Islam Family Quotes

True Islam taught me that it takes all of the religious, political, economic, psychological, and racial ingredients, or characteristics, to make the Human Family and the Human Society complete.

If your family are not very practicing, it is on you to create the aura of Islam around the household; revive sunnahs & increase dhikr.

Arabs and other Muslims generally agreed that Saddam Hussein might be a bloody tyrant, but, paralleling FDR's thinking, "he is our bloody tyrant." In their view, the invasion was a family affair to be settled within the family and those who intervened in the name of some grand theory of international justice were doing so to protect their own selfish interests and to maintain Arab subordination to the west.

The world today is fast becoming one.Humanity is one, God is one and mankind are all part of one human family. all Religions are connected, and they all lead to faith in the one God, no matter what name we give him he is but one God.

So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.

Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have 'ever been threatened' by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact.

Ma'alesh; no matter; never mind; what can you do but accept things as they are? Ma'alesh, your pot overturned in the fire; ma'alesh, your prize mare died; ma'alesh, you lost all your possessions and half your family. The word was the everyday essence of Islam - which itself, after all, means "submission.

Saying of the Prophet THE PEOPLE It is the people who are God's family. (Muhammad the Prophet)

How did the infant sent away from his family grow up to redefine the whole concept of family and tribe into something far larger: the umma, the people or the community of Islam?

Saying of the Prophet. The Bequest: I have nothing to leave you except my family.

I told her that we go to work to provide for our families, attend school functions that our children are involved in, take a few pieces of cake we just baked over to our neighbor next door, drive our children to school in the morning. “No! No!” She said. “How do you worship?” I said we make love to our spouses, smile and greet someone we pass on the street, help our children with their homework, hold open a door for someone behind us. “Worship! I’m asking about worship!” She exclaimed. I asked her exactly what she had in mind. “You know-Rituals!” She insisted. I answered her that we practice those also and that they are a very important part of Muslim worship. I was not trying to frustrate her, but I answered her in this way in order to emphasize Islam’s comprehensive conception of worship.

So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.

The Shah stayed on the throne until 1979, when he fled Iran to escape the Islamic revolution. Since then, this old and great civilization has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. As an Iranian who has lived more than half of my life in Iran, I know that this image is far from the truth. This is why writing "Persepolis" was so important to me. I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists. I also don't want those Iranians who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive regimes, or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland to be forgotten. One can forgive but one should never forget.

Many people are born into their religion. For them it is mostly a matter of legacy and convenience. Their belief is based on faith, not just in the teachings of the religion but also in the acceptance of that religion from their family and culture. For the person who converts, it is a matter of fierce conviction and defiance. Our belief is based on a combination of faith and logic because we need a powerful reason to abandon the traditions of our families and community to embrace beliefs foreign to both. Conversion is a risky business because it can result in losing family, friends and community support.

Marxism rejected the family and the state, but in practice it kept these institutions. Every pure religion disapproved of man's worrying about this world, but as the ideology of living people, it accepted the struggle for social justice and a better world. Marxism has had to accept some degree of individual freedom and religion some use of force. It is obvious in real life that man cannot live according to a consistent philosophy.

We’re seeing a rise in the school dropout rate for girls because their families’ incomes are falling and girls’ schooling is the first place they economize,” she sighed. The

Save the Children, an organization whose research has proved repeatedly that money in women’s hands benefits families much more than money flowing to men.

God did not reveal every final detail for a reason. He rarely does. If He did, then we would be justified in simply waiting for the Antichrist to come and get us. We would be entirely justified in digging holes in the ground as secret hideouts to store our survival food. But instead, God desires us to actually wrestle with Him in prayer, not only for our own souls and those of our families, but also for the very nations that we live in and call home.

Often the women are burned, so that the death can be passed off as an accident. The killer usually becomes a local hero: a man who has done what was necessary to clear his family name.

Now, when I assert that Islam is not a religion of peace I do not mean that Islamic belief makes Muslims naturally violent. This is manifestly not the case: there are many millions of peaceful Muslims in the world. What I do say is that the call to violence and the justification for it are explicitly stated in the sacred texts of Islam. Moreover, this theologically sanctioned violence is there to be activated by any number of offenses, including but not limited to apostasy, adultery, blasphemy, and even something as vague as threats to family honor or to the honor of Islam itself.

This is the difference between someone whose heart is purified and sound and one whose heart is impure and corrupt. Impure people oppress, and the pure-hearted not only forgive their oppressors, but elevate them in status and character. In order to purify ourselves, we must begin to recognize this truth. This is what this book is all about — a book of self-purification and a manual of liberation. If we work on our hearts, if we actually implement what is suggested here, we’ll begin to see changes in our lives, our condition, our society, and even within our own family dynamics. It is a blessing that we have this science of purification, a blessing that this teaching exists in the world today. What remains is for us to take these teachings seriously. Signs, Symptoms and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart. Translation and Commentary of Imam Mawlud's Matharat al-Qulub. Schaykh Hamza Yusuf. E-Book S. 10

A common error of western commentators who seek to interpret Islamism sympathetically is to view it as a form of localised resistance to globalisation. In fact, Islamism is also a universalist political project. Along with Neoliberals and Marxists, Islamists are participants in a dispute about how the world as whole is to be governed. None is ready to entertain the possibility that it should always contain a diversity of regimes. On this point, they differ from non-western traditions of thinking in India, China and Japan, which are much more restrained in making universal claims. In their unshakeable faith that one way of living is best for all humankind, the chief protagonists in the dispute about political Islam belong to a way of thinking that is quintessentially western. As in Cold War times, we are led to believe we are locked in a clash of civilisations: the West against the rest. In truth, the ideologues of political Islam are western voices, no less than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical Islam is yet another western family quarrel.

There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world—or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world—I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.

The laws of the Islamic state would be derived first from the Koran. But since only about six hundred of its six thousand verses are concerned with law, and only about eighty of these deal directly with crime, punishments, contracts and family law, other sources also have to be consulted. The

Many ex-Muslims do have lifelong Muslim friends and family who are supportive, moderate, or liberal, even if they disagree. This was a common theme in the #ExMuslimBecause tweets: most participants, while certainly unreserved in their criticism of the faith, made it a point to differentiate between criticizing Islam (an idea) and demonizing Muslims (a people). Human beings have rights and are entitled to respect. Ideas, books, and beliefs don’t, and aren’t.

Saying of the Prophet The Bequest I have nothing to leave you except my family.

We are brothers and sisters. We are a sacred family.

The West needs to think of itself as a family again, not as a sugar daddy for other people and their families.

month—the money gives the women at least a small degree of discretion in spending and the prestige that comes from contributing to the family budget.

women now share the economic burden of their families, very few Egyptian men are prepared to share the housework. To

Since the moment we met, my wife and I have not stopped kissing. I’m Catholic and she’s Islamic, so there were complications. Throughout the delicate negotiations with our families, our lips did not part for a moment. Eventually they accepted our love, so we married. We walked, tongues tangled, down the aisle. Now after six years of marriage, we are still fused. We had our first child without stopping kissing for the conception, pregnancy or birth. Our lips are four broken scabs, and our chins always covered in blood, but we still never stop. We are far too much in love.

When we examine , not the language of propaganda, but the witness of the combatants themselves, religion does not occupy the first place. Their motivations are more often secular, they mention their sympathy for a population reduced to poverty, the victims of the whim of ruling classes that live in luxury and corruption- rulers able to maintain themselves in power thanks only to the support of the American government ( as in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt). They speak of the members of their families or their local communities who have suffered or died by the fault of these governments ( and thus of their protectors); and they want to avenge them. The thirst for vengeance did not wait for Islam to appear in the world, and the appeal to the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is universal.

