islam doesn't speak, muslims do | "the ink of the scholar is worth more than the blood of the martyr" – Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)
Over 120 dead today. Pray for the victims and their families. I hope this doesn’t turn the insurgency into a Sunni-Shi’ah civil war. The country is in bad enough condition as it is. Hopefully Sistani will issue a call for peace, and will be allowed and encouraged to do so. Hopefully Sadr won’t get any ideas in his head to launch the end of the world. Pray for peace.
A friend of mine wanted to know what I thought of Asma Gull Hasan’s Why I Am a Muslim. I was honest and said I hadn’t read it. While I enjoyed her first book – American Muslims – as an individual and personal voice of being Muslim and American, it did have some factual inaccuracies that I thought weakened it. However, I believe her misperceptions and misunderstandings are common enough in the Muslim community that she can’t be faulted for them. In addition, her first book was her personal experience, not a description of the Muslim American community. I did…
Read Bob Herbert’s op-ed today. Do we really need to explain to people why torture is bad? Why it demeans the US? If we do, have we already fallen too far?
Be forewarned, there’s a new institute of Muslim learning opening in London. It’s founded by a Muslim. It will teach about Islam. Hide your daughters (or reveal them, depending on what you think the primary threat is). Man the gates! Keep the barbarians out! My big question is who is going to hate this institute more, political conservatives, or conservative Muslims.
What do you call someone who doesn’t follow the tradition of Prophet Muhammad? Who in fact does the opposite of the tradition of the Prophet? What do you call someone who relishes in the death of the Prophet’s family? Who celebrates the murder of the Prophet’s grandson by killing those who believe it to be a sorrowful event? Muslims (not most, all) would call him a murderer. To everyone else they are Muslims. We Muslims are more than a nationality, an ethnicity, a collection of people who speak the same language. We are those who have promised to submit ourselves…
A Boston Globe op-ed and the variety and flexibility of shari’ah. It’s not what it’s called, it’s what it says.
I have to admit, that I was pleasantly surprised at the high rate of voting in the recent Iraq elections. Even a cynic such as myself watched as a high number of Iraqi citizens lined up under threat of death and cast their vote for the future of the country. This was historic. History will decide whether is was worth the cost of over 100’000 Iraqi lives. While I do not delude myself that this event will deter violence, it does give Iraqis a stake in their country. It does another thing as well; it shifts the focus of insurgent…
From tonight’s Law and Order: Criminal Intent website: Season 4 Episode E5416 STRESS POSITION 9/8pm 02/13/05 PRISON GUARD’S SLAYING RIPS LID OFF CORRUPT PRISON; GUEST STAR CHRISTOPHER NOTH REPRISES ‘LAW & ORDER’ ROLE — The murder of a corrections officer points the Major Case squad toward a corrupt Brooklyn prison where unaccounted-for prisoners are secretly abused by guards — and the key to exposing the ring lies with a prison nurse whose boyfriend is the maverick Detective Mike Logan (Christopher Noth, NBC’s “Law & Order”). As Logan warily aids Detectives Goren (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Eames (Kathryn Erbe) in their probe,…
Oh boy! Was the US so confident of Allawi’s victory that they didn’t think what would happen if the Shi’i religious party won the elections? It’s not so much that they won, I think everyone but this administration saw them winning a plurality if not a majority, but it dawned on me today that they won the elections during Muharram. The first ten-days were when the Prophet’s grandson Husayn was tortured and killed. It’s one of the formative moments of Shi’ah identity and remains incredibly important for the Ithna’ashari, the type of Shi’ah in Iraq. The symbology of Imam Husayn…
Neither an Ashkenazim nor Sephardim be. Here’s an interesting article about the first South Asian to head a US synagogue. A short introduction to South Asian Jews as well. The Revealer has a good post called “Who’s a Jew?” It’s about a Muslim. My wife is a big fan of Ali and Nino and has been trying to get me to read it for a while. The question of authenticity is hard enough within a religious tradition, especially as different interpretations of the same faith come into contact. Then you throw in inter-faith issues and have people from outside any…