South African Ambassador's
Inspiring Banquet Address
WASHINGTON, D.C., 10/3/13) -- The Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the
nation's largest Muslim civil rights and
advocacy organization, today released video
of an "inspiring" keynote address by South
African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool at the
group's 19th annual banquet on Saturday in
Arlington, Va.
At CAIR's sold out event, almost 900
community members, activists, diplomats, and
civil rights and interfaith leaders heard
Ambassador Rasool salute CAIR's civil rights
and civic empowerment efforts, and offer
lessons learned from the anti-Apartheid
movement.
In his address, Ambassador Rasool stated:
"If
your objective is peace, you cannot
worship violence as a methodology ... If
your objective is justice for all, you
cannot do [in]justice to any, not even
your enemy. And certainly not fight for
justice between black and white while
you do injustice to women at home."
He also told the audience:
"Courage is what it takes to be peaceful
in a violent world ... We claim courage
as our garb, and we claim peace as our
objective and our methodology."
Driving
affects ovaries and pelvis, Saudi sheikh
warns women
SAUDI
ARABIA: Saudi women seeking to
challenge a de facto ban on driving should
realize that this could affect their ovaries
and pelvises, Sheikh Saleh bin Saad al-Luhaydan
(pictured left), a judicial and
psychological consultant to the Gulf
Psychological Association, told Saudi news
website sabq.org.
Driving “could have a reverse physiological
impact. Physiological science and functional
medicine studied this side [and found] that
it automatically affects ovaries and rolls
up the pelvis. This is why we find for women
who continuously drive cars their children
are born with clinical disorders of varying
degrees,” Sheikh al-Luhaydan said.
Saudi female activists have launched an
online campaign urging women to drive on
Oct. 26.
More than 11,000 women have signed the
oct26driving.com declaration that says:
“Since there are no clear justifications for
the state to ban adult, capable women from
driving. We call for enabling women to have
driving tests and for issuing licenses for
those who pass.”
Sheikh al-Luhaydan urged these women to
consider “the mind before the heart and
emotion and look at this issue with a
realistic eye.”
“The result of this is bad and they should
wait and consider the negativities,” he
said.
Source:
Al Arabiya
The Mirror of
Health: Discovering Medicine in the Golden
age of Islam
UK:
The Golden Age of Islam tends to be
recognised most for its contributions to
mathematics and astronomy.
But The Royal
College of Physicians’ major exhibition for
2013 reminds us it also ushered in huge
advancements in another field: medicine.
‘The mirror of health’ pulls newly
researched material from the college’s
collection of rare Thirteenth Century
Islamic medical manuscripts, presented to
the public for the very first time.
Although
Islamic medicine drew heavily on the ancient
Greeks, the field’s practitioners made
important original contributions of their
own.
This
exhibition explores those innovations,
drawing on advancements from the Ninth to
the Seventeenth Centuries.
Source:
Time Out
Opposition to
Valhalla mosque brings back bad taste of
apartheid
SOUTH AFRICA:
The Muslim community in Valhalla, Pretoria
face opposition to the erection of a mosque
on a portion of land at the corner of
Hammerfest and Finus streets.
Certain
residents objected to the Thaba Tshwane
Islamic Centre Trust’s intentions to the
building of a mosque at a meeting held at NG
Kerk on September 17. Even though
application was made by the Trust to buy the
property, the land was donated to them by
government. Residents however claim
underhanded methods were used to attain the
property.
The Trust’s
Umar Aboo Bakr says this was not the case
and normal procedures were put in place to
buy until it was donated to them. He says
when Ina Strijdom, Valhalla’s DA ward
councillor, was made aware of the donation
she emailed the municipality and requested
they “rather give it [the land] to the
church than the Muslims”. There are
currently six churches in the community.
A petition
was also drawn up on behalf of the town’s 2
647 residents by the Christian Democratic
Party (CDP) to show dissatisfaction with the
building of the mosque.
After members
from the Trust and Strijdom consulted with
each other, Aboo Bakr says Strijdom who
appeared to have taken a neutral stance, set
up a meeting for everyone to discuss the
matter.
