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If I had only a few weeks to live, where would I go?

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( On Not Going Home)

A wonderfully written and enjoyable article by Richard Cohen. It is always in our subconscious but never much thought about the question and subject. It is worth expressing your thoughts on the subject in comments section. (F. Sheikh) Some excerpts;

” In a fascinating recent essay in The London Review of Books, called “On Not Going Home,” James Wood relates how he “asked Christopher Hitchens, long before he was terminally ill, where he would go if he had only a few weeks to live. Would he stay in America? ‘No, I’d go to Dartmoor, without a doubt,’ he told me. It was the landscape of his childhood.”

It was the landscape, in other words, of unfiltered experience, of things felt rather than thought through, of the world in its beauty absorbed before it is understood, of patterns and sounds that lodge themselves in some indelible place in the psyche and call out across the years.

That question is worth repeating: If I had only a few weeks to live, where would I go? It is a good way of getting rid of the clutter that distracts or blinds. I will get to that in a moment.

In the essay, Wood, who grew up in England but has lived in the United States for 18 years, explores a certain form of contemporary homelessness — lives lived without the finality of exile, but also without the familiarity of home.

He speaks of existences “marked by a certain provisionality, a structure of departure and return that may not end.”

This is a widespread modern condition; perhaps it is the modern condition. Out of it, often, comes anxiety. Wood does not focus on the psychological effects of what he calls “a certain outsider-dom,” but if you dig into people who are depressed you often find that their distress at some level is linked to a sense of not fitting in, an anxiety about belonging: displacement anguish.

Wood describes looking at the familiar life of his Boston street, “the heavy maple trees, the unkempt willow down at the end, an old white Cadillac with the bumper sticker ‘Ted Kennedy has killed more people than my gun,’ and I feel … nothing: some recognition, but no comprehension, no real connection, no past, despite all the years I have lived there — just a tugging distance from it all. A panic suddenly overtakes me, and I wonder: How did I get here?”

“Wood writes: “Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness,’ which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: It is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.”

Yes, being not quite home, acceptance, which may be bountiful, is what is left to us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/opinion/cohen-in-search-of-home.html?hp&rref=opinion

Mardin Fatwa & New Mardin Declaration

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(Written by S Iftikhar Murshed and shared by Wequar Azeem)

A very interesting article.Does this mean that both Western Media and Muslim Media are wrongly blaming Wahabbism as the root cause of terrorism? Who is the real culprit? Taliban, JUI and majority of NWF is Deobandi. Although Deobandi and Wahabbi are considered cousins, but they hate each other and has differences in ideology. Are Deobandi happy that Wahabbis are getting all the blame and they are getting a free pass?  ( F. Sheikh).

Article

Friday,28th March 2014 marked the fourth anniversary of the adoption of the New Mardin Declaration by globally renowned Muslim theologians and academics from across the world including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India, Senegal, Kuwait, Yemen, Bosnia, Mauritania, Iran, Morocco and Indonesia. They convened at the picturesque south-eastern Turkish city of Mardin on March 27-28, 2010 and accomplished more in a few hours than what that grotesquely inept outfit known as the Organisation of the Islamic Conference has been able to achieve in the four decades of its futile existence.


The meeting, which was jointly organised by the Artuklu University and the Global Centre for Renewal and Guidance, was chaired by the famed scholar and former vice president of Mauritania, Sheikh Abdullah bin Mahfudh ibn Bayyih. In the two days that the conference lasted, it critically examined and then exposed the deliberate textual distortions of the Mardin fatwa of Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328). It is from the corrupted version of this decree that Al-Qaeda and its affiliated networks have derived their ideology which justifies mass murder and destruction in the name of Islam.

Though the fatwa was issued more than 700 years ago, its relevance to the terrorism-plagued contemporary world is undiminished. This was recognised by the Mardin scholars who accordingly decided “to take the fatwa from the specific geographical focus for which it was intended to a broader global focus and from the contingencies of Ibn Taymiyyah’s time to a timeless understanding.”

