World Muslim Congress

American Muslims reject separate ‘sharia’ law system

2012-01-31T11:26:00.000-06:00

Indeed, Muslims like all other people of faith would love the personal form of Sharia, guidelines regarding one’s relationship with the creator, however, the American Muslims believe that American Laws will serve the relationships between the individual and others. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-ghouse/sharia-law-not-in-america_b_653250.html

Mike Ghouse
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American Muslims say they reject separate ‘sharia’ law system

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/interviews-american-muslims-reject-separate-sharia-law-system-194357992.html

By Liz Goodman

A new study based on interviews with more than 200 North American Muslims concludes that a recent spate of state laws banning "sharia law" from the court system may be an overreaction to a non-existent threat.

Oklahoma, Tennessee and Louisiana each passed laws or referendums to ban state judges from considering sharia and other foreign laws last year, and more than 20 other states have debated similar legislation. Newt Gingrich has called for a federal law to ban sharia, while his fellow Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has said sharia law is an "existential threat" to America.

The qualitative study, by University of Windsor law professor Julie MacFarlane and published by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding think tank, is the first to ask American Muslims what they think of sharia, or Islamic religious law. MacFarlane interviewed 101 Muslim men and women, 41 imams and 70 community leaders and specialists about their uses of Islamic law in everyday life. (About a quarter of the respondents live in Canada, but MacFarlane found no significant difference between the Canadian and American responses.)

MacFarlane asked the respondents whether they thought American courts should apply Islamic law to non-Muslims in the legal system. All of them said no.

Three imams out of the 41 surveyed said they wanted a parallel Islamic family tribunal where Muslims could go to sort out their legal problems. But this idea was unpopular with every other respondent, who were content with the separate and secular civil court system. The study's sample was not random, and MacFarlane's findings are not generalizable to the American Muslim community as a whole. But the research still offers a rare look into Muslim attitudes about sharia.

MacFarlane began her research after a small group of Muslims in Toronto petitioned the government in 2003 to set up a separate Islamic family tribunal where Muslims could get binding legal decisions on family law issues. (The city already had such a tribunal for Catholic and Jewish Canadians.) The request--which ultimately was denied--sparked protests in Canada as well as in far-off London, Vienna and Paris. Protesters said the tribunal would violate the separation of church and state. In America, a well-organized network of experts warn of the threat of "creeping sharia," whereby American Muslims--who make up less than 1 percent of the population--attempt to infiltrate courts with Islamic law.

Most of the Muslims MacFarlane interviewed use religious law for family issues such as divorce, marriages, and inheritances in tandem with the regular court system, not instead of it. She focused her research on Muslims who are divorced, interviewing 101 people in that situation. Ninety-five percent of those 101 people said they signed both a nikah, or religious marriage contract, as well as a civil marriage license. Those who had a legal marriage also all formally divorced in courts, after receiving religious permission to do so from an imam. Some imams would not grant a religious divorce until the couple first brought in the civil divorce decree.

"For most American Muslims, sharia represents a private system of morality and identity, primarily focused on marriage and divorce rituals," MacFarlane writes.
Most of the people who signed only a nikah, and not a civil marriage document, were recent immigrants to North America, MacFarlane told Yahoo News. (A nikah-only marriage is not recognized as legal in North America.) In a handful of cases, nikah-only marriages were used when a man was already married and wanted to have multiple wives. Some imams tolerated or encouraged this informal bigamy, MacFarlane says.

MacFarlane's sample isn't representative of the Muslim community as a whole. About 75 percent of the respondents were immigrants to America or Canada, and nearly all of them had at least a college degree. Half were of South Asian descent, 30 percent of Middle Eastern descent, and 10 percent of African descent. The remaining 10 percent were Caucasian converts and African Americans. (African Americans are estimated to make up about 35 percent of the total American Muslim population.)

MacFarlane's findings will be published in a book by Oxford University Press in April.

Prejudices about Islam will be shaken by this show

2012-01-25T00:49:00.000-06:00

By Karen Armstrong

22 January 2012

Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith – even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity.

Recent terrorist atrocities have seemed to confirm this received idea. But if we want a peaceful world, we urgently need a more balanced view. We cannot hope to win the "battle for hearts and minds" unless we know what is actually in them. Nor can we expect Muslims to be impressed by our liberal values if they see us succumbing unquestioningly to a medieval prejudice born in a time of extreme Christian belligerence.

Like Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Sikhs and secularists, some Muslims have undoubtedly been violent and intolerant, but the new exhibition at the British Museum – Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam – is a timely reminder that this is not the whole story.

The hajj is one of the five essential practices of Islam; when they make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims ritually act out the central principles of their faith. Equating religion with "belief" is a modern western aberration. Like swimming or driving, religious knowledge is practically acquired. You learn only by doing. The ancient rituals of the hajj, which Arabs performed for centuries before Islam, have helped pilgrims to form habits of heart and mind that – pace the western stereotype – are non-violent and inclusive.

In the holy city of Mecca, violence of any kind was forbidden. From the moment they left home, pilgrims were not permitted to carry weapons, to swat an insect or speak an angry word, a discipline that introduced them to a new way of living. At a climactic moment of his prophetic career, Muhammad drew on this tradition. Fleeing persecution in Mecca in 622, he and the Muslim community (the umma) had migrated to Medina, 250 miles to the north. Mecca was determined to destroy the umma and a bitter conflict ensued. But eventually Muhammad broke the deadly cycle of warfare with an audacious non-violent initiative.

In March 628, to general astonishment, he announced that he was going to make the hajj.

This meant that he had to ride unarmed into enemy territory, yet 1,000 Muslims accompanied him. The pilgrim party narrowly escaped being massacred by the Meccan cavalry, and eventually entered the sacred territory of Mecca where they simply sat down beside their camels and refused to move. Knowing that they would lose all credibility if they slaughtered pilgrims on this holy ground, the Meccans negotiated a truce and Muhammad accepted humiliating conditions that filled the Muslims with dismay. But the Qur'an proclaimed that this apparent defeat was a "clear triumph" because, like Jews and Christians, the Muslims had acted in a spirit of peace, self-restraint and forbearance. Two years later, hostilities ceased and the Meccans voluntarily opened their gates to the prophet.

Clearly the Qur'an did not despise Jews and Christians; this affinity with "the people of the book" was also central to the Muslim cult of Mecca. The Arabs firmly believed that they, too, were children of Abraham, because they were the descendants of his eldest son Ishmael – a regional view shared by the Bible. It was said that Abraham and Ishmael had rebuilt the Ka'bah, the sacred shrine of Mecca, when it had fallen into disrepair, had dedicated it to their God, and then performed the rites of the hajj. Many Arabs thought that Allah, their high God, was the God worshipped by the people of the book, and Christian Arabs used to make the hajj pilgrimage to the Ka'bah alongside the pagans.

The Arabs had no conception of an exclusive religious tradition, so they were deeply shocked when they discovered that most Jews and Christians refused to consider them as part of the Abrahamic family. The Qur'an still urged Muslims to respect the people of the book and revere their prophets, but decreed that instead of facing Jerusalem when they prayed, as hitherto, they should turn towards the Ka'bah built by Abraham.

Like Abraham, who had not belonged to a closed-off cult, they would take no pride in an established institution and, as Abraham had done, focus on the worship of God alone. Hence the Muslim hajj is all about the Abrahamic family – not Muhammad himself. Pilgrims re-enact the story of Hagar and Ishmael, symbolically returning to the era that preceded religious chauvinism.

Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders. But the British Museum's beautiful presentation of the hajj can help us understand how the vast majority of the world's Muslims understand their faith. Socrates, founder of the western rational tradition, insisted that the exercise of reason required us constantly and stringently to question received ideas and entrenched certainties. The new exhibition can indeed become a journey to the heart of Islam and also, perhaps, to a more authentic and respectful western rational identity.

Source: Guardian

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamMuslimsAndIslamophobia_1.aspx?ArticleID=6466

Texas Faith: What do you think about Tebowing?

2012-01-24T16:24:00.003-06:00

Tebow told Fox Sports last fall that he knows about the criticism, but he's more focused on those who draw inspiration from his public prayers. Said Tebow: "It's not my job to see people's reasons behind it, but I know [of a kid] with cancer that tweeted me, 'Tebowing while I'm chemoing' -- how cool is that?" Tebow said. "That's worth it right now. If that gives him any encouragement or puts a smile on his face, or gives him encouragement to pray, that's completely awesome."

With this phenomenon swirling around us, and the Super Bowl approaching, here is this week's question: What is your view about his public praying and the Tebowing phenomenon that has built up around it?

Eleven Texas Faith panelists respond, please visit Dallas Morning News at http://religionblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2012/01/texas-faith-what-do-you-think.html

MIKE GHOUSE, President, Foundation for Pluralism, Dallas

Tebowing phenomenon has several parallels in our society.

When things are not going well, hope is the only thing that drives the average person to live-on, and look forward to the light at the end of a tunnel. We are in a tunnel now with the highest unemployment a generation has witnessed in a long time; someone we know closely does not have a job, lost his or her house, and is struggling to take care of the family to keep a roof above the head.

God is the last resort for those who believe in divine intervention, we expect miracles, and we day-dream about a positive change in our lives. When someone like Tim Tebow expresses that call to God in public, we feel it in our guts and we relate with it.

We are an untapped reservoir of kindness, and were looking to release that energy. When Tebow rested his knee on the ground with millions of us watching, he instantly became a catalyst and has released that energy in us, and emotionally, we connected with him. This is something we wanted to do, but did not know how.

The last such phenomenon was witnessed on the evening of Tuesday November 4, 2008 by most Americans regardless of their political, ethnic or religious affiliation. I choked and felt the tears in my eyes, the tears of Joy. I was happy to think of the prospect of America becoming a great nation once again, in those few bare seconds I was imagining prosperity knocking on every American door fulfilling the dream of millions of Americans with a Job, health and education for their children. A sense of safety permeated through my body, getting the chills to know that in a few hours the Obama presidency would be a reality. America once again will be a strong, healthy and a prosperous nation. I was still trying to understand my feelings of joy when someone on NPR said it was like "birthing", birthing it was.

Birthing it is. Tebowing has unleashed hope in us, and I hope and pray that our economy recovers and absorbs the unemployed among us to take care of our families. I have interacted with several of my friends from Atheists to Zoroastrians and every one in between; most of them see it as a positive change. Tebow has made us conscious of the need for humility and need for prayers.

Let's pray that all our presidential candidates including the incumbent, to make an effort to visit every place of worship across the width and breadth of our land and kneel in humility towards the creator and sincerely beg to remove the ill-will towards each other. Can we do that? Yes we can, we are in this together and no American should feel apprehensive, discomfort or fear of the other. May God open our hearts and minds towards each other to look with kindness and goodwill, and give hope to each other, Amen!

. . . . . .

Mike Ghouse is committed to building a cohesive America, where no Americans has to live in apprehension or fear of the other. He is a speaker, thinker and a writer and offers pluralistic solutions on current issues. His work is listed at www.MikeGhouse.net

Satanic Verses - six different takes on the topic

2012-01-23T09:15:00.000-06:00

I am pleased to share different takes on the issue of freedom of speech and Satanic Verses. If you want to have an opinion on the topic, it is good to read six pieces appended below in the link.

Maulana Wahiduddin’s view is my view as well. Indeed, I have written in identical terms about Tasleema Nasreen (http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2010/03/taslimas-article-sparks-violence-in_01.html ) and the Pastor who wanted to burn the Quraan (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-ghouse/muslims-proact-against-qu_b_705571.html) .

I would have written two articles identical to Maulana Wahiduddin, and Praveen Swami, thanks to both of them to write it out, they have said precisely what I wanted to say. Aijaz Syed has articulated some great points.

I applaud Sultan Shaheen to put together diverse opinions on the issues, just as I have done over the years. Unless we have all the cards placed on the table, our opinion or solutions remain incomplete without factoring in all aspects of the issue. However, I would not have taken the approach of Sultan Shahn’s own opinion.

Muhammad Yunus’ piece is incredible one on the topic; however his highlight is on the life of Prophet. I have held the same opinion as Yunus and it is good to read his research on the topic. Reverence for Prophet is beautiful but making a God out of him was not his message. He was the ultimate consummate peacemaker and wanted us, the whole humanity to live in peace by learning about each other (49:13) and respecting everyone equally (last sermon). It's his message that he wanted us to value. The best among us is one who is sincere, humble, and pious and does well to fellow beings by his virtues and not by his birth. We don’t need miracles to prove his prophet hood, our faith should be strong enough in his message, which in itself is a miracle, the prophet wanted to create cohesive societies where no human was above the other. It’s the same message you find in all the great wisdom, Islam is not a new religion, prophet had said that repeatedly, It's your character not the familial or racial thing that needs to judged. He even said that to his daughter, you earn your ticket to paradise through your deeds, in what you do to your fellow beings and not because you are his daughter.

As Muslims, and as part of the human family, our role ought to be to mitigate conflicts and nurture goodwill for creating a society where no one feels injustice is done to them, and ultimately no one is apprehensive of the other. As Praveen Swami has written, no one can cast the first stone. We all have to sit down and do what is good for all of us in the long run.

Take the time to read them all, they will contribute to your thought process.

Mike Ghouse is a speaker, writer and thinker committed to building cohesive societies and offers pluralistic solutions on current issues. His work is indexed in the links at www.MikeGhouse.net

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Muslim reactions to Salman Rushdie: No Thought Crime in Islam, says Maulana Wahiddudin Khan

By Maulana Wahiddudin Khan

Jan 15, 2012

According to international norms, everyone has the right to express his views in a peaceful manner, says MAULANA WAHIDDUDIN KHAN

Salman Rushdie is once again in the news. Born in India and now settled in the UK, he has been invited to the Jaipur Literature Festival that is being held from January 20 to 24. On hearing of this, a Muslim religious organisation reacted by issuing a statement demanding that the government of India should not allow Rushdie’s entry into India. According to them, he has committed blasphemy in his book The Satanic Verses, and his visit to India will hurt the sentiments of Muslims here.

According to my way of thinking, the demand by this Muslim group is completely uncalled for. They have the right to stop Rushdie from coming to their own campus, but they have no right to ban his entry into Indian soil.

Follow The Constitution

India is a democratic country which is guided by a secular constitution and Muslims should know the framework of the Indian Constitution. Any demand that is alien to this constitutional framework will undoubtedly be invalid and unacceptable to the Indian government.

Moreover, this kind of demand is un-Islamic. It is against the Islamic spirit. If Muslims want to represent Islam, they must take the visit of Rushdie as an opportunity to invite the British author to enter into a dialogue, so that they may discuss the controversial point with him, and try to impress upon him their point of view. This visit to India by Rushdie gives them the chance to remove any misunderstanding of Islam by presenting their case before him in a rational manner.

There is a very relevant verse in the Quran on this subject. It reads: “If any of the non-believers seeks your protection, then let him come so that he may hear the words of God, then convey him to a place of safety” (9:6).

What The Quran Says

The verse focuses on a very important Islamic principle, that Muslims should welcome everybody. According to this principle, Muslims should organise meetings with the British author. They should put their point of view before him in a rational manner, then try to present to him their point of view and their objections to his writings.

If Rushdie is not convinced, they should make Dua for him and according to the Quranic teaching, see him off amicably, without rancour.

We are living in an age of freedom. According to international norms, everyone has the right to express his views in a peaceful manner. Muslims also have right to put their point of view before Rushdie, just as he has the right to express his views — both have an equal right.

Spirit Of The Age

It is not good for Muslims to go against the spirit of the age. If they do so, they will only harm the religion of Islam. They will prove by this act that George Orwell was right when he said that Islam believes in “thought-crime”, although Islam is completely free of this blame.

If Rushdie has published a negative book, Muslims by their negative reaction are giving the false impression that Islam does indeed believe in “thought-crime”. I would, therefore, like to reiterate that Muslims should take this opportunity to have a dialogue with Rushdie and try to present the Islamic point of view to him rationally, so that he may understand the true picture of Islam.

