Prof Ahmed Latif (formerly of Zimbabwe) was amongst the Queen's Birthday honour recipients, just weeks before the 68-year-old Indian-born doctor retires.
 

“This is a major thing for me, this OAM,” he told CCN.
 

“It’s fantastic, this is really something unexpected and a great farewell present.”
 

"Coming from Africa, I feel very privileged and honoured to be given an OAM as an Australian citizen."

 

Professor Latif has been the medical director and public health advisor to the Katherine-based Sunrise Health Service Aboriginal Corporation since 2009.

 

He moved to Australia in 2003 and his first post was as medical officer for the STI/HIV control program in the Northern Territory.
 

Before that he was dean of the medical school at the University of Zimbabwe in Africa.
 

Professor Latif has also been a consultant to the WHO on and off for more than 20 years, and also to the United Nations Population Fund from 2007-08.
 

The halls of a great university are a long way from Australia’s Aboriginal and Indigenous communities, but it was a challenge he grasped with both hands.
 

He set about establishing community-based public health programs to address child and maternal health, population health issues, chronic health conditions and mental health.
 

The initiatives have brought results - more chronic illnesses are being detected early, leading to better health outcomes. And childhood vaccination rates are nudging 100%.
 

“Bringing public health awareness into Aboriginal communities – I think that’s where I have made my mark I suppose,” he said.

 

---

 

 

Police Sergeant Jim Bellos, the cross cultural liaison officer with the Queensland Police Service, was also a recipient of an OAM for his services to the multicultural community.

 

He will add this prestigious recognition along with his Queenslander of the Year Award and his more recent Australian Police Medal which he received in January.

 

 

Last Sunday marked the inaugural Kuraby fun day at the Brisbane Islamic School. Alhamdulillah we managed to raise $83,829.10. The contribution of all of the food stall holders ensured there was an explosion of colour, aromas and tastes with the launch of the first ever Kuraby Mosque Fun Day. Our community's taste buds were treated to an assault of the finest international cuisines including scrumptious, Somali samoosas (arguably the best we’ve tasted) ; sizzling Indonesian satay and South African steak burgers that were sensational and sold out even before dinner. The Pakistani tikka and biryani were a hot favourite. But all of the food at the fun day was a great delight. Our children revelled in the rides, play time with the cutest animals in the farm and spent hours being decorated in the creative corner with face paint, henna, loom bands and much more. The ladies enjoyed some quality time learning how to decorate cakes, the most effective exercises for burning off all those cakes and the fine art of calligraphy from the experts - not to forget an entire shopping bazaar of beautiful Islamic clothing and homewares to spoil themselves for Eid. For the health and fitness gurus amongst us, we were treated to amazing displays from the local karate club, a unique opportunity to meet cricket professionals from the International Cricket Club and a chance to show off their fitness and strength in the rowing and bench press challenges. We were all treated to a spectacular performance of a new genre, called 'slam poetry' performed by some talented young students and witnessed first hand the extraordinary artistic talents of our Kuraby Madrassah students with their beautiful Ramadaan inspired murals. It was also useful to learn more about the many charitable organisations that work so tirelessly in our community and to have an opportunity to offer our support to them. Whilst it was an extraordinary day filled with fun for everyone, it was also an opportunity for our diverse community to come together and support each other by raising much needed funds for our beloved Kuraby Mosque. The extraordinary fireworks display on the night sky brought an excitement to the faces of our children that was a pleasure to witness. As the day drew to a close, it was hard not to feel truly blessed by Allah SWT to be a part of our community, in this great country. On behalf of the Kuraby Mosque, we would like to say a special "JazaakAllah" to all those many volunteers and stall holders that contributed their efforts and resources to ensuring the success of this spectacular fun day. It is always hard to single out a few people to the exclusion of others. Without detracting from the efforts of others, the following communities/ stalls need to be announced because their contribution was prime in making the event the success it was: • Algerian / Japanese - Individuals • Pakistani Community • Bangladeshi Community • Uzbek Community • Fijian Community • Algerian Community • Indonesian Community • South Africa Community • Zambian Community • Somali Community • Maldivian Community • Flamingos Flame Grill (Organisation of Food City Group) • Crescent of Brisbane • Mangal - Underwood Shopping Centre • Fijian Cup Cakes - Individuals We would also like to thank the many thousands of people who attended the day and supported the efforts of all those involved. Your attendance made the day exciting as it was. Jazaakallah

 

 

Kuraby Mosque

MCF/MAA

Toowoomba Mosque

Gold Coast Mosque

Email your calendar to ccn@crescentsofbrisbane.org for inclusion here

 

 

On Saturday 24 May, more than 600 school community members attended the Australian International Islamic College (AIIC) for a fun filled night.