Ibn Taymiyyah was born in Haran, an obscure little town in the Mardin region, and was only seven at the time of the Mongol invasion of the area. His family, which consisted of some of the most well-known theologians of the times, was forced to flee to Damascus which was then ruled by the Mamluks of Egypt. But the damage insofar as Ibn Taymiyyah was concerned had already been done. At that tender age he had witnessed the atrocities perpetrated by the Mongols and was traumatised. Hideous memories of Mardin haunted him for the rest of his life. 

In Damascus he was taught Islamic jurisprudence by his father and steeped himself in the teachings of the Hanbali school of thought. Although Ibn Taymiyyah was soon acknowledged as the foremost religious authority of his times, he also became controversial. As early as 1293, he came into conflict with the local authorities for protesting the sentencing of a Christian on charges of blasphemy. Five years later he was accused of anthropomorphism (ascribing human characteristics to God) as well as for contemptuously criticising the legitimacy of dogmatic theology. 

Around that time Ibn Taymiyyah accompanied a delegation of the ulema to Mahmud Ghazan, the ruler of Mongol Empire’s Ilkhanate branch in Iran in order to persuade him to stop attacking Muslims. But suddenly ghastly scenes and images from his early childhood in Mardin came back to Ibn Taymiyyah, and, unable to restrain himself, he told the ruler bluntly: “You claim that you are a Muslim and you have with you muftis, imams and sheikhs but you have invaded us and reached our country for what? While your father and your grandfather, Hulagu, were non-believers, they did not attack and kept their promise. But you promised and broke your promise.”

This impassioned outburst brought Ibn Taymiyyah to the adverse notice of the authorities. He was subsequently jailed on several occasions for contradicting the opinions of the jurists and theologians of his day. On the orders of the Mamluk rulers of Cairo he was imprisoned in Damascus from August 1319 to February 1321 for propounding a doctrine that curtailed the ease with which a Muslim male could divorce his wife. He was incarcerated again in 1326 until his death two years later for issuing edicts that conflicted with the thinking of those in authority. 

But his fame had spread far and wide and his bier was followed by 20,000 mourners, many of them women who considered him a saint. It is ironic that Ibn Taymiyyah’s grave became a place of pilgrimage even though he was an exponent of the fundamentalist strand of Islam and is considered one of the principal forerunners of the Wahhabis.

It is against this background that the scholars at the Mardin conference moved on to a textual examination of Ibn Taymiyyah’s actual decree. He was pointedly asked whether his beloved land, Mardin, was an abode of war (dar al-kufr) or the home of peace (dar al-Islam). His answer was that an unprecedented composite situation had emerged. Mardin was neither an abode of peace where the Shariah prevailed nor was it a land of war because the inhabitants of the region were believers. Therefore, he decreed that “the Muslims living therein should be treated in accordance to their rights as Muslims, while the non-Muslims living there outside the authority of Islamic law should be treated according to their rights.”

This superbly nuanced ruling, which came to be known as the Mardin fatwa, was unmistakably peaceful in intent and was in accord with the teachings of Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855) who prohibited rebellion even against unjust authority in order to stave off anarchy and indiscriminate bloodshed. But the text was subsequently changed to read: “…while the non-Muslims living there outside the authority of Islamic law should be fought as is their due.”

This was done through the substitution of two letters in a single word. In the second version the word ‘yuamal’ (should be treated) had been rendered as ‘yuqatal’ (should be fought) as a result of which the purport of the decree was drastically altered. According to Sheikh Abd al-Wahab al-Turayri, an internationally acknowledged authority on Islamic jurisprudence and a former of professor at Riyadh’s al-Imam University, the only known copy of the original fatwa was the Zahiriyyah Library manuscript which had been archived at the Asad Library in Damascus. But unfortunately this was either not widely known or had been deliberately ignored. 

The corrupted version made its first appearance more than a hundred years ago in the 1909 edition of Ibn Taymiyyah’s ‘Fatawa’ that was printed and published by Faraj Allah al-Kirdi. This did incalculable damage because the error was never rectified and was not only republished time and again but also rendered into English, French and several other languages. 

