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Mere pictures, videos or words cannot capture the amazing energy of the Sufi Trance Project.
The brother hovering over his laptop puts on a CRAZY show for the others. I did not know what they meant by “ecstatics” until this mad DJ came on the scene with his mad skilz.
Check out the video. Ya Hu!
YouTube – Sufi Trance Project – TRT2 Geceyarısı Muhabbeti Programı …
Sufi Trance Project – TRT2 Geceyarısı Muhabbeti Programı part4M.Celaleddin Yüksel
WEC-job. Graham remains a moral pariah.
Muslim civil rights group calls for meeting to clear up ‘misconceptions’
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — A prominent national Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization today requested a meeting with Christian evangelist Franklin Graham to discuss his latest remarks attacking Islam.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said it has received a number of complaints from concerned Muslims who watched an interview last night on CNN during which Graham stated in part: “…we have many Muslims that live in this country. But true Islam cannot be practiced in this country. You can’t beat your wife. You cannot murder your children if you think they’ve committed adultery or something like that, which they do practice in these other countries… I don’t agree with the teachings of Islam and I find it to be a very violent religion.”
Human Rights in the Arab world has worsened in 2009.
The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) has concluded that the state of human rights in the countries reviewed in the present report has worsened compared to 2008. The following is a summary of the most significant features of this decline.
2009 Awards of Excellence in Middle East Studies
MESA is pleased to announce its 2009 award recipients. The awards were given at the annual awards ceremony held on November 22, 2009, in Boston, Massachusetts:
Albert Hourani Book Award
Sophia Vasalou, Cambridge University
Moral Agents and Their Deserts: The Character of Mu’tazilite Ethics
(Princeton University Press)Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award
Sussan Babaie, Fulbright Regional Scholar, Egypt and Syria
Isfahan and Its Palaces: Statecraft, Shi’ism and the Architecture of Conviviality in Early Modern Iran
(Edinburgh University Press)Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Awards (Humanities)
Ahmed El Shamsy ( Harvard University)
From Tradition to Law: The Origins and Early Development of the Shafi’i School of Law in Ninth-Century EgyptMalcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Awards (Social Sciences)
Alan Mikhail (University of California, Berkeley)
The Nature of Ottoman Egypt: Irrigation, Environment, and Bureaucracy in the Long Eighteenth CenturyStudent Paper Prize
Fatemeh Hosseini, University of Maryland College Park
Whores or Wives: Discourses on Prostitution in Modern Iran, 1969-2006MESA Mentoring Award
Robert L. Tignor, Princeton University (Emeritus)Jere L. Bacharach Service Award
Mary Ellen Lane, Council of American Overseas Research CentersMESA Academic Freedom Award
Radwan Ziadeh, Founder and Director, Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies
Challenger to Keith Ellison wants to unseat Michelle Bachman as the craziest bigot in Congress.
Lynne Torgerson, who wants to unseat U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison in Minnesota’s 5th District, says she’s “big on freedom of speech and freedom of religion, as establishment by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.” Those freedoms evidently don’t apply to Muslims such as Ellison, however, judging by the language she uses on her campaign Web site.
Torgerson, a criminal defense lawyer, who graduated from the University of Minnesota and William Mitchell College writes on her campaign Web site, “What do I know of Islam? Well, I know of 911. Nineteen (19) men from Saudi Arabia, all Muslim, hi-jacked planes, and flew into the two (2) World Trade Towers murdering thousands of people, and tried to fly into our Pentagon, and some believe they also tried to fly an airplane into our White House. From this, what I perceive is Islam conducting an act of war against my country.”
Excerpts from President Obama’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo today:
Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel committee, citizens of America, and citizens of the world:
I receive this honour with deep gratitude and great humility. It is an award that speaks to our highest aspirations – that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.
And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labours on the world stage…
Alternate take on the Swiss Ban on Minarets from Islamabad Blogger
…The request of the Turkish minister to pull out deposits from Swiss banks is not going to work. We can defeat extremists by convincing the people of Switzerland that Islam is not related to violence. Those who justify violence in the name of Islam are not our representatives. If we are able to defeat these elements, winning back the support of the masses in Western societies would not be very difficult. Unfortunately, those who believe in peace, non-violence and modernity in Muslim societies are unorganised and their voices are weak. Our support should be with the Swiss government, which still stands for human rights and freedom of religion, and those who rejected the extremists’ propaganda and voted against the ban.
