The target of some serious envy every time we come to terms with one or the other low of our politicians, they succeed in showing us a new low in the bottomless pit that our polity To be a successful politician in Malaysia partically an individual must be blessed with attributes: the art of listening patiently, the ability to tolerate blockbusterfools like Kota Belud MP Abdul Rahman Dahlan and Umno’s Temerloh MP Saifuddin Abdullah
I agree with Nurul that “the oppressor is man, not Islam” . In fact, it is Islam which liberated
the human race from the brutality of patriarchal society and the shackles of cruel customs that had usurped their basic and fundamental rights of living. It is Islam which provided them several rights — right of inheritance, right to own property, right to education, right to trade and business, right of selection of the husband by free will and right of remarriage in case of his demise and right of divorce.
the human race from the brutality of patriarchal society and the shackles of cruel customs that had usurped their basic and fundamental rights of living. It is Islam which provided them several rights — right of inheritance, right to own property, right to education, right to trade and business, right of selection of the husband by free will and right of remarriage in case of his demise and right of divorce.
nurul has shown more courage then any other young malaysian politician to engage the rakyat on this issue. we desperately need more leaders like nurul to help bring malaysia forward. nurul has always passed this test that separate the wheat from the chaff while the fake progressive wannabes stumble over one another to show us their tails. nurul is clearly PM material!
only in Malaysia – do we have such chauvinistic male outlook – and only in Malaysia is the unstated rule that all Malays must be Muslims and there can be no inter-marriage without conversion. In Uzbekistan (as well as a host of other Islamic countries) a Muslim can marry an Orthodox Christian without embracing the other’s religion and their children are free to choose whatever they want to follow. Even our Indonesian neighbors allow their citizens the freedom of choice to choose their religion. When someone is true to his/her faith would this person allow corruption to happen and is blind to it? Can Kota Belud MP answer this question?
only in Malaysia – do we have such chauvinistic male outlook – and only in Malaysia is the unstated rule that all Malays must be Muslims and there can be no inter-marriage without conversion. In Uzbekistan (as well as a host of other Islamic countries) a Muslim can marry an Orthodox Christian without embracing the other’s religion and their children are free to choose whatever they want to follow. Even our Indonesian neighbors allow their citizens the freedom of choice to choose their religion. When someone is true to his/her faith would this person allow corruption to happen and is blind to it? Can Kota Belud MP answer this question?
Dahlan: You are a prize idiot. Is it not so that the words “no compulsion in religion” are taken directly from the Koran? I’m not a scholar on Islam but I have seen these words quoted so often. Nurual has more guts than the majority of the BN government put together. BN is full of those who talk behind their hands, or with forked or trident tongues, depending on their audience. Most, like your beloved, but lame PM, are afraid of even holding a public debate on important issues that affect every Malaysian. UMNO has no credibility when it comes to view on religion, Islam as well. Islam do not condone corruption, but UMNO is full of corruption…so what grounds have they to comment of what is Islam and not. It’s like the pot calling the kettle black.
What she meant was Muslims are Muslims not out of compulsion but out of the love for their religion. Saifuddin just proved that he has a mental capacity similar to the rest of his flock from UMNO. An intelligent person won’t comment based on heresy but on cold hard facts especially on an issue as sensitive as this. leaders seem to be desperate and getting more and more moronic as GE13 grow closer. Vote them in and we get a sick country. When Pakatan takes over Putra Jaya, they would need to expand Tg. Rambutan and the prisons for the mentally deficient and corrupt be end leaders and cronies.What can you expect from frightened UMNO bastards of the highest order!!! There is freedom of religion all over the world, as somebody said, even in Indonesia, the country with the largest muslim population in the world! These fucking Malay politicians and religious extremists are, as somebody also said, just want to control the minds of the malays and forever keep them stupid and grateful to the plundering UMNO warlords!
In the Quran, we are commanded not to make judgments about people just because they belong to a particular race, nation or religion. In every community, there are good people as well as wicked people like Umno’s Temerloh MP Saifuddin Abdullah and Umno’s Kota Belud MP Abdul Rahman Dahlan , . The Quran draws attention to this differentiation. For instance, right after mentioning the rebellious nature-against God and His religion-of some People of the Book, there is reference to an exception:
{[However] They are not all alike. Among the People of the Book there is an upright community who recites the revelation of God during the night and fall prostrate before Him. They believe in God and the Last Day, enjoin what is right and forbid what is evil, and vie with one another in good works. They are of the righteous and whatever good they do, its reward will not be denied them. God knows those who fear [Him].} (Al-Imran 3:113-15) what it means for Islam and democracy – a promise that many Arabs and other Muslims also believe in.said that was not seeking a theological state. That, would indeed be un-Islamic. “We are talking of the nation (the ummah or people) as a source of power, and this is Islam.” This is a far cry from the claims of political Islamic groups in the past that in an Islamic state sovereignty belonged not to the people but to God. When they said sovereignty belonged to God, people understood that this meant the implementation of Islamic legal principles as interpreted by a few clerics.
