Medina City Quotes

Being the Novelist-in-Residence at a riad hotel in the kasbah of an Arabic North African city is a lot like trying to write one’s memoirs on shreds of napkins in a nuthouse.

The abode of the Midianites is to be looked for near the place where the city of Medina is today. This name Medina may likely be a remnant of the habitation of the Midianites there. The identification of Midian and Medina may be further substantiated by the name of the Midianite priest, Jethro. The old Arabian name of Medina is Yathrib.

Those bastards have absolutely no regard for history! Why not just bomb the whole city and be done with it?

Manhattan is basically this island in New York, where all the cool stuff is located.

We have welcomed fundamentalist preachers into our cities and stood idly by as thousands of disaffected young people have been radicalized by their rantings. Worse, we have made almost not attempt to counter the proselytizing of the Medina Muslims. If we continue this policy of nonintervention in the culture war, we will never extricate ourselves from the actual battlefield. For we cannot fight an ideology solely with air strikes and drones or even boots on the ground. We need to fight it with ideas – with better ideas, with positive ideas. We need to fight it with an alternative vision.

Jill was born into an inner-city home. Her father began having sex with Jill and her sister during their preschool years. Her mother was institutionalized twice because of what used to be termed “nervous breakdowns.” When Jill was 7 years old, her agitated dad called a family meeting in the living room. In front of the whole clan, he put a handgun to his head, said, “You drove me to this,” and then blew his brains out. The mother’s mental condition continued to deteriorate, and she revolved in and out of mental hospitals for years. When Mom was home, she would beat Jill. Beginning in her early teens, Jill was forced to work outside the home to help make ends meet. As Jill got older, we would have expected to see deep psychiatric scars, severe emotional damage, drugs, maybe even a pregnancy or two. Instead, Jill developed into a charming and quite popular young woman at school. She became a talented singer, an honor student, and president of her high-school class. By every measure, she was emotionally well-adjusted and seemingly unscathed by the awful circumstances of her childhood. Her story, published in a leading psychiatric journal, illustrates the unevenness of the human response to stress. Psychiatrists long have observed that some people are more tolerant of stress than others.

Alas! We really do not choose the ending of a journey, especially journeys that transforn1 our lives. For women, security would never return to the city. No more than dreams, can a journey back in time change the fact that the Medina of women would be forever frozen in its violent posture. From then on, women would have to walk the streets of uncaring, unsafe cities, ever watchful, wrapped in their hijab. The veil, which was intended to protect them from violence in the street, would accompany them for centuries, whatever the security situation of the city. For them, peace would never return. Muslim women were to display their hijab everywhere, the vestige of a civil war that would never come to an end.

Ansar is an Arabic term that means helpers or supporters. They were the citizens of Medina who helped Prophet Mohammed upon His arrival to the Holy city. While 'Hussain' is a derivation of 'Hassan' that means 'GOOD' (I also owe this one to Khaled Hosseini). That's how my favorite character in my debut novel 'When Strangers meet..' gets his name... HUSSAIN ANSARI, because he is the one who helps Jai realize the truth in the story and inspires his son, Arshad, to have FAITH in Allah.

The destruction of old Mecca goes hand in hand with the ban on non-Muslims entering the city, as well as the center of Medina. Both are attempts to cleanse the city of historical complexity. The road signs on the freeway into Mecca spell it out: “Muslims Only.

had to demonstrate that I had mastered the routes only a resident of the medina, the ancient city, would know. If I could not master the alleys, I would be forever hounded by the hawkers and illicit guides who preyed upon the unsuspecting, the weak, the lost, the tourists.

There was a particular hostility to anything that smacked of price-fixing. One much-repeated story held that the Prophet himself had refused to force merchants to lower prices during a shortage in the city of Medina, on the grounds that doing so would be sacrilegious, since, in a free-market situation, “prices depend on the will of God.”82 Most legal scholars interpreted Mohammed’s decision to mean that any government interference in market mechanisms should be considered similarly sacrilegious, since markets were designed by God to regulate themselves.

It was hard to believe it had finally come down to the nuking of New York City. A virus had managed to bring about what decades of the Cold War and terrorist threats could not accomplish. The United States would never be the same. A major city had been destroyed. Millions were dead.

I would be happy just about anywhere, as long as I can be surrounded by tall trees and maybe a lake or river with majestic mountains in the background. I always admired how they lived during the frontier times. You could find yourself a nice spot and build your dream home without worrying about paying rent or a mortgage. Simpler times. I think what’s happening now could possibly lead to something like that happening, again. We’re already experiencing a breakdown in government, as far as New York City goes. If more cities become infected elsewhere, who knows how things will turn out?

