and place.

It was a spiritual odyssey of over thirty years that took me from my Irish-Catholic-American roots through agnosticism and New Age metaphysics to Islam. It was only in Islam where I found the answers to all my questions and the peace which I had been seeking for a lifetime. It was also in Islam where I found solace and sanctuary, friendships and brotherhood, a new life, a spiritual home and Allah in the fall of 1992.

In 1990, at the age of forty-five, I returned to graduate school at the University of Arizona to begin my studies for a Ph.D. in Modern British Empire History and Near Eastern Studies. This was the realization of a dream I'd had since obtaining my M.A. in British and European history twenty-one years earlier. At that time, in 1969, I had passed up pursuing a Ph.D. program at Brown University to raise a family and take some time off from school. It was at the University of Arizona through my studies of Middle East and India that I once again came in contact with Islam.

From the time I was three until eighteen, my father's position as an executive with the California-Texas Oil Company (Caltex) took our family to live and travel all over the world. Our first overseas assignment in 1949, when I was three, was in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, where my parents, brother and I lived for five-and-a-half years. From there we moved to London for a short time before moving to India in 1956. Once in India, because there was no American schooling available locally, my parents sent me to Kodaikanal, an American Protestant missionary boarding school 600 miles to the south, where I attended school from the 5th to 10th grades. As one of the few Catholics at Kodaikanal International School, I learned much about Christianity -- my own Catholicism -- included, which began a lifelong interest in the subject as well as religion in general. However, my Catholic father became more concerned about my “Protestant” education and, mid-way through 10th grade, transferred me to an American international Catholic boy’s school in Rome, Italy. So, it was from Notre Dame International School in Rome that I graduated from high school two-and-a-half years later in June 1963.

Rome was a fascinating place to learn more about my religion, especially after the “negative” perceptions I’d received about Catholicism from some of my Protestant classmates at the missionary school. It was also a time of historic changes in the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council, some of which I was able to witness in person, or learn about from the Catholic prelates who came and spoke at the school. On my own, I also got to meet a cardinal, some bishops and archbishops attending the Council and had a papal audience with the charismatic and very dynamic ecumenical Pope John XXIII. (Ten years earlier, my parents, brother and I had had a private audience with Pope Pius XII and spoken directly with the Pope at his summer retreat at Castello Gondolfo.) By the time I left Rome, I was thoroughly entranced with my Catholic faith and planning on becoming a priest.

Meanwhile, because of my father’s executive position with Caltex Oil Company -- both in India and in Germany, where my parents moved in 1962 -- when at home or during vacations I met a number of important government, business and political leaders from all cultural backgrounds who were frequent guests in our home.

However, as I look back, it was as a five-year-old in Bahrain and later as a young man in India, where the sight of Muslims at prayer and the muezzin’s call to prayer made the most lasting impression of all my overseas experiences. Just hearing the adhan excited me. It made me feel good inside (as it still does today) and, no matter what I was doing, I always paused to listen whenever I heard it. Little did I know at the time that the adhan would later become such an important part of my life.

Still, it took some time for this to sink in. It was only after moving back to the States, going to college and grad school, raising a family and having a twenty-year business career, when I returned to graduate school and once again became acquainted with Islam. This time, however, it was in an academic setting and through books and class lectures. Once “hooked” on Islam, I eagerly and voraciously read anything and everything I could get my hands on in English on the subject. I bought and devoured all the books I could find. Many were written by western Islamic scholars, themselves converts to Islam like Muhammad Asad, Martin Lings, Victor Danner, and Mohammad Marmaduke Pickthall. The fact that there were Western converts to Islam of this caliber further piqued my interest and curiosity. After much reading and study, I sensed a strong, growing affinity with Islam and a complete and total agreement with all its teachings in everything I read.

During the summer of 1992, I read A.J. Arberry's The Koran: Interpreted, Danner’s The Islamic Tradition: An Introduction, Lings' deeply moving and absorbing Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources while away from home studying Intensive Arabic at summer school at the University of Washington. In my Arabic class, I got to know an Irish-French-Canadian woman classmate who was a convert to Islam (and a former Catholic like me). I also got to know better a Pakistani-American Muslim, whom I'd met earlier that year at a conference at UCLA, where we both gave papers. Throughout the summer I talked with both of them about Islam and what it was like to be a Muslim. Soon it became apparent to all of us that my beliefs were the same as those taught by the Prophet (peace be upon him) and Islam. However, when gently asked why I didn't become a Muslim, I had no answer. At the time, I was just intellectually content to have found a faith with which I could agree 100%. Moreover, as an historian I was most impressed with the fact that the authenticity of the Qur’an could be verified (two of the original Qur’ans from the time of Caliph ‘Uthman still exist), as could the teachings and traditions of the Prophet (PBUH). This was quite the opposite of Christianity, as I’d learned to my surprise over many years of study. Despite all this, I still gave little thought to becoming a Muslim myself.

At the end of the summer, my UCLA friend suggested I read Muhammad Asad's The Road to Mecca and get a copy of his translation and commentary of the Holy Qur’an. Asad was an Austrian-Polish Jew (Leopold Weiss) who converted to Islam and became a close friend of Abdul Aziz Ibn Sa`ud, founder of Sa`udi Arabia, in the 1920s. Among his many other activities over the years, including being a student and the close friend of Pakistan’s Sir Muhammad Iqbal, Asad became a renowned Arabic and Qur’anic scholar. However, it was reading Arberry’s translation of the Holy Qur’an that summer and realizing no man could have written it that did it for me. I finished reading Asad’s Road to Mecca in mid-October, just before attending the Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in Portland, Oregon, where I was to give a paper.

As it turned out, the meeting became a reunion of sorts for me with my summer school friends, as both the Canadian Muslimah and my Muslim friend from UCLA were also giving papers at the same conference. Almost as soon as we ran into each other at a bookstore in Portland near the conference site, the Muslimah asked me pointblank, “When are you going to become a Muslim?” I could only respond that I guessed I already was one in my heart and mind. Without a pause, she suggested that I make shahadah right then and there. I hemmed and hawed, but could find no reason not to do so. So, right then and there, in the "new arrivals" section of Powell's Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, with another Canadian Muslimah as a witness, I made my shahadah. Not long afterwards, I left the bookstore and walked to my room at a nearby dorm. I was in a state of euphoria and incredible joy, feeling as if I was walking two feet above the ground. Later, when I saw my friend from UCLA and told him what had happened, and showed him the Qur’an I'd received from our Muslimah friend, he was overjoyed, hugged me warmly and welcomed me to Islam as his brother.

Two weeks later, on November 13, I once again recited the shahadah at Jumu‘ah prayers at the Islamic Center of Tucson. This time it was in front of several hundred people, after which I found myself at the front of a receiving line, where I was welcomed into the Islamic community with hugs and kisses from about 40 Muslim brothers in the most moving forty-five minutes of my life. It was an experience that still lives with me.

Attributing some of the final steps towards Islam to Muhammad Asad’s book, I decided to take his name as my Muslim name. Since he was a convert to Islam like me, I felt his name would also be a good name for me and, hopefully, I would become a good Muslim and scholar like him. However, once back at the University of Arizona, both my Arabic and Islamic history professors to whom I told my story suggested I change my name to Muhammad As‘ad, “The Happiest Muhammad” in Arabic. This name seemed to them (and to me) to more accurately reflect the change in my personality and over-all attitude since accepting Islam.

In the ten years since, my life has been a series of joys and efforts for Islam. While no one else in my family has yet become a Muslim, there is now sympathy and understanding where before there was none and -- in sha’ Allah -- one day other family members will come to Islam. My wife in particular has been most supportive. Since then, I have become active in outreach and da‘wah for the Islamic Center of Tucson, where I am on the Executive Committee and responsible for media and public relations. Beginning early 1993, I have become a frequent speaker about Islam in schools, churches, synagogues and community centers in the area and elsewhere. I also spent the summers of 1994 and 1995 in Damascus, Syria, where I studied Islam and Arabic in an Islamic Call College. Since 1996, I’ve taught classes in Islam and introduced courses in Islamic Civilization and Middle East History at Pima Community College in Tucson. During this time also, while working on my Ph.D. in History at the University of Arizona, I received a second M.A. in 1997 (in Near Eastern Studies) at the University of Arizona. In March of 2001, I went on Hajj.

Finally, in August 2001 I was awarded my Ph.D. in History and, since August 2002, I have been a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso. At UTEP, I teach Middle Eastern and Islamic History, as well as World History

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/islamic_ways/message/7935

Book Review: Madrasah Life By Shaykh Dr Akram Nadwi

2011-12-27T14:06:00.000-08:00

Madrasha Life is a unique book by the erudite scholar, Shaykh Dr Akram Nadwi which shatters the negative myths of the madrasah system that is increasingly prevalent in the Western world. The book unearths a day in the life of a madrasah student who is in the fadilah course (Masters Level) at the celebrated Nadwat al-Ulama in Lucknow, India. This distinguished school is celebrated for its emphasis on Arabic, Persian, Urdu languages and literatures as well as managing to successfully blend the traditional sacred sciences with the secular. Thus, it is not surprising that the book is glittered with quotations from esteemed poets from Labid to Ghalib.

This book reveals for the reader the daily activities a master’s student undergoes in a classical Islamic education system. Readers are introduced to a group of young master’s students and their educational and social life. The reader discovers the student’s curricula they study, their social antics, the recreational games they play, the conversations and disagreements in detail to the food they eat. Readers will be surprised to see that western and traditional Islamic students are very much similar, they love and dislike grammar, they tease one another, some are proactive and while others just down right lazy. This book beautifully reveals the level of intellectual curiosity of students, their favorite subjects, teachers and social life.

I was very surprised when reading the book because as a masters student myself in an eminent Western university. I know first-hand the level of intellectual capacity my fellow student’s possess. Yet the intellectual level of traditional masters students at Nadwah compared to my university is far greater. The author shows how students are well versed and competent in discussing and critiquing the works of Plato, Aristotle, Satre as well as Ibn Tamiyyah and Bukhari. One can see that that the students at Nadwah have a passion for knowledge and learning that is rarely found in a western master’s education. No wonder that the students at Nadwah are extremely hardworking and intelligent.

I have not come across an institute in the Western World that requires mastery of three different languages, a clear comprehension of different sciences as well as a four year degree, just to be considered as a candidate to enter a Master’s Program. The social and educational interactions dismiss the Western notion that madrasahs are platforms of extremisms, where young brain dead individuals are brainwashed into ideals of extremism. This is far from the truth as acknowledged by Major General Sir Sleeman who argues that traditional Islamic madrasahs are akin to a classical Western education. Moreover their tuition fees are much cheaper too.

“He who holds an office worth twenty rupees a month commonly gives his son an education equal to that of a prime minister. They learn through the medium of the Arabic and Persian languages, what young men in our colleges through those of Greek and Latin- that is, grammar, rhetoric and logic. After his seven years of Study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford; he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna”

What I really love about this book is the reader can clearly see the relationship of a traditional Islamic teacher and their student. You can see the traditional Islamic students have a respect for their teachers that many western students cannot fathom. Traditional students do not see their teachers as just mere teachers. But as loving fathers.They take their students gently by their hands ensuring a mastery of the subject. Students do not just inherit the knowledge attained, but an Ijazah and sometimes their teacher’s spiritual states. A Ijazah is a certification to teach the subject which ensures that the student becomes part of the Isnad, a scholarly lineage of teachers that goes back to the Prophet PBUH through his Companions, a later venerable Shaykh, or the author of a specific book. This way knowledge is not just taught and merely given away but protected. Each student who requires an ijazah must have mastery of the particular subject, this ensures that academic standards do not drop.

Although teachers are greatly respected, the book conveys the critical thinking of the madrasah system. Opinions are cross examined and criticized in a respectful academic manner. Readers should understand that traditional educations colleges like Nadwah do not result in inflexibility of the mind, obstinate opinions and a monolith world view. Students do not just accept their knowledge blindly.They are taught to challenge their teachers. They critically examine their knowledge and question them. Students are taught to understand the chain of thought of scholars, this result in often questioning a scholar in one science, while admiring him in another. By embarking on research projects and dissertations this also leads to critical thinking. The contribution of Madrasah Life by Shaykh Dr Nadwi is witty and a very fun read while still unearthing the milieu of traditional Islamic schools and their traditions.

Madrasah Life, By Mohammed Akram Nadwi, Published by Turath Publishing,(2007)

The story of Praise

2011-12-12T07:22:00.000-08:00

One night a man was crying Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with praising,
until a cynic said, “So!
I’ve heard you calling our, but have you ever
gotten any response?”

The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.

“Why did you stop praising?” “Because
I’ve never heard anything back.”

“This longing you express
is the return message.”

The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.

Give your life
to be one of them.

Prophet of God

2011-12-11T06:32:00.001-08:00

by Rafey Habib

Prophet of God, I am
Steeped in the things
Of sin, and wrong:
Unworthy to stand
Beside you,
Or even to sing in
Your praise.

Prophet of my heart, my
Verse is beneath you, my
Only skill, bequeathed by
Birth, perturbed dreams
Of your nights and days.

How can I come near
The cloak that wraps you,
When fear dries my throat,
When I know Who spoke
In your hearing.

How can I read, or
Understand, when I live
At the edge of His commands,
When my sins need
To feel Him forgive?

Where will I find help;
Where will I know the
Good in Self; where
Will I not be alone, if not
In the places you
Have known?

If I stand, arrayed,
Against my own desire,
For fame, prestige, wealth,
Will your shield defend
My faith, against the fire,
Against my own, lower, self?

If I come stumbling,
Across desert and
Grey seas; if I humbly call
Across the sands, will you
Reach for my hand?

Prophet of God,
Do not turn away from me;
Stay... say a prayer for me:
Unworthy to sing
In His praise.

Prophet of my heart,
My lonely art, companion
Of my unworthy
Nights and days.

Al Ameen

2011-12-11T06:31:00.001-08:00

(by an admirer of Islam, J.P. [a good chance that this is John Yehya-en-Nasr Parkinson])

Who is this who comes from Hira?
Not in stately pomp or pride,
But a great free son of Nature,
Lion-souled and eagle-eyed?

Who is this before whose presence
Idols tumble to the sod,
As he cries out "Allah[u] Akbar,"
No! There is no God but God?

Wandering o'er the solemn desert
He has wondered, like a child,
Not as yet too proud to wonder,
At the Sun and Star, and Wild.

Oh thou Moon! Who made thy brightness?
Stars, who hung you there on high?
Answer! so my soul may worship --
I must worship, or I die.

Then there fell the brooding silence
That precedes the thunder roll,
And the old Arabian whirlwind
Called another Arab soul.

He has stood and seen Mount Hira
To the awful Presence nod,
He has heard from cloud and lightning --
No, there is no God but God.

Call you this man an "Imposter"?
He was called "The Faithful," when
A boy he wandered o'er the desert,
By the wild-eyed Arab men.

He was always called "The Faithful":
Truth he knew was Allah's breath;
But the Lie went darkly gnashing
Through the corridors of Death.

He was fierce! -- Yes, fierce at falsehood:
Fierce at hideous bits of wood
Which the Koreish taught the people
Made the sun and solitude.

But his heart was also gentle,
And affection's graceful palm,
Waving in his tropic spirit,
To the weary brought a balm.

"Precepts?" -- "Have on each compassion,"
"Lead the stranger to your door,"
"In your dealings keep up justice,"
"Give a tenth unto the poor."

Yet ambitious? Yes, ambitious,
While he heard the strong and sweet
Aiden voices sing, to trample
Conquered Hell beneath his feet.

Islam? Yes, "submit to Heaven."
Prophet? To the World thou art;
What are Prophets but the Trumpets
Blown by God to stir the heart?

And the great heart of the desert
Stirred unto the solemn strain,
Rolling from the Mount of Hira,
Over Error's troubled plain.

And two hundred dusky millions
Honour still "El Ameen's" rod,
Daily chanting "Allah[u] Akbar,"
Know -- there is no God but God.

Call him, then, no more "Imposter!"
Mecca is the choral Gate,
Where till Zion's moon shall take them
Nations in the Morning wait.

(Islamic Review, November 1915, pp.584-5.)

Hymn on the Capture of Mecca

2011-12-10T11:38:00.000-08:00

By Amherst D. Tyssen

Ye gates, unfold; strong walls, fall down;
Bow minaret and dome!
The seer, who fled with life proscribed,
Returns as conqueror home.

Ten thousand followers swell his train,
All armed with sword and shield;
His foes have found their forces melt,
And now must humbly yield.

No blood he sheds, no fine exacts,
No prince to prison sends;
Forgives, forgets all injuries past,
Treats enemies as friends.

Oh, hence may we a lesson learn
Sweet tempers to display,
And ne'er resent the varied wrongs
We suffer day by day.

Tho' others call our faith a sin,
And motives bad impute;
May we no angry word reply,
But rest in patience mute.

So shall they see that in our hearts
God's spirit truly lives;
And honour with unfeigned respect
The gentle grace it gives. Courtesy of Sidi Yahya Birt
http://www.yahyabirt.com/

Hymn on the Welcome to Medina

2011-12-10T11:37:00.000-08:00

By Amherst D. Tyssen

The governors of Yathreb
They laid their maces down,
They made the Meccan exile
The ruler of their town;
To him they came for judgment
In each disputed cause;
They offered him their tribute,
They bade him frame their laws.

They swore with manly fealty
To serve him e'en to death,
Confessing him their prophet
With life's expiring breath.
Their very lives they perilled,
They laboured and they fought;
For in good truth they deemed him
By God divinely taught.

Lord grant that we, renouncing
All selfishness and pride,
At Thy command may freely
Cast wealth and power aside.
Attentive may we listen
Where'er Thy voice is heard,
And life itself surrender
Obedient to Thy word.

Consistent with Thy precepts
Our journey may we trend,
Stern duty's path pursuing
Unswerving to the end.
Thus we, like Yathreb's heroes,
Shall brave examples be
Of worldly weal discarded
For faithfulness to Thee.

Courtesy of Sidi Yahya Birt
http://www.yahyabirt.com/

Hymn on Muhammad in the Cave

2011-12-10T11:36:00.000-08:00

By Amherst D. Tyssen

The prophet with one faithful friend
In the dark cavern stood,
A thousand foemen scouring round,
All thirsting for his blood.

"Alas, my master," spake the liege,
"Our term of life is sped;
I hear the murd'rous bands approach,
Intent to strike us dead."

"Be not distressed!" in accents firm,
The Prophet's voice replied;
"For God is mightier far than they,
And God is on our side.

"Will He we live, no mortal power
Can take our lives away;
Will He we die, to Him we pass;
No need to feel dismay."

Oh, may we thus through life's rough voyage,
With all its tempests cope;
Make God the Rock whereon we cast
The anchor of our hope.

Come weal: to Him we give the praise;
Come woe: on Him we rest;
E'en death is bliss to hearts assured
Whate'er He sends in best.

Courtesy of Sidi Yahya Birt
http://www.yahyabirt.com/

The Prophet's Resolution

2011-12-10T11:26:00.000-08:00

By Amherst D. Tyssen

The prophet felt a mission
To preach the word of God,
To brave all opposition,
To fear no threatened rod.
Oh, had his foes the power,
To scale the heaven's height,
To pluck from out their bower,
The orbs of day and night.
On right and left hand place them,
To bar his onward way.
Undaunted he would face them,
Nor brook an hour's delay.
Filled with determined boldness,
His steadfast heart would meet,
The moon's pale silv'ry coldness,
The sun's bright scorching heat.
On, till he saw prevailing,
The cause of God on high,
Or felt, with forces failing,
His lot ordained to die.
Oh, may such resolution,
With courage nerve us all
To bear such persecution,
Entailed by Heaven's call

Courtesy of Sidi Yahya Birt
http://www.yahyabirt.com/

In Praise of the Prophet: A Ghazel

2011-12-10T11:17:00.000-08:00

By Shaykh Abdullah Quilliam Bey Effendi (writing as Prof. Haroun Mustapha Leon)

So long as the heart doth pulsate and beat,
So long as the sun bestows light and heat,
So long as the blood thro' our veins doth flow,
So long as the mind in knowledge doth grow,
long as the tongue retains power of speech,
So long as wise men true wisdom do teach,
The praise of God's Prophet,Ahmed theblest,
Shall flow from our lips and spring from our breast.
'Twas Rasul-Allah from darkness of night
Did lead us to Truth, did give to us Light,
Did point out the Path, which follow'd with zest,
Leadeth to Islam and gives Peace and Rest.
Praise be to Allah! 'Twas He who did send
Ahmed Muhammad, our Prophet, our Friend.

(The Islamic Review, 3 (1915), p.286.)

Hymn for the Prophet's Birthday

2011-12-10T11:13:00.000-08:00

Hymn for the Prophet's Birthday

By Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam Bey Effendi

The people that in darkness sat
A glorious light have seen;
God's prophet now to them hath come --Muhammad, al-Amin.
For thou the burden did'st remove,
Idolatry's fell rod;
And in the day the idols fell
Before the sword of God.
To bless Arabia and the world
Most surely thou wast raised:
We'll sing thy praises evermore,
Our Mustapha, the praised.
We watch with gentle, fostering care
The seed that thou hast sown;
And trust to hear the world declare
God's prophet as its own.

Coutesy of Sidi Yahya Birt

http://www.yahyabirt.com/

Poem of the Glorious Morning

2011-12-05T17:02:00.000-08:00

Dawn rising from the east is enlivening.
It puts an end to the enveloping silence of the night.
Life manifests itself in every object at dawn.
Birds chirrup, heralding the message of life.
Flowers too, start a new life.
Muslims! Arise and awake from your slumber.
Shine like the sun and seek inspiration from the symbols of life around you.
Obliterate evil.
Your being full of light should put an end to darkness.
Reveal yourself like a flashing light,
unravelling the secrets of the universe.

(Madrasah Life, A student's day at Nadwat al Ulama, Shaykh, Dr, Mohammed Akram Nadwi, Page 11)

The Prophet's (صلي الله عليه وسلم) Love for His Ummah | Al Habib Umar

2011-11-28T03:43:00.000-08:00

12 of Arsene Wenger’s finest quotes

2011-11-25T02:11:00.000-08:00

So here follows 12 of Wenger’s finest musings as Arsenal boss:

1. ‘I tried to watch the Tottenham match on television in my hotel yesterday, but I fell asleep.’

2. After a disappointing draw with Middlesbrough in 1998 – ‘If you eat caviar every day it’s difficult to return to sausages.’

3. ‘A football team is like a beautiful woman. When you do not tell her, she forgets she is beautiful.’
So here follows 12 of Wenger’s finest musings as Arsenal boss:

4. Following Sol Campbell ’s departure to Portsmouth – ‘It is a big surprise to me because he cancelled his contract to go abroad. Have you sold Portsmouth to a foreign country?’

5. After Sepp Blatter ’s accusation that big clubs were guilty of ‘child slavery’ – ‘If you have a child who is a good musician, what is your first reaction? It is to put them into a good music school, not in an average one. So why should that not happen in football?’

6. After the success of the Great Britain team at the Olympics – ‘I didn’t know the English were good at swimming. I have been in this country for 12 years and I haven’t seen a swimming pool.’

7. In response to Sir Alex Ferguson ’s claim that he possessed the best team in the league, despite Arsenal winning the title in 2002 – ‘Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.’

8. After being asked if he’d received the apology that Sir Alex had announced he had sent to Wenger – ‘No. Perhaps he sent it by horse.’

9. On Emmanuel Adebayor ’s stamp on Robin van Persie – ‘I watched it when I got home and it looked very bad. You ask 100 people, 99 will say it’s very bad and the hundredth will be Mark Hughes.’

10. ‘I don’t kick dressing room doors or the cat or even football journalists.’

11. ‘We do not buy superstars. We make them.’

12. After Jose Mourinho accused him of being a voyeur – ‘He’s out of order, disconnected with reality and disrespectful. When you give success to stupid people, it makes them more stupid sometimes and not more intelligent

Pursuit of Happiness by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf

2011-11-15T13:17:00.000-08:00

Should Christian women wear bikinis?

2011-11-12T16:50:00.002-08:00

Encounter with a Wali

2011-11-09T15:56:00.001-08:00

Translation By Ibn Riaz:

بسـم الله الرحمن الرحيم

By Shaykh Ṣāliḥ al-Maghāmasī

I know of a man from Egypt who performed Ḥajj 32 years ago in his youth. He, at the time, was riding in a nine-passenger vehicle. In the front seats were a husband and wife. Behind them was a woman very old in age who, due to the congestion inside, was in an uncomfortable position, and her age and body’s condition didn’t help the situation any better. So, the man who I know tried to convince the man in the front to switch seats with the old woman so that she could up front. He refused, but this man kept on pushing him to do it until he finally accepted. The husband ended up going to the back seat and the old woman was able to sit up front. When the old woman felt relaxed and was able to extend her legs she said to this man, in her local dialect, what means, “May Allāh not prevent you from Ḥajj every year.”

This man has performed Ḥajj until now—and I know him—for 32 years. 32 pilgrimages since she supplicated for him that year! Sometimes a new year comes and the time of Ḥajj approaches, but he doesn’t have the money or even the intention to perform it. Yet, without any notice, he’s led to perform Ḥajj by the blessing of that woman’s supplication.

`Alī (may Allāh be pleased with him) said, “Allāh has concealed two within two: He has concealed His pleasure in righteous acts, so one does not know which righteous act of his pleases Allāh; and He has concealed His awliyā’ amongst His servants, so one does not know which servant of Allāh is His walī.”

The point here: perform good deeds and desire for them to be sincerely for Allāh’s Sake. Perhaps you’ll do something for someone who is unknown amongst the people—which is better—and his supplications are answered. In turn, he supplicates for you and prosperity is decreed for you while you don’t know from where it came. However, Allāh bestowed His loving Mercy upon you and made an easy way for you to reach your goal. May Allāh allow for us to attain that which He loves through our good deeds.

May His peace and blessings be upon our Prophet Muḥammad and his family, and all praises are due to Allāh, Lord of the Worlds

http://muslimmatters.org/2011/11/08/encounter-with-an-awliya-of-allah/

The lost diary of Queen Victoria's final companion

2011-11-05T14:45:00.000-07:00

Abdul Karim’s writings, hidden by his family until now, throw new light on a close and controversial relationship, says Ben Leach.

'I am so very fond of him. He is so good and gentle and understanding… and is a real comfort to me.”

These were the words of Queen Victoria speaking to her daughter-in-law, Louise, Duchess of Connaught, on November 3, 1888, at Balmoral. Perhaps surprising, though, is who she was talking about – not her beloved husband, Albert, who had died in 1861. Nor John Brown, her loyal Scottish ghillie, who in many ways filled the void left by Albert, since Brown had died in 1883.

Instead, Queen Victoria was referring to Abdul Karim, her 24-year-old Indian servant.

Her relationship with Karim was one that sent shockwaves through the royal court – and ended up being one of the most scandalous periods of her 64-year reign.

Indeed, such was the ill-feeling that when Victoria died, her son King Edward ordered all records of their relationship, including correspondence and photographs, to be destroyed.

But a new archive of letters, pictures and Karim’s “lost diary”, held secretly by his family for more than a century, sheds new light on their relationship.

The documents tell the story of how Karim arrived in England in 1887 and quickly gained the affection of a monarch 42 years his senior. They chart the remarkable rise of the clerk from Agra in northern India to one of Victoria’s closest and most influential friends.

The author Shrabani Basu discovered the documents after writing Victoria & Abdul, her book on the remarkable relationship between the Queen and her Indian servant. In 2010 Basu was in Bangalore, India, for the book’s launch when she received a call from the British Council. Begum Qamar Jehan, then 85, frail and blind, was one of Abdul Karim’s few remaining relatives (Karim had had no children himself); yet, despite her age and condition, she still had vivid memories of her days in Karim Lodge, Agra (more of which later). Moreover, she had in her possession Karim’s diary documenting the period in which he served Queen Victoria.

Two months later Basu flew from London to Karachi in Pakistan. She was handed the diary – a neat brown journal with gold edges, recognisable as the stationery used in Windsor. It contained a record of Karim’s 10 years in London between the Golden and Diamond jubilees. The pages were also filled with photographs and magazine cuttings. It had been smuggled out of India by the family when they had fled in 1947 following the Partition riots, then kept a closely guarded secret until Basu’s visit. Basu has now updated her remarkable story of the Queen and her Indian manservant with extracts from his diary – plus from Queen Victoria’s Hindustani Journals, which Basu has had translated for the first time.

Karim initially moved to England for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee – the Queen wanted two Indian waiters there to attend to the Indian princes who would be present. Victoria was instantly charmed by the tall, elegant Karim, and within a year he had transcended from waiting tables to becoming a powerful figure within the royal court.

Yet in the opening paragraphs of his diary, Karim remarks on the humble nature of his status in the Royal household: “Under the shadow of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, I a humble subject venture in the following pages to lay before the reader a brief summary from the journal of my life at the court of Queen Victoria from the Golden Jubilee of 1887 to the Diamond Jubilee of 1897. As I have been but a sojourner in a strange land and among a strange people I humbly trust all mistakes will be kindly overlooked by the reader who would extend indulgence to the writer of these pages.”

He then goes on to describe his initial thoughts on coming to England: “In 1887 with the recommendation of Dr Tyler who was my superior officer at the Central Jail [where he was working as a clerk] I came to England as orderly to the Queen. I must mention that the word 'orderly’ as understood by us in India means one who has to accompany a sovereign or Prince or other high person of rank on horseback. It is a much higher position than the orderly of the British Army who is simply a private soldier selected to attend an officer as a personal servant carrying his orders etc. It was in the former sense of the word that I accepted the proposal to go to England.”
On arriving in London, he notes, he visits the zoo as well as Madame Tussauds. Yet sightseeing was not Karim’s prime purpose; he is there to meet the Queen. He recounts their first audience:

“Dr Tyler and I were instructed to take our station near the dining room and wait her Majesty’s coming. I was somewhat nervous at the approach of the Great Empress who soon entered accompanied by HRH the Duke of Connaught and Princess Beatrice. Dr Tyler at once did homage by kneeling, whilst I did the same in Oriental style. I presented nazars, or gifts by exposing, in the palms of my hands, a gold mohar [a coin] which Her Majesty touched and remitted as is the Indian custom. The Queen was thereafter pleased to speak to Dr Tyler a few words, and so ended my first interview with the Empress of India.”

Two days later, Dr Tyler received a telegram asking him to return to Buckingham Palace with Karim. The queen wrote in her diaries about her two new Indian servants: “The one Mohammed Buksh, very dark with a very smiling expression… and the other, much younger, called Abdul Karim, is much lighter, tall and with a fine, serious countenance. His father is a native doctor at Agra. They both kissed my feet.”
Karim introduced curry to the royal menu and started teaching her to speak Urdu, offering lessons every evening. As Empress of India – and a committed Indophile – nothing pleased her more.

Yet Karim was dispirited – he was unhappy doing such a menial task as waiting tables and professed his wish to return to his homeland. This is mentioned in his diaries.

The following letter from Queen Victoria that Karim kept in his journal asking him to stay is significant: that letter was one of many destroyed by her son, King Edward, following his mother’s death. Karim, however, had kept a certified copy:

“General Dennehy has read me your petition… I shall be very sorry to part with you for I like and respect you, but I hope you will remain till the end of this year or the beginning of the next that I may be able to learn enough Hindustani from you to speak a little. I shall gladly recommend you for a post in India which could be suitable for you and hope that you may be able to come and see me from time to time in England.”

And recommend him for a post she did: Queen Victoria made Abdul Karim her official munshi (teacher) as well as Indian Clerk to the Queen. This too he notes in his diary: “It was a day I shall never forget and for the same I shall ever thank my God and pray for the long life and happiness of Her Majesty.”

Henceforth Karim travelled everywhere with the Queen, even on her tours of Europe, meeting numerous monarchs and prime ministers along the way. The Queen allowed him to move his wife over to England, and the couple were given their own cottage on each of her estates. In Balmoral, a special cottage was built just for him, and the Queen called it “Karim Cottage” in his honour. The munshi spared no expense decorating and, on the completion of Karim Cottage, threw a house-warming party for the ladies and gentleman of the household.

According to his diaries, Karim seems particularly enamoured by Balmoral: “I admired the scenery for it reminded me so forcibly of the Highland scenery of India which is much resorted to by Europeans during the hot season… I was told that Her Majesty is particularly partial to this residence in the Highlands. During the summer the neighbouring hills are covered with the rich bloom of the white and purple heather and with many kinds of wild flowers. To add to the charms of the scenery the silver Dee flows directly past the back of the castle.”

He isn’t as impressed with Glasgow, though: “Glasgow is a very dirty town but it could not be otherwise as it is purely a business centre. There are numerous manufactories, ship building yards and great iron works. The country round about produces abundance of coal. It is situated on the River Clyde, the water of which is so black and dirty… that no fish can live in the river.”

On one of his many foreign trips with the Queen, this time to Nice, he remarks upon his good fortune: “Events which we never thought or even dreamt of happening to us cause us to wonder at the wonderful ways God makes use of in working out his purposes. This thought came to my mind as I considered the wonderful good fortune that happened to some Indian jugglers who chanced to be in Nice while Her Majesty was there. When Her Majesty came to hear of them she sent a request to have them brought before her to exhibit their tricks. The Queen was highly amused and delighted and the honour which was given to these poor jugglers must have made them happy for life.”