Source: The Times of India, New Delhi

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamIslamAndSpiritualism_1.aspx?ArticleID=6380

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Acceptance of The Satanic Verses Episode of The Classical Sira is Shirk knd Kufr

Face value acceptance of the episode of Satanic Verses and other colorful, dramatic, and vindictive accounts of the Classical Sira (the Prophet’s early biography) stand shirk, kufr and nifaq (hypocrisy) in present day objective vocabulary.

Islamic theology must be treated historic critically because of its undeniable historical moorings;

The eternal and universal paradigms of the Qur’an must be regarded as the font of guidance for all humanity for all times.

By Muhammad Yunus, NewAgeIslam.com

co-author (Jointly with Ashfaque Ullah Syed), Essential Message of Islam, Amana Publications, USA, 2009.

“Thus we made for every messenger an enemy - Satans from among men and jinn, some of them inspiring others with seductive talk (in order to) deceive (them), and had your Lord pleased, they would not have done it. Therefore, leave them and what they forge” (6:112).

“Thus we made for every messenger an enemy among the criminals - but enough is your Lord (O Muhammad,) as a Guide and Helper” (25:31).

The biggest problem with Muslim scholars and theologians is that on one hand they regard the Qur’an as the infallible word of God and ultimate font of wisdom and guidance, and on the other, they claim the divinity/integrity of their theological discourses that were pieced together by early scholars/Imams - in most cases by one or few individuals, with resources as scanty as their era could pool. The case of the alleged satanic verses is a glaring example.

The episode was first put together from oral accounts by Ibn Ishaq (d. 768), one of the earliest biographers of the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632). al-Tabari (d. 926), one of the earliest and most renowned exegetes, drew on Ibn Ishaq’s manuscript (not preserved for later times) to relate the story, which suggests that as the Prophet was preaching to an elite (Quays) audience, a revelation came down venerating the three most popular pagan deities (Lat, Uzi and Manta) in the underlined words below: "Have you considered al-Lat and al-‘Uzi (53:19), and another, the third (goddess), Manta (53:20). These are the exalted birds whose intercession is approved.”

The story further suggests that the venerating words were later expunged from the Qur'an and replaced with what we find in it today: “What! For you the male sex and for Him the female (53:21)? Behold, such would indeed be the most unfair division” (53:22).

Ibn Hisham (d. 834), who edited and published Ibn Ishaq’s work, and the early compilers of the Hadith (Imam al-Bukhari, d. 870, and Muslim, d. 875) who both succeeded Ibn Ishaq and preceded al-Tabari, make no mention of this episode, indicating their suspicion about the authenticity of the narrators in the transmission chain (isnad) dating from the Prophet’s era. More importantly, the story is not substantiated by the Qur’an and, in fact, contradicts its repeated assertion on the incorruptibility of its text (6:34, 6:115, 18:27, 41:42, 85:22), and is therefore not tenable, unless the Qur’an were to falsify itself – which it did not [1]. Some Muslim scholars have, however, made a sweeping connection of this episode with the Qur’anic generic verses 22:52/53, which relate to Satan’s influencing the desires (tamanna) of the prophets and messengers in general and not to Satan’s tampering with the revelation. Salman Rushdie has treated the episode as a fantasy, as it veritably deserves, although he has been provocative possibly to gain appeal among the Western audience. Fame, ambition and wealth remain the chief motivators of the mortals – no matter how intellectually gifted. And the naïve dances in the tune of such instigators disregarding the Qur’anic reminders under the caption above and thus turn the knave into a hero and celebrity. But this is beside the point.

Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdi might have been prompted by his desire to pose as the leader of the global Muslim community, or it might as well have been aimed at pre-empting enlightened scholarship from digging into the Islamic theology. Theologians lose their theological clout once the human element of theology is exposed and so they abhor any theological scrutiny. $

The truth is, as in all ancient religions, theological discourses are embedded with legends, fantasies, fables, tales, parables and all forms of embellishments, characterized by the era in which they evolved. The embellishments were incorporated – as part of the literary culture and paradigms of the era - to aggrandize and lionize the founder of the religion its leaders, to demonize the perceived enemies, to fire the imagination of common-folk and to fill them with awe and admiration for their prophet/ religious leaders. Islam has been no exception. Thus, despite the Qur’an’s repeated assertions of the Prophet’s incapability to show any miracles (6:37, 11:12, 13:7, 17:90-93, 21:5, 25:7/8, 29:50), the most authentic of Sunni Hadith compilation – that of Imam al-Bukhari credits him with the following miracles: $

The Prophet's touching/ rubbing of the mouths of two empty water skins enabled the latter to fill all the empty water skins of his companions [2].

Flowing of water from his fingers [3].

Rising up of water from a dry well at Hudaibiya to help quench the thirst of one thousand and four hundred of his companions [4].

Manifold increase in the quantity of meal served to guests at the Prophet's invocation [5].

Continuous one week rain with flooding immediately after his invocation [6].

Audible crying of the stem of a date palm tree in the Prophet's mosque [7].

Increase in the amount of dates in a garden after the Prophet went round it [8].

Splitting of the Moon at the Prophet's command [9]. $

Similarly, the Qur’an testifies that the Prophet was unaware of his mission before the revelation commenced (10:16, 29:48, 42:52), and that the Meccans had no clue whatsoever of his vocational assignment as he later claimed, and accordingly they took him for a joke (21:36, 25:41), called him an impostor (30:58), crazy (44:14, 68:51) and a crazy poet (37:35/36); and ridiculed the Qur’anic revelation (18:56, 26:6, 37:14, 45:9) as the legends of the ancients (6:25, 23:82/83, 27:67/68, 68:15, 83:13) and a jumble of dreams (21:5). However, disregarding these copious, repetitive, compelling and irrefutable Qur’anic testimonies regarding the obscurity of his early life, the following tale of the circumstance of his birth became very popular not long after his death:

“When the planet al-Moushtari past, a line of light darted for the second time from Amina's body in the direction of far away Syria and it illuminated the palace of the town of Busra. At the same time, other prodigies astonished the world: the lake Sowa suddenly dried up; a violent earthquake made the palace of Chosroes the Great tremble, and shattered fourteen of its towers; the sacred fire, kept alight for more than a thousand years, went out in spite of the exertions of its Persian worshippers, and all the idols of the universe were found with their heads bowed down in great shame” [10]. $

Another area of major contrast is the profound veneration of the Prophet in the traditional accounts and the Classical Sira (The Prophet’s biography). The Qur’an describes him as a human being like others (18:110, 41:6), places him at a spiritual parity with other Prophets (2:136, 2:285, 4:152), its Speaker, God, does not speak to him directly except through the agency of archangel Gabriel, threatens to “seize him by the right hand (69:45), then sever his aorta” (69:46) were he to tamper with the revelation, and warns his wounded followers at the end of Uhud battle (625) in the face of a rumor about his fatality that “Muhammad was merely a messenger, other messengers had passed away before him and(and asks them,) if he died or was killed would they turn on their heels?(3:144). As a sharp contrast to these and other similar enunciations asserting the absolute remoteness of God from the person of the Prophet, the traditional account illustrated below venerate him as an integral part of God’s creative scheme, thus (God forbid) transgressing the transcendence of the Almighty:

“Muhammad said: ‘The first light which Allah created was my light.’ They say that when Allah created His divine Throne, He wrote on it in letters of light: ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. ‘When Adam went out of Paradise, he saw the name Muhammad coupled with the name of Allah written on the leg of the Throne and everywhere in Paradise” [11]. $

Any orthodox Muslim or Islam critical scholar will know numerous such accounts that are knit together to aggrandize and virtually deify the Prophet. In the medieval ages these accounts did not stand out as odd or exaggerated as the literary style of the era admitted such embellishments as part of the prevalent linguistic art – the most predominant art form of the era. Thus, contemporaneous accounts extol King Solomon by reporting that he bedded with all his one hundred wives one night [12], and ii) Sir Key of King Arthur’s court claimed before the full house that he threw a stone ‘as large as a cow’ to dislodge the ‘stranger’ (a human being), who had leaped up to the top of a tree, two hundred cubits high in a single bound [13].The simple people of the era who heard these accounts made no effort to objectively evaluate them. They had grown up in a literary environment that was far more geared to creating an emotional and sensational impact than recording historical facts. So they let these ‘tall’ accounts pass over their heads and waited to know the bottom lines. But in today’s objective and analytical vocabulary these embellished accounts sound untrue, highly exaggerated, bizarre and fantasized. $

The Muslim ulama suffer ambivalence, or rather a pathetic disorientation in their mindset. Groomed in the medieval theological discourses in their madrassas, they venerate the medieval embellished accounts but at the same time they hold on to the truth of the Qur’anic revelation that keeps absolutely clear of the embellished medieval accounts that sound like fables, legends and fantasies today. The legend of Satanic Verses is one such account.

If the Muslim ulama continue to venerate the embellished accounts of their medieval theological corpuses, and do not treat them as closed corpuses - tales, fables and gossips in today’s objective vocabulary, they will be acting like some of the Beduin Arabs of the Prophet’s era, who were intense (ashaddu) in kufr (denial) and nifaq (hypocricy) (9:97-98) – because they cannot simultaneously venerate the Qur’an and a theological corpus that in its face value contains tales, fables, embellishments and legends such as the Satanic Verses and other similar episodes that are antithetic to the Qur’anic message.

This is no trick of arguments. The early biographers relied entirely on the oral reports – or rather poetic imageries that constituted the news of the era. Thus, the work of the early biographers suffered internal incoherence as different poets left differing accounts and it was simply impossible for the early biographers to produce a coherent record from the materials on their hands. This can amply be demonstrated by the following examples of inconsistency and emotional outbursts of Ibn Hisham’s work:

i) One section of the work shows a martyred companion of the Prophet, Khabib, articulating his deep parting emotions in a poetic imagery as he stood on the gallows just before he was hanged [14]. Another section contradicts this imagery suggesting that the martyr was weeping unceasingly as he stood on the gallows [15].

ii) The work quotes the parting dialogue between the propagandist poet Ka‘b Ibn Ashraf and his wife, just as he was coming out from ‘under the blanket’ at the call of Abu Naila, who had gone to his house to kill him [16]. The poet was killed suddenly, and it is inconceivable that his widow would tell the parting words of her slain husband to those who killed him. The quoted words were obviously speculative.

The same holds for the works of al-Waqidi (d. 206/822) and Ibn Sa‘d (d. 230/845) In fact, these early biographers have been sharply criticized by many Muslim scholars of their own era [17].

Conclusion: It is high time that the Muslim theologians and scholarship acknowledge that the accounts reported in the Prophet’s early biography are laid out in the literary style and mental framework and imageries of the era - that was characterized by what we shall today call, fantasy, fable, imaginations and speculations verging on the fantabulous, the grotesque and the bizarre. While some examples are quoted above, the following extract on the Prophet Muhammad’s conversation with Adam in the first heaven reported in one of Ibn Hisham’s versions loudly testifies to its apocryphal character:

“Then I saw men with lips like those of camels. In their hands were balls of fire which they thrust into their mouths and collected from their extremities to thrust into their mouths again. I asked, ‘Who are these O Gabriel?’ He said, ‘these are men who robbed the orphans.’ I then saw men with large bellies the likes of which I have never seen before even on the road to the house of Pharaoh where the greatest punishment is meted out to the greatest sinners. These are then trodden upon by men who when brought to the fire run like maddened camels. Those whom they tread upon remain immobile…. I then saw women hanging from their breasts and asked, who are these, O Gabriel? He said, ‘These are women who fathered on their husbands’ children, not their own.’… He then took me into Paradise where I saw a beautiful damsel with luscious lips. As I was attracted by her, I asked her, ‘To whom do you belong?’ She answered, ‘To Zayd Ibn Harithah.’” [18]

It must be admitted that it will be a gross injustice and insolence of the highest order to undermine the earlier biographic works or their authors. Their works fired the imagination of their audience and fed religious inspiration and zeal to millions and millions of people down the generations until this very era. Practically all the converts to Islam had identified their religion with their Prophet and found it far easier and inspiring to glorify their religious leaders with whom they could associate rather than probe the message he left for them. This propensity of icon-worship imperceptibly found its way into Islam and resulted in an explosive proliferation of hymns and accounts glorifying the Prophet Muhammad. However, the Muslim ulama must understand that God had assigned a singular role to the Prophet - that is to convey God’s Message [19] - the Qur’an with clarity [20]. If the ulama insist on a regime of oral theological devotion – loving the Prophet, showering him with praises, narrating his biography in a literalist fashion, researching on issues like Satanic verses and the miraculous powers and military genius of the Prophet, observing his birthday with great fanfare, praying for him in all their prayers and so on but totally ignore the functional aspect of his message – the social, moral and ethical paradigms of the Qur’an, they have virtually reduced the Prophet into a cult leader and Islam into a cult of Muhammad that will repel the seekers of Divine guidance from Islam and freeze Islam into the seventh century Arabia. Face value acceptance of the episode of Satanic Verses and other colorful, dramatic, vindictive and venerating accounts of the Classical Sira (the Prophet’s early biography), read and propagated in today’s objective vocabulary may thus stand shirk, kufr and nifaq (hypocrisy) – though God knows best; and the practice must be deconstructed in favor of preaching the Qur’anic message – rid of its historical moorings.

Notes:

1. http://www.newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamIslamicShariaLaws_1.aspx?ArticleID=6316

2.Sahih al-Bukhari, English translation by Mohsin Khan, New Delhi, 1984, Vol.4, Acc.771.

3. Ibid., Vol.4, Acc.772-776, 779.

4. Ibid., Vol.4, Acc.777.

5. Ibid., Vol.4, Acc.778, 781.

6. Ibid., Vol.4, Acc.782.

7. Ibid., Vol.4, Acc.783-785.

8. Ibid., Vol.4, Acc.780.

9. Ibid., Vol.4, Acc.830, 831.

10. Sliman bin Ibrahim and Etienne Dinet, The life of Muhammad, London 1990 , p. 19.

11. Maxime Rodinson, Muhammad, English translation, 2nd edition, London 1996, p. 304.

1. 12. Sahih al-Bukhari, (2 above) Vol.7, Acc. 169.

13. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, USA 1988, p. 23.

14. Ibn Hisham, Sirrat un Nabi, Urdu translation by Gholam Rasul, Delhi 1984, Vol.2, Chap.124, p. 197.

15. Ibid., Vol. 2, Chap.124, p. 198.

16. Ibid,, Vol.2, p. Chap.109, p. 35.

17. To quote Rafique Zakaria:

“He (Ibn Ishaq) has been sufficiently meticulous in the collection of facts, but sometimes he does not distinguish between facts and fiction. That is why many of his contemporaries denounced him... Malik, one of the founders of four schools of Muslim theology, who was a contemporary of Ibn Ishaq, called him ‘a devil’. Hisham bin Umara, another prominent theologian of the time said, ‘the rascal lies.’ Imam Hanbal, one of the greatest jurists of Islam refused to rely on the traditions collected by him. There were many other learned men who held similar views about Ibn Ishaq’s works. The same is more or less true of his successors like al-Waqidi, Ibn Sa‘d…” - Muhammad and the Qur’an, London 1992, p. 12.

18. Muhammad Husayn Haykal, The Life of Muhammad, English translation by Ismail Ragi, 8th edition, Karachi 1989, p. 143.

19. 5:99, 7:158 13:40, 42:48.

20. 5:92, 16:82, 24:54.

January 21, 2012

Muhammad Yunus, a Chemical Engineering graduate from Indian Institute of Technology, and a retired corporate executive has been engaged in an in-depth study of the Qur’an since early 90’s, focusing on its core message. He has co-authored the referred exegetic work, which received the approval of al-Azhar al-Sharif, Cairo in 2002, and following restructuring and refinement was endorsed and authenticated by Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl of UCLA, and published by Amana Publications, Maryland, USA, 2009.

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamIslamicIdeology_1.aspx?ArticleID=6444

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Salman Rushdie: Indian Muslims Should Stop Fighting Phantoms, Take Up Real Issues

By Aijaz Z. Syed

20 January, 2012

When I first heard of Salman Rushdie I was at university.

