Accountability Islam Quotes

...Turn our thoughts, in the next place, to the characters of learned men. The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. Read over again all the accounts we have of Hindoos, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Teutons, we shall find that priests had all the knowledge, and really governed all mankind. Examine Mahometanism, trace Christianity from its first promulgation; knowledge has been almost exclusively confined to the clergy. And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate a free inquiry? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes. [Letters to John Taylor, 1814, XVIII, p. 484]

A life without love is of no account. Don’t ask yourself what kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, Eastern or Western. Divisions only lead to more divisions. Love has no labels, no definitions. It is what it is, pure and simple. Love is the water of life. And a lover is a soul of fire! The universe turns differently when fire loves water.

If you ask Muslim women why they cover up, ninety-nine percent of them will say it's to avoid arousing men. Fuck that, where's your self-accountability?

During the Obama years, there have been more than 8,000 Islamic terrorist attacks on “infidels” across the globe, a twenty-five percent rise over the years in which the fighting in Iraq was at its height.

In the Arab world, at any rate, to doubt the traditional account of Islam’s origins has been to risk death threats, prosecution for apostasy, or even defenestration.61

REMEMBER: No matter what happens in your life, if it turns you towards Allah, it is a blessing. Whether Allah is testing you to strengthen you or holding you accountable for a sin you may have committed, the response is the same: turn to Allah and ask for His help and guidance.

Remaining for a moment with the question of legality and illegality: United Nations Security Council Resolution 1368, unanimously passed, explicitly recognized the right of the United States to self-defense and further called upon all member states 'to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of the terrorist attacks. It added that 'those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of those acts will be held accountable.' In a speech the following month, the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan publicly acknowledged the right of self-defense as a legitimate basis for military action. The SEAL unit dispatched by President Obama to Abbottabad was large enough to allow for the contingency of bin-Laden's capture and detention. The naïve statement that he was 'unarmed' when shot is only loosely compatible with the fact that he was housed in a military garrison town, had a loaded automatic weapon in the room with him, could well have been wearing a suicide vest, had stated repeatedly that he would never be taken alive, was the commander of one of the most violent organizations in history, and had declared himself at war with the United States. It perhaps says something that not even the most casuistic apologist for al-Qaeda has ever even attempted to justify any of its 'operations' in terms that could be covered by any known law, with the possible exception of some sanguinary verses of the Koran.

As long as we continue to search for enemies anywhere but inside ourselves, there will always be a Middle East problem. Religion is not the solution. Religion without Jesus is just self-righteousness. Freedom from oppression will not resolve things either. Delivered from the oppression of Europe, Israel became the oppressor. Delivered from persecution, Muslims became persecutors. Abused spouses and children often go on to abuse spouses and children. It is a cliché, but it’s still true: hurt people, unless they are healed, hurt people.

The Islamicist account of the rise of Islam is overwhelmingly based on ḥadīth, indeed on ḥadīth as opposed to the Qurʾān, reflecting the preference for tradition that prevailed among Muslims themselves until quite recently. It is the revolt against traditional tafsīr, the move back to the Qurʾān, of the modernists that allows all of us to take the Qurʾān as evidence in a way that would have been unthinkable forty years ago.

For this world has neither worth nor weight with God; so slight it is, it weighs not with God so much as a pebble or a single clod of earth; as I am told, God has created nothing more hateful to Him than this world, and from the day He created it He has not looked upon it, so much He hates it.

Traditional Muslims stand at the foot of the ladder, living in guilt for not really practicing Islam. At the top are fundamentalists, the ones you see in the news killing women and children for the glory of the god of the Qur’an. Moderates are somewhere in between. A moderate Muslim is actually more dangerous than a fundamentalist, however, because he appears to be harmless, and you can never tell when he has taken that next step toward the top. Most suicide bombers began as moderates.

Mujāhada, a collateral form of jihād (the so-called "holy war"), taken [by Sufis] to mean "earnest striving after the mystical life." The term is based on the Koranic text, "And they that strive earnestly in Our cause, them We surely guide upon Our paths." A Tradition makes the Prophet rank the "greater warfare" (al jihad al-akbar) above the "lesser warfare" (al jihad al-asghar, i.e., the war against infidelity), and explain the "greater warfare" as meaning "earnest striving with the carnal soul" (mujāhadat al-nafs).

The fact that the doctrine makes perfect sense even though Epiphanius keeps finding it incoherent suggests that he is giving a faithful account of it.

Paul’s letters were occasional responses to specific questions rather than a coherent account of a fully articulated theology.

To think beyond the familiar narratives handed down to us by generations of historians is to see that Columbus’s life simply cannot be understood without taking Islam into account.

And never concern thyself with anything of which thou hast no knowledge: verily, [thy] hearing and sight and heart - all of them - will be called to account for it!

Muhammad vs. Jesus “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.” Jesus (Matthew 5:11) “And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter.” Qur’an 2:191

Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.

Hamas, on the other hand, Islamized the Palestinian problem, making it a religious problem. And this problem could be resolved only with a religious solution, which meant that it could never be resolved because we believed that the land belonged to Allah. Period. End of discussion. Thus for Hamas, the ultimate problem was not Israel’s policies. It was the nation-state Israel’s very existence.

Indeed, for the righteous is attainment - Gardens and grapevines And full-breasted [companions] of equal age And a full cup. No ill speech will they hear therein or any falsehood - [As] reward from your Lord, [a generous] gift [made due by] account, [From] the Lord of the heavens and the earth and whatever is between them, the Most Merciful. They possess not from Him [authority for] speech. [The Quran, 78:31-37]

I die, and yet not dies in me The ardour of my love for Thee, Nor hath Thy Love, my only goal, Assuaged the fever of my soul. To Thee alone my spirit cries; In Thee my whole ambition lies, And still Thy Wealth is far above The poverty of my small love. I turn to Thee in my request, And seek in Thee my final rest; To Thee my loud lament is brought, Thou dwellest in my secret thought. However long my sickness be, This wearisome infirmity, Never to men will I declare The burden Thou has made me bear. To Thee alone is manifest The heavy labour of my breast, Else never kin nor neighbors know The brimming measure of my woe. A fever burns below my heart And ravages my every part; It hath destroyed my strength and stay, And smouldered all my soul away. Guidest Thou not upon the road The rider wearied by his load, Delivering from the steeps of death The traveller as he wandereth? Didst Thou not light a beacon too For them that found the Guidance true But carried not within their hand The faintest glimmer of its brand? O then to me Thy Favour give That, so attended, I may live, And overwhelm with ease from Thee The rigor of my poverty.

Lastly, to the memory of my beloved niece Mayyada, who cut her life short by committing suicide to escape the hellish marriage imposed upon her under Islamic Sharia Law: May her tragic account be an eternal inspiration to all who are privileged to live in free societies. May her story encourage all those who have been subjugated to tyranny—especially women—to become well informed and to persevere beyond fear and intimidation. And a challenge: To those whose spirits uphold the principles of justice and freedom of speech—May Mayyada’s story, and that of many more whose stories have never been told, embolden you to speak up against the unjust and immoral treatment of women in the Muslim world.

The Americans struggled to understand just how much support reached bin Laden in Afghanistan from Saudi sources. It appeared to be substantial, even into 2000. A Saudi government audit of the National Commercial Bank, the kingdom’s largest, showed that at least $3 million had flowed from its accounts to bin Laden. One of Saudi Arabia’s largest charities, the International Islamic Relief Organization, acknowledged that it had sent about $60 million to the Taliban.25

Aristotle's account of the Katharsis of tragedy was a philosophic presentation of a truth that Homo religiosus had always understood intuitively: a symbolic, mythical or ritual presentation of events that would be unendurable in daily life can redeem and transform them into something pure and even pleasurable.

