Mosque Related Quotes

even if Noam Chomsky were right about everything, the Islamic doctrines related to martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, the rights of women and homosexuals, etc. would still present huge problems for the emergence of a global civil society (and these are problems quite unlike those presented by similar tenets in other faiths, for reasons that I have explained at length elsewhere and touch on only briefly here). And any way in which I might be biased or blinded by “the religion of the state,” or any other form of cultural indoctrination, has absolutely no relevance to the plight of Shiites who have their mosques, weddings, and funerals bombed by Sunni extremists, or to victims of rape who are beaten, imprisoned, or even killed as “adulteresses” throughout the Muslim world. I hope it goes without saying that the Afghan girls who even now are risking their lives by merely learning to read would not be best compensated for their struggles by being handed copies of Chomsky’s books enumerating the sins of the West

Furthermore, the Prophet’s gracious reception of the Christians of Najran in Medina, where he allowed them to pray in his mosque and affirmed the continuing protection of their churches, set a new standard for inter-faith relations.42

It is an amazing contradiction: a society that frowns on a woman going out without a man; that forces you to use separate entrances for universities, banks, restaurants, and mosques; that divides restaurants with partitions so that unrelated males and females cannot sit together; that same society expects you to get into a car with a man who is not your relative, with a man who is a complete stranger, by yourself and have him take you somewhere inside a locked car, alone.

For years, we have spent trillions on waging wars against ‘terror’ and ‘extremism’ that would have been much better spent protecting Muslim dissidents and giving the necessary platforms and resources to counter the vast network of Islamic centers, madrassas, and mosques which has been largely responsible for spreading the most noxious forms of Islamic fundamentalism. For years, we have treated the people financing the vast network – the Saudis, the Qataris, and the now repentant Emiratis – as our allies. In the midst of all our efforts at policing, surveillance, and even military action, we in the West have not bothered to develop an effective counternarrative because from the outset we have denied that Islamic extremism is in any way related to Islam. We persist in focusing on the violence and not on the ideas that give rise to it.

Are the religious individuals in a society more moral than the secular ones? Many researchers have looked into this, and the main finding is that there are few interesting findings. There are subtle effects here and there: some studies find, for instance, that the religious are slightly more prejudiced, but this effect is weak when one factors out other considerations, such as age and political attitudes, and exists only when religious belief is measured in certain ways. The only large effect is that religious Americans give more to charity (including nonreligious charities) than atheists do. This holds even when one controls for demographics (religious Americans are more likely than average to be older, female, southern, and African American). To explore why this relationship exists, the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell asked people about life after death, the importance of God to morality, and various other facets of religious belief. It turns out that none of their answers to such questions were related to behaviors having to do with volunteering and charitable giving. Rather, participation in the religious community was everything. As Putnam and Campbell put it, “Once we know how observant a person is in terms of church attendance, nothing that we can discover about the content of her religious faith adds anything to our understanding or prediction of her good neighborliness.… In fact, the statistics suggest that even an atheist who happened to become involved in the social life of the congregation (perhaps through a spouse) is much more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen than the most fervent believer who prays alone. It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.” This importance of community, and the irrelevance of belief, extends as well to the nastier effects of religion. The psychologist Jeremy Ginges and his colleagues found a strong relationship between religiosity and support for suicide bombing among Palestinian Muslims, and, again, the key factor was religious community, not religious belief: mosque attendance predicted support for suicide attacks; frequency of prayer did not. Among Indonesian Muslims, Mexican Catholics, British Protestants, Russian Orthodox in Russia, Israeli Jews, and Indian Hindus, frequency of religious attendance (but again, not frequency of prayer) predicts responses to questions such as “I blame people of other religions for much of the trouble in this world.

The average Christian is not supposed to know that Jesus’ home town of Nazareth did not actually exist, or that key places mentioned in the Bible did not physically exist in the so-called “Holy Land.” He is not meant to know that scholars have had greater success matching Biblical events and places with events and places in Britain rather than in Palestine. It is a point of contention whether the settlement of Nazareth existed at all during Jesus' lifetime. It does not appear on contemporary maps, neither in any books, documents, chronicles or military records of the period, whether of Roman or Jewish compilation. The Jewish Encyclopedia identifies that Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament, neither in the works of Josephus, nor in the Hebrew Talmud – Laurence Gardner (The Grail Enigma) As far back as 1640, the German traveller Korte, after a complete topographical examination of the present Jerusalem, decided that it failed to coincide in any way with the city described by Josephus and the Scriptures. Claims that the tombs of patriarchs Ab’Ram, Isaac, and Jacob are buried under a mosque in Hebron possess no shred of evidence. The rock-cut sepulchres in the valleys of Jehoshaphat and Hinnom are of Roman period with late Greek inscriptions, and there exists nothing in groups of ruins at Petra, Sebaste, Baalbec, Palmyra or Damascus, or among the stone cities of the Haran, that are pre-Roman. Nothing in Jerusalem itself can be related to the Jews – Comyns Beaumont (Britain: Key to World’s History) The Jerusalem of modern times is not the city of the Scriptures. Mt. Calvary, now nearly in the centre of the city, was without walls at the time of the Crucifixion, and the greater part of Mt. Zion, which is not without, was within the ancient city. The holy places are for the most part the fanciful dreams of monkish enthusiasts to increase the veneration of the pilgrims – Rev. J. P. Lawson (quoted in Beaumont’s Britain: Key to World’s History)