The Satanic Verses had set off a perfect storm in India and around the world. The book was banned in India following fiery protests by Muslims. Many died in Mumbai when police opened fire on angry protesters. Then came Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa sanctioning the novelist's death, sparking a global debate on free speech and "excessive" Muslim sensitivity.

One day, discussing artistic freedom in one of his lectures, Prof. Isaac Sequiera, who headed the English department at Osmania University and taught us American literature, launched a blistering broadside against Khomeini's fatwa and attempts by "some people" to curtail free speech. Prof. Sequiera was one of those brilliant teachers who would draw you to the class day after day. Yet it wasn't easy to stomach his critique of the Muslim response to Rushdie's book, comparing it to the infamous Spanish Inquisition. Was it the same thing?

The church burned “heretics” on mere hearsay — and everyone who didn't subscribe to its worldview — at stake. When Galileo suggested Earth was round, rather than flat as the church insisted, he was given a chance to reconsider his opinion while he spent the rest of his life behind bars.

Rushdie, on the other hand, has repeatedly abused his creative license, and the gift of creativity, to assail a billion people's revered icons. As someone born in a Muslim family, he knew what he was doing and its possible consequences.

No freedom is absolute — not even in the anything-goes West. Blasphemy is a serious crime in many European nations including in Denmark. Every freedom is qualified. Every right comes with responsibility. You can't go around happily waving your big stick and hitting people in the name of freedom. The freedom of your stick ends where my nose begins. And if you think you have a right to offend, well, others have an equal right to take offense. If Rushdie is free to exercise his creative freedom to attack people's sacred icons, shouldn't his victims too have a right to exercise their freedom of action to deal with him?

Of course, I couldn't say all this to my teacher. Blame it on my moral timidity or the fact that I was painfully shy and the only Muslim in the whole class. That was nearly two decades ago. Today, as this row over Rushdie's participation in the Jaipur literary festival rages on, I am amazed by the fact how little has changed in this whole debate over the past two decades. The latest report is Rushdie has cancelled his visit to India for the Jaipur festival due to security reasons.

The Muslims are upset over the invitation being extended to someone whose name has become a curse word for them. On the other hand, the increasingly shrill voices in the media are crying themselves hoarse as they invoke India's fabled tolerance while ignoring the sentiments of the minority community.

Indeed, more than their concern for the nation's secular ethos, it's their intolerance of all things Muslim that has them batting for Rushdie. They defend his right to visit his “motherland” oblivious of the fact that the man has repeatedly heaped abuse and scorn on the same motherland and its icons in his books, from Midnight's Children to Shame to The Moor's Last Sigh.

The late Premier Indira Gandhi took Rushdie to court over Midnight's Children which describes her as a “black widow.” He was forced to expunge parts of the book that had Sanjay Gandhi accusing his mother of killing his father, Feroz Gandhi, by neglecting him. Rushdie argued in court that it was only fiction, only to be snubbed by the judge who pointed out that Indira and Sanjay Gandhi were real people.

In the case of Satanic Verses too he hid behind the same fig leaf launching cheap attacks on the Prophet, peace be upon him, and his blessed household, outraging his billion-plus believers.

The outrage was deliberate, just as most of his books have been deliberately offensive and provocative. He loves to provoke and offend because it sells in the West. And Islam and its icons and followers have been a fair game for centuries. Free speech? Gimme a break! Freedom and free speech have nothing to do with it. Even the so-called liberals and Hindutva fanatics cheering for the author and lecturing Muslims on tolerance know it. They love him because the Muslims loathe him.

That said, the way this whole issue has been handled by Muslim leadership — if there's such a thing as Muslim leadership — makes one extremely uncomfortable. Except for Asaduddin Owaisi, the young leader of MIM who saved the day once again, not one Muslim talking head could survive the likes of Arnab Goswami of Times Now, India's answer to Fox News. Once again the bumbling lot did not merely fail to present their case explaining why Rushdie isn't welcome, they managed to make a laughingstock of the whole community.

This week CNN IBN's Sagarika Ghose had two Muslim “leaders” pitted against two “liberals” on the panel. One gentleman, an eminent lawyer associated with the Babri Masjid case, had one hand on his earpiece the whole time as he struggled to make sense of the brutal attacks by the anchor and her guests. And studio guests and audience couldn't understand half the things the other gentleman, a former Maharashtra MLA, kept muttering in a chaotic mix of Urdu and English talking of an “international conspiracy” against Muslims. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Do these guys really represent and speak for a 200-million-strong, diverse community? More important, why do Indian Muslims get repeatedly bogged down in the same old, festering issues when we have far more serious challenges and problems staring us in the face?

As much as I am repelled by Rushdie, I can't help being intrigued by the question that has been raised by others: Why now? Rushdie has apparently been quietly and frequently visiting India over the past few years. Does it have something to do with the assembly elections in five states, including Uttar Pradesh, next month as some suggest? Given the propensity of political parties to raise such issues to excite the easily excitable Muslim public opinion so they could soothe it later, the possibility cannot be dismissed.

Of course, Rushdie will remain unwelcome as long as he remains unrepentant. And by protesting against his abuse, Muslims are only exercising their democratic rights and the suggestion that they're undermining India's future is ridiculous. We cannot, however, allow characters like Rushdie and controversies like these to define us and our agenda forever. We must choose our battles wisely. For we have far bigger wars ahead of us.

From our political and economic dispossession to our situation in education and employment sectors, the level of our deprivation is simply overwhelming. A TV documentary this week, again on CNN IBN, on the legendary weavers of Benares, literally fighting for survival with their emaciated, starving children, should be a must-watch for every Muslim. It's the same story with the once-famous artisan communities in UP, from Aligarh to Moradabad to Bareilly and Kanpur, and general state of affairs across the Gangetic belt. Indeed, the condition of Muslims in north India, once the power center, is today the worst in the country. When will Muslim leaders and those who claim to champion the community take up these real issues? When will we stop expending all our time and energy on fighting phantoms and chasing chimeras?

Aijaz Zaka Syed is a Gulf-based commentator. Write him at aijaz.syed@hotmail.com

Source: Arab News

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamWarWithinIslam_1.aspx?ArticleID=6441

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Satanic Verses Controversy: Salman Rushdie & India's New Theocracy

By Praveen Swami

21 January, 2012

India's secular state is in a state of slow-motion collapse. The contours of a new theocratic dystopia are already evident.

In 300CE, the historian and cleric, Eusebius, fearfully recorded the rise of a new “demon-inspired heresy.” “From innumerable long-extinct blasphemous heresies,” he wrote, the new religion's founder “had made a patchwork of them and brought from Persia a deadly poison with which he infected our own world.”

Manichaeism, a new religion which posited an eternal struggle between good and evil, had dramatically expanded across the ancient world. Less than half-a-century after its rise, though, the faith had been all but annihilated. Bahram II massacred its followers in Persia; in 296, the Roman emperor, Diocletian, decreed its leaders “condemned to the fire with their abominable scriptures.” Khagan Boku Tekin, the Uighur king, made Manichaeism the state religion giving it a home — but even this last redoubt collapsed in 840.

Eusebius' own Christian faith, by contrast, flourished after it won imperial patronage: the word of god grows best in fields watered by the state's pelf, and ploughed by the state's swords.

Salman Rushdie's censoring-out from the ongoing literary festival in Jaipur will be remembered as a milestone that marked the slow motion disintegration of India's secular state. Islamist clerics first pressured the state to stop Mr. Rushdie from entering India; on realising he could not stop, he was scared off with a dubious assassination threat. Fear is an effective censor: the writers Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar, who sought to read out passages from The Satanic Verses as a gesture of solidarity, were stopped from doing so by the festival's organisers.

In a 1989 essay, Ahmad Deedat, an influential neo-fundamentalist who starred in the first phases of the anti-Rushdie campaign, hoped the writer would “die a coward's death, a hundred times a day, and eventually when death catches up with him, may he simmer in hell for all eternity.” He thanked Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi for his “sagacious” decision to ban The Satanic Verses. Now, another Indian Prime Minister has helped further Mr. Deedat's dream.

The betrayal of secular India in Jaipur, though, is just part of a far wider treason: one that doesn't have to do with Muslim clerics alone, but a state that has turned god into a public-sector undertaking.

Underwriting faith

Few Indians understand the extent to which the state underwrites the practice of their faith. The case of the Maha Kumbh Mela, held every 12 years at Haridwar, Allahabad, Ujjain and Nashik, is a case in point. The 2001 Mela in Allahabad, activist John Dayal has noted in a stinging essay, involved state spending of over Rs.1.2 billion — 12,000 taps that supplied 50.4 million litres of drinking water; 450 kilometres of electric lines and 15,000 streetlights; 70,000 toilets; 7,100 sanitation workers, 11 post offices and 3,000 phone lines; 4,000 buses and trains.

That isn't counting the rent that ought to have been paid on the 15,000 hectares of land used for the festival — nor the salaries of the hundreds of government servants administering the Kumbh.

Last year, the Uttar Pradesh police sought a staggering Rs.2.66 billion to pay for the swathe of electronic technologies, helicopters and 30,000 personnel which will be needed to guard the next Mela in 2013. There are no publicly available figures on precisely how much the government will spend on other infrastructure — but it is instructive to note that an encephalitis epidemic that has claimed over 500 children's lives this winter drew a Central aid of just Rs.0.28 billion.

The State's subsidies to the Kumbh Mela, sadly, aren't an exception. Muslims wishing to make the Haj pilgrimage receive state support; so, too, do Sikhs travelling to Gurdwaras of historic importance in Pakistan. Hindus receive identical kinds of largesse, in larger amounts. The state helps underwrite dozens of pilgrimages, from Amarnath to Kailash Mansarovar. Early in the last decade, higher education funds were committed to teaching pseudo-sciences like astrology; in 2001, the Gujarat government even began paying salaries to temple priests.

In 2006, the Delhi government provided a rare official acknowledgment that public funds are routinely spent on promoting god. In a study of its budget expenditure, it said it provided “religious services, i.e. grants for religious purpose including repairs and maintenance of ancient temples, contribution to religious institutions and for memorial of religious leaders like Guru Nanak Birth Anniversary, Dussehra Exhibitions [sic., throughout]”.

The study did not reveal precisely how much had been spent on what kind of religious promotion. It did, however, note that spending on a broad category called “cultural, recreational and religious activities” had increased steadily — from Rs.526.5 million in 2003-2004, to Rs.751 million in 2006-2007. In 2006-2007, these kinds of activities accounted for 0.74% of Delhi's overall budget — ahead of, say, environmental protection (0.17%), mining and manufacturing (0.59%), and civil defence (0.12%).

India's clerics, regardless of their faith, have long been intensely hostile to state regulation of religion — witness the country's failure to rid itself of the faith-based laws that govern our personal lives. In the matter of the perpetuation of their religion, though, the state is a welcome ally.

The contours of the bizarre theocratic dystopia that could replace the secular state are already evident. The state tells us we may not read the Satanic Verses, or Aubrey Menen's irreverent retelling of the Ramayana; it chooses not to prosecute the vandals who block stores from stocking D.N. Jha's masterful Holy Cow, James Laine's history of Shivaji, or Paul Courtright's explorations of oedipal undertones in Hindu mythology.

Regulation on what we eat, drink

It doesn't end there: the state regulates, on god's behalf, what we may eat or drink — witness the proliferation of bans on beef, and proscriptions on alcohol use in so-called holy cities. It ensures children pray in morning assemblies funded by public taxes, provides endowments for denomination schools and funds religious functions. It pays for prayers before state functions, and promotes pseudo-sciences like astrology. And, yes: it censors heretics, like M.F. Husain or Mr. Rushdie.

Even the rule of law has been contracted-out to god's agents. Last week, a self-appointed Sharia court issued orders to expel Christian priests from Jammu and Kashmir; neither the police, the judicial system nor political parties stepped in. In many north Indian States, local caste and religious tyrannies have brutally punished transgressions of religious laws. In 2010, the National Crime Records Bureau data show, a staggering 178 people were killed for practising witchcraft.

For decades now, Indian liberals have shied away from confronting theism, choosing instead to collaborate with the marketing of allegedly tolerant traditions. Back in 2005, the Human Resource Development Ministry set up a committee to consider how state-funded schools could best promote tolerance. Lingadevaru Halemane, a linguist and playwright, made clear the committee was chasing a chimera. “These days,” he argued, “whichever religion dominates in the area, they open the schools.” Local culture, he said bluntly, “will be dominated by the dominant group.”

Spurious secularism

Leaving aside the question of whether India's religious traditions are in fact tolerant — a subject on which the tens of thousands of victims of communal and caste violence might have interesting opinions — this spurious secularism has served in the main to institutionalise and sharpen communal boundaries. It has also allowed clerics to exercise influence over state policy — insulating themselves from a secularising world.

The strange thing is this: India's people, notwithstanding their religiosity, aren't the ones pushing the state to guard god's cause. India's poor send their children to private schools hoping they will learn languages and sciences, not prayer. Indian politics remains focussed on real-world issues: no party campaigns around seeking more funds for mosque domes or temple elephants.

Eight years ago, scholar Meera Nanda argued that “India is a country that most needs a decline in the scope of religion in civil society for it to turn its constitutional promise of secular democracy into a reality.” “But,” she pointed out, “India is a country least hospitable to such a decline”. Dr. Nanda ably demonstrated the real costs of India's failure to secularise: among them, the perpetuation of caste and gender inequities, the stunting of reason and critical facilities needed for economic and social progress; the corrosive growth of religious nationalism.

India cannot undo this harm until god and god's will are ejected from our public life. No sensible person would argue that the school curriculum ought to discourage eight-year-olds from discovering that the tooth fairy does not exist. No sensible person ought argue, similarly, that some purpose is served by buttressing the faith of adults in djinns, immaculate conceptions, or armies of monkeys engineering trans-oceanic bridges. It is legitimate for individuals to believe that cow-urine might cure their cancer — not for the state to subsidise this life-threatening fantasy.

In a 1927 essay, philosopher Bertrand Russell observed that theist arguments boiled down to a single, vain claim: “Look at me: I am such a splendid product that there must be design in the universe.”

The time has come for Indian secular-democrats to assert the case for a better universe: a universe built around citizenship and rights, not the pernicious identity politics the state and its holy allies encourage.

Source: The Hindu

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamIslamAndTolerance_1.aspx?ArticleID=6434

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Satanic Verses: Rafiq Zakaria’s open letter to Salman Rushdie published in 1988

By Rafiq Zakaria

23 October, 1988

Rafiq Zakaria, Islamic scholar and well-known congressman, vigorously defends Rajiv Gandhi’s decision to ban The Satanic Verses in this open letter to its author Salman Rushdie published in The Illustrated Weekly Of India, 23 October, 1988.

DEAR MR RUSHDIE...

I have read with interest your open letter to our Prime Minister Mr Rajiv Gandhi, in which you have pleaded for a review of the ban on your book The Satanic Verses.

You have made fun of the fact that the order was issued by the finance ministry. Well, your information is half-baked. It was reported in the press that the decision was taken by the entire cabinet; but as the ban is to be executed by the customs, which falls under the finance ministry, no other ministry could have issued it.

This aside, it is for Rajiv Gandhi to reply to your letter: he may ignore it as most heads of government do.

I am not one of those, who has not read your book. I have, and am interested to know from you the replies to some questions, as I feel they may help me to understand you better and also for you to plead your case more effectively. We, in India. are ever so worried about communal violence, which erupts on the slightest pretext, we cannot allow a writer, whatever be his motive, to provoke it.

You say in your letter to Mr Gandhi that you ‘strongly deny’ that your book is ‘a direct attack on Islam’. Further, that ‘the section of the book in question .... deals with a prophet who is not called Muhammad’.