Still, many in the royal court were unhappy with Karim’s constant presence. He was forever by her side and the Queen, a prolific letter-writer, often sent him several letters a day. He became her most trusted companion. Although mother to nine children, her relationship with them was distant – and often strained. She missed her late husband dearly, and was desperate for company. As the years went on, Karim’s influence grew, and in time, the one-time servant had servants himself.

The courtiers’ fears had some substance. Since Karim saw every letter that the Queen sent, he was soon advising her on how to deal with sectarian problems between Muslims and Hindus – advice she passed on to the bemused Viceroy. Unsurprisingly, her solutions always seemed to favour the Muslims – Karim, of course, was a Muslim. He even asked to be given a knighthood – one of the few requests the Queen turned down.

The courtiers’ resentment came to a head in 1889 when the Queen spent the night with her munshi at Glassalt Shiel, the isolated Scottish cottage she had once shared with John Brown but vowed never again to visit after he died. Although it appears to have been platonic, he was 26 and she 70, so eyebrows would have been raised. Several courtiers – and indeed members of the Queen’s own family – attempted to distance the Queen from Karim but to no avail; indeed, she thought their actions were motivated by race – and jealousy.

Karim only notes the hostility towards him in his diaries once, and in passing: “The memorable year [Diamond Jubilee year] did not open well… The unpleasantness I remarked on last year still existed.”

Queen Victoria died in 1901, and Abdul Karim was given a prominent place in the funeral possession. Yet days later, guards ordered him to hand over every letter she had written to him. He must somehow have managed to keep his diary concealed.

The few other documents that survived fire are held at Windsor. These include a journal kept by the Queen that was written entirely in Hindustani, and Shrabani Basu has painstakingly translated all 13 volumes.

The translations also reveal fascinating insights into the nature of the Queen’s relationship with Karim.

Abdul had created a phrase book of everyday Urdu words for the Queen to use when speaking to her Indian servants, as well as visiting royalty, and has written them out in Roman script.

The phrases include the standard ones such as: “You may go home if you like” (Tum ghar jao agar chhate ho); and: “The egg is not boiled enough”.

But some of the phrases are significantly more intriguing. For instance: “You will miss the munshi very much” (Tum munshi ko bahut yad karoge). And: “Hold me tight” (Ham ko mazbut thamo).

The Windsor documents also contain letters from Queen Victoria to Karim, frequently concerning his wife (towards whom, it would appear, she was equally fond), signed: “dearest mother”; or “Your loving mother, Victoria R.I.”

She nearly always signed these in Urdu. Moreover, the intimate details that the Queen included showed how close she had come to Karim. For instance, the Queen learnt that Karim and his wife had been unsuccessfully trying to have children, and decided to get medical advice:

“I spoke to Dr Reid about your dear wife and I think he will understand easily what you have to tell him. It may be that in hurting her foot and leg she may have twisted (moved or hurt) something in her inside, which would account for things not being regular and as they ought.”

Following the letter-burning, Karim and his wife were ordered to return to India. Years of fine living in the Queen’s palaces meant Karim had grown portly. He had also grown rich, and, returning to Agra, built himself a house, Karim Lodge. He died eight years after his return, at the age of 46.

Yet King Edward’s paranoia was not quelled, and he sent more agents to India to demand that all memorabilia relating to the Queen be burned, much to the alarm of Karim’s grieving widow. King Edward had done the same with all mementos of his mother’s relationship with John Brown.

After all these years, Abdul Karim’s family decided to come forward with the diary as they were determined to show him in a more positive light; not the social climber he had been painted as by many. In truth, Karim was one of the Queen’s closest companions, and offered the widowed monarch a great deal of support – and pleasure - during her lonely later years.

Extracted from 'Victoria & Abdul’ by Shrabani Basu, published by The History Press March 7. To order a copy from Telegraph Books for £9.99 plus £1.25 p&p call 0844 871 1516 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/8349760/The-lost-diary-of-Queen-Victorias-final-companion.html

Inside Madrasa A Personal History

2011-11-05T13:57:00.000-07:00

Above : The famous Darul Uloom Deoband

By Shaykh Dr Ebrahim Moosa

As I walked one morning last spring through the town of Deoband, home to India’s famous Sunni Muslim seminary, a clean-shaven man, his face glowing with sarcasm, called out to me. “Looking for terrorists?” he asked in Urdu. “I have every right to visit my alma mater,” I protested. With a sheepish grin he turned and walked away.

I shouldn’t have been so annoyed. The century-old seminary in Deoband had come under intense scrutiny after the Taliban leadership claimed an ideological affiliation with it via seminaries in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Journalists, politicians, and diplomats have since September 11 descended periodically on this town near Delhi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, long considered the intellectual and spiritual heartland of Indian Islam.

Once the Taliban was linked to Bin Laden, every aspect of India’s Muslim seminaries, or madrasas, became stigmatized. Top-level U.S. officials, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a chorus of journalists, pundits, and scholars have declared all madrasas to be breeding grounds for terrorists, but they have done so without any evidence and without an understanding of the complexity of these networks of schools, which are associated with multiple Muslim sects and ideologies. They have drowned out reasonable voices—for example, Peter Bergen and William Dalrymple—who argue that not all madrasas can be indicted in the war on terror. But even their sympathetic gestures fall short of providing a realistic picture of what happens inside madrasas or humanizing their inhabitants.

Had I not been defensive, I would have told the man from Deoband that I had lived and studied in several Indian madrasas between 1975 and 1981. A quarter century later, I had returned—not in search of terrorists, but to try to create a bridge between the world inside the walls and the outside.

* * *

“Wednesday 23 April 1975: The start of our four months in India. We slept after reading two raka’as (formal Muslim prayers). After fajr (pre-dawn prayers) and ishraq (optional after-sunrise prayers) we slept again. This was at Khar mosque in Bandra, Bombay.” So reads the first entry I made in my diary on my six-year journey in India’s madrasas.

Mumbai, known as Bombay in 1975, was a bewildering city for an 18-year-old kid from Cape Town, South Africa. Nothing prepared me for the intimidating throng of beggars and street urchins outside the airport, the countless people sleeping on sidewalks, and the heavy-laden monsoon air and strong odors. At the time I wasn’t aware of the full impact of the “state of emergency” that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had imposed to silence her critics, but I knew that fear surrounded me: people whispered about danger and secret arrests. I suddenly understood my father’s reluctance to let me go.

Deciding to study in India was its own journey that began with a crisis of faith. I was barely 16 when a classmate, a Jehovah’s Witness, brought some stinging anti-Islamic literature to our class. I still hear Gabriel reading: “Muhammad was an impostor who spread his message by the sword and was unworthy of being a prophet.” And he added, “Actually, Muhammad cribbed his teachings from Jews and Christians whom he met during his travels.” I had learned at the daily religious school sessions—also called madrasa in South Africa—that as a youth the Prophet Muhammad traveled to Syria with his uncle and was even anointed by a Christian monk. But never did I suspect the Prophet of treachery. This first exposure to the hostility some Christians harbor toward Muslims crushed my unchallenged sense of faith. But the encounter also started me thinking critically about Islam: it would change my life.

A trip to the library did little to reassure me. The refined prose of authors like Sir William Muir and Montgomery Watt leveled the same charges against Muhammad and claims to Islam’s authenticity. On reflection, it seems rather odd that as devout Christians and rational Scotsmen, Muir and (perhaps less so) Watt found it plausible that God could be incarnate in a man from Nazareth but incredible that a seventh-century Arab could prophesy as the Jewish prophets did.

I later found comfort with a group called the Tabligh Jamat. The Arabic word tabligh means “to convey or transmit.” The Tabligh Jamat consisted of lay Muslims reminding their co-religionists of their religious duties. I attended their pious circle at my neighborhood mosque in District Six, Cape Town’s multiethnic and defiant cultural center, where I lived during the school week. Several years later, apartheid’s architects would obliterate District Six to remove any evidence that the coexistence of different races was possible and assign us to racially segregated ghettos.

But questions about my faith persisted. My doubts—and my existential anxiety as a person of color in this white-supremacist world—became unbearable. My plans to become an engineer slowly gave way to another obsession. I wanted to go to India to study the faith of my ancestors, to reconcile that faith with reason. My mother was sympathetic to my cause, but my father didn’t want to see his eldest son as a poor cleric dependent on the benevolence of the community. Born and raised in South Africa, he hardly performed the daily rituals or attended Friday prayers, giving priority to his business. He relented, though, when my aunts reminded him of the promise of paradise for learned scholars of Islam and the Qur’an as well as their benefactors.

* * *

In my heart I was following my mother’s prayers. She had come to South Africa as a 19-year-old bride from Gujarat. Far from close relatives and burdened with domestic chores in an extended family with seven children, one of whom died in infancy, she took refuge in religion. In particularly tough times she would share with me, her eldest, the religious lore she learnt in her childhood in the village of Dehgaam, of how the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima, endured life’s trials.

My grandiose plan was also an escape from the drudgery of life: South Africa’s third-rate segregated schools, where discipline was violent and dictatorial, and the weekends and vacations working in the family grocery store in a seaside town 30 miles away. I was aware of the country’s segregationist politics; but I knew little of the lives of black South Africans, and I did not see the black unrest that would erupt on June 16, 1976, after I had been in India just more than a year.

When I arrived in Bombay, Tabligh volunteers received me and the rest of our group; I had agreed to spend four months in the Tabligh program before entering a madrasa. The brainchild of an Indian cleric, Muhammad Ilyas, who felt the teachings of Islam were not reaching the grass-roots faithful in British India, the Tabligh has no real bureaucratic administration, but its presence is felt in almost every corner of the globe. Resigning from his teaching position at a prestigious madrasa in the 1920s, Ilyas devoted himself, against tremendous odds, to revival work (da’wa) in the Mewat, a region straddling two states, Rajasthan and Haryana. He used a small mosque, the Banglawali Masjid, as his base in Delhi, where he cultivated his core of loyal associates. On the same site today a Spartan mosque serves as the international center (markaz) of the Tabligh.

Ilyas had a simple but highly effective evangelical message that he had boiled down to five points to mirror Islam’s five cardinal pillars of practice: grasp the true meaning and implications of the creedal statement that there is no deity except Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger; pray conscientiously five times a day; acquire learning and engage in the frequent remembrance of God; honor fellow believers; and participate in missionary work (da’wa) by spreading awareness of Islam. The Tabligh now hosts some of the largest Muslim gatherings, involving millions of participants on the subcontinent and around the world.

Working with the Tabligh was a grueling ordeal; and overcoming culture shock in India was daunting. We stayed at mosques, ate very basic meals, navigated treacherous roads, and traveled in overcrowded trains. By the lights of my naive faith, eternal damnation awaited these millions of Hindus apparently devoted to idols. In just weeks, India taught me to ask the first and enduring question about the workings of divine justice: how was it possible that a just God could promise me paradise and damn all these people who look like me? Years later, I would discover that many thinkers in the monotheistic tradition were confronted by similar questions, including the 12th-century thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, about whom I would later write a book.

I cut short my four months with the Tabligh to three and headed for the Madrasa Sabilur Rashad in Bangalore along with two other South Africans I met in the Tabligh. At the austere walled campus I found dozens of students apart from the majority South Indians and the few from my home country—young men from Trinidad and Tobago, Malaysia, Indonesia, the United States, and a lone Cuban. I occupied the fourth thin mattress in a sparse and cramped dorm room with a West Indian, an African-American, and the Cuban. The latter two would in pursuit of piety rise at 3 a.m. for optional prayers and liturgy, tormenting the rest of us for not doing the same. I saw this “calculator mentality” often in the Tabligh—the preoccupation with rewards for performing certain acts of piety and an attitude that these roommates celebrated.

Daily madrasa routine would begin at least an hour before sunrise with preparation for the early-morning prayers. Afterward students remained at the mosque to read a portion of the Qur’an. Others used the early morning hours to memorize the Qur’an, known as hifz. Breakfast would follow in the dining hall, called “the mess,” a reminder that the British had ruled India. Breakfast consisted of South Indian idli (lentil-rice patties), a crispy roti (baked bread), and chai (tea boiled in milk). Most foreign students made breakfast in their rooms with a spread of eggs, toast, and chai.

I had arrived at the madrasa only one month before it closed for the long Ramadan break, the end of the academic year. But in that short time I chafed at the highly regimented and pietistic environment and, worst of all, the cafeteria food. I took a class on memorizing portions of the Qur’an for liturgical purposes and perfecting my recitation of the holy book. The six-hour day of memorization was tedious, and students would take frequent bathroom breaks, sip lots of tea, and play surreptitiously to pass the time. The day’s memorized passage, as well as back lessons, were recited to an instructor at least twice daily. It took up to three full years to memorize the entire Qur’an. Not having budgeted such a length of time, I selected chapters, which would be useful in the classroom or in delivering sermons, as well as for liturgy. Since all instruction was in Urdu, I also threw myself into learning both Urdu and Arabic in private lessons.

But after almost four months in India, I had yet to enroll in an alimiyya program, required for gaining the knowledge and skills of an alim, the Arabic word for “a learned person.” (The plural, ulama, is today used to refer to Muslim clerics.) I spent the Ramadan break with my maternal grandfather, visiting my parents’ ancestral villages in Gujarat, near Bharuch, a bustling city on the banks of the Narmada River. On the outskirts of Baruch I discovered a small madrasa, Darul Uloom Matliwala, supported by an affluent South African family and enrolling some 200 students at the time.

The centerpiece of the seminary was a three-level Parsee bungalow. Parsees are followers of Zoroastrianism, an ancient religion of Persia. They straddle Indian and Anglo cultures and often speak both English and Gujarati. The bungalow was large enough to accommodate several classrooms and administrative space. To the side of the sprawling compound on Eidgah Road was a beautiful mosque of pastel greens surrounded by palms and a well-maintained garden. A student dormitory abutted the tilled fields that ran down to the banks of the Narmada.

The pace was relaxed and congenial. I decided to enroll. By coincidence, three other fellow South Africans came to study as a private cohort with a brilliant teacher, Mawlana Ibrahim Patni, who allowed me to join his group. Mawlana Patni’s talents were such that he could have succeeded as a lawyer or businessman. For the first few months we four would spend most of the day at the back of a class with dozens of 12-to-14-year-olds who were taking elementary classes in the pre-alimiyya program. We were on average 18 years old, writing with white chalk on child-sized black slate boards. At first we hardly understood the day classes we were auditing, but as the weeks and months progressed, things became clearer. By year-end I had a good handle on Urdu, and my Arabic was coming along.

As I adjusted to my new life, I also learned that my naive views about madrasas were not immune to contradiction. Puritanism reigned, and sex was taboo. I recall one evening in Bangalore when the Cuban student raised the alarm in the dorms, claiming that he had caught two Indian students in a homosexual embrace in the bathroom. I was scandalized, and the revelation haunted me for weeks. At home and in the madrasa I was taught that heterosexual conduct outside marriage was forbidden (and had life-threatening consequences); homosexuality was an unthinkable abomination.

Within a few months at the Bharuch madrasa I received my second jolt: I learned that it was an open secret that one of the teachers had sexual relations with younger men or perhaps even boys. Disturbed, but less shaken this time, I was getting a reality check. The personal lives of teachers and fellow students would not be my biggest concern. I realized that Bharuch was a provincial city and the madrasa lacked the more robust intellectual environment I sought, which was available in reputable North Indian madrasas.

After a year in Gujarat, I headed for Darul Uloom Deoband—the most prominent and prestigious madrasa for those affiliated with the Deobandi interpretation of the Sunni sect. Deoband, legend has it, was named after the goddess Durga, who in ancient times lived in the dense forest (van) near a lake (kund). It then became known as the ‘forest of the goddess’ (devi van) or ‘lake of the goddess’ (devi kund), which became corrupted to Deoband.

Today, the small town of Deoband, 98 miles from the Indian capital, Delhi, is typical, with open air markets, bookstores, food stalls, grocers, barbers, Internet cafes, and telephone exchanges. On its congested roads, man, animals, and vehicles vie for space. Locals joke that Deoband is famous for five things starting with the letter m: moulvis (Muslim clerics), masjid (mosque), mandir (temple), matchchar (mosquitoes) and makkhi (flies). But the spacious courtyard of Darul Uloom Deoband, in its serenity and historical grandeur, is reminiscent of Castalia in Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game: a place without family, amusements, poverty, and hunger, but dedicated to learning and hierarchy. Inside the red-brick walls, a large green cupola rises, dominating the landscape. The madrasa is built like a medieval fort, with four main gates and a courtyard marking the administrative and teaching spaces. Enclosing a larger courtyard replete with manicured lawns and simple flower gardens are extremely modest student residences. A majestic white marbled mosque now looms outside Madani Gate of the main campus.

* * *

Deoband was founded in 1867 in the aftermath of the failed Indian rebellion against British rule. With the defeat of the Moghuls, Muslim India divided into two intellectual paths. One saw the future secured in the embrace of modernity; this school established secular universities such as Aligarh Muslim University, founded by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. The other embraced tradition through religious schools, madrasas.

Deoband’s intellectual architect, Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi, a man of ascetic taste, a committed traditionalist, and a tireless anti-imperialist, belonged to the latter group. He and Khan were contemporaries and, as evident in their extensive and at times hostile correspondence, clashed over the meaning and place of Islam in the modern world. According to Khan, modern rationalism and science were compatible with a new interpretation of Islam—his. Older and more established doctrines, he believed, might have to be modified, if not jettisoned. (Khan did have his limits—he never entirely reconciled himself with the role of women in modern society.) Nanautvi was also a rationalist, but for him rationalism did not mean modern Western rationality like Descartes and Spinoza. It was, instead, a very early form of Greco-Arabic rationality consisting of Euclidean geometry and Aristotelian logic in the service of the old theological formulations of faith. Even today, this rationalist framework at Deoband and similar schools effectively exclude modern science.

Despite his anti-imperialism, Nanautvi did find European bureaucratic modernity attractive. He was trained at Delhi College, established by the British East India Company. He institutionalized exams, salaries for faculty, stipends for students, and an administrative system at Deoband modeled in part on Delhi College.

Nanautvi and his descendants controlled the main campus of Deoband until 1981 when rivals ousted Nanautvi’s aging grandson during an extended student strike that led to the closure of the institution. The reasons for the schism remain unclear. Students and their supporters at the time leveled charges of nepotism at the leadership and demanded better living conditions and some modernization of the syllabus. Ironically, the ousted administration had been planning to radically transform the Deoband madrasa with the support of a new hastily formed council that was later deemed to be unconstitutional. Two decades later very little had changed at the main Deoband campus. In fact, a breakaway madrasa, a cloned version of the main Deoband madrasa, has sprung up not far from the original campus. The new facility housed some 1,500 students, whereas the main campus housed over 3,000 students.

Deoband and other madrasas on the Indian subcontinent differed from their counterparts elsewhere in the Muslim world: they were privately funded. In fact, their raison d’�(tm)tre was resisting the state, in particular the influences of British rule and the spread of modernity through westernized Muslim elites. In contrast, Cairo’s al-Azhar and other schools in the Middle East had lost their independence to secular governments, who turned religion and clerics into extensions of the state and coerced modernization in certain areas.

For idealistic young men like me, who landed on the subcontinent in the mid-1970s in search of salvation and identity, the madrasas of India and Pakistan were presented as genuine bastions of tradition. We viewed institutions and scholars throughout the Middle East with disdain: they were feckless, robbed of intellectual vigor by governments that were slavish to foreign powers and uninterested in indigenous talents and history. Despite meager resources (extremely meager compared to the bourgeois comforts to which I had become accustomed), the madrasas had great legitimacy in our hearts and minds.

Being a student at Deoband was for me at first a dizzying experience. I devoured my texts, and they opened up worlds to me. Madrasa education drives home the sacred nature of knowledge. One is taught to show the utmost respect for the bearers of knowledge, teachers, and the instruments of learning, books. Novices quickly learn that some scholars cannot even tolerate the sight of paper lying in the street; carelessly discarded paper is the desecration of knowledge. Texts are not only symbols of learning, but markers of progress, too. So, for instance, if you ask a student what year of the program he is in, he will cite the text he is studying; only an insider could translate the name of that text into a specific year of the curriculum.

We studied books that were written in the tenth century and earlier, as well as those from the 15th to 20th centuries. The beauty of the textual tradition lies precisely in its discordant variety: texts serve as palimpsests of the ancient and the modern world. The best professors not only translated and clarified the text; they made an effort to link the ancient world to contemporary realities.

Law, called fiqh in Arabic, is the mainstay of the madrasa curriculum. Fiqh is actually moral discourse that proposes ethical guidelines for society. Learning the classical fiqh texts was exciting and awesome; after all, learning the practices advanced by tradition confers a certain responsibility and authority. I initially held out the hope that the proper application of fiqh would create an ideal Muslim society, only to find out that it would take more than law. I was disturbed, too, that some of what passes as the execution of Sharia practices involved gruesome amputations and floggings. I believed that if there were other ways to deter murder and theft they would be preferable to the practices of early centuries. There were few teachers to whom one could air such doubts. Most would respond with dire warnings of the spiritual and theological hazards of such thinking.

Even as students we would lampoon some of what we were taught, questioning its utility. For instance, in the fiqh class there were endless discussions about seven types of water usable to secure ritual purity: rain, sea, river, and well water, followed by water melted from snow and ice, and, finally spring water. Most of us had only seen water from the taps and wells, and few students from rural India would have had seen snow or the sea, except for in pictures—and pictures were rare, since images of animate objects were taboo. But thoughtful professors would transform arcane lessons into broader discussions, for example about the validity of recycled water for ritual purposes, a possibility unimaginable to the medieval authors of our texts.

* * *

Critics often charge the madrasa system of anachronism, a charge that is partly true. Defenders of the traditional curriculum, which was devised by the 18th-century scholar Mulla Nizamuddin, insist on the supreme pedagogical value of the old texts. They believe that, apart from connecting students to the canonical tradition, the “Nizami curriculum” enhances one’s mastery of every discipline and enables scholars to solve any contemporary problem. But few have been able to rebut the charge that the texts used are redundant and at times impenetrable, save to a few scholars who have spent their lives mastering them. Indeed most texts are frustratingly terse, forcing teachers and students to scour commentaries and super-commentaries for help. The multiple levels of calligraphic marginalia on each textbook page were decorative, but they were taxing to the eyes and mind. For decades critics have petitioned for more lucid texts. But inertia has turned the texts and syllabus into inviolable monuments to the past. The result is that students are poorly prepared and lack the confidence to engage the tradition critically to meet the needs of a changing world. At its worst the system recycles intellectual mediocrity as piety.

After three years in India I started asking questions about the relevance of the texts and how to apply their insights in the modern world and, especially, in South Africa. By now I had become acutely aware of the political challenges of my home country: racism, and the intransigence of the Muslim clergy there to speak out against the evil of apartheid. Reading the uncensored Indian press and following political developments at home through the literature of Nelson Mandela’s banned African National Congress, all impressed upon me the challenges I would face in South Africa. My restlessness drove me to read widely and independently—especially literature written by more contemporary authors. One such author was Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi, whom most teachers in Deoband reviled and for whom only the bravest expressed guarded admiration. Mawdudi was the gadfly among clerics who pushed for what is called “political Islam.”

Mawdudi rose to prominence during the dying years of British colonialism and after partition moved to the new state of Pakistan. While he had the credentials, he was not a member of the clerical elite, being for most of his life an autodidact, a gifted writer and founder of a continent-wide social movement known as the Jamat-e Islami. Mawdudi’s prolific writings guaranteed him audiences among modern educated Muslims. As the traditionalist ulama bickered with him on petty issues, Mawdudi emphasized the social dimensions of Islam as an ideology. If Muslims conceived of Islam as a social teaching then they could build new societies. Establishing an Islamic state, fully backed by Islamic laws and institutions, was one of Mawdudi’s ideals. Mawdudi was an ideologue with a vision, a political program, and international influence. Sayyid Qutb, the prominent Egyptian writer and ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood was persuaded by Mawdudi’s analysis that secular materialism was akin to the days of ignorance, jahiliyya, at the birth of Islam.

I thus discovered an interpretation of Islam outside the walls of the madrasa where I could find inspiration and guidance for building society from an Islamic platform. The ancient texts I was studying suddenly seemed musty and stale.

An overbearing government clerk who told my father that my expired passport could not be renewed unless I returned home changed everything. During mysubsequent—and, as it turned out, unecessary—three-month trip to South Africa in 1978, I realized I had been living in a cloistered world. Just seeing the people of Cape Town made me begin to question everything: my lifestyle, attire, ideas about my future. Up to that point, I had hardly spent time in Indian cities; nor did I watch television, go to movies, or listen to music because of the strict moral code I had followed for three years. I had given away all my Western clothes, vowing to wear only what I then believed was “Islamic dress”: the typical loose-fitting knee-length tunic, called a kurta, and loose-fitting pants.

I now knew that if I were to follow the rules of Deoband, not only would my life in South Africa be restricted—I had come to the madrasa to escape such confinement—but so too would be my emotional and intellectual development.

On my return to India I stepped into the precincts of Deoband wearing a T-shirt and jeans, a cavalier affront to my immediate friends. Even though the act was largely symbolic—I would continue to wear the conventional attire—I spurred a debate among close friends about what I thought were the deficiencies in the madrasas. Fellow students and a few teachers predictably labeled me a “modernist,” an insult. Some of my younger teachers who often gently challenged my views, helped me realize how self-righteous I had been in the past about an Islamic dress code and the superiority of the interpretations of madrasa authorities on virtually every matter.

It was time to move on. I was still determined to complete the alimiyya program, but I needed to find a madrasa with less emphasis on texts. I explored opportunities to study in Libya, Iraq, and Egypt to little avail. I was less of an idealist by now, and the burden of becoming independent started to weigh on me as I approached 21. Taking over the family business was certainly not an option; I needed to find a vocation.

I decided to transfer to Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama, a madrasa in the capital of Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow. Nadwa was located on the banks of the Gomti River, which flows through this historic Mughal city, reputed for its refined culture, food, and aesthetic taste and a place where people still feel nostalgia for the days of nobility. In Mughal times this region was known as Oudh, and its rulers were mostly those who followed the Shia rite. In my student days there were occasional Sunni–Shia tensions around the beginning of the Islamic month of Muharram, signaling the Muslim New Year, when public exhibitions of Shia passion plays rekindled ancient grievances underlying the sectarian split within Islam more than a millennium ago. Yet Lucknow was a city that took pride in civility.

* * *

Moving from Deoband to Nadwa is in effect like transferring from the Vatican to a liberal divinity school. Deobandis look askance at Nadwa: in addition to being too modern and too liberal for the Deoband temper, it is more internationalist in outlook. Its former president, the late Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, was internationally reputed in the Muslim world. A one-time colleague of Mawdudi, with whom he would later had differences, he was clearly enchanted by Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood. He wrote extensively on the plight of Muslims in the 20th century and mobilized for their welfare and advancement. Nadwa received a great deal of support from foundations and individuals in the Arabian Gulf, and the campus boasts significant upgrades over the last three decades. Ali Nadwi was a descendent of the Prophet’s family and was therefore known as a sayyid. He wrote mainly in Arabic and strongly believed that a renaissance among the Arabs would have a salutary influence on the rest of the Muslim world. I think that toward the end of his life he was less sanguine about such an outcome.

Nadwatul Ulama was launched in 1898 by a broad spectrum of ulama, traditionalists to modernists, who all believed that the Deoband-type madrasa education did not equip students for the challenges of modern life. Placing a greater emphasis on the liberating message of the Qur’an, Nadwa favored certain departures from the traditional curriculum and emphasized the study of history. Nadwa’s motto was “Synthesizing the profitable past with the useful modern.” Nadwa’s tolerance to intra-Sunni differences made it attractive. Students adhering to the Barelwi school of thought, a more Platonic interpretation of Islam that accepts elements of popular religion, and Salafis, those who follow a scripturalist interpretation, both rivals to Deoband, enroll at Nadwa to pursue different degrees. Students are allowed to attend class wearing Western dress, although the majority wear kurtas.

But while Nadwa offered me space to pursue my own interests, the curriculum was in the end not that different from Deoband. (On a recent visit to both places I was unable to tell the difference.) By now, too, the Nizami curriculum seemed largely redundant. Classes at Nadwa were not very demanding. And I was completely put off by the lifeless study of Islamic law, even though the philosophy and sociology animating law and ethics intruigues me to this day. On my own I frequented the British Library in the Hazratganj area of Lucknow and borrowed widely from Nadwa’s excellent library collection to read new subjects—political science, economics, and English literature. I found Alex Haley’s biography of Malcolm X inspirational and became totally enchanted by Muhammad Asad (Leopold Weiss), the author of The Road to Mecca, an account of an Austrian Jew’s discovery of Islam and his life as an explorer, a confidante of kings and rulers, a scholar and a diplomat. Asad and Malcolm X kindled in me the desire to write. I published an essay in Arabic in Nadwa’s monthly newspaper and submitted op-ed pieces to the daily Northern India Patrika on politics and Islam.

In 1980 several international speakers attended a conference on Arabic literature held at Nadwa. A tall and imposing Egyptian lawyer and Princeton postgraduate, Mohammed Fathi Osman impressed me. We had several animated conversations about the Iranian revolution that had just occurred. Later, when I was about to graduate, I wrote Osman seeking advice. I received no reply, and decided to visit Egypt and explore a master’s degree at al-Azhar in Cairo. By now I was thoroughly disabused of my earlier, negative views of Islamic education in the Middle East. But just weeks before I was to leave, Osman sent a message inviting me to join the staff of a promising new magazine, sponsored by liberal Saudis, that he was launching in London. The choice between studies in Egypt and journalism in the United Kingdom was a no-brainer. I grabbed the offer and set off for London. Arabia: The Islamic World Review turned out to be the beginning of my career as a journalist. Even though I moved on from Arabia after 18 months, its closure a decade later was a great loss to the world of progressive Islamic ideas.

* * *

Spending six years inside India’s madrasas left deep imprints that over time have become only more significant as I have grown further from my youthful indignation. If given a choice once again at age 18 between a madrasa and a university, I suspect I would opt for a madrasa.

I remain a critic of madrasa education—its inability to provide the big picture of Islamic ideas, its failure to effect the transformation of Muslim societies. Yet madrasas offer something of enormous value. Properly harnessed, they are repositories of classical learning and seed intellectual sophistication that might challenge the shallow discourses of fundamentalism and revivalism that often pass as Islam today. Madrasas are environments of Islamic cultivation of the self, culture, civility, wisdom, and life.

While madrasas are growing in number on the subcontinent, the cherished world of the madrasas of my youth is rapidly disappearing. Shrill rhetoric substitutes for critical and sober reflection as the battle lines are drawn between a triumphant West and the madrasas who believe it is out to destroy them. This atmosphere breeds a debilitating defensiveness and a victim’s mindset. Madrasas of the 21st century will continue to change. I fear that the West’s insistence on casting madrasas as redoubts of terror and proposing invasive surveillance techniques and unilateral curriculum reforms will only force madrasas to retreat into more unpredictable modes of resistance. Madrasas may be forced to defend themselves by more militant means as the political rapids in countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh become more turbulent.

My experience in the madrasas is an atypical one: I crafted my own program and selected from what was on offer, whereas most conform to the prescribed syllabus and ideology. Yet as I continued in my work as a journalist, social activist, and then academic in South Africa and now in the United States, I have been able to recover the palimpsest of my madrasa education. I now appreciate these resources in ways madrasa authorities would not approve. Now, as I write about human rights, bioethics, Islamic law, and the ethical interpretation of the tradition, I can do so with confidence and argue that tradition is open to abuse and open to change. In my own thinking, writing, and activism I can push back against the many retrogressive forces and form productive associations with progressive ones. I doubt I would have had the courage to undertake some of this work otherwise.

http://bostonreview.net/BR32.1/moosa.php

‘Undercover’ in hijab: unveiling one month later

2011-11-04T07:51:00.000-07:00

Mother’s lap is protective and familiar. Leaving this worldview can be uncomfortable, but I can assure you, the rewards are much greater.

Hijab
Last month, I climbed out of my “lap” and wore a hijab, the Muslim headscarf. I thought this temporary modification of my appearance would bring me closer to an understanding of the Muslim community, but in retrospect, I learned more about my place in the world.

Simplified, one piece of fabric is all it takes to turn perspectives upside-down.

The hijab is a contested, sacred and sometimes controversial symbol, but it is just a symbol. It is a symbol of Islam, a misconstrued, misunderstood religion that represents the most diverse population of people in the world — a population of more than one billion people.

I realized the best way to identify with Muslims was to take a walk in their shoes. On Oct. 1, I covered my head with a gauze scarf and grappled with the perceptions of strangers, peers and even my own family.

Because of perceptions, I even struggled to write this column. My experience with the hijab was personal, but I hope sharing what I saw will open a critical conversation.

My hijab silenced, but simultaneously, my hijab brought unforgettable words.

Idea
In the first column I wrote this semester, I compared college to an alarm clock saying, “we see the face of a clock, but rarely do we see what operates behind it.” At the time, I did not realize how seriously I needed to act on my own words — as a journalist, a woman and a human.

A few weeks after I wrote that piece, a guest columnist addressed Islamophobic sentiments regarding the proposed “ground zero” mosque. The writer was Muslim, and she received a flurry of feedback.

