Category — Community

This book got a warm recommendation by one of the biggest Danish news papers.

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed blogs at spirit21, and she is the winner of brass crescent awards for best blog and best female blog.She writes:

I took the book to a number of publishers whose commissioning editors loved the story, but couldn’t see it fitting with the existing mould of books about Muslim women. “We need an ‘alias’ of a book that is already out there so people understand how it relates to previous books,” they explained, meaning it should be either a forced marriage story or one of escape from Islam.

With such black and white views about the stories that Muslim women are permitted to tell, how can it ever be possible to create an understanding of our diversity and complexity?

I hope my book brings a fresh perspective to the discussion about Muslim women. But there is a serious question to be asked – will it provoke the Muslim community to look into itself and wonder why these lazy stereotypes exist? Sometimes as Muslims we lack an intellectual honesty about ourselves, and are not brave enough to tell our stories as human beings on a journey, with all our flaws. If publishers are guilty of monolithic misery memoirs, then Muslims must also take some of the blame for not sharing our universal experiences in a language and context that everyone can relate to.

To find out more, click here.

Dervish on the recent order for a Muslim woman in Canada to remove her niqab during her testimony in court, and she tells you that the Niqab  is Islamic whether you like it or not.

To quote:

For someone like myself (an Anglo-Celtic convert), the veil is also a manifestation of Muslim identity where skin-colour, ethnicity and language do not link me to Muslim identity. I do not wear the face-veil much in the West (I have from time-to-time) only because it is often interpreted as threatening to non-Muslims who misunderstand it. But I have to confess I do like the privacy that the face-veil offers me, and I am comfortable in drawing on a long history of Islamicity of face-veiling as a manifestation of the positive virtue of haya’ (bashfulness). As a feminist, I completely reject that any man has a right to tell me I cannot wear it, or that my wearing it is
not Islamic. It may not be particular interpretation of the religion, but he does not have the right to tell me how to interpret my religion for myself.

We’ve all heard time and again that interest and riba are categorically haraam in Islam. Maddeningly though, we often don’t hear a solution to the problem. Everybody knows these things are haraam but practical advice on how to avoid them is very hard to come by. This blog post answers a part of the question; it offers suggestions on eliminating interest-bearing debt quickly.

Pre-Requisites

1. Ask Allah to Forgive You: If you made the mistake of getting into riba (interest) debts, for whatever reason, repent and do your best to get out of it. I didn’t know better myself, and even when I found the ruling out on interest, I justified it to myself, which was wrong (college education). Stop immediately and reverse course on this.  Ask to be forgiven and formulate a new plan of action to deal with this situation.  Take your time with college and life in general – don’t let society force its ridiculous standards on you.

2. Ask Allah to Help You: We underestimate this, but remember that if you try to come closer to Allah, Allah will come closer to you faster, as was mentioned in a hadeeth qudsi. I’ll explain later how this very principle caused my wife and I to pay off all our college debts ($35,000 from me, about $8000 from her) and other lingering debts in 2 months, alhamdulillaah.

3. Financial Discipline: If you don’t have control over yourself, this system will never work. If you can’t control compulsive shopping or spending, no system will work for you. Period. If you have control issues, see a therapist, psychologist / psychiatrist, or a personal coach to help out.

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The big factor here is the DD – the bigger it is, the faster your debt gets destroyed.  I placed a modest $200, but honestly, most people living on their own can go a couple of hundred higher and make this happen much faster, and people who are living with their families can create a massive DD of about $900 – $1000 or more and can out can knock debts out very quickly.  Given the state of the economy, although I don’t normally recommend it, if you can live with your folks and work a full-time professional job, then stay with them til all debts are gone.

Read the entire post here.

I have heard so many times how some Muslim Male scholars referred to the Hijab/ veil or Niqaab as a 30 g cloth. It reveals indeed their disdain and prejudice for Muslim women and how much deep the Western Orientalists grasped their way of thinking without realising it.

John Borneman reviews The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore and Politics ed by Jennifer Heath [LRB Vol. 30 No. 24] I have chosen the book review because it got quite a lot publicity in press media, and I’ll will quote only this passage from John Borneman:

The veil, in whatever form, is not and never will be just a scrap of cloth, as Taylor wishes the hijab to be thought of, because it is worn in order to symbolise something, or many things. Veils are not, as many of the contributors to The Veil want to think, merely a diversion or distraction from issues of more substance to more women, such as poverty, the distribution of rights, the allocation of resources, sociopolitical disenfranchisement and violence. Attending to these issues, important as they are, will not necessarily affect the ways in which the veil’s meanings are made.

John Borneman, who teaches anthropology at Princeton, is the author of Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers and an Anthropologist in Aleppo.