At some point, there was rape and nothing else. This becomes your normal day. You don't know who is going to open the door next to attack you, just that it will happen and that tomorrow might be worse. You stop thinking about escaping or seeing your family again. Your past life becomes a distant memory, like a dream. Your body doesn't belong to you, and there's no energy to talk or to fight or to think about the world outside. There is only rape and the numbness that comes with accepting that this is now your life. Fear was better. With fear, there is assumption that what is happening isn't normal. Sure, you feel like your heart will explode and you will throw up, you cling desperately to your family and friends and your grovel in front of the terrorists, you cry until you go blind, but at least you do something. Hopelessness is close to death.

Three things follow the dead person to his grave, two of which return and one of which remains with him. His family money and deeds accompany him to the grave, then his family and wealth return and his deeds stay with him.

No, it has nothing to do with Islam. The Quran grants women the freedom and right to seek divorce. It’s more cultural, or maybe regional. The importance of family values and keeping the family together, that sort of thing.

Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says. It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says. "Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'" Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love. "Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?" Pollan asks. Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.

Many of the politicians in Delhi and Karachi, too, had once fought together against the British; they had social and family ties going back decades. They did not intend to militarize the border between them with pillboxes and rolls of barbed wire. They laughed at the suggestion that Punjabi farmers might one day need visas to cross from one end of the province to the other. Pakistan would be a secular, not an Islamic, state, its founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, promised: Hindus and Sikhs would be free to practice their faiths and would be treated equally under the law. India would be better off without two disgruntled corners of the subcontinent, its people were told, less

Dr Leila Gupta found that most children had witnessed extreme violence and did not expect to survive. Two-thirds of the children interviewed had seen somebody killed by a rocket and scattered corpses or body parts. More than 70 per cent had lost a family member and no longer trusted adults. ‘They all suffer from flashbacks, nightmares and loneliness. Many said they felt their life was not worth living anymore,’ said Dr Gupta. Every norm of family life had been destroyed in the war.

On behalf of those you killed, imprisoned, tortured, you are not welcome, Erdogan! No, Erdogan, you’re not welcome in Algeria. We are a country which has already paid its price of blood and tears to those who wanted to impose their caliphate on us, those who put their ideas before our bodies, those who took our children hostage and who attempted to kill our hopes for a better future. The notorious family that claims to act in the name of the God and religion—you’re a member of it—you fund it, you support it, you desire to become its international leader. Islamism is your livelihood Islamism, which is your livelihood, is our misfortune. We will not forget about it, and you are a reminder of it today. You offer your shadow and your wings to those who work to make our country kneel down before your “Sublime Door.” You embody and represent what we loathe. You hate freedom, the free spirit. But you love parades. You use religion for business. You dream of a caliphate and hope to return to our lands. But you do it behind the closed doors, by supporting Islamist parties, by offering gifts through your companies, by infiltrating the life of the community, by controlling the mosques. These are the old methods of your “Muslim Brothers” in this country, who used to show us God’s Heaven with one hand while digging our graves with the other. No, Mr. Erdogan, you are not a man of help; you do not fight for freedom or principles; you do not defend the right of peoples to self-determination. You know only how to subject the Kurds to the fires of death; you know only how to subject your opponents to your dictatorship. You cry with the victims in the Middle East, yet sign contracts with their executioners. You do not dream of a dignified future for us, but of a caliphate for yourself. We are aware of your institutionalized persecution, your list of Turks to track down, your sinister prisons filled with the innocent, your dictatorial justice palaces, your insolence and boastful nature. You do not dream of a humanity that shares common values and principles, but are interested only in the remaking of the Ottoman Empire and its bloodthirsty warlords. Islam, for you, is a footstool; God is a business sign; modernity is an enemy; Palestine is a showcase; and local Islamists are your stunned courtesans. Humanity will not remember you with good deeds Humanity will remember you for your machinations, your secret coups d’état, and your manhunts. History will remember you for your bombings, your vengeful wars, and your inability to engage in constructive dialogue with others. The UN vote for Al-Quds is only an instrument in your service. Let us laugh at this with the Palestinians. We know that the Palestinian issue is your political capital, as it is for many others. You know well how to make a political fortune by exploiting others’ emotions. In Algeria, we suffered, and still suffer, from those who pretend to be God and act as takers and givers of life. They applaud your coming, but not us. You are the idol of Algerian Islamists and Populists, those who are unable to imagine a political structure beyond a caliphate for Muslim-majority societies. We aspire to become a country of freedom and dignity. This is not your ambition, nor your virtue. You are an illusion You have made beautiful Turkey an open prison and a bazaar for your business and loved ones. I hope that this beautiful nation rises above your ambitions. I hope that justice will be restored and flourish there once again, at least for those who have been imprisoned, tortured, bombed, and killed. You are an illusion, Erdogan—you know it and we know it. You play on the history of our humiliation, on our emotions, on our beliefs, and introduce yourself as a savior. However, you are a gravedigger, both for your own country and for your neighbors. Turkey is a political miracle, but it owes you nothing. The best thing you can do

Many years later when I got involved in activism, I noticed a very common thread. A lot of us girls had been psychologically abused by our mothers. A [Muslim] woman who has no control over her life craves control. There are very few outlets where that control is acceptable. In her immediate family, she cannot exert control over her husband or her son, but her daughter is fair game. All of her aggression and frustration are released in that one direction. Since, according to Hadith, Heaven is at the feet of mothers, mothers will get to determine if their children will burn in Hell for eternity or not. That is a lot of power to wield over a child. That power can have tragic results in the hands of an abusive mother. She can abuse the status and use it to control and manipulate. You must be an obedient slave to get her affection, support, approval, and, most importantly, to get into Heaven one day. She can revoke her 'blessing' at any point, keeping you in line for perpetuity.

The attempt to establish this separate Muslim identity is growing more and more intense, with persistent pressure for official recognition of Islamic family law, the rise of a de facto parallel Islamic legal system not recognised by the state, demands for highly politicised Islamic dress codes, prayer meetings or halal food to be provided by schools and other institutions, and so on. No other minority attempts to impose its values on the host society like this. Behind it lies the premise that Islamic values trump British ones,

The Afghans whom Yousaf trained uniformly denounced suicide attack proposals as against their religion. It was only the Arab volunteers—from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria, and other countries, who had been raised in an entirely different culture, spoke their own language, and preached their own interpretations of Islam while fighting far from their homes and families—who later advocated suicide attacks. Afghan jihadists, tightly woven into family, clan, and regional social networks, never embraced suicide tactics in significant numbers.18

The truth is that Islam itself was a barbaric reaction against that very humane complexity that is really a Christian character; that idea of balance in the deity, as of balance in the family, that makes that creed a sort of sanity, and that sanity the soul of civilisation.

It was the debut of a strategy employed by the Saudi royal family throughout the twentieth century: Threatened by Islamic radicalism, they embraced it, hoping to retain control. The al-Sauds’ claims to power on the Arabian peninsula were weak and grew largely from conquests made by allied jihadists. They now ruled the holiest shrines in worldwide Islam. There seemed to them no plausible politics but strict official religiosity. Many among the royal family were themselves true believers. Theirs was, after all, the only modern nationstate created by jihad.7

Rehab had been cursed indeed. There was no way Mohamed could have raised the money to buy his secret stash of gold without scrimping on his family. I imagined the lies he’d told, as he denied her every little luxury. Four years of privation: the punishment for having only a daughter.

I told my family that, in my opinion, the remaining traditions of that era were what kept us women in bondage, and not the Koran. Few people know the facts, that the Koran does not call for veiling, nor the restrictions women endure in the Muslim world. It is the traditions passed down that so hinder us from moving forward.

Because Islam, besides coming at the end of the major cycle of revelations, had had an experience of the different religions of the world before modern times. I have always said that Islam is the only religion that had direct contact with nearly all the major families of religions of the world outside of the matrix of modernism.