The comments online accumulated like a swarm of mindless pests. The collective opinion equated Islam to violence and terrorism.

In response to her column, one comment said, “[The writer] asks us to trust Islam. Given our collective experience, and given Islam’s history I have to wonder what planet she thinks we are on.”

Although I did not know the voices behind these anonymous posts, I felt involuntarily linked to them — because I am not Muslim. I wanted to connect people, and almost instinctively, I decided that a hijab was necessary. A hijab could help me use my affiliation with “white,” non-Muslims to build rapport with the Islamic community and at the same time, show non-Muslims the truth from an unheard voice. Above all, I wanted to see and feel the standard lifestyle for so many women around the world — because I’m curious, and that’s why I’m a journalist.

Before I took this step, I decided to propose my idea to the women who wear headscarves every day. Little did I know, a room full of strangers would quickly become my greatest source of encouragement and would make this project more attainable.

The handshake
Initially, I worried about how the Muslim community would perceive a non-Muslim in a hijab, so I needed its approval before I would start trying on scarves. On Sept. 16, I went to a Muslim Student Association meeting to introduce myself.

When I opened the door to the meeting room, I was incredibly nervous. To erase any sign of uncertainty, I interjected to a girl seated across the room, “meeting starts at 7, right?” The girl, it turns out, was Heba Suleiman, the MSA president. After I explained my plan, her face lit up.

“That is an amazing idea,” she said.

I felt my tension and built-up anxiety melt away. In the minutes following, I introduced myself to the whole group with an “asalaam alaykum,” and although I was half-prepared for it, I was alarmed to hear dozens of “wa aylaykum asalam” in response.

Before I left, several girls approached me. I will not forget what one girl said, “this gives me hope.” Another girl said, “I’m Muslim, and I couldn’t even do that.” It did not hit me until then, that this project would be more than covering my hair. I would be representing a community and a faith, and consequentially, I needed to be fully conscious of my actions while in hijab.

First steps “undercover”
Two weeks later, I met Heba and her friend Leanna for coffee, and they showed me how to wrap a hijab. The girls were incredibly helpful, more than they probably realized. Although this project was my personal undertaking, I knew I wouldn’t be alone — this thought helped me later when I felt like ripping off the hijab and quitting.

Responses to my hijab were subtle or nonexistent. I noticed passing glances diverted to the ground, but overall, everything felt the same. Near the end of the month, a classmate pointed out that a boy had been staring at me, much to my oblivion. The hijab became a part of me, and until I turned my head and felt a gentle tug, I forgot it was there.
For the most part, I carried out life as usual while in hijab. I rode my bike and felt the sensation of wind whipping under my headscarf. I walked past storefront windows, caught a glimpse of a foreign reflection and had to frequently remind myself that the girl was me. Hijab became part of my morning routine, and on one morning I biked to class and turned around because I realized I left without it. At the end of the day, I laughed at my “hijab hair” pressed flat against my scalp.

The hijab sometimes made me uneasy. I went to the grocery store and felt people dodge me in the aisles — or was that just my imagination?

I recognize every exchange I had and every occurrence I report may be an assumption or over analysis because few of my encounters were transparent. The truth is, however, very few of my peers said anything about the hijab. My classmates
I’ve sat next to for more than a year, my professors and my friends from high school — no one addressed the obvious, and it hurt. I felt separated from the people who know me best — or so I thought.

A gap in the conversation exists, and it’s not just surrounding my situation.

Just over a week ago, I turned on the news to see Juan Williams, a former NPR news analyst fired for commentary about Islam. Williams said, “If I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

His statement revealed an internalized fear. And I saw this fear when my colleagues dodged the topic. When I went back to ask “why?,” several said it was too “touchy” or insensitive to bring up.

A hijab is a just symbol, like a cross, a star or an American flag. I am still the same Cassidy Herrington — I didn’t change my identity, but I was treated like a separate entity.

Talk is not cheap
When someone mentioned my hijab without my provocation, I immediately felt at ease. A barista at my usual coffee stop politely asked, “Are you veiling?” A friend in the newsroom asked, “Are your ears cold?”

My favorite account involves a back-story.

I love Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine, and I garnered an appetite when I was young. My childhood home neighbored my “third grandmother,” the most loving second-generation Lebanese woman and exceptional cook (not an exaggeration, she could get me to eat leafy vegetables when I was a child zealot of noodles and cheese). I remember knocking on her back door when I was five, asking for Tupperware brimming with tabouleh.

When King Tut’s opened on Limestone, my school year swiftly improved to a fabulously garlicky degree. At least once a week, I stopped by to pick up the tabouleh, hummos or falafel to medicate my case of the newsroom munchies.

On Oct. 21, the owner, Ashraf Yousef, stopped me before I went inside.

“I heard about your project, and I like it,” he said. “And you look beautiful in your hijab.”

This encounter was by far the best. And it made my shawarma sandwich taste particularly delicious. I went back on my last day to thank him, and Yousef said, “I’m just giving my honest opinion, with the hijab, you look beautiful. It makes your face look better.”

Yousef asked if I would wear the hijab to his restaurant when the project was over. I nodded, smiled and took a crunchy mouthful of fattoush.

False patriotism
I did not receive intentional, flagrant anti-Muslim responses. I did, however, receive an e-mail allegedly “intended” for another reader. The e-mail was titled “My new ringtone.” When I opened the audio file, the Muslim prayer to Mecca was abruptly silenced by three gunshots and the U.S. national anthem.

I spoke to the sender of the e-mail, and he said, “It was just a joke.” Here lies a problem with phobias and intolerance — joking about it doesn’t make it less of an issue. When was it ever okay to joke about hatred and persecution? Was it acceptable when Jews were grotesquely drawn in Nazi cartoons? Or when Emmet Till was brutally murdered?

The e-mail is unfortunate evidence that many people inaccurately perceive Islam as violent or as “the other.” A Gallup poll taken last November found 43 percent of Americans feel at least a “little” prejudice against Muslims. And if you need further confirmation that Islamophobia exists, consult Ann Coulter or Newt Gingrich.

Hijab-less
I’ve been asked, “Will you wear the hijab when it’s over?” and initially, I didn’t think I would — because I’m not Muslim, I don’t personally believe in hijab. Now that I see it hanging on my wall and I am able to reflect on the strength it gave me, I think, yes, when I need the headscarf, I might wear it.

Ashraf said, “A non-Muslim woman who wears a hijab is just wearing a headscarf.” (and apparently, my face “looks better.”) Appearances aside, when I wore the hijab, I felt confident and focused. I wore the hijab to a news conference for Rand Paul, and although an event coordinator stopped me (just me, except for one elusive blogger) to check my credentials, I felt I accurately represented myself as an intelligent, determined journalist — I was not concerned with how I looked, but rather, I was focused on gathering the story.

So now, I return to my first column of the year. I’ve asked the questions, and I’ve reached across the circles. Now, it’s your turn. You don’t have to wear a hijab for a month to change someone’s life or yours. The Masjid Bilial Islamic Center will host a “get to know your neighbors” on Nov. 7, and UK’s Muslim Student Association is having “The Hajj” on Nov. 8. These are opportunities for non-Muslims to be better informed and make meaningful connections.

I want to thank Heba for being a friend and a resource for help. Thank you to Ashraf Yousef and King Tut for the delicious food and the inspiration. Finally, I apologize to the individuals who feel I have “lied” to them about my identity or who do not agree with this project. I hope this page clears things up — you have the truth now, and I hope you find use for it.

Why are we so afraid to talk about this? We are not at war with Islam. In fact, Muslim soldiers are defending this country. Making jokes about terrorism is not going to make the situation less serious. Simply “tolerating” someone’s presence is not enough.

If you turn on the news, you will inevitably hear the prefix, “extremist,” when describing Islam. What you see and hear from the media is fallible — if you want the truth, talk to a Muslim.

Cassidy Herrington is a journalism and international studies junior. E-mail cherrington@kykernel.com.

http://kykernel.com/2010/10/31/‘undercover’-in-hijab-unveiling-one-month-later/

Shaykh Nurettin Can Passes to the Mercy of his Lord

2011-11-02T17:09:00.000-07:00

Assalaamu alaykum warahmutAllahi waBarakatuhu,

Dear brothers and sisters,

May I ask those who are able to recite Sura Ikhlas 3 times and a Fatiha for the soul of this great scholar.

Short Bio

During the regime of Attuturk some of the great Ottoman Scholars moved to Eastern Turkey to avoid the repression of the time.

Shaykh Nurettin Can rahimullah studied classical texts and was a Master of many outward disciplines including Hadith , Fiqh and Tafsir. He studied under many of the last of the great Ottoman Scholars.

He had ijaza in tasawuf but never taught any students this science.

Towards the end of his life he had people flocking to him to take ijazas in the outward sciences. People as far away as Indonesia sat in his madarasa in the Uskuder area of Istanbul.

The link to many DPers is that Sh Muhammad Yaqoubi was also his student and his teacher. Sh Muhammed spent much time at his home this last Ramadhan and I personally felt the love these great scholars had for each other.

Sh Nurettin also had one of the greatest book collections in the world.

May Allah perfume his resting place and make it into a garden of Paradise, Ameen

What Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi said concerning him :

I, with a lot of sorrow and grief, announce that the great erudite scholar and the dear brother and friend, shaykh Nurettin Jan of Istanbul passed away peacefully in Turkey on Wednesday evening, Oct. 26th, 2011 in his 60, after having been in coma for two weeks due a stroke he had as a result of irregular blood pressure.

Shaykh Nurettin was a dear brother and a close friend and I was deeply saddened by the news of his death; as it is a big loss for me on a personal, level and for the Muslim World; as he was not only a local scholar but well known and highly repsected in many countries; hundreds of scholars, professors and imams studied under him.

He devoted his life to the service of this deen and the sacred knowledge and its students. He suffered from several ailments due to his sacrifices when he was a child studying the shari'a sciences.

He told me many stories of the difficulties and the pain he had to go through during his early years of study in the towns South East of Turkey where his family of Kurdish descent lived. They had to study in secret to avoid being cought by the secular regime which banned private institutes. He would walk for miles in the snow with freezing temprature from a village to another because of not having enough money to take any transportation. He and his classmates would share few dry olives every morning in the school, which was a room in a cellar with no ventolation often sealed during police surveiance. He was teaching everyday from six in the morning till noon in his private school and library till before he died.

We had a lot of memories together and he was very close to my heart. His love and respect for me as a member of the Family of the Prophet PBUH was beyond description. He asked me several times for an ijaza and insisted; and I gave it to him just to please him; as he himself was a great scholar but with qualities which are rare in our time, one of them was modesty.

Last time I spoke to him was two weeks before his stroke; I phoned him from Sweden and his voice was frail. As soon as I heard the news of his stroke, I travelled to South of Turkey to see him; it was not easy to see him lying in a hospital with life supporting machines. It was clear that Allah Almighty loved him and wanted him out of this world. He had the stroke in the place he loved most and in the company of his own teacher, the great 'Allamah sh. Burhaniddin, as he was his guest and they were sitting privately. He was excited and thrilled and forgot about his health. Although his doctor advised him not to travel by plane, he went to see his teacher and to attend with him the inauguration of a new madrasah. He never stopped sacrificing for this religion till he paid his life as a price, but we know that the reward Allah promised for such scholars are beyond description.

I pray that Allah Almighty grant him the highest ranks the Garden and that he be resurrected with the Prophet PBUH and his family.

We stand by and sustain his family members, especially his three sons, Muhmmad Asil, Muhammad Wasif, and Muhammad 'Akif, in their grief. And I send my sincerest condolences to his teacher the great 'Allamah Burhanuddin of Tello and to his students and friends.

We know that words seem futile now in the midst of this loss but we also know that du'a is a powerful means of requesting mercy for him and solice his family and for us all.

Therefore, I request brothers and sisters to make khatem for him and recite Yasin as many times as possible and beseech Allah to grant him the rewards. May Allah reward you all.

An old Interview with Sheikh Hamza Yusuf - Some Interesting Points Made

2011-10-03T11:13:00.000-07:00

As-salaamu Alaikum.

Walaikumu Salaam.

Jazak-Allah Khair for taking time out of your busy schedule to spend some of it with us. You returned from the Hajj recently, and you’ve been previously haven’t you.

Right.

What was different this time around as opposed to other times - or is each time different in itself?

I think the Hajj tends to reflect the state of the Ummah. That’s one of the things about the Hajj is that you get to see the Ummah. It’s a microcosm of the Ummahs condition. And I think what you see on Hajj is that the Ummah is not in good condition. What you see is that there is good in the Ummah, but the state, the overall state is not a got state and I think that’s very reflective in the Hajj. One of the things that is very obvious is that there is, in a sense, a loss of what’s called "Ithar", which is deference to others. One of the essential characteristics of the Muslims is this idea of deference and adab and if you lose adab in the Haram, you certainly won’t have adab in the place where you’re coming from. And so what happens is that you have people who forget partly where they are. Some of the outwardly manifestations of that are a lot of people smoking, publicly, in the Haram, a lot of intermingling between men and women in ways that are inappropriate.

Also a total lack of concern for the cleanliness of the place - garbage is everywhere. I mean, already garbage as a phenomenon, it’s a modern phenomenon. Humans have always produced waste products, but consumer waste products are very different from classical waste products that were by and large, biodegradable - things that would go back to the earth. And here you’re dealing with a lot of plastics and thing that are not...they’re ugly. And there’s just a lot of garbage, and what I’ve think that is indicative of, the fact that the Muslims throw things around, is that there is an assumption that somebody else is going to pick it up. And so really what that’s telling us is that nobody is taking personal responsibility, and I think that is by and large a real crisis in the Muslim Ummah as a whole, that people, individual Muslims are not taking personal responsibility for the condition of the Ummah, they’re expecting that somebody else is going to take care of the problems, somebody else is going to take care of our troubles, and this has led to a type of apathy, and so I think that’s all reflective in the behaviour. At the throwing at the stones, I mean that’s.... I mean, the people that I went with, we all threw our stones without harming anybody, without any pushing and shoving, and we went in and out. But we did it because we were consciously doing that, where as there’s a lot of people there that, there just don’t care about other people, they’re pushing people to get their...to get in and do what they have to do, and they harm other people doing it. You can see this also around the Black Stone, you see it around the Tawwaf, and the trouble is is that by honouring other Muslims, Allah honours you, and by disparaging other Muslims, you only in the end, Allah says "Ya Ayohan nas, Inna Baghiakum a la Anfusikum" - O mankind, your harm of other people is only against ourselves. And so by harming other people, what we’re really doing is harming ourselves, and I think that’s what’s happening in the Muslim Ummah, and that’s why we have this type of oppression in the Muslim Ummah towards one another, which manifests in the corruption within government organisations, the corruption within the private sector.

So are you saying that during the time you’ve been going back to the Hajj, things have gotten worse - you’ve perceived deterioration or improvement?

No, I don’t think so - I don’t think that... I don’t want to paint a completely bleak... but one has to be realistic as well. For me personally, despite all of that, there are extraordinary things that take place, and it is still.... I mean the real task of every pilgrim is to, inspite of all these overwhelming circumstances, to experience the Hajj as a spiritual journey. I mean, that is a task. Something that probably earlier, in earlier time, it was easier. Now there’s a struggle.

Why do you think Muslims have lost their tradition of mutual love and courtesy amongst each other, why do you think there has been that decline?

Because there is a breakdown in the whole concept of what an ‘Ummah’ is, I mean this is the idea of Divide and Conquer. It’s taken some time to achieve, but there has been a breakdown in nationalities, there’s now artificially created nationalities and borders that divide us, and those nationalities and borders have taken a life of their own, and so what happens is that people begin to view themselves as Egyptians, as Algerians etc. and not as Muslims, not as one Ummah and Allah says that "you are one Ummah and I am your Lord". You have one Lord, one Ummah and one Prophet. We have in our Ummah all of the ingredients that no other communities have, not even the homogeneity of countries, don’t have the ingredients of unity outside of there countries. In other words, the Japanese, they do have a type of solidarity based on their Japaneseness, but outside of that, outside of a bloodlink, as a people and a language link, they don’t have anything to unite them. Whereas with the Muslims, we have within our tradition all of the ingredients to unite the most diverse people and it’s extraordinary, there’s nothing else similar to it at all in history or in the world right now.

What America would like to do is they would like to unite the world based on shared, quote - unquote, values, because I don’t like that word, based on these shared values of consumerism, gratuitous consumption, of pleasure and the world is created basically for play and entertainment and as a pastime, and music and dancing and basically bestial lower self behaviour and this is what they’re spreading all over the world. So everybody will look the same, in their jeans and their Nikes shoes, and everybody will listen to the same sugared pop music, and everybody will eat the same hamburger, French fries and milkshakes and everybody will have the same banal perspectives on the world. So this type of unity which is based on reducing the human being to an automaton, who has no volition of its own and who simply sleepwalks through life without any sense of identity, awareness or tradition. This is the unity they’re hoping to achieve with this idea of some kind of one world. Maybe with some new-age spirituality thrown in there because people do tend to have some spiritual needs, so we can throw in some new-age... it’s all one in any case, right? So take a little dabble from this religion and that religion, and we can all be Buddhists, and then you can just meditate, or something like that, or they’ll, I’m sure, be providing soon enough, Spiritual Television.

Have you read the book by James Redfield, it’s very appropriate to what you’re talking about, The Celestine Prophecy?

I actually have read that. I think that’s exactly what I’m talking about. It’s this kind of new-age religion that’s being promoted - which is Dajjalic in its nature because it’s looking at certain spiritual truths and it’s distorting them. Iblis is the mimicker, right, I mean Allah says that his throne is on water, so Iblis made his throne on water. Iblis is the great mimicker; he’s the mocker. And so the pseudo religion always will mimic true religion, and unfortunately when you don’t have people that have the ability to discern and distinguish between truth and falsehood, then they spend their life being misled and groping in darkness.

Do you think the intellectual decline in our Ummah can in any way be related to the decline in the Arabic language and its importance?

That’s a very strong element in the whole overall decline. Out of the several hundred languages in the world, there are only a handful of languages that are considered ‘civilisational’ and Arabic is certainly one of them.

Right now, the language of power and dominance, and of discourse at whatever level - whether commercial, philosophical or scientific - is English. And the power elite in the west are certainly capable of articulating in the English language. Whereas in the Arab world, you would be hard pressed to find people capable of articulating verbally - using the Arabic language as a vehicle for discussion and serious though - unless they had been well trained. More can actually write and part of that is because the Arabic language is so deeply rooted in classical Islamic Knowledge.

English has a worldview, and now you find in the Arab world, people who have English as their second language - usually their higher education will now be in English. Every language contains within it the roots of the worldview of the people that produced it - so by taking on the English language, one is taking on a western worldview, and you can’t avoid it. By abandoning the Arabic language what people are doing in fact is abandoning the worldview that the Qur’an provides. Also, the Muslims had a deep sense of the linguistic power and the actual underlying expression of reality embedded in the language. The language of the Qur’an is the language of truth, and therefore the one who learns it and is deeply into it will ultimately be confronted with reality through the expression of the Arabic language.

Why do you think so many pieces of good Islamic literature are being written by non-Muslims - e.g. George Makdisi’s ‘Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian World’?

Partly because the west is the dominant power-elite, and the dominant powers always have intellectual apparati to maintain their power - part of the apparatus, what it will do is it will enable and facilitate research and facilitate intellectuals to explore/pursue ideas and thoughts ultimately for the benefit of the power elite. But what will come out of that often is that people who do have inherent brilliance are able to have the time and the freedom to think deeply about matters. This is the whole system of endowments in the west - if you look at most of these people who do these things, they’ll often have a paragraph of gratitude towards some fellowship that was given to them, which gave them 2 or 3 years to do the research they needed to do. What happened in the Muslim world is that because there is no power (the Muslim world has in fact become of secondary importance) most Muslim governments are in no way interested in pursuing intellectuals - in fact, quite the opposite. They want to prevent them from thinking, they don’t want them to think. The fact that the west does allow these intellectuals to pursue things is in no way indicative of some desire for truth.

That is a very important note.

Right. Sometimes, truth is a by-product of it, because in order for the to fulfil what they want to fulfil, they allow an ‘expressive’ control of their intellectuals - but because of the nature of the mechanism, it will in the end, only serve the power elite.

Someone remarked that "sitting before a teacher who passes you knowledge is like taking a photograph - in that by the light, the image of what is in front of you is implanted in your heart. This is education."

Please comment - why can’t we receive ‘education’ from reading books?

Part of it is the idea of transmission. Anybody who has studied with a teacher will know the answers to that question and anybody who hasn’t won’t. It’s the difference between hearing about something and experiencing it. Our tradition is a tradition of transmission. Our Prophet (saw) was taught by an Angel - that Angel was taught by Rabb -ul-Izza - the Lord of Power. And the Qur’an says, "over everyone who possesses knowledge is someone who has more knowledge". When Musa (as) was asked if there was anyone more knowledgeable on the earth than he was, he replied "No". But Allah then sent him to study with Al-Khizr, who the majority of scholars say wasn’t even a prophet, so here’s a prophet being sent to a non-prophet and it was a reminder to Musa (as) that one can never assume that there is not someone that they can learn from. Part of the modern crisis in the Muslim Ummah is we have auto-didactic scholars - the damage that they have caused is, I think, extraordinary, and one of the signs of the end of time is a Hadith in which the Prophet (saw) said knowledge would be taken from a "Saghir" which means "a little one". Ibn Abd-ul Barr, the great Andalusian commentator on Hadith, wrote that what this Hadith means is that the chain would be broken towards the end of time - people who had not taken their knowledge from the previous generation will begin to transmit knowledge, and that knowledge will be their own opinion and not transmitted knowledge and from the Muslim perspective, truth is not something that needs to be discovered - it’s something that needs to be learned. In the western understanding, truth is something that needs to be discovered, truth has not been given to man - it’s something that man needs to discover for himself. In the 20th Century, although that meta-narrative is disappearing, i.e. - the post-modern phenomenon is in a sense a capitulation to the idea that there is no truth - and if there is truth, it is not with a "T" but with a "t" - meaning, "your truth may not be my truth". What the post-modernist thesis is to say that, really what we have not is some grand narrative of the search of truth, but rather a meta-narratives or small narratives of the truth, that each one is as equally true as the other which is ultimately saying that nothing is true. Because one you say everything is true, what you’re really saying is nothing is true. If I say it’s wrong to kill and somebody says, well that statement has no meaning because what is "wrong"? - what’s your definition of wrong? And because wrong cannot be technically defined within the dominant discourse of the 20th century, therefore it has no meaning. Whereas, if I say it is wrong and wrong is that which Allah has made prohibited, I am laughed out of the auditorium because what I’m saying is that "truth has been revealed by God" - that is no longer an accepted premise for the modern social discourse. So we can’t talk of morality - all we can talk of is legislation, and legislation is what the latest vogue is - should we have the death penalty or shouldn’t we.... it becomes a debate, and there’s nothing in stone so to speak. Like "Thou shalt not kill". It becomes "should we kill or shouldn’t we? Well, let’s take a vote". Truth becomes a democratic process, and that is very alien to the Islamic tradition. So the idea that truth is something which is transmitted from generation to generation is no longer acceptable within the dominant social discourse. And for the Muslims that has been the truth because the Prophet (saw) said that this knowledge - i.e. the truth/revelation will be carried in each generation by upright people and transmitted to the following generation. So Muslims have always seen that knowledge is a transmission, from the breasts of those who know to the hearts of those who don’t know.

Many sisters wish to travel to Muslim countries to learn the Deen from those who know, but they are concerned about the issue of travelling without a Mahram.

First of all, living in the non-Muslim lands - it is accepted in Shariah that if a women makes hijrah from the land of the non-Muslim to the land of the Muslims, she doesn’t need a Mahram - that’s a well known principle in Islamic jurisprudence. The way I view it is I think that a woman is safer without a Mahram in the land of the Muslims than she is with a Mahram in the land of the non-Muslims.

To what extent can a female, married or unmarried, affiliate herself with a sheikh whilst keeping within the boundaries of the Shariah?

Women traditionally studied with teachers, it just has to be done with adab. There’s obviously more limitations on the female, the Qur’an says the male is not like the female. It’s obviously better and more preferred if a women learns from a female sheikh, and there used to be a considerable number of them in the Muslim Ummah. There isn’t anymore and it is even quite unusual now to find a male teacher who is of any high calibre, but to find a female is an anomaly in the Muslin world right now.

With regards to the Shariah, why do you think that the rules regulating trade/industry/ business transactions have almost been abandoned by the Muslims?

Because we’ve become subject completely to the dominant world order, which is a capitalistic, western world order and so international law is now western law, this is history, just read what happened in the 19th century with the abdication of Islamic Law and the usurpation of it place by western legal systems - with some amalgamations like the Anglo-Mohammadan law, where personal matters (e.g.; inheritance & marriage) were left to the scope of the Islamic Tradition, but those matters that related to business and commerce and penal codes became under the jurisdiction of western secular law.

In the Mu’watta of Imam Malik (ra), he places a lot of emphasis on the "Aml of Medina". What is the difference between this and Hadith?

Within Imam Maliks (ra) framework, he sees that Medina has a unique status that other cities do not have during the time of the Tabi’een, because what he says is the Tabi’een were people who lived with the Sahabah, there’s over 10,000 Sahabah buried in Baqia who died in Medina. He’s saying that this city was a city that had a special place in Islam that no other city had - even Mecca - because Medina is the city in which the Islamic legal system and the Islamic social order was fully implemented. For that reason, he in a sense is a inheritor of a social expression of the totality of the Islamic teaching and so his recording that in the Mu’watta is in a sense a recording of what he would consider a city in Submission, and for that reason he would say that if I find an isolated Hadith, not Muttawatir (a Hadith that has several transmissions), with one or two chains from the Sahabah and I find 1000 of the people of knowledge from the Tabi’een in Medina doing something, Imam Malik is saying that their actions override the solitary transmission of that Hadith - i.e., the fact that they’re not following that Hadith and that they were people who lived in the presence of the Sahabah, and that practice would’ve been done in the presence of the Sahabah, among whom were men like Ibn Umar and Umar ibn al-Khattab and women like Aisha, that these people knew better what was the final Islamic decision on the matter. Imam Malik for that reason would consider the action of the people of Medina - when he says that, he rally doesn’t mean everybody, he means the people of knowledge in the city, and the city was filled with people of knowledge. Imam Malik felt that the action was a Hadith, only it had achieved the status of Muttawatir because of its agreement in the city of Medina - even if he did not have an actual verbal transmission of that matter - e.g., there’s a sound Hadith that the Prophet (saw) told people not to fast on Friday, but in the Mu’watta, Imam Malik new that Hadith and said "I found the people of knowledge in this city fasting". - they considered it to be a virtuous day to fast. His point was that they were doing that action in the presence of the Sahabah, and none of the Sahabah said you can’t fast on Friday. Therefore, Imam Malik is saying that the fact that they transmitted this as a virtuous day to fast, and it was not rejected because of that Hadith, he considered isolated transmissions of the Hadith to be weaker than the transmission of Aml, of action.

It’s a difference of opinion, but it is an accepted principle in Usul. Imam Shaffie and Imam Abu Hanifah don’t agree with it, nor does Ahmad, but they do agree the Aml of Medina is higher with regards to certain things e.g.. Measurements.

Have you written/published any works?

I’m in the process of doing so - I’m working on a few things. I’ve published a few articles and things.

There are Muslims who say that we should not attach the word "Syedinna" to the Prophet (saw). Is there such a thing as loving our Prophet (saw) too much?

The Prophet (saw) said in a sound Hadith "I’m the Syed of the children of Adam", so he is our Syed whether people like it or not. Allah (swt) praises Yahya in the Qur’an by calling him "Syedinna Wa Hasoora", that he was a Syed in the Qur’an and our Prophet (saw) is certainly greater than Yahya. Syed means master in the Arabic language, and he is our master.

You should not say Syedinna in the Fard prayer when you do the Tahiyya - there is an opinion that you should, but it is a weak opinion. But when we speak of the Prophet (saw), we should call him the Messenger of Allah, the Prophet of Allah or we should call him Syedinna. We should not say Muhammad without putting some honorific title before his name. One of the things that Qadi Iyad points out in the Shifah is that Allah (swt) always in the Qur’an calls his prophets by honorific titles, e.g.. Ya Ayohal Muzamill, Yasin and so on. It’s part of the adab of the Muslims.

With regards to loving the Prophet (saw) too much, it really has no meaning. He is the means through which we have come to know Allah. The Hadith says whoever has not thanked people has not thanked Allah, this is why massive respect is owned to the parents, because they were the means through which you were given life. Even though it’s Allah (swt) who gave you life, Allah has command that you honour your parents in a way that no one else has been given that high status in the Qur’an - after Allah and his Messenger (saw), high status is given to parents in terms of obedience, so after obeying Allah and his Messenger (which is obeying Allah), the next highest thing the parents.

The Prophet (saw) said none of you truly believe until I am more beloved to you than your own self, and so if you love the Messenger of Allah (saw) less than you love yourself, then you don’t have true iman. And if you love the Messenger of Allah (saw) less than you love your parents or your children, then you don’t have true iman.

Many people would like to know about the Zaytuna Institute and why you decided to found it/what are your goals in relation to it?

Zaytuna is just a vehicle for doing the work I’m doing. To me institutions don’t really mean anything. Ultimately, institutions are nothing other than the people that run them. I think the important thing for us to remember is that ultimately we are all mortal, and that our time is limited, and so the best actions are those actions that continue on. My hope is that this work will continue on after my lifetime. The work is nothing other than trying to teach the message of Islam. To establish institutions that guarantee or give whatever worldly guarantee that we can have that that will continue on, is part of our tradition. The creation of endowments to make sure that the traditions of Islam would be maintained from generation to generation. It’s my small contribution to the overall picture. What the Muslim world needs is for Muslims to take it upon themselves, at the personal level, maintenance of the tradition, and it has to happen. It’s not the talk of any one individual, but the talk of an Ummah. But an Ummah is nothing other than the individuals that comprise it. Muslims have to recognise that our tradition is disappearing, and that there has to be efforts to re-ignite learning at a senior level.

What about the Rihla Course?

The Rihla again is an attempt also at doing the above. What it will hopefully move to is a full-time type of Madrassa, but right now it’s a summer programme of one month.

The problem is that the Muslims have fallen into the western approach - which is the ‘conference’ approach. We have conferences, but the conferences last a few days, they are comprised of talks that are in a sense not so much informative as inspirational, and there’s not a real transmission of knowledge, rather a type of narrative story telling which is not conducive to the transmission of Islamic knowledge. Islamic knowledge means sitting at the feet of people, who sat at the feet of people, back to the Messenger of Allah (saw).

Even within the western corporate model that created the conference phenomenon, it’s still buried in institutions -i.e.. Conference papers are actually the result, in the western model, of research which will end up being abridged synopsis of someone’s work, and if attending the conference are interested in it, then they can actually have access to the work of that person. What happens in our conferences though is that there isn’t any work really being done other than this type of inspirational model. I don’t think we should eliminate conferences all together, but I think people have to recognise the limitations of the format.

What books are you currently reading?

The Saffwat -at- Tafsir of Muhammad Ali Sabooni, and also "The Venture of Islam" by Marshall Hodgkin.

Interview by Fauzia Malik

http://www.witness-pioneer.org/vil/Articles/misc/interview_with_sheikh_hamza_yusuf.htm

An interview with Malcolm X’s daughter

2011-10-03T11:01:00.000-07:00

In a recent interview, Ilyasah Shabazz remembered her father, Malcolm X, and speculated on his reaction to hip-hop music and the hip-hop lifestyle, and Americans' views of Islam in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. — Michael E. Ross

Q: It's perhaps a little unfair to ask what you remember of your father, but what do you remember of him as a family man? So much is made of him as a fire-breathing public figure. What personal dimensions of the man can you share?

Shabazz: Of course I was in love with my father as a child. He was daddy and our house came alive in a special way whenever he walked through the door. He’d romp and play with us; my sisters and I would literally squeal with excitement when daddy came home.

Also, my father and Ihad a special ritual, as my mother often told many times:

In the evenings I’d wait for him at the front door. He'd come in, pick me up, throw me over his shoulder, get a plate of oatmeal cookies that my mother made from scratch, and we’d go into the den to watch the news and share the delicious cookies.

Shabazz: Well, I think my father would avoid the pitfall of monolithic generalities and simplistic assessments of complex movements or genres. Remember, my father was a complex man and some people wanted to reduce him to, as you suggested earlier, a “fire-breathing public figure” who, as such, had no real credibility.

I don’t know that there is a, quote, "hip-hop lifestyle." I think the music responds to complex social issues and injustices; I think it also raises complex social questions. To the extent that young people are conscious and aware of human rights issues and the problems of miseducation, I think my father would be pleased.

To the extent that history and thinking and self-pride are conveyed, he would applaud the artistic efforts. I'm certain he would encourage everyone to live lives of service to God and commitment to family and community, and to learn historical facts.
Q: The 40th anniversary observance of his passing comes in an America newly, and in some ways angrily, sensitive to Islam, related to the events of 9/11 and a variety of conflicts around the world. How do you think your father would have responded to the American reaction to Islam today?