I have read your book. Like you, I have also been a student of Islam. Your statements, therefore, surprise me. I feel you are going back on your own objective just to get the ban lifted. Maybe I am wrong. I will, therefore, appreciate if you will clarify your position by replying openly to the following questions:

1. What is the significance of the title of your book The Satanic Verses? Has it not some historical connection? Do not the verses which refer to the three goddesses, condemned as Satanic and repudiated by Allah, the same as your reference to them in your novel? Your words are so clear that no other inference seems possible: “These verses are banished from the true recitation, al-qur’an. New verses are thundered in their place.” “Shall He have daughters and you sons?” Mahound recites. “That would be a fine division!” “These are but names you have dreamed of, you and your fathers. Allah vests no authority in them.”

2. Is Jahilia not the same word as used in Muslim annals for “the era of ignorance”—Jahilia means ignorance—the era before the advent of Islam? Your description is so apt:

“The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises. It is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated, the whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, who have learned the trick of transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts—the very stuff of inconstancy—the quintessence of unsettlement, shifting, treachery, lack-of-form—and have turned it, by alchemy, into the fabric of their newly invented permanence. These people are a mere three or four generations removed from their nomadic past, when they were as rootless as the dunes, or rather rooted in the knowledge that the journeying itself was home.”

3. Whom had you in mind when you delineated the character of Mahound? Do your descriptions of his various activities not fit those of the Prophet Muhammad? I can quote passage after passage to show the coincidence, but it will be too lengthy; moreover most of them are so offensive that I shudder to reproduce them.

4. From where have you drawn the names of the three goddesses: Lat, Uzza and Manat? They are certainly not the products of your imagination? No one reading about them in your book can think otherwise.

5. Is Hamza not the same as Prophet Muhammad’s uncle of the same name? And are his encounters with Hind, as depicted by you, not representative of what happened in the early annals of Islam?

6. Is Abu Simbel in your novel not a reflection of Abu Sufiyan, the inveterate enemy of the Prophet? And Hind, whom you characterise so graphically, not his wife?

7. Is Salman—your namesake—called Persian in your book, not the same as Salman Farsi, a companion of the Prophet?

8. Is Bilal not the first Muezzin of Islam, whom you describe as “the slave Bilal, the one Mahound freed, an enormous black monster, this one, with a voice to match his voice”?

9. Is Zamzam, referred to in your novel, not the well held sacred by Muslims? Here is your description: “The city’s water comes from underground streams and springs..., next to the House of the Black Stone.”

10. Does the description of the “Black Stone” in your novel not fit that of Ka’aba? Here are your words: “The graves of Ismail and his mother Hagar the Egyptian lie by the north-west face of the House of the Black Stone, in an enclosure surrounded by a low wall.”

These are some of the coincidences; there are many others. You, unlike most authors, have not mentioned that the characters in your novels do not bear any resemblance to persons living or dead. Can you, with your hand on your heart, say that they really don’t resemble the characters and situations in the life of the Prophet of Islam. And if they do. what should the authorities do to control a likely occurrence which you as well as I know may disturb the tranquillity of the land.

I have not referred to your section on Ayesha; I found it rather confusing, where you have cleverly mixed fact with fiction. This does not apply, I feel, to your section on Mahound, which represents, to use your own words” the result of five years of work on Islam, which has been central to my life’. Apart from the Muslim politicians, whom you mention in your open letter to Mr Gandhi, you will be surprised that some of our best intellectuals-both writers and poets—have come out against you: they are J P Dixit, Nissim Ezekiel, Jean Kalgutkar, Vrinda Nabar, Vaskar Nandy, V Raman and Ashim Roy. In a letter to The Indian Post they refer to your statement that you knew Islam best and that was why you had talked about it and observe: ‘How does he ''talk”about this religion? Its founder is named Mahound. Rushdie has not invented this name. This was the name given to the Prophet Mohammed by his European detractors as a term of abuse (‘Ma’ from ‘Mahomet’ added to ‘hound’) and used frequently in various European eschatologies as a creature belonging to the lowest depths of Hell, as the Devil himself.’

After analysing your treatment further, they summarise your approach thus:

How has Rushdie treated the other pillars of Islamic faith? Ayesha, the youngest wife of the Prophet and the one who is regarded as one of the highest authorities of the Traditions is shown as “clad only in butterflies, leading an entire village, lemming-like into the Arabian Sea”. The Ka’aba, regarded by the Muslims as the only consecrated spot on earth, is treated no better. Disguised as the “Tent of Black Stone called Ten Curtains”, it has twelve prostitutes with names of the twelve wives of Mahound to add ''the tempting spices of profanity”. These “tempting spices” were apparently necessary to increase the number of pilgrims. Then what else remains of the basic core of the Islamic faith? The prophet is the Devil, the law-givers are sexual perverts, and the Ka’aba and the Haj examples of depravity and greed. The Koran is of course only a collection of satanic verses.

The signatories conclude:

‘We, the undersigned, are all non-Muslims. We are, therefore, obviously not subscribers to the Islamic faith. We believe that any critique of that faith has to be restrained, reasoned and full of the spirit of respecting diverse cultures and faiths. India’s unity and harmony demands it. It is for such harmony and unity that we demand that the ban on this book be not lifted.’ What have you to say, Mr Rushdie, to these friends who are no friends of Mr Rajiv Gandhi and are known upholders of freedom of expression?

Lastly, as one born to Muslim parents and brought up, I think, under Islamic traditions, may I ask you whether you honestly believe that your book will not upset Muslims. Mr Khushwant Singh, who holds you in high esteem, advised your publisher, Penguins, against its publication as he felt that it would injure the religious feelings of Muslims and may disturb the law and order situation. Mr Zamir Ansari, Penguins’s representative in India, confirmed this to me though he said a confidential advice sought by Penguins should not have been publicised by Mr Singh. But that is another matter. The fact remains that Mr Singh is no friend of the Government of India—in fact he is one of its most bitter critics—and his opinion has been unequivocal. So is that of Mr M V Kamath, an eminent journalist, who never finds anything right with Mr Rajiv Gandhi. He said that Mr Rushdie’s book is full of ‘despicable ideas’. If Nehru was alive he would have banned it.

I ask you in the same manner as you have asked Mr Gandhi, our prime minister, whether you consider this ban as really uncalled for, in view of the danger that many persons in public life feel it poses to communal harmony and peace in India. Is democracy a licence to do or undo anything by anyone or everyone?

Some idealists in the past might have dreamt of it; but is it really practical?

May I also remind you that it was Lord Macaulay who incorporated the need for such a ban in our legal system to prevent disorder; it is not Mr Rajiv Gandhi’s invention. Mr Soli Sorabjee, whose legal eminence is undisputed, has argued against the ban; but he is a poor judge of public reaction. That is why,like his mentor Mr Nani Palkhivala, he wanted to be in politics but gave up the idea. The Times of India, in its editorial, has answered both you and him effectively:

‘No, dear Rushdie, we do not wish to build a repressive India. On the contrary we are trying our best to build a liberal India where we can all breathe freely. But in order to build such an India, we have to preserve the India that exists. That may not be a pretty India. But this is the only India we possess.'

Do not pontificate, Mr Rushdie; be logical and face the facts. Answer your critics if you can.

Yours truly,

Rafiq Zakaria

Source: The Illustrated Weekly of India

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamWarWithinIslam_1.aspx?ArticleID=6443

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Salman Rushdie's Indian Mullah critics, listen to the message of Satanic Verses

Sultan Shahin, Editor, New Age Islam

Salman Rushdie's Indian Mullah critics, the beardless as much as the bearded, have reason to celebrate. They have forced the government into surrender to their demand of keeping Rushdie away. How much ill-will they have created against Muslims in the country in this process, of course, does not matter to them. They are in a state of Jihad against India, the same as their Pakistani counterparts. Read the Urdu press where most of the columnists are Mullahs, some openly bearded, some with their beards well hidden in their stomachs. You would seldom find a good word about India. Nothing positive at all.

Salman Rushdie is a sideshow. It just came in handy as he was coming this time on the eve of important Assembly elections. This gave them an opportunity to show to their patrons how they could bully even the mighty Congress party into submission again. These Mullahs had only recently forced politicians to announce reservations for Muslims. From 4.9 percent (the Congress) to 18 percent (the Samajwadi). This has completely vitiated the atmosphere. A Hindu-Muslim polarisation is emerging where there was none. This would only benefit the enemies of India among the Hindu obscurantists. But, of course, the Mullahs do not care. Indeed they need the other; both sets of enemies of India feed on each other.

As for Salman Rushdie, does his novel Satanic Verses not offend me? Of course, it does. Are my religious sensibilities not hurt? Of course, they are. Particularly the fact that he gave prostitutes of Mecca the names of our beloved Prophet’s wives whom we revere even more than our mothers. But I think I am more hurt reading newspapers everyday when I see Mohammads reportedly committing the most heinous crimes; they lie, cheat, loot, rape, murder, massacre, do everything dreadful you can imagine. More than fifty percent of male Muslims are named Mohammad or Ahmad and as everybody knows we are the most corrupt people on earth. Prostitution is a profession Muslims women are very good at. Even when forced into business by devilish Muslims, Muslim prostitutes command a premium. Looking for prostitutes rich and corrupt Saudi men prefer to go to Muslim Indonesia rather than non-Muslim Thailand, for they can engage in halal prostitution there. Even today some of these prostitutes, I am sure, have the names of our dear Prophet’s wives and our dearest, most revered mothers. Like the name Mohammad or Ahmad among Muslim men, prophet’s wives’ names are the most popular among Muslim women.

So why should I be particularly offended if an atheist cultural Muslim and a great writer out to poke fun at us, seeking to grab our attention, in order to convey his message, tries to offend us by using that particular literary device. The important thing for me is to look at where he is pointing. All great men and women, scientists, artists, reformer, prophets, offend and blaspheme. That is part of their job profile. Prophet Mohammad was the greatest blasphemer, as was Jesus Christ before him, Moses and Mahatma Buddha, Hazrat Noah, even earlier and so on. They all blasphemed their ancestral religions, cultures, traditional mores. They all offended the religious sensibilities of their people. Their scandalised people were always their bitter opponents, often trying to kill them, before converting to their ideas, accepting their message and becoming stalwarts of the new Deen.

The Juhala, that our so-called Ulama are, cannot possibly read and understand The satanic Verses or any other piece of literature for that matter. Not many even among those who do normally read and enjoy literature are able to follow Rushdie’s fantasies to the end. Rushdie is a difficult read for many. But for the Mullahs the book would not have sold so much and would not be available for free on the internet.

Satanic verses is a book of fiction that contains dream sequences within the dream of a demented person. It is wrong to treat it as a discourse on Islam. However, like all dreams, realities do enter into the dream sequences. The episode of Satanic Verses is most likely pure fiction and creation of the determined enemies of Islam in its infant years. Deeply offended by Prophet Mohammad’s many blasphemies against their gods and goddesses, belief in whom was a part of Prophet Mohammad’s ancestral religion, the Quraish leaders, later stalwarts of Islam, wanted to kill him or defame him and his message in any way possible. They did many things in this context. Satanic verses could be just a part of that effort at maligning the messenger of God. But the fact remains that Arab Muslims of that period mentioned it and it was one of the relatively less known parts of Islamic history until Mullahs made Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses an issue.

Mullahs claim to be hurt with the publication of the book. But there are things that hurt other too. Don’t they know that the very existence of the Holy Quran and Muslims hurts the religious sentiments of many Christians; the message of the Gospels hurts many Jews and so on. Hindus, being the most ancient, have the right to claim feeling hurt at the existence of every other religion. So what do we do? Kill each other? Don’t let one come into other’s country. Live separately? Throw rotten eggs at each other? As Ahl-e-Hadeesis do and suggest we should.

This may be news the Mullahs that others too can feel hurt. But they do. An ordinary Muslim like me too feels hurt, for instance, sometimes. I feel hurt the most when I find a Muslim, particularly one calling himself Mohammad, lying, cheating, killing, raping. No matter how offended the Quraish of Mecca were with the Prophet’s blasphemies, they never accused him of lying or cheating or any other misconduct. No one called him intolerant of even his worst enemies and his own blasphemers. They continued to consider him Al-Ameen (The Trustworthy). Never was a word breathed about him by his enemies about even the remotest sexual misdemeanour on his part. If anyone really loved Mohammad, as Mullahs claim Muslims do, they would follow him. But we Muslims, well, we can kill and die in Mohammad’s name, saving his honour, but follow him, no we can’t do that. Too difficult. Impossible. Not in our DNA. So what do we do? We create an image of Mohammad, a deviant, pervert, cruel Mohammad, whom we can follow. This is precisely what Salafi Arabs did and today’s Salafi Muslims follow.

It is only Arab Muslims, the Quraish descendants of the original inveterate enemies of Islam, who captured power after killing all members of his family in the 48th year of his demise, who started spreading stories of his “sexual prowess”, paedophilia, and other perversions, even his brutality and intolerance of Jews and other non-Muslims to justify their own predilections. Nothing in his character or the Holy Quran shows any of this intolerance or brutality or perversion. But it is the Arab Muslims who have told and even in contemporary Saudi Arabia tell stories defaming the Prophet to justify their own perversions and cruelties and intolerance. Read the classical Sira written by Salafi Arabs.

Now when an atheist Rushdie or other non-Muslims pick up these stories and tell it in their own way, make what they would make of it, we feel hurt. But do we have a right to feel hurt, particularly when we are not calling Salafi Muslims, who spread these malicious stories in the first place, with the names they deserve. The most popular televangelist among Muslims is one Dr Zakir Naik, a darling of Salafis, who sends God’s blessings to Yazid, the killer of the Prophet’s family, every time he quotes him or takes the name of this accursed person in some context. He justifies all kinds of sexual perversions in the name of Islam. But what of him. So do Saudi Ulema and Qazis, religious scholars and judges. It is the Ahl-e-Hadeesis, not a word criticising whom can appear in the Muslim Press, who finance and organise Zakir Naik’s perversions.

Now take the very name of this Saudi-financed sect, Ahl-e-Hadees. Does the very term Ahl-e-Hadees not offend an ordinary Muslim who believes that the Holy Quran is his primary scripture? Ahl-e-Hadees means people or Muslims who believe in Hadees, that is the so-called sayings of the Prophet that were collected and concocted hundreds of years after the demise of the Prophet. This was done clearly because the Quran could not be changed and another scripture was required to serve the purpose of rulers. These descendants of the inveterate enemies of Islam had to of necessity rule in the name of Islam. Their ancestors had converted to Islam after the Prophet’s victory at Mecca obviously so they could defeat the new religion from within and capture its power, use the energies it had generated for Arab expansion and imperialism.

It is this that Salman Rushdie is pointing to in his own perverted way. The victory at Mecca and the conversion of the entire city to Islam. Some must have obviously converted impressed by the bloodless victory, completely unexpected generosity of the Prophet who – unprecedented for Arabia in such situations – announced a general amnesty for all including the vicious war criminals, and so on. But many of the elite who had lost power apparently joined as an attempt at a shot at power working from within. And how successful they were! In 24 years one member of their Umayyads clan became the all-powerful Caliph of Islam. Usman bin Affan was a generous and pious man and an early Muslim. He had fought for Islam and sacrificed a lot. But he appointed all his relatives, the former elite of Mecca, as administrators in every position of power, including Muawiah the son of Abu Sufian and the father of Yezid as the governor of all-important Syria.

Now Salman Rushdie’s demented character is imagining this newly all-Muslim Mecca where clearly many have joined Islam out of convenience and not conviction. Apart from the political elite, professional prostitutes could be another such group. Islam has no room for prostitution or any kind of illicit sex. They can’t be a happy lot. Some of them must have already had the very popular names of the wives of the Prophet, as they do today. Mischievously, Rushdie gives all of them these names. He is trying to tell us that the rot in Islam dates to the day the Prophet announced a general amnesty and allowed all of the Meccans to covert.