Many had been raped and most of these rape victims had fallen prey to male members of their own family, usually their own fathers. Unmarried women who became pregnant as a result of these rapes were murdered as soon as their condition was discovered to wash away the disgrace and keep the scandal hidden. In some cases the murderer was the rapist himself. Some victims were deliberately poisoned with the pesticides that were used to spray the apple trees in that region famous for its apple production. The death certificate would read: “Death from natural causes.” No doctor was required to obtain a death certificate for these women. Witnesses were sufficient.

asked how, if he never had spoken before to women outside his family, he was able to serve as spiritual counselor to the village women. My friend looked at me strangely. “They put their problems to him through their husbands, of course,” he said. “But what if their husband is their problem?” That possibility hadn’t crossed either man’s mind.

Some may view my focus on sexual matters as playing into the Western obsession with Muslim sexuality at the expense of other, more vital, areas of concern. Poverty, political repression, war, and global power dynamics are, indeed, crucial to Muslim women’s lives. However, even these issues cannot be entirely divorced from sex and sexuality: poverty matters differently for women, when it constrains women’s inability to negotiate marriage terms or leave abusive spouses; repressive regimes may attempt to demonstrate their “Islamic” credentials by capitulating to demands for “Shari‘a” in family matters or imposing putatively Islamic laws that punish women disproportionately for sexual transgressions.

I can well remember how when someone in my family lay sick or dying—like my aunt when she contracted breast cancer—the Qur’an was chanted by the bedside, in the belief that its words alone would cure the patient. Analogies with Christian prayer are misleading because the reciter of the Qur’an is voicing God’s words, not appealing to God for intercession.

Nasser turned to me, a serious expression on his face. “Nadia, you’re with Sabah now, and you’ll be going to join the rest of your family. There’s no need for me to come. But I need to ask you something. Do you feel safe? If you are scared at all that something is going to happen to you or that they will do anything to you because you were a sabiyya, I’ll stay with you.

The story of a family where three generations drifted between Christianity and Islam and back again, between suits and salvars, Mughal Hyderabad and Regency London, seemed to raise huge questions: about Britishness and the nature of Empire, about faith, and about personal identity; indeed, about how far all of these mattered, and were fixed and immutable – or how far they were in fact flexible, tractable, negotiable. For once it seemed that the normal steely dualism of Empire – between rulers and ruled, imperialists and subalterns, colonisers and the colonised – had broken down. The easy labels of religion and ethnicity and nationalism, slapped on by generations of historians, turned out, at the very least, to be surprisingly unstable.

These people say things like “If a liberal intellectual like you can’t speak about the link between specific doctrines and violence without being defamed as a bigot, what hope is there for someone like me, who has to worry about being killed by her own family or village for merely expressing doubts about God?” So yes, I’m aware that one can’t speak in Pakistan as I do here.

Surveys show that a large proportion of veiled women hold progressive views on such matters as gender. For some women, who have come from rural areas to the university and are the first members of their family to advance beyond basic literacy, the assumption of Islamic dress provides continuity and makes their rite of passage to modernity less traumatic than it might otherwise have been.

It can be concluded that in the West the relevance of the family and motherhood has been sabotaged long ago. It began in subtle ways with innocent and cleverly sent messages which targeted women's minds. The media told them that being a wife and mother is oppressive and limiting and that children can raise themselves... Staying home with children was considered a waste of one's time and effort.

We also have to bear in mind that our own sense of what is plausible and implausible is severely limited by the fact that the modern world is dominated by an extremely narrow range of family arrangements. Looking in anthropology books on kinship and marriage is like opening a book on a huge variety of dead and dying languages, all victims of the inexorable homogenisation of the world that has been in progress since the dawn of civilisation.

When trying to explain the violent path of some Islamists, Western commentators sometimes blame harsh economic conditions, dysfunctional family circumstances, confused identity, the generic alienation of young males, a failure to integrate into the larger society, mental illness, and so on. Some on the Left insist that the real fault lies with the mistakes of American foreign policy. None of this is convincing. Jihad in the twenty-first century is not a problem of poverty, insufficient education, or any other social precondition. (Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was earning more than $90,000 a year working for a drilling company in British Columbia, where he also reportedly proclaimed his support of the Taliban and joked about suicide bombing vests, with no repercussions.) We must move beyond such facile explanations. The imperative for jihad is embedded in Islam itself. It is a religious obligation.

The Islamic world can be viewed as an onion-layered multiple dictatorship: the dictatorship of political dynasties like the Mubarak, Gaddafi, Hussein, Ben Ali, and Assad families forms its first layer; the dictatorship of the military, the next; after that, that the dictatorship of religion, which determines how children are raised and educated; and finally, the dictatorship of society, which impacts life within families through archaic gender roles.

The new community would become their new family. Muhammad insisted that each Meccan emigrant be “adopted” by a Medinan believer and regarded not as a guest but as a brother or sister, regardless of age or kinship or place of birth. What was being formed here was not another tribe but the kernel of a kind of supra-tribe. They did not yet call it Islam with a capital I, or themselves Muslims with a capital M. That usage would come later, after Muhammad’s death, as Islam spread out into the whole of

Evolutionary pressures have accustomed humans to see the world as a static pie. If somebody gets a larger slice of the pie, somebody else inevitably gets a smaller slice. A particular family or city may prosper, but humankind as a whole is not going to produce more than it produces today. Accordingly, traditional religions such as Christianity and Islam sought ways to solve humanity’s problems with the help of current resources, either by redistributing the existing pie, or by promising a pie in the sky.

Cemetery of al-Baqi in Medina, they utterly destroyed the tombs of the Imams Hasan, Ali ibn Husayn, Muhammed ibn Ali, and Jafar, as well as the tomb of Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad.  In Mecca, they destroyed the Cemetery of Mualla, where the ancestors of Muhammad and his first wife Khadija were buried.  These prominent destructions were part of a pattern of violence that witnessed the Wahhabi Saudis smash buildings, tombs and mosques associated with the history of the Prophet and his family and which were venerated by Shia.

Every American should own a Koran. There are no excuses. Every day you can switch on the television or the radio or open a newspaper and hear or read pronouncements about what Islam is and“what the Koran says. Most of it is wrong—very wrong. You owe it to yourself, your family, and all the Americans killed on 9/11 and since to know the truth. Do not take anyone’s word for it. Find out for yourself by reading the actual Koran. One of the most reliable and recognized versions is the The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. Once you have a Koran and start to read it, take care to note the enormous differences between the half reportedly communicated to Mohammed in the beginning in Mecca, when he was weak and without followers, and the latter half, allegedly written after he returned from Medina with thousands of followers, the leader of a mighty military force. It is the post-Medina chapters of the Koran that are naturally favored by groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. They are not in fact perverting religious texts but skillfully applying those alleged revelations that best support their cause.

It is difficult to know how anyone, even the most bitter anti-Catholic, could truly have believed any of this! By itself, the biography of Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) makes a travesty of all these claims. In 1148, the Maimonides family pretended to convert to Islam when the Jews of Córdoba were told to become Muslims or leave, upon pain of death. Note that when most historians mention that in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the Jews of Spain to convert to Christianity or leave, they forget to mention that the Muslims had imposed the same demand in the twelfth century. Nor do they mention that many Jews who opted to leave Moorish Spain rather than pretend to convert settled in the Christian areas of northern Spain. In any event, after eleven years of posing as converts, the Maimonides family became so fearful of discovery that they fled to Morocco where they continued their deception. Thus, throughout his adult life, the most celebrated medieval Jewish thinker posed as a Muslim.64 His story clearly reveals that, as Richard Fletcher has put it so well, “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.

No, that’s not the style of these people,’ explained Maxy. ‘You shouldn’t think of these Bolsheviks as modern politicians. They were religious fanatics. Their Marxism was fanatical; their fervour was semi-Islamic; and they saw themselves as members of a secret military-religious order like the medieval Crusaders or the Knights Templar. They were ruthless, amoral and paranoid. They believed that millions would have to die to create their perfect world. Family, love and friendship were nothing compared to the holy grail. People died of gossip at Stalin’s court. For a man like Satinov, secrecy was everything.