Shabazz: Again, I think we must be careful of monolithic generalities. I don’t know that there is a quote, "American reaction" to Islam today. There is no “one American” or “one American reaction” to anything. To the extent that there is any reaction that would condemn Islam and Muslims on the basis of the tragedy of 9/11 and the travesties of wars and conflicts in the world ... well, I think my father would respond to such fallacious thinking and faulty premises the way he always did — expose them for what they are and challenge all of us to think more clearly and let our actions always be based in truth.

I think he would point out the absurdity of condemning an entire religion and applauding the trampling of the human rights of its followers ... in response to the zeal of a limited number of practitioners.

It just doesn’t make sense — no more sense than to condemn all Christians and arbitrarily round up Baptists and detain them indefinitely because a few fundamentalists bomb abortion clinics and kill doctors who provide these kinds of services to women, or to lock up all priests and condemn Catholicism because a number of clerics broke the laws of the faith and of man.

And how would he respond to the way in which the tenets of his faith are being violently corrupted by extremists?

I’m certain my father would welcome any debate about the tenets and practice of Islam. Throughout his life, he would have continued to study the faith of his choice — seeking to expand his understanding of Islam in its various dimensions. He would be a strong voice of advocacy for Muslim self-determination and freedom from oppression. By the same token, he would distinguish between legitimate liberation struggles and acts of terrorism, because Islam itself makes that distinction.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7008349/ns/news-black_history_month/

Reclaiming our Pakistan By Imran Khan

2011-07-17T14:53:00.000-07:00

Today the Pakistani state — that is its government and security structures - stands exposed as never before in front of its own people as well as the world. Never before, since 1971, has the Pakistani nation felt so defenceless and so full of anger and shame.

Yet the disastrous outcome for all of us to see today was the natural outcome of self serving policies pursued by a dictator and subsequently by a US manufactured and NRO sanctioned leadership. Policies based on lies and propaganda was inevitably going to end up in humiliation and disgrace not just for the leadership of the country but for every living Pakistani. That is what finally happened when the US invaded Pakistani airspace and carried out its operation against Osama bin Laden, unhindered and undetected by the seventh most powerful nuclear armed military in the world.

The US had always stated that in case they had actionable intelligence on a high value target, they would take unilateral military action. Why was this strategic US policy decision that directly impaired our security and sovereignty not made a bone of contention in any strategic dialogue? Similarly, the US has stated that in case of any terrorist attack on US mainland, all options would be on the table. Why has our government never sought the revision of this policy conditional to our cooperation to protect Pakistan from a massive military retaliation in case of a terrorist attack against the US mainland is linked to Pakistan? By fighting a US led war and hypocritically telling the people of Pakistan that it was their war, the state of Pakistan lied shamelessly. After all, al-Qaeda was all in Afghanistan, until the US attacks on Tora Bora left an exit route for them to escape. Even more critical, no Pakistani was involved in the 9/11 attacks. But in the aftermath of 9/11 the Pakistani leadership weaved a web of deceit for its people.

Certainly Pakistan should have helped the US get the 9/11 terrorists and their organisation but this did not require handing over the country to the US, allowing the CIA to set up a parallel intelligence network across Pakistan seriously undermining our internal security and indulging in the renditions of Pakistanis to the US.

As Clive Smith of Reprieve has pointed out, 90% of those handed over to the US turned out to be innocent; the case of Mullah Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan and a serving diplomat, was just one such case, where Pakistan also violated its commitments under the Geneva Convention.

To our everlasting shame, after three years at Guantanamo, Mullah Zaeef was found innocent. Using fear as a weapon and having trapped the country into deception and deceit on the US behest, the Pakistani state sent its forces into Waziristan while the US pounded Fata with drone attacks, killing thousands of civilians. It was hardly surprising to find a full-blown tribal rebellion and the Pakistani Taliban as a result of these erroneous militarycentric policies.

Lies continued to be fed to the Pakistani people on the casualties of the drone attacks. Much before the killing of the tribal jirga earlier this year, in September 2004 a drone attack killed 70 people while another 40 were killed the next day during the funerals being held for the earlier victims. With no substantiation, Interior Minister Rehman Malik declared that all those killed were “militants” when the MNA from South Waziristan had declared that if even one of the victims was a foreign militant he would resign! Who can forget the 2006 drone attack in Bajaur which targeted a Madrassah and of the 80 killed, 60 were children? Three days later, a relative of one of the victims committed a suicide attack on soldiers in Malakand killing 50. By far the biggest lie was that Pakistan army was fighting an ideological Taliban rather than 90% of militants being our own tribal people. There was another blatant lie emanating from a Pakistani general that drone attacks always kill militants.

There is no way of ascertaining who has been killed. There is no DNA test conducted as people are just blown into pieces. Drone strikes constitute not only a blatant breach of Pakistan’s sovereignty, but it is also a grave violation of the international humanitarian laws where the US acts as the judge, jury and the excutioner - all put into one - killing suspects’ wives and children.

The drone strikes have created more hatred against the Americans than any other single incident. According to those who attended the dharna the ratio was that one killed out of ten may be a militant. The others are innocent citizens who have nothing to do with any terrorist activity. The New American Foundation Survey that was conducted about six months ago has reiterated that more than 80% tribal people oppose the drone strikes as they believe that these attacks mostly kill innocent people. So why did the Pakistani state accept such a suicidal policy under US pressure? Pakistan’s ruling elite - civil and military - since the sixties have sought US crutches for prolonging their hold on power at the cost of building state institutions and our economy.

Instead of investing in education and social reforms they have taken short cuts at the expense of the Pakistani people, seeking US dollars whenever the opportunity presented itself to sustain its corrupt and extravagant lifestyle as well as inept governance. The same renter class obliged the US during the Gen. Zia’s period to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan with the help of the CIA by creating and funding several militant groups.

The one time heroes of the West turned villains after 9/11. Our leaders also changed their colours and with their new found passion to be portrayed as liberals and bulwarks against Islamic extremism. Their latest mantra of liberalism was music to Western powers who were willing to ally with every scoundrel and thug as long as they danced to their tunes. Most disgracefully, by seeking to make themselves indispensable to the West, our rulers have played a major role in creating the misperception abroad that Pakistan is a haven for radical Islam, despite the reality that every election has shown the religious parties to be marginal in the politics of the country.

Meanwhile, fear has been used as a weapon on the Pakistani people: fear of US military action against them; fear of an economic collapse; and most damaging, fear of the country being overrun by militants and extremists. As a result, while the wealth of the rulers continues to multiply, the country has faced $68 billion in losses over the last decade, as well as 35,000 dead and a national debt that has doubled in three years from Rs5 to $10 trillion. Add to this the displaced people from Fata where the population of 6 million has seen its lives devastated and traumatised, and the disaster visited upon Pakistan becomes clearer.

And, yet we are not trusted by our so-called western allies who are pointing accusatory fingers at us as harbourers of terrorists. Typically, President Zardari had declared at a FoDP meeting in Japan (2009) that “we are fighting to save the world” and then demanded dollars; but in reality it is Pakistan that needs to be saved from its rulers and their lies and corruption. There is only one way forward for Pakistan today. The NRO-sponsored leaders came to power through fraudulent elections as the Election Commission has now made public that out of 80 million registered votes, 37 million were bogus and 35 million unregistered in the last elections.

This government must resign or made to resign through public pressure so that fair and free elections can be held under an independent Election Commission and Nadra based electoral rolls. Reforms must be instituted. An austerity drive must be in place to stop the shameful extravagance of the rulers. A democratic government needs to own its war on terror based on indigenously- formulated policies. Most significantly, a democratic government must take responsibility for all acts of terror in its country.

The more our military and political leadership is seen as a mercenary of the US, the more it increases the radicalisation, extremism and terrorism within Pakistan. Whenever al-Qaeda and the Taliban announce Jihad against the US, they also announce it against US agents - meaning the Pakistani state. This undermines the Pakistan military’s ability to fight militancy effectively. The US should be told categorically that no help or aid is required from it and that the Pakistani state cannot be America’s hired gun anymore.

The tribal people, who have never been involved in terrorism, need to be co-opted into a national policy to fight and isolate the real terrorists. Rule of Law is critical and all militant groups, private armies and other non-state actors carrying arms must be disarmed. There can be no exceptions to this rule. Corruption can only be tackled through an independent accountability process involving auditors and lawyers while tax collection needs to be widened by withdrawing all exemptions so that the rich can be taxed.

A most important aberration that needs to be tackled is illiteracy. An education emergency must be declared and one uniform educational system needs to be put in place as a soon as feasible for the whole country. These problems and their solutions are totally doable but only by a credible and democratic government that has the capacity to mobilize the people and indigenous resources. Perhaps the crossroad that Pakistan has been pushed to at present can be a blessing in disguise.

At a time when the whole Osama operation has exposed the Pakistan state and its duplicity internally and externally, with Overseas Pakistanis suffering an extreme reaction especially in the USA, Pakistanis can choose to rid themselves of this complicit and disgraced leadership.

This is the time for a national revival through restoration of national dignity and sovereignty. Today Pakistan has no other choice.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=45969&Cat=2&dt=5%2F9%2F2011

Noam Chomsky: "The U.S. and Its Allies Will Do Anything to Prevent Democracy in the Arab World"

2011-07-17T14:51:00.000-07:00

The short story of the Quarter

2011-07-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

In the Name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful.

Brothers and sisters in Islam,

Several years ago, an Imam from out-of-state accepted a call to a Mosque in Houston, Texas.

Some weeks later after he arrived, he had an occasion to ride the bus from his home to the downtown area. When he sat down, he discovered that the driver had accidentally given him a quarter too much change.

As he considered what to do, he thought to himself, "You'd better give the quarter back. It would be wrong to keep it".

Then he thought, "Oh, forget it, it's only a quarter. Who would worry about this little amount? Anyway, the bus company gets too much fare, they will never miss it.

"Accept it as a 'gift from ALLAH' and keep quiet", another thought came in his mind.

When his stop came, he paused momentarily at the door, and then he handed the quarter to the driver and said, "Here, you gave me too much change".

The driver, with a smile, asked, "Aren't you the new Imam in town?".

"Yes", he replied.

"'Well, I have been thinking a lot lately about going somewhere to worship. I just wanted to see what you would do if I gave you too much change. I will see you at the mosque"

When the Imam stepped off of the bus, he literally grabbed the nearest light pole, held on, and said,

"Oh ALLAH, I almost sold you for a quarter".

Our lives are the only Quran some people will ever read. This is a really scary example of how much people watch us as Muslims and will put us to the test! Always be on guard - and remember - You carry your IMAN on your shoulders when you call yourself "A Muslim"

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf on the Prophet

2011-06-28T15:02:00.000-07:00

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf on the Prophet (Peace and blessings be upon him and his family)

Below is a transcript of a very beautiful piece that Sidi Hamza did for the BBC World Service's In Praise of God programme last year around the time of the Prophet’s Birthday—salla Allahu 'alayhi wa salam. A copy of it was sent to me earlier today and I felt, especially being so close to the Mawlid, that others would find it beneficial as well, insha'llah.

Twenty-six years ago I became a Muslim largely because I fell in love with a beautiful human being. "I was only sent to perfect noble character," said the man declared as a "mercy to all the worlds."

As time passed, this love grew as my knowledge of him increased. I painfully watched his religion hijacked by some for their own ends distorting his message and forgetting that he was indeed a mercy to all the worlds. I am troubled by the media’s portrayal of him sometimes in the worst of lights. How could the man I came to know and love be so vilified and maligned by those who claim to represent him and also by those who aim to be unbiased interpreters?

Muhammad, peace be upon him, was a shy, reticent man who lived among his people with such high moral character they called him al-Amîn—the Trustworthy.

The Prophet of Islam was born in the city of Mecca, Arabia, into a poor but noble branch of an aristocratic clan known as Quraysh, a people who despised treachery, lies and stupidity, while honouring bravery in battle, generosity in partying, and cleverness in poetry.

Some families, were so ashamed of their baby girls, that they would bury them alive instead of suffering the possible indignity of future dishonour. The religion of the Arabs at the time was a hodge-podge of superstition, divination and idolatry. To them, man's life ended with his death and his afterlife was based on his military exploits might be immortalized by a poets tongue.

The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, was born into this world on April 9th, 570, Christian era in the lunar month of Rabi'a al-Awwal. His father, Abdallah died during his mother’s pregnancy. And for the first four years he was raised in the relative purity of the desert by a Bedouin woman named Halimah. After which he returned to his mother, Aminah. But in his seventh year, his mother died leaving him in the care of his grandfather.

At the age of twenty-five, he was employed as a commercial agent by Lady Khadijah, a successful widow from his own clan. She soon recognized his honesty and good nature and proposed marriage. Although fifteen years younger than she was, he accepted her proposal, and fathered six of his seven children with her.

At the age of forty, it had become his custom to escape the idolatry of Meccan society by seeking solitude in a cave on the mountain known as "the Mountain of Light." In the solitary confines of his small cave a voice pierced his consciousness declaring: "Recite!"

Alarmed and shivering he fled to his wife, begging her to wrap him in a cloak. He feared for his sanity, concerned that a desert spirit or poetic muse might be pursuing him. More revelations soon followed and Muhammad came to the understanding that he was not only a prophet in a long line of prophets, but that he was the last of them who was sent with a universal message.

As the days passed his revelations increased and they were powerfully rhythmic punctuated with intoxicating messages that challenged listeners to reflect on everyday miracles such as the alternation of the night and day

These revelations revealed to Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, came to be known as the Qur'an, the Muslim holy book. For thirteen years he invited his clan to worship one God, sit with slaves in spiritual solidarity, respect women as soul-full equals and the source of human mercy, care for the widow, the orphan, the weak and the oppressed.

At first people ridiculed his message and accused him of attempting "to make the gods one." His message threatened his people’s financial control of the markets of Mecca where pilgrims from all over Arabia came to spend their wealth.

When his clan failed to stop his preaching they plotted to kill him in his sleep. But he was warned by the Angel Gabriel and told to flee in the cover of darkness to Madina with his beloved friend and lifelong companion Abu Bakr.

Setting out, the two sought refuge in a cave to escape the skilled trackers of Mecca hot on their trail. The bounty hunters quickly came upon the cave, but a spider’s web had already covered the entrance and a dove with her young rested in a nest above it.

When the posse left and the two felt safe again, they continued their journey to the city of Yathrib. And as they entered it the young girls and children of Bani Najjar came out chanting lines of poetry which is still sung all over the world in remembrance of this auspicious occasion.

The name Yathrib was changed to Medina, city of hope. It became a city founded on the brotherhood of virtue. The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, enacted a treaty uniting the once warring groups. He secured the rights of the Jewish minority by granting them full citizenship and freedom to practice their religion without constraint.

Days after his arrival in Medina he began the construction of a mosque, a sanctuary of prayer and meditation, in the centre of the city. And he had his companions; the Muslims create their own marketplace in order to ensure economic strength.

The Meccans, sensing that a rising power was now emerging in the peninsula, plotted ways of subverting the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, and his growing community of believers.

And the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, who had practiced a strict pacifism in Mecca for thirteen years and disliked the use of coercive force, was now given permission by God to defend against any attacks by his enemies. The Qur'an declared, "Fighting has been prescribed for you and you detest it, but perhaps you detest something and in it is much good. And perhaps you love something and in it is much harm, and God knows and you do not know." [Qur'an 2:216].

The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, "Never desire to meet your enemies, rather ask God for peace and well-being; but should you be forced to meet them, then act courageously." [Sahih al-Bukhari]

Muslims are not ashamed of their Prophet’s teaching about war. On the contrary, for us it is a great source of pride. He was courageous as a great lion against the strong and oppressive yet gentle as a shepherd with the weak and the oppressed.

The true object of war fought for God should always be peace. What the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, taught is that Muslims fight for a just cause only. In this world, there are only two choices: two sides, truth and justice or falsehood and oppression. You don’t have to be a Muslim to understand that.

After years of conflict between members of his clan and his followers, the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, had a revelation that he should visit the sacred mosque. In the eighth year after his migration to Medina the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, set out for Mecca but his adversaries refused to allow him in. They sent out an arbitrator to strike an agreement that would bring the stand-off to an end. And on every point of this treaty the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, compromised his own position in pursuit of peace.

On the journey back to Medina some of the companions were deeply troubled by what had just taken place and disappointed that they were thwarted from visiting the sanctuary. When asked to explain, the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, replied, "Did I say it was going to be this year?"

And so the following year, in accordance with the treaty, the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, and his followers performed a pilgrimage completely unmolested. But soon his clan the Quraysh broke their end of the deal, massacring another clan with alliance to the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, attacking them even in the sacred precinct. Abu Sufyan, the head of the Prophet’s enemies, attempted to restore the truce but it was too late. News of the massacre enraged the believers and the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, summoned all of the Muslims capable of bearing arms to march on Mecca. When the nearly ten thousand Muslims arrived on the outskirts of the city, the Quraysh realized they did not stand a chance and people either fled or stayed in their homes.

And so it was, after years of persecution, the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, marched triumphant into the city of his birth at the head of the largest army ever assembled in Arabian history. With his head bowed in humility he declared a general amnesty and granted war criminals refuge.

His overwhelming magnanimity of character led to a mass conversion among the citizens of Mecca. Even Abu Sufyan, his archenemy, embraced the religion of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him. In the months that followed, almost all of Arabia dispatched representatives to swear allegiance to this Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, and to enter in the faith of Islam. In a period of twenty-three years Muhammad, peace be upon him, had succeeded in uniting a feuding people trapped in cycles of violence into one people with a sense of destiny and a mission that would transform the world.

He elevated the low, and he lowered the elevated that they might meet in that middle place known as brotherhood. He infused in them a love of learning unleashing a creative power that would lead to some of the most extraordinary scientific breakthroughs in human history.

He died on the same day he was born, in the same house he had lived in for ten years in Medina, on a small bed made of leather stuffed with palm fibres, in the arms of his beloved wife Aishah. His dying words were, "Treat your women well, and do not oppress your servants, the prayer, the prayer, don’t be neglectful of the prayer. O God, my highest companion, O highest companion."

But the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, was more than just a great historical person, he was a father and friend, a husband, a companion and above all he was a human being. The Prophet’s unique physical appearance, his high character and willingness to sacrifice for others, are often at the essence of any description of him. He was once described by a contemporary in the following words:

"The Messenger of God was imposing and majestic. His face was luminous like a full moon. He was taller than medium but not excessive in height. He had wavy hair, which he parted and it never went beyond his shoulders. He was light-skinned with a high brow. He had full eyebrows and a small space between them. He had a fine, aquiline nose. His beard was full, his eyes black. His physique was supple and lithe, with a full chest and broad shoulders. When he walked, he was determined and his pace was as if he was walking down hill.

When he spoke he was always brief and reflective. He spoke when he saw benefit and spent long periods in silent contemplation. His speech was comprehensive being neither wordy nor laconic. He had a mild temperament and was never harsh nor cruel, coarse nor rude. He expressed gratitude for everything given to him no matter how insignificant. When he spoke, his companions lowered their heads as if birds were perched upon them. When he was silent, they felt free to speak. He never criticized food or praised it excessively. He never swore, nor did he find fault in people. He did not flatter people but praised them when appropriate.

People entered his gatherings as seekers and left enlightened. He would ask about his companions when they were absent often making inquiries about people’s needs. He never stood nor sat without mentioning the name of God. He never reserved a special place for himself in a gathering and sat where space provided. He gave each of those who sat with him such full attention that everyone felt that he was the most important person in that gathering. Voices were never raised in his presence. The aged were respected for their age and the young were shown compassion for their youth."

The Qur'an reminds Muslims that when they are slandered by those who reject them they should bear it patiently and be forgiving. I yearn for a deeper understanding of this man, his gentleness towards children, his love of animals, his concern for the weak and oppressed, his sense of justice tempered always with mercy.

I personally love his humour and his sense of tomfoolery. He said once, "I joke but always tell the truth." His wife Aishah said, "he was always making us laugh in the house." One of his names is ad-dahhak—the smiling one. His humour and cheerfulness even in the face of the most difficult of times is so needed today in our troubled world. I imagine him telling those of us who don’t laugh enough to lighten up, to show more gratitude even in what appears to be difficulties. And as for those who laugh too much and do so inappropriately, I imagine that he would ask that they reflect deeper on the condition of humanity and nurture compassion in their hearts.

“Those who sin while laughing enter hell crying,” he once said.

Once an old woman asked him if she would enter paradise and he replied, "Old people don’t go to heaven!" The woman was crestfallen with the answer he had provided, to which he added with a smile, "You shall enter paradise in the prime of your youth."

The Arabs believed dates made eye infections worse. His companion Suhayb was eating dates one day while his left eye was infected. The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, "Suhayb do you eat dates and your eye is infected?" To which Suhayb said, "I am eating with my right eye only O Messenger of God." To which the Prophet, peace be and blessings be upon him, laughed heartily.

And once a gruff desert Bedouin came into the mosque and prayed out loud saying, "O God forgive me and Muhammad and don’t forgive anyone else." Hearing this the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, laughed and said to him, "You are limiting the vast mercy of God."

I feel so incredibly grateful and blessed to have come to know him and to learn from him. A day of my life has not gone by that I haven’t felt indebted to him for the wisdom he has given me in making sense of my life and my world.

Every day my love for Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, increases. Like the vast majority of my fellow believers across the world and through times he is, indeed, the Beloved—the Praised One.

To the solace of his name, simply saying Muhammad, has an incredibly soothing effect on me.

Story of the blind bird

2011-06-24T12:05:00.000-07:00

In the name of Allah, most Gracious, most Merciful

Peace Be Upon Prophet Muhammad, His Blessed Progeny, His Pure Wives, His Companions and the Scholars who have inherited Him through implementation of His Sunna.

"It is from Allah . Indeed, Allah provides for whom He wills without account." Quran 3:37

"Allah is Subtle with His servants; He gives provisions to whom He wills. And He is the Powerful, the Exalted in Might." Quran 42:19.

"O people none of you shall die until he completes his provision". Ibn Masoud Radiallahu from Prophet Muhammad - Peace Be Upon Him."

“Listen to ...what the Imam Ahmed Ar-Rifai (May Allah be pleased with Him) said:"My heart is at rest because I know that no one will take my ruzuq (provisions) but me"...

A man from the family of Shuman about people he knows them in the area of 'irsal; A person who has a store and sells wheat, like his usual day he opens his store, he fixes and neatens his products (which are sacks of wheat), and he puts a chair in front of his store and sits (waiting for customers), so while he’s sitting, he hears the sound of a beetle, this beetle comes to the sack of wheat (which is an open sack so the customers can see), he (the beetle) takes a grain of wheat to the tree in front of the store on the sidewalk, this beetle comes and goes and goes and comes to this sack of wheat taking a grain of wheat each time, so this man said to himself 'a beetle eats grain?!!? A beetle eats WHEAT!!, what does he want with wheat?!?!' So this man got a ladder and put it under this tree that the beetle keeps going to and climbed up, so he saw a bird nest and in the bird nest he saw a blind bird, a bird that is BLIND!!, this bird cannot fly, it is sitting in this nest, in its house, so this beetle is going and coming bringing this wheat to this bird; Amantu bi Rab al ^alameen, Amantu bIllahil Kareem; he (the beetle) comes holding this grain of wheat, he makes a sound (a whizzing sound), this bird hears the sound and opens his mouth, and the beetle puts this grain of wheat in the birds mouth. La Illaha illa Allah, LA ILLAHA ILLA ALLAH!!, something very weird. This man came out with a phrase, what did he say, he said 'subHan meen sakhar il daboor lal 'asfoor', A BEETLE! It is getting this wheat for this bird that is blind; Allah is the creator of everything; Allah has power over everything; Allah is capable of doing anything; SubHanal Qadiri 'ala kuli shay'; SubHanal Qadiri 'ala kuli shay'.

"And if Allah had extended [excessively] provision for His servants, they would have committed tyranny throughout the earth. But He sends [it] down in an amount which He wills. Indeed He is, of His servants, Acquainted and Seeing. " Quran 42:27.

The Dawrah an Introduction

2011-06-22T09:40:00.000-07:00

Poem on Jannah by Ammar Al Shukry

2011-06-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

http://iamammar.com

What They Said

2011-05-18T06:25:00.000-07:00

The day I met Abdul Sattar Edhi, a living saint

2011-05-08T08:32:00.000-07:00

Sixty years ago, Abdul Sattar Edhi, 82, gave up everything to devote his life to helping Pakistan's poorest. Here, Peter Oborne hails a truly selfless spiritual sage

In the course of my duties as a reporter, I have met presidents, prime ministers and reigning monarchs.

Until meeting the Pakistani social worker Abdul Sattar Edhi, I had never met a saint. Within a few moments of shaking hands, I knew I was in the presence of moral and spiritual greatness.

Mr Edhi's life story is awesome, as I learnt when I spent two weeks working at one of his ambulance centres in Karachi.

The 82-year-old lives in the austerity that has been his hallmark all his life. He wears blue overalls and sports a Jinnah cap, so named because it was the head gear of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

No Pakistani since Jinnah has commanded the same reverence, and our conversations were constantly interrupted as people came to pay their respects.

Mr Edhi told me that, 60 years ago, he stood on a street corner in Karachi and begged for money for an ambulance, raising enough to buy a battered old van. In it, he set out on countless life-saving missions.

Gradually, Mr Edhi set up centres all over Pakistan. He diversified into orphanages, homes for the mentally ill, drug rehabilitation centres and hostels for abandoned women. He fed the poor and buried the dead. His compassion was boundless.

He was born in 1928, when the British Empire was at its height, in Gujarat in what is now western India. But he and his family were forced to flee for their lives in 1947 when the division of India and creation of Pakistan inspired terrible communal tensions: millions were killed in mob violence and ethnic cleansing.

This was the moment Mr Edhi, finding himself penniless on the streets of Karachi, set out on his life's mission.

Just 20 years old, he volunteered to join a charity run by the Memons, the Islamic religious community to which his family belonged.

At first, Mr Edhi welcomed his duties; then he was appalled to discover that the charity's compassion was confined to Memons.

He confronted his employers, telling them that "humanitarian work loses its significance when you discriminate between the needy".

So he set up a small medical centre of his own, sleeping on the cement bench outside his shop so that even those who came late at night could be served.

But he also had to face the enmity of the Memons, and became convinced they were capable of having him killed. For safety, and in search of knowledge, he set out on an overland journey to Europe, begging all the way.

One morning, he awoke on a bench at Rome railway station to discover his shoes had been stolen. He was not bothered, considering them inessential.

Nevertheless, the next day an elderly lady gave him a pair of gumboots, two sizes too large, and Mr Edhi wobbled about in them for the remainder of his journey.

In London, he was a great admirer of the British welfare state, though he presciently noted its potential to encourage a culture of dependency. He was offered a job but refused, telling his benefactor: "I have to do something for the people in Pakistan."

On return from Europe, his destiny was set. There was no welfare state in Fifties Pakistan: he would fill the gap. This was a difficult period in his life. Shabby, bearded and with no obvious prospects, seven women in rapid succession turned down his offers of marriage. He resigned himself to chastity and threw all of his energy into work.

He would hurtle round the province of Sindh in his poor man's ambulance, collecting dead bodies, taking them to the police station, waiting for the death certificate and, if the bodies were not claimed, burying them himself.

Mr Edhi's autobiography, published in 1996, records that he recovered these stinking cadavers "from rivers, from inside wells, from road sides, accident sites and hospitals… When families forsook them, and authorities threw them away, I picked them up… Then I bathed and cared for each and every victim of circumstance."

There is a photograph of Mr Edhi from this formative time. It could be the face of a young revolutionary or poet: dark beard, piercing, passionate eyes. And it is indeed the case that parts of his profound and moving autobiography carry the same weight and integrity as great poetry or even scripture.

Mr Edhi discovered that many Pakistani women were killing their babies at birth, often because they were born outside marriage.

One newborn child was stoned to death outside a mosque on the orders of religious leaders. A furious Mr Edhi responded: "Who can declare an infant guilty when there is no concept of punishing the innocent?"

So Mr Edhi placed a little cradle outside every Edhi centre, beneath a placard imploring: "Do not commit another sin: leave your baby in our care." Mr Edhi has so far saved 35,000 babies and, in approximately half of these cases, found families to cherish them.

Once again, this practice brought him into conflict with religious leaders. They claimed that adopted children could not inherit their parents' wealth. Mr Edhi told them their objections contradicted the supreme idea of religion, declaring: "Beware of those who attribute petty instructions to God."

Over time, Mr Edhi came to exercise such a vast moral authority that Pakistan's corrupt politicians had to pay court. In 1982, General Zia announced the establishment of a shura (advisory council) to determine matters of state according to Islamic principles.

Mr Edhi was suspicious: "I represented the millions of downtrodden, and was aware that my presence gave the required credibility to an illegal rule."

Travelling to Rawalpindi to speak at the national assembly, he delivered a passionate denunciation of political corruption, telling an audience of MPs, including Zia himself: "The people have been neglected long enough.

"One day they shall rise like mad men and pull down these walls that keep their future captive. Mark my words and heed them before you find yourselves the prey instead of the predator."

Mr Edhi did not distinguish between politicians and criminals, asking: "Why should I condemn a declared dacoit [bandit] and not condemn the respectable villain who enjoys his spoils as if he achieved them by some noble means?"

This impartiality had its advantages. It meant that a truce would be declared when Mr Edhi and his ambulance arrived at the scene of gun battles between police and gangsters.

"They would cease fire," notes Mr Edhi in his autobiography, "until bodies were carried to the ambulance, the engine would start and shooting would resume."

Mr Edhi eventually found a wife, Bilquis, but his personal austerity was all but incompatible with married life. When the family went on Hajj, a vast overland journey in the ambulance, he forbade Bilquis to bring extra clothes, because he was determined to fill the vehicle with medical supplies.

Reaching Quetta in northern Baluchistan, with the temperature plunging, he relented enough to allow her to buy a Russian soldier's overcoat. Later on, when their children grew up, Mr Edhi would not find time to attend his daughter's marriage.

But Mr Edhi's epic achievement would not have been possible but for this inhuman single-mindedness. Today, the influence of the Edhi Foundation stretches far outside Pakistan and Mr Edhi has led relief missions across the Muslim world, providing aid at every international emergency from the Lebanon civil war in 1983 to the Bangladesh cyclone in 2007.

There are no horrors that Mr Edhi and his incredibly brave army of ambulance men have not witnessed, and the numerous lives they have saved.

The story of Mr Edhi coincides with the history of the Pakistan state. More than any other living figure, he articulates Jinnah's vision of a country which, while based on Islam, nevertheless offers a welcome for people of all faiths and sects. Indeed, the life of Mr Edhi provides a sad commentary on the betrayal of Jinnah's Pakistan by a self-interested political class.

One evening, as the sun set over Karachi, I asked Mr Edhi what future he foresaw. "Unless things change," he said, "I predict a revolution."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8440920/The-day-I-met-Abdul-Sattar-Edhi-a-living-saint.html

Sir Ken Robinson -Changing Education Paradigms

2011-05-05T16:13:00.000-07:00

RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

Becoming Muslim : Shaykh Nuh Ha Meem Keller

2011-04-26T18:30:00.000-07:00

Becoming Muslim

Born in 1954 in the farm country of the northwestern United States, I was raised in a religious family as a Roman Catholic. The Church provided a spiritual world that was unquestionable in my childhood, if anything more real than the physical world around me, but as I grew older, and especially after I entered a Catholic university and read more, my relation to the religion became increasingly called into question, in belief and practice.

One reason was the frequent changes in Catholic liturgy and ritual that occurred in the wake of the Second Vatican Council of 1963, suggesting to laymen that the Church had no firm standards. To one another, the clergy spoke about flexibility and liturgical relevance, but to ordinary Catholics they seemed to be groping in the dark. God does not change, nor the needs of the human soul, and there was no new revelation from heaven. Yet we rang in the changes, week after week, year after year; adding, subtracting, changing the language from Latin to English, finally bringing in guitars and folk music. Priests explained and explained as laymen shook their heads. The search for relevance left large numbers convinced that there had not been much in the first place.

A second reason was a number of doctrinal difficulties, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, which no one in the history of the world, neither priest nor layman, had been able to explain in a convincing way, and which resolved itself, to the common mind at least, in a sort of godhead-by-committee, shared between God the Father, who ruled the world from heaven; His son Jesus Christ, who saved humanity on earth; and the Holy Ghost, who was pictured as a white dove and appeared to have a considerably minor role. I remember wanting to make special friends with just one of them so he could handle my business with the others, and to this end, would sometimes pray earnestly to this one and sometimes to that; but the other two were always stubbornly there. I finally decided that God the Father must be in charge of the other two, and this put the most formidable obstacle in the way of my Catholicism, the divinity of Christ. Moreover, reflection made it plain that the nature of man contradicted the nature of God in every particular, the limitary and finite on the one hand, the absolute and infinite on the other. That Jesus was God was something I cannot remember having ever really believed, in childhood or later.

Another point of incredulity was the trading of the Church in stocks and bonds in the hereafter it called indulgences. Do such and such and so-and-so many years will be remitted from your sentence in purgatory that had seemed so false to Martin Luther at the outset of the Reformation.