Three Books on Afghanistan Reviewed
Times as complex as ours present us with huge moral dilemmas and require minds that receive constant sharpening, and sometimes news reports just don’t do.
Since the United States sent military forces after al-Qaida following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the political and cultural landscape of Afghanistan has been a daily feature in newspapers across America. But America’s involvement in Afghanistan predates Sept. 11 by two decades, and military engagement only begins to explain the relationship between the two countries. The following three books deepen our understanding of the news reports from Afghanistan.
Books reviewed:
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright, paperback, 576 pages, Vintage
The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban by Sarah Chayes, paperback, 400 pages, Penguin Press
Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Erdag Goknar, hardcover, 96 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
“Exposé” of Shaykh Hamza Yusuf’s secrets by the American Stinker and Campus Watch
“Shaykh Hamza” was long known as one of the most outspoken Muslim radicals in America. Two days before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Hanson, speaking in Southern California, declared that America stood “condemned” and “unfortunately has a great, great tribulation coming to it.” This diatribe, reported in The Washington Post on October 2, 2001, was delivered at a benefit dinner for the prominent black nationalist known in the 1960s as H. Rap Brown, and later as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, who is now serving a life term without parole at the U.S. federal prison in Florence, Colorado, for murdering a police officer in Georgia (among other charges). The dinner was advertised on an Islamist website, NetMuslims.com.
Erudite Sarkozy speaks loosely in La Monde
Nicolas Sarkozy stoked the debate over immigration today with a warning to Muslims to practise their religion discreetly or face rejection by moderate Islam in France. The President voiced sympathy for Swiss voters who opted last week to ban minarets as he tried to reassert himself in a debate over national identity which he launched last month but that has since spiralled out of his control.
Over the past week, Mr Sarkozy had appeared to retreat from his original comments following a backlash over the way that they were being used against immigrants, particularly Muslims.
But in a column for Le Monde, Mr Sarkozy returned to his theme and said that the result of the Swiss referendum showed how important it was for France to define its identity.
More @ Times UK
Are European societies anti-Islam? That’s a question more people are asking in the wake of Switzerland’s referendum to ban the building of minarets in the Alpine country. Almost 6 out of 10 Swiss voters supported the ban — charges of racism be damned. France passed a law in 2004 that bans young women from wearing Islamic headscarves in public schools, and has now joined the Netherlands in debating a ban on full-body coverings like a burqa. And Muslims in multicultural Britain have also repeatedly accused officials there of talking down to them with urges to drop clothes that ‘form a barrier’ between them and mainstream society.
But while these controversies attract attention, there are also efforts to work out solutions to living with religious differences in Europe. Take a recent book by French anthropologists Dounia and Lylia Bouzar, Is There Room for Allah in the Workplace? The book offers legal guidelines on how work-religion conflicts might be examined, as well as practical suggestions on resolving them. “Paradoxically, as the question of the visibility of religious practice crops up regularly in the media, it remains a total haze in the professional world,” the book notes.
But with this increased awareness of the Muslim, there is a lack of appreciation of the nuances within our group. The reality is that many Muslims are secular. We do not pray five times a day, do not read the Koran and have not spent much time inside a mosque. We only turn to Islam when a child is born, someone gets married or someone dies.
We certainly have no interest in participating in civilizational battles. We are, in fact, loathed by the religious minority. And yet we have no clear voice, no representation and no one in the Western world appears to be aware of our existence. Every time a terrorist attack occurs, we suffer the most.
Muslim Americans faced more anti-Muslim bias but fewer physical assaults in 2008, according to a report released Thursday (Dec.3) by the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Review of Alia Malek’s New Book:
In “A Country Called Amreeka,” Malek chronicles the lives of a dozen Arab Americans. Their stories are markers on a timeline that stretches back to the legendary Alabama-Auburn football game of 1948 and runs through the riotous Detroit of the ’60s, the fraught tensions over Palestine in the ’80s, up to the election of George W. Bush. Each chapter focuses on an individual (often, a family) whose personal lives dramatize the political concerns of the age or the timeless personal anxiety of living, as an outsider, in a foreign land. In between each chapter, Malek fills in the historical gaps, recapping for the reader the changes in Middle Eastern politics or in American immigration policy necessary to understand the next narrative.
