Future of Makkah: Reform?

I posted this on the blog for Professor’s other class but I want to relate this one to reform and revival. I was at a family friends house earlier today for a house warming party and I noticed something on his wall that stuck out to me. It was a Islamic calendar. It was not the calendar that stuck out to me but the pictures on it. Calendars usually have pictures which are determined based on a theme and the theme of this calendar was holy land in the Islamic world, so it had pictures of Makkah, Medinah, Jeruselam, etc. The month of November had a picture of the Kabah and Makkah. Makkah is the holy city where the Kabah resides. The Kabah is the black structure most of you see and hear about on TV and it is the direction toward which Muslims pray and where the Hajj occurs. This was no regular picture of Makkah but a picture of future Makkah. Over the years there has been a lot of talk about modernizing Makkah and the sorrounding areas of the Kabah to make it look real modern and nice. Well after a lot of controversy that construction has begun but I amn not sure what the layout is. If you go to google and type in future Makkah and look at the pics there you will see they layout I saw on the calendar. But basically what my concern or question is: Is it right to modernize holy land? The yare basically trying to turn that holy land into another Dubai. I am just curious what many of you have to say about this. I myself am totally against it. Of course there is always room for improvement for the betterment of society but to modernize a holy land to such an extent seems horrendous to me. When I go to Hajj I want to be in the land that the Prophet was in. I want to see it the way he saw it and struggle they way he struggled. The more struggle, the closer we can get to Allah. I say we can make minor improvements but I am against turning it into another Dubai.

Now let’s talk about this situation in terms of revival and reform. Will changing the holy land and the way it looks change the way Muslims think? Does this not go against what people like Ghazali preached. Most of the people whose works we have read said to put aside the material hoys of this world and imagine the material joys that will be provided in the Hereafter. What’s basically happening is that the holy land is being turned into a material object and being sorrounded by it. I don’t think to many reformers would be happy about this. When Muslims go to Makkah to pay tribute to God and worship him, especially during Hajj, they will be distracted by the huge towers and the beutiful architecture, and this might ruin their Hajj.

Conversations at the dinner table

I saw a post abouyt a political discussion at the Thanksgiving dinner table and I wanted to share my experiences and the holiday dinners. I am of Indian descent and this past weekend I gladly able to enjoy a Thanksgiving dinner and a Eid dinner. At most Indo-Pak gatherings the men, or what most of us refer to as Uncles, tend to always have their political conversations. As a kid I avoided these conversations to the best of my ability becaues I always thought the Uncles argued about pointless stuff and talked about how American sucked or something like that. But over the past couple of the years I have had the privileage of joining in on these holiday dinner table discussions and they are not that bad at all. Of course these desi Uncles will at times talk about useless things and act as if they understand NFL football and hate on Cutler when Cutler is not the problem. Anyhow, this Thanksgiving and Eid there was a huge discussion at the dinner table about how the government views Muslims. Different Uncles have different opinions, but it seems like they always avoid talking about Osama Bin Laden. Its either cause they feel uncomfortable as Muslims or they think that the CIA/FBI/other letter coporations, are listening in on their conversation. For the first time I felt comfortable and old enough to have my input and it was nice to see them listen to what I had to say and using alot of what I learned in this class, I was able to discuss politics and the situation of the Muslim world.

Bin Laden

So this Thanksgiving I went to my friends house (his parents were kind enough to invite me over even though we had never met)… So there I am at a table of 10 people that I have never met, eating a Thanksgiving dinner, when an interesting political discussion begins. Of coarse it ended up on issues of media, horrible wars, and the mistakes of the West in the past century. I, of course, decide to bring up my very liberal views of such things in the midst of these strangers and began to talk about Bin Laden and his statements. Amazingly I was not kicked out or tarred and feathered!

That, in response to the whole peanut debacle, should say that at least some Americans are willing to look more honestly at our current position in the world. The basic point was that if we don’t learn from the mistakes of the past, if we don’t wisen up and start to REALLY look at what the “haters” of the good old US of A are angry about (both the radicals and more rationally inclined people) we will be like any other ‘empire’ out there, we will be stomped out. This is never a very pretty proccess either!