Most people in Europe in 1950 held views that seventy years later would be regarded as anathema. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (arising from their catastrophic breach during the Second World War) had been adopted by the United Nations as recently as December 1948, but there was little popular understanding of what it meant in practice. Racist views and blatant racial discrimination were widely accepted and scarcely seen as remarkable. Few people of skin colours other than white lived in European countries. Capital punishment was still in existence, and executions were routinely carried out for people found guilty of the worst crimes. Homosexuality remained a criminal offence. Abortion was illegal. The influence of the Christian churches was profound, and attendance at church services still relatively high. By the time post-war children approached old age, human rights were taken for granted (however imperfect the practice), holding racist views was among the worst of social stigmas (though less so in Eastern and Southern than in Western Europe), multicultural societies were the norm, capital punishment had disappeared from Europe, gay marriage and legal abortion were widely accepted, and the role of the Christian churches had diminished greatly (though the spread of mosques, a feature of modern European cities almost wholly unknown in 1950, testified to the importance of religion among Muslim minorities).

Inflexibility in relations with India, and the belief that India represented an existential threat to Pakistan, led to maintaining a large military, which in turn helped the military assert its dominance in the life of the country.

Black Muslim cooperation with Rockwell and the Ku Klux Klan went beyond ideology and rhetoric. There were practical implications. Like his white racist counterparts, Elijah Muhammad believed that interracial sexual relations were morally depraved and genetically destructive, for interracial sex "ruins and destroys a people." Rhetoric aside, he wanted to establish a truce between racists and his Southern mosques. To this end he sent Malcolm X to Atlanta to accompany Jeremiah X, the local Muslim minister of Atlanta, to a secret meeting with members of the Klan. Both sides discussed race relations. Malcolm described the integration movement as a Jewish conspiracy carried out by black stooges. The parties eventually hammered out the main issue: a nonaggression pact. If the Muslims did not aid the civil rights movement in the South, the mosques would be undisturbed.

So what should we do with this information? One simple, fairly uncontroversial idea: we can utilize the area-level data to allocate resources. If a city has a huge rise in suicide-related searches, we can up the suicide awareness in this city. The city government or nonprofits might run commercials explaining where people can get help, for example. Similarly, if a city has a huge rise in searches for “kill Muslims,” police departments might be wise to change how they patrol the streets. They might dispatch more officers to protect the local mosque, for example.

Arts of energy management and of combat are, of course, not confined to the Chinese only. Peoples of different cultures have practised and spread these arts since ancient times. Those who follow the Chinese tradition call these arts chi kung and kungfu (or qigong and gongfu in Romanized Chinese), and those following other traditions call them by other names. Muslims in various parts of the world have developed arts of energy management and of combat to very high levels. Many practices in Sufism, which is spiritual cultivation in Islamic tradition, are similar to chi kung practices. As in chi kung, Sufi practitioners pay much importance to the training of energy and spirit, called “qi” and “shen” in Chinese, but “nafas” and “roh” in Muslim terms. When one can free himself from cultural and religious connotations, he will find that the philosophy of Sufism and of chi kung are similar. A Sufi practitioner believes that his own breath, or nafas, is a gift of God, and his ultimate goal in life is to be united with God. Hence, he practises appropriate breathing exercises so that the breath of God flows harmoniously through him, cleansing him of his weakness and sin, which are manifested as illness and pain. And he practises meditation so that ultimately his personal spirit will return to the universal Spirit of God. In chi kung terms, this returning to God is expressed as “cultivating spirit to return to the Great Void”, which is “lian shen huan shi” in Chinese. Interestingly the breathing and meditation methods in Sufism and in chi kung are quite similar. Some people, including some Muslims, may think that meditation is unIslamic, and therefore taboo. This is a serious mis-conception. Indeed, Prophet Mohammed himself clearly states that a day of meditation is better than sixty years of worship. As in any religion, there is often a huge conceptual gap between the highest teaching and the common followers. In Buddhism, for example, although the Buddha clearly states that meditation is the essential path to the highest spiritual attainment, most common Buddhists do not have any idea of meditation. The martial arts of the Muslims were effective and sophisticated. At many points in world history, the Muslims, such as the Arabs, the Persians and the Turks, were formidable warriors. Modern Muslim martial arts are very advanced and are complete by themselves, i.e. they do not need to borrow from outside arts for their force training or combat application — for example, they do not need to borrow from chi kung for internal force training, Western aerobics for stretching, judo and kickboxing for throws and kicks. [...] It is reasonable if sceptics ask, “If they are really so advanced, why don't they take part in international full contact fighting competitions and win titles?” The answer is that they hold different values. They are not interested in fighting or titles. At their level, their main concern is spiritual cultivation. Not only they will not be bothered whether you believe in such abilities, generally they are reluctant to let others know of their abilities. Muslims form a substantial portion of the population in China, and they have contributed an important part in the development of chi kung and kungfu. But because the Chinese generally do not relate one's achievements to one's religion, the contributions of these Chinese Muslim masters did not carry the label “Muslim” with them. In fact, in China the Muslim places of worship are not called mosques, as in many other countries, but are called temples. Most people cannot tell the difference be