Consequently, it is almost impossible to prove rape in lands that follow the dictates of the Sharia. Men can commit rape with impunity: As long as they deny the charge and there are no witnesses, they will get off scot-free, because the victim’s testimony is inadmissible. Even worse, if a woman accuses a man of rape, she may end up incriminating herself. If the required male witnesses can’t be found, the victim’s charge of rape becomes an admission of adultery. That accounts for the grim fact that as many as 75 percent of the imprisoned women in Pakistan are, in fact, behind bars for the crime of being a victim of rape.34

CAIR is still trying to promote its strange claim that criticism of its ideology is racist....The ridiculous claims that criticism of Islam is an act of bigotry fail to take into account the fact that former Muslims like Bosch, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Firoozeh Bazrafkan have been some of the sharpest critics of the ideology. Did they also change races?

Like the Babylonians, the Aryans were quite aware that their myths were not factual accounts of reality but expressed a mystery that not even the gods themselves could explain adequately. When they tried to imagine how the gods and the world had evolved from primal chaos, they concluded that nobody—not even the gods—could understand the mystery of existence:

Drawing upon first-hand accounts from my own journey to the Muslim world – and primary and secondary scholarship when necessary – this book offers an anthropological window into Muslim piety in the early 21st century. In doing so, it is hoped that discussions concerning multiplicity in Muslim space and ritual, and Islam more widely, become more nuanced and more inclusive.

The only way to reverse this trend is to mount a campaign to put Obama’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood at the forefront of the political debate, and to educate Americans about the real dangers we face. Americans need to become aware of the Islamic supremacist threat, of the malignant designs of the Muslim Brotherhood, and of the disasters that may lie ahead because of the Obama administration’s policies of appeasing and enabling their evil ambitions.

It was inevitable, as soon as legends of miracles became attached to the names of the great mystics, that the credulous masses should applaud imposture more than true devotion; the cult of the saints, against which orthodox Islam ineffectually protested, promoted ignorance and superstition, and confounded charlatanry with lofty speculation. To live scandalously, to act impudently, to speak unintelligibly—this was the easy highroad to fame, wealth, and power.

There is nothing more to chasing after wealth than the wastage of a person’s noble life for that which has no value. Instead he could have earned a high rank (in Paradise) and everlasting bliss, but he lost this due to his craving after provision – which had already been assured to him and allotted to him, and it was not possible for anything to come to him except what was decreed for him – then on top of this he does not benefit from that, but rather abandons it and leaves it for someone else. He departs from that and leaves it behind so that he will be the one held accountable for it, yet someone else benefits from it. So in reality he is only gathering it, yet someone else benefits from it. So in reality he is only gathering it for someone who will not praise him for that, whilst he himself goes on to One who will not excuse him for that – this itself would indeed be enough to show the blameworthiness of this craving.

Dignity and honor are gifts: “[O God], You exalt whomever You will, and You debase whomever You will” (QURAN, 3:26). Proofs of this Divine law abound. There are many accounts, for example, of people who were once in positions of authority and wealth, who then find themselves paupers completely stripped of their former glory, reduced, in many instances, to wards of the state. God is powerful over all things, and all good, authority, and provision are in His hand, not ours.

Israeli intelligence, on the other hand, relied mostly on human resources—had countless spies in mosques, Islamic organizations, and leadership roles; and had no problem recruiting even the most dangerous terrorists. They knew they had to have eyes and ears on the inside, along with minds that understood motives and emotions and could connect the dots. America understood neither Islamic culture nor its ideology. That, combined with open borders and lax security made it a much softer target than Israel.

Unfollow relentlessly. Unfollow anyone who shares updates that are toxic, that bring negativity, or are even just annoying. Your feed is a place to exercise being selfish. If an account does not positively contribute to your life, then unfollow. This goes for unfollowing discussions in addition to people. It can be tempting to go down various rabbit holes while following trending discussions, or even the news. Exercise that same level of restraint. If a discussion is not of direct benefit for you, remove yourself from it.

Many people in the West who stereotype all Muslims as terrorists don’t know about the side of Islam that reflects love and mercy. It cares for the poor, widows, and orphans. It facilitates education and welfare. It unites and strengthens. This is the side of Islam that motivated those early leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Of course, there is also the other side, the one that calls all Muslims to jihad, to struggle and contend with the world until they establish a global caliphate, led by one holy man who rules and speaks for Allah.

To understand the extreme lengths to which the Sufis were prepared to go in reading esoteric meanings into the quite simple language of their Scriptures, it is necessary to remember that the Koran was committed to memory by all deeply religious men and women, and recited constantly, aloud or in the heart; so that the mystic was in a state of uninterrupted meditation upon the Holy Book. Many passages which would otherwise pass without special notice were therefore bound to arrest their attention, already sufficiently alert, and to quicken their imagination, already fired by the discipline of their austerities and the rigor of their internal life.

The administration’s denial was also egregiously manifest in its response to the massacre of 13 unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood by an Islamic fanatic, who three and a half years later still has not been brought to trial. The Fort Hood terrorist successfully infiltrated the American military and despite open expressions of hatred against the West was promoted to U.S. Army Major. The Obama administration’s Kafkaesque response to an obvious case of Islamist violence against the U.S. was to classify the terrorist attack as an incident of “workplace violence,” and thus to hide the fact that Hasan was a Muslim soldier in a war against the infidels of the West.

The prophet died in the year 632 of our own approximate calendar. The first account of his life was set down a full hundred and twenty years later by Ibn Ishaq, whose original was lost and can only be consulted through its reworked form, authored by Ibn Hisham, who died in 834. Adding to this hearsay and obscurity, there is no agreed-upon account of how the Prophet’s followers assembled the Koran, or of how his various sayings (some of them written down by secretaries) became codified. And this familiar problem is further complicated—even more than in the Christian case—by the matter of succession. Unlike Jesus, who apparently undertook to return to earth very soon and who (pace the absurd Dan Brown) left no known descendants, Muhammad was a general and a politician and—though unlike Alexander of Macedonia a prolific father—left no instruction as to who was to take up his mantle. Quarrels over the leadership began almost as soon as he died, and so Islam had its first major schism—between the Sunni and the Shia—before it had even established itself as a system. We need take no side in the schism, except to point out that one at least of the schools of interpretation must be quite mistaken. And the initial identification of Islam with an earthly caliphate, made up of disputatious contenders for the said mantle, marked it from the very beginning as man-made.

If the term 'science' has any precise meaning - relating it to knowledge of the real - then it is the science of tawhid. It could be said, and with good reason, that the kafir should never be permitted to approach the physical sciences or to involve himself in them. He does not possess the key to them, and he is therefore bound to go astray and to lead others astray. He divides when he should unite, and his fragmented mind deals only with fragments: it is little wonder that he splits the atom, with devastating results. Those who know nothing of the principle are incompetent to study its manifestations. 'Pursue not that of which thou hast no knowledge. Surely hearing and sight and heart - all these - shall be called to account' (Q.17.36).

