E-baad-e News

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf:

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Sat, 25 May 2013 06:28:00 +0000

Tempest in a Teapot: Islamophobia Meets Homophobia | Sandala

Article by Mehdi Hasan:

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Sat, 25 May 2013 06:24:00 +0000

As a Muslim, I Struggle With the Idea Of Homosexuality - But I Oppose Homophobia - The Huffington Post

On Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Part III

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Fri, 24 May 2013 05:14:00 +0000

One of the distinguishing features of my father's leadership was his critique of his own community. As much as he spoke against racism and the war, he was equally critical of Jewish religious institutions: "On every Sabbath multitudes of Jews gather in the synagogues, and they often depart as they have entered." Prayer had become vicarious, delegated to rabbis and cantors who failed to inspire because they "do not know the language of the soul." He found fault as much with Orthodox as with Reform and Conservative branches of Judaism, as much with educators as with lay leaders. Too much money had been spent on demographic surveys and not enough on education, while educators themselves should make their goal "reverence for learning and the learning of reverence." Worship had lost its fear and trembling and had become a social occasion, rather than a moment of holiness. Society was disintegrating, and Judaism was conforming, failing to convey its resources of integrity. Judaism, he wrote, had become a platitude, when it should be spiritual effrontery. The modern Jew had become a messenger who had forgotten the message.

-Susannah Heschel in the introduction to the Perennial Classics Edition of The Prophets by Abraham Joshua Heschel, p. xix.

On Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Fri, 24 May 2013 05:10:00 +0000

Shortly after publishing The Prophets, my father became active in the anti-war movement, and in 1965 he founded an organization, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. As much as the Selma march was for him a religious experience, religious without indignation at political evils was impossible. Justice is not simply an idea or a norm, but a divine passion. Echoing the prophetic language, my father declared, "To speak about God and remain silent on Vietnam is blasphemous." If we are to follow, however modestly, the teachings of prophetic sympathy and divine pathos, then religion must be understood as the opposite of callousness. The opposite of good, he wrote, is not evil; the opposite of good is indifference. Indeed, in our very humanity depends upon our compassion. In speaking out against the war, he said, "Remember that the blood of the innocent cries forever. Should that blood stop to cry, humanity would cease to be." Hearing the silent anguish is not limited to the prophets, but devolves upon all of us: "Few are guilty, but all are responsible," my father writes in the early pages of The Prophets.

-Susannah Heschel in the introduction to the Perennial Classics Edition of The Prophets by Abraham Joshua Heschel, pgs. xviii-xix.

On Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Fri, 24 May 2013 05:04:00 +0000

My father lived in Nazi Germany, fleeing just at the last minute. His mother and three of his sisters, all living in Poland, were murdered by the Nazis. For him, those experiences resulted in both a deepened commitment to his faith and a heightened sensitivity to the suffering of all people. Hitler and his followers came to power not with machine guns, but with words, he used to say, and they did so with a debased view of human beings rooted in contempt for God. You cannot worship God, he writes, and look with contempt at a human being as if he or she were an animal. In particular, he held German Christian religious leaders responsible for the widespread collaboration with the Nazi regime and their failure to provide theological tools for opposing anti-Semitism.

-Susannah Heschel in the introduction to the Perennial Classics Edition of The Prophets by Abraham Joshua Heschel, p. xvi.

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Fri, 24 May 2013 03:55:00 +0000

Watch "Divine Lights of Witness and Entrance - Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah" on YouTube

President Obama quote on Islam in America

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Thu, 23 May 2013 20:46:00 +0000

The best way to prevent violent extremism is to work with the Muslim American community – which has consistently rejected terrorism – to identify signs of radicalization, and partner with law enforcement when an individual is drifting towards violence. And these partnerships can only work when we recognize that Muslims are a fundamental part of the American family. Indeed, the success of American Muslims, and our determination to guard against any encroachments on their civil liberties, is the ultimate rebuke to those who say we are at war with Islam.

