Clipmarks | arifsali's 'islam' clips

Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:16:50 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Mr Singh is a member of the Kathat community in Rajasthan and follows what his community believes is a pledge undertaken by their forefathers.

Legend has it that the Mehrat, Kathat and Cheeta communities - with a combined total of one million people in four districts of central Rajasthan - are the descendants of the Hindu ruler of the warrior caste, Prithviraj Chauhan.

The three communities also have strong Islamic connections, because many centuries ago, their forefathers undertook a pledge to follow three Muslim practices.

These include the circumcision for the newborn male children in the community, eating halal meat and burying their dead.

That is the tradition many have followed, keeping the word of their ancestors. But it has also led to them facing something of a faith-based identity crisis.

A majority of them are poor and illiterate. They are people with a mixed Hindu-Muslim identity.

"We don't care about being Hindu or Muslim. It is sheer politics," he says.

Tags: islam, hinduism, india, culture, religion

Say No To Terrorism

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 22:05:45 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.yehhumnaheen.org

The Yeh Hum Naheen Foundation is a Pakistan based non-profit organisation that was established under the Societies Act of Pakistan in October 2007, with the following key aims:

To reinforce the point that Islam is a peaceful faith that promotes tolerance and harmony.
To develop an awareness among people regarding the issues of the growing radicalization of Pakistani youth.
To promote better understanding and co-existence of Muslims around the world among non-Muslim communities.
To convey that the majority of Muslims do not support the rise in terrorism, and to deny Muslims the opportunity for involvement in terrorist activities.
To show the positive impact of Pakistan and Muslims around the world, and remove the distance between east and west through media education.

Tags: pakistan, terrorism, muslims

Exhibit aims to shatter US stereotypes of Islam

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:53:47 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - In the months following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Princess Wijdan Al Hashemi and her friend Aliki Moschis-Gauguet noticed that the only depictions they saw of Muslim women showed figures behind veils, oppressed by their cultures.

Moschis-Gauget said, "'Do you see what's going on the media?... Muslim women are being portrayed as women living behind long veils,'" said Al Hashemi, founder and director of the Royal Society of Fine Arts of Jordan. "She couldn't stand the way Muslim and Arab women were being portrayed."

Al Hashemi and Moschis-Gauguet, president of the Pan-Mediterranean Women Artists Network, turned to the world they knew best to find an answer: the world of art.

To combat what they saw as misperceptions about the Muslim world and Arab nations, the two women teamed up to create a traveling exhibit featuring female artists from Islamic countries.

The show "Breaking the Veils: Women Artists From the Islamic World"

Tags: art, culture, islam, religion, women

The dilemma of anti-extremist Pakistanis

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:03:00 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: The whole piece is worth reading.

Clip Source: icga.blogspot.com

Yesterday the New York Times ran a front-page article on the growth of al-Qaida in Pakistan and the failure of the Bush administration to devise any strategy to confront it.

(Instead they are apparently thinking again about attacking Iran.

As usual, the Times article presented the alternatives as do nothing, Predator missile strikes, or invasion by U.S. Special Forces, without any discussion of competing Pakistani and Pashtun political agendas for the tribal agencies.

American hypocrisy has played into the hands of Islamic militants. They have been vigorously promoting the notion that this is a bipolar conflict of Islam, which they claim to represent, versus imperialism. Many Pakistanis, who desperately want someone to stand up to the Americans, buy into this.

According to Khattak, one part of the "government of Pakistan" is at war with groups created by another part of the "government of Pakistan." A policy toward "Pakistan" cannot address this problem.

Tags: terrorism, united states, pakistan

The Islam you don't hear about

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 05:27:04 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: blogs.usatoday.com

A trip to Indonesia — home to more than 200 million Muslims — reveals a faith that hardly resembles the one Americans have come to know in the blood-soaked years since 9/11.

After the 9/11 attacks, Americans put out a call for moderate Islam. Many Muslims answered that call, but few Americans heard them. Early this month, I traveled to Asia to see what Islam looks like on the ground there, and to listen to what Muslims themselves have to say about their religion, terrorism and the United States. What I found surprised me.

