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Islam and Politics
The fact is, as I have said before, today’s Indian Muslims suffer from
an intellectual paralysis. An earlier generation of scholars used to study such
thinkers like Ibn Arabi, Fakhruddin Razi, Einstein, Bergson, Russel and Freud.
The task, once again, is to rethink Islam without completely breaking from the
past....
Islam and Sectarianism
Ayatollah Sistani, one of the highest and most reputable religious
figures amongst the Shias, publicly called for everyone to comply with the
prohibitions and restrictions on the visits to the holy sites, Friday prayers
and all forms of collective gathering. Yet very significantly, Al Sadr’s
defiance of Sistani did not pay off….
Islamic World News
• Islamic State Threat During Coronavirus Outbreak: Delhi Police
Personnel on Target, Alert Issued
• Muslim Community Critical, Cautious After Tablighi Jamaat
Features as Covid-19 Hotbed in News Reports
• Prime Minister Imran Khan Asks Youth to Join Corona Tiger Force
As ‘Jihad’ Against Pandemic
• Islamists Are Frustrating Pakistan’s Fight Against Coronavirus
• Iranian Youths and Resistance Units: Mullahs Want Us to Despair,
We Will Fight Against It
• Taliban To Cease Fire in Areas Only Affected by Coronavirus:
Mujahid
• Muslim Doctors, Alfa Sa'adu; Amged el-Hawrani; Adil El Tayar and
Habib Zaidi, First to Die on Front Line of UK Pandemic
• Muslim Paramedic Shaves Beard to Protect People During
Coronavirus Pandemic
• Worshippers Attack Govt Officials, Journalists, Police at Lagos
Mosque
• How Coronavirus Challenges Muslims’ Faith and Changes Their
Lives
• Indonesian Religious Leaders Must Be More Active in
Communicating Messages About the Pandemic
• “If You Find Me, I’m Yours.”: Writer of Mystery Letters in
Jeddah Revealed
Compiled By New Age Islam
News Bureau
For Details And More News From All Regions, Please Click, ‘Read
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Islam, Women and Feminism
• The First Saudi Female Filmmaker Talks About 'Going Her Own Way'
• A Female Saudi Doctor Tries to Heal Divisions in The Perfect Candidate
• Iran’s Women’s Football Team 70th In FIFA Rankings
• Turkey Neutralizes Top Woman Terrorist Of PKK/KCK
• Racist Coughed in Muslim Woman’s Face and Told Her He Had
Covid-19 In UK
• Pakistan Government Urged to Do More for Female Drug Addicts
• AWS Webinar Brings Together Regional Women Leaders
• Sex Offenders May Walk As Lawmakers Mull Releasing One In Three
Turkish Prisoners
Compiled By New Age Islam
News Bureau
Urdu Section
کروناوائرس ایک
متعدی وبا ہے جس
کی جنگ سے
آج پوری دنیا
نبرد آزما ہے ۔
بالخصوص امریکہ، اٹلی ،
چین ، فرانس
، اسپین اور
انگلینڈ جیسے ترقی یافتہ
ممالک میں اس
وائرس نے
لوگوں کو اپنی
چپیٹ میں لے رکھا
ہے ۔اب تک
۶ لاکھ سے
زائد لوگ اس کی
لپیٹ میں آچکے ہیں
اور ۲۵ ہزار
سے زیادہ لوگ
اس مہلک وبا
سے مر چکے
ہیں۔ ایسے نازک حالات
میں دنیا کے
ہر شہری پر یہ
لازم ہے کہ
وہ سماجی دوری
اختیار کریں۔
Spiritual Meditations
He warns us in the books of all three great religions against
transgressions, zulm (cruelty in its many forms), and lack of faith and shirk
(making other deities/personalities partners in His kingdom). There is no
sharing of power with Him as He is the only Omnipotent, Omnipresent and the
All-powerful....
Current Affairs
To be sure, the world will no longer be the same on the other side of
Covid- 19, but some challenges won’t change. Almost all of the old security
threats will continue to dog us, and there will be new, and even more potent,
strategic threats that will emerge out of the tectonic changes in the global
order that will unfold once the immediate crisis is over....
Spiritual Meditations
What shall we do? How shall we respond to this peril? Respond, we have
to. Even refusing to respond is also a response, the response of denial. On
occasions like this, it could help to recall how such calamities were faced in
the past. The Plague—or the Black Death—that ravaged the world in the 14th
century offers an instructive case study....
