A Letter by Malcolm X, may Allâh have mercy upon him

A Letter by Malcolm X, may Allâh have mercy upon him
Quoted from The Autobiography of Malcolm X printed by Penguin Classics






Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this ancient Holy Land, the home of Abraham, Muhammad and all the other Prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors.

I have been blessed to visit the Holy City of Makkah, I have made my seven circuits around the ka'bah, led by a young religious guide (mutawaf) named Muhammad, I drank water from the well of the Zam-Zam. I ran seven times back and forth between the hills of Mt. as-Safa and al-Marwah. I have prayed in the ancient city of Mina, and I have prayed on Mt. Arafat.

There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blondes to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white.

America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white - but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color.

You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.

During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept on the same rug - while praying to the same God - with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the deeds of the white Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan and Ghana.

We were truly all the same (brothers) - because their belief in one God had removed the white from their minds, the white from their behaviour, and the white from their attitude.

I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man - and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their 'differences' in color.

With racism plaguing America like an incurable cancer, the so-called 'Christian' white American heart should be more receptive to a proven solution to such a destructive problem. Perhaps it could be in time to save America from imminent disaster - the same destruction brought upon Germany by racism that eventually destroyed the Germans themselves.

Each hour here in the Holy Land enables me to have greater spiritual insights into what is happening in America between black and white. The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities - he is only reacting to four hundred years of the conscious racism of the American whites. But as racism leads America up the suicide path, I do believe, from the experiences that I have had with them, that the whites of the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, will see the handwriting on the walls and many of them will turn to the spiritual path of truth - the only way left to America to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to.

Never have I been so highly honored. Never have I been made to feel more humble and unworthy. Who would believe the blessings that have been heaped upon an American Negro? A few nights ago, a man who would be called in America a white man, a United Nations diplomat, an ambassador, a companion of kings, gave me his hotel suite, his bed. Never would I have even thought of dreaming that I would ever be a recipient of such honors - honors that in America would be bestowed upon a King - not a Negro.

All praise is due to Allah, the Lord of all the Worlds.

Sincerely,

Al-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X)

Poem by Sultan Murad III of Turkey

I like this poem by Sultan Murad III of Turkey (r. 1574-1595). He wrote it one morning after finishing Fajr. It’s become a famous song and apparently he wrote the tune too.

UYAN EY GÖZLERIM GAFLETTEN UYAN …

Wake from your heedlessness O my eyes awake
Long you have slumbered so now my eyes awake.
Azrail’s intention is your soul to take.
Wake from your heedlessness O my eyes awake
Long you have slumbered so now my eyes awake.

Dawn hears the birds when early they stir and wake,
Hear from their tongues all the sweet praises they make,
Mountains and trees and the stones their worship make,
Wake from your heedlessness O my eyes awake
Long you have slumbered so now my eyes awake.

See how they open God’s heaven’s gates so wide,
Raining his mercy as the faithful abide;
Robing with high honour those who sleep denied.
Wake from your heedlessness O my eyes awake
Long you have slumbered so now my eyes awake.

This world is not your home, soon it melts away.
Even were all seven climes under your sway
Throne and dominion and glory pass away
Wake from your heedlessness O my eyes awake
Long you have slumbered so now my eyes awake.

Here is Murad your slave, all his sins erase!
Forgive my errors and all my burden raise,
Raise me in the shade of Ahmad’s flag of praise.
Wake from your heedlessness O my eyes awake
Long you have slumbered so now my eyes awake.

Timothy Winter: Britain's most influential Muslim - and it was all down to a peach

It was the sight of peach juice dripping from the chin of a teenage French female nudist that led a Cambridgeshire public schoolboy to convert to Islam. Thirty-five years later, Timothy Winter – or Sheikh Abdul-Hakim Murad, as he is known to his colleagues – has been named one of the world's most influential Muslims.

The hitherto unnoticed Mr Winter, who has an office in Cambridge University's Divinity Faculty, where he is the Shaykh Zayed Lecturer of Islamic Studies, has been listed ahead of the presidents of Iran and Egypt, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Mahmoud Abbas. "Strange bedfellows," he concedes.

Tall, bookish, fair-skinned and flaxen-haired, a wiry beard is his only obvious stylistic concession to the Islamic faith.

To the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre (RISSC), which is based at the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in the Jordanian capital, Amman, Winter is "one of the most well-respected Western theologians" and "his accomplishments place him amongst the most significant Muslims in the world". Winter is also the secretary of the Muslim Academic Trust, director of The Anglo-Muslim Fellowship for Eastern Europe, and director of the Sunna Project, which has published the most respected versions of the major Sunni Hadith collections, the most important texts in Islam after the Qur'an.

He has also written extensively on the origins of suicidal terrorism.