I went to Asia because Islam is by no means a Middle Eastern phenomenon. In fact, Asia is home to most of the world's Muslims. I focused on Indonesia because there are more Muslims in Indonesia than in any other country — roughly three times as many as in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

Tags: indonesia, islam, muslims

In Algeria, a Tug of War for Young Minds

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:20:16 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

ALGIERS — First, Abdel Malek Outas’s teachers taught him to write math equations in Arabic, and embrace Islam and the Arab world. Then they told him to write in Latin letters that are no longer branded unpatriotic, and open his mind to the West.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Malek is 19, and he is confused.

“When we were in middle school we studied only in Arabic,” he said. “When we went to high school, they changed the program, and a lot is in French. Sometimes, we don’t even understand what we are writing.”

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

The confusion has bled off the pages of his math book and deep into his life. One moment, he is rapping; another, he recounts how he flirted with terrorism, agreeing two years ago to go with a recruiter to kill apostates in the name of jihad.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

At a time of religious revival across the Muslim world, Algeria’s youth are in play. The focus of this contest is the schools, where for decades Islamists controlled what children learned, and how they learned, officials and education experts here said.

Tags: algeria, education, youth

Pakistani sentenced to die for blasphemy

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:24:45 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.newsvine.com

A Pakistani judge sentenced a Muslim man to death Wednesday on charges he insulted Islam's Prophet Muhammad, a court official said.

Falk Sher, a court administrator, said Judge Shoaib Ahmad Roomi also sentenced the man, Shafeeq Latif, to life in prison and fined him $75,000 on a separate charge of desecrating pages of Islam's holy book, the Quran, in 2006.

Latif was accused of making derogatory remarks about Muhammad.

The trial was held in the eastern city of Sialkot after police arrested him in a nearby village.

Latif's lawyer was not immediately available for comment, but Sher said the defendant had the right to appeal.

Under Pakistan's blasphemy laws, anyone who insults Muhammad can be punished by death. Scores of people, including Muslims and minority Christians, are facing trial under the laws, which human rights groups have demanded be abolished.

New York-based Human Rights Watch urged the government on Tuesday to abolish the death penalty

Tags: pakistan, law, religion, blasphemy

Students rusticated due to religious bias

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 21:59:51 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: Pakistan.
Shameful

Clip Source: www.thepersecution.org

Professor Dr Asghar Ali Randhawa, Principal of Punjab Medical College rusticated 15 Ahmadi women students and 8 men students from the college as well as hostels on June 5, 2008. Four of the women students were in the final year of their studies.

As per essential details, a campaign was going on for the last one month against Ahmadi women students who were accused of preaching Ahmadiyyat. It is not far-fetched that an Ahmadi occasionally chooses to defend herself against the oft-repeated charge that “Ahmadis are the worst enemies of Islam and Pakistan.” At this college, the anti-Ahmadi campaign was supported by a warden of the hostel.

As all this was an organized campaign, some extremist male students, mostly from the Islami Jamiat Talaba, increased their efforts to poison the college environment further. The college administration, rather than handling them firmly as done by the Punjab University recently, gave them a free hand.

Tags: pakistan, islam, students

Against Islamic Extremism

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:30:10 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: It is for this reason that one must approach Islam from Islamic sources if one wants to understand it. This doesn’t mean one will have to accept all that one reads, nor that one can’t be critical after you have studied it: but you will then be able to be critical of something which is true and representative of the faith, not something made up.

Clip Source: vox-nova.com

What has become one of the most difficult things for Westerners to understand is that Islam is not a monolithic religion. There are many ways Islam has manifested in history, both in its normative forms, but also in its secondary and under-represented forms. Just as it would be wrong to form one’s understanding of Christianity by looking to Christian slave-owners in the 19^thcentury (even if they could have appeared as normative to many looking to the Christian faith at that time), so it is wrong to form one’s understanding of Islam based upon 21^stcentury radicals.

Just as it is wrong to read an anti-Catholic polemical tract to understand Catholicism, so it is wrong to read anti-Muslim polemical tracts to understand Islam (even though the tracts will indeed “quote from legitimate sources” they will do so carefully, cherry-picked for the most shock value, and without a legitimate hermeneutical approach to help the readers properly understand the context of the quotes themselves).

Tags: islam, religion, faith, culture

The paradox of Muslim weakness

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:51:50 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: Interesting article

Clip Source: www.iht.com

In the years since 9/11 two broad narratives have emerged in the West to explain the nature of the so-called war on terror.