[M]ost Americans are still drawing some water from the Christian well. But a growing number are inventing their own versions of what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in favor of religions that stroke their egos and indulge or even celebrate their worst impulses. . . . Both doubters and believers stand to lose if religion in the age of heresy turns out to be complicit in our fragmented communities, our collapsing families, our political polarization, and our weakened social ties. Both doubters and believers will inevitably suffer from a religious culture that supplies more moral license than moral correction, more self-satisfaction than self-examination, more comfort than chastisement. . . . Many of the overlapping crises in American life . . . can be traced to the impulse to emphasize one particular element of traditional Christianity—one insight, one doctrine, one teaching or tradition—at the expense of all the others. The goal is always progress: a belief system that’s simpler or more reasonable, more authentic or more up-to-date. Yet the results often vindicate the older Christian synthesis. Heresy sets out to be simpler and more appealing and more rational, but it often ends up being more extreme. . . . The boast of Christian orthodoxy . . . has always been its fidelity to the whole of Jesus. Its dogmas and definitions seek to encompass the seeming contradictions in the gospel narratives rather than evading them. . . . These [heretical] simplifications have usually required telling a somewhat different story about Jesus than the one told across the books of the New Testament. Sometimes this retelling has involved thinning out the Christian canon, eliminating tensions by subtracting them. . . . More often, though, it’s been achieved by straightforwardly rewriting or even inventing crucial portions of the New Testament account. . . . “Religious man was born to be saved,” [Philip Rieff] wrote, but “psychological man is born to be pleased.” . . . In 2005, . . . . Smith and Denton found no evidence of real secularization among their subjects: 97 percent of teenagers professed some sort of belief in the divine, 71 percent reported feeling either “very” or “somewhat” close to God, and the vast majority self-identified as Christian. There was no sign of deep alienation from their parents’ churches, no evidence that the teenagers in the survey were poised to convert outright to Buddhism or Islam, and no sign that real atheism was making deep inroads among the young. But neither was there any evidence of a recognizably orthodox Christian faith. “American Christianity,” Smith and Denton suggested, is “either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself,” or else is “actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith.” They continued: “Most religious teenagers either do not really comprehend what their own religious traditions say they are supposed to believe, or they do understand it and simply do not care to believe it.” . . . An ego that’s never wounded, never trammeled or traduced—and that’s taught to regard its deepest impulses as the promptings of the divine spirit—can easily turn out to be an ego that never learns sympathy, compassion, or real wisdom. And when contentment becomes an end unto itself, the way that human contents express themselves can look an awful lot like vanity and decadence. . . . For all their claims to ancient wisdom, there’s nothing remotely countercultural about the Tolles and Winfreys and Chopras. They’re telling an affluent, appetitive society exactly what it wants to hear: that all of its deepest desires are really God’s desires, and that He wouldn’t dream of judging. This message encourages us to justify our sins by spiritualizing them. . . . Our vaunted religiosity is real enough, but our ostensible Christian piety doesn’t have the consequences a casual observer might expect. . . . We nod to God, and then we do as we please.

when the United States and Britain denied their non-propertied classes and their female citizens suffrage, or when the US operated a colonial system of slavery, genocide, and racial apartheid, no culturalist arguments were advanced to explain this grave democratic deficit among white Euro-American property-owning Protestant Christian men either (the only exception was the use by antebellum Northern white abolitionists of culturalist arguments against Southern whites as sexually excessive and libertine—on account of having learned such traits from their Black slaves and from living in a warmer climate—and confining of women, but no arguments were offered to explain the racism of Northern whites against Blacks and Native Americans, let alone Northern intolerance of Catholics and Mormons or discrimination against women).

At some point every religion, especially one that purports to encompass a complete way of life and system of government, has to be called to account for the kind of life it offers the people in the lands where it predominates. It becomes insufficient to look at Islam on paper, or Islam in history, and dwell on the inarguable improvements it brought to women’s lives in the seventh century. Today, the much more urgent and relevant task is to examine the way the faith has proved such fertile ground for almost every antiwomen custom it encountered in its great march out of Arabia. When it found veils and seclusion in Persia, it absorbed them; when it found genital mutilations in Egypt, it absorbed them; when it found societies in which women had never had a voice in public affairs, its own traditions of lively women’s participation withered.

Then I read this: “You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:43-45). That's it! I was thunderstruck. Never before had I heard anything like this. But I knew that this was the message I had been searching for all my life. For years I had struggled to know who my enemy was, and I had looked for my enemies outside of Islam and Palestine, but I suddenly realized that the Israelis were not my enemies. Neither was Hamas, nor my Uncle Ibrahim, nor the kid who beat me… nor the ape like guards... I saw that enemies were not defined by nationality, religion, or color. I understood that we all share the same common enemies. Greed, pride, and all of the bad ideas and the darkness of the devil that live inside us. That meant I could love anyone.

He went into their temple and there met their teacher, who had shaved his head and beard and wore scarlet robes. Shaqīq [of Balkh] said to him, 'This upon which thou art engaged is false; the men, and thou, and all creation—all have a Creator and a Maker, there is naught like unto Him; to Him belongs this world, and the next; He is Omnipotent, All-providing.' The servitor said to him, 'Thy words do not accord with thy deeds.' Shaqīq said, 'How is that?' The other replied, 'Thou hast asserted that thou hast a Creator, Who is All-providing and Omnipotent; yet thou has exiled thyself to this place in search of thy provision. If what thou sayest is true, He Who has provided for thee here is the same as He Who provides for thee there; so spare thyself this trouble.' Shaqīq said, 'The cause of my abstinence (zuhd) was the remark of that Turk.' And he returned, and gave away all he possessed to the poor, and sought after knowledge.

Whereas Jesus demanded of the Jews the rejection of the tribalist Jahweh whom they identified with Israel, the race, the community the political state as object of worship and desire, the Sufis, born in an atmosphere of pure monotheism, demanded what Jesus of the first century A.D. would demand if he were to relive his early life again in present-day monotheistic Christendom. This does not mean that Jesus did not demand, like the Sufis, the cleansing of the soul from the personal deities it may worship besides God, but it does mean that the main weight of his teaching centered around the Jewish preoccupation with the tribe as God." "The object and deal of Sufism is, therefore, identically the same as that of the radical self-transformation of Jesus. Both aimed at the state of consciousness in which God is the sole subject, the sole determiner and the sole object of love and devotion. The tradition of both later influenced each other and succeeded in developing the same kind of preparatory disciplines leading towards the end. Finally, both referred to the final end of these processes as 'oneness' and their reference was in each case exposed to the same dangers of misunderstanding, indeed to the same misunderstanding. The oneness of Jesus was misunderstood as unity and fusion of being, and thus gave rise to the greatest materialization of an essentially spiritual union history has ever seen. The oneness of the highest Sufi state was likewise misunderstood and gave rise to the worst crime perpetrated on account of a supremely conscious misunderstanding...The destinies of the two misunderstandings, however, were far apart. The Christian misunderstanding came to dominate the Christendom; the Muslim misunderstanding performed its bloody deed and sank away in front of the Sufi tide which overwhelmed the Muslim world. The success of Sufism in Islam was therefore the success of the Jesus' ethic, but devoid of the theological superstructures which this Christian misunderstanding had constructed concerning the oneness of Christ with God, or of men with Christ. In the Middle Ages, the intellectual disciples of Jesus were the sufis of Islam, rather than the theologians of the Council or Pope-monarchs of Christendom.

In 2006, Egyptian bloggers witnessed hundreds of men thronging the streets to celebrate the end of Ramadan, harassing women with or without hijabs, ripping off their clothes, encircling them, and trying to assault them.48 Girls ran for cover in nearby restaurants, taxis, and cinemas. As protests continued in Tahrir Square in 2012, mob attacks against women became more organized. Men formed concentric rings around individual women, stripping and raping them.49 Some Egyptian women spoke out, taking their accounts and video evidence of sexual assaults to police, but little headway was made until laws against sexual harassment were introduced in 2014.50 The rape game crossed the Mediterranean in December 2015. During New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne, as we have seen, more than a thousand young men formed rings around individual women, sexually assaulting them.51 When the victims identified the perpetrators as looking “foreign,” “North African,” and “Arab,” they were pilloried as racists on social media.52 The local feminist and magazine editor Alice Schwarzer’s dogged reporting established that the young men had coordinated and planned the attacks that night “to the detriment of the Kufar [infidels].”53 Schwarzer was vindicated twelve months later, when Cologne police chief Jürgen Mathies confirmed that the attacks had been intentionally coordinated to intimidate the German population.

Despite his earthbound approach and his preoccupation with scientific fact, Aristotle had an acute understanding of the nature and importance of religion and mythology. He pointed out that people who had become initiates in the various mystery religions were not required to learn any facts “but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a certain disposition.”35 Hence his famous literary theory that tragedy effected a purification (katharsis) of the emotions of terror and pity that amounted to an experience of rebirth. The Greek tragedies, which originally formed part of a religious festival, did not necessarily present a factual account of historical events but were attempting to reveal a more serious truth. Indeed, history was more trivial than poetry and myth: “The one describes what has happened, the other what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and serious than history; for poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular.”36 There may or may not have been a historical Achilles or Oedipus, but the facts of their lives were irrelevant to the characters we have experienced in Homer and Sophocles, which express a different but more profound truth about the human condition. Aristotle’s account of the katharsis of tragedy was a philosophic presentation of a truth that Homo religiosus had always understood intuitively: a symbolic, mythical or ritual presentation of events that would be unendurable in daily life can redeem and transform them into something pure and even pleasurable.