According to the RISSC, the list highlights "leaders and change-agents who have shaped social development and global movements". Winter is included because "[his] work impacts all fields of work and particularly, the religious endeavors of the Muslim world".

In the 500 Most Influential Muslims 2010, Mr Winter is below the King of Saudi Arabia – who comes in at number one – but ahead of many more chronicled figures. He is ranked in an unspecified position between 51st and 60th, considerably higher than the three other British people who make the list – the Conservative Party chairman Baroness Warsi; the UK's first Muslim life peer, Lord Nazir Ahmed, who was briefly jailed last year for dangerous driving; and Dr Anas Al Shaikh Ali, director of the

International Institute of Islamic Thought – making him, at least in the eyes of the RISSC, Britain's most influential Muslim.

"I think that's very unlikely," says Winter, seated in front of his crowded bookshelves. "I'm an academic

observer who descends occcasionally from my ivory tower and visits the real world. If you stop most people in the street they've never heard of me. In terms of saying anything that makes any kind of sense to the average British Muslim I think they have no need of my ideas at all."

The son of an architect and an artist, he attended the elite Westminster School in the 1970s before graduating from Cambridge with a double first in Arabic in 1983. His younger brother is the football correspondent Henry Winter. Tim says: "I was always the clever, successful one. Henry just wanted to play football with his mates. I used to tell him, ‘I'm going to make loads of money, and you'll still be playing football with your mates.' Now he's living in a house with 10 bedrooms and married to a Bond girl." (Brother Henry insists on the telephone later: "She was only in the opening credits. And it's not as many as 10.")

If this seems an improbable background for a leading Muslim academic, his Damascene moment on a Corsican beach is unlikelier still.

"In my teens I was sent off by my parents to a cottage in Corsica on an exchange with a very vigorous French Jewish family with four daughters," Winter recalls. "They turned out to be enthusiastic nudists.

"I remember being on the beach and seeing conjured up before my adolescent eyes every 15-year-old boy's most fervent fantasy. There was a moment when I saw peach juice running off the chin of one of these bathing beauties and I had a moment of realisation: the world is not just the consequence of material forces. Beauty is not something that can be explained away just as an aspect of brain function."

It had quite an effect on him: "That was the first time I became remotely interested in anything beyond the material world. It was an unpromising beginning, you might say.

"In a Christian context, sexuality is traditionally seen as a consequence of the Fall, but for Muslims, it is an anticipation of paradise. So I can say, I think, that I was validly converted to Islam by a teenage French Jewish nudist."

After graduating, Winter studied at the University of al-Azhar in Egypt and worked in Jeddahat before returned to England in the late eighties to study Turkish and Persian. He says he has no difficulty reconciling the world he grew up in with the one he now inhabits. "Despite all the stereotypes of Islam being the paradigmatic opposite to life in the west, the feeling of conversion is not that one has migrated but that one has come home.

"I feel that I more authentically inhabit my old identity now that I operate within Islamic boundaries than I did when I was part of a teenage generation growing up in the 70s who were told there shouldn't be any boundaries."

The challenge, he feels, is much harder now for young Muslims trying to integrate with British life.

"Your average British Asian Muslim on the streets of Bradford or Small Heath in Birmingham is told he has to integrate more fully with the society around him. The society he tends to see around him is extreme spectacles of binge drinking on Saturday nights, scratchcards, and other forms of addiction apparently rampant, credit card debt crushing lives, collapsing relationships and mushrooming proportions of single lives, a drug epidemic. It doesn't look very nice.

"That is why one of the largest issues over the next 50 years is whether these new Muslim communities can be mobilised to deal with those issues. Islam is tailor-made precisely for all those social prolems. It is the ultimate cold turkey. You don't drink at all. You don't sleep around. You don't do scratchcards. Or whether a kind of increasing polarisation, whereby Muslims look at the degenerating society around them and decide ‘You can keep it'."

It is not this, though, that contributes to some young Muslim British men's radicalism, he says, since their numbers are often made up of "the more integrated sections".

"The principle reason, which Whitehall cannot admit, is that people are incensed by foreign policy. Iraq is a smoking ruin in the Iranian orbit. Those who are from a Muslim background are disgusted by the hypocrisy. It was never about WMD. It was about oil, about Israel and evangelical christianity in the White House. That makes people incandescent with anger. What is required first of all is an act of public contrition. Tony Blair must go down on his knees and admit he has been responsible for almost unimaginable human suffering and despair."

He adds: "The West must realise it must stop being the world's police. Why is there no Islamic represenation on the UN Security Council? Why does the so-called Quartet [on the Middle East] not have a Muslim representative? The American GI in his goggles driving his landrover through Kabul pointing his gun at everything that moves, that is the image that enrages people."

Is there a similar antagonistic symbolism in the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero?