a promise that many Arabs and other Muslims also believe in. this prospect of a truly Islamic democracy emerging is the most exciting promise of the Arab awakening. Islamic democracy is like any other democracy, except that in the public sphere Islamic values form the foundation of a political conscience, inspiring the citizens and government to pursue justice and compassion.
President Mursi shared his mainstream understanding of Islam and Egypt with us, arguing that Islam respects freedom of religion. At the heart of Islam, he said, were human rights and human dignity.
In the decades in the United States, have studied, taught and written extensively about Islam and its contemporary revival. Islamic revivalism means many things to many people. For some it means rule by Islamic law, for others, especially Muslim Americans, it is the return of the intellectual and cultural vitality of the Muslim world, freedom from dictatorships and the restoration of Islam’s democratic traditions. even feel that through my research and writing, have made a small contribution to that effort. But, here in the United States, it has remained more of an intellectual puzzle than a living reality.Many Muslim American scholars like Dr Khaled Abou El Fadl at the University of California, Los Angeles; Dr Abdulaziz Sachedina at George Mason University and myself have for over a decade made the case that Islam and democracy are compatible, and that a genuine implementation of Islamic values requires democratization. For many of us involved in such work, the Arab awakening, or Arab Spring, is finally an opportunity to prove that Islam and democracy are compatible not just in theory, but also in practice.
While many in the Arab and Muslim world are optimistic about Mursi’s election, there are many – including Egyptians, and some in the United States and Europe – who are skeptical about Mursi’s promises of equality, and concerned that he might try to bring about an Islamic state.
While many in the Arab and Muslim world are optimistic about Mursi’s election, there are many – including Egyptians, and some in the United States and Europe – who are skeptical about Mursi’s promises of equality, and concerned that he might try to bring about an Islamic state.
It is Islam which elevated women while they were degraded to the status of property and buried alive in the grave at the time of birth. It is Islam which regarded them as a blessing of God and made them equal partners of men in the form of wives and kept the heaven beneath the feet of mothers and commanded them to wear hijaab without covering the face in order to protect their dignity and chastity and commanded men to respect and treat them well. As Prophet Muhammad clearly declared, “the best man among you is he who treats well the female members of his family and a bad man among you is he who misbehaves with the female members of his family.” (Bukhari)
However, the sad part is that a section of Muslims has deprived women of their basic and fundamental rights, including the right to education and the selection of a husband by free will and usurped their liberties and rights which were granted to them by Islam and that too under the pretext of Islamic veil or hijaab. These sections of Muslims first deprived their women of discovering their face under patriarchal, skewed interpretations of the Islamic veil; then usurped their basic rights; they were even prevented from offering prayers. Nowadays, Islam is the only religion on earth with its patriarchal skewed interpretation, which bars its women believers from the mosque. Despite the fact that Prophet Muhammad not only encouraged Muslim women to attend the mosque but also commended Muslim men that “they should not prevent their wives from attending them to mosque for their prayer.” (Bukhari) This type of patriarchal ideology has resulted a distorted version of Islamic teaching of veil of which Nazia Jassim herself became a victim and advocated the veil (for covering the face) to encourage men to enslave women. This precisely made me write this brief clarification.
In fact, the face is not included in the veil, as there are a number of Koranic verses and statements of the Prophet which clearly prove that covering the face is not required in Islam. As the Koran says: “Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty: that will make for greater purity for them, and God is well acquainted with all that they do and say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty, that should not display their beauty except what appear from their beauty.” (S: XXIV: Verse, No: 30, 31).
In fact, the face is not included in the veil, as there are a number of Koranic verses and statements of the Prophet which clearly prove that covering the face is not required in Islam. As the Koran says: “Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty: that will make for greater purity for them, and God is well acquainted with all that they do and say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty, that should not display their beauty except what appear from their beauty.” (S: XXIV: Verse, No: 30, 31).
It appears that President Mursi accepts popular democracy as a default condition and seeks to introduce Islamic principles only to the extent the electorate will permit.
One of my recommendations to him was to make Al-Azhar University, easily the most important institution of Islamic learning, completely independent, fully endowed and disengaged from government supervision. It currently is overseen by the Egyptian state.