After the loss of so much of the learning of the past, the destruction of manuscripts and the slaughter of scholars, it was more important to recover what had been lost than to inaugurate more change. Because the Mongol military code made no provision for civil society, the ulama continued to govern the lives of the faithful, and their influence tended to be conservative. Where Sufis such as Rumi believed that all religions were valid, by the fourteenth century the ulama had transformed the pluralism of the Quran into a hard communalism, which saw other traditions as irrelevant relics of the past. Non-Muslims were forbidden now to visit the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and it became a capital offence to make insulting remarks about the Prophet Muhammad. The trauma of the invasions had, not surprisingly, made Muslims feel insecure. Foreigners were not only suspect; they could be as lethal as the Mongols.

It is a nightmare come true, as the city becomes Hell on Earth.

The officers of the 26th Precinct had their hands full. The night was starting out to be quite busy. What they did not realize is that it was only the beginning. Things were about to get worse and not just for them, but for the entire city.

We had a major incident last night, one that could change the future of New York City forever.

When I was in the Army, I was trained to survive, not to wait to die. Make no mistake. I am leaving this city one way or another.

Who cares? My balls are wet! The city is going to shit and you guys are yapping about this crap, as if we don’t have a worry in the world.

I can’t believe this is happening. My best friend is dead. Zombies are real??? The whole city is going to burn and we’re going to die!

If it gets me out of this city, I am up for mostly anything. Wait. Maybe I should rephrase that. I almost forgot I’m talking to your wise ass.

I’ll be damned if I am getting trapped in another borough of this city!

In a way, he knew it would be better if she died a quick painless death. It would be easier for him because, otherwise, how else could he justify leaving the city without finding her, first?

Many businesses had closed down due to the emergency situation that went on in the city. People were strongly advised to remain in their homes, until the situation could be contained.

The city was starting to resemble a ghost town. If you saw anyone out on the streets, chances are they were probably infected. The majority of fast infected had spread out to the south and north, which happened to be where they were heading. In between, it was mainly the slower zombies that ruled.

They knew if they remained in the city for much longer, they would be stuck and eventually run out of food. Their only hope of survival was to leave the city and meet up with the others.

Traffic was congested in both directions due to the recent destruction of the bridges and the many abandoned cars, which left fewer options for those still trying desperately to flee the city and finding themselves unable to go anywhere. The vehicle occupants were easy pickings for the increasing number of infected on the roadway.

What about Jerusalem? When discussing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, pundits and politicians often tell us that Jerusalem is one of the holy cities of Islam—indeed, its third holiest city, right after Mecca and Medina. But in reality, the Islamic claim to Jerusalem is extremely tenuous, based only on a legendary journey of Muhammad—a journey that is at best a dream and at worst a fabrication. The Koran refers to this journey only obliquely and in just one place; Islamic tradition fills in the details and connects Jerusalem with the words of the Koran. But the Koran itself never mentions Jerusalem even once—an exceptionally inconvenient fact for Muslims who claim that the Palestinians must have a share of Jerusalem because the city is sacred to Islam. Muhammad’s famous Night Journey is the basis of the Islamic claim to Jerusalem. The Koran’s sole reference to this journey appears in the first verse of sura 17, which says that Allah took Muhammad from “the Sacred Mosque” in Mecca “to the farthest [al-aqsa] Mosque.” There was no mosque in Jerusalem at this time, so the “farthest” mosque probably wasn’t really the one that now bears that name in Jerusalem, the Al-Aqsa mosque located on the Temple Mount. Nevertheless, Islamic tradition is firm that this mosque was in Jerusalem.

Like cities back on Earth where era had built on era had built on the era before, the systems of Medina were shaped by long-forgotten forces. The thinking behind each decision was lost now in a tangle of database hierarchies and complex reference structures. Finding something interesting was easy. It was all interesting on some level. Finding some particular piece of information—and knowing whether it was the most recent or complete version of the data—was very, very difficult.

Wahabism is the dominant form of Islam found in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and is also popular in Egypt, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Wahabists control the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, giving Wahabists great influence in the Muslim world. More important are the extensive oil fields of Saudi Arabia which have been used to fund the promotion of Islam’s most radical sect across the world. Saudi oil funds have built most of the Muslim Mosques in the western world since 1975. More than 1,500 mosques across the globe were built from Saudi petro funds over the last 50 years.

When Mohammed conquered Medina, the booty included the public beheading of eight hundred men and boys and the enslavement of their girls and women. He destroyed the last remaining Jewish tribe of Qurayzah at the Jewish city of Khaibar.

Excursion from marrakech offers the possibilty to discover Morocco with all his rich history from his amazing Sahara deserts, imperial cities ( MARRAKECH MEKNES FES AND RABAT ) ancient medinas, thousands kabah, unesco heritage, gorges and landscaps until his long coasts from both sides medeteranien and atlantic ocean.