In the light of the evidence it is hard to believe that most crusaders were motivated by crude materialism. Given their knowledge and expectations and the economic climate in which they lived, the disposal of assets to invest in the fairly remote possibility of settlement in the East would have been a stupid gamble. It makes much more sense to suppose, in so far as one can generalize about them, that they were moved by an idealism which must have inspired not only them but their families. Parents, brothers and sisters, wives and children had to face a long absence and must have worried about them: in 1098 Countess Ida of Boulogne made an endowment to the abbey of St Bertin 'for the safety of her sons, Godfrey and Baldwin, who have gone to Jerusalem'.83 And they and more distant relatives — cousins, uncles and nephews - were prepared to endow them out of the patrimonial lands. I have already stressed that no one can treat the phenomenal growth of monasticism in this period without taking into account not only those who entered the communities to be professed, but also the lay men and women who were prepared to endow new religious houses with lands and rents. The same is true of the crusading movement. Behind many crusaders stood a large body of men and women who were prepared to sacrifice interest to help them go. It is hard to avoid concluding that they were fired by the opportunity presented to a relative not only of making a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem but also of fighting in a holy cause. For almost a century great lords, castellans and knights had been subjected to abuse by the Church. Wilting under the torrent of invective and responding to the attempts of churchmen to reform their way of life in terms they could understand, they had become perceptibly more pious. Now they were presented by a pope who knew them intimately with the chance of performing a meritorious act which exactly fitted their upbringing and devotional needs and they seized it eagerly. But they responded, of course, in their own way. They were not theologians and were bound to react in ways consonant with their own ideas of right and wrong, ideas that did not always respond to those of senior churchmen. The emphasis that Urban had put on charity - love of Christian brothers under the heel of Islam, love of Christ whose land was subject to the Muslim yoke - could not but arouse in their minds analogies with their own kin and their own lords' patrimonies, and remind them of their obligations to avenge injuries to their relatives and lords. And that put the crusade on the level of a vendetta. Their leaders, writing to Urban in September 1098, informed him that 'The Turks, who inflicted much dishonour on Our Lord Jesus Christ, have been taken and killed and we Jerusalemites have avenged the injury to the supreme God Jesus Christ.

As Hamas’s rocket stockpiles dwindled, it reduced the number of rockets launched nightly but increased the range to Tel Aviv and beyond. Several of my conversations with Obama were interrupted by sirens. “Sorry, Barack,” I’d say. “I’m afraid we’ll have to resume our conversation in a few minutes.” With the rest of the staff I had forty-five seconds to go into underground shelters, returning after getting the all-clear sign. These live interruptions strengthened my argument for taking increasingly powerful actions against Hamas. And so we did. The IAF destroyed more and more enemy targets. Hamas panicked and became careless. Our intelligence identified the locations of their commanders. We targeted them and delivered painful blows to their hierarchy. Hamas then shifted their command posts to high-rises, believing they would be immune to our strikes. Using a technique called “knock on roof,” the air force fired nonlethal warning shots on the roofs of the buildings. Along with phone calls to the building occupants, these warnings enabled them to leave the premises unharmed. The IDF flattened several high-rise buildings with no civilian casualties. The sight of these collapsing towers sent Hamas a powerful message of demoralization and fear. This was literally “you can climb but you can’t hide.” Desperation was seeping through Hamas ranks. Arguments began to flare between Mashal in Qatar and the ground command in Gaza, which was suffering the brunt of our attacks. Eventually they caved. In the talks with Egypt they rescinded all their demands and agreed to an unconditional cease-fire that went into effect on August 26, 2014. After fifty days, Protective Edge was over. Sixty-seven IDF soldiers, five Israeli civilians, including one child, and a Thai civilian working in Israel lost their lives in the war. There were 4,564 rockets and mortars fired at Israel from Gaza, nearly all from civilian neighborhoods. The Iron Dome system intercepted 86 percent of them.4 The IDF killed 2,125 Gazans,5 roughly two-thirds of whom were members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian terrorist groups. A third were civilians who were often used by the terrorists as human shields. Colonel Richard Kemp, the commander of British forces in Afghanistan, said that “the IDF took measures to limit civilian casualties never taken by any Western army in similar situations.” At least twenty-three Palestinian civilians were executed by Hamas over false accusations of colluding with Israel. In reality many had simply criticized the devastation of Gaza brought about by Hamas’s aggression against Israel.6 Hamas leaders emerged from their bunkers. Surveying the rubble, they predictably declared victory. This is what all dictatorships do. They are not accountable to the facts or to their people. Less predictably, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas admitted that Hamas was severely weakened and achieved none of its demands.7 With the

Islamic life is like a ladder, with prayer and praising Allah as the bottom rung. The higher rungs represent helping the poor and needy, establishing schools, and supporting charities. The highest rung is jihad.

So where does one move?  This clearly is a matter for much prayer and seeking God’s face. In doing so, two factors should be taken into account: a.) does the potential location for immigration allow abortion; and b.) what is the level of Muslim population? The remaining nations of the world that today prohibit or severely restrict abortion and that have low levels of Muslim population are mostly in Central and South American, nations that, therefore, may offer an appropriate refuge.

It’s not necessary to believe America is the Daughter of Babylon to believe that God will keep His word and demand America must make an accounting for the blood of fifty five million babies killed by abortion and that the accounting will be demanded from those who shed/allowed the shedding of the blood. God either means what He said, or He doesn’t.

Muhammad’s violent end years and final violent words were quickly followed by those who succeeded him in power, after his death in 632 AD.          “Within thirty years after Muhammad’s death Islam achieved the most spectacular expansion in its history. During the caliphate of Muhammad’s immediate successors from 632 to 661, Islam conquered the whole Arabian peninsula and invaded territories which had been in Greco-Roman hands since the reign of Alexander the Great….Damascus fell in 635. Jerusalem was captured in 638. In the same year Antioch fell, and the other great Hellenistic capital, Alexandria, became a permanent Arab possession in 646. Coastal cities in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, as well as the island of Cyprus were successively occupied by Arabs in a short period of time…The rapid advance of Islam spread panic and consternation among the Christians in the Greek Near East…The Arabic wars against the Greeks were not only political and economic wars, but holy wars of Islam against Christianity.” (“Greek Christian and Other Accounts of the Muslim Conquests of the Near East,” Demetrios Constantelos, article in The Legacy of Jihad, Prometheus Books, 2005, Edited by Andrew Bostom, MD).

We wouldn’t lose all that much, honestly. With rare, rare exceptions, the anti-Trump “conservatives” were out of touch, boring, lame, ineffective, self-righteous losers without enough flare or original thought to headline an accountants’ convention. Except, as their reading of the polls showed us, the accountants are better at math.

To know that someone had thought to prepare halal food, that someone had taken my religion into account rather than ignore or be afraid of it, it felt like such a blessing. Before leaving Syria, everyone had warned me not to lose Islam—as if moving to a non-Muslim country would wipe out my faith—but here, people wanted to honour it.

Under 'rational' assumptions, such texts as those of early Islam can be taken as either literal or symbolic (and the notion of "literal" itself, meaning "as written", adds a further problematic dimension to interpreting something written), but those texts were in fact written as neither literal nor symbolic, but as revelatory. The same is true of Christian and Jewish religious texts, and in fact of most religious texts worldwide. Revelatory texts, to be understood, require an experience of the revelatory itself, and in fact many such texts were intended precisely to provoke the experience necessary for understanding them. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Mind) is in fact a revelatory text, but the content of the revelation is the nature of revelation itself as reflexive understanding, and as such attempts to provoke not only the experience, but the experience of understanding the experience of revelation. There is no guarantee, though, as with any other revelatory text, that it will in fact be understood by any given reader. Other reflexively revelatory texts include Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra and Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning) . All three are considered among the most "difficult" texts in philosophy precisely because approaching them with the usual, rational, interpretive apparatus of philosophy itself will get the reader nowhere. As a projection, though, the rational on its own cannot give any guidance as to what to record content-wise, since it can only account-for something already given. As a result while history is by definition formally rational, its content is tacitly determined by something else. This something else, in the western world, is factually a priori revelation, for the most part in the west revelatory texts associated with the Christian religion and its immediate antecedents, but also with those of Islam, with which we share antecedent revelatory texts and with whom there has been significant mutual influence over the past millennium, and with specific westernisations of eastern revelatory texts. Thus, the underlying assumptions of the most formally rational thinking are inherently revelatory and religious in nature, while our rational interpretation of revelatory texts themselves as either literal or symbolic completely misses the thrust and intent of the very texts that underlie our basic thought processes.