It was used by the Egyptian ideologue Muhammad abd al-Salam Faraj (1954-1982) for his book ‘Al-Faridah ahl-Gaibah’ which posits that jihad is the sixth pillar of Islam and, in the words of Sheikh Abd al-Wahab al-Turayri, “has become a manifesto for militant groups” including Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Faraj established the Jamaat al-Jihad in 1981 which assassinated President Anwar Sadat on October 6 of that year. He was executed six months later.

For the first time ever the distortions in the text of Ibn Taymiyyah’s fatwa were exposed and corrected by the Mardin conference. This was a remarkable achievement and was acclaimed worldwide as a crippling blow to the ideology of terrorism. The New Mardin Declaration which was adopted on the conclusion of the conference affirms unambiguously: “Anyone who seeks support from this fatwa for killing Muslims or non-Muslims has erred in his interpretation…It is not for a Muslim individual or a Muslim group to announce and declare war or engage in combative jihad…on their own.”

This is a sobering thought for the Pakistan government which has committed the supreme folly of initiating direct talks with the TTP, the first round of which was held on Wednesday. The outcome of the Mardin conference was summed up by its spokesman who said that the meeting had brought together “scholars and theologians from different persuasions within Islam. But united they stood: Islam condemns terrorism and indiscriminate murder.” This is the message that the government’s panel of negotiators should convey to the TTP shura as the futile talks with the outlawed group gathers momentum.

  

How Vladimir Putin became evil

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Interesting article by Tariq Ali in The Guardian. After winding down of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, is Industrial Military Complex trying to prop up a new frontier in Ukraine and wooing Russia into military race? Excerpts:

“Once again, it seems that Russia and the United States are finding it difficult to agree on how to deal with their respective ambitions. This clash of interests is highlighted by the Ukrainian crisis. The provocation in this particular instance, as the leaked recording of a US diplomat, Victoria Nuland, saying “Fuck the EU” suggests, came from Washington.

Several decades ago, at the height of the cold war, George Kennan, a leading American foreign policy strategist invited to give the Reith Lectures, informed his audience: “There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentric than embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision … Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side is the centre of all virtue.”

And so it continues. Washington knows that Ukraine has always been a delicate issue for Moscow. The ultra-nationalists who fought with the Third Reich during the second world war killed 30,000 Russian soldiers and communists. They were still conducting a covert war with CIA backing as late as 1951. Pavel Sudoplatov, a Soviet intelligence chief, wrote in 1994: “The origins of the cold war are closely interwoven with western support for nationalist unrest in the Baltic areas and western Ukraine.”

When Gorbachev agreed the deal on German reunification, the cornerstone of which was that united Germany could remain in Nato, US secretary of state Baker assured him that “there would be no extension of Nato’s jurisdiction one inch to the east”. Gorbachev repeated: “Any extension of the zone of Nato is unacceptable.” Baker’s response: “I agree.” One reason Gorbachev has publicly supported Putin on theCrimea is that his trust in the west was so cruelly betrayed.

As long as Washington believed that Russian leaders would blindly do its bidding (which Yeltsin did blind drunk) it supported Moscow. Yeltsin’s attack on the Russian parliament in 1993 was justified in the western media. The wholesale assaults on Chechnya by Yeltsin and then by Putin were treated as a little local problem with support from George Bush and Tony Blair. “Chechnya isn’t Kosovo,” said Blair after his meeting with Putin in 2000. Tony Wood’s book, Chechnya: The Case for Independence, provides chapter and verse of what the horrors that were inflicted on that country. Chechnya had enjoyed de facto independence from 1991-94. Its people had observed the speed with which the Baltic republics had been allowed independence and wanted the same for themselves.