The book looks at America through the eyes of a minority so often viewed as its enemy. As the book progresses through time, a bigger story begins to emerge. With delicate cues from Malek, the reader begins to see how the image of Muslims has hardened over time. They have always been outsiders; in the early 20th century, politicians went to great lengths to classify newly arrived Arabs as nonwhites, a form of social exclusion. But by the ’80s, the outsider has become the other, the “swarthy-looking,” turban-wearing villain in Hollywood’s good-versus-evil dramas. (Never mind that it’s Sikhs who wear turbans, and Sikhs aren’t Muslim.)
The story that simply refuses to die.
Kominas et al in Time Mag.
Taqwacore. The Chia Pet of Islamic projects.
Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs goes rogue and follows deansworld in reassessing their ties with the conservative right, especially in light of the “anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam…”
Pro-Israel blogger breaks with right wing
By Eric Fingerhut · December 2, 2009Longtime pro-Israel blogger Charles Johnson of the popular Little Green Footballs site has “parted ways with the Right” and writes that he can be called an independent. In a post on his blog earlier this week, Johnson, a critic of radical Islam, wrote that among his reasons was “anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide.” Other problems with the right, he said, was “support for anti-science bad craziness” and “hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source).”
A mixed op/ed from Thomas Friedman at the NY Times today talks about the warped narrative propagated by Muslim extremists to mirror the neocon narrative against Islam. It is time for Americans and Pan-Arabs to ask themselves how far they are willing to be warped.
Of Major Hasan, Friedman writes:
What is scary is that even though he was born, raised and educated in America, The Narrative still got to him.
The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand “American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy” to keep Muslims down.
Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny — in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan — a narrative that says America is dedicated to keeping Muslims down is thriving.
Although most of the Muslims being killed today are being killed by jihadist suicide bombers in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Indonesia, you’d never know it from listening to their world. The dominant narrative there is that 9/11 was a kind of fraud: America’s unprovoked onslaught on Islam is the real story, and the Muslims are the real victims — of U.S. perfidy.
Hypocritically, he then goes on to tell his own necon ‘cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies’ to justify the war on terror. The whole world is caught in a vast web of deception.
As someone not born into the culture of Islam, I have gaps that I occasionally have to fill in on the holidays.
What is the significance of Eid ul Adha? Feast of Sacrifice, Abraham (AS) obeyed Allah’s Command to sacrifice his son. And?
I have not sat through dozens of Eid khutbahs. Maybe some of you have.
Terry Gross interviews the author of a new book on a secretive Christian Fundamentalist group and its connections to government and foreign policy. I could not believe the reach these whackjobs have into congress nor their warped ideas of Christianity. They rival any terrorist group in their belligerent activities.
You may recognize these names from recent headlines: Sen. John Ensign, Rep. Bart Stupak and Rep. Joe Pitts. Stupak and Pitts have become familiar names through the media’s health care overhaul coverage; their abortion funding amendment introduced an 11th-hour twist as the House of Representatives approached a vote on a landmark health care bill.
Ensign was the focus of media attention over his affair with a campaign staffer. Just last night, a Nevada man disclosed that he found out about his wife’s affair with the state’s junior senator — his best friend — via a text message.
The common factor among these political players is their involvement with the Family, a secretive fellowship of powerful Christian politicians that centers on a Washington, D.C., townhouse. Investigative journalist Jeff Sharlet has written extensively about the influential group in his book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.
Well written and thoughtful OpEd piece in the NY Times.
…It’s true that Major Hasan was unbalanced and alienated — and, by my lights, crazy. But what kind of people did conservatives think were susceptible to the terrorism meme? Like all viruses, terrorism infects people with low resistance. And surely Major Hasan isn’t the only American Muslim who, for reasons of personal history, has become unbalanced and thus vulnerable. Any religious or ethnic group includes people like that, and the post-9/11 environment hasn’t made it easier for American Muslims to keep their balance. That’s why the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy — a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims — is so dubious…
I have been thinking about the question of influential people in Islam and who has the right to speak on behalf of Islam. This led me to an article in the American Muslim today. There is a legal battle in Malaysia where authorities are attempting to silence some self-proclaimed cleric:
The Sharia authorities in the Malaysian state of Selangor have charged the former Mufti of Perlis, Dr. Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin, of preaching Islam without a permit to do so. For Malaysian-watchers worldwide, this case will be seen as a litmus test for Malaysia, the Najib administration, the government and Sharia authorities of Selangor (now under the control of the Pakatan Rakyat), and the state of Islamic praxis in Malaysia in general. The outcome of the case will tell us where Islam is heading in a country that has for some time now been seen and cast as an exemplary model of normative Islam at work. But is it really?