In 571 Mohammed was born in Mecca, and at his death in 632 the religion of Islam, of which he was the founder and prophet, had spread over the greater part of Arabia. Islam, or “submission to the will of God”, had as its creed: “There is no God but God and Mohammed is His Prophet”. It utterly repudiated images or pictures of any kind. Its book, the Koran, contains many confused references to persons and events spoken of in the Bible. Abraham as the Friend of God, Moses the Law of God, Jesus the Spirit of God, are all venerated, but are excelled by Mohammed the Prophet of God. This religion was mercilessly spread by the sword, and such was the resistless energy of the new enthusiasm that in less than a hundred years from the death of Mohammed, the dominion and religion of his followers stretched from India to Spain. The choice of conversion to Mohammedanism or death constantly reinforced the armies of Islam, but untold numbers died rather than deny Christ.

Meanwhile, the constant pressure of Islam was becoming an increasing danger for Europe, and Hungary was in the forefront of the fight; yet this did not awaken the Catholic countries to see the folly of destroying a barrier between them and their most dangerous foe, and the Pope wrote (1325) to the Ban of Bosnia: “Knowing that thou art a faithful son of the Church, we therefore charge thee to exterminate the heretics in thy dominions, and to render aid and assistance unto Fabian, our Inquisitor, forasmuch as a large multitude of heretics from many and divers parts collected, have flowed together into the Principality of Bosnia, trusting there to sow their obscene errors and to dwell there in safety. These men, imbued with the cunning of the Old Fiend, and armed with the venom of their falseness, corrupt the minds of Catholics by outward show of simplicity and lying assumption of the name of Christians; their speech crawleth like a crab, and they creep in with humility, but in secret they kill, and are wolves in sheep’s clothing, covering their bestial fury as a means whereby they may deceive the simple sheep of Christ.

Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973. Most of those Americans who were, say, about fifty years old, in 1973, will not likely be around, due to the sheer passage of time, when the blood of aborted Americans is accounted and avenged. On the other hand, for those of us who were fifty years old or younger when Roe v. Wade was handed down, and therefore Roe v Wade was allowed by us as Americans to continue as the law of the land, though we were of an age and level of influence that we could have done something about it, we may likely witness the destruction of the world’s leading abortion nation in the end times. That’s justice. It happened on our watch, during our time of influence, we let it happen, and today we continue to let it happen.

Remember that God says in Numbers 35:33 that “atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it.” When the accounting for the blood of the slain innocent fifty five million aborted Americans happens, the accounting will likely take at least fifty five million non-innocent Americans, who could have stopped the slaughter, but who decided instead to look the other way. Is God likely, as we have done, to look the other way, and not stop the attack on America? “‘When I called, they did not listen; so when they called, I would not listen’, says the Lord Almighty.” (Zechariah 7:13).          It’s not necessary to believe America is the Daughter of Babylon to believe that God will keep His word and demand America must make an accounting for the blood of fifty five million babies killed by abortion and that the accounting will be demanded from those who shed/allowed the shedding of the blood. God either means what He said, or He doesn’t.

According to the Prophet, the four blemishes of knowledge are boasting of one’s knowledge and feeling superior on account of it to recognized scholars, entering into contests with fools on the strength of one’s knowledge, trying through it to influence people in his favor, and attempting to obtain favors from leaders in powerful positions by means of it.

An ignorant man is forgiven seventy sins, before one sin is forgiven to the person who possesses knowledge. Evil actions should not deter anyone from accepting good advice from the individual who commits them. This has been said by Bilâl b. Abî Burdah and is expressed in a famous verse, here ascribed to al-Khalîl: The light of knowledge must not be extinguished by dark sins. Knowledge is sought on account of action, and not vice versa. Leaving the truth alone because of one’s ignorance is better than doing so through inaction.

Shaped by political considerations, and then driven by geopolitical urgencies, Khomeinism was always a hybrid: the beneficiary of an ideological account of Islamic tradition, which borrowed from modern idioms and used secular concepts, particularly those of Shariati, and also incorporated a Third Worldist revolutionary discourse. Islamists negating top-down modernizers ended up mirroring, even parodying, their supposed enemy, cancelling their own simple oppositions between Us and Them.

The deeply rooted Christianity of Africa and Asia did not simply fade away through lack of zeal, or theological confusion: it was crushed, in a welter of warfare and persecution. New Masters Reading sympathetic accounts of the spread of Islam, we can forget that this was a movement of armed conquest and imperial expansion, which on occasion involved ferocious violence. The battle of Yarmuk in 636, which gave the Muslims control of Syria, was one of the great military massacres of antiquity, costing the lives of perhaps fifty thousand soldiers of the Christian Byzantine Empire. And while cities were generally spared, the invaders showed little mercy to surrounding villages and settlements.

Islam emphasizes reason; it is the basis upon which humans are held accountable for their choices. It is also the characteristic that elevates the human being above the rest of Allah's creation, if that gift is used appropriately. Islamic law is designed in such a way as to preserve reason and intellect and to ensure its well-being and freedom. Islam prohibits the use of any substance that may affect the mind negatively or decrease its ability in any way.

Several themes that are common in early non Muslim sources but far less so in sources from the Arabo-Islamic tradition feature prominently in al-Zuhrī’s account. For instance, al-Zuhrī portrays the ascendance of Muhammad’s followers: (1) as led by a new king (malik), or else as ushering in an era of new kingship/dominion (mulk); and (2) as primarily an ethnic dominion, being a rule not of a community of faithful believers (al-muʾminīn) but rather of “the circumcised people [al-khitān].” While this is not incompatible per se with early Islamic historiography, these themes deeply resonate with early Christian accounts of the rise of Islam, particularly in the Levant, which most often speak of the new Arab/Saracen rulers in terms a new dominion (Syr. malkūtā), not a new religion and hence just as often depict Muhammad and other early Muslim rulers as merely “kings” (Syr. malkē) and nothing more. The account of Ps.-Fredegar fits this pattern perfectly, inasmuch as it describes the “circumcised” conquerors in purely ethnic terms, designating them as either Hagarenes (Agarrini) or Saracens (Saracini), but displays no knowledge of Muhammad, his religion, or the religious convictions and motivations of the “Saracen” conquerors.

Putting together Muhammad’s story is a challenge, as the sources from which the orthodox Islamic account are drawn come from at least a century after the events of his life. Further, even those show clear evidence of legendary expansion and the influence of piety in the early generations of adherents.

Muhammad ﷺ is for us, an EXAMPLE and GUIDE, The GREATEST Prophet, in him we take pride. Spread GOODNESS wherever you go, but make sure, That in your heart, your intentions remain PURE. Take yourself to account, before you’re accounted for, So that in this life and the next, you’ll be successful forevermore.

It’s here that you realize that the unholy collusion between the far-left and radical Islam is not a fantasy dreamed up by Gilles-William Goldnadel, but is something that is increasingly becoming a reality. I leave the accountability of those who find excuses for Islam because it’s the “religion of the poor,” or who look for points of agreement between Marxist thought and Sharia law, but I will say that every anti-Semitic attack or murder in the French banlieues owes something to them.

It is into that overwhelming flood of grace that our hearts release their poison. When we have been forgiven so much, how can we hold our fellow man accountable for so little?