I also remember a desire for a sacred scripture, something on the order of a book that could furnish guidance. A Bible was given to me one Christmas, a handsome edition, but on attempting to read it, I found it so rambling and devoid of a coherent thread that it was difficult to think of a way to base one's life upon it. Only later did I learn how Christians solve the difficulty in practice, Protestants by creating sectarian theologies, each emphasizing the texts of their sect and downplaying the rest; Catholics by downplaying it all, except the snippets mentioned in their liturgy. Something seemed lacking in a sacred book that could not be read as an integral whole.

Moreover, when I went to the university, I found that the authenticity of the book, especially the New Testament, had come into considerable doubt as a result of modern hermeneutical studies by Christians themselves. In a course on contemporary theology, I read the Norman Perrin translation of The Problem of the Historical Jesus by Joachim Jeremias, one of the principal New Testament scholars of this century. A textual critic who was a master of the original languages and had spent long years with the texts, he had finally agreed with the German theologian Rudolph Bultmann that without a doubt it is true to say that the dream of ever writing a biography of Jesus is over, meaning that the life of Christ as he actually lived it could not be reconstructed from the New Testament with any degree of confidence. If this were accepted from a friend of Christianity and one of its foremost textual experts, I reasoned, what was left for its enemies to say? And what then remained of the Bible except to acknowledge that it was a record of truths mixed with fictions, conjectures projected onto Christ by later followers, themselves at odds with each other as to who the master had been and what he had taught. And if theologians like Jeremias could reassure themselves that somewhere under the layers of later accretions to the New Testament there was something called the historical Jesus and his message, how could the ordinary person hope to find it, or know it, should it be found?

I studied philosophy at the university and it taught me to ask two things of whoever claimed to have the truth: What do you mean, and how do you know? When I asked these questions of my own religious tradition, I found no answers, and realized that Christianity had slipped from my hands. I then embarked on a search that is perhaps not unfamiliar to many young people in the West, a quest for meaning in a meaningless world.

I began where I had lost my previous belief, with the philosophers, yet wanting to believe, seeking not philosophy, but rather a philosophy.

I read the essays of the great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, which taught about the phenomenon of the ages of life, and that money, fame, physical strength, and intelligence all passed from one with the passage of years, but only moral excellence remained. I took this lesson to heart and remembered it in after years. His essays also drew attention to the fact that a person was wont to repudiate in later years what he fervently espouses in the heat of youth. With a prescient wish to find the Divine, I decided to imbue myself with the most cogent arguments of atheism that I could find, that perhaps I might find a way out of them later. So I read the Walter Kaufmann translations of the works of the immoralist Friedrich Nietzsche. The many-faceted genius dissected the moral judgments and beliefs of mankind with brilliant philological and psychological arguments that ended in accusing human language itself, and the language of nineteenth-century science in particular, of being so inherently determined and mediated by concepts inherited from the language of morality that in their present form they could never hope to uncover reality. Aside from their immunological value against total skepticism, Nietzsche's works explained why the West was post-Christian, and accurately predicted the unprecedented savagery of the twentieth century, debunking the myth that science could function as a moral replacement for the now dead religion.

At a personal level, his tirades against Christianity, particularly in The Genealogy of Morals, gave me the benefit of distilling the beliefs of the monotheistic tradition into a small number of analyzable forms. He separated unessential concepts (such as the bizarre spectacle of an omnipotent deitys suicide on the cross) from essential ones, which I now, though without believing in them, apprehended to be but three alone: that God existed; that He created man in the world and defined the conduct expected of him in it; and that He would judge man accordingly in the hereafter and send him to eternal reward or punishment.

It was during this time that I read an early translation of the Koran which I grudgingly admired, between agnostic reservations, for the purity with which it presented these fundamental concepts. Even if false, I thought, there could not be a more essential expression of religion. As a literary work, the translation, perhaps it was Sales, was uninspired and openly hostile to its subject matter, whereas I knew the Arabic original was widely acknowledged for its beauty and eloquence among the religious books of mankind. I felt a desire to learn Arabic to read the original.

On a vacation home from school, I was walking upon a dirt road between some fields of wheat, and it happened that the sun went down. By some inspiration, I realized that it was a time of worship, a time to bow and pray to the one God. But it was not something one could rely on oneself to provide the details of, but rather a passing fancy, or perhaps the beginning of an awareness that atheism was an inauthentic way of being.

I carried something of this disquiet with me when I transferred to the University of Chicago, where I studied the epistemology of ethical theory how moral judgments were reached reading and searching among the books of the philosophers for something to shed light on the question of meaninglessness, which was both a personal concern and one of the central philosophical problems of our age.

According to some, scientific observation could only yield description statements of the form X is Y, for example, The object is red, Its weight is two kilos, Its height is ten centimeters, and so on, in each of which the functional was a scientifically verifiable is, whereas in moral judgments the functional element was an ought, a description statement which no amount of scientific observation could measure or verify. It appeared that ought was logically meaningless, and with it all morality whatsoever, a position that reminded me of those described by Lucian in his advice that whoever sees a moral philosopher coming down the road should flee from him as from a mad dog. For such a person, expediency ruled, and nothing checked his behavior but convention.

As Chicago was a more expensive school, and I had to raise tuition money, I found summer work on the West Coast with a seining boat fishing in Alaska. The sea proved a school in its own right, one I was to return to for a space of eight seasons, for the money. I met many people on boats, and saw something of the power and greatness of the wind, water, storms, and rain; and the smallness of man. These things lay before us like an immense book, but my fellow fishermen and I could only discern the letters of it that were within our context: to catch as many fish as possible within the specified time to sell to the tenders. Few knew how to read the book as a whole. Sometimes, in a blow, the waves rose like great hills, and the captain would hold the wheel with white knuckles, our bow one minute plunging gigantically down into a valley of green water, the next moment reaching the bottom of the trough and soaring upwards towards the sky before topping the next crest and starting down again.

Early in my career as a deck hand, I had read the Hazel Barnes translation of Jean Paul Sartres "Being and Nothingness", in which he argued that phenomena only arose for consciousness in the existential context of human projects, a theme that recalled Marx's 1844 manuscripts, where nature was produced by man, meaning, for example, that when the mystic sees a stand of trees, his consciousness hypostatizes an entirely different phenomenal object than a poet does, for example, or a capitalist. To the mystic, it is a manifestation; to the poet, a forest; to the capitalist, lumber. According to such a perspective, a mountain only appears as tall in the context of the project of climbing it, and so on, according to the instrumental relations involved in various human interests. But the great natural events of the sea surrounding us seemed to defy, with their stubborn, irreducible facticity, our uncomprehending attempts to come to terms with them. Suddenly, we were just there, shaken by the forces around us without making sense of them, wondering if we would make it through. Some, it was true, would ask Gods help at such moments, but when we returned safely to shore, we behaved like men who knew little of Him, as if those moments had been a lapse into insanity, embarrassing to think of at happier times. It was one of the lessons of the sea that in fact, such events not only existed but perhaps even preponderated in our life. Man was small and weak, the forces around him were large, and he did not control them.

Sometimes a boat would sink and men would die. I remember a fisherman from another boat who was working near us one opening, doing the same job as I did, piling web. He smiled across the water as he pulled the net from the hydraulic block overhead, stacking it neatly on the stern to ready it for the next set. Some weeks later, his boat overturned while fishing in a storm, and he got caught in the web and drowned. I saw him only once again, in a dream, beckoning to me from the stern of his boat.

The tremendousness of the scenes we lived in, the storms, the towering sheer cliffs rising vertically out of the water for hundreds of feet, the cold and rain and fatigue, the occasional injuries and deaths of workers these made little impression on most of us. Fishermen were, after all, supposed to be tough. On one boat, the family that worked it was said to lose an occasional crew member while running at sea at the end of the season, invariably the sole non-family member who worked with them, his loss saving them the wages they would have otherwise had to pay him.

The captain of another was a twenty-seven-year-old who delivered millions of dollars worth of crab each year in the Bering Sea. When I first heard of him, we were in Kodiak, his boat at the city dock they had tied up to after a lengthy run some days before. The captain was presently indisposed in his bunk in the stateroom, where he had been vomiting up blood from having eaten a glass uptown the previous night to prove how tough he was.

He was in somewhat better condition when I later saw him in the Bering Sea at the end of a long winter king crab season. He worked in his wheelhouse up top, surrounded by radios that could pull in a signal from just about anywhere, computers, Loran, sonar, depth-finders, radar. His panels of lights and switches were set below the 180-degree sweep of shatterproof windows that overlooked the sea and the men on deck below, to whom he communicated by loudspeaker. They often worked round the clock, pulling their gear up from the icy water under watchful batteries of enormous electric lights attached to the masts that turned the perpetual night of the winter months into day. The captain had a reputation as a screamer, and had once locked his crew out on deck in the rain for eleven hours because one of them had gone inside to have a cup of coffee without permission. Few crewmen lasted longer than a season with him, though they made nearly twice the yearly income of, say, a lawyer or an advertising executive, and in only six months. Fortunes were made in the Bering Sea in those years, before overfishing wiped out the crab.

At present, he was at anchor, and was amiable enough when we tied up to him and he came aboard to sit and talk with our own captain. They spoke at length, at times gazing thoughtfully out at the sea through the door or windows, at times looking at each other sharply when something animated them, as the topic of what his competitors thought of him. "They wonder why I have a few bucks", he said. "Well I slept in my own home one night last year."

He later had his crew throw off the lines and pick the anchor, his eyes flickering warily over the water from the windows of the house as he pulled away with a blast of smoke from the stack. His watchfulness, his walrus-like physique, his endless voyages after game and markets, reminded me of other predatory hunter-animals of the sea. Such people, good at making money but heedless of any ultimate end or purpose, made an impression on me, and I increasingly began to wonder if men didn't need principles to guide them and tell them why they were there. Without such principles, nothing seemed to distinguish us above our prey except being more thorough, and technologically capable of preying longer, on a vaster scale, and with greater devastation than the animals we hunted.

These considerations were in my mind the second year I studied at Chicago, where I became aware through studies of philosophical moral systems that philosophy had not been successful in the past at significantly influencing peoples morals and preventing injustice, and I came to realize that there was little hope for it to do so in the future. I found that comparing human cultural systems and societies in their historical succession and multiplicity had led many intellectuals to moral relativism, since no moral value could be discovered which on its own merits was transculturally valid, a reflection leading to nihilism, the perspective that sees human civilizations as plants that grow out of the earth, springing from their various seeds and soils, thriving for a time, and then dying away.

Some heralded this as intellectual liberation, among them Emile Durkheim in his "Elementary Forms of the Religious Life", or Sigmund Freud in his "Totem and Taboo", which discussed mankind as if it were a patient and diagnosed its religious traditions as a form of a collective neurosis that we could now hope to cure, by applying to them a thoroughgoing scientific atheism, a sort of salvation through pure science.

On this subject, I bought the Jeremy Shapiro translation of "Knowledge and Human Interests" by Jurgen Habermas, who argued that there was no such thing as pure science that could be depended upon to forge boldly ahead in a steady improvement of itself and the world. He called such a misunderstanding scientism, not science. Science in the real world, he said, was not free of values, still less of interests. The kinds of research that obtain funding, for example, were a function of what their society deemed meaningful, expedient, profitable, or important. Habermas had been of a generation of German academics who, during the thirties and forties, knew what was happening in their country, but insisted they were simply engaged in intellectual production, that they were living in the realm of scholarship, and need not concern themselves with whatever the state might choose to do with their research. The horrible question mark that was attached to German intellectuals when the Nazi atrocities became public after the war made Habermas think deeply about the ideology of pure science. If anything was obvious, it was that the nineteenth-century optimism of thinkers like Freud and Durkheim was no longer tenable.

I began to re-assess the intellectual life around me. Like Schopenhauer, I felt that higher education must produce higher human beings. But at the university, I found lab people talking to each other about forging research data to secure funding for the coming year; luminaries who wouldn't permit tape recorders at their lectures for fear that competitors in the same field would go one step further with their research and beat them to publication; professors vying with each other in the length of their courses syllabuses. The moral qualities I was accustomed to associate with ordinary, unregenerate humanity seemed as frequently met with in sophisticated academics as they had been in fishermen. If one could laugh at fishermen who, after getting a boatload of fish in a big catch, would cruise back and forth in front of the others to let them see how laden down in the water they were, ostensibly looking for more fish; what could one say about the Ph.D.'s who behaved the same way about their books and articles? I felt that their knowledge had not developed their persons, that the secret of higher man did not lie in their sophistication.

I wondered if I hadn't gone down the road of philosophy as far as one could go. While it had debunked my Christianity and provided some genuine insights, it had not yet answered the big questions. Moreover, I felt that this was somehow connected I didn't know whether as cause or effect to the fact that our intellectual tradition no longer seemed to seriously comprehend itself. What were any of us, whether philosophers, fishermen, garbagemen, or kings, except bit players in a drama we did not understand, diligently playing out our roles until our replacements were sent, and we gave our last performance? But could one legitimately hope for more than this? I read "Kojves Introduction to the Reading of Hegel", in which he explained that for Hegel, philosophy did not culminate in the system, but rather in the Wise Man, someone able to answer any possible question on the ethical implications of human actions. This made me consider our own plight in the twentieth century, which could no longer answer a single ethical question.

It was thus as if this century's unparalleled mastery of concrete things had somehow ended by making us things. I contrasted this with Hegel's concept of the concrete in his "Phenomenology of Mind". An example of the abstract, in his terms, was the limitary physical reality of the book now held in your hands, while the concrete was its interconnection with the larger realities it presupposed, the modes of production that determined the kind of ink and paper in it, the aesthetic standards that dictated its color and design, the systems of marketing and distribution that had carried it to the reader, the historical circumstances that had brought about the readers literacy and taste; the cultural events that had mediated its style and usage; in short, the bigger picture in which it was articulated and had its being. For Hegel, the movement of philosophical investigation always led from the abstract to the concrete, to the more real. He was therefore able to say that philosophy necessarily led to theology, whose object was the ultimately real, the Deity. This seemed to me to point up an irreducible lack in our century. I began to wonder if, by materializing our culture and our past, we had not somehow abstracted ourselves from our wider humanity, from our true nature in relation to a higher reality.

At this juncture, I read a number of works on Islam, among them the books of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who believed that many of the problems of western man, especially those of the environment, were from his having left the divine wisdom of revealed religion, which taught him his true place as a creature of God in the natural world and to understand and respect it. Without it, he burned up and consumed nature with ever more effective technological styles of commercial exploitation that ruined his world from without while leaving him increasingly empty within, because he did not know why he existed or to what end he should act.

I reflected that this might be true as far as it went, but it begged the question as to the truth of revealed religion. Everything on the face of the earth, all moral and religious systems, were on the same plane, unless one could gain certainty that one of them was from a higher source, the sole guarantee of the objectivity, the whole force, of moral law. Otherwise, one man's opinion was as good as another's, and we remained in an undifferentiated sea of conflicting individual interests, in which no valid objection could be raised to the strong eating the weak.

I read other books on Islam, and came across some passages translated by W. Montgomery Watt from "That Which Delivers from Error" by the theologian and mystic Ghazali, who, after a mid-life crises of questioning and doubt, realized that beyond the light of prophetic revelation there is no other light on the face of the earth from which illumination may be received, the very point to which my philosophical inquiries had led. Here was, in Hegel's terms, the Wise Man, in the person of a divinely inspired messenger who alone had the authority to answer questions of good and evil.

I also read A.J. Arberrys translation "The Koran Interpreted", and I recalled my early wish for a sacred book. Even in translation, the superiority of the Muslim scripture over the Bible was evident in every line, as if the reality of divine revelation, dimly heard of all my life, had now been placed before my eyes. In its exalted style, its power, its inexorable finality, its uncanny way of anticipating the arguments of the atheistic heart in advance and answering them; it was a clear exposition of God as God and man as man, the revelation of the awe-inspiring Divine Unity being the identical revelation of social and economic justice among men.

I began to learn Arabic at Chicago, and after studying the grammar for a year with a fair degree of success, decided to take a leave of absence to try to advance in the language in a year of private study in Cairo. Too, a desire for new horizons drew me, and after a third season of fishing, I went to the Middle East.

In Egypt, I found something I believe brings many to Islam, namely, the mark of pure monotheism upon its followers, which struck me as more profound than anything I had previously encountered. I met many Muslims in Egypt, good and bad, but all influenced by the teachings of their Book to a greater extent than I had ever seen elsewhere. It has been some fifteen years since then, and I cannot remember them all, or even most of them, but perhaps the ones I can recall will serve to illustrate the impressions made.

One was a man on the side of the Nile near the Miqyas Gardens, where I used to walk. I came upon him praying on a piece of cardboard, facing across the water. I started to pass in front of him, but suddenly checked myself and walked around behind, not wanting to disturb him. As I watched a moment before going my way, I beheld a man absorbed in his relation to God, oblivious to my presence, much less my opinions about him or his religion. To my mind, there was something magnificently detached about this, altogether strange for someone coming from the West, where praying in public was virtually the only thing that remained obscene.

Another was a young boy from secondary school who greeted me near Khan al-Khalili, and because I spoke some Arabic and he spoke some English and wanted to tell me about Islam, he walked with me several miles across town to Giza, explaining as much as he could. When we parted, I think he said a prayer that I might become Muslim.

Another was a Yemeni friend living in Cairo who brought me a copy of the Koran at my request to help me learn Arabic. I did not have a table beside the chair where I used to sit and read in my hotel room, and it was my custom to stack the books on the floor. When I set the Koran by the others there, he silently stooped and picked it up, out of respect for it. This impressed me because I knew he was not religious, but here was the effect of Islam upon him.

Another was a woman I met while walking beside a bicycle on an unpaved road on the opposite side of the Nile from Luxor. I was dusty, and somewhat shabbily clothed, and she was an old woman dressed in black from head to toe who walked up, and without a word or glance at me, pressed a coin into my hand so suddenly that in my surprise I dropped it. By the time I picked it up, she had hurried away. Because she thought I was poor, even if obviously non-Muslim, she gave me some money without any expectation for it except what was between her and her God. This act made me think a lot about Islam, because nothing seemed to have motivated her but that.

Many other things passed through my mind during the months I stayed in Egypt to learn Arabic. I found myself thinking that a man must have some sort of religion, and I was more impressed by the effect of Islam on the lives of Muslims, a certain nobility of purpose and largesse of soul, than I had ever been by any other religions or even atheisms effect on its followers. The Muslims seemed to have more than we did.

Christianity had its good points to be sure, but they seemed mixed with confusions, and I found myself more and more inclined to look to Islam for their fullest and most perfect expression. The first question we had memorized from our early catechism had been Why were you created? to which the correct answer was To know, love, and serve God. When I reflected on those around me, I realized that Islam seemed to furnish the most comprehensive and understandable way to practice this on a daily basis.

As for the inglorious political fortunes of the Muslims today, I did not feel these to be a reproach against Islam, or to relegate it to an inferior position in a natural order of world ideologies, but rather saw them as a low phase in a larger cycle of history. Foreign hegemony over Muslim lands had been witnessed before in the thorough going destruction of Islamic civilization in the thirteenth century by the Mongol horde, who razed cities and built pyramids of human heads from the steppes of Central Asia to the Muslim heartlands, after which the fullness of destiny brought forth the Ottoman Empire to raise the Word of Allah and make it a vibrant political reality that endured for centuries. It was now, I reflected, merely the turn of contemporary Muslims to strive for a new historic crystallization of Islam, something one might well aspire to share in.

When a friend in Cairo one day asked me, Why don't you become a Muslim?, I found that Allah had created within me a desire to belong to this religion, which so enriches its followers, from the simplest hearts to the most magisterial intellects. It is not through an act of the mind or will that anyone becomes a Muslim, but rather through the mercy of Allah, and this, in the final analysis, was what brought me to Islam in Cairo in 1977.

Is it not time that the hearts of those who believe should be humbled to the Remembrance of God and the Truth which He has sent down, and that they should not be as those to whom the Book was given aforetime, and the term seemed over long to them, so that their hearts have become hard, and many of them are ungodly? Know that God revives the earth after it was dead. We have indeed made clear for you the signs, that haply you will understand.

(Koran 57:16-17)

2001 © Nuh Ha Mim Keller
http://www.shadhiliteachings.com/tariq/?act=article&id=5

University and Endowments

2011-04-21T16:46:00.000-07:00

The Islamic world has a long history of endowments, founded in education.

Nasr Arif, director of the Institute for Islamic World Studies at Zayed university said: "The first university in the history of mankind was created during the Islamic civilisation and was founded on endowments established by society, especially women.

"When the Europeans returned from the Crusades, they tried to replicate these ideas and systems into European societies."

The University of Qarawiyin in Morocco was established in 859 through an endowment fund created by Fatima al Fihri, the daughter of a local merchant.

The first known European endowment was founded in the late 13th century by Walter de Merton, chancellor to Henry III and later Edward I, in what became Oxford University.

The university was given independent status with an endowments system to support it.

Dr Arif said: "The text of the endowment document was copied verbatim from the Islamic endowment. This was the beginning of the spread of endowments within the European universities."

However, it is today's highly lucrative system in the US that countries such as the UAE and the UK hope to emulate.

The top US endowments - with Harvard at the top, last year topping $27 billion - dwarf their UK equivalents, Oxford and Cambridge.

Between the two universities, their funds are still only in the region of $11bn but below that, in third place, the University of Edinburgh's fund is significantly less, worth around $264 million.

http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/education/zayed-university-the-islamic-university-that-inspired-the-world

Reclaiming history: Muslim women scholars

2011-04-21T16:42:00.000-07:00

Mohammad Akram Nadwi, a 43-year-old Sunni alim, or religious scholar, has rediscovered a long-lost tradition of Muslim women teaching the Qur'an, transmitting hadith (deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) and even making Islamic law as jurists.
For Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the stock image of an Islamic scholar is a gray-bearded man. Women tend to be seen as the subjects of Islamic law rather than its shapers. And while some opportunities for religious education do exist for women — the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo has a women’s college, for example, and there are girls’ madrasas and female study groups in mosques and private homes — cultural barriers prevent most women in the Islamic world from pursuing such studies. Recent findings by a scholar at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies in Britain, however, may help lower those barriers and challenge prevalent notions of women’s roles within Islamic society. Mohammad Akram Nadwi, a 43-year-old Sunni alim, or religious scholar, has rediscovered a long-lost tradition of Muslim women teaching the Koran, transmitting hadith (deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) and even making Islamic law as jurists.

Akram embarked eight years ago on a single-volume biographical dictionary of female hadith scholars, a project that took him trawling through biographical dictionaries, classical texts, madrasa chronicles and letters for relevant citations. “I thought I’d find maybe 20 or 30 women,” he says. To date, he has found 8,000 of them, dating back 1,400 years, and his dictionary now fills 40 volumes. It’s so long that his usual publishers, in Damascus and Beirut, have balked at the project, though an English translation of his preface — itself almost 400 pages long — will come out in England this summer. (Akram has talked with Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s former ambassador to the United States, about the possibility of publishing the entire work through his Riyadh-based foundation.)

The dictionary’s diverse entries include a 10th-century Baghdad-born jurist who traveled through Syria and Egypt, teaching other women; a female scholar — or muhaddithat — in 12th-century Egypt whose male students marveled at her mastery of a “camel load” of texts; and a 15th-century woman who taught hadith at the Prophet’s grave in Medina, one of the most important spots in Islam. One seventh-century Medina woman who reached the academic rank of jurist issued key fatwas on hajj rituals and commerce; another female jurist living in medieval Aleppo not only issued fatwas but also advised her far more famous husband on how to issue his.

Not all of these women scholars were previously unknown. Many Muslims acknowledge that Islam has its learned women, particularly in the field of hadith, starting with the Prophet’s wife Aisha. And several Western academics have written on women’s religious education. About a century ago, the Hungarian Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher estimated that about 15 percent of medieval hadith scholars were women. But Akram’s dictionary is groundbreaking in its scope.

Indeed, read today, when many Muslim women still don’t dare pray in mosques, let alone lecture leaders in them, Akram’s entry for someone like Umm al-Darda, a prominent jurist in seventh-century Damascus, is startling. As a young woman, al-Darda used to sit with male scholars in the mosque, talking shop. “I’ve tried to worship Allah in every way,” she wrote, “but I’ve never found a better one than sitting around, debating other scholars.” She went on to teach hadith and fiqh, or law, at the mosque, and even lectured in the men’s section; her students included the caliph of Damascus. She shocked her contemporaries by praying shoulder to shoulder with men — a nearly unknown practice, even now — and issuing a fatwa, still cited by modern scholars, that allowed women to pray in the same position as men.

It’s after the 16th century that citations of women scholars dwindle. Some historians venture that this is because Islamic education grew more formal, excluding women as it became increasingly oriented toward establishing careers in the courts and mosques. (Strangely enough, Akram found that this kind of exclusion also helped women become better scholars. Because they didn’t hold official posts, they had little reason to invent or embellish prophetic traditions.)

Akram’s work has led to accusations that he is championing free mixing between men and women, but he says that is not so. He maintains that women students should sit at a discreet distance from their male classmates or co-worshipers, or be separated by a curtain. (The practice has parallels in Orthodox Judaism.) The Muslim women who taught men “are part of our history,” he says. “It doesn’t mean you have to follow them. It’s up to people to decide.”

Nevertheless, Akram says he hopes that uncovering past hadith scholars could help reform present-day Islamic culture. Many Muslims see historical precedents — particularly when they date back to the golden age of Muhammad — as blueprints for sound modern societies and look to scholars to evaluate and interpret those precedents. Muslim feminists like the Moroccan writer Fatima Mernissi and Kecia Ali, a professor at Boston University, have cast fresh light on women’s roles in Islamic law and history, but their worldview — and their audiences — are largely Western or Westernized. Akram is a working alim, lecturing in mosques and universities and dispensing fatwas on issues like inheritance and divorce. “Here you’ve got a guy who’s coming from the tradition, who knows the stuff and who’s able to give us that level of detail which is missing in the self-proclaimed progressive Muslim writers,” says James Piscatori, a professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford University.

The erosion of women’s religious education in recent times, Akram says, reflects “decline in every aspect of Islam.” Flabby leadership and a focus on politics rather than scholarship has left Muslims ignorant of their own history. Islam’s current cultural insecurity has been bad for both its scholarship and its women, Akram says. “Our traditions have grown weak, and when people are weak, they grow cautious. When they’re cautious, they don’t give their women freedoms.”

When Akram lectures, he dryly notes, women are more excited by this history than men. To persuade reluctant Muslims to educate their girls, Akram employs a potent debating strategy: he compares the status quo to the age of al jahiliya, the Arabic term for the barbaric state of pre-Islamic Arabia. (Osama Bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb, the godfather of modern Islamic extremism, have employed the comparison to very different effect.) Barring Muslim women from education and religious authority, Akram argues, is akin to the pre-Islamic custom of burying girls alive. “I tell people, ‘God has given girls qualities and potential,’ ” he says. “If they aren’t allowed to develop them, if they aren’t provided with opportunities to study and learn, it’s basically a live burial.”

When I spoke with him, Akram invoked a favorite poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Thomas Gray’s 18th-century lament for dead English farmers. “Gray said that villagers could have been like Milton,” if only they’d had the chance, Akram observes. “Muslim women are in the same situation. There could have been so many Miltons.”

New York Times, "A Secret History", 25-02-1007

Carla Power is a London-based journalist who writes about Islamic issues.
Submitted on 03/04/2007

The Blessed 'Madness' of the Blessed Sahaba - Shaykh Ibrahim Osi-Efa

2011-04-05T17:36:00.000-07:00

Shaykh al-Islam Ibrahim al-Riyahi

2011-04-05T04:47:00.000-07:00

Called the "Izzideen Abdus Salaam of his time" the Mufti of Tunis and Shaykh al Islam of Zaytun University Sidi Ibrahim Riyahi by Faheem Taalib Deen on Monday, 04 April 2011 at 23:47.Shaykh al-Islam Ibrahim al-Riyahi By Muhammad Nasiruddin Andrea Ibrahim al-Riyahi (1767-1850), the Imam of the Zaytuna University and Maliki Shaykh al-Islam of Tunis from 1832. He was an enlightened mufti, a dedicated and innovative teacher and an accomplished poet. He also discretely cultivated a profound spirituality throughout his life, and was the man who introduced the Tariqa Tijaniyya in Tunisia. Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (d. 1975)[1] said about him: “Were Shaykh Ahmad al-Tijani to have no other follower but Abu Ishaq Ibrahim al-Riyahi, it would suffice us as proof to also follow him.”[2] After having memorized the Qur’an from his father when he was in his late teens (some time between 1782 and 1785), Ibrahim was sent out to pursue higher studies in Tunis. He settled in the Madrasa of the Hawanit al-‘Ashur (Houanet Achour) ward, a western quarter of the Medina. He attended courses in all the major religious and philological disciplines at the Houanet Achour Madrasa, and then at the Zaytuna, the oldest center of Islamic learning in North Africa, which had been established in the eighth century and functioned as a major hub of Maliki legal thought. Under Ottoman rule, a parallel system of Hanafi law had been established, and the two legal doctrines were taught at the Zaytuna and practiced by the Tunisian courts. A Maliki Shaykh al-Islam (Bash-mufti) supervised the Maliki qadis, while a Hanafi one headed the Hanafi judiciary. At the Zaytuna, Ibrahim al-Riyahi studied with the most renowned scholars in Tunis of his time. Among his teachers were Muhammad al-Mahjub (Maliki Bash-mufti), Isma’il al-Tamimi (who succeeded the former as Maliki Bash-mufti), Muhammad Bayram II (Hanafi Bash-mufti), Hasan al-Sharif (Chief-Imam of the Zaytuna), Ahmad Abu Khris, Muhammad al-Fasi, Salih al-Kawwash, ‘Umar al-Mahjub, Tahir b. Mas‘ud.[4] He quickly attained great recognition for his sharp intelligence and for the passion with which he devoted to study. After obtaining ijazas in the major disciplines, he was encouraged by his masters to accept students of his own, which he did some time in his late twenties under one of the pillars of the Zaytuna mosque as was customary. He specialized in the teaching of grammar, prosody, rhetoric, and Maliki fiqh. It is related that one day his former teacher Tahir b. Mas‘ud, while commenting on the Mukhtasar of Sa‘d, overheard Ibrahim al-Riyahi teaching the same book to another group of students a few meters away. He interrupted his own lesson, and sent his students to listen to his former pupil’s explanations. The pathway which would eventually lead Ibrahim al-Riyahi to join the Tijaniyya developed out of his early search for knowledge in Tunis. Esoteric sciences, however, were probably already part of his family legacy: indeed the esoteric sciences associated with Arabic letters of the Qur’an (‘ilm al-huruf) were integrated into his ancestors’ study and transmission of the Qur’anic sciences. In any case, while pursuing his training in other classical Islamic sciences in Tunis, he simultaneously evidenced strong Sufi inclinations. He first embraced the path of Sidi Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, the famous Moroccan saint who visited Tunis, where his Tariqa is still very popular. He devotedly pursued this path under the direction of his master Sidi ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Bashir Mashish. Some years later, his encounter with the Moroccan Sidi ‘Ali Harazim, one of the closest companions of Shaykh Ahmad al-Tijani, would lead him to embrace the Tijani path. ‘Ali Harazim had come to Tunis en route to accomplishing the pilgrimage, after having been confirmed as a consummate ‘Arif billah (Gnostic) by Shaykh Ahmad Tijani and sent from Fez to spread the tariqa Ibrahim met Sidi ‘Ali Harazim in the Zaytuna after a premonitory dream, and then invited Sidi Ali Harzimi to be his guest in the Madrasa ‘Ashuriyya.[5] ‘Ali Harazim was gifted with many karamat (miraculous signs), and some intense events marked the acquaintance of the two, probably deeply affecting the young Zaytuna professor. It is related that one night ‘Ali Harazim woke up Ibrahim and told him: “wake up and ask God what you desire, for this is the time of the answered prayer”. Ibrahim wrote down 14 implorations (amongst them “to be granted constant vision of the Prophet Muhammad (sAws)”, “obtaining complete ma‘rifa“, “to be granted mastery in exoteric and esoteric sciences”, “to be granted a wife who will assist me”, “pious children”, and “to die as a believer”).[6] It seems that God did indeed grant Ibrahim his supplications through the intermediary of Sidi Ali Harazim. Notwithstanding the intense period of acquaintance with Sidi ‘Ali Harazim and the latter’s close affiliation with the Tijaniyya, Ibrahim al-Riyahi did not ask for actual initiation into the new order until he met Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili in a dream encouraging him. Then, after he had asked permission the shaykh who had initiated him into the Shadhiliyya, Sidi al-Mashish, he took the tijani pact at the hand of Sidi Ali Harazem.[7] Ali Harazim would soon leave Tunis to proceed his journey eastwards, but a providential coincidence gave the young professor and fresh Tijani initiate the opportunity to visit the Pole of the order he had just joined. In 1803, an insistent drought in Tunis prompted the Bey to send a mission to Morocco, in order to convince the Sultan Moulay Sulayman, who had enacted a protective measure against the exportation of Moroccan crops, to sell a certain quantity of crops that would allow Tunisia to overcome the food crisis. Ibrahim al-Riyahi was selected to conduct the mission, bringing a letter written by Isma‘il al-Tamimi. He stayed at the court of Moulay Sulayman, to whom he also dedicated a panegyric, and engaged in a fascinating poetical challenge with the learned men of his court. At the end, he had laid the foundations for long-lasting intellectual relations with some of the leading scholars of Fez. While in Fez, he also visited Shaykh Ahmad al-Tijani, about whom he would later remember: “I have never met anybody whose qiyam and whose sujud lasted longer than his.” He received further instruction in the Tijani path from Shaykh Ahmad Tijani himself, whom he would later praise in many verses of poetry In 1839, he was appointed as First Imam of the Zaytuna. He was the first person in Tunis who combined the position of Maliki Shaykh al-Islam and that of First Imam. From the pulpit of the Zaytuna, he used to enjoin to people zuhd (asceticism), but also to reprimand the economic policies of the Bey when he felt compelled to do so.[9] Other travels of Shaykh Ibrahim al-Riyahi include the Pilgrimage to Mecca and the visit to Medina. He also had occasion to visit the Algerian town of Tamasin to pay his respects to the Khalifa of Shaykh Ahmad Tijani, Sidi Ali al-Tamasini. Among his many writings were the following: 1.Dozens of poems, collected in a published Diwan [10] (praises of the Prophet [sAws] and of Shaykh Ahmad al-Tijani [rAh]; elegies for his teachers, as Isma‘il al-Tamimi, Tahir b. Mas‘ud, Ahmad Abu Khris; a touching elegy for his son Muhammad al-Tayyib, a brilliant scholar himself, killed by an epidemy of cholera in 1850); 2.A dazzling devotional text on the Prophet [sAws] titled al-Narjasa al-‘anbariyya fi al-salati ‘ala Khayr al-bariyya; 3.Glosses on the commentary by Fakihani to the Qatr al-nada; 4.A writing in the defense of the sound Ash‘arism of Sidi Ahmad al-Tijani, in response to a writing by an Egyptian; 5.A versification of the Ajurrumiyya; 6.A refutation of the Wahhabi doctrine (this document is apparently lost; it was written as a response to Ibn Sa‘ud’s letter reaching the Regency and calling for either joining the movement or prepare to fight); 7.Numerous khutbas, fatwas and answers to legal problems. 8.He also revived the celebration of the Mawlid nabawi in Tunis and wrote a short text for the occasion. Shaykh Ibrahim al-Riyahi died shortly after his son, from the same cholera epidemic. The last of the many favors that he received from God was that he was destined to leave the world on the night of Ramadan 27th, 1266 (August 6th, 1850).