Did the Prophet have a choice? He was a fount of compassion for humanity, Rahmat-ul-lil-Aalemeeen (A Blessing for all the worlds). He could have at least punished the war criminals and thus saved Islam and his own family from future decimation. But this is the speculation of an ordinary mortal blessed with hindsight, knowing what happened soon after. The Prophet was a prophet. There is no point speculating on that, questioning his decision. But one thing is clear in the light of what happened later: the rot started from that day of Victory and general amnesty and permission for all to convert. Of course, the Prophet could hardly have told them not to convert. He had been appointed as messenger in order to convert them to Islam and they were now willing to convert; whatever his reservations might have been, he could hardly say no.

What is Rushdie’s goal? What has he set out to achieve in The Satanic Verses? In his own words, Rushdie has set out "to name the unnameable, to point out frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep." And he doesn't care "if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict". He does not recognise any jurisdiction except that of his Muse. But the world Rushdie is going to shape is full of "walking corpses, great crowds of the dead, all of them refusing to admit they are done for, corpses mutinously continuing to behave like living people, shopping, catching buses, flirting, going home to make love, smoking cigarettes." And this is why he has decided to use the technique of extreme provocation.

What is the task before Rushdie that is so important? Worth paying the ultimate price for a 'poet's work'? What does he actually do in his Verses? Well, he has tried to sow doubt and confusion in the minds of the faithful. He has asked questions that they are too dead to think about. Certainty is death, for Rushdie. Confusion, fife. This man must be a manifestation of the Satan then, the faithful would naturally say. After all, sowing doubt and confusion in the minds of believers is precisely the task allotted to Shaitan in the divine scheme of things. But what his Muslim critics have, of course, forgotten is the repeated Quranic injunction to think and consider the revelations and not to believe in them unthinkingly. But why and what would you think if you have no doubt, no confusion, no questions?

One thing, however, we should learn from this tragic point in our history to which Rushdie’s demented character is directing our attention. Having too many Muslims is not necessarily a good thing. Let us stop trying to convert people unnecessarily and feeling elated at even the likes of Chander Mohan converting to Islam, even if they do so merely to commit rape of a respectable lady. Also, let us stop forcing our children to adopt our religions. Religion should not be, indeed cannot be hereditary. Let us teach our children the essentials of all religions and let them choose when they grow up, when they are capable of understanding the nature of religion, spirituality, divinity and so on. Too many Muslims are not necessarily a good thing for Islam. This to me is the message of Satanic Verses and I think this is a message worth pondering over. Had Salman Rushdie not been forced to bear the crescent of being a Muslim, he would probably not have felt forced to define and explain his identity in terms of why he was or was not a Muslim. This business of his feeling forced to convert to Islam to save his life and then reconverting to atheism when he discovers that Mullahs cannot be appeased even with his conversion is a shameful business. Shameful for him, shameful for the rest of the Muslim community! He has paid enough price for being born in a Muslim family. Now let us let him be.

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamWarWithinIslam_1.aspx?ArticleID=6446

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Standing with Christians

2012-01-19T06:39:00.001-06:00

Jesus Christ’ ultimate dream was to create a kingdom of heaven on the earth; it is the idea where no human has to live in apprehension, discomfort or fear of the other under one God. It is the same idea repeated and revived by several great reformers of the world including but not limited to Zarathustra, Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Confucius, Muhammad, Nanak, Bahaullah, Gandhi, MLK and others.

Then the best among us would be someone who works towards this goal and believe in "treat others as you would want to be treated."

Thank God for blessing me with the idea of standing up with everyone. As an example I am creating a site to list some of my work from an Atheist to Zoroastrian and every one in between.

Here I am listing a few things to stand up with Christians, as usual the right wingers in other faiths have harassed me for doing this or even demanding why I did not do it for them, by God, given my little life, as a volunteer, I have done as much as I can.

My mentors in pluralism are Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mother Teresa and I dedicate this collection to them:

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An appeal to Indonesian Muslims
Friday, December 18, 2009 will be noted as a sad day in the history of Indonesia. On this day, a group of people on their way out from attending an Islamic New Year parade attacked the Santo Albertus Church under construction in Bekasi. http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2009/12/appeal-to-indonesian-muslims.html

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The appeal is published in Jakarta Post
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/12/31/letters-an-appeal-indonesian-muslims.html

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Religious conflict in India

Eleven Churches have been razed to ground following a reported attack on Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati, a political party leader. Shamefully this is a normal thing in India and it needs to be stopped before it escalates.
http://wisdomofreligion.blogspot.com/2007/12/orissa-religious-conflict.html

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Appeal for Justice to Pakistani Asia Bibi and Mercy to mankind

As peace makers, we cannot cause people to dig in their heels and take positions, we have to mitigate conflicts and nurture goodwill for the ultimate good of all. I hope, you understand the avoidance of such language in the petition. http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2011/01/appeal-for-justice-to-pakistani-asia.html

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A Muslim’s Christmas, Huffington PostAs a Muslim I will be celebrating Christmas, recommitting myself to listen to Jesus and follow his path. And in my Islamic tradition, I will reflect on chapter 19 of Quraan, dedicated to Maryam, Mother Mary, and pray on his birthday. I will pray that we all honor his message of creating peace and building cohesive societies where no one has to be apprehensive of the other. Amen!Continued: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-ghouse/a-muslims-christmas_b_1167258.html

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A tribute to JesusThis column is dedicated to Rev. Petra Weldes of the Center for Spiritual Living in Dallas. Some of my conversation with her inspired me to write this tribute to Jesus and what it means to be religious.http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2009/12/tribute-to-jesus.html

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Iran’s death penalty for Christian pastor violates treaties, KoranIndeed there is absolutely no punishment for apostasy in Quraan; one is free to become a Muslim and free to leave the faith. After all no one is to bear the burden of the other, he alone is responsible for his belief.

http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2011/10/irans-death-penalty-for-christian.html

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Muslims condemn Blasphemy attack in Kerala
Evil continues to thrive, when good people do nothing about it. Our role as Muslims is to mitigate conflicts and nurture goodwill and work towards building social cohesion, so all the humanity can co-exist in harmony. http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2010/07/muslims-condemn-blasphemy-attack-in.html

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Where is the Muslim outrage?

Mike Ghouse, November 30, 2007
As a Muslim I am outraged at this nonsense going on in Sudan and Saudi Arabia.When Prophet Muhammad’s cartoons were published, few Muslims around the world were outraged to the point of becoming destructive. They burned the embassy in Syria and destroyed property elsewhere. http://www.mikeghouse.net/Articles/Where-is-the-Muslim-Outrage.asp

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Afghan blasphemy caseSpokesman says Karzai has last word in Afghan blasphemy case Mike Ghouse Note: It takes conviction to do the right thing and one must subscribe to the idea of nothing but truth. Karzai needs to pardon, rather, apologize for his governments infringement of individual liberty. There is no compulsion in Islam and one needs to be free to practice what one believes. http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2008/02/afghan-blasphemy-case.html

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Building Respect for Christmas

A handful of Jews, Muslims and others show belligerence towards the celebration of Christmas and have vandalized Christmas trees, shame on them. http://wisdomofreligion.blogspot.com/2010/12/building-respect-for-christmas.html

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Citizenship, Islam and AmericaLaw is one thing and practice is the other. As an American and as a Muslim, I have to be critical of both groupings and work toward creating cohesive societies where no citizen has to live in apprehension, discomfort or fear of the other. Here is a summary of 2011 and what we can aspire for 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-ghouse/citizenship-islam-and-ame_b_1174834.html

. . . . Religious Freedom, international coalition

Religions help us sustain peace and balance in the society in the times of our spiritual, physical and societal ups and downs. Living for the sake of others is not a charity or even a noble thing to brag about; it is indeed the pragmatic thing to do.
http://wisdomofreligion.blogspot.com/2010/04/religious-freedom-international.html

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Japanese Unificationists Believed to Be Resisting Confinement
http://www.foundationforpluralism.com/Articles/Religious_Persecution_in_Japan.asp

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Muslim-Christian dialogue: An Islamic viewhttp://wisdomofreligion.blogspot.com/2010/03/muslim-christian-dialogue-islamic-view.html

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Top Muslim Declares All Christians 'Infidels'

It is quite possible, the Grand Mufti of Al-Azhar university Ali Gomaa did not say anything like the alleged words listed below. These guys at Middle East Forum may have cooked it up. They have done it before and that is their business. http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2011/11/top-muslim-declares-all-christians.html

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Ninth Church Vandalized in MalaysiaWe appeal the Malaysian Government to reign in this immediately.http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2010/01/ninth-church-vandalized-in-malaysia.html

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Muslims, Christians and The Lost TombOne question that concerns me is the depth of the faith, rather paucity of the faith of the believers. One’s faith must be really weak to be frightened by a movie, and I often wonder, how will it offend the faith of millions? It is not just Christians, Muslims will be offended too. That is nearly 3.4 billion people of the world comprising 2.1 Billion Christians and 1.3 billion Muslims. http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2007/03/faith-and-lost-tomb.html

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Spitting on Christians in JerusalemJudging from the title, I hope you did not jump to the conclusion, that Muslims are the ones spitting on Christians. In this case the culprits are extremists from a different tradition.

http://wisdomofreligion.blogspot.com/2010/01/spitting-on-christians-in-jerusalem.html

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A Church in Saudi Arabiahttp://wisdomofreligion.blogspot.com/2008/03/church-in-saudi-arabia.html

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Mike Ghouse committed to building cohesive Societies and offers pluralistic solutions on current issues. His work is all listed at www.MikeGhouse.net

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Family of man thought to be al-Qaeda operative is known for interfaith work in Plano, Texas

2012-01-19T04:55:00.000-06:00

Family of man thought to be al-Qaeda operative is known for interfaith work in North Texas

By Jeffrey Weiss and Jason Trahan

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/plano/headlines/20120118-family-of-man-thought-to-be-al-qaeda-operative-is-known-for-interfaith-work-in-north-texas.ece

For the Salam family’s fellow volunteers in North Texas interfaith activities, the idea that they could have a son in al-Qaeda seemed preposterous.

“He could not be in al-Qaeda, knowing his parents,” said Mike Ghouse, president of the Foundation for Pluralism in Dallas.

And yet, according to The Associated Press, when Moeed Abdul Salam died in Pakistan late last year, he was an al-Qaeda operative. Pakistani officials say he killed himself with a hand grenade. An Islamic media group said troops killed him.

His family lives in Plano, in a two-story house on a suburban street. A woman inside the house on Wednesday would not open the door or speak to a reporter.

That doesn’t surprise Christopher Parr, former chairman of the Plano Multicultural Outreach Roundtable, where Moeed Salam’s mother, Hasna Shaheen Salam, is a co-chair.

“She doesn’t want to talk about it because it is too painful,” he said.
The Salams had never mentioned a son in Pakistan, he said. Other members of the roundtable learned about his death only when contacted by an AP reporter. That’s when Parr called his friend, he said.

“She said they didn’t know where he was or what he was doing,” he said.
Parr met Shaheen Salam, a fellow Rotarian, several years ago. Not long afterward, she joined the Plano roundtable, where she was a liaison to the North Texas Muslim community, Parr said.

According to public records, Shaheen Salam lives in the Plano home with her husband, Mohammed. The house is worth about $400,000. Moeed Salam’s driver’s license also lists that address. In addition, the home is the address of record for several businesses, at least one of them closed because of bankruptcy in 2005.
Bankruptcy documents listed secured debt of $186,000 and unsecured debt of $980,000. They listed at least $442,000 owed on at least 17 credit card accounts.
According to a piece Shaheen Salam wrote for the January 2011 edition of the “Lone Star Crescent,” a Texas Muslim publication, she herself had traveled to Pakistan in 2010. According to the article, she went there to facilitate the adoption of an infant girl by her daughter, a Dallas physician who was unable to make the trip. She makes no mention of Moeed Salam.

Moeed’s brother Monem Salam is a graduate of the University of Texas at Dallas, a former Morgan Stanley money manager in Dallas and a former executive council member of the Islamic Society of North America. The society was an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal criminal case against the North Texas-based Holy Land Foundation. Foundation leaders were convicted of funneling money to Hamas.
According to the AP, Moeed Salam, who was 37 when he died, had not lived in Plano for many years. He attended boarding school in Connecticut, attended college at the University of Texas in Austin, and had moved overseas at least eight years ago.

However Moeed Salam’s thoughts about the West had mutated, Ghouse said that the family remained more than casually involved with volunteer work in North Texas and beyond. Shaheen Salam has served as a president of the Texas Muslim Women’s Foundation. And a few years ago, Ghouse said, she had taken wheelchairs to Afghanistan.

“The one thing I can tell you is that his parents had nothing to do with it,” he said of Moeed Salam’s apparent al-Qaeda connection. “His mother would not have put up with it.”

Mohamed Elibiary, a Muslim interfaith advocate, said the family members “were pillars of the community as I was growing up” in North Texas.

“The family members are victims in all this,” said Elibiary, a Department of Homeland Security adviser who has assisted the FBI in multiple investigations of homegrown terrorism. “They did everything to try to set a good example, not only inside their own family but by being good citizens and good Muslims.”

Staff writer Brooks Egerton contributed to this report.
jweiss@dallasnews.com;
jtrahan@dallasnews.com

Mike Ghouse
Committed to a cohesive America
www.MikeGhouse.net=

Texas Faith: Beyond King, who has has had major impact.

2012-01-18T17:27:00.002-06:00

Beyond King, which religious leader has had a major impact on American Politics and culture. Ten Texas Faith Panelists share their thoughts, here is Mike’s perspective, to see them all including this, please go to Dallas Morning News:
http://religionblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2012/01/texas-faith-beyond-king-which.html

Mike Ghouse, President, Foundation for Pluralism

I am pleased to share about a few Pluralist individuals who are making a difference in the religious landscape of Dallas Fort Worth.

Pluralism is an attitude of learning to respect the otherness of others, and accepting the God given uniqueness of each one of us. As we do that, conflicts fade and solutions emerge to create a cohesive America where no one has to live in apprehension, discomfort or fear of the other. In the context of religion, we define Religious pluralism as, learning to respect every which way one honors or worships the divine and accepts each path to be a valid one without denigrating any.

Pastor Bob Roberts of Northwood Baptist Church from Keller, Texas was clear when he opened up his church to a thousand Muslims for celebrating Ramadan. He said, you have your beliefs and your faith and I have mine, no matter how you view Jesus.

I take him as a son of God and my redeemer and the Muslims understood that and still talk about his eloquence. About a year and a half ago, when Pastor Jeffress said his famous line, Quraan is an evil book written by a false prophet; Bob Roberts wrote an op-ed in Dallas Morning News countering the poor understanding of the other Pastor, there were huge discussions on it honoring Bob Roberts for leading the way in accepting the otherness of other.

Pastor George Mason of Wilshire Baptist Church has helped me understand and propagate the grace aspect of God, it is not just your actions and deeds that are enough, but God’s ultimate grace is needed for salvation. This is one of the differences in understanding between Muslims and Christians and his teachings have built some bridges of understanding.

The Pastor of the Unification Church, Rev. Sun Myung Moon who is making a genuine difference in the world of Pluralism by practicing respect for other faiths in his congregations and organizations throughout the world.

I am highlighting Pastors Roberts and Mason, because they are Baptists of big Churches. There is a bias against Baptists out there in the market that I hope to remove. Each religion has its own share of bigots and we need to see that clearly.

Indeed, our first Unity Day event’s Christian prayers were led by Late Rev. Roy Harrell another Baptist Minister. There are many more great pastors I admire for their work; Rev. Bill Matthews, Rev. Petra Weldes, Rev. Diane Baker, Rev. Eric Folkerth, Rev. Dennis Hamilton and several others who are making a difference in our area.

The open mindedness of Swami Nityananda Prabhu of Hare Krishna Hindu Temple; a panelist on this forum is admirable. Where ever I run, people love to talk about his teachings from Bhagvad Gita on my Radio Show, called Wisdom of Religion. He has indeed opened up minds of non-Hindus to see the wisdom of Hinduism.

Dr. Imam Zia Shaikh of Irving Islamic Center has broken many records of stereotyping Muslims; one of the situations was when he led the Pledge of Allegiance in one of the annual Unity day programs. I was rather surprised to hear from a few calling me up to tell that, they did not expect a Muslim Imam to lead the pledge of Allegiance and they said we will not stereotype Muslims any more.

