Category Archive

to read:

Ethnic Cleansing and the Long Term Persistence of Extractive Institutions: Evidence from the Expulsion of the Moriscos

Ok, it’s not going to be the easiest read but inshaAllah I’m going to plod through it.  It’s been awhile since I’ve had to sift and winnow.

Weather here has been pretty cruddy as of late.  I’ve lost count of the number of tornado sirens that have gone off in the last week.  But alhamdulilah, nothing major has happened up in our neck of the woods. 

The same cannot be said for many of our midwesterly neighbors to the south.  The flooding in Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois has been devestating.  It hits a wee bit close to home when the roads you’ve traveled dozens of times to both your grandmother’s and parents’ homes are impassible and that places you used to live are flooded.

Now word comes from CAIR-MN that one of the first mosques in America has been damaged:

Flood Damages Historic American Mosque, Destroys Documents
CAIR-MN urges American Muslims to assist flood victims of all faiths(ST. PAUL, MN, 6/16/08) – The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MN) today called on American Muslims to help repair damage to one of the first mosques in America caused by recent flooding in Iowa.The Mother Mosque of America in Cedar Rapids, completed in 1934, was one of the first permanent structures built specifically to serve as a mosque in the United States. The mosque had recently completed a renovation project.

Documents inside the mosque, including photographs of American Muslim immigrants from the early 1900s, were destroyed by the flood waters.

“The mosque has been visited by people from all over the country,” said Imam Taha Tawil, Director of the Mother Mosque of America. “It is part of the American Muslim identity.”

CAIR-MN is asking Muslims to donate to help restore the mosque and to assist flood victims of all faiths throughout the region.

SEE: Mother Mosque of America

mothermosque.org

The Mother Mosque is listed on both the Iowa State Historical Register and the National Register of Historic Places as an “essential piece of American religious history, which symbolizes tolerance and acceptance of Islam and Muslims in the United States.”

MAS Service Corps are consolidating muslim efforts in the area.

Some of the first mosques in the United States was built in the Midwest.  Many of them claim to be first, although there is evidence that some were built out on the east coast before them.  It seems to come down to semantics – those in the midwest (Ross, North Dakota and The Mother Mosque claim to be the first purpose build mosques.  Were the mosques on the east coast buildings converted into mosques?  Definately something to look into further.

From ISIM via MR:

By Stéphane Lacroix

When on the first of October 1999 Shaykh Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani passed away at the age of 85, he was mourned by virtually everyone in the world of Salafi Islam. To many, he represented its third main contemporary reference, after ‘Abd al-’Aziz bin Baz (who himself had died a few months before) and Muhammad bin ‘Uthaymin (who would pass away in January 2001), both leading figures of the Saudi religious establishment. Salafi newspapers, journals, and websites celebrated this Syrian son of an Albanian clock-maker—whose family left Albania in 1923, when he was nine years old, and re-established itself in Damascus—who had become known as the muhaddith al-’asr (traditionist of the era), that is, the greatest hadith scholar of his generation.

How did al-Albani, with his undistinguished social and ethnic origins, come to occupy such a prestigious position in a field long monopolized by a religious elite from the Saudi region of Najd—The answer is, as we shall see through the example of al-Albani himself and some of his disciples, lies in his revolutionary approach to hadith.

Read the rest through the link, it’s fascinating.

on the blogs I read

Climbing Walls – an American Muslimah living in Palestine, her whole blog is chock full of posts on Palestine.  More recent posts include 1000 Year Mosques destroyed in wake of the Nakba and Al Jazera reports on Palestinians.  *added 9:36 am* Her blog about Palestine day post is up – Judaizing East Jerusalem

Southern Muslimah blogs about her Mother-in-Law’s experience in the nakba

The Muslimah links to a post her husband wrote about his grandmother and her ceaseless dhikr

*added at noon*  Writeous Sister writes about Genocide by any other name in Palestine and of Native Americans

*added at 12:30*  A Mother in Gaza writes about the cyber terrorism attack against Palestinian bloggers.   The rest of her blog is a good read for today as well.