Woe to the World

2011-03-26T19:14:00.001-07:00

One of my poems

Woe to the world for indeed it has disgraced me
Via giving me the knowledge of the secular rather than the sacred
Embedding in me no virtue nor wisdom, but foolishness and folly
Woe to my heart for listening to the sweet melody of the world
And not listening to the odes which rhyme to the ultimate facts of divine truth and reality
Indeed now as I approach my death I only have myself to blame; my soul blames me
Undeniably I am infinitely disgraced,
I am more than a dead man living the last breaths of a life’s frivolity
It’s a poor triviality; the game of my life
I always thought of life as a trivial game, yet with every move I came closer to deaths reality
Now I hope only for a peaceful resting place, enveloped in Gods mercy

The Awakening By Mevlana Rumi

2011-03-26T19:10:00.001-07:00

All night, a man called “Allah”
Until his lips were bleeding.
Then the Devil said, “Hey! Mr Gullible!
How comes you’ve been calling all night
And never once heard Allah say, “Here, I am”?
You call out so earnestly and, in reply, what?
I’ll tell you what. Nothing!”

The man suddenly felt empty and abandoned.
Depressed, he threw himself on the ground
And fell into a deep sleep.
In a dream, he met Abraham, who asked,
“Why are you regretting praising Allah?”

The man said, “ I called and called
But Allah never replied, “Here I am.”
Abraham explained, “Allah has said,
“Your calling my name is My reply.
Your longing for Me is My message to you.
All your attempts to reach Me
Are in reality My attempts to reach you.
Your fear and love are a noose to catch Me.
In the silence surrounding every call of “Allah”
Waits a thousand replies of “Here I am.”

~ Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi

The Poem of al Ghazali

2011-03-26T19:08:00.000-07:00

Imam Ghazali (rahmatullahi alayh) woke up one early morning and as usual offered his prayers and then enquired what day it was, to which his younger brother, Ahmad Ghazali replied, “Monday.” He asked Ahmed to bring his white shroud, kissed it, stretched himself full length and saying “Lord, I obey willingly,”

“Say to my friends, when they look upon me, dead

Weeping for me and mourning me in sorrow

Do not believe that this corpse you see is myself

In the name of God, I tell you, it is not I,

I am a spirit, and this is naught but flesh

It was my abode and my garment for a time.

I am a treasure, by a talisman kept hid,

Fashioned of dust, which served me as a shrine,

I am a pearl, which has left it’s shell deserted,

I am a bird, and this body was my cage

Whence I have now flown forth and it is left as a token

Praise to God, who hath now set me free

And prepared for me my place in the highest of the heaven,

Until today I was dead, though alive in your midst.

Now I live in truth, with the grave – clothes discarded.

Today I hold converse with the saints above,

With no veil between, I see God face to face.

I look upon “Loh-i-Mahfuz” and there in I read

Whatever was and is and all that is to be.

Let my house fall in ruins, lay my cage in the ground,

Cast away the talisman, it is a token, no more

Lay aside my cloak, it was but my outer garment.

Place them all in the grave, let them be forgotten,

I have passed on my way and you are left behind

Your place of abode was no dwelling place for me.

Think not that death is death, nay, it is life,

A life that surpasses all we could dream of here,

While in this world, here we are granted sleep,

Death is but sleep, sleep that shall be prolonged

Be not frightened when death draweth night,

It is but the departure for this blessed home

Think of the mercy and love of your Lord,

Give thanks for His Grace and come without fear.

What I am now, even so shall you be

For I know that you are even as I am

The souls of all men come forth from God

The bodies of all are compounded alike

Good and evil, alike it was ours

I give you now a message of good cheer

May God’s peace and joy for evermore be yours.”

Dr. Timothy Winter: The life and works of al-Ghazali (Part 2/2)

2011-03-21T15:22:00.000-07:00

Dr. Timothy Winter: The life and works of al-Ghazali (Part 1/2)

2011-03-21T15:20:00.000-07:00

Ustad Yasir Qadhi : His Thinking and His Changing

2011-03-19T10:10:00.000-07:00

On a chilly night in the dead of a New England winter, Yasir Qadhi hurried down the stairs of Yale University’s religious-studies department, searching urgently for a place to make a private call. A Ph.D. candidate in Islamic studies, Qadhi was a fixture on the New Haven campus. He wore a trim beard and preppy polo shirts, blending in with the other graduate students as he lugged an overstuffed backpack into Blue State Coffee for his daily cappuccino. A popular teaching assistant, he exuded a sprightly intensity in class, addressing the undergraduates as “dudes.”

But Qadhi had another life. Beyond the gothic confines of Yale, he was becoming one of the most influential conservative clerics in American Islam, drawing a tide of followers in the fundamentalist movement known as Salafiya. Raised between Texas and Saudi Arabia, he seemed uniquely deft at balancing the edicts of orthodox Islam with the mores of contemporary America. To many young Muslims wrestling with conflicts between faith and country, Qadhi was a rock star. To law-enforcement agents, he was also a figure of interest, given his prominence in a community considered vulnerable to radicalization. Some officials, noting his message of nonviolence, saw him as an ally. Others were wary, recalling a time when Qadhi spouted a much harder, less tolerant line. On this night, however, it was Qadhi’s closest followers who were questioning him.

Two weeks earlier, on Christmas Day 2009, a young Nigerian tried to blow up a jet headed for Detroit with a bomb sewn into his underwear. The suspect had been a student of Qadhi’s at the AlMaghrib Institute, which teaches Salafi theology in 21 American cities. F.B.I. agents were demanding interviews with Qadhi’s students. He urged them to cooperate, but many pushed back, and Qadhi found himself caught between two seemingly irreconcilable forces: a deeply suspicious government and a young following he could lose.

In the basement of the religious-studies building, Qadhi settled into an empty room, flipped open his MacBook Pro (encased in Islamic apple green) and dialed in to an Internet conference call with more than 150 of his AlMaghrib students. “I want to be very frank here,” Qadhi said, his voice tight with exasperation. “Do you really, really think that blowing up a plane is Islamic? I mean, ask yourself this.”

None of the students defended the plot, but some sympathized with the suspect, said several students who participated in the call, one of whom provided a recording to The Times. Was it not possible, they asked, that he had been set up? And how could they trust the F.B.I. after all they experienced — the post-9/11 raids, the monitoring of mosques, the sting operations aimed at Muslims? A few went as far as to say that they could not turn against a fellow Muslim who was trying to fight the oppressive policies of the United States.

Qadhi paced the worn, gray carpet. “There were even Muslims on that plane!” he said. “I mean, what world are you living in? How angry and overzealous are you that you simply forget about everything and you think that this is the way forward?”

Over the next year, Qadhi was thrust into the center of a crucial struggle — for the minds of his young students, the trust of his government and his own future as America was waking to a new threat. Since 2008, more than two dozen Muslim-Americans have joined or sought training with militant groups abroad. They are among the roughly 50 American citizens charged with terrorism-related offenses during that time. These suspects are a mixed lot. Some converted to Islam; others were raised in the faith. They come from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and have migrated to different fronts in their global war, from Somalia to Pakistan. Their motivations differ, but the vast majority share two key attributes: a deep disdain for American foreign policy and an ideology rooted in Salafiya.

In the spectrum of the global Salafi movement, Qadhi, who is 36, speaks for the nonmilitant majority. Yet even as he has denounced Islamist violence — too late, some say — a handful of AlMaghrib’s former students have heeded the call. In addition to the underwear-bomb suspect, the 36,000 current and former students of Qadhi’s institute include Daniel Maldonado, a New Hampshire convert who was convicted in 2007 of training with an Al Qaeda-linked militia in Somalia; Tarek Mehanna, a 28-year-old pharmacist arrested for conspiring to attack Americans; and two young Virginia men held in Pakistan in 2009 for seeking to train with militants.

Qadhi said that none of those former students had approached him for counsel. But in recent years, countless others have come to him with questions about the legitimacy of waging jihad. “We’re finding ourselves on the front line,” Qadhi said. “We don’t want to be there.”

During the months I spent in the insular world of young American Salafis, it became clear how pressing those questions are for many conservative Muslims who have come of age after 9/11. They have watched as their own country wages war in Muslim lands, bearing witness — via satellite television and the Internet — to the carnage in Iraq, the drone attacks in Pakistan and the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo. While the dozens of AlMaghrib students I interviewed condemned the tactics of militant groups, many share their basic grievances. They are searching for the correct Islamic response, turning to the ancient texts that guide their American lives. Their salvation, they say, hangs in the balance.

This is what makes Qadhi such a pivotal figure in a subculture that is little understood, even by the law-enforcement officials who monitor it. He is the rare Western cleric fluent in the language of militants, having spent nearly a decade studying Islam in Saudi Arabia, steeped in the same tradition that spawned Osama bin Laden’s splinter movement. Arguably few American theologians are better positioned to offer an authoritative rebuttal of extremist ideology. But to do that, Qadhi says he would need to address the thorny question of what kinds of militant actions are permitted by Islamic law. It is a forbidden topic for most American clerics, who even refrain from criticizing their country’s foreign policy for fear of being branded unpatriotic.

For an ultraconservative cleric like Qadhi, the picture is more complicated. Engaging in a detailed discussion of militant jihad — a complex subject informed by centuries of scholarship — risks drawing the scrutiny of law enforcement and, Qadhi fears, possible prosecution. If he were to acknowledge that Islamic law endorses the legitimacy of armed resistance against Western forces in Muslim territory, he could give a green light to the very students he claims he is trying to keep off the militant path. Yet by remaining silent, Qadhi says he is losing the credibility he needs to persuade them of his ultimate message: those fights are not theirs, as Westerners, to fight. “My hands are tied, and my tongue is silent,” he said.

Militant clerics abroad have filled the void, none more than Anwar al-Awlaki, the American preacher who is now believed to be in hiding in Yemen with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Awlaki has been linked to numerous plots against the United States, including the botched underwear bombing. He has taken to the Internet with stirring battle cries directed at young American Muslims. “Many of your scholars,” Awlaki warned last year, are “standing between you and your duty of jihad.”

It was near midnight last October when Qadhi’s teenage acolytes surrounded him at Thomas Sweet, an ice cream parlor in New Brunswick, N.J. Puma sneakers peeked out from under long robes. Suddenly the lyrics “shake your booty” blasted over the speakers. The young men leaned in closer, unfazed. Between helpings of mango-flavored sorbet, Qadhi pontificated on medieval Islamic theology. “We have a reasonable religion,” he said. “We’re a very logical, rational group of people.”

Qadhi’s students hang on his every word. They huddle around him — between classes, during meals, even in bathrooms — pinging him with questions. Their reliance on Qadhi is a product of contemporary Islam, a decentralized religion with no clear authority. Clerics with the highest level of scholarship are considered invaluable guides, especially in the secular West.

Qadhi was in New Jersey that weekend to teach a seminar on the concept of faith-led action. During a break, a dozen young men flocked to him once again. A soft-spoken engineer lobbed the first question: Wasn’t it hypocritical for the same Western imams who supported the Afghan resistance against the Soviets to now condemn the jihad against American troops? After all, another student asked, don’t civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan “have an obligation to do something to defend themselves?”

“I am not commenting on what they should or should not do,” Qadhi replied. “I am commenting on what you should do as American Muslims.”

They had heard it before: vote, educate your neighbors, protest peacefully. But is that what Islam commands when your people are dying? The question haunts some of Qadhi’s brightest students. One of the deepest Islamic principles is that of the ummah — the global community that unites all Muslims. The Prophet Muhammad was said to have likened it to the human body. If one part hurts, the whole body aches.

One of Qadhi’s followers, a feisty 27-year-old New Yorker, compared his experience of watching bombs fall on Iraq to what other Americans might feel at seeing “California being ravaged day in and day out. How would you feel?” He said he understood why Qadhi could not speak expansively about the conflicts overseas. Even so, he asked, who has greater credibility: the cleric living comfortably in America or the militant “in the cave” who sacrificed everything for his beliefs? “One thing about Awlaki no one can deny,” he said, “this man is fearless.”

That Awlaki carries weight with conservative Muslims underscores both the rivalry and proximity between militant and nonmilitant Salafis. Qadhi and Awlaki have parallel pasts: they were both born in the United States, spent part of their youth in the Middle East and entered the American Salafi movement just as it was on the rise. Awlaki later spent time in a Yemeni prison and emerged in 2008 calling for Muslims to fight the West. Recordings of his sermons continued to be sold at AlMaghrib seminars even after the students were ordered to stop in November 2009, following the Fort Hood shootings that Awlaki praised. Many of the students had grown up listening to him preach on his CDs. They trusted him then, one told me, why not trust him now?

For the tiny fraction of AlMaghrib’s students who have turned to violence, many are what Qadhi refers to as “sympathizers” of militant anger. These young, politically attuned Muslims are taken with events that don’t even register with most Americans, like two recent terrorism cases in New York that drew overflow crowds, Qadhi’s students among them. “If any Muslim is oppressed anywhere, the prevailing wisdom is that we should be standing up to help them — if we’re true believers,” says Ify Okoye, an AlMaghrib volunteer from Beltsville, Md. Sometimes, she added, “you feel guilty for living here.”

Many of today’s young American Muslims are the children of educated, successful immigrants whose passage to the United States came smoothly, in contrast to Europe’s largely working-class Muslims. For years, this bolstered the theory that American Muslim youth had been spared the alienation that fostered militancy in Europe.

But alienation has many faces. America’s youngest Muslims have grown up in a newly hostile country, with mounting opposition to the construction of mosques, a national movement seeking to ban courts from consulting shariah, or Islamic law, and rising hate crimes against Muslims. While some young Muslims have sought distance, abandoning Islam and even changing their names, others have experienced a spiritual awakening. The most conservative have found a home in Salafiya.

Salafis take their name from the Arabic word “salaf,” meaning “ancestor.” Their movement seeks to reclaim Islam’s lost glory by purging the faith of modern influences. Salafis model their lives after the first Muslims, beginning with the Prophet Muhammad, the seventh-century Meccan merchant to whom the Koran, it is believed, was revealed. They encourage a direct relationship with God through a literal reading of Islam’s primary sources — the Koran and the Sunnah, the prophet’s sayings and deeds.

Within the faith, Salafis have a reputation for intolerance and divisiveness. Like other religious conservatives, they tend to be adamant in their strict interpretations, shunning those who disagree. They denounce the veneration of saints, common among some Sufi sects. Many Salafi men insist on a fist-length beard and wear their trousers above the ankle in a desire to emulate the prophet.

While versions of Salafiya have persisted through history, its current iteration derives largely from the puritanical, 18th-century school of Saudi Islam known as Wahhabism. Today’s Salafis share the same basic theology but differ on how to manifest it. Many are apolitical, while another subset engages in politics as a nonviolent means to an end — namely, an Islamic theocracy. A third fringe group is devoted to militant jihad as the only path to Islamic rule and, ultimately, heaven. All three strains have surfaced in the West, where the movement has flourished among the children of immigrants. “It’s about this deep desire for certainty,” Bernard Haykel, a leading Salafi expert at Princeton University, says. “They are responding to a kind of disenchantment with the modern world.”

One balmy afternoon last spring, Qadhi walked across Yale’s campus, stepping around a throng of teenagers he dismissed, irascibly, as “the prefreshie tour.” He stopped before the tomblike building that houses the elite Skull and Bones society. Qadhi stared up at the brownstone facade, as if imagining the secrets it held. “You’re set for life,” he said, squinting through his sunglasses. “You get to thinking that everyone in the White House was a part of this, and it’s easy to see why people think there is a conspiracy.” After a pause, he added, “I don’t believe those theories.”

Qadhi is hardly disenchanted by the trappings of Western life. He has more than 10,000 fans on Facebook, hundreds of sermons on YouTube and a growing Twitter following. He drives a black, leather-interior Honda CR-V, often pulling into a Popeye’s drive-through for popcorn shrimp and gravy-slathered biscuits. He is planning a trip to Disney World with his wife, Rumana, and their four children.

Some of Qadhi’s followers find his ease with American culture perplexing, even suspicious. Yet it is his unapologetic comfort with America — his assertion that Muslims belong here as much as anyone — that has also made him a point of pride for many young Salafis. “We need to make sure that our children can live freely, and we’re going to fight for that freedom,” he told me one afternoon. “And every time I use that word, I need to make a disclaimer — I don’t mean ‘fight’ in the Tea Party sense of overthrowing the government.”

A stout five-foot-five, Qadhi chuckles easily and speaks rapidly, his hands punctuating his words with slicing motions. He is confident to a fault, often trailing a sentence with “God protect me from arrogance.” In class, he can be staid and professorial, with flashes of frivolity. He once implored students to “make love, not jihad.” He blends religious piety with entrepreneurial savvy. More than 20,000 people have signed up for “Like a Garment,” Qadhi’s new online seminar about sex in Islamic marriage. “I give explicit detail on how a man should give his wife an orgasm in a permissible manner,” he explained.

Qadhi’s platform is the AlMaghrib Institute, where he serves as academic dean. Founded in 2002 by Muhammad Alshareef, a Canadian cleric then living in Alexandria, Va., AlMaghrib is now an international enterprise, offering seminars in the United States, Canada and Britain. It reported nearly $1.2 million in revenue in 2009 and aspires to become a full-time Islamic seminary, albeit with an air of corporate America. During a recent retreat in the mountains of Ontario, AlMaghrib’s clerics whizzed along snowy bluffs on sleds drawn by Siberian huskies. “As long as you don’t touch them, it’s all right,” Qadhi said, referring to his interpretation of Islam’s ruling on dogs.

Last June, Qadhi and his family left New Haven for the outskirts of Memphis, settling into a spacious new ranch house in a well-tended subdivision. Still at work on his doctoral thesis, Qadhi found a job teaching Islamic studies at Rhodes College, which is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church.

It is something of a curiosity that Qadhi, who was raised in Saudi Arabia, Islam’s birthplace, now lives in a landscape marked by church steeples and “What would Jesus do?” bumper stickers. But the American South seems to agree with Qadhi, who often preaches on the Islamic principle of polite conduct. He takes to the gentility of his students at Rhodes, who call him sir. There is no better place to be Muslim than in America, he says, because as a minority “you feel your faith.” At times, he seems oddly Pollyanna-ish about his future in Tennessee, where someone tried to torch the site of a planned mosque last year. Qadhi concedes that living someplace like Saudi Arabia might be easier, but “it’s not my land at the end of the day,” he said. “I am an American. What else can I say?”

In Qadhi’s current incarnation, it is hard to make out the preacher he refers to as “the old me.” That Qadhi lives on via YouTube. In a television show recorded in Egypt in 2001, Qadhi, then 26, explains that one form of kufr, or disbelief, is adhering to man-made laws over God’s law. “Can you believe it?” he says. “A group of people coming together and voting — and the majority vote will then be the law of the land. What gives you the right to prohibit something or allow something?”

His young students nod their heads. “Islam is a complete way of life, a complete submission to Allah and to the rulings of Allah,” Qadhi said on the show. “It is a complete package.”

Long before Salaﬁya came to the United States, Qadhi’s father arrived in Houston from Karachi, Pakistan. It was 1963, and the young bachelor, Mazhar Kazi, enrolled at the University of Houston with his sights on a medical degree. One of the first foreign-born Muslims to settle in the area, Kazi took a job as a busboy and tended to his studies. He eventually married a microbiologist from Karachi and founded the area’s first mosque.

Their son, Yasir, was born in 1975, the second of two boys. When Yasir was 5, the Kazis moved to Jedda, Saudi Arabia, intent on exposing their sons to Islam and Arabic. Kazi took a job teaching medicine at the King Abdulaziz University. The family spent summers in Houston, but the boys were mostly shaped by life in Jedda, a blend of British expat culture and strict Saudi norms. Qadhi (who later changed the spelling of his surname to reflect the correct pronunciation) was precociously bookish. On weekends, he searched the local library for Tolstoy and Hemingway. By 15, Qadhi had memorized the Koran and graduated from high school, two years early, as valedictorian. Following his father’s wishes, he enrolled at the University of Houston in 1991, majoring in chemical engineering.

Qadhi had never attended a class with women and was shocked by campus life. He took refuge in the Muslim Students Association, a close-knit group of mostly Arab and South Asian immigrants. He was soon leading study circles and delivering effusive Friday sermons.

His introduction to Salafiya came in his sophomore year, when a Muslim convert from Colorado visited campus. A tall, regal man with a wispy white beard, the preacher displayed a command of Islam that Qadhi had never seen. When asked a question, he closed his eyes and recited a litany of evidence from the Koran and the Sunnah. This approach, a cornerstone of Salafiya, appealed to Qadhi’s empiricism. “It’s so disciplined and academic,” he said. Then 17, Qadhi began driving through the night to attend Salafi camping retreats, where legendary clerics lectured from Jordan and Saudi Arabia via teleconference. He drilled into Salafiya with a discipline that defied his adolescence. At a retreat in Boulder, Colo., some of Qadhi’s friends skipped out to go fishing. When they returned, Qadhi refused to share his notes. “It was very clear that this guy was going to become something and we weren’t,” said one of the friends, Amad Shaikh.

At another retreat, Qadhi fell under the sway of Ali al-Timimi. A cancer researcher from Maryland, Timimi had studied Islam in Saudi Arabia and helped spread the American Salafi movement, which began in the early 1980s as a patchwork of nonprofit groups subsidized by the Saudi government. Through shipments of free Korans and other texts, Salafi doctrine developed a strong presence at American mosques, prisons and Islamic schools. By the 1990s, the Salafi community numbered in the low thousands.

American Salafiya mirrored the movement abroad. It was largely apolitical until the first gulf war, when the United States set up a base in Saudi Arabia. The presence of American troops on Saudi soil, home to Islam’s holiest sites, was a defining moment for Salafis, giving rise to a political awakening and fueling bin Laden’s militancy. In America, some Salafi clerics began calling for political action against the Saudi regime, while others remained loyal. Qadhi was torn.

But on other matters, he steered his fellow students in Houston toward a strict code. They instituted sex segregation, policing each other for signs of deviation. When a Pakistani student organization sponsored a rock concert, Qadhi and his friends distributed fliers warning the crowds that Islam prohibited music. They did not see themselves as stakeholders in America, Shaikh recalled. Their goal was to spread Islam and then migrate to Muslim lands. “It was almost cultish,” Shaikh said.

For all his stridency, Qadhi broke one significant rule: he fell in love outside the bounds of arranged marriage. The young woman, Rumana, was a quiet, graceful college student of Indian descent. But Qadhi’s parents had their sights on other marriage candidates, and the courtship faded.

During college, jihad loomed in the backdrop of Qadhi’s life. Like many of his peers, he was taken by the legend of the American Muslims who had fought with the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets. Back then, talk of jihad carried little taboo, given the United States’ role in financing the resistance. Qadhi knew several men who later fought in Bosnia. Noble as it seemed, he said, “I thought there were more productive ways for me to spend my life.”

He had long thought of becoming a Muslim scholar. Shortly before graduating, Qadhi applied to the Islamic University of Medina, a leading Salafi institution. After enrolling in the fall of 1996, he called Rumana. “I can’t live without you,” he told her. “Are you willing to live a difficult life?”

Qadhi and his new wife settled into a spare apartment, and he plunged into round-the-clock study. Life in Medina deepened his faith while narrowing his tolerance for the outside world. He came to identify with political Salafiya, denouncing secular democracies and declaring Sufis and Shia “heretics.” He took up the Palestinian cause — a pathway, he said, to the anti-Semitic rhetoric that ran rampant in his circles.

In the summer of 2001, Qadhi traveled to London to teach at an Islamic conference. At the end of a class, he went into a diatribe arguing that Israel did not rightfully belong to the Jewish people. “Hitler never intended to mass-destroy the Jews,” Qadhi said, telling the audience to read a book about “the hoax” of the Holocaust. He went on to say that most Islamic-studies professors in the United States are Jews who “want to destroy us.”

Looking back, Qadhi said he fell down a slippery slope where criticism of Israel gave way to attacks on Jews. Beneath the vitriol, he said, was a sense of victimization — that non-Muslims were to blame for the afflictions of the Muslim world. “When you’re young and naïve, it’s easier to fall prey to such things,” said Qadhi, who publicly recanted years later. Last August, he joined a delegation of American imams and rabbis on a visit to the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps, which he said left him “sick” and more embarrassed by his Hitler remarks.

“It was a pre-9/11 world,” he said. “The circumstances did not dictate that we think critically.”

Two months after the London episode, Qadhi was walking to his mosque in Medina when a friend came running. “Yasir, Yasir, did you hear what happened?” the young man called out. Qadhi rushed to a neighbor’s apartment in search of a television, just as the second tower collapsed.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the American Salafi movement fell apart. As federal agents raided Muslim mosques, charities and businesses, the most prominent Salafis vanished from clerical life or landed in prison. Some of the movement’s key figures were convicted on charges unrelated to terrorism, ranging from tax evasion to visa-immigration violations. “All of these people were jailed for different things, but if you look at them collectively, you see the Salafi movement,” Idris Palmer, a onetime Salafi activist, told me.

Law-enforcement officials say that there was no policy singling out Salafis. They were rushing to root out a new enemy, with little time to grasp the theological differences separating nonviolent fundamentalists from the creed of the hijackers. Many agents did not even know what a Salafi was “and still don’t,” says Christopher Heffelfinger, a security analyst who consults with the government. Northern Virginia — then a nexus of the American Salafi movement given its proximity to the Saudi Embassy — became a focal point. Anwar al-Awlaki was still preaching in Virginia when federal agents raided 15 local Islamic offices and homes. “It’s a war against Muslims and Islam,” Awlaki bellowed in an audio address. “It’s happening right here in America.”

The most high-profile Virginia case involved Qadhi’s onetime mentor, Ali al-Timimi, who regularly preached at a Falls Church mosque. At a dinner five days after 9/11, Timimi and some of the mosque’s young congregants discussed how to respond. Prosecutors later accused Timimi of spurring the men to wage jihad against American troops overseas, saying they practiced shooting at a paintball facility. At issue in the case against Timimi were his words: his lawyers argued that he recommended that the men move to Muslim countries, while prosecutors said he was inciting jihad. They highlighted comments by Timimi unrelated to the dinner, including politically charged speeches and a statement in which he celebrated the Columbia Shuttle disaster. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

From Medina, Qadhi followed the case closely. For American clerics, he said, the message was clear: those who engage in controversial rhetoric are treading on thin ice. While 9/11 had shaken Qadhi’s movement, it also unsettled him personally. “No matter how strange this sounds, after having lived in Saudi Arabia for so long and also in America for so long, I could fully understand the fear, the anger, the frustration, the paranoia on both sides,” Qadhi says. “I could understand ‘they’ and ‘us.’ ”

Qadhi began to wrestle with some of his own beliefs. It troubled him that Salafiya, even in its nonmilitant form, had helped shape the ideology of groups like Al Qaeda. “What type of Islam are we going to teach people?” he recalled thinking. “This isolationist Islam? This Islam of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ — is that healthy? Is that what my religion is?”

At the time, Qadhi was on track to become Medina’s first American doctoral candidate. He wondered if he had a more promising future in America, where the Salafi movement, bereft of leaders, was in crisis. From Houston, Qadhi’s father — who had retired and was volunteering as a prison chaplain — encouraged his son to leave Saudi Arabia, which he believed had left Qadhi “totally brainwashed.”

“I said, ‘Come back to America; this is your land,’ ” Kazi said in an interview at his home, sitting in what he called his “Archie Bunker chair.”

In 2004, Qadhi applied to Yale. Some of his contemporaries saw the move as strategic. “It was a stepping stone,” Imam Abdullah T. Antepli, the Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told me. “He knew that with that Yale ticket, people would take him more seriously.”

Qadhi’s Saudi professors were aghast that he would switch to a Western university to study Islam. Yale’s professors were also surprised. The religious-studies department had never taken on a graduate of the Saudi educational system. “You admit someone from Saudi Arabia, you don’t know how much intolerance you let into an American university,” says Frank Griffel, a professor of Islamic studies.

But Qadhi impressed Griffel as “profoundly intelligent” and willing to engage in critical thinking. At Medina, Qadhi’s studies revolved around the search for an absolute religious truth. At Yale, the line of inquiry was markedly different. In Qadhi’s first class with Griffel in the fall of 2005, the subject was a 12th-century Sufi jurist. “You, Yasir, probably know more about this guy,” Griffel said. “But we’re going to study how to study him.” Qadhi was struck by this analytical approach. “The question is more historical in nature — it’s about where did this idea come from, how did it affect later ideas,” Qadhi said.

For Qadhi, the Koran remained the unequivocal word of God. But he began to think more critically about the “man-made” canon that informed Islamic theology. So much of Qadhi’s intransigence — especially toward other Muslim sects — was based on the view that his tradition was divinely ordained. He came to see Salafiya as yet another “human development” that was handed down over generations and therefore subject to imperfection. “I realized that, in many issues, only God knows the ultimate truth,” he says.

Qadhi landed on the American preaching circuit with force, and his following skyrocketed among young Salafis. America’s leading clerics were converts who had risen to prominence because they could translate an intricate theology into an American vernacular. Qadhi did the same but as the proud son of Muslim immigrants. Plus he was a Salafi — or so it seemed.

In July 2006, at a conference in Copenhagen, Qadhi did the unthinkable: he shook a woman’s hand in a spontaneous challenge to her perception of fundamentalists, he said. The woman, Mona Eltahawy, a columnist on Arab and Muslim issues, wrote about the exchange, which became known in Salafi circles as the “when-Yasir-met-Mona moment.” The handshake drew a death threat from a man in London.

The following year, Qadhi further pushed the limits, making a pact of “mutual respect and cooperation” with American clerics of the Sufi order, Salafiya’s longtime enemy. Several of Qadhi’s former Saudi professors publicly assailed him, a signal he had become too prominent for them to ignore.  Qadhi began to step away from the Salafi label, rebranding his movement “orthodox with a capital O.” While he remained devoted to Salafiya’s core tenets, his followers struggled to keep pace with his changes. Others remained skeptical. “Is he being instrumental and opportunistic, or has he really abandoned some of these Salafi beliefs?” said Haykel, the Princeton professor. “He’s engaged in an incredible performance of reinvention that I’m not sure he’ll be able to pull off.” The same question hovered over Qadhi’s institute, whose founder, Alshareef, once gave a sermon titled “Why the Jews Were Cursed.”

Meanwhile, as Qadhi honed a new message, he was roundly dismissed on jihadist forums as a “sellout.” One detractor was Samir Khan, a young blogger from North Carolina who eventually moved to Yemen and now runs the Al Qaeda magazine, Inspire, according to law-enforcement officials.

While Khan was still living in the United States in 2007, he wrote several blog posts about Qadhi. “He has done good, and we do not deny this,” read one. But Qadhi’s “wrongdoings,” he continued, “can destroy the Muslims.”

Suspicion surrounded Qadhi. In February 2006, he was crossing from Canada into the United States when American border agents pulled aside his van and ushered his family into a room. An agent told Qadhi he was “waiting for permission from Washington” to let Qadhi back into the country, he recalled. They were freed more than five hours later.