Former Mufti Asri’s ‘crime’, if one could even call it that, was to preach Islam without an official permit. But in the course of the past few weeks the man himself has been vilified by his critics and accused of being – among other things – a Wahabi Muslim as well.
It is an interesting debate. I can see how some who are drawn to anarchy would also be drawn to Islam. It has a very decentralized nature with only a Transcendent God and an anti-iconic Holy Prophet to hold it together. Islam is ….whatever they say it is. Politics. Activism. Terrorism. Mysticism. Etc.
CAIR: Va. Gov-Elect Asked to Repudiate Anti-Islam Donor’s Remarks
One of McDonnell’s top contributors says Muslims should be treated like communists, fascists
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — A prominent national Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization today called on Virginia’s Governor-elect Robert F. McDonnell to publicly repudiate anti-Islam remarks by Pat Robertson, the televangelist and gubernatorial campaign contributor who recently said Islam is “not a religion” and that American Muslims should be treated like members of a communist or fascist party.
Take heed Islamophobes, the American Caliphate is coming, one-small-backwater-town-at-a-time….
In WA, old mining town elects a Muslim mayor
By MANUEL VALDES (AP) – 1 hour agoGRANITE FALLS, Wash. — Granite Falls residents are suspicious of any newcomers, let alone a Muslim native of Pakistan who moved to this rugged, blue-collar mining town to open his own bar.
But 54-year-old Haroon Saleem has thrived, winning over the town with hard work and an easy smile. He has become so popular that, on Nov. 3, he won the mayor’s job in a landslide, getting 61 percent of the more than 800 votes cast — a result that residents say would have been inconceivable not long ago.
“In the old Granite Falls, there were no minorities. It was a rough, rough, logging town. Any outsider, whether a minority or somebody from Everett, was the same. It was very difficult to be accepted in this town,” said Sharon Ashton, a close confidant of Saleem.
Saleem said he was nervous about being accepted, and hired a white assistant manager to ease local concerns when he opened his bar in 2000.
“I was kind of scared, you know,” he says.
But he was embraced virtually from the start.
“That tells you how good and great of a community Granite Falls is,” he says with a slight accent. “They didn’t care … I am who I am, and people love me for that, and I just love people. People know that I am smart, I am a businessman. In the big scheme of things, all these qualities have made me, got me to where I am today.”
Colonel Gaddafi preaches Islam to 200 glamour girls
Colonel Gaddafi has lived up to his reputation for eccentric behaviour by lecturing 200 attractive young glamour models on the benefits of Islam.
The Libyan leader paid the women to attend the bizarre meeting on the fringes of a global food summit in Rome where he subjected them to a solemn discourse on the role of Muslim women. The models, who had been told they were attending a party, were recruited from an agency which hires out pretty young women to act as “hostesses” for conferences and conventions.
An advertisement placed by the Hostessweb agency read: “Seeking attractive girls between 18 and 35 years old, at least 1.7 metres (5 foot, 7 inches) tall, well-dressed but not in miniskirts or low cut dresses.” High heels and fur coats were allowed, but plunging necklines were out, the agency said.
Food Summit Opens With Censure of Greed, Speculation
By Karl Maier and Jeffrey DonovanNov. 16 (Bloomberg) — A United Nations summit on food security opened with leaders slamming rich nations for worsening world hunger by allowing speculation in agricultural markets and using subsidies that hurt production in developing nations.
Pope Benedict XVI cited “greed which causes speculation to rear its head even in the marketing of cereals, as if food were to be treated just like any other commodity.”
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who called hunger “the most terrible weapon of mass destruction,” urged rich nations to meet their commitments to boost investment in agricultural in poor nations and to end “shameful” farming subsidies.