On the right it has become commonplace to equate Islamism - the ideology that seeks to order 21st century societies by the medieval norms enshrined in Islamic Shariah law - with a long line of totalitarian threats to liberal democracy. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, for instance, calls it a "foul apparition that has succeeded fascism, Nazism, and communism as the world's next bane."

The left sees the issue as a product of poverty or flawed policies toward the Middle East. Robert Fisk of The Independent blames Islamist terrorism on "political situations and injustice in various parts of the world."

Both views are flawed

Tags: islam, west

Islamic body issues fatwa against terrorism

Sat, 31 May 2008 20:38:02 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

NEW DELHI: Thousands of Muslims gathered in New Delhi on Saturday to denounce terrorism, with leading Islamic seminary Darul Uloom issuing a fatwa declaring it as the "most inhuman crime".

"In its (Islam) eyes, on any part over the surface of the earth spreading mischief, rioting, breach of peace, bloodshed, killing of innocent persons and plundering are the most inhuman crime," read the fatwa, issued here at an Anti-Terrorism Conference.

The conference, organised by Jamiat-Ulma-I-Hind, saw the participation of clerics, scholars and religious leaders of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs besides 70,000 people from across the country.

Reading out the fatwa, Deoband's cleric Riyasat Ali Bijnouri, quoted Holy Koran as saying: "Do not mischief on the earth after it has been set in order."

"Islam loves peace. Islam rejects all kinds of unjust violence... and does not allow it in any form," the fatwa said.

Tags: islam, terrorism, peace

Sam Harris responds

Sat, 24 May 2008 19:49:00 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.irshadmanji.com

It appears that my Buddhist Muslim (Bu-Mu) friend, Shahid, has hit a raw nerve.

In my previous post, I featured the Bu-Mu’s advice to “hard core atheists.”

Not so fast, says Sam Harris.

Today, Sam sent me this spirited response.

Irshad:

It is obvious that this person has not actually read my work. The entire last chapter of The End of Faith is devoted to deconstructing the “self” and to the benefits of meditation.

I have frequently spoken and written about these subjects (to the consternation of many atheists). For example, read this. I have even organized several vipassana retreats for scientists.

I would especially turn your friend’s attention to the remarks I made at the largest gathering of atheists in the country. The talk is available on YouTube, entitled “The Problem with Atheism.” The last ten minutes or so are devoted to meditation. Here’s the transcript.

Tags: atheism, islam, buddhism

Buddhist temple reminder of Indonesia's past

Fri, 23 May 2008 21:52:49 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.theglobeandmail.com

BOROBUDUR, Indonesia — The Buddhist temple of, set among volcanoes on Indonesia's Java island, stands as a testament to the Buddhist roots of the world's most populous Muslim country.

The temple, the world's largest Buddhist monument, was built in the eighth and ninth centuries. It is a pilgrimage site for followers from around the region and it is also the most popular tourist attraction in Indonesia.

This week, pilgrims came in their thousands to celebrate Buddha's birthday. Monks, nuns and devotees, dressed in yellow, saffron, grey and black robes, prayed and circled the grey, volcanic stone temple, which is decorated with reliefs showing scenes from Buddhist texts and from the life of Buddha.

Each year an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 worshippers from Indonesia, China, Taiwan, Singapore and elsewhere gather at Borobudur to celebrate Vesak, boosting local tourism in a country that often struggles to attract more visitors.

Tags: indonesia, buddhism, islam

"Arab = Muslim = Terror = War"?

Thu, 22 May 2008 22:51:35 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: Via Eboo Patel's blog

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

Many people mistakenly assume that all Arabs are Muslims or that all Muslims are Arab. Neither of these assumptions are correct.

Worse yet, Arabs and Muslims are continuously and incorrectly associated with terror and war.

[Video]

Tags: arab, islam, muslims

See what Arab women are up to...

Thu, 22 May 2008 22:50:58 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: Via Eboo Patel's blog

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

What are Arab women up to? Well, every day they're making bold choices. Their participation in the workforce is increasing, and the fields that they are going into are sometimes even groundbreaking...

[Video]

Tags: arab, islam, muslims, women