It was the first sign that Qadhi was on the terrorist watch list. From then on, he and his family traveled separately. “I’m not going to be humiliated in front of my kids,” he said. At airports, he became accustomed to long interviews with border agents, who downloaded his laptop hard drive and searched his cellphone. They photocopied notes he kept on his sermons and even asked for his definition of jihad. F.B.I. agents in New Haven questioned him about two American acquaintances who had been charged with terrorism-related offenses. Qadhi said he knew nothing of their activities, but the agents pressed him to report on anyone who expressed views that “might be of interest,” he recalled. He refused, saying, “This is America, not Soviet Russia or East Germany.”

Increasingly, Qadhi felt backed into a corner. In August 2006, at a meeting for Muslim leaders in Houston, he walked up to Daniel W. Sutherland, a Homeland Security official. “Hi, I’m a pacifist Salafi,” Qadhi said to him. Looking stunned, Sutherland sat and talked with Qadhi for more than an hour.

Then in May 2008, Qadhi received an invitation from Quintan Wiktorowicz, an analyst for a government agency that was hosting a conference on counterradicalization. (Wiktorowicz was recently named a senior director at the National Security Council.) In attendance were British and American intelligence officials, including the director of Homeland Security at the time, Michael Chertoff.

During a break, Qadhi spotted a Houston acquaintance who happened to work for Chertoff. “I said, ‘Don’t you think it’s ironic that on the one hand, you’re reaching out for my expertise and wanting my help, and on the other hand, you’re harassing and intimidating me as if I’m a potential terrorist?’ ”

In the West, jihad is often depicted as a self-contained, violent cause. But in Qadhi’s world, it exists within a panoply of complex and overlapping issues. The most immediate question is not whether to fight overseas but how to make peace living in the pluralistic West.

Debates pivot on arcane theological points from the ninth century, a time when religious empires reigned, not secular nations. Classical scholars reference a world divided between dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, and dar al-harb, the land of war. But which land is America?

“If we’re not at war, why is America killing Muslims throughout the world?” says Basil Gohar, 30, who has studied with Qadhi. “If we are at war, how can we live in America peacefully?”

Even absent the question of war, Western Salafis ponder their loyalties. Internet forums buzz with talk about the concept of al-walaa wal-baraa, which is rooted in Koranic verses dictating allegiance to Muslims over non-Muslims. Qadhi’s students are divided over whether to vote, pay taxes that support the military or even celebrate Thanksgiving. “These sorts of things, they are the fault lines,” says Okoye, the student from Maryland.

Qadhi sees in his students an earlier version of himself — the passionate Salafi who took comfort in a black-and-white world. He prods them to think “in colors” and find a balance between loyalty to Islam and to America. He urges them to pay taxes and vote, drawing the line at military service, given Iraq and Afghanistan. “There is no draft,” he said. “Thank God for that.”

For Qadhi and his students, nothing tested those loyalties more than the events after the underwear-bomb plot of December 2009. Whenever a terrorism suspect is identified, AlMaghrib runs the name through its database of alumni to see if there is a match. “Oh, my God,” Qadhi said when a colleague told him that the 23-year-old suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been his student.

Qadhi searched his memory. The son of a prominent banker, Abdulmutallab had been living and studying in London. He had taken two AlMaghrib classes before attending the institute’s 16-day Houston conference in 2008. There, Abdulmutallab kept mostly to himself. “He never got into political issues,” says Abdul-Malik Ryan, 36, a lawyer from Chicago who studied with him every morning.

As media outlets discovered the connection, AlMaghrib’s leaders rushed to contain a crisis. The institute’s vice president, Waleed Basyouni, reached out to the F.B.I.’s Houston field office. Agents wanted to interview all 156 students who attended the 2008 conference. “I said, ‘If you start going to our students and terrifying them, and they stop coming, we will close down,’ ” he recalled telling the agents. “ ‘You would be pushing the students to go to basements, small circles, on the Internet. So it’s in your benefit that this organization stay open.’ ”

In previous cases, F.B.I. agents dropped by the homes of some AlMaghrib students, unannounced. This time, they issued a subpoena but agreed to arrange interviews in advance and to send female agents to question the women. The clerics urged the students to cooperate, but many balked, prompting Qadhi’s 50-minute conference call from Yale.

Veering between high-pitched emotion and tedious scholarship, Qadhi argued that the case presented no conflict of loyalties because Abdulmutallab, by all appearances, committed a crime, violating both American and Islamic law.

But, one student asked, what about America’s transgressions? Why was Qadhi focused on the militants? He responded that he had bluntly criticized American policies to State Department and other officials, telling them “the root cause of this terrorism is terrorism perpetrated at the state level.”

Even so, Qadhi urged his students to “chill out” and use common sense. “You need to look at the repercussions of what you are going to do to yourself, to your family, to your society and to the Muslims that are around you,” he said.

The students cooperated, and in subsequent meetings with the F.B.I., an agent told Qadhi and Basyouni that the bureau did not consider AlMaghrib a terrorist threat, said the clerics. (An F.B.I. spokesman declined to comment about Qadhi or the investigation.)

The Abdulmutallab episode drew a new line in the long-distance battle between Qadhi and Awlaki. The Yemeni-American cleric announced that Abdulmutallab’s operation was in retaliation for American “cruise missiles and cluster bombs.” By then, the United States had authorized the assassination of Awlaki, provoking outrage among many of Qadhi’s students.

Qadhi seemed to be riding a pendulum of self-preservation. If he lurched too far toward appeasing the government, he risked losing his base.

That March, Qadhi rose before a crowd of thousands in Elizabeth, N.J., to finally speak about Awlaki. “I am against this preacher when he tells our youth to become militant against this country while being citizens to this country,” Qadhi told the packed auditorium.

“But when my government comes and says, ‘We’re allowed to take him out; we’re allowed to kill him; we’re allowed to assassinate him,’ I also put my foot down, and I say to my own government, ‘Shame on you!’ ” The audience listened raptly. “Be angry every time a bomb is dropped on innocent civilians in the name of the war on terror,” Qadhi bellowed. “Be angry every time our tax dollars are spent to oppress yet another group of innocent Palestinians. Be angry every time more draconian measures are utilized against us in this greatest democracy on earth.”

Never before had Qadhi so forcefully condemned America’s policies in public. But “channel that anger,” he continued, “in a productive manner.” He urged a “jihad of the tongue, a jihad of the pen, a jihad that is not a military jihad.”

American Muslims, Qadhi told the audience, needed to abide by the laws of their country, understanding that had they been born in Palestine or Iraq, their “responsibilities would be different.” He did not elaborate.

It is this kind of ambiguity that gnaws at some of Qadhi’s students. “We just get wishy-washy nonanswers,” one female student told me, adding that Qadhi’s “jihad of the tongue” was unconvincing. Being martyred in the battlefield, she said, is “romantic,” while “lobbying your congressman is not.”

The call to prayer soars through the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Houston, its lobby adorned with a fresco of the Texan flag. Every summer, AlMaghrib’s most-devoted students convene here for a two-week Ilm Summit, transforming the ballroom floor — a corporate tableaux of overstuffed sofas and dim lighting — into a version of Islamic utopia.

“Ilm,” in Arabic, means “knowledge.” From dawn to night, the students immerse themselves in advanced Islamic theology and Koran recitation under the guidance of Qadhi and other clerics. The men favor long tunics, and some women wear niqabs, the full-face veil. Most are upper-middle-class college students of South Asian descent who pay $1,500 to attend. To the hotel’s Hispanic waiters, they seem otherworldly. The men and women eat, study and even ride the elevators separately.

Yet the so-called AlMaghribis upend easy stereotypes. The women are a forceful presence in class and can be spotted on breaks engaging in fierce arm-wrestling matches. The most dominant trait among the men is a quintessentially American geekiness. Qadhi, like many of his students, is a “Star Trek” fan. His lectures are laid out on PowerPoint as students crouch over laptops. Between classes, talk often turns to the latest AlMaghribi courtship.

The mood darkened last July after Qadhi announced that agents from the local F.B.I. office would be dropping by for a “roundtable discussion.” The ballroom fell to a hush as Qadhi and Basyouni led Brad Deardorff, supervisory special agent of the Houston division, to the stage. He smiled tentatively as Qadhi began a quick speech about the need to counteract extremism. Deardorff talked about the history of militant movements, saying there was “no standard profile for an Islamist terrorist.”

Then came the students’ questions, submitted in writing. “How do you expect us to help you” read one question, “when there are F.B.I. informants in our mosques?”

“Jeez, that’s a tough question,” Deardorff said. “We don’t target mosques. We do collect domestic intelligence. But mosques are buildings. Mosques don’t conspire. Mosques don’t blow things up.”

The students stared at him incredulously. It struck some as ironic that Qadhi would engage in a public discussion with the F.B.I. about “terrorism” — which they deemed a loaded word — when the underlying theological issues remained off limits. In a poll last year on Qadhi’s blog, Muslim Matters, participants ranked “jihad” as the No. 1 subject in which they wanted academic instruction.

There are several kinds of jihad, which is translated to mean “striving in the path of God.” While progressive Muslims emphasize the spiritual form, Qadhi and other conservatives say that the majority of the Koran’s references to jihad are to military struggle. Qadhi’s interpretation makes him neither a hardline militant nor a pure pacifist. While he unequivocally denounces violence against civilians, he believes Muslims have the right to defend themselves from attack. But he says “offensive jihad”— the spread of the Islamic state by force — is permissible only when ordered by a legitimate caliph, or global Muslim ruler, which is nonexistent in today’s world.

Such fine distinctions were less pronounced before 9/11, when Qadhi and others preached openly about the glory of Islam’s early military triumphs. In a decade-old sermon about one of Islam’s landmark battles, Qadhi said, “once a prophet has become ready for jihad, for fighting, then he will not take off his armor until he has actually met the enemy.”

By the time he returned to the United States in 2005, AlMaghrib had canceled a popular class on Islam’s military history, and its instructors largely avoided current events. Some students inferred from Qadhi’s silence a tacit support for militant groups. “Everyone was always like: ‘We know he believes it. He can’t say it publicly,’ ” recalled Lauren Morgan, who is 26 and a former student of Qadhi’s. She said she and other students had openly sympathized with militants. “I think if you’re going down the Salafi interstate, the jihadi exit is open for you,” Morgan said. “It’s there.”

Many students first heard Qadhi denounce jihadist movements almost a year after the London bombings. That same month, June 2006, AlMaghrib released a statement calling terrorism “a perversion of the true Islamic teachings.”

The central contest between Qadhi and militants like Awlaki hinges on a rather abstruse point: how to define America in Islamic terms. Qadhi likens his country to Abyssinia, the seventh-century African kingdom that gave refuge to the prophet’s followers. In exchange for upholding the laws of the land, they were allowed to worship freely — a contract Qadhi equates to an American passport or visa. Breaking the contract by joining militant groups at war with America constitutes treachery, Qadhi says, which is forbidden in Islam. Awlaki, by contrast, compares America with ancient Mecca, where the prophet’s followers were persecuted, forcing them to flee and later fight back.

Critics take issue with the technical nature of the debate. Qadhi’s students, they argue, could conclude that joining a militant group is permissible provided they renounce their citizenship. This is further complicated by his refusal to address whether the Islamist uprisings in Iraq and Afghanistan constitute legitimate jihads.

Saying yes would open the door to public recriminations, but denying the legitimacy of those insurgencies would fly in the face of Islamic law, says Andrew F. March, a professor at Yale who specializes in Islamic law. “The conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine are unambiguous examples of jihad or war against an outside invader,” March says. “There is no mainstream juridical opinion that says that Muslims cannot resist that.”

Under mounting pressure from students, Qadhi and another AlMaghrib scholar, Abu Eesa Niamatullah, considered teaching a course on the fiqh, or jurisprudence, of jihad. “What stopped us?” Niamatullah says. “Picture two bearded guys talking about the fiqh of jihad. We would be dead. We would be absolutely finished.”

On Oct. 18, Qadhi posted a 5,000-word essay on his blog, trying to jump-start a discussion on jihad. He argued that extremists cherry-pick verses from the Koran to justify actions antithetical to the faith, while United States policy also plays a central role in radicalizing Muslim youth. What Abdulmutallab did not hear at AlMaghrib, Qadhi lamented, “was a discourse regarding the current political and social ills that he felt so passionately about, and a frank dialogue about the Islamic method for correcting such ills.”

“It is an awkward position to be in,” he wrote of his situation. “How can one simultaneously fight against a powerful government, a pervasive and sensationalist-prone media and a group of overzealous, rash youth who are already predisposed to reject your message, because they view you as being a part of the establishment (while, ironically, the ‘establishment’ never ceases to view you as part of the radicals)?”

One week later, Qadhi was flying through Dallas. He had traveled free of hassle for nine months and seemed to be off the watch list. But now, border agents were stopping him. They wanted to ask a few questions. “Here we go again,” he said.

Qadhi’s ambiguous relationship with the government reflects a quandary facing the Obama administration: whether to engage with Muslims across the ideological spectrum. While many American Muslim leaders have been hit by accusations of extremism, Qadhi is a natural target. Self-described terrorism watchdogs refer to AlMaghrib as “Jihad U.,” and last year, a Fox News reporter called Qadhi a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

While Qadhi hardly seems the caricature of his critics’ rendering — the stealth Islamist plotting a shariah takeover of the White House — his views reflect a vision that many Americans would find objectionable. He hopes that the world will someday fully adhere to his faith, he said, conceding that it would most likely be “not in my lifetime.” Egypt’s recent uprising, he wrote on his blog, illustrates that change cannot come from militancy but “begins in the heart and in the home, and it shall eventually reach the streets and shake the foundations of government.”

As the administration confronts domestic radicalization, some government analysts say they have much to learn from clerics like Qadhi. “We’re trying to get our arms around how to engage with Yasir and people like him,” a senior counterterrorism official told me. “It’s a new issue.” One concern, officials told me, is their uncertainty about how world events might harden the thinking of clerics like Qadhi.

In the search for answers, the Obama administration has studied counterradicalization approaches overseas. In Europe, some policy makers argue that nonmilitant fundamentalists are the problem, not the solution, because their rigid interpretation of Islam fuels the very radicalization they profess to fight. The British government was rebuked for providing funds to nonmilitant Salafi organizations.

The U.S. Constitution would prevent such financing. But the question remains to what extent the administration will consult with nonviolent fundamentalists or help them by creating what Qadhi and others call “a safe space” in which Muslims are free to discuss controversial issues without the fear of repercussions.

“There is a way to stop extremism,” he claimed, “but it’s not palatable for Americans.”

Qadhi recently went live with a Web site devoted to issues of jihad. He is calling it The J Word.

Other American clerics have also begun to speak out, most notably Imam Zaid Shakir, who posted a widely read letter online aimed at dissuading the “would-be mujahid,” or warrior.

Gone are the days when Qadhi would dismiss teaming up with clerics of different schools. There were too few Salafis left in America. “I need help,” Qadhi told me one afternoon last month.

He was sitting in the library of his new home, where more than 10,000 books line the cherry-stained shelves. Memphis is a long way from the centers of Islamic thought — places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It would be folly, Qadhi said, to think that a young American cleric could solve the theological puzzles that have invited centuries of debate.

But he was certain of one thing: only America’s clerics could lead the way forward for their young flocks.

“American Muslims are at the forefront in battling Islamic extremism because they have everything to lose if anything else happens,” Qadhi said. “They’ll lose their American identity, and they’ll lose their prestige, whatever prestige remains of our religion that we would like to have in this land.”

Andrea Elliott (a.elliott-reporter@nytimes.com) is a reporter for The Times. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for a series of articles about an imam in Brooklyn.
Editor: Joel Lovell (j.lovell-MagGroup@nytimes.com)

A version of this article appeared in print on March 20, 2011, on page MM34 of the Sunday Magazine..
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/magazine/mag-20Salafis-t.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all

Aron Lee Ralston - "127 Hours" "Between a Rock and a Hard Place" author

2011-03-17T18:21:00.000-07:00

William Wilberforce

2011-03-07T08:02:00.000-08:00

“God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners (morality).”

William Wilberforce was one of Britain’s great social reformers. In particular, William Wilberforce is remembered for his active participation in getting Parliament to outlaw the slave trade.

Early Life William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce was born in Hull, to a wealthy family. At a young age he moved to London where he lived with some nonconformist relatives. These puritan ideals appealed to the young William and he became closely attached to his London relatives. However, at the age of 12, his Mother brought him back to Hull. His mother was keen to see William brought up in the traditional Anglican Church tradition and was not keen on her son having a nonconformist upbringing.

At the age of 18, William went to St John’s College, Cambridge University. As a student he lived a fairly carefree life, his early religious intensity had diminished and he was an active participant in the social life of University. However, he distanced himself from some of the social and drinking excesses his student colleagues participated in. William was not the best student (he had come into an inheritance and so felt little need to work very hard) However, he was well liked; he was an excellent conversationist with a pleasing voice and renowned singing voice. It was at Cambridge that he became friends with William Pitt the younger. William Pitt, a future Prime Minister, would remain a good friend and mostly a loyal supporter of William in later life. (except during the war with France, when they fell out on politics)

As his time at University was drawing to a close, William decided to run for parliament. Spending £8,000 he was able to win the seat in his native Hull, entering parliament at the age of 21. He decided to be an independent, although he would lean towards the reform element of the Tory party.

After four years in Parliament, William travelled to Europe with his sister and Mother. It was during their European vacation that the religious urge came back to William. A key factor was reading the evangelical book, Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul together. This encouraged him to lead a religious life, such as, getting up early to read the Bible; he lost interest in card games and drinking. He became a committed Christian for the remainder of his life and his religion deeply influenced his outlook on life. On returning to England he spoke with John Newton, one of the leading Anglican churchman of his day. This further encouraged him to lead a religious life, but also he was encouraged to stay in Politics and work for social reform.

William Wilberforce and Anti Slavery Movement

It was shortly after this ‘conversion’ period in 1786 that Wilberforce was invited to take an active role in the abolitionist movement. The Leading figures in the anti slavery campaign (such as Thomas Clarkson) wished Wilberforce to be their figurehead for passing legislation through parliament. Although Wilberforce was in complete sympathy with their aims, initially he was skeptical of his own abilities. However, after deliberation he decided to take the campaign on.

“If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow-creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.”

- William Wilberforce

Following successful public campaigns by the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in raising awareness of the conditions of slaves, William Wilberforce was encouraged to try and pass a bill in the year of 1789.

In 1789 Wilberforce spoke in the House of Commons arguing that slavery was a matter of great injustice and contrary to principles of human dignity. Although there was considerable support within Parliament, the anti abolitionists were well organised and they managed to out vote the bill by 163 votes to 88.

After spending a year raising awareness of the issue, Wilberforce tried again the next year. However, the anti abolitionists were again well organised and were able to slip in a delaying tactic in putting off the abolition indefinitely.

Following the outbreak of war with France in 1793, the mood swung against the cause for abolishing the slave trade. Any calls for its abolition were often accused of being seditious. The country became very conservative due to the threat of invasion; in the climate of fear there was little interest in the emancipation of slaves.

However, in the early part of the nineteenth century, the climate once again became favourable and following the death of William Pitt, in 1806, Wilberforce tried once more. However, they first tried a clever trick of making it more illegal for slave owners to participate in the trading slaves with the French colonies. It was a bill not aimed at making the slave trade illegal, it was hoped to just undermine their business, therefore weakening the position of the ship owners. It was suggested by maritime lawyer, James Stephen. The bill made it illegal for ships to aid the French slave trade; it was passed and effectively ended 75% of the slave trade.

Slave Trade Act 1807

In 1807, both the Lords and the Commons finally passed the Slave Trade Act; Wilberforce was able to command an unexpected large margin of 283 votes to 16.

Slavery Abolition Act

This act only made illegal the trade in slaves. Many slaves in the British Empire were still not free. Therefore, in the remaining period of his life, William Wilberforce campaigned for the rights of slaves in Africa and other parts of the world. Just a few days before his death, Wilberforce heard the news that on 26 July 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act was passed – outlawing slavery in most parts of the British Empire. India would be freed from slavery a decade later.

Other Social Campaigns of William Wilberforce

Although he is best associated with the slave trade, William Wilberforce also campaigned for other social issues such as prison reform, education, missionary work in India and issues of public health. However, he did not support trades unions, nor did he support women rights.

Personal Life of William Wilberforce

William’s personal life was dominated by his religious sensibilities. He married late in life to the devoted Barbara Ann Spooner. In 10 years they had 6 children

Citation : Pettinger, Tejvan. "Biography of William Wilberforce", Oxford, UK www.biographyonline.net, 22nd Jan. 2009.

David Halpin gives a presentation on 'The Zionist agenda, Dr. David Kelly, The propaganda of the BBC'.

2011-03-06T15:45:00.000-08:00

I first saw my wife 10 years after we married

2011-02-25T06:43:00.000-08:00

Experience: I first saw my wife 10 years after we married'Being blind was just part of our married life. We didn't talk about it, we just lived with it'

Series: ExperiencePrevious Index Experience: I first saw my wife 10 years after we married'Being blind was just part of our married life. We didn't talk about it, we just lived with it'

The Guardian, Saturday 19 February 2011 Article history
'I didn’t think anyone would want to marry me, but she said she did.' Photograph: Chris Thomond for the Guardian

When you are blind, you imagine how people look. Not by touching their face or gauging their height, but by their voice, and the kind of person they are. That's what helps you form a picture. I realise now I can see that those pictures aren't always accurate. But when I first saw my wife, Gurjeet, 10 years after we'd met, she was exactly as I'd imagined.

I lost my sight at school, Christmas 1972 – I was 10 and larking about when I fell in some nettles and came up in a terrible rash. The doctor gave mum some tablets to clear it up but I had an awful reaction to them – what's called Stevens Johnson syndrome – and for a few weeks it was touch and go if I'd survive.

One of the effects of the SJS was my tear ducts stopped working; without tears, your corneas can't work. They tried all sorts to fix the problem. Every two weeks when we went to hospital I'd buy comics – the Beano, Dandy, the Beezer – thinking I'd be able to read them on the way home, but I never could. My sight just kept getting worse, and by the time I was 14 it had gone.

I went to a special school in Birmingham, where you had to board Monday to Friday. I knew my mum and dad found it hard to leave me there, but they knew it was the best thing for me. The turning point was going to college in Hereford to study IT – the Royal National College for the Blind, where I am now a governor. I didn't learn only academic and vocational stuff, but how to be independent: cooking, cleaning, doing sports, going out and about.

I used to ring my parents every day and tell them how I was doing. They were proud and, if I'm honest, surprised, too. A lot of people are surprised. They imagine that when you're blind you "manage" rather than "achieve", and that I must feel those years of being blind were wasted somehow. That's simply not true. It was an amazing period of my life.

The best thing was meeting Gurjeet. It was an arranged marriage. I didn't think anyone would want to marry me, but she said she did. She said it felt right. I sensed she was lovely and couldn't believe my luck. Even on my wedding day my brother-in-law and I wondered if she'd turn up. But there she was, waiting for me. We have been shoulder to shoulder since.

After I married I started a business building computers. I could do all the programming myself through a Braille terminal but I remember the first one I built. Gurjeet and I worked through the night – she was my eyes while I was building it, orientating me around the circuit board. Then she'd drive me around the country so I could deliver the computers to clients, with our two daughters in the back. I bought a shop and it went from strength to strength. At our height we were one of the largest suppliers in the UK and turning over millions.

Being blind was just part of our married life. We didn't talk about it, we just lived with it. I never thought it would be any different. Then one day – when we'd been married about 10 years – an optician I knew came rushing into our office saying he'd read about a new technique he was sure could help me. Two weeks later I was at an eye hospital in Brighton and booked in for this new experimental operation. When they took off the bandages and cleaned up my eyes, it was like having Windolene cleaned off a window. I saw the doctor's tie, then his huge smile, and then everything was crystal clear. When Gurjeet and the girls walked into the room, they were just as I had pictured in my mind. So familiar. I will never forget that moment. "I can see you," I said to them. "I can see for miles."

The world seemed so bright – that's what struck me most. The colours of the 70s – the dark red curtains, brown lino, drab shopfronts and black Morris Minors and Austin 1100s that I had remembered from my childhood – were replaced by this array of bright shades. We all walked down to the seafront in Brighton. It was a beautiful day, and I was walking in front, holding the girls' hands, showing off a bit. I couldn't stop staring at everything. There was so much to take in. It was wonderful. I still have to pinch myself when I think about it today.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/19/i-saw-my-wife-10-years-after-we-married

Poetry of Abdullah William Quilliam: Against Tyrants

2011-02-21T14:31:00.001-08:00

Poetry of Abdullah William Quilliam: -
Day of Freedom, bright and clear,
Day that tyrants well may fear,
Day they fall, undone, unwrung,
Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.

A description of the Beloved, Sal Allahu 'alayhi wa salam, from "The Sunnah as Primordiality" by Shaikh Abdal Hakim Murad

2011-02-15T15:24:00.000-08:00

A description of the Beloved, Sal Allahu 'alayhi wa salam, from "The Sunnah as Primordiality" by Shaikh Abdal Hakim Murad
paraphrased by Mustafa Miroku Nemeth

Here is a condensed recollection, a kind of verbal icon, of that Prophetic beauty. It is paraphrased from a passage by Imam al-Ghazali, in Book 19 of his Revival of the Religious Sciences, Ihya Ulum al-Din.

‘The Messenger of God (s) was the mildest of men, but also the bravest and most just of men. He was the most restrained of people; never touching the hand of a woman over whom he did not have rights, or who was not his mahram. He was the most generous of men, so that never did a gold or silver coin spend the night in his house. If something remained at the end of the day, because he had not found someone to give it to, and night descended, he would go out, and not return home until he had given it to someone in need. From what Allah gave him [...] he would take only the simplest and easiest foods: dates and barley, giving anything else away in the path of Allah. Never did he refuse a gift for which he was asked. He used to mend his own sandals, and patch his own clothes, and serve his family, and help them to cut meat. He was the shyest of men, so that his gaze would never remain long in the face of anyone else. He would accept the invitation of a freeman or a slave, and accept a gift, even if it were no more than a gulp of milk, or the thigh of a rabbit, and offer something in return. He never consumed anything given in sadaqa. He was not too proud to reply to a slave-girl, or a pauper in rags. He would become angered for his Lord, never for himself; he would cause truth and justice to prevail even if this led to discomfort to himself or to his companions.

‘He used to bind a stone around his waist out of hunger. He would eat what was brought, and would not refuse any permissible food. If there was dates without bread, he would eat, if there was roast meat, he would eat; if there was rough barley bread, he would eat it; if there was honey or something sweet, he would eat it; if there was only yogurt without even bread, he would be quite satisfied with that.

‘He was not sated, even with barley-bread, for three consecutive days, until the day he met his Lord, not because of poverty, or avarice, but because he always preferred others over himself.

‘He would attend weddings, and visit the sick, and attend funerals, and would often walk among his enemies without a guard. He was the most humble of men, and the most serene, without arrogance. He was the most eloquent of men, without ever speaking for too long. He was the most cheerful of men. He was afraid of nothing in the dunya. He would wear a rough Yemeni cloak, or a woolen tunic; whatever was lawful and was to hand, that he would wear. He would ride whatever was to hand: sometimes a horse, sometimes a camel, sometimes a mule, sometimes a donkey. And at times he would walk barefoot, without an upper garment or a turban or a cap. He would visit the sick even if they were in the furthest part of Madina. He loved perfumes, and disliked foul smells.

‘He maintained affectionate and loyal ties with his relatives, but without preferring them to anyone who was superior to them. He never snubbed anyone. He accepted the excuse of anyone who made an excuse. He would joke, but would never say anything that was not true. He would laugh, but not uproarously. He would watch permissible games and sports, and would not criticise them. He ran races with his wives. Voices would be raised around him, and he would be patient. He kept a sheep, from which he would draw milk for his family. He would walk among the fields of his companions. He never despised any pauper for his poverty or illness; neither did he hold any king in awe simply because he was a king. He would call rich and poor to Allah, without distinction.

‘In him, Allah combined all noble traits of character; although he neither read nor wrote, having grown up in a land of ignorance and deserts in poverty, as a shepherd, and as an orphan with neither father nor mother. But Allah Himself taught him all the excellent qualities of character, and praiseworthy ways, and the stories of the early and the later prophets, and the way to salvation and triumph in the Akhira, and to joy and detachment in the dunya, and how to hold fast to duty, and to avoid the unnecessary. May Allah give us success in obeying him, and in following his sunna. Amin ya rabb al-alamin.‘

This moving portrait by Imam al-Ghazali depicts our role model, and simultaneously our ideal of humanity lived in the form of absolute beauty. His was a life lived in fullness. There was no aspect of human perfection that he did not know and manifest. And his perfection also indicates the nature of specifically masculine perfection. He was a great warrior; a sound hadith narrated by Imam al-Darimi tells us, on the authority of Ali, that

‘On the day of Badr I was present, and we sought refuge in the Prophet (s.w.s.),

who was the closest of us all to the enemy. On that day he was the most powerful

of all the combatants who fought.’One of the Companions described him riding his horse, wearing a red turban and holding his sword, and said later that never in his life had he seen a sight more beautiful.

In 23 years he became undisputed ruler of Arabia. Through his genius and charisma, and the attractive force of his personality, he united the Arabian tribes for the first time in their history. He took his people from the depths of idolatry into the purest form of monotheism. He gave them a law for the first time. He laid down, in his mosque in Madina, a system of worship, self-restraint and spiritual fruitfulness that provided the inspiration and the precedent for countless generations of later worshippers and saints. In affirming the Ka‘ba, he affirmed beauty; so that all else that he did was beautiful.

And in all this, he attributed his success only to Allah. He was, as Imam al-Ghazali records, the most humble of men. He was forbearing, polite, courteous, and mild. He paid no attention to people’s outward form, but assessed and responded to their spirits. He forgave constantly. He was indulgent with the simple Bedouin of Central Arabia, the roughest people on earth. When one of them. who wanted money, pulled his cloak so violently that it left a mark, he merely smiled, and ordered that the man be given what he wanted.

.

Is English law related to Muslim law?

2011-02-05T16:02:00.001-08:00

In London's historic "Inns of Court", barristers practise law in the shadow of the distinctive medieval Temple Church. But does English law really owe a debt to Muslim law?

For some scholars, a historical connection to Islam is a "missing link" that explains why English common law is so different from classical Roman legal systems that hold sway across much of the rest of Europe.

It's a controversial idea. Common law has inspired legal systems across the world. What's more, calls for the UK to accommodate Islamic Sharia law have caused public outcry.

The first port of call when looking for an eastern link in the common law is London's Inns of Court.

"You are now leaving London, and entering Jerusalem," says Robin Griffith-Jones, the Master of the Temple Church, as he walks around its spectacular rotunda.

The church stands in the heart of the legal district and was built by the Knights Templar, the fierce order of monks-turned-warriors who fought Muslim armies in the Crusades.

London's historic legal district, with its professional class of independent lawyers, has parallels with the way medieval Islamic law was organised.

In Sunni Islam there were four great schools of legal theory, which were often housed in "madrassas" around mosques. Scholars debated each other on obscure points of law, in much the same way as English barristers do.

There is a theory that the Templars modelled the Inns of Court on Muslim ideas. But Mr Griffith-Jones suggests it is pretty unlikely the Templars imported the madrassa system to England. They were suppressed after 1314 - yet lawyers only started congregating in the Inns of Court after the 1360s.

Perpetual endowment

This doesn't necessarily rule out the Templars' role altogether. Medieval Muslim centres of learning were governed under a special legal device called the "waqf" under which trustees guaranteed their independence.

In an oak-panelled room in Oxford, historian Dr Paul Brand explains the significance of the 1264 statute that Walter De Merton used to establish Merton College. He was a businessman with connections to the Knights Templar

The original 1264 document that established Merton has parallels with the waqf because it is a "perpetual endowment" - a system where trustees keep the college running through the ages. It's been used as a template across the Western world.

Dr Brand says many branches of Western learning, from mathematics to philosophy, owe a debt of gratitude to Islamic influence.

Advanced Arabic texts were translated into European languages in the Middle Ages. But there's no record of Islamic legal texts being among those influencing English lawyers.

And Dr Brand pointed out the Knights Templar were, after all, crusaders. They wanted to fight Muslims, not to learn from them, and they were rarely close enough to observe their institutions at work.

But the fact remains that England in the Middle Ages had very distinct legal principles, like jury trial and the notion that "possession is nine tenths of the law". And there was one other place in Europe that had similar legal principles on the books in the 12th Century.

Jury trial

From the end of the 9th to the middle of the 11th Century, Sicily had Muslim rulers. Many Sicilians were Muslims and followed the Maliki school of legal thought in Sunni Islam.

Maliki law has certain provisions which resemble English legal principles, such as jury trial and land possession. Sicily represented a gateway into western Europe for Islamic ideas but it's unclear how these ideas are meant to have travelled to England.

Norman barons first invaded Sicily in 1061 - five years before William the Conqueror invaded England. The Norman leaders in Sicily went on to develop close cultural affinities with the Arabs, and these Normans were blood relations of Henry II, the English king credited with founding the common law.