"If the mosque represented an invading power they would have every right. Muslims in America are there as legitimate citizens with their green cards, with jobs, trying to get by. They are there in humble mode.

"Would you oppose the construction of Shinto Shrines at Pearl Harbour, of which there a number? How long must the Muslims of lower Manhattan have to wait to get a place to pray five times a day? With Islam there are certain liturgical requirements. It's not like a church that you can build on the top of a hill and say, we've only got to go once a week and it looks nice up there. Muslims need to pray five times a day, they can't get the subway out and back. It should be seen as a symbol of reconciliation not antagonism."

Last year Winter helped set up the Cambridge Muslim College, which offers trained imams a one year diploma in Islamic studies and leadership, designed to help trained imams to better implement their knowledge and training in 21st-century Britain. This year's first graduating class have recently returned from a trip to Rome where they had an open audience with the Pope.

In an increasingly secular Britain, sociologists suggest with regularity that "football is the new religion". Winter understands the comparison. "Football has everything that is important to religion," he says. "Solidarity, skill, ritual, the outward form of what looks like a sacred congregation. Except it's not about anything." Just don't tell his brother.

Converts to Islam

Muhammad Ali

Cassius Clay, widely considered to be one of the greatest boxers, shocked America when he revealed in 1964 that he had converted to the Nation of Islam (becoming a Sunni 11 years later) to discard the name of his ancestors' enslavement.

Yusuf Islam

Born Steven Demetre Georgiou in London, the singer, best known as Cat Stevens, converted to Islam at the height of his fame in 1977. Two years later he auctioned all his guitars for charity and left his music career to devote himself to educational and philanthropic causes.

Yvonne Ridley

The British journalist was captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan in September 2001 having crossed the border anonymously in a burqa. After her release 11 days later, she explained that she had promised one of her captors that she would read the Koran and it changed her life. She converted to Islam in the summer of 2003.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/timothy-winter-britains-most-influential-muslim-ndash-and-it-was-all-down-to-a-peach-2057400.html

Shaykh Yusuf Al Nabahani

The scared hair of the Prophet Peace and Blessing Be Upon Him.

Tabarruk with the Prophet’s hair and nails. There are countless hadiths on this:

Bukhari narrates in his Sahih in the Book of Clothing, under the chapter entitled "What is mentioned about gray hair," that `Usman ibn `Abd Allah ibn Mawhab said: "My family sent me to Umm Salama with a cup of water. Umm Salama brought out a silver bottle which contained one of the hairs of the Prophet, and it used to be that if anyone came under the evil eye or ill health they used to send her a cup of water through which she would pass this hair (for drinking). We used to look into the silver bottle: I saw some reddish hairs."

Anas said: "When the Prophet shaved his head (after pilgrimage), Abu Talha was the first one to take of his hair." Bukhari.

Anas also said: "The Prophet threw stones at al-Jamra, then sacrificed, then told the barber to shave his head right side first, then began to give the hair away to the people." Muslim.

He said: "Talha was the one distributing it." Muslim, Tirmidhi, Abu Dawud.

He also said: "When the Prophet shaved his head in Mina, he gave me the hair from the right side and he said: Anas! take it to Umm Sulaym [his mother]. When the Companions saw what the Prophet gave us, they began to compete to take the hair from the left side, and everyone was getting a share from that." Ahmad narrated it.

Ibn al-Sakan narrated through Safwan ibn Hubayra from the latter’s father: Thabit al-Bunani said: Anas ibn Malik said to me (on his death-bed): "This is one of the hairs of Allah’s Messenger, Allah’s blessings and peace upon him. I want you to place it under my tongue." Thabit continued: I placed it under his tongue, and he was buried with it under his tongue."

Abu Bakr said: "I saw Khalid [ibn Walid] asking for the Prophet’s forelock and he received it. He used to put it over his eyes and then kiss it." It is known that he then placed it in his qalansuwa (head cover around which the turban is tied) and never faced battle again except he won. al-Waqidi (Maghazi), Ibn Hajar (Isaba). Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani relates that Imam Malik said: "Khalid ibn al-Walid owned a qalansiyya which contained some of the Prophet’s hair, and that is the one he wore the day of the battle of Yarmuk.

Ibn Sirin (one of the tabi`in) said: "One hair of the Prophet in my possession is more precious to me than silver and gold and everything that is on the earth and everything that is inside it." Bukhari, Bayhaqi (Sunan kubra), and Ahmad.

In Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 7, Book 72, Number 784: `Uthman bin `Abd Allah ibn Mawhab said, "My people sent me with a bowl of water to Umm Salama." Isra’il approximated three fingers indicating the small size of the container in which there was some hair of the Prophet. `Uthman added, "If any person suffered from evil eye or some other disease, he would send a vessel (containing water) to Umm Salama (and she would dip the Prophet’s hair into it and it would be drunk). I looked into the container (that held the hair of the Prophet) and saw a few reddish hairs in it."