First of Many Posts… democracy/religion

So I have to catch up on my blogging so you will be hearing a lot from me in the next couple of days.

The first conversation I wanted to respond to is the whole democracy/ religion thing based off of Ramadan’s book. The first thing that should be said is that you simplify what he is arguing from modernity to democracy. His support of modernity is reason/rationality, change, and freedom. Ramadan states that “modernisation is a liberation, the breaking of the chains of all intangible dogmas, stilted traditions and evolving societies.” (pg.3) So I don’t think his argument is for democracy per say, but rather for the modernisation of Islam (and that these priniciples are already in Islam so it is not a bad thing).

So I don’t think he is really try to “reconcile democracy with religion” in the first place. It is true that religions can be exclusive (especially the more radical forms) but in terms of modernism he is trying to say that it can be applied to Islam as long as they heed the lessons in the history of the West. 

At least thats what I got from it…

Re: Stoning of Somali Woman

Firstly, I think it is terrible that a woman was stoned for this offense, when in my opinion worse things are being done. The difficulty in many faiths, as we have seen this semester, is interpretation. In this case someone of influence declared this offense to be worthy of death. My concern is the lack of accountability for such people. In any belief there will be people with a varying degree of interpretations, from liberal to conservative. What I still do not understand is how these ‘Muslim’ countries function, seemingly, without any accountability. This has been a long-standing issue for me and instances like this make me wonder what the umma is going to do about it. If actions such as these do not represent Islam then when are people going to start publically challenging those who would propose that it does?

RE: RE: Stoning of Somali Woman

I think the media plays a huge role in this. If we look at news over the past two decades, whenever the media can attach Islam to anything they blow it up into a huge seen. As we all know, the man involved in the Fort Hood shootings was Muslim. Since that shooting occured I have been inolved in many group conversations with Muslim in and out of the Masjid where this topic came up. Everytim it did come up the one thing we all talked about was how he did notthing in the name of Islam but jsut because he was Muslim it blew up in the faces of all the Muslims. Now lets say this man was Christian. This news would probably not been as big of a deal and there would be no religious association to it. Now we must realize in this day and time that the media, in my opinion, is evil. We must be careful of what we belive and don’t belive. We cannot always make a quick judgment based on something we hear on T.V. Its funny that the media could actually get away with saying that stoning is a form of the death penalty in Islam. The problem here is that people will belive it, EVEN the Muslims. Why? Because over the centuries its just been like that and so they assume thats how it should be dealt with in Islam. Most of the reformers that we have been readindg about are trying to overcome this media wall that has made the interpretation of Islam a hard task. Instead of looking at the Quran and sunnah as the primary text and sources of interpretation, people are basing their opinions on what they hear and read from the media. Establishing the Quran and Sunnah as the main sources needs to be established as one of the many tasks.

RE: Stoning of Somali Woman

I agree that this situation is quite disheartening but there should be no judgement put on Islam. People act out in the name of religion because they find it a way out or a way of justifying their actions. With that said, there is nothing in the Quran that allows this behavior. But just because extremists or fundamentalists say that it is the Quran that states this should be done  way doesn’t make it factual. These are people that seem to interpret the holy words in their own way and make up their own rules in their heads to make their behaviors acceptable. These are people that lack knowledge which is why they act of in ways and then place it on the Quran to justify their doings.  In my opinion it is simply ignorance and denial to take responsibility for their actions. And i can almost guarantee that if this was a man in place of this woman nothing would have happened to him.

Somali woman stoned to death

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8366197.stm

This is a BBC article about a woman who was divorced but had sex with an unmarried man and was consequently buried to the waste and stoned to death by a crowd of 200 people after local Somali authorities claimed that this is the procedure which the Qur’an says to follow. First off, I do not recall ever seeing anything about this in the Qur’an, nor to do recall reading anything which could possibly be interpreted as instructions to this end.