 

 

There was a positive ambience that filled the entrance of the hall as mothers, fathers, teachers and children graced the school with their presence and eagerly awaited the excitement for the evening.

 

Every year the school hosts this event with performances and activities that provide an opportunity for the whole school community to come together and celebrate the education of their children.

 

 

At AIIC we identify the prominent position that our school community plays in making our school a special place to be. A strong partnership between the school, the home and the community is central toward constructing a quality learning atmosphere for our children.

 

The Parent and Citizens Committee has worked diligently with teachers to present this key event on our school calendar.

 

The action on the day entailed many well thought out activities implemented by our very own teachers.

 

This included a photo booth, movie sessions with free popcorn, face painting, henna and multiple food items such as a jelly and custard stall and a hot chocolate stall.

 

 

Our student council was encouraged to participate and helped raise funds for Afghanistan on the night.

 

 

Key performances for the night included the school’s Nasheed group and a well known community artist Hafeez Ali Khan.

 

 

Making this year’s event come to life, our students and families of AIIC were overcome with excitement on viewing the fireworks!

 

 

THE Holland Park Islamic Society has spoken out against proposed changes to the Racial ­Discrimination Act that could allow people to vilify a group because of their race, colour or national or ethnic origin as a part of “public discussion”.

The centre, which has a congregation of more than 400 people, has collected 1000 signatures against the proposed changes in conjunction with the Brisbane Sikh Temple in Eight Mile Plains and the wider community.

The petition was tabled by Labor Member for Griffith Terri Butler last fortnight.

Holland Park Islamic Society spokesman Ali Kadri (pictured above) said it was important to work with other ethnic and cultural groups against draft amendments.

“Although I understand free speech, if you open such legislation, which would damage the social fabric of multicultural nations, it’s not going to be good,” Mr Kadri said.

“It’s going to isolate and marginalise more and more people.”

 

He said without the protection of the current act, different cultural groups might retaliate against those vilifying them.

“It will become a tit for tat sort of thing,” he said.

Ms Butler said she was pleased to table the petition.

“I strongly believe that the hate speech laws should ­remain,’’ Ms Butler said.

She said she hoped that the Attorney-General, Senator George Brandis, would listen to the voice of the people and stop any attempt to remove protections against hate speech.

Senator Brandis, who raised the proposal earlier this year, told the South-East Advertiser the federal government made an election commitment to reform the act to protect freedom of speech while prohibiting racial vilification.

“Section 18C, in its current form, does neither of these things well,” Senator Brandis said.

He said he thanked those who had taken part in the community community consultation and now planned to release a draft bill in the coming weeks.

“There are a variety of views in the community, many who want Section 18C repealed completely, which is not the government’s view, many who want Section 18C to remain in its present form, and many who think Section 18C should be reformed,” Senator Brandis said.

He said these views would help the development of a draft bill for consideration by cabinet in coming weeks.
 

Source:  Courier Mail

 

Source: Sunday Courier Mail 1 June 2014

Zuha Ali seen receiving her CCN Young Muslim Writers Award in 2012

Two students of the Islamic College of Brisbane, Nadia Saeed and Zuha Ali, have been appointed as 2014 Youth Parliament Members. Nadia is representing Springwood and Zuha, Woodridge.

They are two of the 89 young Queenslanders aged between 12 and 25 who have been selected to represent their communities at this peak youth forum. Their respective departments are Education and the Arts as well as Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Multicultural Affairs.

 

Nadia Saeed is a senior student in her 11th year at the Islamic College. "I was ecstatic upon receiving the phone call that informed me that my application as a youth parliamentarian had been accepted," she said.

 

Zuha Ali aspired to represent the Muslim community from a very young age and was immediately drawn to Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Multicultural Affairs.

 

In September, the youth parliament members will be heading off to Queensland Parliament House to debate eight new youth bills which the Youth parliament members have been writing.

A GYMPIE man named Dollah (pictured left) may be Australia's loneliest and most financially desperate man. He might also be its most honest.

Desperate by any definition, working only to pay his rent and get food to his refugee family trapped in a remote corner of Bangladesh, Dollah recently stumbled on what would have been temptation for anyone else.
He found a pay envelope containing hundreds of dollars.

He handed it in to police and has yet to be convinced that he can hang on to it if it is not claimed in six weeks.

"He doesn't want anything he hasn't worked for," his friend and host Deborah Rays told The Gympie Times.