More to be added as I continue my daily blog stroll inshaAllah

*added at 9:36 am*

Personal accounts always tug at my heart strings the most.  I can still remember the exact moment of my awakening to the situation in Palestine.  Hanan Ashwari came to speak at my university.  During the Q&A period, an old man got up, on the brink of tears.  He spoke about wanting to to to his childhood home, currently located in Israel, to be buried with his family.  He hadn’t been back since he was expelled decades earlier.  And he wouldn’t be allowed to go back to die.  I get a lump in my throat just remembering it now.

If Americans Knew - what every american needs to know about Israel

Remember these Children

Since September 2000

982 Palestinian Children

and

119 Israeli Children

have been killed

 Innaa lillaahi wa innaa ilayhi raaji'oon

to God we belong and to Him is our return

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/3P12aqVeZkQ" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Ohh let's not cry tonight I promise you one day is through
Ohh my brothers! Ohh my sisters!
Ooh shine a light for every soul that ain't with us no more
Ohh my brothers! Ohh my sisters!

As a child, family vacations consisted of each child carefully packing a box of books and colored pencils, my mom baking weeks worth of almond chocolate chip muffins and everyone piling into the family van for a 3 week road trip to some scenic and/or historic american destination.  On these family vacations, I developed a great love of history and it’s preservation.  Walking the battlefields at Yorktown and Gettysburg, viewing the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s stovepipe hat, following the Oregon Trail westward, earning countless junior ranger badges, american history came alive.  History wasn’t simply something printed on the pages of textbooks.  No, it was something to touch, to see, to experience, to live.   I feel my life is fuller having experienced the history of my country.  I better understand my country, and what it means to be an american.

Imagine my disapointment then, when I first visited the Great Pyramids of Giza and found it was one big tourist trap.  Certainly, there were some highlights, such as the solar barque preservation building, but mostly, it was a bunch of ducking and avoiding men and boys trying to show you secret hidden chambers or get you to overpay for a ride on a poor, mangy camel.  Later trips to historic mosques like al Azhar were mared by janitors demanding enormous amounts of baqsheesh for special tours to places we could have gone to on our own.

But, at least the pyramids and these mosques were still there.  Muslim history, OUR history, has been steadily destroyed right under our very noses by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for decades.  Want to follow in the Prophet’s (saws) footsteps?  Good luck trying to find them.

Is the danger of grave worship and bida so dangerous that we must wipe our history from the face of the earth?  Should not future generations be able to visit these places where the blessed Prophet (saws) and his companions walked, to touch, to see, to experience, to live?  Companions of the Prophet (saws) strove to walk in the Prophet’s footsteps, literally.  They loved him so much that they followed him physically, with their bodies, as well as in their hearts.

Should not muslims today be allowed these same opportunities?  Do we not love the Prophet (saws) and want to imitate him as his companions did?  Cannot these brushes with our history increase our love for the Prophet (saws) and his sunnah, help us to better understand who we are, where we came from, and what it means to be a muslim?

Now, that rant aside, via 13 Martyrs, there is some good news:

The Supreme Council for Tourism plans to open a number of museums across the country including an Islamic museum in Makkah, a Qur’an museum in Madinah and a major one in Jeddah.

It is a very welcome development. Awareness both abroad and at home of the country’s heritage and history ranges, with one or two notable exceptions, from poor to abysmal. The consequences of that are seen in the way historic sites have been left to rot or destroyed altogether to make way for the new — with no concern whatsoever for what is being lost. For the past 40 years or so, the past has been studiously ignored. It was perhaps understandable in the rush for development.