-President today via Rashad Hussain

NYU commencement

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:21:00 +0000

Webcast

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Wed, 22 May 2013 06:33:00 +0000

BBC News - How religions change their mind

Via Usama Hasan

"Is any of this story of larger significance or helpfulness?

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Wed, 22 May 2013 05:35:00 +0000

Muslims often ask me what they should study; and are perplexed when I usually warn them against joining the legions of believers now populating departments of politics or social science. The crisis of our age produces political and social disruptions, but it is not their consequence. Religion is about truth, and unless truth be properly discerned and defended, nothing else will come right.

-Abdal-Hakim Murad, "Quicunque Vult, or, A teenage journey to Islam."

Big Think clip with Dr. Cornel West: How Intellectuals Betrayed the Poor

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Wed, 22 May 2013 05:27:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:34:00 +0000

Watch "Interview of Sh. Hamza Yusuf w/ Tim Winter (1/3)" on YouTube (from 1995)

The Opening

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Mon, 20 May 2013 05:58:00 +0000

In the name of God, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy! Praise belongs to God, Lord of the Worlds, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy, Master of the Day of Judgement. It is You we worship; it is You we ask for help. Guide us to the straight path: the path of those You have blessed, those who incur no anger and who have not gone astray.

The Qur'an. A new translation by M.A.S. Abdellah Haleem.

Caffeinated Muslim: Review of “Light Without Fire: The Making of America’s First Muslim College”

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Fri, 17 May 2013 00:59:00 +0000

http://caffeinatedmuslim.com/2013/05/12/review-of-light-without-fire-the-making-of-americas-first-muslim-college/

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Fri, 10 May 2013 06:57:00 +0000

Watch "College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be" on YouTube

The Reality of Idealism by David Coolidge

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Fri, 10 May 2013 00:01:00 +0000

http://islamatbrown.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-reality-of-idealism.html

Quote from President of Fordham University about the Jesuit Tradition

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Wed, 08 May 2013 04:59:00 +0000

“From the very beginnings, Jesuit education has been characterized by a number of different qualities:

We have a great emphasis on care for the individual student;

We have a great desire to introduce excellence and rigor into the classroom and every subject we teach;

Third, we believe that students have to be invited to wrestle with the great ethical issues of their time. We want them to be bothered by the realization that they don’t know everything and bothered by injustice.”

—Joseph M. McShane, S.J., President of Fordham University

http://www.fordham.edu/discover_fordham/fordhams_jesuit_trad/

MacIntyre on God, philosophy, universities

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Wed, 08 May 2013 01:44:00 +0000

Theism, as I noted at the outset, is not just a set of doctrines about God. It concerns the nature of the natural and social universe as created and sustained by God, as embodying his purposes. For theists understanding how things are is inseparable from understanding them as informed by God's purposes. So any study of physics or history or political science or psychology that omits all reference to God will be importantly incomplete. And this puts theists at odds with any purely secular understanding of such academic disciplines. Yet what would it be instead to understand them in the terms afforded by a theistic account of the order and nature of things?

-Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, p. 15.

AHM quote on Muslims engaging Jews and Christians

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Wed, 08 May 2013 01:44:00 +0000

