President Obama wishes us all Eid Mubarak – and lectures us a bit about swine flu 
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aziz
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aziz
a blessed convergence indeed: Today is Thanksgiving and The Day of Arafat; in just a few short hours it will also be Eid ul Adha. I have some thoughts on the intersection of these three events and how they are linked.
Happy Thanksgiving and Eid Mubarak!
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aziz
Here’s an interesting – and courageous – article about Shi’a pilgrims at Hajj who must make compromises for the sake of unity – and their physical well-being.
I also have additional Hajj-related tidbits at City of Brass. Anyone have any family or friends making the pilgrimage this year?
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aziz
sterilized stones for the pilgrims doing Jamrah! The Saudis are taking the swine flu very seriously indeed.
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abunoor
The moon of Dhul Hijjah has been sighted...Eid ul Adha will be Friday November 27.
These ten days are from the most blessed days of the year. May Allaah (swt) allow each of us to fill them with good deeds.
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johnpi
Con artists prey on UK Muslims ahead of hajj.
As Muslims across the world prepare for the upcoming hajj season, con artists in the United Kingdom are preying on the faithful and scamming them out of thousands of pounds with hajj packages that either fail to deliver or turn out to be completely fake.
With nothing but a stack of leaflets dropped off at local mosques, con artists lure people who want to perform the annual pilgrimage with offers of deals including a visa to Saudi Arabia, internal flight to Mecca, accommodation and other amenities needed.
….A recent scam includes a group of 70 pilgrims, who were charged £2,350 (nearly $4,000) per person, arriving to Saudi to find the internal flight to Mecca they paid for was bogus forcing them to pay for a coach to the holy city.
Upon arriving to Mecca the group found they had no accommodation and were forced to sleep in a kitchen of one of the make-shift tents.
“People are being taken for a ride because if you have never been to hajj before you are hoping for the journey of a lifetime and expect people to be sincere and honest,” Aziz said, adding the association is lobbying the British government to help bring the con artists to justice.
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johnpi
A workshop on precautionary health measures during Haj and Umrah yesterday recommended that the old, the infirm, pregnant women and children not perform Haj and Umrah this year in view of the global swine flu pandemic.
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shahed
An article I authored (“Technology and the Hajj”) appears in the latest issue of the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, published by Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. (Unfortunately, it is not available online – you’ll have to buy a copy.)
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kaitlin
Has anyone seen the Second Life documentary about the hajj??
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shahed
How has technology affected the hajj, for better or worse? I’m working on a paper that explores the good and bad of the impact of technology – from mobile phones to buying cheap airfare online. Would love some of your thoughts on the matter.
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aziz
Hajj = death: an intriguing analogy by a friend of mine who attended Hajj this year.
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aziz
behold the Power of Obama: healing the Shi’a – Sunni divide.
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aziz
The plot against the Hajj was a hoax, it seems – I was taken in by the sister publication to the Moonie Times. mea culpa.
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wangdaiyu
Keith Elison, the first Muslim to be elected to Congress also becomes the first Muslim Congressperson (Just trying to use gender neutral language) to perform Hajj.
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aziz
Better late than never, but my Eid ul Adha roundup post is finally up at City of Brass. I link to lots of familiar faces around here, and there’s video and comics involved. Check it out
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aziz
Aerial view of the great tent city at Mina, courtesy of Google Maps.
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aziz
Hajj has begun – the pilgrims are now enroute to Arafat. We are surely in the prayers of our loved ones on Hajj; let us keep them in ours.
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aziz
Irving relates a Sufi tale about Hajj, which strikes me as both profound and meaningless, like an Islamic koan. It raises the question, does the symbolic render the literal obsolete?
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Andrea Useem
Why does Hajj make people more tolerant? (In this study, “people” = Pakistanis.) The study authors, all economist, say it’s probably because of all the social interaction with fellow Muslims with different customs, a la Malcolm X. But I wonder: maybe it’s about the religious experience itself? Having contact with God gives you a warm fuzzy feeling toward fellow man? Or that the rules of hajj encourage — maybe even force — you to be patient with others.
