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Michael Jackson is Dead, so is Neda [update]

Yesterday, June 25, 2009. Michael Jackson died; God rest his soul. I was not going to blog about his passing. He is an artist, a celebrity, why is his death more important than any other? He was an artistic genius, of that there can be no doubt. What he did for music and dance in pop is unparalleled. However, he was still a human being. He had an impact on my childhood, but I did not know him. In many respects, because of his fame, he was unreal. He was no closer to me than Rumi, whose poetry speaks to…

Social Justice

This issue is about social justice. Every Muslim in the US should be stepping up and saying until the community is fed, until parents can spend time with their family instead of working 20 hours a day for necessities, until the sick are cared for, until hope is only an aspiration and not a refuge for the desperate, until … Until then we cannot be bought with cheap talk of family values. Until then our faith with remain pointless. Until then the promise of America will remain unrealized. It’s not like there’s no precedent for this sort of talk in…

Reading the Qur’an – part 1 – Interpretation

The Qur’an (also Quran, Koran) is the Muslim holy book, believed to have been revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) – through the angel Jibra’il (Gabriel) – over the span of 23 years. The Arabic language of the time was a nascent language of literature, used mostly as a mnemonic guide in its written form; because of the close association of Semitic Languages (including Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac) the turn of Arabic into a literary language was not unprecedented. The script did not (and still does not) mark short vowels, punctuation, differentiate amongst different letters, and depending on the scribe,…