My mom was a sayyed from the bloodline of the Prophet (which you know about now). In Iran, if you convert from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, it’s a capital crime. That means if they find you guilty in religious court, they kill you. But if you convert to something else, like Buddhism or something, then it’s not so bad. Probably because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are sister religions, and you always have the worst fights with your sister. And probably nothing happens if you’re just a six-year-old. Except if you say, “I’m a Christian now,” in your school, chances are the Committee will hear about it and raid your house, because if you’re a Christian now, then so are your parents probably. And the Committee does stuff way worse than killing you. When my sister walked out of her room and said she’d met Jesus, my mom knew all that. And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you. And she believed. When I tell the story in Oklahoma, this is the part where the grown-ups always interrupt me. They say, “Okay, but why did she convert?” Cause up to that point, I’ve told them about the house with the birds in the walls, all the villages my grandfather owned, all the gold, my mom’s own medical practice—all the amazing things she had that we don’t have anymore because she became a Christian. All the money she gave up, so we’re poor now. But I don’t have an answer for them. How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.” Why else would she believe it? It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life. My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise. If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side. That or Sima is insane. There’s no middle. You can’t say it’s a quirky thing she thinks sometimes, cause she went all the way with it. If it’s not true, she made a giant mistake. But she doesn’t think so. She had all that wealth, the love of all those people she helped in her clinic. They treated her like a queen. She was a sayyed. And she’s poor now. People spit on her on buses. She’s a refugee in places people hate refugees, with a husband who hits harder than a second-degree black belt because he’s a third-degree black belt. And she’ll tell you—it’s worth it. Jesus is better. It’s true. We can keep talking about it, keep grinding our teeth on why Sima converted, since it turned the fate of everybody in the story. It’s why we’re here hiding in Oklahoma. We can wonder and question and disagree. You can be certain she’s dead wrong. But you can’t make Sima agree with you. It’s true. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. This whole story hinges on it. Sima—who was such a fierce Muslim that she marched for the Revolution, who studied the Quran the way very few people do read the Bible and knew in her heart that it was true.

A deep disconnect exists between the feminists in the Western countries and the feminists in the Muslim-majority countries. Growing up as a first-generation Canadian in a fundamentalist Muslim family, I spent a lot of time being caught between those two worlds. At home I was taught that from the time I was nine years old, I needed to wear a hijab to protect myself from men who wanted to molest me. From my society, I learned that this is called victim blaming. At home I was taught that good, pure, clean girls wore hijab, and filthy, loose, despicable girls did not. From my society, I learned that was called slut shaming.

Just before Obama’s nationally televised campaign kickoff rally last Feb. 10, the candidate disinvited Wright from giving the public invocation. Wright explained: ‘When [Obama's] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli’ to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, ‘a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.’ According to Wright, Obama then told him, ‘You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.’ But privately, Obama and his family prayed with Wright just before the presidential announcement.

While George W. Bush was in office, the killing of women and babies in Gaza could be accepted even by the American administration as part of that holy war against Islam. The worst month in 2006 for the Gazans was September, when this new pattern in the Israeli policy became all too obvious. Almost daily, civilians were killed by the IDF: 2 September 2006 was one such day. Three citizens were killed and an entire family injured in Beit Hanoun. This was just the morning’s harvest; before the end of the day many more were killed. In September an average of eight Palestinians died every day in Israeli attacks on the Strip, many of them children. Hundreds were maimed, wounded and paralysed

Let me tell you a joke, Rora said. Mujo wakes up one day, after a long night of drinking, and asks himself what the meaning of life is. He goes to work, but realizes that is not what life is or should be. He decides to read some philosophy and for years studies everything from the old Greeks onward, but can't find the meaning of life. Maybe it's the family, he thinks, so he spends time with his wife, Fata, and the kids, but finds no meaning in that and so he leaves them. He thinks, Maybe helping others is the meaning of life, so he goes to medical school, graduates with flying colors, goes to Africa to cure malaria and transplants hearts, but cannot discover the meaning of life. He thinks, maybe it's the wealth, so he becomes a businessman, starts making money hand over fist, millions of dollars, buys everything there is to buy, but that is not what life is about. Then he turns to poverty and humility and such, so he gives everything away and begs on the streets, but still he cannot see what life is. He thinks maybe it is literature: he writes novel upon novel, but the more he writes the more obscure the meaning of life becomes. He turns to God, lives the life of a dervish, reads and contemplates the Holy Book of Islam - still, nothing. He studies Christianity, then Judaism, then Buddhism, then everything else - no meaning of life there. Finally, he hears about a guru living high up in the mountains somewhere in the East. The guru, they say, knows what the meaning of life is. So Mujo goes east, travels for years, walks roads, climbs the mountain, finds the stairs that lead up to the guru. He ascends the stairs, tens of thousands of them, nearly dies getting up there. At the top, there are millions of pilgrims, he has to wait for months to get to the guru. Eventually it is his turn, he goes to a place under a big tree, and there sits the naked guru, his legs crossed, his eyes closed, meditating, perfectly peaceful - he surely knows the meaning of life, Mujo says: I have dedicated my life to discovering the meaning of life and I have failed, so I have come to ask you humbly, O Master, to divulge the secret to me. The guru opens his eyes, looks at Mujo, and calmly says, My friend, life is a river. Mujo stares at him for a long time, cannot believe what he heard. What's life again? Mujo asks. Life is a river, the guru says. Mujo nods and says, You turd of turds, you goddamn stupid piece of shit, you motherfucking cocksucking asshole. I have wasted my life and come all this way for you to tell me that life is a fucking river. A river? Are you kidding me? That is the stupidest, emptiest fucking thing I have ever heard. Is that what you spent your life figuring out? And the guru says, What? It is not a river? Are you saying it is not a river?

Oil production affects gender relations by reducing the presence of women in the labor force. The failure of women to join the nonagricultural labor force has profound social consequences: it leads to higher fertility rates, less education for girls, and less female influence within the family. It also has far-reaching political consequences: when fewer women work outside the home, they are less likely to exchange information and overcome collective action problems; less likely to mobilize politically, and to lobby for expanded rights; and less likely to gain representation in government. This leaves oil-producing states with atypically strong patriarchal cultures and political institutions

Once he has recognized his invisible guide, a mystic sometimes decides to trace his own isnlld, to reveal his spiritual genealogy, that is, to disclose the "chain of transmission" culminating in his person and bear witness to the spiritual ascendancy which he invokes across the generations of mankind. He does neither more nor less than to designate by name the minds to whose family he is conscious of belonging. Read in the opposite order from their phenomenological emergence, these genealogies take on the appearance of true genealogies. Judged by the rules of _our historical criticism, the claim of these genealogies to truth seems highly precarious. Their relevance is to another "transhistoric truth," which cannot be regarded as inferior (because it is of a different order) to the material historic truth whose claim to truth, with the documentation at our disposal, is no less precarious. Suhrawardi traces the family tree of the IshrlqiyOn back to Hermes, ancestor of the Sages, (that Idris-Enoch of Islamic prophetology, whom Ibn rArabi calls the prophet of the Philosophers) ; from him are descended the Sages of Greece and Persia, who are followed by certain �ofis (Abo Yazid Bastlmi, Kharraqlni, I;Ialllj, and the choice seems particularly significant in view of what has been said above about the Uwaysis}, and all these branches converge in his own doctrine and school. This is not a history of philosophy in our sense of the term; but still less is it a mere fantasy.

[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.

In Pakistan and Iran, calls to raise the legal age of marriage are shot down as un-Islamic. Nearly every two seconds a girl under eighteen is married. ... Many Muslim-majority countries have enacted the marry-your-rapist law, which stipulates that if a girl is raped, she must marry her rapist because no one else will want her. She is used goods, her seal has been broken. It is important to remember that these ideas travel across borders. People with this mind-set do not magically change their minds when they move to another country. Girls all over the world are subjected to the same dehumanization, even if it is not the law in the new country they reside in. That is why it is essential for Western countries to protect their young girl citizens from the barbaric and archaic families and communities that engage in such atrocities.