Despite appearances, and the urgent but mistaken desire of many Muslims to engage in dialogue with purely secular thinkers and ideologies, we are primarily called to speak to the ‘People of the Book’. Years ago, as I turned away from the machine age to consider alternative voices, I expected to find the heirs to the monotheist scriptures as the most serious prophetic dissidents of our time. By no means is that always the case, as there are many churchmen who are willing to lower the price of their goods in the hope of selling them to a trivial and lazy world. Yet I take heart from conversations with other scripturalists, and experience the accompanying fellowship as momentously important. I find, too, that God has placed Muslims in a privileged situation in such environments. Followers of Ishmael, who revere the founders of the other monotheisms not just for reasons of conviviality or diplomacy, but as a doctrinal necessity, are better-placed than Jews or Christians to benefit from the eirenic and mutually-affirming ethos which is informally demanded in such encounters.[37] The clarity and apostolic authority of our doctrines proves a no less precious advantage. It is helpful, and not difficult, gently to help the People of the Book confront their inherited misunderstandings about our faith, which are often based on errors already challenged in the Koran. In earlier centuries, and in certain right-wing Christian circles even today, a furious and hate-filled polemic existed based on utterly erroneous information,[38] and it is still not unusual to hear, even from reputed mainline theologians, wild opinions based on hearsay or long-dead scholarship. Pope Benedict XVI’s various pronouncements on Islam, for instance, seem to be drawn not from consultations with the Vatican’s established Islam experts, but on concerns shared, to a visible degree, with right-wing activists and journalists such as Oriana Fallaci.[39] He hardly condescends to listen to us; any more than the Roman emperors spoke to the new Christian believers multiplying in their inner cities.. But there are many others, perhaps very numerous, who seek humbly to listen and to learn. Many of them are seekers. Many of them, too, harbour the doubts about Christian doctrine which once precipitated my change.

-Abdal-Hakim Murad, Quicunque Vult, or, A teenage journey to Islam

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Tue, 07 May 2013 18:50:00 +0000

Rolling Stone Mobile - Politics - Politics: Everything You've Been Told About Radicalization is Wrong

Muslims and Institutional Building as a minority in America

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Tue, 07 May 2013 04:01:00 +0000

Muslims have ignored establishing some of the most basic institutions that are necessary for any minority community who seeks to have their voice taken seriously. There are no widely circulated national publications that explain Muslim perspectives. There is no widely recognized think tank expressing Muslim understandings of policy debates. There are a scant few public intellectuals from Muslim backgrounds that articulate mainstream views or who represent general Muslim thinking. While there are a number of very talented Muslim academics, very few have been able to cross-over and achieve mainstream credibility. Every other minority community has multiple inventories in each category listed above. What Muslims have are a number of smaller efforts that lack support, lack funding and lack human resources. If Muslims have failed in all these arenas it is not for a lack of talent, but rather for a lack of collective vision.

-Firas Ahmad, in an Islamica Magazine article "Muslim Voters and Obama"

previously available at http://www.islamicamagazine.com/Online-Analysis/Muslim-Voters-and-Obama.html

Andrew Delbanco

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Mon, 06 May 2013 02:24:00 +0000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Delbanco

C-SPAN Book Discussion at NYU Bookstore with Scott Korb and Khalid Latif

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Mon, 06 May 2013 00:46:00 +0000

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Lightw

Scott Korb talked about his book, Light without Fire: The Making of America’s First Muslim College, in which he recounts the creation of the first four-year Muslim liberal arts college, Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California. The author follows the school’s first class and profiles its founders, Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shakir. Scott Korb [and Imam Khalid Latif] spoke at the New York University Bookstore in New York City.

Bill Clinton on his early sense of mortality

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Sun, 05 May 2013 23:54:00 +0000

My father [who drowned after losing control of his car at the age of 28 in 1946] left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people, and that if I did it well enough, somehow I could make up for the life he should have had. And his memory infused me, at a younger age than most, with a sense of my own mortality. The knowledge that I, too, could die young drove me both to try to drain the most out of every moment of life and to get on with the next big challenge. Even when I was't sure where I was going, I was always in a hurry.

-Bill Clinton, My Life, p. 7.

NYT: A Viewer’s Guide to the NYC Mayoral Candidates

noreply@blogger.com (Ebadur Rahman) — Sun, 05 May 2013 22:42:00 +0000

By visiting a mosque every Friday, he [John C. Lui] has made unexpected inroads with the city’s long-neglected Muslims. His least understood asset, however, is the deep bond he has forged with the city’s black community, which has applauded his call for the abolition of the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactic and his complaints about prosecutorial zeal.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/14/nyregion/mayoral-candidates.html