Mary peace be upon her the Choosen and the Pure women of the Whorld the Honor Women the Chapter 19 of QURAN named by her names Mary Maryam in Arabic : "[Mention, O Muhammad], when the wife of 'Imran said, "My Lord, indeed I have pledged to You what is in my womb, consecrated [for Your service], so accept this from me. Indeed, You are the Hearing, the Knowing." But when she delivered her, she said, "My Lord, I have delivered a female." And Allah was most knowing of what she delivered, "And the male is not like the female. And I have named her Mary, and I seek refuge for her in You and [for] her descendants from Satan, the expelled [from the mercy of Allah ]." So her Lord accepted her with good acceptance and caused her to grow in a good manner and put her in the care of Zechariah. Every time Zechariah entered upon her in the prayer chamber, he found with her provision. He said, "O Mary, from where is this [coming] to you?" She said, "It is from Allah . Indeed, Allah provides for whom He wills without account." Quran Family of Imran 3 : 35-37.

When we come to Christ, God not only forgives us, he also adopts us. Through a dramatic series of events, we go from condemned orphans with no hope to adopted children with no fear. Here is how it happens. You come before the judgment seat of God full of rebellion and mistakes. Because of his justice he cannot dismiss your sin, but because of his love he cannot dismiss you. So, in an act which stunned the heavens, he punished himself on the cross for your sins. God’s justice and love are equally honored. And you, God’s creation, are forgiven. But the story doesn’t end with God’s forgiveness. . . . It would be enough if God just cleansed your name, but he does more. He gives you his name. The Great House of God DAY 8 To him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness. ROMANS 4:5 NKJV God wants you to believe in him. “Whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16 NIV). The phrase “believes in him” doesn’t digest well in our day of self-sufficient spiritual food. “Believe in yourself ” is the common menu selection of our day. Try harder. Work longer. Dig deeper. Self-reliance is our goal. And tolerance is our virtue. “In him” smacks of exclusion. Don’t all paths lead to heaven? Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and humanism? Christ walks upriver on this topic. Salvation is found, not in self or in them, but in him. Paul assures salvation to the most unlikely folks:

Said the Prophet, on him be peace: ‘On the Day of Resurrection, three people will find themselves on a ridge of black musk. They will have no reckoning to fear, nor any cause for alarm while human accounts are being settled. First, a man who recites the Quran to please God, Great and Glorious is He, and who leads the Prayer to people’s satisfaction. Second, a man who gives the Call to Prayer in a Mosque, inviting people to God, Great and Glorious is He, for the sake of His good pleasure. Third, a man who has a hard time making a living in this world, yet is not distracted from the work

America’s power position as “the hammer of the whole earth” extends to more than military power. America tells other nations what to do and how to do it. For example, America forced the UBS AG Bank in Switzerland to close all of the offshore accounts in the Swiss Bank held by U.S. citizens, as part of an IRS “tax investigation which challenges Switzerland’s famous banking secrecy laws.” (Reuters, January 9, 2009).

What distinguishes us above all from Muslim-born or converted individuals—“psychologically”, one could say—is that our mind is a priori centered on universal metaphysics (Advaita Vedānta, Shahādah, Risālat al-Ahadiyah) and the universal path of the divine Name (japa-yoga, nembutsu, dhikr, prayer of the heart); it is because of these two factors that we are in a traditional form, which in fact—though not in principle—is Islam. The universal orthodoxy emanating from these two sources of authority determines our interpretation of the sharī'ah and Islam in general, somewhat as the moon influences the oceans without being located on the terrestrial globe; in the absence of the moon, the motions of the sea would be inconceivable and “illegitimate”, so to speak. What universal metaphysics says has decisive authority for us, as does the “onomatological” science connected to it, a fact that once earned us the reproach of “de-Islamicizing Islam”; it is not so much a matter of the conscious application of principles formulated outside of Islamism by metaphysical traditions from Asia as of inspirations in conformity with these principles; in a situation such as ours, the spiritual authority—or the soul that is its vehicle—becomes like a point of intersection for all the rays of truth, whatever their origin. One must always take account of the following: in principle the universal authority of the metaphysical and initiatic traditions of Asia, whose point of view reflects the nature of things more or less directly, takes precedence—when such an alternative exists—over the generally more “theological” authority of the monotheistic religions; I say “when such an alternative exists”, for obviously it sometimes happens, in esoterism as in essential symbolism, that there is no such alternative; no one can deny, however, that in Semitic doctrines the formulations and rules are usually determined by considerations of dogmatic, moral, and social opportuneness. But this cannot apply to pure Islam, that is, to the authority of its essential doctrine and fundamental symbolism; the Shahādah cannot but mean that “the world is false and Brahma is true” and that “you are That” (tat tvam asi), or that “I am Brahma” (aham Brahmāsmi); it is a pure expression of both the unreality of the world and the supreme identity; in the same way, the other “pillars of Islam” (arqān al-Dīn), as well as such fundamental rules as dietary and artistic prohibitions, obviously constitute supports of intellection and realization, which universal metaphysics—or the “Unanimous Tradition”—can illuminate but not abolish, as far as we are concerned. When universal wisdom states that the invocation contains and replaces all other rites, this is of decisive authority against those who would make the sharī'ah or sunnah into a kind of exclusive karma-yoga, and it even allows us to draw conclusions by analogy (qiyās, ijtihād) that most Shariites would find illicit; or again, should a given Muslim master require us to introduce every dhikr with an ablution and two raka'āt, the universal—and “antiformalist”—authority of japa-yoga would take precedence over the authority of this master, at least in our case. On the other hand, should a Hindu or Buddhist master give the order to practice japa before an image, it goes without saying that it is the authority of Islamic symbolism that would take precedence for us quite apart from any question of universality, because forms are forms, and some of them are essential and thereby rejoin the universality of the spirit. (28 January 1956)

As for the negation of the Christian Trinity in the Quran - and this negation is extrinsic and conditional - we must take account of certain shades of meaning. The Trinity can be envisaged according to a "vertical" perspective or according to either of two "horizontal" perspectives, one of them being supreme and the other not. The vertical perspective- Beyond-Being, Being and Existence - envisages the hypostases as "descending" from Unity or from the Absolute - or from the Essence it could be said - which means that it envisages the degrees of Reality. The supreme horizontal perspective corresponds to the Vedantic triad Sat (supraontological Reality), Chit (Absolute Consciousness) and Ananda (Infinite Beatitude), which means that it envisages the Trinity inasmuch as It is hidden in Unity(1). The non-supreme horizontal perspective on the contrary situates Unity as an essence hidden within the Trinity, which is then ontological and represents the three fundamental aspects or modes of Pure Being, whence the triad : Being, Wisdom, Will (Father, Son, Spirit). Now the concept of a Trinity seen as a deployment (tajalli) of Unity or of the Absolute is in no way opposed to the unitary doctrine of Islam ; what is opposed to it is solely the attribution of absoluteness to the Trinity alone, or even to the ontological Trinity alone, as it is envisaged exoterically. This last point of view does not, strictly speaking, attain to the Absolute and this is as much as to say that it attributes an absolute character to what is relative and is ignorant of Maya and the degrees of reality or of illusion ; it does not conceive of the metaphysical - but not pantheistic - identity between manifestation and the Principle; still less, therefore, does it conceive of the consequence this identity implies from the point of view of the intellect and the knowledge which delivers. (1) The Absolute is not the Absolute inasmuch as it contains aspects, but inasmuch as It transcends them; inasmuch as It is Trinity It is therefore not Absolute.

What my father saw in those early days was the part of Islam that reflects love and mercy. What he didn’t see, what he perhaps has never yet allowed himself to see, is the other side of Islam.