„The Prophet had a universal soul. He had an oceanic soul. One that embraced all other Souls and our masters in our tradition talk about that. They talk about the magnanimity of the Prophet. The great souledness of our Prophet. That meant that he had the ability to relate to every single human being: as they are, where they are, to feel and suffer with them if they had harm and to feel joy with them if they had good and to be intent on their well-being in all things that they did. This is an incredible capacity. And as we grow spiritually this must be one of the gauges by which growth is measured. You are able to embrace people as a whole, not just your own group, not just your own family, not just your own country, but to embrace all people. And not just the good ones but also the bad ones as well. The more that we grow spiritually, the greater this quality becomes. That‘s why the community that embodies that becomes a mercy to the worlds like the Prophet himself. Then that community is a mercy for everyone around it. For the trees, for the animals, for all the people no matter who they are. For the homeless, for the down-and-out, for the people that have nothing. This is the way the community got to be. It‘s got to be a community with open arms, a community that is here to serve and to love. That‘s the way the Prophet was, isn‘t it? The Prophet who is the greatest thing that God created in creation, the greatest of all the human beings, of all the Jin, greater than all the angels. Greater than anything that God created. And we believe also that he is the first thing that God created, the light of our Prophet. “ (From the lecture „Community and Continuity“)

Seeking God: My Journey as a Christian It was a journey of nearly 15 years. I spent it searching for answers, longing to have a sense of intimacy & unshakeable belief & trust in God. I had spent a lifetime feeling like I could never be good enough for God, good enough for a church or good enough for my family. About a year before I came to Islam, I joined a large, nondenominational church. I hadn't been part of a church in about 10 years. I was touched & compelled by its musical programs at each service. I felt emotional, broken, & healed simultaneously. It was my first experience in church as an adult, & my first experience in "praising" or "worshipping" God. My entire history in church & with God had been based on guilt, shame, & confusion. I had carried around a lot of questions growing up, & they had always been avoided or ignored. They created

European statesmen of the First World War era did—to some extent—recognize the problem and its significance. As soon as they began to plan their annexation of the Middle East, Allied leaders recognized that Islam’s hold on the region was the main feature of the political landscape with which they would have to contend. Lord Kitchener, it will be remembered, initiated in 1914 a policy designed to bring the Moslem faith under Britain’s sway. When it looked as though that might not work—for the Sherif Hussein’s call to the Faithful in 1916 fell on deaf ears—Kitchener’s associates proposed instead to sponsor other loyalties (to a federation of Arabic-speaking peoples, or to the family of King Hussein, or to about-to-be-created countries such as Iraq) as a rival to pan-Islam. Indeed they framed the postwar Middle East settlement with that object (among others) in view.

Fundamentalism is the philosophy of the powerless, the conquered, the displaced and the dispossessed. Its spawning ground is the wreckage of political and military defeat, as Hebrew fundamentalism arose during the Babylonian captivity, as white Christian fundamentalism appeared in the American South during Reconstruction, as the notion of the Master Race evolved in Germany following World War I. In such desperate times, the vanquished race would perish without a doctrine that restored hope and pride. Islamic fundamentalism ascends from the same landscape of despair and possesses the same tremendous and potent appeal. What exactly is this despair? It is the despair of freedom. The dislocation and emasculation experienced by the individual cut free from the familiar and comforting structures of the tribe and the clan, the village and the family. It is the state of modern life. The

While the exact changes Muhammad made to this tradition are far too complex to discuss in detail here, it is sufficient to note that women in the Ummah were, for the first time, given the right both to inherit the property of their husbands and to keep their dowries as their own personal property throughout their marriage. Muhammad also forbade a husband to touch his wife’s dowry, forcing him instead to provide for his family from his own wealth. If the husband died, his wife would inherit a portion of his property; if he divorced her, the entire dowry was hers to take back to her family. As one would expect, Muhammad’s innovations did not sit well with the male members of his community. If women could no longer be considered property, men complained, not only would their wealth be drastically reduced, but their own meager inheritances would now have to be split with their sisters and daughters—members of the community who, they argued, did not share an equal burden with the men. Al-Tabari recounts how some of these men brought their grievances to Muhammad, asking, “How can one give the right of inheritance to women and children, who do not work and do not earn their living? Are they now going to inherit just like men who have worked to earn that money?” Muhammad’s response to these complaints was both unsympathetic and shockingly unyielding. “Those who disobey God and His Messenger, and who try to overstep the boundaries of this [inheritance] law will be thrown into Hell, where they will dwell forever, suffering the most shameful punishment” (4:14). If Muhammad’s male followers were disgruntled about the new inheritance laws, they must have been furious when, in a single revolutionary move, he both limited how many wives a man could marry and granted women the right to divorce their husbands.

Once the ruling elite stopped depending on the traditional economy for tax revenues, they no longer needed allies in that world. Even in totalitarian dictatorships, the power elite have to propitiate some domestic constituency. But in these oil-rich Muslim states, they could diverge from the masses of their people culturally without consequence. The people they did need to get along with were the agents of the world economy coming and going from their countries. Thus did “modernization” divide these “developing” societies into a “governing club” and “everyone else.” The governing club was not small. It included the technocracy, which was not a mere group but a whole social class. It also included the ruling elite who, in dynastic countries, were the royal family and its far-flung relatives and in the “republics” the ruling party and its apparatchik. Still, in any of these countries the governing club was a minority of the population as a whole, and the border between the governing classes and the masses grew ever more distinct.

Timeline of History Years Before the Present 13.5 billion Matter and energy appear. Beginning of physics. Atoms and molecules appear. Beginning of chemistry. 4.5 billion Formation of planet Earth. 3.8 billion Emergence of organisms. Beginning of biology. 6 million Last common grandmother of humans and chimpanzees. 2.5 million Evolution of the genus Homo in Africa. First stone tools. 2 million Humans spread from Africa to Eurasia. Evolution of different human species. 500,000 Neanderthals evolve in Europe and the Middle East. 300,000 Daily usage of fire. 200,000 Homo sapiens evolves in East Africa. 70,000 The Cognitive Revolution. Emergence of fictive language. Beginning of history. Sapiens spread out of Africa. 45,000 Sapiens settle Australia. Extinction of Australian megafauna. 30,000 Extinction of Neanderthals. 16,000 Sapiens settle America. Extinction of American megafauna. 13,000 Extinction of Homo floresiensis. Homo sapiens the only surviving human species. 12,000 The Agricultural Revolution. Domestication of plants and animals. Permanent settlements. 5,000 First kingdoms, script and money. Polytheistic religions. 4,250 First empire – the Akkadian Empire of Sargon. 2,500 Invention of coinage – a universal money. The Persian Empire – a universal political order ‘for the benefit of all humans’. Buddhism in India – a universal truth ‘to liberate all beings from suffering’. 2,000 Han Empire in China. Roman Empire in the Mediterranean. Christianity. 1,400 Islam. 500 The Scientific Revolution. Humankind admits its ignorance and begins to acquire unprecedented power. Europeans begin to conquer America and the oceans. The entire planet becomes a single historical arena. The rise of capitalism. 200 The Industrial Revolution. Family and community are replaced by state and market. Massive extinction of plants and animals. The Present Humans transcend the boundaries of planet Earth. Nuclear weapons threaten the survival of humankind. Organisms are increasingly shaped by intelligent design rather than natural selection. The Future Intelligent design becomes the basic principle of life? Homo sapiens is replaced by superhumans?