“They sabotage emerging agriculture in the poorer countries, wiping out their hope to create a bridge to development,” Lula said.
Republicans want this to go away in the worst way. They want to deal with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a dark military tribunal where the reporting is limited and the public won’t be able to consider charges against the Bush Administration. Love the explanation: it “gives an unnecessary advantage to the terrorists.” Such a joke.
Giuliani Criticizes Terror Trials in New York
By JOSEPH BERGERRudolph W. Giuliani, mayor of New York at the time of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, said on Sunday that the Obama administration’s decision to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the attacks, in a civilian court in Manhattan would unnecessarily cost millions of dollars for security, create legal advantages for the defense and symbolically deny that the United States is at war with terrorism.
“It gives an unnecessary advantage to the terrorists and why would you want to give an advantage to the terrorists, and it poses risks for New York,” Mr. Giuliani said in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He also interviewed on ABC’s “This Week” and “Fox News Sunday.”
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced on Friday that the United States would try Mr. Mohammed in the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, just blocks from where the World Trade Center towers were brought down by the attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Mr. Holder said that a military commission would try five other detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, because they are accused of committing crimes overseas.
Published: November 13 2009
Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador to Kabul and a former army commander in Afghanistan, set the cat among the Washington pigeons this week when he warned against any further increase of American forces, essentially because Hamid Karzai is not a reliable partner.
These leaked (un)diplomatic cables give a picture of an Afghanistan strategy at sixes and sevens. They nevertheless go to the heart of the agonising debate inside the Obama administration on what sensibly to do about what is beginning to look like a quagmire.
Mr Eikenberry is basically right. The counterinsurgency strategy laid out by General Stanley McChrystal, President Obama’s hand-picked commander on the ground, while totally coherent, is far too ambitious. It requires a level of forces, and a length of time that the US political timetable and shrivelling public support for the war among all the allies is unlikely to sustain. Simply put, few ultimately believe the US and Nato have the stamina for it.
Muslims need not be apologetic
By Linda S. HeardMuslims make up roughly one quarter of the world’s population. Just because one out of almost 1.5 billion ran amok, leaving 13 dead and 23 wounded, does not mean the entire Muslim nation is responsible. When Sergeant John M. Russell opened fire on his comrades at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, last May, killing five, the media did not even mention his religion. Instead, papers reported that the young man, who “had been broken by the army” was suicidal and in debt.
When National Guard soldier Joshua Cartwright shot and killed two Florida deputies in April he was characterized as “severely disturbed”. No one investigated his spiritual beliefs. The media, likewise, took a soft approach, last year, when Dustin Thorson, an Air Force sergeant, shot his wife and son at Tinker Airbase and, in 1995, when Sergeant William Kreutzer killed one and injured 18 at Fort Bragg. But when an American-born major with the name Nidal Malek Hassan commits a similar crime he is judged in the court of public opinion based on his ethnicity and religion.
Bill O’Reilly of Fair and Balanced on Fox News has already decided that Hassan is either a “Muslim terrorist” or “crazy”. Fox’s Brian Kilmeade has made up his mind too. He asked a guest: “Do you think it is time for the military to have special debriefings of Muslim Army Officers …?” or “anyone enlisted”?
HaHaHa!!! My eyes almost popped out of my head.
Congrats Bro. Fox news just got a little more Fair and Balanced.
What Does the Koran Say About Muslim Soldiers?
In an unstable Pakistan, can nuclear warheads be kept safe?
America’s dealings with Pakistan may be increasing the risk of radicalization.In the tumultuous days leading up to the Pakistan Army’s ground offensive in the tribal area of South Waziristan, which began on October 17th, the Pakistani Taliban attacked what should have been some of the country’s best-guarded targets. In the most brazen strike, ten gunmen penetrated the Army’s main headquarters, in Rawalpindi, instigating a twenty-two-hour standoff that left twenty-three dead and the military thoroughly embarrassed. The terrorists had been dressed in Army uniforms. There were also attacks on police installations in Peshawar and Lahore, and, once the offensive began, an Army general was shot dead by gunmen on motorcycles on the streets of Islamabad, the capital. The assassins clearly had advance knowledge of the general’s route, indicating that they had contacts and allies inside the security forces.