The patronage of devadāsī troupes by Muslims is also found in Qanoon-e-Islam, or the Customs of the Moosulmans of India (Shureef and Herklots 1832, lxxxii). This account notes that mēḷams are generally invited to perform at weddings, and mentions the nutwa (naṭṭuvaṉār) who leads the troupe. Professional dancers in Tanjore also performed in Muslim homes, particularly at the time of marriages. A mid-nineteenth-century painting from Tanjore currently held at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2006AV2428– 01) depicts a Muslim marriage procession led by dancers performing in the “Hindustānī” style. The participation of Tanjore’s devadāsīs in Muslim weddings is also confirmed by musicologist B. M. Sundaram: “In Tanjore, there were some devadāsī dancers who used to give regular performances in the homes of Muslims, whenever marriages take place there. When someone in those Muslim families died, it was a custom for the devadāsī who danced in these homes to gift a goat for the [funerary] meal … It shows a mutual respect, a mutual affinity.” (Sundaram, personal communication)

The New Yorker (The New Yorker) - Clip This Article on Location 1510 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015 5:42:23 PM FICTION THE DUNIAZáT BY SALMAN RUSHDIE   In the year 1195, the great philosopher Ibn Rushd, once the qadi , or judge, of Seville and most recently the personal physician to the Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub in his home town of Córdoba, was formally discredited and disgraced on account of his liberal ideas, which were unacceptable to the increasingly powerful Berber fanatics who were spreading like a pestilence across Arab Spain, and was sent to live in internal exile in the small village of Lucena, a village full of Jews who could no longer say they were Jews because they had been forced to convert to Islam. Ibn Rushd, a philosopher who was no longer permitted to expound his philosophy, all of whose writing had been banned and burned, felt instantly at home among the Jews who could not say they were Jews. He had been a favorite of the Caliph of the present ruling dynasty, the Almohads, but favorites go out of fashion, and Abu Yusuf Yaqub had allowed the fanatics to push the great commentator on Aristotle out of town. The philosopher who could not speak his philosophy lived on a narrow unpaved street in a humble house with small windows and was terribly oppressed by the absence of light. He set up a medical practice in Lucena, and his status as the ex-physician of the Caliph himself brought him patients; in addition, he used what assets he had to enter modestly into the horse trade, and also financed the making of tinajas , the large earthenware vessels, in which the Jews who were no longer Jews stored and sold olive oil and wine. One day soon after the beginning of his exile, a girl of perhaps sixteen summers appeared outside his door, smiling gently, not knocking or intruding on his thoughts in any way, and simply stood there waiting patiently until he became aware of her presence and invited her in. She told him that she was newly orphaned, that she had no source of income, but preferred not to work in the whorehouse, and that her name was Dunia, which did not sound like a Jewish name because she was not allowed to speak her Jewish name, and, because she was illiterate, she could not write it down. She told him that a traveller had suggested the name and said it was Greek and meant “the world,” and she had liked that idea. Ibn Rushd, the translator of Aristotle, did not quibble with her, knowing that it meant “the world” in enough tongues to make pedantry unnecessary. “Why have you named yourself after the world?” he asked her, and she replied, looking him in the eye as she spoke, “Because a world will flow from me and those who flow from me will spread across the world.” Being a man of reason, Ibn Rushd did not guess that the girl was a supernatural creature, a jinnia, of the tribe of female jinn: a grand princess of that tribe, on an earthly adventure, pursuing her fascination with human men in general and brilliant ones in particular.

Despite public anxiety about extremists inspired by Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, the number of violent plots by such individuals has remained very low. Since 9/11, an average of nine American Muslims per year have been involved in an average of six terrorism-related plots against targets in the United States. Most were disrupted, but the 20 plots that were carried out accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years. In contrast, right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities, according to a study by Perliger, a professor at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. The toll has increased since the study was released in 2012.

Weiss’ account of the leading role in this campaign to limit Americans’ free speech rights played by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the U.S. Department of State is particularly troubling. We learn that Mrs. Clinton collaborated closely with the man who was at the time the Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, through a series of high-level meetings that came to be known as “The Istanbul Process.” Its explicit purpose was to find ways to accommodate the OIC’s demands for the official stifling of any critical examination of Islam.

America is the great exception to the demographic collapse sweeping the modern world. As an immigrant nation we regenerate ourselves. We bear no baggage from a tragic past. The glue that holds us together is a common concept of justice and opportunity. The United States is what John Courtney Murray called “a propositional nation.” In our benevolence and optimism we assume that all peoples are like us, forgetting that we are or descend from people who chose to abandon the tragic fate of their own nations at the further shore and selected themselves into the American nation. But we have learned that our capacity to influence events in the rest of the world, even in the absence of a competing superpower, is limited, and that the dissipation of our resources can be deadly for us. Our strategic thinking suffers from a failure to take into account the existential problems of other nations. (2011-09-19). How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) . Regnery Publishing

In the Bible, Ham finds Noah drunk and naked in Noah's tent. He tells his brothers, Shem and Japheth, who proceed to cover their father without gazing at him. When Noah finds out what happened, he curses Ham's son Canaan, saying he shall be “a servant of servants.” Yet, in the earlier biblical account, Noah and his family are not described in racial terms. Before the 16th or 17th century, the racial interpretation of Ham is absent or contradictory. But as the story echoed through the centuries and around the world, variously interpreted by Islamic, Christian and Jewish scholars, Ham came to be widely portrayed as black; blackness, servitude, and the idea of racial hierarchy became inextricably linked. The racist interpretation of scripture was never adopted by the African Coptic Churches, and in Europe, some of the earlier representations of Jesus Christ, Mary, etc. depicted them as being dark-skinned. By the early nineteenth century, many supposed scholars in America supported the belief that African-Americans were descendants of Ham, who were cursed and consequently blackened by their sins, was a primary justification for their enslavement.

The search for knowledge demands foregoing the pleasures of companionship, but this is usually understood to mean frivolous and unprofi table human relations. Knowledge is rather something to be shared. It is restricted to an elite, since the ignorant are not only proverbially hostile to knowledge and those who possess knowledge, but they also greatly outnumber the learned and always will. This makes scholars always gravitate toward each other. Learned men never fi nd themselves strangers anywhere. They alone recognize each other, since the ignorant are unable to perceive the worth of learning, never having possessed any learning before. And they enjoy only the company of their peers. There is nothing to be pitied more than men of knowledge who have to put up with ignoramuses. This often expressed view appears also in the form of a witty anecdote told of one of the Persian kings. He imprisoned a scholar who had angered him together with an ignorant man in the same room, as the worst punishment he could think of. Thus, in defense against the world as well as on account of the intrinsic nature of knowledge, scholars must band together, in order to insure the persistence of knowledge in the world by communicating with each other and, above all, by transmitting their knowledge to others, if they are deserving. Nothing is more sterile than uncommunicated knowledge. Nothing is more signifi cant for society at large than the small groupings of teachers and students. Nothing, in short, has greater basic value for society than knowledge.

Now, in comparing the Turk with the pope, if a question be asked, whether of them is the truer or greater Antichrist, it were easy to see and judge, that the Turk is the more open and manifest enemy against Christ and his church. —John Foxe, English compiler of    Protestant martyr accounts, 1570

Poppies in Afghanistan: The Taliban and the Heroin Trade Harvesting opium in Afghanistan Ghaffar Baig/ Reuters/Corbis Most Americans knew little about Afghanistan or the Taliban prior to September 11, 2001, but those who follow the heroin trade have focused on Afghanistan for decades. Afghanistan has long been a major area of opium production, but the “golden triangle” of Southeast Asia (Burma, Laos, and Thailand) historically dominated opium production. By 1999, though, Afghanistan had become the undisputed world leader in opium production despite being an Islamic state ruled by the Taliban, which publicly opposed opium use. In 1999, the Taliban representative to the United States, Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, said, “We are against poppy cultivation, narcotics production and drugs, but we cannot fight our own people” (Bartolet & Levine, 2001, p. 85). Even before 9/11, the United States accused the Taliban of profiting from opium and heroin production, and using those profits to fund terrorist activities. Under pressure from the United Nations, the Taliban announced bans on poppy cultivation in 1997, 1998, and 2000, but there was little evidence of any decreased production. In 2001, though, a ban was put into place that apparently really did reduce poppy production. Cynics have pointed out that the Taliban was simply trying to increase prices by temporarily cutting the supply; whatever the reason, when the Taliban lost control of Afghanistan, the poppy made a comeback. In this war-ravaged and economically depressed nation, growing opium is one of the few ways that farmers can make a living. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has urged his people to declare jihad (holy war) on drug production, but opium farming still accounts for nearly half of the domestic economy, and Afghanistan supplies nearly 80% of the world’s heroin (Office of National Drug Control Policy, 2013). In recent years, opium production has declined in Afghanistan, but a close relationship between heroin traffickers and the insurgency continues to create difficulties for that country’s reconstruction process (Office of National Drug Control Policy, 2013).