Al-Zawahiri, the son of an upper middle-class family who had grown up in Al-Maadi, an affluent Cairene suburb, joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of fifteen right after the 1967 defeat. He quickly moved from the Brotherhood's ordinary ranks to join (and create) independent, highly radicalized cells. Though he had no links to the murder of Sadat, he was imprisoned in the major incarceration waves that followed the crime, and was sentenced to three years. Having served his prison sentence, he emigrated to Saudi Arabia, then soon afterwards to Afghanistan to join in the fight against the Soviets. It was during that time that he met Dr Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian godfather of many militant Islamic groups and the founder of the Jihad Service Bureau, the vehicle that helped recruit thousands of Arabs to the Afghanistan War. Al-Zawahiri became a close friend and confidant of Azzam. After the Soviets' withdrawal from Afghanistan, he returned to Egypt where he became the effective leader of the Al-Jihad group. In 1992, Dr Al-Zawahiri joined his old Arab Afghan colleague, the Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden, in Sudan, and from there he continued to lead Al-Jihad, until its merger with Al-Qaeda in 1998. Dr Al-Zawahiri presented his thinking and rationale for ‘jihad by all means’ in his book Knights under the Prophet's Banner.38

Why Trump, many wondered, including many evangelicals themselves. For decades, the Religious Right had been kindling fear in the hearts of American Christians. It was a tried-and-true recipe for their own success. Communism, secular humanism, feminism, multilateralism, Islamic terrorism, and the erosion of religious freedom—evangelical leaders had rallied support by mobilizing followers to fight battles on which the fate of the nation, and their own families, seemed to hinge. Leaders of the Religious Right had been amping up their rhetoric over the course of the Obama administration. The first African American president, the sea change in LGBTQ rights, the apparent erosion of religious freedom—coupled with looming demographic changes and the declining religious loyalty of their own children—heightened the sense of dread among white evangelicals. But in truth, evangelical leaders had been perfecting this pitch for nearly fifty years. Evangelicals were looking for a protector, an aggressive, heroic, manly man, someone who wasn’t restrained by political correctness or feminine virtues, someone who would break the rules for the right cause. Try as they might—and they did try—no other candidate could measure up to Donald Trump when it came to flaunting an aggressive, militant masculinity. He became, in the words of his religious biographers, “the ultimate fighting champion for evangelicals.” 6

The tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters—about one-third—believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure—which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him.

The town of Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip, like all the other towns and villages in the West Bank and the Strip, was placed under military curfew for three days. This short period was enough for the army to perform its routine devastation. Muhammad Ahmad al-Astal, who was then twenty-four years old, recalled how the soldiers burst into the house where his friends usually gathered, about ten Palestinian men in all. The soldiers took four of them to another room. He remained with three other members of the family. Two of them were taken by the soldiers to a corner of the room and beaten with rifle stocks; they were also punched, slapped and kicked. He and another family member were ordered to empty the cupboard of its contents, clothing and other household items. In his own words: ‘The soldiers called me over, slapped me on the face and told me, ‘You are Hamas’. I returned to empty the cupboard but I was called over again. This time they told me, ‘You are Islamic Jihad’, and slapped me again.’ There was a third round of abuse in which he was told, ‘You are PLO’. Another man in the room was treated in a similar way. Then they were both summoned: ‘one soldier held me by the neck and banged our heads together’. It turned out that in the next room the same abuse was taking place and then they were united with two men from the other room and ordered to stand facing the wall with their hands up in the air: ‘the soldiers gave us back our ID cards to hold up in the air and told us to remain like this’. After half an hour the older members of the family told them the soldiers had left

The Koran is empathetic about the rights of other religions to practice their own beliefs. It unequivocally condemns attacks on civilians as a violation of Islam. It states that suicide, of any type, is an abomination. The tactic of suicide bombing, equated by many of the new atheists with Islam, did not arise from the Muslim world. This kind of terror, in fact, has its roots in radical Western ideologies, especially Leninism, not religion. And it was the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist group that draws its support from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka, which invented the suicide vest for their May 1991 suicide assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Suicide bombing is what you do when you do not have artillery or planes or missiles and you want to create maximum terror for an occupying power. It was used by secular anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They bequeathed to us the first version of the car bomb: a horse-drawn wagon laden with explosives that was ignited on September 16, 1920, on Wall Street. The attack was carried out by Mario Buda, an Italian immigrant, in protest over the arrest of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. It left 40 people dead and wounded more than 200. Suicide bombing was adopted later by Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and Hamas. But even in the Middle East, suicide bombing is not restricted to Muslims. In Lebanon during the suicide attacks in the 1980s against French, American and Israeli targets, only eight suicide bombings were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were the work of communists and socialists. Three were carried out by Christians.

Rather, the issue is whether it is right to have a mosque and Islamic center in virtually the exact spot where so many Americans were killed in the name of Islamic holy war. I don’t think it is right, any more than I would support the idea of a neo-Nazi recruiting center at Auschwitz. My sympathies in this case are not with religiously deprived Muslims, but rather with Debra Burlingame, a spokesperson for a 9/11 victims group. “Barack Obama has abandoned America at the place where America’s heart was broken nine years ago,” she said.5 Some supporters of the mosque, such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, clearly missed the distinction being made here between the right to worship and how and where that right is exercised. Fareed Zakaria, writer and CNN host, recognizes the distinction; even so, he argues in favor of the mosque on the grounds that the folks building it are traditional Muslims who have condemned terrorism.6 Still, it’s not clear why these moderate Muslims disregarded the sentiments of the 9/11 victims’ families and decided on a site so close to Ground Zero. Undoubtedly radical Muslims around the world will view the mosque as a kind of triumphal monument. There is historical precedent for this. Muslims have a long tradition of building monuments to commemorate triumphs over adversaries, as when they built the Dome of the Rock on the site of Solomon’s Temple, or when Mehmet the Conqueror rode his horse into the Byzantine church Hagia Sophia and declared that it would be turned into a mosque. Many Americans may not know this history, but the radical Muslims do, and Obama does as well. The radical Muslims would like the Ground Zero mosque built so it can stand as an enduring symbol of resistance to American power, and President Obama evidently agrees with them.

I see a direct connection between the Fuenta Magna Bowl and Ogma, I believe the former is an authentic yet misplaced artifact that has its origins in the Middle East as the Irish/Celtic mythology as well. Ogma -being the god/originator of speech and language- carries the syllable of 'Og' in his name (according to a renowned authority on Irish Mythology, James Swagger) which signals some process of initiation through which other members could join into this culture. His family connections were confused (according to, The Dictionary Of Mythology) but it is said that he was the brother of Dagda and Lugh; and Dagda owned a magical cauldron known as Undry, which was always full and used to satisfy his enormous appetite. The [Tales depict Dagda as a figure of immense power, armed with a magic club to kill nine men with one blow]. This symbolism shows another remarkable link, however, to ancient Egypt with the Nine Bows representing its enemies. With Richard Cassaro's work, we now know the significance of the Godself icon which we see on the Fuenta Magna Bowl; and yet my observation and surprise here lies in the fact that the Godself icon could simply refer to Dagda being a figure of immense power, but what is more astounding is when I found that the Latin word caldaria (whence 'cauldron' was taken) means a 'cooking pot'. This is indeed amazing, but that's not all! This Latin word has its etymological roots in the Semitic languages, where the Old Babylonian word 'kid' meaning 'to cut/soften/dissolve' got preserved into Arabic with the same meaning as well and even a new word got derived therefrom: 'kidr'; which literally means a 'cooking pot'. It also happens to refer to one of God's names (in Islam) with the meaning of: Almighty. Moreover, the word 'Undry' could be looked at as if it were composed of two syllables: Un and Dry, with 'Un' signaling a continuous action in present and 'Dry' meaning 'to generate' and 'pour out' in the Semitic language.