He is active in interfaith and perhaps one devoted and a committed Muslim who has attended every interfaith program in the last five years and he has demonstrated in respecting the other otherness of other.

Same goes with Dr. Imam Yusuf Zia Kavakci of Richardson Mosque, who is considered one of the 100 recognized Muslims Scholars in the world. The Muslims in Dallas Fort worth hear and see the open mindedness of these two scholars towards other faiths. Both of them are nurturing the values of pluralism in their congregations; that is thousands of Muslims in our area who are influenced by their teachings.

Each one of them is all about affection for life, non-discriminatory caring. They do not favor one person over the other for the heck of it, instead, they look at the good deeds, which Prophet Muhammad [pbuh] described as the good you can do to other beings, the goodness you bring to God's creation.

Mike's note: There are many more individuals who have done tremendous work in the Dallas Forth Worth Metroplex, God willing, I hope to write about them as well.

Mike Ghouse is committed to building a cohesive America, where no American has to be apprehensive, uncomfortable or fear the other. He is a speaker, thinker and a writer offering pluralistic solutions on issues of the day and a frequent guest on Sean Hannity Show on Fox and a regular guest on National syndicated radio show and Dallas Media. With over 1000 published articles he has two books poised to be released. Most of his work is indexed at www.MikeGhouse.net

Dallas school districts controversial use of religious buildings

2012-01-14T11:00:00.002-06:00

Its about Muslim participation in civic affairs.

Dallas Morning News writes a report on the topic and includes some of my comments in the article following my notes.

The School District’s decision to hold the commencement ceremonies at churches, synagogues, mosques and other religious buildings without restrictions does not bode well in the long haul.

A few religious places will be generous in their offer; however, it implies an association with that place of worship and carries the baggage in the long haul. What if the new pastor is a bigot and has a problem with gay or lesbian kids or kids of other faiths. It is always the individual that drives the society towards ill-will or goodwill. Why do we need to subject ourselves to such whims?

We are a pluralistic society and deeply want our kids to grow up and interact with the real world out there that comprises people of different faiths, races, ethnicities and sexual orientation. A religious building does not offer such an environment, even with a few exceptions.

The Federal court just rejected a referendum in Oklahoma to ban families from seeking guidance from international or Sharia law to resolve disputes among family members even though 70% of the voters had approved it. In California proposition 5 met the same fate years ago and the Farmers Branch overwhelmingly approved the anti-immigration bill, which is in the courts now.

I would suggest the board members not to vote for this motion; the school will end up squandering money on legal suit rather than children’s education.

As a pluralist, I do welcome this, but since we are still not there we have to hold this off.
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Mike Ghouse is committed to building a cohesive America and offers pluralistic solutions on issues of the day. A writer, thinker and a speaker and is available to speak on pluralism, politics, Islam, peace, cohesive societies and a variety of topics. Check out 4 websites and 27 Blogs indexed at www.MikeGhouse.net. Current articles at www.TheGhousediary.com
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ACLU warns Dallas ISD against plan to allow graduations at churches
By TAWNELL D. HOBBS Staff Writer thobbs@dallasnews.com
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/headlines/20120113-aclu-warns-dallas-isd-against-plan-to-allow-graduations-at-churches.ece
Published: 13 January 2012 12:26 AM

The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas is warning Dallas ISD to “tread cautiously” on loosening restrictions to allow graduations at churches and other religious facilities.

Dallas school trustees discussed the proposal at Thursday’s board briefing. Two of eight trustees voiced concern about the plan, which will be considered Jan. 26.
The change would eliminate a clause that prohibits commencement exercises from being held at churches, synagogues, mosques and other religious sites without permission of the superintendent, and only under extenuating circumstances when no other nonreligious facility is available.

District officials said the change is being proposed because some schools have for years been using churches for graduations. The schools, which were not aware they were violating board policy, raised the issue with district administration, they said.
But the ACLU of Texas said in a news release Thursday that it cannot understand why DISD would consider changing what the group calls a “neutral policy.” It also noted that such a change could result in legal proceedings.

“DISD should tread cautiously in this area,” Lisa Graybill, ACLU of Texas’ legal director, warned in the news release. “The current policy provides a safeguard to ensure commencement exercises are held in appropriate, nonsectarian locations where all students, their families, and school personnel feel equally comfortable. Changing the policy could ultimately result in a constitutional challenge and costly litigation.”

The ACLU of Texas also submitted a public information request to the school district, asking for information that includes costs for off-site events and the reason for the proposed change.

Board President Lew Blackburn said that neither he nor school attorneys have a problem with the proposal. Blackburn said that he has attended graduations at churches and that nothing religious occurred.

Several Dallas school trustees, including Bruce Parrott and Carla Ranger, said they were unaware of the ACLU’s misgivings when they discussed the matter at Thursday’s meeting. Parrott and Ranger voiced concerns about the proposal during the discussion.

pointed to a similar situation that involved the separation of church and state in the Irving school district last year. The ACLU of Texas had contacted that district with questions about a plan to hold graduations at The Potter’s House church. In response, district officials decided against the move.

“We don’t need to be involved with any lawsuit,” Parrott said. “We’ve got a policy; let’s just adhere to the policy.”

Ranger voiced similar concerns.

“We all know there have been problems in other places because of this very issue,” she said. “Removing this would put us in a situation that we don’t want to be in.”
The vast majority of religious leaders contacted Thursday agreed that the school district should not make such a change.

“I would suggest the board members not to vote for this motion; the school will end up squandering money on [a] legal suit rather than children’s education,” Mike Ghouse, a Muslim and president of the Foundation for Pluralism in Dallas, said in an email.

The Rev. Daniel Kanter of First Unitarian Church of Dallas said in an email that “it could make people uncomfortable to have their graduations in a house of worship, and we shouldn’t be putting citizens in that situation.”

He added: “Unfortunately, some people of faith might also have prohibitions about attending events in a house of worship other than theirs.”.

But the Rev. Trey Graham, senior pastor of First Baptist Church Melissa, said in an email that he “applauds the school board” for considering the change. He said the district shouldn’t be deterred by possible legal action by the ACLU.

“The elimination of this restriction makes sense for the school district financially, logistically and relationally,” Graham said. “Financially, school districts can often save money by utilizing church facilities at lower cost than other large meeting places.”
Graham said that his church’s facilities are often used by school, civic and community groups that need meeting space. “We consider the use of our church’s space by outside groups as another way to positively impact our communities,” he said.
Staff writer Holly K. Hacker contributed to this report.

Faith leaders on DISD proposal

Several religious leaders from North Texas, including regular contributors to The Dallas Morning News’ Texas Faith blog, weighed in on a proposal to allow Dallas ISD schools to hold graduation ceremonies in religious facilities. Here are excerpts from their comments:

Ric Dexter, Northeast Texas area leader in SGI-USA, a Buddhist lay organization

“I can’t imagine any religious facility that would be willing to remove or cover over a symbol of their reason for being, simply not to offend some of the graduates. While most Christians would have no problem with a crucifix as a backdrop, I wonder if they would feel as comfortable with Shiva or Buddha overlooking this important moment in their children’s life.”

Trey Graham, senior pastor, First Baptist Church Melissa

“Our church’s facilities, on multiple campuses, are often used by school, civic and community groups who need meeting space at times that do not interfere with our regular church ministries. We consider the use of our church’s space by outside groups as another way to positively impact our communities. The threat of legal action by the ACLU should not deter school board personnel from making this sensible change.”

Katie Sherrod, Episcopal lay leader, Fort Worth

“I don’t know what freedom of religion and freedom from religion is worth, but way too many U.S. soldiers have died to defend those American values. However much money the district might save by using religious buildings doesn’t even come close to being worth sacrificing that. While Christian children and parents might be OK with sitting under an image of the crucified Christ, I doubt it would be comfortable for Jewish children and their parents, given how often the crucifixion has been used as an excuse to persecute Jews. And I’m trying to imagine how some Christians would feel about having their child’s graduation in a mosque.”

Mohamed Elibiary, spokesman, Islamic Asssociation of North Texas/Dallas Central Mosque

“We would advise DISD to slow down its consideration to change the current neutral graduation venue policy and instead launch a broad stakeholders’ feedback effort. It is a fact that some faith communities with larger percentages of new immigrant constituencies will view this policy change as biased towards certain denominations, such as megachurches, with the large facilities to lease to the school district in the first place. Public schools were partially established more than a century ago so that various segments of the American public can find that uniting neutral ground that reminds all that despite numerous differences, we are still all equal Americans, civically speaking.”

Mike Ghouse, a Muslim and president of the Foundation for Pluralism, Dallas

“It implies an association with that place of worship and carries the baggage in the long haul. What if the new pastor is a bigot and has a problem with gay or lesbian kids or kids of other faiths? It is always the individual that drives the society towards ill will or goodwill. Why do we need to subject ourselves to such whims?

“We are a pluralistic society and deeply want our kids to grow up and interact with the real world out there that comprises people of different faiths, races, ethnicities and sexual orientation. A religious building does not offer such an environment, even with a few exceptions.”

Holly K. Hacker

Mitt Romney, you can do this, others don’t have the balls.

2012-01-14T10:44:00.002-06:00

I was concerned with Romney's statements earlier on that bordered on bigotry, but he has done very well with his response to a question by a woman, "Do you believe in the divine saving grace of Jesus Christ?"

"I would hope that there are people in our nation that have different beliefs. There are people of the Jewish faith and the Islamic faith and other faiths who believe other things, and our president will be president of the people of all faiths," he said.

"We welcome people of other faiths. I happen to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and my savior, but I know other people have differing views and I respect those views, and I don't believe those qualify or disqualify people for leadership in our nation," he said.

http://www.politico.com//blogs/burns-haberman/2012/01/romney-gets-a-faith-question-in-sc-110840.html

Indeed I am working on developing leadership programs to train our future leaders to be free from bigotry at America Together Foundation.

Here is an item I wrote way back and you ~nearly pass my test of Pluralism.

We are one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. We are represented by every race, nationality, ethnicity, language, culture and religion. We see God as one, none and many and in every form; male, female, genderless and non-existent, being and non-being, nameless and with innumerable names. Americans together are committed to preserve this pluralistic heritage of America.

http://americatogetherfoundation.blogspot.com/2011/11/americans-together-documentary_11.html

You may really like this Pluralism Prayer, if you can subscribe to this, you have won me as an individual and I will do these prayers for you in one of your debates or fund raising.

Text: http://theghousediary.blogspot.com/2011/12/pluralism-greetings-and-prayer-at.html

Actual Prayer in Carrollton City Hall – Congressman Kenny Marchant has listened to this; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mc9D9guPMY&feature=youtu.be

Americans Together building Cohesive societies

OUR MISSION

Our Mission is to build a cohesive America, where no American has to live in anxieties, discomfort or fear of the other.

OUR VISION

It is our individual and collective responsibility to keep law and order and faithfully guard the safety of every citizen. Hate, prejudice and stereotyping are some of the many root causes of disrupting the peace in a society and it is our duty to track down the source of such ill-will and work on mitigating it.

We believe humans are open to choices and will make best choices if the path is paved for them. It has been our experience through our annual events like Unity Day, Reflections on Holocaust and Genocides, Thanksgiving, Conferences, that our participants have walked out with a commitment to be less biased, less prejudiced and willing to stand up for the others for the sake of general good of mankind.

We are committed to enhance the efforts nationally, one brick at time in building a cohesive America, where each one of the 312 Million Americans feel safe in their homes, at their jobs, places of worship and in the public places.

Mike Ghouse is committed to building a cohesive America where no American has to live in apprehension, discomfort or fear of the other – www.MikeGhouse.net

ROMNEY, YOU CAN DO THIS, OTHER BIGOTS DON'T HAVE THE BALLS
http://theghousediary.blogspot.com/2012/01/mitt-romney-you-can-do-this-others-dont.html

OTHER ROMNEY LINKS :: I WROTE 11 ITEMS ON ROMNEY?

Mitt Romney, you can do this, others don’t have the balls.
http://theghousediary.blogspot.com/2012/01/mitt-romney-you-can-do-this-others-dont.html

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Evangelicals are ganging up on Romney
http://theghousediary.blogspot.com/2012/01/texas-faith-evangelical-leaders-finding.html
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Romney wins New Hampshire
http://theghousediary.blogspot.com/2012/01/romney-wins-new-hampshire.html

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Gingrich next exit, Romney has to contend with Paul
http://theghousediary.blogspot.com/2011/12/gingrich-next-exit-romney-has-to.html

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The Ghouse Diary: IOWA REPUBLICAN CAUCUS NOTES
http://theghousediary.blogspot.com/2012/01/iowa-republican-caucus-notes.html
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Texas Faith: How should Huntsman and Romney handle their Mormonism?
http://theghousediary.blogspot.com/2011/06/texas-faith-how-should-huntsman-and.html

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Embarrassing Presidential debate on 11.12.11
http://theghousediary.blogspot.com/2011/11/embarassing-presidential-debate-on.html
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PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE ON FOX
http://theghousediary.blogspot.com/2011/08/presidential-debate-on-fox.html

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Perry will be the nominee if he keeps up

http://theghousediary.blogspot.com/2011/09/perry-will-be-nominee-if-he-keeps-up.html
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Trust, Democrats and Republicans.
http://theghousediary.blogspot.com/2011/08/trust-democrats-and-republicans.html
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Bigotry of Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain and other Republicans http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Bigotry-of-Newt-Gingrich--by-Mike-Ghouse-110622-717.html

TEXAS FAITH: Evangelical leaders finding an alternative to Romney

2012-01-12T16:06:00.002-06:00

The Dallas Morning News' Wayne Slater and Texas Faith moderator Wayne Slater reported last week that a group of prominent conservative evangelical leaders are gathering at a Texas ranch this weekend to decide about a candidate they could unite behind as an alternative to Mitt Romney.

The invited include James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, Christian Zionist pastor John Hagee, Kelly Shackelford of the Liberty Institute and Don Wildmon of the American Family Association. Southern Baptist leader Paul Pressler is hosting them. With that as the background, here is this week's question:

If you were invited to join other religious leaders in coalescing behind a candidate, would you attend? Ten Texas Faith panelists respond to the question in Dallas Morning News, here is my response:

MIKE GHOUSE, President, Foundation for Pluralism, Dallas

Yes, I would attend.

If they are considering endorsing a candidate for the presidency of the United States and possibly inviting me, it becomes my responsibility to attend and be a part of the decision making in agreeing with them or asserting a nay, regardless of the outcome.

To disengage ourselves from people we don’t agree with is to give them a tacit approval to go ahead with their plans; by refusing to attend we are giving them a reason to dig in their heels.

Can the Pastor of a Church publicly endorse a candidate without influencing or dividing his or her congregation? Is that a fine line that blurs the separation of Church and state?

The wise men have said it all along, bad things happen in the society not (exclusively) because of bad people, but because good people do nothing about it. I do not want to abdicate my responsibility of speaking up.

No American needs to beg for approval if he or she is qualified, I may or may not vote for Romney but I will stand up for his right to contest and the right to serve our nation. The qualifications and abilities of the candidate should matter to us and not his faith,

The evangelicals rightfully condemn the persecution of Christians in Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Israel, China, India, Sudan and elsewhere, and as Americans we have rightfully condemned all of that plus the persecution of Baha’is, Zoroastrians, Jews, Hindus, Wicca, Sikhs, Buddhists, Pagans, Ahmadiyya, Shia and other Muslims in other parts of the world.

Should we not be ashamed of our duplicity towards Mormons, Muslims and Gay communities in America? What message are we sending to the bigoted nations out there? Do more of what they do? Are we worth emulating?

To push Romney aside for his faith is Anti-American, bigoted and unpatriotic, at least that seems to be the intention of the six individuals gathering up.

We need to be a part of the society and not let a whimsical few run our nation. Indeed, I will attend and speak up for a cohesive America where no American has to live in discomfort, apprehension or fear of the other.