Such a move would, I believe, increase the authority and legitimacy of the university and its religious edicts. In an Islamic democracy, universities play the role of society’s moral conscience, and they can do so only if they are free from government supervision.
The Muslim world, I told him, badly needed an authoritative voice and at the moment there was none. An independent Al-Azhar could aspire to it. President Mursi chose not to engage this subject, perhaps because an independent Al-Azhar might become a critic of his government, or perhaps he anticipates a backlash from non-democratic states in the region that fear an independent religious authority whose voice would travel across borders and shape the opinion of people in their countries.
The challenges President Mursi faces, international and domestic, economic, political and spiritual, are daunting indeed. Yet I wish him success in his endeavors to establish an Islamic democracy in the Arab world, and in so doing to take a major step towards reviving Islamic civilization.
The challenges President Mursi faces, international and domestic, economic, political and spiritual, are daunting indeed. Yet I wish him success in his endeavors to establish an Islamic democracy in the Arab world, and in so doing to take a major step towards reviving Islamic civilization.
Death and destruction tend to be associated with Muslims, but the Prophet reminded, “God is Beautiful and He likes beauty.”
For many people, including some Muslims, it has become difficult to associate Islam with beauty. The popular view of Islam is based largely on images conveyed by the mass media, and those images are usually repugnant. Such images may include the carnage wreaked by suicide bombers upon unsuspecting crowds of innocent people in mosques, bazaars and other public gathering places. They may include the faces of women that have been mutilated or disfigured by acid or blades owing to some un-Islamic concepts of honour, ownership or worse. Those images may include the distorted visages of angry men railing against outrages or atrocities that their anger does little to alter or abate.
In short, the images usually associated with Islam and Muslims are those of death, destruction, harshness and anger. Rarely do we see images of life, gentleness and happiness. Indeed, many Muslim societies are challenged by scourges such as war and famine, and the pictures painted by such afflictions, usually, are not beautiful. This is a reality that transcends religion.
However, even in those societies there are heroic struggles being waged daily that highlight the dignity that still characterises most Muslims. A discerning photographer or videographer could readily capture many of the countless beautiful images those struggles give birth to. Unfortunately, in far too many instances, those capable of doing so are frequently charged to capture images that reinforce the most negative stereotypes associated with Islam and Muslims.
However, even in those societies there are heroic struggles being waged daily that highlight the dignity that still characterises most Muslims. A discerning photographer or videographer could readily capture many of the countless beautiful images those struggles give birth to. Unfortunately, in far too many instances, those capable of doing so are frequently charged to capture images that reinforce the most negative stereotypes associated with Islam and Muslims.
That being the case, each and every one of us has a responsibility to do what we can to counter the prevailing stereotypes and to present an alternative image. To do that effectively, we have to realise just how beautiful our religion is and then begin to articulate that beauty in all that we do. The Prophet, peace upon him, reminded us that God is beautiful and that He loves beauty (Muslim). Similarly, he reminded us of the incomparable beauty of Paradise; most powerfully when he simply stated, “God has prepared for His righteous servants [in Paradise] what no eye has ever beheld, no ear has ever heard, and what no human heart has ever imagined.” (Bukhari)
Historically, Muslims have endeavoured to capture the beauty of the Divine as well as the beauty they believed to exist in Paradise in everything they did. As a result, the most beautiful art, architecture, music, literature, cuisine, gardens, homes, dress, and cities adorning the pre-modern world were those crafted by Muslim hands. Even today, after centuries of decline, the carpets, calligraphy, cuisine, tile-work, and other manifestations of brilliant Muslim cultural creation are the most sought after on earth.
Perhaps more importantly, Muslims always strove to be beautiful people. Some of our greatest scholars wrote books encouraging the believers to adorn themselves with the beautiful names and attributes of God—to the extent humanly possible. Morality and character reformation were great goals that helped to define the very essence of Islam. Such an emphasis was never seen as an inauthentic appendage to the pure teachings of the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet, peace upon him. These teachings were found at the very heart of the Revelation.
God addresses His Beloved Muhammad, “Verily, you are established on an exalted standard of conduct.” (68:4) He then reminds us, “Surely, the Messenger of God is a most excellent example for any of you who puts his hope in God and the Last Day and remembers God much.” (33:21) The truly successful believer is one who follows the prophetic example and endeavours to adorn herself or himself with beautiful and virtuous character.