Jkt 20/12/2012 Bulan ini bulan desember,spt juga desember thn2 sebelumnya pada bulan ini umat kristiani mempunyai hari besar semacam tradisi tahunan yaitu yg di sebut "Natal" atau Natale (italia) atau Christmas,dan sebagai penganut kirstiani sejak lahir saya selalu menikmati bulan2 desember spt ini tiap tiap tahunnya,saya selalu menikmatinya didalam hati saya,apalagi saat saya masih kanak kanak dulu,karena natal identik dengan hadiah untuk anak2,desember adalah menjadi bulan yg paling saya tunggu2 karena pada bulan itu akan ada sebuah kado yang menunggu saya pd bulan itu,akan ada gemerlap cahaya lampu pohon dan hiasan hiasan natal lainnya,saya akan memakai baju baru juga saya akan tampil dipanggung gereja memainkan fragmen dan drama natal bersama anak2 lainnya yang juga memakai baju baru yg menambah kesan natal semakin saya tunggu, Saya lahir di Indonesia saya tinggal di Indonesia saya bersekolah di Indonesia,negara yg mempunyai beragam agama yg mana agama2 itupun mempunyai Hari besar nya masing2,sejak masih kanak2 saya selalu terharu ketika melihat org lain berdoa entah dengan memakai tata cara agama apa mereka berdoa yg jelas saya selalu merasa ada suatu hal yg berbeda dlm hati saya ketika melihat org berdoa itu,saya bersahabat dgn beberapa teman saya orang2 keturunan yg beragama Budha,sy juga punya beberapa sahabat org Bali dan keturunan India yg beragama Hindu,walaupun jumlah mereka tidak sebanyak sahabat2 saya dari kaum Muslim,Muslim adalah mayoritas di negri ini otomatis muslimlah yg hampir 90% dari mereka setiap harinya berinteraksi dengan saya, lebih dalam lagi saya pun mempunyai banyak family sedarah dari kakek saya yg beragama muslim,tidak heran kalau sy pun menikmati hari raya Idul fitri,dan tidak jauh berbeda dengan natal momen Lebaran adalah menjadi hari yg saya tunggu2 juga, karena setiap tahunnya saya akan berkumpul dgn sanak family dan kerabat merasakan ketupat lebaran dan opor ayamnya juga saya bisa meminta maaf dan bersalaman dengan orang yg pernah bertengkar dengan saya dengan ucapan minal aidin walfaidzin,luar biasa hubungan batin saya dengan muslim sepertinya suatu hal yg tidak bisa terpisahkan,tetapi diluar daripada itu semua terjadi dilema dalam hidup saya ketika saya menyaksikan hal2 lain yg "mengusik mesranya hubungan saya dengan muslim,di saat yg sama berita di media masa sebegitu hebatnya memberitakan hal yang menumbuhkan opini2 perpecahan yang semakin hari semakin jauh dari kata "damai" dimana pandangan yg berbeda tentang Tuhan adalah menjadi alasan untuk pendidikan perang! sehingga seolah olah memaksa manusia siaga satu dan siap untuk membenci saat ada kaum yg berbeda dengan mereka,saya muak dengan ini, Keperdulian saya dgn keharmonisan keduanya Membuat saya tertarik utk "mencari tau tentang isi dari kedua agama ini,dgn hati yg bertanya tanya ada apa sebenarnya yg terjadi di dalamnya?,dengan segala keterbatasan saya bertahun tahun saya mencoba mencari titik temu antara perbedaan dan persamaan antara kristen dan islam,rasa ingin tau saya yg membuat saya sedikit demi sedikit menggali keduanya mulai dari sisi sejarah,segi terminologi,sisi tafsir2 atau doktrin (aqidah) nya,dgn mencari sumber2 yg akurat atau dengan cara bertanya,berdiskusi dll,sy tidak terlalu tau apa tujuan dan visi saya tapi yg jelas saya tertarik untuk mengetahuinya dan kadang saya lelah!saya merasa terlalu jauh memikirkan ini semua,saya merasa agama yg seharusnya memproduksi kedamaian dan cinta thd sesama malah membuat saya pusing dan muak karna saya koq malah pusing memikirkan konflik2 dan benturan2 yg justru disebabkan oleh agama itu sendiri Seiring berjalannya waktu pemahaman saya terhadap natal dan bulan desember itupun mulai terpisah,saya sudah mempunyai pemahaman sendiri mengenai natal,Desember hanyalah salah satu bulan dari 12 bulan yg ada,tetapi damai natal itu sendiri harus berada dalam sanubari dan jiwa dan roh saya setiap hari, "Selamat Natal Damai Selalu Beserta Kita Semua" Amien.........

When we made up our minds to leave for Medina,” one emigrant would remember, “three of us arranged to meet in the morning at the thorn trees of Adat,” about six miles outside Mecca. “We agreed that if one of us failed to appear, that would mean that he had been kept back by force, and the other two should go on without him.” Only two of them reached Adat. The third was intercepted halfway there by one of his uncles, accompanied by abu-Jahl, who told him that his mother had vowed she would neither comb her hair nor take shelter from the sun until she had seen him again. On the way back, they pushed him to the ground, tied him up, and forced him to recant islam. This was how it should be done, the uncle declared: “Oh men of Mecca, deal with your fools as we have dealt with this fool of ours.” Women were not dealt with much more kindly. Umm Salama, who was later to become Muhammad’s fourth wife after she was widowed, told how her kinsmen were enraged when they saw her setting out by camel with her then husband and their infant son. “You can do as you like,” they told her husband, “but don’t think we will let you take our kinswoman away.” “They snatched the camel’s rope from my husband’s hand and took me from him,” she remembered. Then to make matters worse, her in-laws turned up, and a tussle developed over who would take custody of the child she was cradling in her arms—her family or her husband’s family. “We cannot leave the boy with you now that you have torn his mother from our kinsman,” her in-laws declared, and to her horror, both sides “dragged at my little boy between them until they dislocated his shoulder.” In the end, her husband’s family took the child, Umm Salama’s family took her, and her husband left alone for Medina. “Thus was I separated from both my husband and my son,” she would say. There was nothing she could do but “sit in the valley every day and weep” until both families finally relented. “Then I saddled my camel and took my son in my arms, and set forth for my husband in Medina. Not a soul was with me.

Les auteurs musulmans considèrent la personnalité comme le produit de la constitution innée modifiée par les facteurs de l’environnement. La constitution innée inclue l’hérédité physique et psychologique, la combinaison des quatre éléments, c’est-à-dire le feu, l’air, l’eau, et la terre, dans leurs mode de chaud, sec, froid, et humide, et la correspondance de cette combinaison avec les signes du zodiaque et les différentes planètes. C’est une question très complexe en raison du nombre indéfini de permutations possibles. La source de confusion pour les esprits modernes vient du matérialisme ambiant qui les pousse à tout prendre au pied de la lettre et à oublier que l’intention derrière les quatre éléments n’a jamais été de les identifier avec leurs équivalents familiers dans le monde visible. S’ils sont appelés feu, air, eau et terre, c’est simplement pour indiquer une correspondance entre eux et les éléments visibles. Ces quatre éléments sont à l’origine de toute matière et eux-mêmes originaires d’un principe commun, l’Hylé indifférencié (hayûlâ, c’est-à-dire la matière primordiale.) Il en est de même de la correspondance entre les sept cieux et les sept planètes. Chaque ciel est désigné par le nom de la planète qui lui correspond le mieux, mais les cieux ne peuvent nullement être identifiés avec les orbites de ces planètes, car les planètes sont dans le ciel visible alors que les cieux sont dans le domaine subtile et invisible. Ces termes ne sont pris dans un sens littéral que si on perd de vue la correspondance entre les différents degrés, ou dimensions, de l’existence. Ces correspondances et leurs implications pour la médecine, la psychologie et les autres sciences, furent comprises par de nombreuses civilisations antérieures à l’islam, et ne sont pas spécifiquement islamiques. Les musulmans, qu’ils fussent savants, religieux, philosophes ou soufis, les percevaient comme possédant une base de vérité et les adoptèrent avec quelques différences mineures selon les écoles. Un tel point de vue est néanmoins devenu si étranger à la mentalité d’aujourd’hui, et il est si peu probable qu’elle présente un intérêt en pratique, que nous n’en poursuivrons pas l’étude ici.