But does that mean medieval England somehow adopted Muslim legal ideas?
There is no definitive proof, because very few documents survive from the period. All we have is the stories of people like Thomas Brown - an Englishman who was part of the Sicilian government, where he was known in Arabic as "Qaid Brun".

He later returned to England and worked for the king during the period when common law came into being.

There is proof he brought Islamic knowledge back to England, especially in mathematics. But no particular proof he brought legal concepts.

There are clear parallels between Islamic legal history and English law, but unless new historical evidence comes to light, the link remains unproven.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7631388.stm

John Mohammed Butt: The hippie who became an imam

2011-02-05T15:56:00.000-08:00

Forty years after following the hippie trail to South Asia, John Butt is still living in the region, and still spreading a message of peace and love - though now as an Islamic scholar.

As our car turned around the bumpy Indian road, a gleaming white marble minaret came into view. My fellow passenger, John Mohammed Butt, could barely contain his excitement.

"Can you see it?" he asks. "It's like the Oxford University of Islamic learning. For me these minarets and domes are just like the spires and towers of Oxford.

"It's been almost 30 years since I was last here and I am still getting the same thrill. This is my alma mater."

The alma mater in question is Darul-Uloom Deoband, South Asia's largest madrassa, or Islamic school.

Driving through the madrassa gates, we entered a world rarely seen by Western eyes.

Deoband was built in 1866 by Indian Muslims opposed to the then British rule. Little has changed since - winding streets and tiny courtyards lined with stalls selling fragrant chai, bubbling pots of rice and paintings of Mecca.

Everywhere are the Talibs, religious students, young men with dark-eyed fervent expressions carrying books or quietly reciting the Koran.

And in another scene reminiscent of Oxford, students riding bicycles.

A chai seller recognises John and runs towards him. "John Sahib, John Sahib."

The two had not seen each other in decades, yet the man remembers him instantly. "John Sahib was the only student I ever saw who used to go jogging.

"There was only one John Mohammed - unique," he laughs.

That is perhaps not so surprising, when you learn that John Butt remains the first and only Western man ever to have graduated from Deoband.

He showed me his old dormitory room, a windowless cell where he spent eight years in a life of virtual seclusion, living under a regime of prayer and Koranic study.

Imposing figure

But that is just one facet of this man's extraordinary life.

Aside from his time at Deoband, he has spent most of the past 40 years living among the fierce Pashtun tribes, who inhabit the lawless hinterland between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He went there in 1969, he says, as a dope-smoking young hippie and never came home.

He laughs. "When people call me an ageing ex-hippie, I always reply that I am ageing maybe, but I'm certainly not ex. I'm still a hippie."

John Butt cuts an imposing figure.

At 6ft 5ins (1.95m) tall, he sports a long white beard and alabaster skin that is almost translucent.

Dressed in flowing white ethnic robes, he reminds me of a Benedictine hermit monk or a Victorian explorer, swashbuckling straight out of the pages of an historical novel.

He tells me he adores the Queen, Stilton is his favourite cheese and that football is his passion.

Yet among the border tribes, he is regarded as a native Pashtun and revered as an Islamic scholar.

Home for him, until recently, was a tiny village in Pakistan's Swat valley.

Swat was once a popular tourist destination but is now the scene of regular battles between the Pakistani military and the Taliban.

But back in 1969, the young John was hooked from the moment he saw Swat, describing to me snow-capped mountains, rivers like flowing jewels, forests and alpine pastures.

It was, he says, "like Tolkien's Middle-earth, magical and other worldly" inhabited by tribal people who were "very pleasant, big-hearted, tolerant, easy-going and welcoming".

When his fellow hippies grew up and went home to become accountants and lawyers, John stayed on - becoming fluent in the Pashto language and studying Islam.

But John's world changed in the late 1980s, with the arrival of jihadists, who came to the border areas from all over the world to fight the war against the Russians in Afghanistan.

"I saw the rural, religious Pashtun way of life I had come to love so much being diluted, contaminated and poisoned, in particular by Arabs from the Middle East," he says.

"The way they practise Islam is very different to the tribal areas, but they used money and influence to impose their own set of values."

So he decided to fight for his adopted culture.

Peaceful Islam

In the early 1990s, he joined the BBC World Service Pashto service and helped to set up New Home New Life, a now iconic Afghan radio soap opera, known as The Archers of Afghanistan

Six years ago, he set up a radio station which broadcasts across the Afghan-Pakistan border and which tries to promote tribal traditions along with peace and reconciliation.

More recently, John has switched his attentions back to Afghanistan and is spearheading the formation of a new Islamic university in the predominantly Pashtun city of Jalalabad.

"It makes perfect sense. There is currently nowhere in Afghanistan where a young man can do higher Islamic studies. They go to Pakistan, where as we know some of them have become radicalised," he says, emphasising that his university will give a platform to moderates.

But this promotion of peaceful Islam has set him on a collision course with militants. His beloved Pakistan has now become too unsafe for him.

"Swat is a militarised zone and people I see as foreigners there now treat me like I'm the foreigner, even though I lived there for 40 years.

"It's hard to work out who is who any more - who is Taliban, who is criminal. The waters are very muddy."

Last year, waters of another kind finally put paid to his idyll, when his house was washed away in the floods which devastated the area and killed thousands.

"It was a relief in some ways. When I lost the house, I knew I'd never go back there."

Afghanistan has also become increasingly perilous after Taliban death threats.

The Taliban have delivered so-called night letters - notes hand-delivered in secret and at night for maximum impact - warning students not to study at the university and denouncing John as a Christian missionary or an "orientalist".

Death threats have also been made to his teachers and staff.

"I've hired some of the best Islamic scholars in the region - pious, good and brave men," he says. "They know this is for the benefit of Afghanistan and they insist they will stay working with me despite the dangers."

As I said goodbye, he was planning to travel to Jalalabad on the local bus. We talked about the possibility of him being attacked and he admitted he could easily be killed.

But when I asked if he was scared, he brushed me off with a shrug. "You only die once. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9369142.stm

Every heart ….melts in the rapture of the beloved

2011-01-31T03:00:00.001-08:00

Every heart ….
Every heart ….melts in the rapture of the beloved
Every heart …melts in the rapture of the beloved
And for that love I have a witness- a witness and a proof:
Regarding that proof, if I mention the name of Muhammed (saw) the eyes of the lovers will be overrun with tears ….
...He is the messenger of God ..
He is the messenger of peace …..
He is the chosen one, he is to the world’s creator a most trusted friend

Shikwa and Jawab e Shikwa

2011-01-29T07:24:00.000-08:00

Shikwa and Jawab-e-Shikwa are the evergreen poems of Dr. Allama Muhammad Iqbal. Dr. Iqbal used wonderful Urdu vocabulary in this poem and highlighted achievements of Muslims.

In Shikwa, he played an oppressed and frustrated Muslim who is being complaining to Allah Almighty. In its second part, he assumed if Allmighty Lord Himself is addressing to this complaining Muslim and answering to his protest.

Shikwa:

Why should I abet the loss, why forget the gain,
Why forfiet the future, bemoan the past in vain?

Hear the wail of nightingal, and remain unstirred,
Am I a flower insensate that will not say a word?

The power of speech emboldens me to speak out my heart,
I'll sure be damned, I know, if fault my God.

_____________________________________________

Hear, O Lord, from the faithful ones this sad lament,
From those used to hymn a praise, a word of discontent.

Enternally were you present, Lord, eternally omniscent,
The flower hung upon the tree, but without incense.

Be Thou fair, tell us true, O fountsinhead of grace,
How could the scent spread withoutthe breeze apace?

______________________________________________

The world presented a queer sight ere we took the stage,
Stones and plants in your stead were worshipped in that age.

Man, being inured to senses, couldn't accept a thing unseen,
How could a formless God impress his senses keen?

Tell me, Lord, if anyone ever invoked Thy name,
The strength of Muslim arm alone restored Thy fame.

__________________________________________________ _____

There was no dearth of peoples on this earth before,
Turkish tribes and Persian clans lived in days of yore;

The Greeks and the Chinese both bred and throve,
Christians as well as the Jews on this planet roved.

But who in Thy holy name raised his valiant sword,
Who set the things right, resolved the rigmarole?

__________________________________________________ _____

We were the warrior bands battling for Thy cause,
Now on land, now on water, we the crusades fought.

Now in Europe's synods did we loudly pray,
Now in African deserts made a bold foray.

Not for territorial greed did we wield the sword,
Not for pelf and power did we suffer the blows.

__________________________________________________ _____

Had we been temped by the greed of glittering gold,
Instead of breaking idols, would have idols sold.

We impressed on every heart the oneness of our mighty Lord,
Even under the threat of sword, bold and clever was our call.

Who conquered, tell us Thou, the fearful Khyber pass?
Who vanquished the Imperial Rome, who made it fall?

__________________________________________________ _____

Who broke the idols of the primitive folks?
Who fought the kafirs, massacred their hordes?

If the prayer time arrived right amid the war,
With their faces turned to Kaaba, knelt down the brave Hejaz.

Mahmud and Ayaz stood together in the same flank,
The ruler and the ruled forget the difference in their rank.

__________________________________________________ _____

The rich and poor, Lord and slave, all were levelled down,
All became brethern in love, with Thy grace crowned.

We roamed the world through, visited every place,
Did our rounds like the cup, serving sacred ale.

Forget about the forests, we spared not the seas,
Into the dark, unfathomed ocean, we pushed our steeds.

__________________________________________________ _____

We removed falsehood from the earth's face,
We broke the shackles of the human race.

We reclaimed your Kaaba with our kneeling brows,
We pressed the sacred Quran to our heart and soul.

Even then you grumble, we are false, untrue,
If you call us faithless, tell us what are you?

__________________________________________________ _____

You reserve your favours for men of other shades,
While you hurl your bolts on the Muslim race.

This is not our complaint that such alone are blesse,
Who do not know the etiquette, nor even can converse.

The tragedy is while kafirs are with houries actually blest,
On vague hopes of houries in heaven the Muslim race is made to rest!

__________________________________________________ _____

Poverty, taunts, ignominy stare us in the face,
Is humiliation the sole reward of our suffering race?

To perpetuate Thy name is our sole concern,
Deprived of the saqi's aid can the cup revolve and turn?

Gone is your assemblage, off your lovers have sailed,
The midnight sights are no more heard, nor the morning wails;

__________________________________________________ _____

They pledged their hearts to you, what is their return?
Hardly had they stepped inside, when they were externed.

Thy lovers came and went away, fed on hopes of future grace,
Search them now with the lamp of your glowing face.

Unassuaged is Laila's ache, unquenched is Qais's thirst,
In the wilderness of Nejd, the wild deer are still berserk.

__________________________________________________ _____

The same passion thrills the hearts, enchanting still is beauty's gaze,
You are the same as before, same too is the Prophet's race.

Why then this indifference, without a cause or fault?
Why with your threatening looks dost thou break our heart?

Accepted that the flame of love burneth low and dim,
We do not, as in your, dance attendance on your whims;

__________________________________________________ _____

But you too, pardon us, possess a coquettish heart,
Now on us, now on others, alight your amorous darts.

The spring has now taken leave, broken lies the lyre string,
The birds that chirped among the leaves have also taken wing;

A single nightingale is left singing on the tree,
A flood of song in her breast is longing for release.

__________________________________________________ _____

From atop the firs and pines the doves have flown away,
The floral petals lie scattered all along the way.

Desolate lie the garden paths, once dressed and neat,
Leafless hang the branches on the naked trees.

The nightingale is unconcerned with the season's range,
Would that someone in the grove appreciates her wail.

__________________________________________________ _____

May the nightingale's wail pierce the listeners' hearts,
May the clinking caravan awaken slumbering thoughts!

Let the hearts pledge anew their faith to you, O Lord,
Let's re-charge our cups from the taverns of the past.

Through I hold a Persian cup, the wine is pureHejaz,
Thought I sing an Indian song, the turn is of the Arabian cast

JAWAB-e-SHIKWA

Second part of the poem "Shikwa". Here, Dr. Iqbal is assuming that Allmighty Allah addresses Muslims and show them the mirror. Wonderful poem with outstanding use of Urdu literature. Bottom line of the logically written thought provoking poem is:'ki Muhammad (PBUH) say wafa tu nay, tou HUM terey hain
yeh jahan cheez hai kya, loh-o-qalam terey hain' ......

Jawab-e-Shikwa:
The word springing from the heart surely carries weight,
Though notendowed with wings, it yet can fly in space.

Pureand spiritual in its essence, it pegs its gaze on high,
Rising from the lowly dust, grazes past the skies.

Keen, defiant, and querulous was my passion crazed,
It pierced through the skies, my audacious wail.
__________________________________________________ _____

"Someone is there," thus spoke the heaven's warder old,
the planets said, "From above proceeds this voice so bold."

"No, no," the moon said," "tis someone on the earth below,"
Butted in the milky way: "The voice is hereabouts, I trow."

Ruzwan alone, if at all, understood aright,
He knew it was the man, from heaven once exiled. __________________________________________________ _____

Even the angles wondered who raised this cry,
All the celestial denizens looked about surprised.

Does man possess the might to scale empyreal heights?
Has this mere pinch of dust learnt the knack to fly?

What are these earthly folks? Careless of all respect,
How bold and impudent, the lowly dwellers of the earth! __________________________________________________ _____

Extremely rude and insolent, cross even with God,
Is it the same Adam whom angels once did laud?

Steeped in bliss, man is of wisdom's lore possessed,
Nonetheless, he's alien to humility's sterling worth.

Man feels proud of the power of his speech,
But the fool doesn'tknow how and what to speak. __________________________________________________ _____

You narrate a woeful tale, thus the voice arose,
Your heart is boiling overwith tears uncontrolled.

You have delivered your plaint with perfect skill and art,
You have brought the humans in contact with God.

We are inclined to grant, but none deserves our grace,
None treads the righteous path, whom to show the way? __________________________________________________ _____

Our school is open to all, but talent there is none,
Where is that soil fertile to breed the human gems?

We reward the deserving folks with splendid meed,
We grant newer worlds to those who strive and seek.

Arms have been drained of strength, hearts have gone astray,
The Muslim race is a blot on the Prophet's face. __________________________________________________ _____

Idol-breakers have left the scene, idol-makers remain,
Aazar has inheritedAbraham's glorious name.

Wine, flask,and drinkers-all arenew and changed,
A differentKaaba, different idols now your worship claim.

Therewas a time when you were respected far and wide,
Once this desert bloom was the season's wealth and pride. __________________________________________________ _____

Every Muslim then was a lover profound of God,
Your sole beloved once was the all-embracing Lord.

Who removed falsehood from the earth's face?
Who broke the shackles of the human race?

Who reclaimed our Kaaba with their kneeling brows?
Who presses the sacred Quran to their heart and soul? __________________________________________________ _____

True, they were your forbears, but what are you, I say?
Idle sitting, statue-like you dream away your days.

What did you say? Muslims are with hopes of houries consoled,
Even if your plaint is false, your words should be controlled.

Justice is the law supreme, operative on this globe,
Muslims can't expect the houries, if they follow the kafir's code. __________________________________________________ _____

None of you is,infact,deservingof the"hoor",
A Moses is but hard to fin,burneth still the Tur.

Common to the race entire is their gain or loss,
Common is their faith and creed, common too the Rasul of God;

One Kaaba, one Allah, and one Quran inspire their heart,
Why can't the Muslims then behave like a single lot? __________________________________________________ _____

Cast, creed and factions have disjointed this race,
Is this way to forge ahead, to flourish in the present age?

It's the poor who visit the mosque, join the kneeling rows,
The poor alone observe the fasts, practise self-control.

If someone repeats our name, it's the poor again,
The devout poor hide your sins, preserve your vaunted name. __________________________________________________ _____

Drunk with the wine of wealth, the rich are unconcerned with God,
The Muslim race owes its life to the poor, indigent lot.

"Muslims have vanished from earth," this is what we hear,
but we ask, " Were the Muslims ever the Jewish sects.

You are Nisars by your looks, but Hindus by conduct,
Your culture puts to shame even the Jewish sects. __________________________________________________ _____

If the son is alien to his learned father's traits,
How can he then claim his father's heritage?

All of you love to lead a soft, luxurious life,
Are you a Muslim indeed? Is this the Muslim style?

All of you desire to be invested with the crown,
You should first produce a heart worthy of renown. __________________________________________________

Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling

2011-01-29T07:22:00.000-08:00

The Hands that built the Kabah can rebuild Humanity : Allama Iqbal

2011-01-27T05:29:00.000-08:00

In the words of the Muslim messenger to the court of Xerxes, Islam notion is to " lead men from the worship of Man to the worship of God, from the narrowing trivialities of life to the expanse of faith, from the injustices of creeds to the justice and equality of Islam" (Islam and the World : The rise and decline of Muslims and its effect on mankind)

For a long time bruised and maimed humanity has been crying out, in the words of Iqbal, for help, still believing that the hands that built the Kabah can rebuild humanity.

Thou art the custodian, the trustee of the Eternal order.
Thou art the right and the left flank of the Lord of the Universe;
O! thou creature of dust, thou art the Time and thou art the Earth.Drink the wine of conviction and get away from the tavern of uncertanity
Wake Up! Wake Up! from thy deep slumber
From thy deep slumber, awake, from thy deep slumber awake, awake
From thy deep slumber, from thy deep slumber awake.
I cry mercy from the wantonness of Europe.
I cry mercy from the Sheerins and Purvazes of Europe
The world has become dissolute by the dispoilation of Europe.
O! thou builder of the Kabah, arise and build a new world again

Converting to Islam - the white Britons becoming Muslims

2011-01-04T11:30:00.000-08:00

Sarah Joseph above converted to Islam as a teenager now edit's Emel a muslim lifestyle magazine

As 22-year-old Aisha Uddin recites Surah Al-Fatiha - the first chapter of the Koran - at home with close friend Sameeah Karim, she may stumble over one word but otherwise the text is perfectly recounted.

Aisha Uddin: 'It's a change I'm happy I've made'
But unlike Sameeah, 35, who has Pakistani heritage and grew up reading the holy book, Aisha is newer to it: she used to be called Laura and only converted to Islam two years ago.

She is pale and has bright blue eyes; originally from Birmingham, until recently she dressed like many other young white British women.

"Before it was the jeans, the hoodies, loads of make-up," she says.

Now Aisha wears a long black jilbab (a long flowing over-garment) and a cream-coloured hijab (headscarf).

"For me now, obviously it's a dramatic change, but it's a change I'm happy I've made, because now I don't have to prove myself to anybody out there."

Aisha took an interest in religion at school - and started quietly visiting her local mosque to find out more.

"Islam caught my eye and I wanted to look further into it - the people, the culture - and I carried on studying it and studying it, even after school. Living in Birmingham, I was surrounded by the religion."

She says she spent years finding out more about Islam before fully committing to the religion, changing her appearance and starting to pray five times a day.

"Life's changed dramatically, I was a rebel before, I was always getting into trouble at home, going out and staying out - not trying hard enough at school.

Conversions at Regent's Park Mosque in London happen on a weekly basis "Then when I became Muslim, I sort of calmed down. I wanted to stay at home studying on the internet or reading books. And I'm more happy than I was - I'm proud of who I am, I've got a certain identity."

Aisha is one of a growing number of white converts according to a new study by Swansea University for the charity Faith Matters.

Using a number of sources, including a survey of more than 250 British mosques, census data from 2001 and conversion figures in Europe, the researchers estimate that there could be as many as 100,000 converts - of all ethnic backgrounds - in the UK. This represents an increase on an estimated 60,000 converts in 2001.

For an insight into the experiences of Muslim converts, the researchers spoke to 120 - mainly young, white women.

Many converts - like Aisha - reported experiencing hostility from their families. She says her parents thought her conversion represented a rejection of her upbringing.

Support network

"My family they weren't too happy about it, [saying] why change your identity? Why cover your hair? Why dress the way you dress?" says Aisha.

Sarah Joseph converted to Islam when she was a teenager "Being in a society where there's so much bad press around... but if you actually get to know these people, they're the friendliest people ever. I'm proud to be Muslim, I don't care what my family say."

Aisha does have a wider support network now. She has recently had a traditional Asian wedding to a British Bangladeshi man and lives with her in-laws.

She also has a lot of friends, also converts, who she met at new Muslim groups.

Aisha pores over pictures of all the women lined up in their different coloured headscarves at her wedding.

"That's Lailah, that's Hanan, that's Mary… Sameeah's the only Asian one," she laughs.

At Regent's Park Mosque in central London there are many white faces among the crowd for Friday prayers.

Conversions happen here every week - largely on a Saturday, and they are mostly women.

Tony Blair's sister-in-law, Lauren Booth, is a recent convert and prays there.

One London imam, Ajmal Masroor, says the findings of the study come as little surprise to him. He says in his experience around three-quarters of converts are women.

'Personal journey'

"Many people are looking for a spiritual and fulfilling lifestyle rather than the hedonistic, materially-driven one that we have around us," says Imam Masroor.

"They find an answer in Islam. Women are hard-wired to reflect and think and take things more seriously, even from a young age.

"This has been going on for the last 20 years and more so since 9/11. People are curious, so they go to the book rather than the distorted media headlines.

"They learn that Islam is fulfilling as a personal journey as well as a collective conscience."

Sarah Joseph sits in her office studying the latest edition of Emel, the Muslim lifestyle magazine she edits.

She converted to Islam as a teenager and has adopted the headscarf, saying she was looking for something with more meaning.

"I'd grown up in a model agency and I'd been surrounded my whole life by external beauty, and the hijab was, and very much is, about the search for inner beauty," she says.

Despite the difficulties, Sarah says British converts have a vital role to play in explaining two sides - Britain's Muslim and non-Muslim communities - to each other.

"[Converts have] authentically belonged to two traditions and should act as a conduit to show each side that we share far more than we differ."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12075931

In Honour of the most Honoured

2010-12-31T17:19:00.001-08:00

A man hurried out into the street of Bakkah and announced " The start of Ahmed has risen ".
The praised one had arrived. The hypocrites of the world fell silent in their trepidation.
The once mighty candle of Persia suddenly was disbanded.

Whilst Aminah RA looked down at the light in her hands and smiled. She was glowing on earth but in celestial palaces she was decorated and elevated.

From this day forward neither the Sun nor the Moon shined a brighter light, then the light of his blessed face.
They followed the command of his blessed hands, shining their light upon him.
Even clouds foam from the seas, would shelter him by their faithful shade.
The stones would send peace upon him, quietly whispering his blessed name.
The blessed tree in Yahrib tree would weep her love for him. In turn it would be so graciously comforted by him with great solace.
Drops of water, splashed from his face, would fall into eager waiting hands. Like shimmering diamonds falling from the sky, and precious pearls falling in the night.

The poor, the rich, the Arab and the Persian came from vales and cities far and wide, just to catch a glimpse of him and his beauty.
They instantly praised his blessed name and lofty rank, hoping in turn to be eternally raised by his Beloved.
Through Love of him, Arabia and its tribes had finally united.
And in the end of days, mankind will come to know that it will be saved by his Prophetic brother and his genealogical race.
Muhammed (pbuh) is his blessed name. To honour is to love.

Invictus

2010-12-16T09:37:00.000-08:00

This is the poem that gave Nelson Mandela solace when he was a prisioner in Robin Island.It gave him the power to belief that he controls his own fate and destiny.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

Poetry of You

2010-12-15T14:51:00.001-08:00

Poetry of you is praise of the tongue
From the heart of love inclining
As time goes by, on its horizon you stand
A moon amidst darkness, a star shining
A memory as fresh as fragrant flowers
Qualities of a garden, exhaling

And if, on a day, you travel fair wind
To a land most sacred and blessed
Then carry my Salaam to the garden in which
The blessed Prophet rests

The gem that is Shaykh Samir an Nass

2010-12-09T01:34:00.000-08:00

Lesley Hazleton Explains The Quran Most Beautifully

2010-12-09T01:25:00.000-08:00

This video adddreses the misconception of the Quran in a very lucid and sophisticated manner

God-Man Relationship - A Disussion with Muhammed Asad

2010-12-07T16:05:00.000-08:00

Muhammad Asad (formerly Leopold Weiss) (1900–1992), an Austrian Jew who converted to Islam, was a 20th century journalist, traveler, writer, social critic, linguist, thinker, reformer, diplomat, political theorist, translator and scholar. Asad was one of the 20th century's most influential European Muslims

Historical Scholars - Muhammed Asad Interview from Afaun Mandol on Vimeo.

Cultural investment is the way forward

2010-12-06T10:14:00.000-08:00

Shaikh Abdul Hakim Murad feels the Muslim world should promote healthy dialogue with the West

For a man who is apparently Britain’s most influential Muslim, Shaikh Abdul Hakim Murad has rather unorthodox views on the way Islam is presented in the Western media. “I don’t think Islam is ever covered,” he tells Weekend Review.

“I have never actually seen an article in a Western newspaper that covers the core aspects of Islamic religion that are of significance to Muslims themselves. The focus is exclusively on social, economic and political dimensions of the religion. I have done interviews with journalists who say they don’t want to talk about the religious dimensions of Islam. That’s just the nature of modern Britain, unfortunately — we are going through a very secular period.”

Is there an Islam fatigue in Britain? “I think it’s not just an Islam fatigue,” he says. “It’s that people have been told everything about Islam except what makes it significant to Muslims themselves, which is often why they are so mystified.”

I am sitting with Murad — also known as Dr Timothy Winter — in his office at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University. Around us on both sides are shelved an ocean of books, including many on Islam and religion with titles such as Ibn Batuta and Islam and Taoism, some in distant foreign languages (Murad speaks Arabic, Persian and Turkish).

While he is speaking, I wonder whether this rather bookish, almost quintessential scholar of the Oxbridge type could really be Britain’s most influential Muslim, as voted by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, based in Jordan. It has compiled a list of 500 most influential Muslims in the world.

Murad himself dismisses his lofty new title. “It’s a little bit of silliness, isn’t it?” he asks. “I don’t know how you could rank such people. I am sure if you would ask most Muslims in England they would certainly name other people. They wouldn’t have heard of me.

“My interests are rather abstract, philosophical and academic. Most Muslims in Britain are interested in more practical bread and butter issues. So I think it was probably a curious misunderstanding that led them to put my name on the list.”

A Muslim celebrity he may not be like the boxer Amir Khan or singer Yousuf Islam, but Murad is certainly a well-respected figure among Muslims, not only in Britain but also internationally, as a leading Islamic scholar. He holds a number of prestigious titles, including director of the Sunna Project, secretary of the Muslim Academic Trust and director of the Anglo-Muslim Fellowship for Eastern Europe.

Last year he helped set up the Cambridge Muslim College, which trains imams for mosques in the United Kingdom. Murad is also very active in the local community and is heading a new mosque-building project in Cambridge, set to replace the present one which is stretched to capacity, with worshippers being forced to pray on the street outside.

Born in 1960, Murad converted to Islam at the age of 19. Back then, many people in Britain did not know much about the religion. The reaction from others to his new faith was one of curiosity. “The main concern was that I might have joined a cult,” he says. “That I was being manipulated by some evil puppet master, which was a fear among middle-class parents at the time. It was an age when cults were spreading very fast in Western countries. But as soon as it became clear that’s not what I was interested in, I think their anxieties receded.”

Compared to Britain’s total Muslim population, estimated at 2.4 million, converts form a small percentage at an estimated 60,000 to 70,000.

However, one odd bit of fact about converts in this country is that they sometimes keep their Islamic faith a secret by not telling others, according to Murad.

He attributes this strange phenomenon partly to an English sense of reticence. “We call them submarines,” he explains. “People who are under the surface and are practising the religion, including praying and fasting. But their close friends and family don’t know.”

For instance, Murad knows one professor at Cambridge University who has been a Muslim for 30 years and comes to the mosque when he can but his colleagues at the university aren’t aware he is a Muslim. Then there is a Christian clergyman who converted to Islam but hasn’t told his wife because he is sure she wouldn’t understand and would divorce him and he would end up losing the children.

But while the case of some converts can at times be rather awkward, Murad himself has lived quite a colourful life as a Muslim. Since graduating from Cambridge University with a first-class honours in Arabic in 1983, he travelled to Egypt, where he studied Islam at the renowned Al Azhar University. He lived for three years in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, before returning to London to study Turkish and Persian. Murad is at present the Shaikh Zayed Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Cambridge University.

Muslims are sometimes criticised for apparently having developed a “victim mentality” — and some prominent Islamic thinkers have also kind of agreed with this. Does Murad concur?
“I don’t find that particularly among Muslim communities,” he says. “The kind of Muslim leaders who the media notice may well think that Muslims are being unfairly singled out. That the West didn’t come to their rescue in Bosnia, the West has been indifferent to their fate in Palestine, the West did something to Iraq that it would never have done to, say, Spain under General Franco. That it is behaving in a cavalier fashion in Afghanistan. That it supports unpopular autocratic regimes throughout the Muslim world — and therefore the West is generically hostile to Muslims and victimises them. I think that is a ridiculous oversimplification.

“There are some Muslims who resent the fact that so many of the victims of Western foreign policy have been Muslims. But I don’t think that is the prevailing view of most mosque-going Muslims in the UK. They are more interested in immediate bread and butter issues of getting jobs, educating their children and finding their way into society.”

Alongside his passionate defence of Britain’s Muslim community, Murad is known for speaking eloquently about those who have gone to the extreme within the religion. I ask him how he would argue, using religion, against these people who find themselves at the radical fringe?

“Well, one has to do it using the traditional instruments of Muslim debate, which are Quran and Hadith quotations with reference to the past consensus of the scholars of the religion,” he says. “That debate is easily won because the radicals very seldom have a very proper religious education.

“Bin Laden is an engineer, Zawahiri is a medic. The typical profile of the radical Islamist is not that he is an expert on Islam, rather it is that he is somebody with a Western technical type of education who is sufficiently incensed by Western policies that he is using an Islamic language misunderstood to justify what is essentially a temper tantrum.”

In Bombing Without Moonlight: The Origins of Suicidal Terrorism, Murad argues that an Islamist suicide bomber is very much a by-product of a Westernised mindset and is in fact an alien phenomenon to the religion of Islam when viewed from a historical context. In the book, he notes how many on both sides will furiously deny an “Islamism with Western roots”. Suicidal militancy is, he points out, entirely absent from the Islamic scriptures. But shouldn’t one be weary of labels such as “moderate” Islam because it gives the impression of some type of “Islam lite” that people should be following? In other words, it is as if there is something wrong with following the religion in its fullness.

“Yes, you may say we have two alternatives,” he says. “We have the alternative of being Muslim extremists or being extremely Muslim. And I don’t accept the category of moderate at all because it is far from clear. Because when it is used usually by Western pundits and politicians, what is intended is anything other than a form of Islam that politically doesn’t obstruct present Western policies. And I don’t think that is a helpful way of developing a meaningful sense of priorities within a religion. So I don’t use this category ‘moderate’ Muslims at all. I think the ongoing face-off between radicals and the mainstream is a face-off between heresy and orthodoxy. Those are the terms which are more indigenous and authentic than ‘moderation’ and ‘extremism’.”

This brings the discussion back to where this interview started: the great Islam debate in the media. Murad believes there is little point in expecting a more accurate account of Islam in the British tabloid press. Instead, he tells me what worries him is that among the educated classes in the UK, who, to some extent, conduct their conversation through the more respectable broadsheets, there is an unwillingness to acknowledge that non-Western cultures may have definitions of happiness and human flourishing which could be worthy of respect and have a right to exist.

“There is something implicitly totalitarian about the assumption that the value set esteemed by Westerners must alone be right,” he says. “This comes from the universalism of the Enlightenment, which thought that ‘man’ was a single sort of subject and about whom large generalisations could always be offered.”

More recently, he acknowledges, such thinking has come under a good deal of attack. “But that does not seem to have percolated to the public sphere,” he says, “where it is assumed that the West alone can define ‘universals’, such as ‘universal human rights’, even though philosophically Western thinkers have an increasingly hard time establishing any universals at all. Some thinkers, such as Gavin D’Costa, Geoffrey Stout — and, I think, Slavoj Zizek — are very aware of this paradox. D’Costa’s new book holds that everything Westerners say to other cultures can be reduced to variations on ‘Be like us’. That’s not entirely accurate, of course.”

Clearly, it would be wrong to put the entire burden of blame on the shoulders of the West. Murad believes part of the problem is the reluctance so far of Muslim states and agencies to encourage a broader and more thoughtful cultural discussion in the West which is rooted in a better understanding of Muslim culture.

He gives the example of the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan, whose Alliance of Civilisations at times seems to attempt such an effort. But if Middle Easterners really wish to be better respected in the West, he believes they need to engage in deep and extensive cultural investment. “The Arab League, or the OIC, should direct resources to creating something like the British Council,” he says, “or the Goethe Institute, with landmark institutions in Western capitals which promote a correct understanding and a healthy dialogue. At the forefront should be teaching the Arabic language. Unless the Muslim world engages in better public diplomacy on behalf of its culture, it cannot expect to be better understood and respected.”

Syed Hamad Ali is an independent writer based in Cambridge.

http://gulfnews.com/life-style/people/cultural-investment-is-the-way-forward-1.696524

Whats wrong with mini skirts ? Muhammed Ali

2010-12-03T12:26:00.000-08:00

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

2010-11-29T20:39:00.000-08:00