Spiritual Meditations
As the old proverb goes, “Every dark cloud has a silver lining.” The
ongoing COVID-19 crisis, too, has a silver lining as it has given the
environment the much-needed break from the relentless degradation and exploitation by mankind....
Current Affairs
The inevitably long state of national emergency, while creating a
war-like political climate, may account for deep fissures in Western
democracies. Meanwhile, the case of Chinese containment only makes it more
difficult for liberal paraphernalia to hail democracy as the beau idéal. ...
BEST OF BEFORE ARTICLES
Islamic Society
What does the Quran say about such a grave human crisis? If we go
through the chronicles of the previous nations in the holy book, we find that
many communities and nations were destroyed as a punishment to transgressions,
sins, disobedience of God, violation of natural order and corruption,
ingratitude to God and oppression of people….
Islamic Society
Those who were interested in
Sufism had no interest in the regimented life the Tablighis led and preached.
And those who loved nature had little time either for Nizamuddin Aulia or
puritanical Islam that the Tablighis practiced and preached. ...
Islamic Ideology
Reclaiming Faith and Reason in IslamIrshad Ahmad and Zahid Sultan, New Age Islam
The Quran specifies that the characteristic that distinct humans from
other Animals is of Aql (Rationality). As Quran Puts,” For the worst of beasts
in the sight of Allah are the deaf and dumb- those who understand not.” (8:22).
When one goes through Quran; Allah asks people again & again to ponder over
the signs in the universe; stars, moon, earth, Creation, Rains, and others. A
system is being set in motion to the use of mankind so as to extract benefits
from it….
Islamic Ideology
The Prophet’s guidance on preventing contagious diseases and enforcing
quarantine also becomes clear from the hadith that the Prophet (peace be upon
him) said, «لا يُوردَنَّ مُمرض على مصخ« which means “a
healthy person should not be brought near a sick person”…
Islamic Society
Restrictions on prayers was not acceptable, he said. He further said
that the holy Prophet said that there is no Adwa that is diseases do not spread
without the permission of Allah. There was no need to panic and Muslims should
spend more time in mosques and pray for the protection of people from the
epidemic….
Islam and Human Rights
Madam President,
The Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)
told the Council last week that the OIC will adopt the Cairo Declaration on
Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI) after it is revised in accordance with
international human-rights standards. This would have been reassuring if
individual member states had shown any renewed commitment to Human Rights.
That, however, doesn’t seem to be the case. Only a couple of examples can be
cited here. Turkey is bringing a law that would allow child rapists to walk
free if they marry their victims, thus legitimising rape. Hundreds of Hindu, Sikh and Christians girls
are subjected to forcible conversions and rapes in Pakistan every year. Equally
frequent are continuing practices of harassment and murder of religious
minorities through misuse of blasphemy law, religious persecution against
Shias, Ahmadiyas, Ismailis and Hazaras in Pakistan. Children are still recruited for terror
activities including suicide bombing in Pakistan and other Islamic nations.
Madam President,
OIC secretary-general also notes that the organization continues to
condemn the ideological rhetoric adopted by terrorist groups. But mere
condemnation of Jihadi rhetoric has not and is not going to help. Jihadis do not merely apply rhetoric. They
have worked out a very coherent, internally consistent theology of violence and
exclusion.
This theology is effective because it’s based on the consensus of all
traditional schools of Islamic thought. It cannot be countered by the
platitudes that our scholars deploy. A new theology of peace and pluralism
needs to be evolved. This should be equally coherent and internally consistent.
OIC seems to be making no effort to evolve such a theology yet.
Considered the intellectual branch of the OIC Sawt Al-Hikma Center or
Voice of Wisdom is merely recounting the positive virtues of Islamic tolerance
based on early Quranic verses that have been declared abrogated by the
traditional ulema. It’s not taking into account doctrines in which the real
strength of the Jihadi ideology lies. For instance, the Uncreatedness of Quran,
which is the basis for universal and eternal applicability of all Quranic
verses including the contextual war-time verses; Doctrine of Abrogation, that says that
war-time instructions that were revealed later in Madina have abrogated the
peacetime pluralistic verses that were revealed earlier in Makkah; Takfirism,
that declares Muslims as Kafir, Mushrik and Munafiq and thus liable to be
killed; Millennarian end-of-the-world theories like Ghazwa-e-Hind that made
ISIS so attractive to our youth; the Doctrine of offensive Jihad to help expand
Islamic territories; the Doctrine of Global Khilafat that considers modern
democracy as un-Islamic; the Doctrine of al-Wala wal-Bara (loyalty and
disavowal, loving and hating, only for the sake of God) that asks Muslims to
have good relations only with Muslims and avoid interaction with non-Muslims;
the forcible application of the Doctrine Al-amr bil-maʿrūf wan-nahi ʿanil-munkar (Enjoining what is right and Forbidding what is
wrong) in which Islam is considered right and all non-Islamic religions are
considered wrong; the argument that Muslims who are helpless, facing
persecution, and do not have any other weapon, can use their own bodies as
weapons of war for the so-called martyrdom operations; and so on….