I was sitting with Abu Darda' in the mosque of Damascus. A man came to him and said: Abu Darda, I have come to you from the town of the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) for a tradition that I have heard you relate from the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ). I have come for no other purpose. He said: I heard the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) say: If anyone travels on a road in search of knowledge, Allah will cause him to travel on one of the roads of Paradise. The angels will lower their wings in their great pleasure with one who seeks knowledge, the inhabitants of the heavens and the Earth and the fish in the deep waters will ask forgiveness for the learned man. The superiority of the learned man over the devout is like that of the moon, on the night when it is full, over the rest of the stars. The learned are the heirs of the Prophets, and the Prophets leave neither dinar nor dirham, leaving only knowledge, and he who takes it takes an abundant portion.

As far back as 1640, the German traveller Korte, after a complete topographical examination of the present Jerusalem, decided that it failed to coincide in any way with the city described by Josephus and the Scriptures. Claims that the tombs of patriarchs Ab’Ram, Isaac, and Jacob are buried under a mosque in Hebron possess no shred of evidence. The rock-cut sepulchres in the valleys of Jehoshaphat and Hinnom are of Roman period with late Greek inscriptions, and there exists nothing in groups of ruins at Petra, Sebaste, Baalbec, Palmyra or Damascus, or among the stone cities of the Haran, that are pre-Roman. Nothing in Jerusalem itself can be related to the Jews – Comyns Beaumont (Britain-Key to World’s History) The Jerusalem

30. Yahya related to me from Mālik from Ibn Shihāb from Said ibn al- Musayyib that the Messenger of Allâh, (S), said, "Anyone who eats this plant should not come near our mosques. The smell of the garlic will offend us.

246. Yahya related to me from Mālik from Ibn Shihāb from Urwa ibn az- Zubayr from Ā'isha, the wife of the Prophet, (S), that the Messenger of Allâh, (S), prayed in the mosque one night and people prayed behind him. Then he prayed the next night and there were more people. Then they gathered on the third or fourth night and the Messenger of Allâh, (S), did not come out to them. In the morning, he said, "I saw what you were doing and the only thing that prevented me from coming out to you was that I feared that it would become obligatory (fard) for you." This happened in Ramadan.

we should also be open to understanding that a similarly named structure may share relatively little with another – whether in its practices, its social norms, its rules, its function or administration. These differences are not to be feared but to be understood and welcomed as opportunities to see the world from another perspective, from outside ourselves. For a space is not only about its name and form but also about the community it houses and the notions of connection and belonging that it inspires – notions we can all relate to and which enrich us collectively. Meanwhile, women’s access remains contentious, with many spaces not admitting women at all, contrary to the Prophet’s practice, or else providing wholly inadequate facilities for them. Other ‘marginal’ groups such as elderly and disabled people can also struggle to have their needs met. At a time of compartmentalization of groups of varied orientations, it would seem that spaces of worship have failed to escape the wrath of

The earliest version of the story we have received relates that it was in the year 622, 13 years after his mission had commenced, the Prophet Muhammad constructed his first masjid at the palm oasis of Yathrib, which would eventually become Medina.

However, while examining spaces of worship serves as a useful avenue for understanding elements of Muslim practice, by no means does it tell us everything about Muslim identities, which cannot be simply reduced to religious convictions or beliefs. While religious beliefs are certainly important for many, we need to be aware that Muslims similarly relate to their regional cultures or their positions in society; for Islam has many voices – and equally as many faces.

But Shia scholars would maintain that Muhammad had long before made the divinely guided choice of his closest male relative—his son-in-law Ali—as his successor. He had done so many times, in public, they would say, and if Ali’s enemies had not thwarted the Prophet’s will, he would certainly have done so again, one last time, as he lay dying in that small chamber alongside the mosque.