According to
the councillor the problem is “due process
was not followed”. She says the property is
zoned for use as a public open space,
“rezoning procedures that needed to be
followed include public participation.
Transparency and public participation were
key elements of any well-functioning
democracy.”
But Aboo Bakr
says the Trust is only in the beginning
stages of the project and that council will
make them aware of the necessary steps –
that is advertising and setting up notices
on the property to allow for community
objections – as they go ahead. He says
council was not there to answer their
questions regarding sewerage and zoning.
“The CDP and DA are basically working
together to make sure the mosque doesn’t go
up.”
“They are so
terrified and worried about this loud adhan.
They say they don’t want to get up with it
in the morning and they’re calling it noise
pollution. They say we must go back to our
country, this is not our land. They say we
must rather go to Laudium and pray,” says
Aboo Bakr.
He says a man with three kids argued that he
moved from Erasmia – where “Islam had
expanded” – to Valhalla to bring his kids up
as Christians “and not mix them up with
Islam”.
“Another lady
says she’ll fight us tooth and nail to make
sure the mosque doesn’t come up. She’ll bomb
it.”
The Tshwane
municipality says preserving Valhalla as an
exclusive Christian community was not in the
city’s acceptable values and ethos. In
addition, it was unconstitutionally baseless
for the metro to review its decision of
handing the land over for the building of a
mosque.
“It’s Allah’s work, it will happen,” says
Farida Abdul, also from the Trust. They say
they won’t give up.
The masjid
will be built to accommodate close to 150
Muslim families living in the community.
Residents claim there are only 40 families
and there is no need for the place of
worship to be built.
“My
neighbours are quite accommodating and
wonderful people. They actually went to that
meeting and they were persecuted by people
that were there. They were angry with them
for standing with the Muslims,” says Abdul.
Abdul says
their biggest fear is that “It’s a white
area that is going to become a Muslim area”.
She says leader of the CDP, Theunis Botha
had sent out a Blackberry message throughout
the country requesting people to oppose the
masjid being built.
According to
Abdul, Strijdom is pretending to be neutral
and is allegedly behind the petition and
objection of the masjid. “How can we have
somebody like that as a leader? They’re
doing their best to bring our Muslim
community down here.”
So far
members from the Islamic Trust have received
death threats and threats to bomb the masjid
when it goes up. Living in Valhalla is tense
at the moment they say.
The community
request assistance from outside community
Muslims to speak up against this
apartheid-like objection as it is “within
their constitutional right to build a
religious place of worship in a democratic
society”.
On Friday,
the DA Councillor could not be reached for
comment
Source:
Cii Broadcasting
Muslim Women
Don't Care If You Feel Uncomfortable
Blog by Shaheen Sattar
UK: And
neither should anyone else who decides to
dress in a way that is subjectively
unnerving to another person. The ridiculous
subjugation of the veil as a cloth of
oppression and regression truly highlights
that Muslim women are not taken seriously in
contemporary society.
They are
recognised with their veil as a commodity to
men and their desires, not as independent
and educated women. Boiling down the
intellectual and spiritual thought process
of wearing a niqab to oppression by men is
wrong, and misleading.
Those who
hold this view are merely fuelled by the
anger that a woman can use her freedom to
cover her face. When a veiled woman decides
to cover her face; something out of the
ordinary in Britain, she is exercising her
right of autonomy. It is simply because the
actual act of covering ones face with a veil
is so scarce within the Muslim community
that she is cast with accusations of
isolating herself within society.
I was taught in my early stages of Islamic
Madrassah in respect to security measures
and proving ones identity, it is permissible
to remove ones veil. Muslim Council of
Britain reiterates this in respect to a
judge who allowed women to wear a veil in
court, but remove it when giving evidence;
"emphasise the need to be practical when
there is an essential need to show ones face
- for example, for reasons of security."
Huff Post
London Mayor
Boris Johnson supports face veil ban in
schools
|
 UK:
The
Daily Mail covered a
conversation on LBC radio phone-in
between London Mayor, Boris Johnson,
and a Muslim mother whose daughter
wears the niqab.