Grateful for their generosity, Muhammad orders the land to be leveled, the graves dug up, and the palm trees cut down for timber to build a modest home. He envisions a courtyard roofed in palm leaves, with living quarters made of wood and mud lining the walls. But this will be more than a home. This converted drying-ground and cemetery will serve as the first masjid, or mosque, of a new kind of community, one so revolutionary that many years later, when Muslim scholars seek to establish a distinctly Islamic calendar, they will begin not with the birth of the Prophet, nor with the onset of Revelation, but with the year Muhammad and his band of Emigrants came to this small federation of villages to start a new society. That year, 622 C.E., will forever be known as Year 1 A.H. (After Hijra); and the oasis that for centuries had been called Yathrib will henceforth be celebrated as Medinat an-Nabi: “The City of the Prophet,” or more simply, Medina. There

Mohammed WAS NURSED BY THE Jewish SPIRIT; fleeing from Mecca, where his preaching had aroused against him the Arabs who were true to old traditions, he sought refuge at Medina, the Jewish city, and as the apostles found their first adherents among the Hellenic proselytes, so he found his first disciples among the Judaizing Arabs.

UBIQUITOUS SCOTS As the British Empire grew, Scots found themselves scattered to the corners of the Earth – an experience which often profoundly changed them. Few changed as much as Thomas Keith. Born in Edinburgh, he enlisted in the 78th (Highlanders) Regiment of Foot and was sent to Egypt as part of the Alexandria expedition of 1807. Captured near Rosetta, he was bought as a slave by Ahmad Aga, and he and his compatriot, William Thompson, decided to convert to Islam. Thomas became Ibrahim Aga and William, Osman. After fighting a duel with an Egyptian soldier, Thomas sought the protection of the wife of a powerful figure, Muhammad Ali Pasha, and she sent him into the service of her son, Tusun Pasha. In 1811 he joined an expedition to fight the Wahhabis of what is now Saudi Arabia, and four years later he was appointed Acting Governor of the holy city of Medina, the burial place of the Prophet Mohammed.

The Israelis feel threatened by the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons. It is not just Iran’s potential to rival their own arsenal and wipe out Israel with just one bomb: if Iran were to get the bomb, then the Arab countries would probably panic and attempt to get theirs as well. The Saudis, for example, fear that the ayatollahs want to dominate the region, bring all the Shia Arabs under their guidance, and even have designs on controlling the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. A nuclear-armed Iran would be the regional superpower par excellence, and to counter this danger the Saudis would probably try to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan (with whom they have close ties). Egypt and Turkey might follow suit.

Al-Wahhab allied with Muhammed bin Saud, the founder of the state of Saudi Arabia, and provided religious and ideological backing to the newly formed state.  The Wahhabi Saudi troops took advantage of the chaos of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I to seize control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. It’s probably safe to say that the Shia will never forgive the Wahhabis for the zealotry they pursued upon taking the cities, which included obliterating centuries-old sacred Shia shrines and claiming that they were used to worship the Imams as gods and were therefore heretical.  In the 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.  In addition, they alienated Shia from governance and oppressed them throughout the kingdom[26].  This vandalism has been repeated time and time again by Wahhabis in other areas as well, including the much-publicized destruction of the Buddha statues of the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001[27] and the outbreak of violence in 2013 around the city of Timbuktu, where Wahhabi fundamentalists  destroyed holy artifacts and burned a priceless library of manuscripts before fleeing the arrival of French troops[28]. While the establishment of the Wahhabi school of thought created an intellectual form of anti-Shia ideology, it is probable that this philosophy would have remained isolated in the political backwater of the Nejd Sultanate (the core of modern Saudi Arabia) if not for the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the final abolition of the Caliphate. The Ottomans had claimed to be Caliphs of the Muslim world since 1453, the same year that they conquered Constantinople (Istanbul) from the Byzantine Empire, and they ruled over a considerable portion of the world's Sunnis, as well as the shrine cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.  After 1876, the Sultans had placed particular emphasis on their role as Caliphs in order to bolster their global position by asserting their Empire's "Muslim” character, and while this was never universally accepted by all Sunnis or Shias, Sunni Muslims everywhere at least could say that there was a government that claimed to represent the form of rule established by the Prophet and that provided legitimacy and continuity.

