While the capital is home to an estimated 40 per cent of the UK's Muslim population, there are still many mysteries surrounding the faith that I follow. For I was born and raised a London Muslim.
I attended mosques and madrassas in Tooting and Balham, adding to the knowledge of Islam taught me by my family. From a young age we learned the importance of the five pillars of Islam; faith, prayer, charity, fasting - and Hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, a journey every Muslim must try to make in their lifetime. So I was delighted to visit the British Museum's Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam.
I have been meaning to write about this spat between two historians for a while but the holiday season took priority. First of all, let me make my position clear: scholars like Niall Ferguson are distinctly responsible for giving intellectual cover to all kinds of unsavoury ideologies that are creating problems for the rest of the world today. While their words may be walking a fine line, the images they conjure up in the minds of others lead to a two-tier world that is simply not acceptable to civilization as we know it.
In his book, 'Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest' (I won't link to it), Ferguson describes the six 'killer apps' of the West that not only provided it deserved dominance, but seeks to justify an approach that may serve little more than a continued dominance at all costs.
Diplomats don't make many mistakes. Certainly not mistakes like attending a reception for 20 minutes and posing for pictures and also giving positive comments.
Marine Le Pen had invited about 100 diplomats to a luncheon earlier this month during a visit to UN Headquarters in New York. But only four accepted: the envoys from Trinidad-Tobago, Armenia and Uruguay — who obviously are of no concern to her at all — and the fourth guest, Israeli UN Ambassador Ron Prosor.
Guardian Editorial - The short war has become a long war which even now, on the 10th anniversary, we do not know how to end.
America and Britain invaded Afghanistan 10 years ago, for reasons which were understandable, to wage a short war that was unavoidable. We stayed, through all the twists and turns imposed by events and by the incoherence of our own changing policies, for reasons which have become less and less understandable. The short war has become a long war which even now we do not know how to end. The ambition to remake Afghanistan on the western model has been silently discarded.
The application to the United Nations for admitting the state of Palestine has been submitted.
In a speech eerily reminiscent of Colin Powell's shameless assertion of Iraqi WMDs at the UN, President Obama produced another US presentation at the UN that reeked of hypocrisy and falsehood. Any credibility that the United States had has been lost.
The issue of Israel goes back to a curious nexus between the cause of the Crusades and to the Protestant guilt at the Holocaust. Germans are mostly Lutherans, and the intellectuals among the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust vowed to bring down Protestant Christianity as an immoral and racist herd psychology that was capable of any atrocity. In our opinion, it is not Protestantism or Martin Luther -- there is a certain Nordic tendency to racial and social purity that may be confused with Protestantism. It remains in check for decades, but when confronted with uncertainty, the Nordics band together and go overboard with their misguided cohesive dehumanisation of 'the other'. The Vikings did it, the English did it, Hitler did it, and now the Anglo-Saxon world did it again after 9/11.
The United States Republican party will stop at nothing to foster Christian fundamentalism. The great and noble religion of Christianity is being hijacked by American Christian fundamentalists. The governor stood by a lady 'prophet' who had previously seen Biblical evil sprits under Jezebel's skirt in the Democratic party. Seriously, it is that weird and twisted. Excerpt below.
Last year, terrorists attacked Qadiani Ahmadiyya places of worship in Lahore just as they have attacked other shrines and places of worship in the last few years in Pakistan. This pattern is part of the general destabilisation that is a natural consequence of the so-called War on Terror being waged on the Western front of the country. These terrorist acts are against all norms of humanity and the perpetrators should be given the strongest possible punishment. Days after the sad event, the Qadiani Centre ordered its country organisations to get the most political mileage out of the attack, especially in Western countries. The actual words in the instructions were "after Lahore attack, everything is changed".
The Leader of the PakistaniJamaat Islami, Syed Munawar Hasan has recently commented that the receipt of taxes from the rich should be a priority. We welcome this step.
A few days ago, discussing the evil of Takfeer, Akber Choudhry expressed the desire that we should at least see a religious scholar try to take on a rich but corrupt person. That desire has not been fulfilled yet, but at least the hope is there that this would happen in our lifetime.
Whether a government is run by Muslims or Hindus or Christians, if it provides the following three things, it is acquitting itself of the dominion that it has been entrusted with:
Yes, 'hero' is a very strong and clichéd word, but when someone has the courage to speak out when no-one else has the courage to do so, that is definitely something to notice. Especially if that someone is from the journalistic community -- people who are paid to write, analyse and think. In case you have not read, Richard Peppiatt has resigned from the Daily Star tabloid with quite some style. In addition to other things, he has written a justified criticism of the tabloid for its Islamophobic stance. He writes,
A lot has been written on the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and now Libya and Bahrain seem to be going the same way. Here at Muslim Identity, we support and promote self-determination with means and goals that are geared to the 21st century and not copied over from the last century of excesses.
Arabia is leading the way once again -- in thought, in action, in co-operation, and in peacefulness. This is the fuzzy foundation being built for the rest of the 21st century, a century in which we will all have to live together with some responsibility falling on each individual. Let us briefly take a look at the ways in which the status quo has changed forever:
by Ahmed Qerni
Diplomats don't make many mistakes. Certainly not mistakes like attending a reception for 20 minutes and posing for pictures and also giving positive comments.
Guardian Editorial
The application to the United Nations for admitting the state of Palestine has been submitted.
The United States Republican party will stop at nothing to foster Christian fundamentalism. The great and noble religion of Christianity is being hijacked by American Christian fundamentalists. The governor stood by a lady 'prophet' who had previously seen Biblical evil sprits under Jezebel's skirt in the Democratic party. Seriously, it is that weird and twisted. Excerpt below.
A lot has been written on the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and now Libya and Bahrain seem to be going the same way. Here at Muslim Identity, we support and promote self-determination with means and goals that are geared to the 21st century and not copied over from the last century of excesses.
@MuslimID
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