Mayor Johnson spoke
on the radio programme in support of
a ban on face veils in classrooms. |
When confronted by a mother who wears the
face veil and whose daughter also wears one,
Mayor Johnson said schools should have the
right to force pupils to show their faces.
He told radio listeners: “Normally I’m in
favour of liberty and people wearing
whatever they want. Where I do draw the line
though, I think that the face veil is a very
difficult thing to make work in a school.
“I think that you’ve got to teach in a way
that you can see how the kids are
responding. They’ve got to be able to
participate in the class. I think that it’s
only fair that they should be able to react
and take part in that way.
“I don’t think that it can reasonably be
called a standard piece of uniform to get
little girls to cover their faces.”
The mother, who called in to the radio
programme to challenge the Mayor’s views,
said:
“As parents Boris, we are expected in
society to teach our children to respect one
another, to respect schools and so on. On
the other hand Boris, you are asking us to
go against school policies or school rules
if it involves wearing the face veils.”
But Mr Johnson disagreed. He replied:
“I’m afraid that is my view I think in
places of instruction where you’re asking
kids to participate in a class, to have fun
together when the teacher has got to see how
the lesson is going down.
“I’ve been a teacher, very ingloriously in
the past. It is a terribly difficult job and
you’ve got to know what, how your pupils are
responding. And I think that is what I would
like to see in classes financed by the
British State that’s what I believe in.”
This latest intervention, by the Mayor of
London, comes after
several weeks of debate
surrounding the
wearing of the niqab after a
Birmingham college
reversed its ban on it.
Earlier this week,
PM David Cameron spoke of
restricting areas where face veils can be
worn. Speaking on BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show on
Sunday, the PM said the UK is a “free
country and
people should be free to wear whatever
clothes they like in public or in
private’.
“But we should support those institutions
that need to put in place rules so that
those institutions can work properly.
“So for instance in a school, if they want
that particular dress code, I believe the
government should back them. The same for
courts, the same for immigration.”
The
veil debate has attracted
considerable attention in recent weeks. The
public debate has also coincided with
incidents of abuse reported by
veiled Muslim women. Last week
BBC Radio 4 interviewed a 14-year-old girl
who had her
niqab ripped off by a man as she
walked down the street.
Source:
Engage
Muslim
prisoners to sue after pork found in halal
pies
 |
UK:
The Daily Telegraph reported that 186 Muslim
prisoners are to sue the Ministry of Justice
(MoJ) after pork was discovered in a number
of products mistakenly labelled as 'halal'.
The prisoners
have launched their legal cases in an
attempt to win compensation over the error
which occurred in three separate prisons.
|
The Daily Telegraph
Ban on
headscarves lifted as Turkey unveils reforms
ANKARA,
TURKEY: Turkey's prime minister, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, unveiled the first big
package of liberalising reforms in years on
Monday, making overtures to the large
Kurdish minority and proposing that
headscarved women be allowed to sit in
parliament and work as civil servants for
the first time in the history of the Turkish
republic.
The
proposals, which have been repeatedly
delayed due to their potentially incendiary
impact, followed a summer of the largest and
most persistent anti-government protests in
Erdogan's 11 years in power.
At a press
conference in Ankara, where journalists were
not allowed to ask questions, Erdogan
announced that the headscarf ban would be
lifted for women in public offices except
for those that require uniforms such as the
military, police and the courts. The ban has
long been one of Turkey's most contentious
laws and many analysts see the reform as an
important step towards more democratic
rights.
The Guardian
.
The
CCN Inbox: Letters
to the Editor
Muslims
believe that
Islam has
existed
since the
beginning of
time and
that it is
the natural
religion of
mankind. Its
message is
for all
people.
In
No god but God, internationally acclaimed
scholar Reza Aslan explains Islam—the origins and
evolution of the faith—in all its beauty and
complexity.
![[IOU] Leadership Of Prophet](dataBusEdAds2/images3/iou_leadershipofprophet_small.jpg)
post comments on
our Wall
7
August 2011