Hafiz Ibn Hajar in Fath al-Bari, Volume 10, page 353, said: "They used to call the silver bottle in which the hair of theProphet was kept jiljalan and that bottle was in the home of Umm Salama." Hafiz al-`Ayni said in `Umdat al-Qari, Volume 18, page 79: "Umm Salama had some of the hairs of the Prophet in a silver bottle. When some people got ill, they would go and obtain blessings from these hairs and they would be healed by means of their blessings. If a person were struck by the evil eye or any sickness, he would send his wife to Umm Salama with a mikhdaba or water-pail, and she would pass the hair through that water and then drink the water and he would be healed, after which they would return the hair to the jiljal."

Imam Ahmad narrates in his Musnad (4:42) from `Abd Allah ibn Zayd ibn `Abd Rabbih with a sound (sahih) chain as stated by Haythami in Majma` al-zawa’id (3:19) that the Prophet clipped his nails and distributed them among thepeople.

Verily I serve the image of the Sandal of Mustafa.
That I shall live under its shadow in both worlds.
[Sa’d] Ibn Masud was in the service of His Sandal.
And I am fortunate by serving its image.
I dust the Sandal image with the whiteness of my beard.
Since the Prophet SalAllahu Alaihi Wasallam fastened the band that passed between His toes.
It is not for the image that my heart is longing.
Yet it yearns for the one who wore this Sandal.
We are lowered by awe to honour this Sandal.
And whenever we lower before it we are raised.
So place it on the highest shelf!
For indeed in reality it is a crown and only outwardly a Sandal

Shaykh Yusuf al-Nabhani

The final section as the same link above elaborates on the Prophet SallAllahu alaihi wasallam’s Mubarak Sandals, also known as ‘Na’lal-Nabi’ in Arabic, and has a slightly different translation to the Shaykh Yusuf al-Nabhani verse.

And an except from And Muhammad is His Messenger:

(the above Sandal also from this book, from the Dhakhira of the Sharqawa)

The Prophet SallAllahu alaihi wasallam wore a special kind of sandal, the two strings of which were drawn betweenthe blessed toes. These sandals na’l, became likewise an amulet full of baraka, particularly strong against the evil eye. Were they not worthy of all admiration and veneration, for the Prophet SallAllahu alaihi wasallam had touched the Divine Throne with them during his heavenly journey, so that they became "the vertex of the crown of the Throne" (other poetic references in the notes include: ‘Your sandals are the crown of the Throne’s seat’, and ‘The Divine Throne gained honour from kissing his sandals.’ SubhanAllah!)

Our master Hazrat Abdur Rahman Jami for example further writes that all heavenly beings rubbed "forhead of their intention" on RasulAllah’s SallAllahu alaihi wasallam "Throne rubbing Sandals" He also writes that the heavenly tree ‘Tuba’ had rubbed its head at the Prophet’s SallAllahu alaihi wasallam sandal and thus reached highest honour, and he repeatedily expresses the feeling that ‘the thread of the soul is nothing but the string of RasulAllah’s SallAllahu alaihi wasallam sandals and that cheek of the longing lover resembles the fine Ta’ifi leather of which these sandals were made: do the lover’s cheeks not hope to be touched by the Prophet’s holy feet thus to obtain every conceivable bliss.

The poets, many of them from North Africa and Spain, described these blessed sandals or expressed their longing for them. Thus an Andalusian poetess, Sa’duna Umm Sa’d bint Isam al Himyarriya begins one of her poems with thewords;

I shall kiss the image if I do not find

A way to kiss the Prophet’s sandal.

Perhaps the good fortune of kissing it

Will be granted to me in Paradise in the most radiant place,

And I rub my heart on it so that perhaps

The burning thirst which rages in it maybe quenched.

The following illustrations are from Imam Ahmad al-Maqarri al-Tilimsani’s book “Fat’h al Muta’al fi madh al Ni’al” deatiling the Radiant Sandal of the Prophet SallAllahu alaihi wasallam, briefly referred to here. Insha’Allah I intend to post more from this book in the future, currently awaiting some translations from the Arabic as ths book is rich in prose, poetry and diagrams. I have included these to show how the shape varies and so that you can print these outlines and decorate them. A family beautiful exercise!

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf on Imam Al-Ghazali, Part 3

Part 2 Shaykh Hamza Yusuf on Imam Al Ghazali

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf on Hujjatul Islam Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali,

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf discusses in an interview the greatness of hujjatul islam imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, his emphasis on the importance of internal aswell as external reformation of a beleiver. Very important to learn in an age of self indulgence, as shaykh explains.

This interview was conducted following the completion of 'alchemist of happiness' a documentry about Imam Abu Hamid Al Ghazali