Yet he was a European titan, receiving ambassadors from the two Christian emperors, a humanistic patron of the arts with the greatest library outside Constantinople. Cordoba was now the biggest city in Europe along with Constantinople: its emperors sent gifts, marble fountains and Greek classics which the caliph had translated into Arabic. He built a new palace complex, Medina al-Zahra, probably named after a slave girl and modelled on the Umayya palace in Damascus, six miles outside Cordoba, with a colossal throne room built around a huge mercury pool, a menagerie of lions (a gift from his African allies) and one of Europe’s first flushing bathrooms at a time when London and Paris were tiny towns with open sewers. His court was cosmopolitan: his guards and concubines were Slavs, his viziers often Jewish or Christian. His Jewish doctor Hasdai ibn Shaprut served as ambassador and treasurer, corresponding with popes and with German and eastern emperors, as well as with the Jewish khagans of Khazaria.

I had to demonstrate that I had mastered the routes only a resident of the medina, the ancient city, would know. If I could not master the alleys, I would be forever hounded by the hawkers and illicit guides who preyed upon the unsuspecting, the weak, the lost, the tourists.

There was a particular hostility to anything that smacked of price-fixing. One much-repeated story held that the Prophet himself had refused to force merchants to lower prices during a shortage in the city of Medina, on the grounds that doing so would be sacrilegious, since, in a free-market situation, “prices depend on the will of God.

Meanwhile, the reanimated zombies followed along at a much slower pace lurking in the shadows and finishing off anyone that managed to slip by, until the entire city had finally fallen and become a metropolis of the undead.

The late Tony Horwitz, the author of the brilliant book Confederates in the Attic, called Lexington “the second city of Confederate remembrance: Medina to Richmond’s Mecca.

He was done playing cop for a city that did not appreciate its police force.

Why should he start caring about the city now? He didn’t care before. It’s exactly what I’d expect from a douche bag like him.

I’m sorry to say this, but the city is lost. Go home to your families, while you still can. They need you, now, more than ever.

The air is still, yet, danger stirs in the distance making its way further downtown, deeper into the heart of the city.

Williams still could not believe there were ‘zombies’ in New York City. Had he not seen them with his own eyes, he would have denied it.

He wondered how many had been created by the virus, since day one. A whole weekend had passed in a city of millions. It was very possible there could be hundreds or thousands, by now. It was a terrifying thought.

The city had an eerie abandoned feeling to it. There were cars on the roads, which created a few random obstacles to avoid, but they were unoccupied. People had given up trying to escape and, for some reason, left their vehicles in a hurry, probably due to infected attackers.

Leaving Yonkers was much easier than leaving Manhattan or the Bronx. Things were still fairly normal in the suburban city, for the most part. A few citizens were going about their daily business. People were going to work, although schools were closed. The roadblocks were mainly set up to prevent anyone from entering Yonkers from New York City. There were not many things set in place to stop anyone from leaving Yonkers and heading north into the rest of Westchester County.

Great was the sorrow in the City of Light, as Medina is now called. The Companions rebuked each other for weeping, but wept themselves. “Not for him do I weep,” said Umm Ayman, when questioned about her tears. “Know I not that he hath gone to that which is better for him than this world? But I weep for the tidings of Heaven which have been cut of from us.” It was indeed as if a great door had been closed. Yet they remembered that he had said: “What have I to do with this world? I and this world are as a rider and a tree beneath which he taketh shelter. Then he goeth on his way, and leaveth it behind him.

After five years of living in New York City, Larry had completely ruined his life and hit rock bottom. He lost any aspirations of ever regaining what had become so far out of reach. Once hope was abandoned, he really did not have much else left.

Living off the land took a lot of getting used to for these city folk. They had to learn how to garden and grow their own crops. Of course, they were learning how to hunt and clean their prey, so it could be cut up and cooked. Smoking the meat was another necessary lesson to be learned.

In conjunction with the development of the theology of the Occultation and the foundation of Twelver Shi’ism, another branch of Shia was also making great strides in the 9th and 10th centuries: the Ismailis.  After the death of the 6th Imam, Jafar, the Shia split between the followers of the son of his elder son Ismail (hence the term “Ismailis”) and the followers of his third son, Musa.  The followers of Musa remained based in Medina and developed an intellectual strand of Shi’ism around their clerical Imams that eventually lead to the Occultation.  The Ismailis, on the other hand, took a more political approach to their Imamate, based out of the restive Shia city of Kufa.

Until the arrival of Spanish troops in 1920, Chefchaouen had been visited by just three Westerners. Two were missionary explorers: Charles de Foucauld, a Frenchman who spent just an hour in the town in 1883, disguised as a Jewish rabbi, and William Summers, an American who was poisoned by the townsfolk here in 1892. The third, in 1889, was the British journalist Walter Harris, whose main impulse, as described in his book, Land of an African Sultan, was “the very fact that there existed within thirty hours’ ride of Tangier a city in which it was considered an utter impossibility for a Christian to enter”. Thankfully, Chefchaouen today is more welcoming towards outsiders, and a number of the Medina’s newer guesthouses now include owners hailing from Britain, Italy and the former Christian enemy, Spain.