If Mamaw's second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to the neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters--about one-third--believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure--which means that a majority of white conservatives aren't certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor--which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up; His accent--clean, perfect, neutral--is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they're frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right--adversity familiar to many of us--but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we're not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren't. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we're lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn't be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it--not because we think she's wrong, but because we know she's right.

Islam tells us that on the unappealable Day of Judgment, all who have perpetrated images of living things will reawaken with their works, and will be ordered to blow life into them, and they will fail, and they and their works will be cast into the fires of punishment. As a child, I knew that horror of the spectral duplication or multiplication of reality, but mine would come as I stood before large mirrors. As soon as it began to grow dark outside, the constant, infallible functioning of mirrors, the way they followed my every movement, their cosmic pantomime, would seem eerie to me. One of my insistent pleas to God and my guardian angel was that I not dream of mirrors; I recall clearly that I would keep one eye on them uneasily. I feared sometimes that they would begin to veer off from reality; other times, that I would see my face in them disfigured by strange misfortunes. I have learned that this horror is monstrously abroad in the world again. The story is quite simple, and terribly unpleasant. In 1927, I met a grave young woman, first by telephone (because Julia began as a voice without a name or face) and then on a corner at nightfall. Her eyes were alarmingly large, her hair jet black and straight, her figure severe. She was the granddaughter and greatgranddaughter of Federalists, as I was the grandson and great-grandson of Unitarians,* but that ancient discord between our lineages was, for us, a bond, a fuller possession of our homeland. She lived with her family in a big run-down high-ceiling'd house, in the resentment and savorlessness of genteel poverty. In the afternoons— only very rarely at night—we would go out walking through her neighbor-hood, which was Balvanera.* We would stroll along beside the high blank wall of the railway yard; once we walked down Sarmien to all the way to the cleared grounds of the Parque Centenario.*Between us there was neither love itself nor the fiction of love; I sensed in her an intensity that was utterly unlike the intensity of eroticism, and I feared it. In order to forge an intimacy with women, one often tells them about true or apocryphal things that happened in one's youth; I must have told her at some point about my horror of mirrors, and so in 1928 I must have planted the hallucination that was to flower in 1931. Now I have just learned that she has gone insane, and that in her room all the mirrors are covered, because she sees my reflection in them— usurping her own—and she trembles and cannot speak, and says that I am magically following her, watching her, stalking her. What dreadful bondage, the bondage of my face—or one of my former faces. Its odious fate makes me odious as well, but I don't care anymore.

The Big Picture: From Abraham to Armageddon Down through the ages, the sons of Jacob have survived trials, persecution, and thousands of years in exile from their homeland. The Scriptures foretold the dispersion of the Jews and also of their regathering toward the end of the age. After a long absence from a country left in desolation, the Jews have come home to the land that God promised to Abraham: “…a land that has recovered from war, whose people were gathered from many nations to the mountains of Israel, which had long been desolate. They had been brought out from the nations, and now all of them live in safety.” (Ezekiel 38:8). The other branch of Abraham’s family—the sons of Ishmael— are the Islamic Arabs that inhabit the lands surrounding Israel. Ishmael’s descendants epitomize the spirit and temperament that the Bible predicted more than three millennia ago: “…his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers” (Genesis 16:12). The Prophet Ezekiel tells us that these same sons of Ishmael will be among the enemies who seek to destroy Israel in the end times: “And thou shalt come up against my people of Israel, as a cloud to cover the land; it shall be in the latter days, and I will bring thee against my land…” (Ezekiel 38:16). The day is soon coming when Ishmael’s descendants will unite as one: “…they receive authority for one hour as kings with the beast.” Their ultimate purpose being the fulfillment of a long-held dream: the annihilation of Israel. Muslims have been taught for centuries that the Last Day will not come until they wage a final war against the Jews and rid the world of them once and for all. They believe that only after this is accomplished will Muslims enjoy a golden age of peace, justice, and worldwide Islamic rule. However, the Bible tells us that God has other plans: Before Israel can be destroyed He is going to intervene, and bring to ruin those who seek her destruction. On that day, multitudes of Jews will realize that Jesus is Messiah, and many Muslims will realize that they have made a fateful mistake. Though most are unaware, we, today, are witnessing the fruition of seeds that were planted nearly four thousand years ago with the birth of Abraham’s sons. God promised Abraham that He would make great nations of both Isaac and Ishmael. To be sure, one would be hard pressed to argue that He did not. The Jewish and Arabic peoples have had an immeasurable impact on the world and can now be found at center stage in the arena of world politics and conflict. Thus, the history of mankind will reach its pinnacle, essentially where it began, in a region literally located at the center of the globe; more specifically, Israel and the nations that surround her.

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.

I’m the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at. I choke up when I hear Lee Greenwood’s cheesy anthem “Proud to Be an American.” When I was sixteen, I vowed that every time I met a veteran, I would go out of my way to shake his or her hand, even if I had to awkwardly interject to do so. To this day, I refuse to watch Saving Private Ryan around anyone but my closest friends, because I can’t stop from crying during the final scene. Mamaw and Papaw taught me that we live in the best and greatest country on earth. This fact gave meaning to my childhood. Whenever times were tough—when I felt overwhelmed by the drama and the tumult of my youth—I knew that better days were ahead because I lived in a country that allowed me to make the good choices that others hadn’t. When I think today about my life and how genuinely incredible it is—a gorgeous, kind, brilliant life partner; the financial security that I dreamed about as a child; great friends and exciting new experiences—I feel overwhelming appreciation for these United States. I know it’s corny, but it’s the way I feel. If Mamaw’s second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters—about one-third—believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure—which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.

Yet Najran was divided. Those in favor of accepting Islam argued that Muhammad was clearly the Paraclete or Comforter whose arrival Jesus had foretold in the Gospels. Those against maintained that since the Paraclete was said to have sons, and Muhammad had no son, it could not possibly be he. Finally they decided to send a delegation to Medina to resolve the matter directly with Muhammad in the time-honored manner of public debate. But Muhammad preempted the need for debate. In a piece of consummate theatricality, he came out to meet the delegation without his usual bevy of counselors. Instead, only his blood family were with him: Ali and Fatima, and their sons, Hasan and Hussein. He didn’t say a word. Instead, slowly and deliberately, in full view of all, he took hold of the hem of his cloak and spread it high and wide so that it covered the heads of his small family. They were the ones he sheltered under his cloak, he was saying. They were the ones he wrapped around himself. They were his nearest and dearest, the Ahl al-Bayt, the People of the House of Muhammad—or as the Shia would later call them, the People of the Cloak. It was a brilliantly calculated gesture. Arabian Christian tradition had it that Adam had received a vision of a brilliant light surrounded by four other lights and had been told by God that these were his prophetic descendants. Muhammad had certainly heard of this tradition and knew that the moment the Najran Christians saw him spread his cloak over the four members of his family, they would be convinced that he was another Adam, the one whose coming Jesus had prophesied. Indeed, they accepted Islam on the spot.

To put leaders in their proper place is to think honorably of them and their families, to support their policies and to advise them, and not to bring them down because of their mistakes or errors, which may affect public interest and national stability. However, we are never to obey of aid them in unjust or sinful acts.

Rather, the society was wide open to popular Western culture at the very time when it was being drawn towards conservatism and increased religiosity. The Cairene and Alexandrian middle-class family would watch the afternoon lesson of Sheikh Al-Sharaawi only to switch channels later to watch the evening episode of Dallas or Dynasty, and later Grey's Anatomy or Desperate Housewives. As large segments of society became participants in the new consumerist waves,13 they were also presented with archaic, debilitated views of ‘a return to Islam’.

economic aspect of Islamism penetrated a number of the economy's industrial and service sectors. For example, eight of the twenty richest families in Egypt throughout the 1990s and 2000s, with vast and interconnected equity stakes across the country's private sector, had direct links to either the Muslim Brotherhood or other Salafist groups.52