His escape from life-threatening viciousness in Myanmar is a long story that includes hiding in the jungle, running from soldiers, a blacked-out two hours on a smuggler's boat and a fearful run through an alien city to pay big money for a Skype connection so he could apply for a visa.
Dollah a Gympie meatworker, is the only man from his village to reach Australia.

Others, aged 12 and upwards, were mutilated and killed in front of their mothers and wives, part of the genocide now being experienced by his Rohingya people, a Muslim group regarded by many as the most oppressed people in the world.

Dollah now has permanent residency and an Australian ID card.

It is the first official recognition he has ever had that he exists and is a person.

Until he came into The Gympie Times' office this week, he had never seen a newspaper - not that he can read or write.

And his friends in Australia - Deborah Rays of Caboolture and Jamie Barnes of Gympie - are among the few strangers he has ever met who were not trying to kill him.

Without asking a free ride from anyone, he is working at Nolan Meats to earn money he uses to attempt to get food to his family - a wife, daughter, mother and two younger brothers - living in fear under a tarp.

His other brother is in jail.

His brother and his father were repeatedly beaten and tortured by the Myanmar Army.

His father died as a result, making Dollah responsible for the family.

His father's last wish was for Dollah to escape and somehow earn money to feed his family hiding across the border in Bangladesh.

He works at Nolan Meats and supporters are raising money to buy Dollah an electric-assisted bicycle so he can ride to work from his rented Monkland home and no longer have to spend much of his wages on cab fares.

But he is a man still in fear, constantly apprehensive. It is an attitude that makes sense after his experiences of life.

Recently he found what looked like a pay packet, an envelope containing some hundreds of dollars.

After handing the money in to police he noticed a very sad looking teenage male walking along the road where he found the money.

If it is your money, Dollah wants you to collect it from Gympie police station.

Told that it is his if it remains unclaimed, he says no.

"He doesn't want anything he hasn't worked for," Ms Rays said.

Dollah's story is proof that ordinary Australians know the difference, even if our leaders on all sides do not.
 

Australians have already donated, through the technological medium of internet "crowd funding", $1500 or more towards the $2500 cost of an electric bicycle to help him get to work.

For less than the cost of a bar of chocolate, Gympie people can make a difference, via the sites www.indiegogo.com or www.facebook.com/ride4refugee (which has a link to the indiegogo fund raising site).

It is also our chance to show a hard-working, honest man that, while we don't like being conned, as we sometimes may feel we are, we appreciate a genuine cause.

And it is our chance to let Australia's loneliest person know that he is among friends.
 

Source:  The Chronicle

Dear all

I am an atheist and someone who hopes that one day we will have secular education in all schools.
 

I am an atheist who believes in religious toleration. On that basis, I think we have common ground.

I believe I am living in a country that does not believe in religious toleration. This is in spite of much talk about 'British values' which apparently refers to such things as 'democracy', 'freedom' and - ironically, 'religious toleration'!

I believe that I am living in a country that does not believe in religious toleration because one faith is being singled out for special treatment. This is not toleration, it is discrimination.

We know the examples: highlighting segregation of sexes in schools where there are Muslims whilst it goes on for many different reasons in the education system as a whole, between schools, or within schools; highlighting Muslim dress whilst the religious dress of other faiths is not mentioned...

So, my position is this: while we are in a situation in which we do not have universal secular education with religious toleration, we should aim for an end to all forms of 'cherry-picking' and 'selectivity' . We should oppose any attempt by politicians to select this or that part of one faith's practises as 'objectionable' whilst failing to notice that equivalents are practised by other faiths.

With this in mind, may I plead with practitioners and leaders of all faiths to regard these selective attacks on Muslims as an attack on you and indeed on all of us?

May I plead with you to point out to politicians exactly how some of their statements about Islam or about Muslim religious practices, could if applied consistently, apply to you?

At present, they are getting away with being selective because, in part, we do not hear your voices saying, 'Us too!'

When one group is attacked, we are all unsafe. You too. Please do not ever think that by politicians attacking one faith, your faith is made secure. Please speak out, call the politicians to account and show that their cherry-picking and selectivity for what it is: prejudice, discrimination or just cynical vote-seeking.

Thank you for reading this.

Michael Rosen

The Logan Mosque is holding a fundraiser on 21 June to raise $100 000 for creating a 450 square meter area to be used for functions, ifthar programmes and room for more Musallies during Jumma and tharaweeh salaats.

 

The house on the adjoining property is also in need of repairs before it is ready to house offices for a full-time Imam and administration. The Logan City council has also given notice for more bitumen sealed car park areas.