 Via Deenport:

Fascinating.  Saint George and the Dragon was one of my favorite books as a kid.  I’ve never really approached Christianity before Muhammad (saws) from this perspective before:

George’s death occurred around the fourth century AD, some 300 years before the last prophet of Islam completed the Message of God to His creation with the Qur’an. Thus as a true follower of monotheism Muslims regard him as dying in a state of submission to the One Creator. Or in Arabic – of dying in a state of Islam. As such, George has acquired status as a Muslim martyr. Muslims across the
Middle East have traditionally associated George with Al Khadr, literally ‘the Green One’, signifying wisdom that is ever fresh and imperishable. Al Khadr is described in the Qur’an as a mystical boat companion of Moses, and even though Moses’ time was centuries earlier, the linking of George to this Qur’anic personality has held the imagination, and the similarity of title has meant the two figures have become entwined.
…

Anthony Cooney, author of the books, The Story of St George and Saint George: Knight of Lydda commented on George as a “man for all people”, not being confined to one country or a single cause. Cooney finds that George’s appeal to Muslims is not something that should be treated as strange. “St George is an ecumenical saint. He is not just for one nation; he is patron saint of many, making him pretty universal. One main reason for Muslims revering him over time is that he was martyred for refusing to give divine honours to idols, and as such is delivered up as a staunch monotheist.” Many accounts have George destroying idols in the

temple of
Apollo, a story that resounds remarkably with the account of Abraham smashing the idols in his time. Although there are some voices of dissent regarding his martyrdom status, according to Cooney there is a “tremendous amount of evidence”, which can leave us in no doubt of the years of torture he endured and his subsequent death.

Before yesterday, I knew that Marmaduke Pickthall was an english convert to Islam and that he had translated the Qur’an.  Then I read this biography by prof. Abdal-Hakim Murad (also a spiffy guy).  SubhanAllah!  If I could accomplish 1/10th of what he did, I would be well satisfied. 

He died in a cottage in the West Country on May 19 1936, of coronary thrombosis, and was laid to rest in the Muslim cemetery at Brookwood. After his death, his wife cleared his desk, where he had been revising his Madras lectures the night before he died, and she found that the last lines he had written were from the Qur’an:

‘Whosoever surrendereth his purpose to Allah, while doing good, his reward is with his Lord, and there shall no fear come upon them, neither shall they grieve.’

 

via Deenport

The Islamic Tradition and Historic Conflict Resolution in Timbuktu

Fascinating, I hope I can find more on these practices. I took an African History class freshman year, but can’t remember much. Guess I’ll have to dig around to find my old books and re read about Timbuktu, and browse the Libraries of Timbuktu website.

Passed on to me by my friend Noura, take time to explore this beautiful look at Islamic History and the art it created.

Discovery Islamic Art Online

I had a hard time picking which pictures to include in this post, as each era produced such unique and fascinating art.

Ceramic tile with a picture of the Ka’baHegira last quarter of the 10th century / AD 16th century – Ottoman Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts Sultanahmet, Istanbul, Turkey

Tile showing the Ka’ba, which would be placed on the outside of a mosque showing the direction of and reminding the faithful about the holiest site of Islam.

Aghlabid ReservoirsHegira 248 / AD 862Abbasid Kairouan, Tunisia

This reservoir is composed of two pairs of circular basins. About 15 similar reservoirs originally surrounded the area outside Kairouan. In addition to rainwater, water from the tributaries of the Merguelil Valley was directed into them. > More information

Museum With No Frontiers (MWNF) is an organisation whose ground-breaking and visionary programme aims to establish a vast trans-national museum that presents works of art, architecture and archaeology in the context in which they were created. Inspired by the principle of organising exhibitions without moving the works of art, MWNF is creating through modern technology an exciting new dimension to museums. The visitor is invited to experience a museum not only as a place to admire artefacts on display but also as a gateway to related works of art in other museums, relevant archaeological sites and monuments as well as to thematic visits.

By raising awareness of artistic and cultural heritage and promoting investment in restoration and conservation projects, MWNF aims to promote cultural integration as a means of facilitating political cooperation between different countries and cultures. The MWNF programme provides an opportunity to learn about and enjoy the shared cultural heritage of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East in a completely new way. Its masterly orchestration brings together a large number of academics, professionals, photographers, tourist managers, politicians and many other people and organisations participating in this innovative project.

The ever expanding MWNF network includes partners from 19 countries in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. To date, public and private bodies from Algeria, Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey and the United Kingdom have joined the MWNF programme.