Wasn’t that what Jesus wanted? Isn’t that what Americans want?

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To view all the 12 opinions, please visit Dallas Morning News link - http://religionblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2012/01/texas-faith-evangelical-leader.html

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Mike Ghouse is committed to building a cohesive America and offers pluralistic solutions on issues of the day. A writer, thinker and a speaker and is available to speak on pluralism, politics, Islam, peace, cohesive societies and a variety of topics. Check out 4 websites and 27 Blogs indexed at www.MikeGhouse.net. Current articles at www.TheGhousediary.com

Mission of World Muslim Congress

2012-01-09T18:58:00.000-06:00

To be a Muslim is to be a peace maker, one who constantly seeks to mitigate conflicts and nurtures goodwill for peaceful co-existence of humanity. Just about every activity of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) consisted those two elements. God wants us to live in peace and harmony with his creation; Life and Matter.

We are driven by the Qur'an, Al-Hujurat, Surah 49:13: "O mankind! We have created you male and female, and have made you nations and tribes that ye may know one another. The noblest of you, in sight of Allah, is the best in conduct. Allah Knows and is Aware."

Our Mission

Our Mission at Islam Together Foundation, dba world Muslim congress is to work for a world of co-existence through inclusiveness and participation. As a member of diverse family of faiths, our efforts will be directed towards justice and equity to attain peace for the humankind with a firm grounding in commonly held values. We cannot have advantages at the cost of others. Such benefits are temporary and deleterious to lasting peace. We believe what is good for Muslims has got to be good for the world, and vice versa, for the goodness to sustain.

Indeed we aspire to promote goodwill amongst people of different affiliations, regardless of their faith, gender, race, nationality, culture or any other uniqueness blessed by the creator.

Our Goals

Our short term goal is to understand different faiths and let the values of Islam be understood as well. We know very little about other faiths just as other know almost nothing about Islam. The idea is to know each other, so we can be good to each other.

Our Long term goal is simply to bring a realization that the purpose of all religions is to bring peace and tranquility to an individual and further create a balanced relationships between the individual, society and the environment. Learning about other faiths need not imply infidelity, but rather the search will enrich one's own faith, it reaffirms the idea that the intent of every faith is to "fix" the individual as an active working and participating spoke in the wheel of life. Most people get it and a few don't.

Muslims are not a monolithic lot, a majority of us are like a majority of any group; minding our own business - taking care of family, raising children, their schooling, job, a home to live and retire comfortable. Its an American dream and it is a Muslim dream.

A few among Muslims and a few among Christians and other faiths are bent on converting people to their faiths. However, most people believe in free will, let people believe what comforts them. Every one is endowed with freedom to eat, drink, wear and believe what is good for him or her in the pursuit of their happiness.

Islam defined

The essence of Islam: Justice for every human being under one Creator (Universe is the only creation we know)

The Qur'aan starts with the word "God of Universe" (not necessarily Muslims) and ends with "Humankind" (and again not Muslims). As such it is understood that God, the cause behind creation of life and matter belongs to all of us. No one owns him (her or it) nor does one group has an exclusive favors over the other. The creator will offer equal opportunities to all and will not sign a deal behind one's back with the other.

Al-Fatiha (The Opening) 1:2 All praise is due to God alone, the Sustainer of all the worlds, [2] Alhamdu lillahi rabbi alAAalameen

الْحَمْدُ للّهِ رَبِّ الْعَالَمِينَ (1:2)

An-Nas (The Mankind) 114:1 SAY: "I seek refuge with the Sustainer of men,

قُلْ أَعُوذُ بِرَبِّ النَّاسِ (114:1

We have a monumental task to repair the World, and we will do our share in working towards a World of co-existence, one person at a time. We are committed, and now help us God do the right thing; where none of your creation has to live in apprehension of fear of the other. Amen.

Good Deeds

Islam teaches one to be non-judgmental, and consistently encourages individuals to do good. It emphasizes about individual responsibility towards the peace and security of society at large.

Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) described a good deed as an act which benefits others, such as planting a tree that serves generations of wayfarers with fruit and the shade. The world is a better place today because of a good legacy bequeathed to humanity by people of all faiths that came before us. We owe it to coming generations to leave the world a little better than we found it, to usher an era of justice and peace.

With Prejudice towards none

Almost all Muslims are cognizant and repeat the verse “God is the master of the Day of Judgment, and he alone we worship”. A fully observant Muslim recites this verse anywhere from 17 times to 51 times a day and refrains from judging others, as he or she believes God only can make that call. There is no compulsion in the matters of faith, says the Qur'aan.Our Jihad, the inner struggle is to resit the temptations to judge others. Most Muslims do, a few don't.

Al-Fatiha (The Opening) 1:4 Lord of the Day of Judgment!

مَـالِكِ يَوْمِ الدِّينِ (1:4)

Individual responsibility

Qur'an, Al-An'am, Surah 6:163-164: I ask whether I should seek any god besides God--when he is the Lord of all things. All people will reap the harvest of their own deeds; no one will bear another’s burden. Ultimately, all of you will return to your Lord, and he will resolve your disputes.

There shall be no compulsion in matters of faith, you are not responsible for my beliefs and you should not be concerned about what I believe. Per Islam, only God has the right to judge my faith and my deeds, and we are told in no uncertain terms that we are individually responsible for our acts on the Day of Judgment (A requisite belief) and no one, not even our Prophet, our siblings, parents, family or friends would have the time or the right to stand up for us, we are responsible and we are all alone.

The society is responsible to contain us from hurting the social fabric through our conduct like lying, stealing, cheating, robbing, hurting, breach of contract, infidelity and other acts that affect others. In the matters of belief, it will be God who judges.

Al-An'am (The Cattle)

6:163 in whose divinity none has a share: for thus have I been bidden-and I shall [always] be foremost among those who surrender themselves unto Him."

Topics discussed in this Verse:

[Allah:has no partner] [Allah's attributes:Cherisher and Sustainer

لاَ شَرِيكَ لَهُ وَبِذَلِكَ أُمِرْتُ وَأَنَاْ أَوَّلُ الْمُسْلِمِينَ (6:163)

Al-An'am (The Cattle)

6:164 Say: "Am I, then, to seek a sustainer other than God, when He is the Sustainer of all things?" And whatever [wrong] any human being commits rests upon himself alone; and no bearer of burdens shall be made to bear another's burden. [163] And, in time, unto your Sustainer you all must return: and then He will make you. [truly] understand all that on which you were wont to differ. [164]

قُلْ أَغَيْرَ اللّهِ أَبْغِي رَبًّا وَهُوَ رَبُّ كُلِّ شَيْءٍ وَلاَ تَكْسِبُ كُلُّ نَفْسٍ إِلاَّ عَلَيْهَا وَلاَ تَزِرُ وَازِرَةٌ وِزْرَ أُخْرَى ثُمَّإِلَى رَبِّكُم مَّرْجِعُكُمْ فَيُنَبِّئُكُم بِمَا كُنتُمْ فِيهِ تَخْتَلِفُونَ (6:164)

Al-An'am (The Cattle)

6:165 For, He it is who has made you inherit the earth, [165] and has raised some of you by degrees above others, so that He might try you by means of what He has bestowed upon you. [166] Verily, thy Sustainer is swift in retribution: yet, behold, He is indeed much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace.

[Allah:raises people to ranks (degrees)] [Allah's attributes:Most Merciful] [Allah's attributes:Oft_Forgiving] [Allah's attributes:Quick in punishment] [Trials and tests] [Vicegerent creation of]

وَهُوَ الَّذِي جَعَلَكُمْ خَلاَئِفَ الأَرْضِ وَرَفَعَ بَعْضَكُمْ فَوْقَ بَعْضٍ دَرَجَاتٍ لِّيَبْلُوَكُمْ فِي مَ

ا آتَاكُمْ إِنَّ رَبَّكَ سَرِيعُ الْعِقَابِ وَإِنَّهُ لَغَفُورٌ رَّحِيمٌ (6:165)

A Just society

Islam emerged to bring peace, tranquility and equilibrium to the multitudes of tribes at conflict with each other in the 6th century AD. In a period of 23 years, thru suffering, persecution and sacrifice a just society evolved. Diversity was it’s basis, respecting each tradition and bringing them together and appreciating the creator was the foundation stone of Islam. Justice, liberty and freedom are the core values enshrined in Islam.

Pluralism

Islam is indeed a pluralistic faith and imbues a sense of humility and ideals of equality of humankind. These values are embedded in its rituals practices. All people harvest their own deeds.

He fashioned each one of you--and each one of you is beautiful. To God you will all return. He knows all that the heavens and the earth contain. He knows all that you hide and all that you reveal. He knows your deepest thoughts. Most of us get the message whereas a few don't, indeed it is the story of every faith group.

At-Taghabun (Loss and Gain)

64:1 ALL THAT IS in the heavens and all that is on earth extols God's limitless glory: His is all dominion, and to Him all praise is due; and He has the power to will anything.

يُسَبِّحُ لِلَّهِ مَا فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَمَا فِي الْأَرْضِ لَهُ الْمُلْكُ وَلَهُ الْحَمْدُ وَهُوَ عَلَى كُلِّ شَيْءٍ قَدِيرٌ (64:1)

64:2 He it is who has created you: and among you are such as deny this truth, and among you are such as believe [in it]. [1] And God sees all that you do. هُوَ الَّذِي خَلَقَكُمْ فَمِنكُمْ كَافِرٌ وَمِنكُم مُّؤْمِنٌ وَاللَّهُ بِمَا تَعْمَلُونَ بَصِيرٌ (64:2)

64:3 He has created the heavens and the earth in accordance with [an inner] truth, [2] and has formed you - and formed you so well; [3] and with Him is your journey's end.

خَلَقَ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضَ بِالْحَقِّ وَصَوَّرَكُمْ فَأَحْسَنَ صُوَرَكُمْ وَإِلَيْهِ الْمَصِيرُ (64:3)

64:4 He knows all that is in the heavens and on earth; and He knows all that you keep secret as well as all that you bring into the open: for God has full knowledge of what is in the hearts [of men].

64:5 HAVE THE STORIES of those who, in earlier times, refused to acknowledge the truth never yet come within your ken? [They denied it -] and so they had to taste the evil outcome of their own doings, [4] with [more] grievous suffering awaiting them [in the life to come]:

أَلَمْ يَأْتِكُمْ نَبَأُ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا مِن قَبْلُ فَذَاقُوا وَبَالَ أَمْرِهِمْ وَلَهُمْ عَذَابٌ أَلِيمٌ (64:5

MADINAH PACT

The Madinah pact, prescribes the rights of its Citizens, an initiative of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) while he was the head of the city state of Madinah. It is probably the first legal document offering the format of pluralistic governance.

It was an all inclusive agreement between the Jews, Christians, Sabeans, Quraish, Muslims and other tribes for a peaceful co-existence. An example was set for a pluralistic society in documenting the rights of individuals. Perhaps it was the first historical document that included diverse people with freedom to practice what they believe. The Word Ummah was used in the document to mean all residents of the City.

Freedom

God could have made us all alike; instead he chose to make us humans, giving guidance on one hand, temptations on the other – then giving room to make mistakes, and room for correction. Islam has not claimed monopoly to heaven; it is assured to those who do good deeds. Good deeds are defined by Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) as how your treat others. He told his daughter that it would be her deeds that would earn her a place in the Kingdom of God and not because she is the daughter of the Prophet. There is no free lunch, you have to take responsibility for your actions and earn the grace of God through serving his creation.

Qur'an, Al-Inshiqaq, Surah 84:7-15: Each person will be given a book. Those who are given their books in their right hands (understanding the book correctly) will be judged leniently; and they will return to their people joyfully. But those who are given their books in their left hands (misunderstanding) will call their own destruction on themselves, and burn in the fire of hell. There are the people who have never cared for their neighbors; they thought they would never return to God. Their Lord watches all that people do.

For Millions of years, the physical dimension of the Universe has existed in a perfect balance as it did not have the ego to compete with each other nor had the freedom to mess with it. They do, what God intended them to do. It is the human dimension that needed religion, and every religion is meant to bring peace to individuals and balance to the world around them through free choice.

God willing, the Muslim community will be drawing the blue prints and developing a 14 year plan to find their space in the world of communities, as contributors and active participants in the peaceful co-existence for the people of the World. The Book “Muslim Vision 2020” is on the horizon.

The human desire to monopolize World resources is the root cause of all evil. The pockets of anarchy and problems of the world are born out of fear and insecurities of evil men. Religion is not the source of wars or conflict. In fact, Religion is the best Gift humans have received from God, without which the World would be chaotic.

Praise the Lord. We are pleased to announce the formation of The World Muslim Congress, A non-profit organization dedicated to promoting co-existence and contributing towards a just world. (Formed: 5/25/2006)

Our silence has done more damage to us, our faith and our World. Silent no more, God willing, we will resolutely take back our faith for our good and the good of mankind.

A Major Paradigm Shift

The world has indeed become a global community. Everyone is a neighbor to everyone else; we aspire to nurture the concept of good neighborliness in the world. Our advisory board will be represented by individuals from every faith. It is time for us to be equal citizens of one world, our home. This is a major paradigm shift in how the religious organizations would be conducting their business in the coming years.

Our upcoming website: www.WorldMuslimCongress.com will present a range of values in Islam. It is a shame that some of the translations of Qur’an contain phrases that are not in Qur’an. A dozen translations will be presented verse by verse, with the source. So you may know the truth!

Speak up, silent no more ®

Mike Ghouse, President, World Muslim Congress, 2665 Villa Creek Dr, Suite 206, Dallas, TX 75234

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Additional Notes

We are drawing the blue prints, and developing a 14 year plan to find our space in the world of communities, as contributors and active participants in the peaceful co-existence of the people of the World.

God willing (Insha Allah) by the September 11, we plan to role out a Seven point program achieving the mission encrusted in the press release below. We are driven by the thought "How can we make the world a better place for every one".

Nothing has ever happened without taking a step forward. The website www.WorldMuslimCongress.com is scheduled to be launched on Monday, September 11, 2006. It will be interactive and accommodative of diversity within Islam and aims to be a voice of the Majority of Muslims who chose moderation.

Islam is not a monolithic religion and has allowed diversity from its very inception. Justice, Liberty and freedom are its core values. God could have made us desire-less and sinless angels, instead he chose to make us human, giving guidance on one hand, temptations on the other – then giving room to make mistakes, and room to correct ourselves thru repentance. Forgiveness is a full cycle concept and not merely utterance of words. Hence, Islam is a deed based religion.

Our silence has done a lot more damage to us than the damage done by the extremists. We have a forum now to speak up and present the majority view to the world.

If you would like to join the discussions on any topic, please send your email request to: WorldMuslimCongress-Subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Supremacism Taking Roots in the US

2012-01-09T08:06:00.001-06:00

The article below highlights Imam Shamsi Ali, the Imam of Islamic Culture Centre of New York who is telling that Quran was preserved through the Sword and other things about Islam that are not kosher. First of all, I will contact the officers of their board and if no response, I will visit the mosque to present an alternate view. I do need to ensure that the information is accurate as finding the truth is one's own responsibility.

As Americans, we value free speech, he has the freedom to say anything he wants just as the Spencers, Gabrielles, Horowitzs, Santorums, Gingrichs and others have it and use the altars of places of worship to deliver it. As a Muslim, I want to speak out against it, at least we cannot do evil things just because others do. I have been monitoring this for a while, this is the first one in several years... and Insha Allah, I will visit Imam Shamsi Ali and hope to begin the process to end that kind of rhetoric.

Mike Ghouse
# # #

By Sultan Shahin, editor, New Age Islam

7 Dec 2011

• Islam is a universal religion. Our prophet came to serve humanity. All other prophets came to serve only their people. Only al-Islam is a universal religion for all humanity.

• Sword protected al-Islam for 1,000 years. There was no state to protect Bible or other holy books. Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) created a state to protect the Quran. So Quran was protected. Sword protected it.