Instead they were bombarded. Grozny, the capital, was virtually reduced to dust as 85 percent of its housing was destroyed. In February 1995 two courageous Russian economists, Andrey Illarionov and Boris Lvin published a text in Moscow News arguing in favour of Chechen independence and the paper (unlike its Western counterparts) also published some excellent critical reports that revealed atrocities on a huge scale, eclipsing the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre in Srebrenica. Rape, torture, homeless refugees and tens of thousands dead was the fate of the Chechens. No problem here for Washington and its EU allies.”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/28/why-putin-crimea-strategy-west-villain

posted by F. Sheikh

Confessions of a Secret Muslim? Experience of a young women post 9/11

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Confessions of a secret Muslim

                            For 12 years, I hid my true identity from friends. I escaped discrimination – but I began to hate myself

                

Topics:                                              Life stories,                                              Muslim Americans,                                              Editor’s Picks,                                              Islam,

Confessions of a secret MuslimEnlarge A photo of the author as a girl.

I didn’t pray much as a child. Sometimes I would copy my grandmother as she prayed toward Mecca. I remember the ritual: bow down, come back up, bow down, looking to both sides while twirling my right fingers. Then she would pick me up with a sheet tied around her waist and carry me over to the neighborhood park, where we would lie down in the grass. This is all a dream to me now. A time when an elderly woman with a hijab and her granddaughter wouldn’t get stared at for being a Muslim.

Back then, I felt like an ordinary child. Ours wasn’t a religious family, besides celebrating Eid-al-Fitr and Ramadan. “Muslim” wasn’t my identity. It was my faith. I was an American.

But my identity crumbled when the Twin Towers fell. I was 8 years old, in third grade, and I was as frantic as any kid would be that day, trying to understand why so many children had to lose their mothers and fathers. I couldn’t imagine their pain.

“You’re a terrorist!” said my best friend in the hallways of our elementary school, pointing at me, his innocent eyes turned menacing. I couldn’t believe it. But this was the start of a new life for me.

That year was hell. Friends distanced themselves. Teachers became mean. Such alienation was normal for me and surely millions of Muslims worldwide in those years. Fearing discrimination and violent attacks, my family changed our last name. “Harvard” was a slice of Americana; a far cry from our original surname. My parents wanted to protect my sister and me, but elementary school teachers and kids knew exactly what had happened, and our situation only became worse. In my silence, lies continued to grow.

In sixth grade, a teaching assistant gathered all the students around the classroom for the last lesson of the day.

“Islam is an evil religion. Muslims all around the world kill innocent, non-Muslim people,” she said. “In their holy book, they said that all good Muslim children must kill kids like you.”

I wanted to say something. I wanted to speak out, because I knew that wasn’t true. I wanted to tell her that I would never hurt my best friends or any living thing, and that there are more than a billion Muslims who are loving and kind.

But I had no power. I was a child, a Muslim one, and she was an adult with authority. What voice did I have?

That year I moved to a new school about an hour away. It was the perfect opportunity to start over and pretend to be somebody I was not. I completely disregarded my faith publicly as a Muslim — and my real life undercover began.

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Living as a fraud is exhausting. It’s exhausting to your mind, body and soul. It seemed like people asked me most about my faith when I kept it a secret. My father taught me how to reply:

“What do you say when someone asks what is your religion?” asked my dad.

“That there is no god but God,” I replied.

“Nooooo,” with his elongated gasp of disapproval, “you say that you are seeking the truth.”

Strangely enough, inside our house, the opposite was happening. With persecutions of Muslim-Americans at an all-time high, my father pushed our family to learn more about our faith. My parents never missed a single day of prayer. I would wake up in the middle of the night and go downstairs for a glass of water only to hear the booming voice of the Qu’ran over our Bose stereo. My parents started playing it on a loop to protect us from any hardship or “evil,” and they still do it to this day.

But hiding like this comes at a great cost. I didn’t have close friends, because I feared discovery and didn’t think anyone could ever understand. Elementary school had taught me the cost of exposure. I could not trust anyone with my deepest, darkest secret.

I was a freshman in college when I first came close to being discovered. My friends and I were about to order late-night pizza.

“Hey Sarah, you want a slice of pepperoni?” said my friend.

“Nah, I’m good. Thanks, though,” I said.

“Wait, you don’t eat pork?” he asked.

I tried to cover my tracks. “Nah, I just don’t like it.”

“Wait, are you a Muslim?”