 

Click on the thumbnail image above for more information on the dinner, contact persons and banking details.

Are Muslim academics playing the role of 'house Muslims'?

"Why are there no Muslim philosophers?" Sudipta Kaviraj posed this question to me while I was studying some critical Western texts of philosophy in the fall of 2009 with him. Although this is a complicated question - which I do not take at face value, given that Kaviraj is himself an important postcolonial thinker - it does point to a significant failure of Muslim thinkers to engage their own intellectual tradition, together with the Western tradition of thought.

At the same time, Kaviraj's question relates to another crucial question raised more recently by Hamid Dabashi: "Can non-Europeans think?" In his article, Dabashi highlights how non-European thought - Muslim thought for our present purposes - is cast by the academia. The problem now is not whether Muslims can or cannot think, but how their thought needs to be reshaped according to Western "styles" of thinking for it to be deemed "philosophy" by Western academics, and not something closer to mythology.

On one level the question "Why are there no Muslim philosophers?" is an absurd one. Hamid Dabashi and Walter Mignolo, both major thinkers in their own right, mention the names of a number of Muslim philosophers (Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Azmi Bishara, Sadeq Jalal Al-Azm, Fawwaz Traboulsi, Abdallah Laroui, Abdolkarim Soroush, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr). Wael Hallaq - himself also a very important thinker - has added to that list in his own commentary on the relation of politics and knowledge (Muhammad Arkoun, M Abed al-Jabiri, Ali Harb, Hasan Hanafi, and Muhammad Shahrur).

Muslim thought and Western academia

Lately, I have been pondering a set of questions. I posed them in a few academic forums, all with a decent Muslim representation, but I have yet to receive any satisfactory responses. My questions are: To what extent can Muslims think as Muslims within academia without being deemed too Muslim, and to what extent must their thought be made to conform to Western paradigms of thought?

That is, in order to be accepted within the academia, the writings of Muslim academics must not be identifiable as Islamic thought, but just more expressions of "academic objectivity". Put differently, if the primary role of the academy is to inculcate obedience to the state, and if Muslims must make their thought conform to the strictures of the academy, are they then reproducing Western power/knowledge given that, as Michel Foucault has taught us, knowledge and power are intertwined?

I would like to remind the reader that one of the major endeavours of the British in India (which was the exemplary colonial project) was to educate Indians according to modern, Western knowledge in order to create subjects that were more pliant and welcoming of British rule. One of the dreams of Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), who played a major role in introducing Western education to India, was that Indians would ultimately educate other Indians in Western subjects.

 

 

Aljazeera

Source: Huffington Post   Next week in CCN: Another of the 10 Muslim Women you Have To Know

Nusayba bint Ka'b Al-Ansariyah (Arabia, unknown-634 C.E.) Nusayba was of one of the first advocates for the rights of Muslim women. Notably, she asked the Prophet Muhammad, "Why does God only address men (in the Quran)?" Soon after this exchange, the Prophet received a revelation in Chapter 33, Verse 35 that mentions women can attain every quality to which men have access. The verse also conclusively settled that women stand on the same spiritual level as men. She was viewed as a visionary who transcended her Nusayba bint Ka'b Al-Ansariyah (Arabia, unknown-634 C.E.) Nusayba was of one of the first advocates for the rights of Muslim women. Notably, she asked the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), "Why does God only address men (in the Quran)?"   Soon after this exchange, the Prophet received a revelation in Chapter 33, Verse 35 that mentions women can attain every quality to which men have access. The verse also conclusively settled that women stand on the same spiritual level as men. She was viewed as a visionary who transcended her own generation.

 

Mohammed Ibrahim $2.15bn ($2.4bn) UK (Sudan)                 
 

Another example of a self-made man, Mohammed ‘Mo’ Ibrahim is putting his money to good effect in Africa, where he has set up the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, to encourage better governance in Africa, as well as creating the Mo Ibrahim Index, to evaluate nations’ performance.

 

Ibrahim is a member of the Africa Regional Advisory Board of London Business School and a British Sudanese mobile communications entrepreneur and billionaire.

 

He was born in north Sudan and started out working at the African country’s postal service.

 

He earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alexandria before going off to the UK to get his master’s degree and PhD, and ended up as an academic with a specialisation in mobile communications.

 

When British Telecommunications was about to launch the first mobile service in the UK the company invited him to come on board as a technical director and engineer.

 

Ibrahim left his job with the support of his wife to become a consultant and eventually forming his own company with $50,000 in savings.

 

With the help of 450 engineers the company designed networks around the world. He then sold his first company a few years later for about $1bn.  
 

Source: ArabianBusiness