God addresses His Beloved Muhammad, “Verily, you are established on an exalted standard of conduct.” (68:4) He then reminds us, “Surely, the Messenger of God is a most excellent example for any of you who puts his hope in God and the Last Day and remembers God much.” (33:21) The truly successful believer is one who follows the prophetic example and endeavours to adorn herself or himself with beautiful and virtuous character.
The Prophet, peace upon him, also described God as good when he mentioned, “God is good and He only accepts goodness.” (Muslim) Muslims strove with might and main to be good people. By so doing, they were people of character and integrity, hospitality and fidelity, kindness and generosity, courage and honesty. Their character impressed itself on all who visited the Muslim world when Muslims lived in societies that bore the distinct stamp of a viable Islamic civilisation. It was the strength of their character and not the force of their arms that was most instrumental in the spread of Islam over vast expanses of the globe.
Now that the civilisation fostered by Islam has been eclipsed by that of the West, the best thing we can do is to make sure that we continue to represent the best of what our civilisation embodied. Although the cultural achievements we mentioned earlier are laudable, the most telling embodiment of Islamic Civilisation lay in the beauty, goodness and character of its people as defined by their ethical system. This is true of any society, nation or civilisation, as mentioned by the great Egyptian poet, Ahmad Shawqi, when he wrote, “Nations are none other than the ethics they embody. When their ethics go, they will soon follow.”
What the poet mentioned is particularly true for the Muslim community, in that its ethical system is based not so much on the characteristics that are peculiar to a specific people. Rather, it is based on principles and knowledge that can be adopted by any people in any time and place. Hence, unlike the Egyptian, Hindu, Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman, Mayan or other civilisations, Islamic civilisation is mobile and can appear anywhere. Thus, over a period of more than 1,000 years it has had Arab, Persian, Turkish, Indian, European and African iterations.
Having said this, we should not be deceived into believing that a revival of Muslim civilisation lies in the achievement of political power or strategic domination and become obsessed with the attainment of the mechanisms usually viewed as essential for their attainment. No revival will be possible without the revival of the ethical system that undergirded the beautiful character and goodness of the Muslim people when their civilisation was the envy of the world.
Beautiful character, in this regard, should not be seen as lying in philosophically titillating abstractions. It is oftentimes manifested in the simplest things. A gentle smile extended to a soul longing to be loved. Patiently enduring the abuses and insults of the ignorant, while endeavouring to educate and inform them with the best manner possible. The loving embrace of a spouse fatigued after a long day competing in what has all too fittingly been described as the “rat race.” The selfless consideration of the best interests of one’s relatives, neighbours, and when relevant, even a stranger. A quiet but determined commitment to reading, learning and critical thinking as the foundation of a life lived in the light of truth and moral excellence. It is further to be found in the willingness to sacrifice something of our present for the sake of our children’s future.
These, and other acts we could mention, are all concrete manifestations of high character and we could of course find numerous citations from the Qur’an and prophetic Sunnah to magnify their significance. A point to note here is that these are the things we can control. Hence, they should demand great commitment from us towards their attainment.
The Prophet, peace upon him, mentioned, “A person’s Islam being good involves him leaving what does not concern him.” (Tirmidhi) Among those things of no concern to us are the things beyond our control. This is particularly true in strategic affairs. Ultimately, it is God who will determine which nations will be tested with strength and which will be tested with weakness. It is clearly stated in the Qur’an, “Say, God, the possessor of all dominion! You extend dominion to whosoever you will and you remove it from whosoever you will. You elevate whosoever you will and you debase whosoever you will. In your hand is all good. Surely, you have power over all things.” (3:26)
When we become obsessed with the attainment of what can only be given by God, we find ourselves more willing to make the kinds of compromises that negate the beauty of our character. Such compromises are not confined to issues related to war and peace; they extend to our entire affair. For example, obsession with the wherewithal of the world leads us to dishonour our contracts, cheat on our taxes, misrepresent our financial situation to remain on the dole, sell illegal drugs and alcohol and engage in other acts that not only sully our individual reputation, but when widespread in our communities make the Muslim community itself seem ugly in the eyes of others.
Finally, it is unacceptable for us to use the excuse of the ugliness of the world for our lack of beauty. If enough of us are committed to bringing to the world as much beauty as we can then the world will be a more beautiful place. It will never be perfect. However, the light of our beauty will help to hide the darkness of its imperfections. This is the surest path to an Islamic revival.
“O the complainant who suffers no malady! Be beautiful yourself and you will see beauty in all of creation.” Ilya Abu Madh
“O the complainant who suffers no malady! Be beautiful yourself and you will see beauty in all of creation.” Ilya Abu Madh
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