So this is the point this raises for me: I will go ahead and agree that there is a bias in the Western media and we are given stories and images often designed to convince us that Muslims are monsters and Islam is this horrible scary thing. But does that mean that things like the events of this article DON’T occur? I can’t bring myself to dismiss the content article as “Western media bias” and yes, it does negatively impact my view of Islamic governance. I am not implying that a positive and just Islamic state is impossible, but here is a real-life contemporary example of a government claiming to be of the Qur’an and having organized public stonings. Bias or not, this did really happen and really was said to be justified in the name of Islam.

Something fishy part 2

Another thing I wanted to add to my previous post is that–

in Islam the killing of innocents is a grave sin. In fact there is a hadith (saying of the Prophet) that states that the taking of a life of one man is as if one has murdered all of humanity. From a religious standpoint– revenge is not something Islam advocates. Yes, fighting in defense is justified– but not murder for the sake of historical grievances. So Bin Laden, with all of his elegant words on the imperialism of the west and its horrific treatment of Muslims– essentially misconstrues Islam with his violence enthused speeches. The killing of children can NEVER be justified–what can they have possibly done?

It seems as if Bin Laden suffuses his lectures with a balance of Hadith and Qur’anic ayas alongside historical grievances against colonizers and Western imperialism. So, while not really focusing on the heart of the Islamic reform of the individual– he uses the Qur’anic scripture as a vehicle to drive his mission of destroying America. Also, the statements he makes that never can a Muslim befriend or trust a Non-Muslim are wholly untrue. The Qur’an offers a great degree of respect for Jews and Christians– People of the Book.

Essentially– I noticed that Bin Laden uses the masses’ faith and cleverly applies it to his speeches on the horrors of American supremacy and hegemony. In doing so, he confuses people– and forces them to believe that true spiritual bliss can only be achieved by fighting out the ‘infidels’ a word he seems to have an affinity for. Once again, something seems fishy about a man so intelligent crafting together such a shrewd and evil argument– for something he must know is inconsistent with Islam and that does not help advance the spirituality of any Muslim.

 

Something seems fishy. Bin Laden book.

So I decided that I would read the Bin Laden book with the eyes of someone who knows nothing about Bin Laden.  Somewhat difficult given all the rhetoric and brouhaha surrounding the global super-villain.

Going through his statements and speeches, I can see how Bin Laden successfully appealed to so many of the poor and uneducated masses. Everything he says about Western imperialism is true– we are the superpower and we don’t apologize for anything. We’ve been massacring and killing innocents for centuries, but always so in line with our economic interests. And the instant someone opposing our interests rises up and defends himself– we are quick to condemn him and squash the opposition. We are a global bully- its recognized world-over, and only now beginning to slightly change under Obama’s administration.

Speaking to a disenfranchised, poor and illiterate audience, I can see how Bin Laden could inspire the youth to take up arms– or even at the very least, find his messages justified. By offering the downtrodden a scapegoat for all of their grievances, Bin Laden successfully polarized the poor and solidified an already lurking hatred toward the West.

HOWEVER– and I acknowledge now that I sometimes believe conspiracy theories– something seems very calculated about all of Osama’s speeches. He offers no goal or positive ends that can possibly justify his murderous means. No, he’s only hell-bent on revenge. ALl there is — is empty angry rhetoric. And while the claims he makes against the crimes of the West he offers are true — he doesn’t offer a viable solution — from his passages, it is clear that he is an intelligent man..so obviously he understands that by attacking America, America will strike back– harder. If he is (as he undoubtedly was), aware of this fact.. why would he push the poor to keep killing themselves for a cause that WILL NEVER SUCCEED?

BIn Laden, for all his eloquence and rhetoric, seems like a political puppet. He’s there to distract everyone it seems. There’s something even more evil lurking beneath the surface.. I suspect. Fight the aggressors, drive them out — he says…then what? Something just seems fishy. Maybe I shouldn’t post this..its pretty controversial.. thoughts?