Islam, Women and Feminism
However, there is no regret because they have achieved what the seasoned
politicians and opportunist, YouTube-mullahs could not. They have awakened the
collective conscience of Indian people, they have ignited the fire of protests
across the country, and they were instrumental in the formation of Dalit Muslim
alliance which will have wide political and social ramifications in the
country. They have won….
Islamic Ideology
Preventions and
precautions like not shaking hands, and not eating and mixing with people
freely with strangers in parties and weddings should be taken. According to a
report, a muezzin started crying while calling the Azan when he said, 'Assalato
fi Buyutikum'. Such emotional reactions are the result of collective fear
created by people and the government in the name of creating awareness about
the disease….
Books and Documents
Barren
sandy desert, extremely hot climate, and scarcity of water resources made the
heartland of the Arabian Peninsula an inhospitable abode for man
since ancient times. Its original people were pagans, except for some
Unitarians (ahnaf) who contemplated on the Oneness of God. In the post
Judeo-Christian era, pockets of wet fertile land attracted Jewish and Christian
settlers from the adjoining regions, and became isolated centres of trade and
commerce. However, the vast stretches of the desert heartland that only
sustained a nomadic life, remained in a primitive state until the advent of
Islam. The nomadic tribes had preserved their ancestral paganism, with each
tribe having its own idol; and the Ka‘ba, a cubical shrine at the heart of an
ancient sanctuary (Haram) in Mecca, was the centre of idol worship. The
nomadic Arabs were largely unlettered, had no notion of central state or
kingdom, and their social and moral norms were based on traditions (Sunnah) and
dictated by the struggle for survival. .....
Radical Islamism and Jihad
The clergy is required to counter
the exclusivist Jihadi theology of violence and supremacism which is primarily
based on the traditional Islamic theology of consensus of all schools of
thought. This has to be done through a counter-narrative based on a new
inclusivist theology of peace and pluralism. But to do that the clergy will
have to work towards evolving a new theology that is different from the
traditional theology taught in madrasas. It is this age-old theology that is
used by Jihadis to propagate their message.
It cannot be stressed enough that
the reason Jihadis have been able to capture the imagination of thousands of
our youth the world over is that they are not saying anything new. They are
simply showing a way to practice what the ulema (religious scholars) have been
preaching. The Jihadi narrative is the traditional Islamic theological
narrative of Islam domination over all other religious beliefs, and eradication
of what it considers the biggest crimes humanity can commit, particularly shirk,
polytheism or idol worship, and kufr, rejection of the prophethood of
Hazrat Mohammad (pbuh). All the most eminent scholars of Islam from Imam
Ghazali (11th-12th century) to Imam Ibn-e-Taimiya (13th-14th
century), Mujaddid Alf-e-Saani Sheikh Sirhindi (16th-17th
century), Shah Waliullah Muhaddis Dehlavi (18th century) have shown
a vision of political Islam that was finally given a more definite form in the
20th century by Maulana Syed Abul A’la Maududi, Hassan al-Banna, and
Syed Qutb. The Jihadi ideologues of the 21st century may be
stressing some parts of this traditional narrative more vigorously and
downplaying some other aspects. But they are not saying anything that is
entirely new or radically different.
Jihadi literature has not dropped
from the sky all of a sudden. This is not the creation of Osama bin Laden or
so-called “Khalifa” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Their narrative of world domination,
fighting those who do not accept the message of Islam is basically what is
taught in all our madrasas. The definition of Jihad as fighting those who do
not accept the oneness of God and prophethood of Mohammad (pbuh) is found in
books of every school of Sunni fiqh (jurisprudence), be it Hanafi,
Malaki, Shafei or Hanbali. Indeed, even Shia theology does not differ much with
Sunnis in matters of political Islam. They too want world domination for Islam
and desire to subdue all non-Muslims.