Here we may observe fully developed the doctrine of passing away in God (fanā) which from Abū Yazīd's time onwards assumes a central position in the structure of Sufi theory. It was after all not a difficult transition to make from saying that all else but God is nothing (which is the logical outcome of the extreme ascetic teaching that the world is worthless and only God's service is a proper preoccupation of the believer's heart), to claiming that when self as well as the world has been cast aside the mystic has passed away into God.

God is deadly serious about His word. He is deadly serious when He tells us in His Word that; a.) He will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel and b.) He demands an accounting for spilt innocent blood. He said it, He meant it and He will enforce His Word.

Incidentally, the names Muslim, Moslem, and Mohammedan all mean the same thing, “belonging to the Faith of Islam and followers of the prophet Mohammed,” but in the Indian subcontinent they are always known as Muslims. Thanks

The vision that shows Muslims as opposed to freedom of speech also makes Muslim the compulsory targets of that speech. It is not enough that one speak of Muslims. It is not even enough that one speak ill of them. One is required to speak ill of Muslims-and to do it in prescribed ways. Freedom of speech is not secured in the study of Islam, in writing or in speaking of Muslims. Freedom of speech is not secured by those who call, however controversially, for the conversion of Christians to Islam. Freedom of speech is not advanced by the call to prayer. Speech is said to be "free speech" when-and only when-it is used to attack Muslims, Islam, or the Koran. When free speech becomes a Muslim question, its principle fails and its practice narrows. In this account, freedom of speech is no longer a matter of supporting the expression of unpopular opinions, defending the rights of minorities to a place in the public square, or speaking truth to power.

Ironically, while modern-day Islam rejects the Gospel accounts as corrupt, the Koran itself commands Muslims to read the Injeel—that is, the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus.

It is He Who made the Sun self-luminous and Moon radiant (reflecting the Sunlight), and measured for it stages, that you might know the number of years and (keep) the account." - The Holy Qur'an (Surah Yunus, Ch. 10, Verse 5)

The Way of man's approach or return to God is in essence the same, [...] non-Christian teaching. It has three stages: an ethical stage, then one of knowledge and love, leading to the mystical Union of the soul with God.

Babur was more than ordinarily ruthless. He pursued to the limit the concept of Jihad- a total war for the annihilation of his adversaries as prescribed by Islam of which he was a practitioner. He was a product of his age and environment, and that is exactly how we must see him. Whitewashing his blood-soaked record to turn him into a figure of chivalry and prince charming is an exercise in juvenile fantasy. Babur saw ruthlessness as a virtue, and terror as a useful tactical tool. In this he was a true descendant of Timur and Chengiz Khan- both of whom were his ancestors. Guru Nanak's eyewitness account gives a better picture of Babur and his methods than almost any modern history book. The same holds true for the Baburnama: it is a primary source of great importance that goes to demolish romantic tales about him.- NS Rajaram quoted in Rushdie's book.

Although cosmologists call the current orthodox model the Standard Cosmological Model or the Concordance Model, it is perhaps more accurately described as the Quantum-Fluctuation-Group-of-Inflationary-ConjecturesEither-Before-Or-After-the-Hot-Big-Bang-Unknown-27-per-cent-Dark-MatterUnknown-68-per-cent-Dark-Energy Model. The versions with inflation occurring before a Big Bang are more internally self-consistent than either the ones in which the Big Bang is the start of everything or else the internally inconsistent Judaeo-Christian and Islamic divine creation myths.† However, since they do not offer a convincing account of what dark matter and dark energy are, they can hardly claim parsimony or even great explanatory power since they currently leave 95 per cent of even the claimed minute observable part of the universe unexplained. Moreover, since these versions don’t explain where the quantum vacuum, the laws of quantum mechanics, and the inflation field came from, it is difficult to argue that they are more reasonable than the insight that Brahman or the Dao is ultimate reality that exists out of space and time, from which everything springs and of which everything consists.

In the long run, however, Mohammed wins out. Christianity spreads primarily by conversion, Islam by conversion and reproduction. The percentage of Christians in the world peaked at about 30 percent in the 1980s, leveled off, is now declining, and will probably approximate about 25 percent of the world’s population by 2025. As a result of their extremely high rates of population growth (see chapter 5), the proportion of Muslims in the world will continue to increase dramatically, amounting to 20 percent of the world’s population about the turn of the century, surpassing the number of Christians some years later, and probably accounting for about 30 percent of the world’s population by 2025.19

GOD’S SHADOW THUS SERVES as a revisionist account, providing a new and more holistic picture of the last five centuries, and demonstrating Islam’s constituent role in forming some of the most fundamental aspects of the history of Europe, the Americas, and the United States. If we do not place Islam at the center of our grasp of world history, we will never understand why Moor-slayers are memorialized on the Texas–Mexico border or, more generally, why we have blindly, and repeatedly, narrated histories that miss major features of our shared past. As we chronicle Selim and his age, a bold new world history emerges, one that overturns shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium. Whether politicians, pundits, and traditional historians like it or not, the world we inhabit is very much an Ottoman one. This is a story only Selim can tell.

Islam provides the method by which our hearts can become sound and safe again. This method has been the subject of brilliant and insightful scholarship for centuries in the Islamic tradition. One can say that Islam in essence is a program to restore purity and calm to the heart through the remembrance of God. This present text is based on the poem known as Maṭharat al-Qulūb (literally, Purification of the Hearts), which offers the means by which purification can be achieved. It is a treatise on the “alchemy of the hearts,” namely, a manual on how to transform the heart. It was written by a great scholar and saint, Shaykh Muhammad Mawlud al Ya’qubi al-Musawi al-Muratani, As his name indicates, he was from Mauritania in West Africa. He was a master of all the Islamic sciences, including the inward sciences of the heart. He stated that he wrote this poem because he observed the prevalence of diseased hearts. He saw students of religion spending their time learning abstract sciences that people were not really in need of, to the neglect of those sciences that pertain to what people are accountable for in the next life, namely, the spiritual condition of the heart, In one of his most cited statements, the Prophet said, “Actions are based upon intentions.” All deeds are thus valued according to the intentions behind them, and intentions emanate from the heart. So every action a person intends or performs is rooted in the heart. Imam Mawlud realized that the weakness of society was a matter of weakness of character in the heart, Imam Mawlud based his text on many previous illustrious works, especially Imam al-Ghazali’s great Ihya’ Ulum alDin (The Revivification of the Sciences of the Religion). Each of the 40 books of Ihya‘ Ulum al-Din is basically about rectifying the human heart. If we examine the trials and tribulations, wars and other conflicts, every act of injustice all over earth, we’ll find they are rooted in human hearts.

Matrimonial website in Pakistan is not something new that we express wonder about its existence. It has been part of this Islamic society and the people circulating it. Matrimonial sites are becoming famous all around the globe because of its services. They provide various unmatchable services to the individuals whose trust on these sites have made them an eye-catching spot for the public. Matrimonial sites are providing free services when it comes to the process of registration. Almost every marriage website in Pakistan gives an opportunity to its customers to open free accounts on the site and without having any fear in mind, express their choices, likes, and dislikes to the site’s official team.

Notice how the Shaytan said that he will ambush us on “the straight path.” Just as a thief only robs a house with expensive goods, the Shaytan comes strongest after those who are on the spiritual path and have fostered a sense of faith. Another commentary on the verse suggests that when the Shaytan says he will come from “behind” us it means he will delude us regarding our divine origin, suggesting we are nothing but an accidental creation of a Godless universe. This can also suggest that he will pull us away from the present moment, into a past we cannot change, by fanning the flames of regret and inciting us with feelings of despair. When the Shaytan says he will come from “before” us this implies that he will delude us regarding the Day of Judgment, attempting to convince us that there will be no accountability in the future for our actions, both good and bad.14