I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. Should I finally embrace it? Would I lose my friends over this? Why can’t I just let it go? All those thoughts were rushing through my head. Luckily, the conversation was hijacked by some loud drunk running through the hallways. Crisis averted.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2013 when I had a journalism internship in Washington D.C. I was excited to be working in the same city as the White House, amid the action of the nation’s capital. And it was going great, until I realized the journalism industry wasn’t exempt from outdated bigotry. We were discussing a potential story about the rise of Mormonism one day, and I was alarmed to hear the typical uneducated jokes from staffers about polygamy and bountiful offspring. I was trying to set the record straight, when someone mentioned Islam.

Another intern looked right at me and said, “Well, I would rather Muslims didn’t reproduce.”

That wasn’t the only time. When discussions came up about social justice and the Middle East, I often heard that old toss-off — “Oh, Muslims cause all the problems in the world.” It made me so uncomfortable; I never went to parties or social events hosted by the publication.

Meanwhile, I began to feel like more of a coward for failing to embrace who I was. My family told me to hush and stay quiet when bigotry or false claims about Muslims were made. But I couldn’t anymore – it was no longer my nature to keep silent.

For the longest time, I was thankful for my multi-ethnic background and Japanese-like physical appearance – no one would assume I was a Muslim. It allowed me to “pass.” And it kept me shielded from frightened stares and airport security checkpoint probes. But my freedom from direct discrimination was starting to make me hate myself.

Looking in the mirror, I had grown sick of my long round face, small plump lips and slightly slanted eyes. I was disgusted by my Mediterranean golden skin tone, the light features that set me apart from the stereotypical Muslim. I hated how I had allowed my thick black locks to flow freely, never eliciting flashes of anger from a stranger, because I hid my faith by exposing my hair.

I was a cop-out, a sell-out. I became depressed and angry at myself – I still am – for staying silent while I watched these injustices occur before me and felt only relief to have escaped consequence. I never gave consideration to those who were brave enough to embrace their own Muslim identity.

Hiding your identity erases your most cherished memories – as if it’s forbidden or dangerous to remember a time when you were free to express who you truly were as an individual. Hiding my identity made me hate myself and made me feel like an example of all that is wrong with the world. I had run away from my true self.

One day, I sat on a bus stop in front of the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C. A Muslim woman wearing a hijab sat right next to me, and I felt ashamed. This woman was a true rebel, fighting against the injustices of society simply by wearing a headscarf that displays her love for Islam and Allah. And here I was, scared of my own identity. I couldn’t do it anymore.

So last November, I came out of my Islamic closet via Facebook. I was tired of hearing criticism about Muslim-Americans within my friend circle. The accusations that all Muslim women are oppressed and that they ought to be liberated from their hijab outraged me. The ongoing raids and wiretappings at mosques made me fearful for the elimination of our liberties and freedom of religion. The continued injustices against Muslim-Americans by the Transportation Security Administration goes on every single day, and I have said nothing. The cowardice that steered 12 years of my life could not let me sleep at night.

I was disappointed by a few friends’ reactions. One raised his eyebrows in a way that expressed his silent disapproval. Another said, “It’s OK. You assimilate, so you’re a cool Muslim,” as if the millions of other Muslims in the world aren’t “cool,” because they choose to remain faithful to their religion.

But I had so many friends who were kind and understanding. They didn’t think any differently of me. And those are the friendships that remain true.

And so now, I am proud to say that my name is Sarah. The name I carry is the name of Abraham’s first wife and the mother of Isaac – the descendent of the Hebrews. I am so blessed to be able to say that Islam is my religion and that the Qu’ran is my conscience.  Therefore, I am proud to stand up tall and to say loud and clear that I bear witness that there is no god but God – And I bear witness that Prophet Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.

Salaam Alaikum – May peace be with you.


Sarah Harvard                        Sarah Harvard is the founder of FreeCulture and is the former Editor-in-Chief at DL Magazine. She has an interest in US-Middle East Relations, national security, identity and culture in America. You can follow more of her work at www.sarah-harvard.com.