Sometimes it’s tough to speak the truth. While raising a child. Shawna writes-

Here’s a last one for the road. Last weekend, I decided to separate Noah and TV in a big way. He got about 40 minutes of TV today. That was all this week. Why? He can’t sleep, he doesn’t read, he’s constantly agitated, what he sees on TV is all he talks about, he screams at me, he started telling me to shut up (from Toy Story) . . . I could go on and on. But mostly it was the agitation. The same agitation we noticed shortly after his birth and every time we’ve decided to get rid of TV since. Why do we keep coming back to this place?Anyway. The semi-lie. I told him the TV is sleeping. Technically, it is sleeping when it’s turned off. I consult with the TV when Noah asks if he can watch something, usually by looking at it, going, “mmmm” and pursing my lips. But today my consultation took me into the office where I “talked” to the TV on the computer. Really, I opened a Gmail chat with Nathan. (Interpret Nathan as the TV how you will.)

“You’re talking to the TV through the computer?” Nathan was skeptical.

I try not to take advantage of the fact that Noah doesn’t know any better. But in case you’re wondering, you can “talk” to the TV thorugh the computer in a way. If you have the right DVR setup and you want to schedule recordings while you’re away. We don’t have anything like that.

Nathan and I decided that since it was Movie Friday, it would be okay if Noah got the equivalent or less in TV time. I came out of the office. I told Noah the TV said it can wake up to let him watch two episodes of Caillou. It did. He watched them. The TV is now back asleep. Noah is upstairs in his crib avoiding a nap. I’m debating whether to get him up when his one hour expires, or leave him there until he actually sleeps for one hour. I think I’ll just get him up even though what I want is to lay down for a nap myself. If it’s not nursing or dealing with Noah in the middle of the night, all this “creative thinking” is sapping my energy.

A Muslim charity in the United States has been found guilty of abetting Hamas

ibnabeeomar at MuslimMatters writes:

 It’s with great sadness that we heard about the verdict of the Holy Land Foundation trial. I find it absolutely appalling that they can convict someone based solely on circumstantial evidence and an anonymous witness. It really begs the question if such a witness would be allowed to testify, in an expert status no less, if the accused had been anything other than Muslim.

Umar Lee writes:

 I am asking all of my readers to make a sincere duah for the brothers from the Holy Land Foundation who were convicted yesterday in a federal court in Dallas, Texas. Let it be known that this prosecution by the federal government, one of the last evil acts of the Bush Administration, was not just an attack on the HLF, but an attack on the entire Muslim community of America. The Justice Department under Bush has been highly politicized and it does not help matters that rank and file FBI agents largely come from the white Christian- right. I encourage all Muslims in America and people of good will to send the Feds a message that we will not be intimidated, by writing a check today or donating online to an Islamic charity, and sending a big F you to the Justice Department.

UPDATE: What saddens me is that this comes after a raging debate whether holding a administrative position with a fascist organization (the Vishwa Hindu Parishad) with a successful genocide in it’s list of “achievements” is or not enough to disqualify somebody from the US administration. Turns out, it is not.

 Mona UmIbrahim on the pulpit.

The keys to successfully managing your home lies in creating Master Lists. Read about the importance of managing your home in this previous entry: Benefits of Scheduling. You can create these on paper first, then copy onto the computer so you can print them out as needed, or start off from the beginning on the computer, but don’t forget to print it and put it where you’ll notice it. I wanted to post my files but my blog is not showing the files properly. I can send you some or all the files by email if you need more help than what i’ve explained below.

1. Master Meal List: a list of all possible dinner meals. Group by meat, chicken, fish, vegetarian etc. If you also cook for breakfast and or lunch, you may need a meal list for those meals as well. For me i only cook breakfast on the weekends, during the week it’s cereal and milk. For lunch, i have a weekly schedule where every monday is mac & cheese, every tuesday is pizza, every wed is sandwiches etc. Refer to the Master Meal List when making the menu for the week.

Moulana Muhammed Shoayb writes a post about the importance of understanding the mindset of teenage children growing up here. He explains why he thinks its crucial to be aware of what’s going on in their minds and to tackle the questions arising from their mindset head-on, either by themselves or by finding someone who can. He argues that it is usually neglect on the side of immigrant parents that ends up leading to confusion and unresolved issues.

 Today’s teens have different issues facing them. They have lived their entire lives here, with an occasional (sometimes frequent) trip back to their parent’s birth countries as visitors. They have identified, and been encouraged by us as parents and community elders to identify, rightly so, as American Muslims. What we didn’t realize when we encouraged them to develop this new identity is that new questions come along with this new identity. Some of our kids are going to want know what it feels like to be a punk rocker. Some of our teens are going to want to know what it feels like to go on a date…and how can it be wrong when so many of their friends in the neighborhood/school are doing it. Those same teens may never give you the slightest idea of what is going on behind their innocent eyes and sweet smiles. It is your duty as parents to let them know that bringing those questions out in the open is ok, that nobody will have a heart attack just because an otherwise sweet child asks some not-so-sweet questions.

Read the whole post here.