• Quran is word of God. Word for word. Word of God and Man are mixed together in Bible. In Torah, Prophet Ishmael is described as an ass. Can God call one of his prophets an ass?

• A dozen people come to this centre to convert every month. A 21-year-old girl came recently. Father English Methodist. Mother Irish. Her parents were not happy with her decision. But she was adamant. How could I reject? 12 times a month, people come to get converted to Islam. Because Islam is the word of God.

• Islam solves problems beautifully. Easy, clean solution. For instance, polygamy is required in certain situations. War creates situations in which there are not enough men for every woman. Half a husband is better than nothing. Because of the practice of polygamy a childless wife is not divorced.

• The use of Quranic verses to justify violence like 9/11 is the worst disfigurement of Islam. 800 Muslim lives were also lost on 9/11. 9/11 was not a religious event. It was purely political. Muslims have never been terrorists in history. Even in the fight between the US and Soviet Union, Muslims were on the side of the US. Osama bin Laden was then a friend of the US. He probably wanted a price for supporting the US in the struggle against Soviet Union. But got nothing and so turned against the US. We felt relief after his killing. His ghaibana namaz-e-Janaza (funeral prayer in absentia) was not said here in America. He was a major cause of Islamophobia.

• Islamophobia and Terrorism are souring our lives here. We are trying to convince Americans that we are a moderate people. For instance, there is a lot of violence in America. Thousands of cases of rape and murder and other acts of violence are reported. The one community whose members do not commit violence is Muslim. Muslim crime statistics is zero. At world level too, the Muslims who engage in extremist violence constitute merely a tiny percentage of the 1.5 billion strong community.

• Islamophobia is a new phenomenon, promoted by anti-Islam media. US foreign policy is turning more positive towards Muslims. Bush period was bad. Things are getting better under Obama. But certain vested interests in the country fuel the fire of hatred.

• Islam is the last and the youngest religion. Islam is the fastest growing religion. It is perceived by some vested interests as a threat, growing threat. Nobody is attacking other religions. The reasons are not difficult to see. Islam is against pornography, drug trafficking, alcohol, pork, gambling, Western banking – so it is a threat. All these interests join forces against Islam.

• I don’t believe there are any Muslim terrorists in this country.

• As long as a Palestinian state is not established, there will be violence, terrorism.

• Arab Muslims are demanding freedom, democracy. So Muslims and the United States are in the same boat. We support the values of the United States. But as Muslims we live by Islamic values.

These are the views of Imam Shamsi Ali, the Imam of Islamic Culture Center of New York, which is the city’s largest mosque, located in 96th Street and 3rd Avenue Manhattan. He is chairman of the Al-Hikmah Mosque in Astoria and the Director of Jamaica Muslim Centre in Queens. He serves as an Advisory Board member to numerous interfaith organizations, including the Tannebaum Centre and Federation for Middle East Peace. He is also chairman of the Board of Trustees for the ASEAN Muslims Federation of North America. He is also a Board member for the Partnership in Faith in New York and co-founder of the UNCC (Universal Clergy Coalition-International). Furthermore, he is also Assistant Director and a Board member of the Muslim Foundation of America, Inc., and Chairman of the annual Muslim Day Parade in NYC. He also serves as the Vice President of the Asian-America Coalition USA (AAC-USA) and it’s UN Representative.

This may appear to be a rather long bio for a short article, but actually it is quite short, just 10 percent of the one provided by State Department to us, a visiting team of 20 Asian Muslim journalists as part of its programme “Many Facets of Islam.” The point is: Imam Shamsi is a very influential Muslim religious leader. The US administration, several other governments as well as leaders of different faiths treat him with utmost respect. He indeed has great influence among Muslims in New York and perhaps elsewhere in the country.

It’s a careful study of his views that is likely to tell us where American Islam is heading. One must carefully study, therefore, his thoughts on Islam, pluralism, interfaith relations, terrorism, Islam and the west, Islam in America, 9/11, and so on to be able to understand the state of American Islam. The above quotes must have given you some idea. Imam Shamsi is clearly a representative of Wahhabi, petrodollar Islam. And why not? He is the Imam of a mosque that was built by Arab petrodollars, mostly from Kuwait. So the ambassador of Kuwait is always the chairman of the board of management that runs the Islamic centre; nearly all Arab ambassadors are members of the board.

Imam Shamsi can be safely considered to be a representative of the community of Muslim Imams in the United States. All the imams come from madrasas and Islamic studies departments funded by Arab petrodollars. The one and only curriculum available anywhere is the one provided by Saudi Arabia and Saudi-funded Islamic websites.

In another interaction, this time with a representative of moderate Islam, Daisy Khan, founder of the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA), along with her husband Imam Feisal Adbul Rauf, I asked if a moderate curriculum is available anywhere. She said ASMA is retraining Imams in Afghanistan and plans to do so in Pakistan. I asked her what her experience with retraining imams in America was and if she did think that these people could indeed be retrained. But it transpired that this question was based on a wrong assumption. I had assumed that she must have already experimented with retraining Imams in the US. She couldn’t explain why charity did not begin at home for her but I assume that this may be due to a widespread misconception in many multi-religious societies including India that living in a secular, multicultural society Muslims here would naturally evolve into a community tolerant of diversity and respectful of other faiths.

Islam has a long history of respectful co-existence with other faith communities. Respecting founders of other faiths and giving them the same status as our own Prophet (pbuh), is a part of our faith, as taught in the Quran. But Islam-supremacism, even contempt for other faiths, has been spread with such passion by petrodollar-funded media, schools, universities and madrasas, distorting the message of Islam, that it has become a widespread belief among Muslims all over the world. “We (Wahhabis) alone will go to Heaven, the rest of Muslims, and of course, others, are all fodder for Hell,” has become the reigning sentiment. Facts, however, prove otherwise. God told us that Islam is not a new religion; it is the same religion that has been revealed to tens of thousands of prophets since the first man and first prophet Adam (pbuh) came to earth. All these prophets taught to their people in the language of their region and time. God promises in the Quran to judge people on the basis of their faith and deeds. But Imam Shamsi and all other imams actually, tell us that Islam alone is a universal religion. So Christianity and Judaism should remain confined to Palestine and Israel, Hinduism and Buddhism to India and so on.

It is anybody’s guess how his Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu interlocutors react when Imam Shamsi tells them in the “interfaith dialogue” he holds that the founders of their religions brought to them teachings that were meant only for their regions and not the whole world and only the teachings of God that were revealed to Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) were meant for the whole world.

But, more importantly, if American Muslims are allowing such Islam-supremacist, un-Islamic views that directly contradict teachings of Quran, to cloud their horizon, this doesn’t augur well for their integration in American society. Already, as I discovered, in a large room designated as a Muslim prayer hall in the Congress building on the Capitol Hill, almost all the participants in Friday prayers, were trained in and followed the Wahhabi way of prayer. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are all Wahhabis. All Wahhabis too are not extremists. And if Wahhabi imams, media, books, websites, etc. are the only ones available to provide religious training, what else would one learn. But imams like Imam Feisal Adbul Rauf need to expend more energy in making an alternative moderate Islamic educational system, curriculum, text books, etc. available, first to American Muslims, and then to Afghanistan and Pakistan and the rest of the Muslim world.

It would be a tragedy if American Muslims too went the British way. What Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad, founder of Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al-Muhajiroun, did in the United Kingdom in 1980s is being done in the US by a number of organisations and imams like Imam Shamsi today. Naturally in the post 9/11 environment, these elements have to be guarded in their language. They all have to mouth platitudes about Islam being against terrorism, etc., which, of course, it is.

But ask them specific questions about pluralism, co-existence, respecting other faiths, treating others religious groups genuinely as Ahl-e-Kitab, present-day applicability of war-related instructions in the Holy Quran, ban on minority religious worship places in Saudi Arabia, near-ban on propagation of other religions almost everywhere in Muslim-majority lands, etc. and the thin veneer of civilisation starts to wears off. The irony is completely lost even on the Muslims who are saying their prayers in the Muslim prayer hall on the Capitol Hill, the seat of American democracy; they do not care to express any opinion on the impossibility of having a prayer place anywhere in the whole country of Saudi Arabia, the seat of Islam. They may not ask for “Sharia-controlled zones” and the like a la Britain, but who knows where this trend is leading.

Incidentally the Muslim prayer hall was officially sponsored by Muslim congressmen Andre Carson (D-IN) and Keith Ellison (D-MN) and permitted, of all people by the right wing republican presidential hopeful and then House speaker Newt Gingrich. Regular participants in Friday prayers include about 100 Muslims who work for Congress in capacities like information technology, policing and legislative research. It’s their organisation the Congressional Muslim Staff Association (CMSA) that manages these weekly Friday prayers. While there is a standby Imam, almost every week organisers invite a guest Imam or a trained khateeb (preacher), who can be even social and political activists, from different parts of the country. If you can believe Fox News, one of the prayer leaders here once was even Anwar al-Awlaki, the notorious Al Qaeda cleric killed recently in Yemen.

Clearly moderates who can read the writing on the wall have to fight as fierce a battle in the US as elsewhere. Saudi Arabia will continue to export Wahhabism around the world. It will continue to spend tens of billions of dollars on the project as it has since 1974 and has continued even after 9/11. It would be futile to expect any support from the US or any other government. The US will continue to protect Saudi evangelism and flouting of civilised Islamic norms of behaviour. If there was one country asking for regime change after 9/11, it was Saudi Arabia. 16 out of 19 terrorists involved in 9/11were Saudis. But what to speak of clamping down, the US probably did not even so much as warn the Saudis. It cannot intervene in internal, particularly religious matters. This is the message I got in a nutshell from both envoys of the Obama administration for outreach to Muslims, Farah Pandith and Rashad Hussain, with whom we interacted in separate meetings. Ditto for every other country.

And perhaps that is as it should be. Government intervention might make matters worse; give the purveyors of Jahiliya in the name of Islam another stick to beat the world with. In any case this is war within Islam more than anything else. It is an attempt to colonise Muslim minds. It is Muslims who should fight it. It is for progressive Muslims, moderate ulema (religious scholars), to create a social movement that can reverse the growing tide of radical Wahhabism, so assiduously promoted by Saudis, no matter how Herculean the task may appear to be.

URL: http://www.newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamIslamAndWest_1.aspx?ArticleID=6086

Burqa Ban

2012-01-07T04:39:00.001-06:00

Burqa Ban

there are at least 25 articles at Huffington post on the topic including one by Mike Ghouse
www.huffingtonpost.ca/tag/burqa-ban

Rethinking Islamic Reform: Hamza Yusuf & Tariq Ramadan

2012-01-06T21:21:00.004-06:00

This is nearly three hours documentation.

Hamza Yusuf and Tariq Ramadan are two of the giant Muslim scholars in the world today.

The Rethinking Islamic Reform conference, originally held May 26, 2010, features two of the world's foremost Muslim intellectuals as they provide guidance in the ever polemical topic of reform in Islam.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY17d4ZhY8M&feature=related

Double standards of Islamic and western societies

2012-01-05T00:35:00.002-06:00

This article is an experimental writing, the first five paragraphs are copied and pasted as the next five, the difference is the first set highlights hypocrisy in Muslim majority nations while the same words express the hypocrisy in western democracies.

Law is one thing and practice is the other. As an American and as a Muslim, I have to be critical of both groupings and work toward creating cohesive societies where no citizen has to live in apprehension, discomfort or fear of the other. Here is a summary of 2011 and what we can aspire for 2012.

Published at Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-ghouse/citizenship-islam-and-ame_b_1174834.html

Published at the Ghouse diary

http://theghousediary.blogspot.com/2012/01/citizenship-islam-and-america.html

Published: Indian Muslim Observer and Two Circles

Mike Ghouse is committed to building a cohesive America and offers pluralistic solutions on issues of the day. A writer, thinker and a speaker. (214) 325-1916 - www.MikeGhouse.net

Double standards of Islamic and western societies

2012-01-05T00:33:00.000-06:00

This article is an experimental writing, the first five paragraphs are copied and pasted as the next five, the difference is the first set highlights hypocrisy in Muslim majority nations while the same words express the hypocrisy in western democracies.

Published at Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-ghouse/citizenship-islam-and-ame_b_1174834.html

Published at the Ghouse diary

http://theghousediary.blogspot.com/2012/01/citizenship-islam-and-america.html

Published: Indian Muslim Observer and Two Circles

Mike Ghouse is committed to building a cohesive America and offers pluralistic solutions on issues of the day. A writer, thinker and a speaker. (214) 325-1916 - www.MikeGhouse.net

Texas Faith : Do we need a Steve Jobs of Religion?

2012-01-05T00:17:00.001-06:00

Do we need a Steve Jobs of religion, an innovative thinker who can "invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious?" If so, where would that person come from? And what would they try to offer? If you don't think we need a "Steve Jobs of religion," please explain why. Here is my response;

MIKE GHOUSE, President, Foundation for Pluralism, Dallas

Throughout the history of mankind, the "Steve Jobs of religions" have made significant contributions to innovative universally-synthesized acceptable traditions for living a balanced life. However, they ended up becoming another competitive religion instead of the one that everyone would embrace. Indeed, there is a new focus in understanding the essence of religion and looking at all religions as valid alternative paths to achieve freedom.

Three thousand years ago, a man shared a corollary between the laws of physics and laws of society. Just as matter finds its own balance, the society will find its own order whenever it goes awry. Someone from among them will rise up and restoresthe order, or the dharma as Lord Krishna called it.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, another Steve Jobs of religion appeared with the name Gautama Buddha. He shared a simple philosophy of life to live with minimum (or no) suffering. He taught a balanced approach between ascetic life and living with given human desires. Today, it has not only become a distinct religion with adherents performing specific identifiable rituals but has split itself into three threads.

Two thousand years ago, there was another one who found a way to bring relief to mankind through teaching and prescribing the psychological medicine of forgiving and loving thy enemy. His teachings were for the whole humanity. but they got monopolized by a group. Two thousand years later,multiple groups claim their version is the truth. Jesus was his name.

Fifteen hundred years ago, yet another Steve Jobs appeared on the horizon with an innovative idea to bring harmony among creation. He said all men are equal before God and that God's love reaches out to every human and every community through the peace makers, messengers and the prophets. Prophet Muhammad said it behooves us to know each other so we can learn to co-exist. He said submitting to the idea of a cohesive society (will of God) is Islam.

Five hundred years ago, Akbar, the Great King of India, made serious efforts in finding a common ground among Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and Judaism and initiated Deen-e-Ilahi, religion of the creator. It died with that Steve Jobs.

The last four hundred years have witnessed Guru Nanak and Bahaullah initiating interfaith movements to bring people together in spirituality. However, they ended becoming Sikhism and Baha'i faiths.

Rituals are the differentiators; they signify the mile stones of our daily life. Every significant moment of the day is a ritual. It is an unwritten way of measuring our progression; a memory pattern to bring discipline to our actions. From the moment we are born to the last rites of our life and every moment in-between is laden with rituals, though some of us may deny it.

When specific rituals are prescribed or become a part of the group it will generate yet another religion rather than a commonality.

The bottom line to religion is to bring a balance to an individual and the balance with what surrounds him, people and the environment.

We have to shed the arrogance that our tradition is superior or the only way to salvation. Indeed, arrogance is the root cause of all conflicts. We have to remember that God has not signed a deal with anyone behind my back or your back, if he did, then we don't a God like that and he is not the one we need to bow.

The foundation for pluralism has done extensive experiments and workshops in religion and getting for people to see the value and essence of each religion that are deeply embedded in the rituals.

Steve Jobs would probably have echoed my belief: To build a cohesive society where no one has to live in apprehension of the other, we have to learn to respect every which way one worships (or not) the creator and accepts the God given uniqueness of each one of us, then conflicts fade and solutions emerge.

# # #

For all the twelve responses go to:
http://religionblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2012/01/texas-faith-do-we-need-a-steve.html

Mike Ghouse is committed to building a cohesive America and offers pluralistic solutions on issues of the day; he is a writer, thinker and a speaker. www.MikeGhouse.net