The Islam Awareness Blog

In Cairo, desperate Egyptian men search in vain for Syrian brides

2013-05-23T09:00:00.000+01:00

On the outskirts of the vast Egyptian capital, Egypt ends and the latest Syria enclave begins. Women tie their headscarves in a distinctly Syrian way. They buy Syrian spices and trinkets from vendors whose shops are now tables lined along the streets. There is a constant murmur of stories about the desperate circumstances that forced the residents to flee places such as Homs and Damascus in the past year.

The only sign that one is still in Egypt is the sound of Egyptian men and their mothers, who flock every day in the hopes they can exploit the dashed hopes of the Syrian revolution. Too poor to take an Egyptian bride, the men have heard that Syrian refugees are cheaper, prettier, better cooks and easier to marry.

“I am looking for a Syrian bride,” a 39-year-old painter, his calloused hands showing his struggle to survive, tells a Syrian man selling pita bread and spices outside the local mosque. “They are less complicated.”

The Syrian has heard this a dozen times already that day and doesn’t even respond, but rather points to a professionally made sign in front of the mosque behind him. It says that the mosque “announces that it has nothing to do with the marriage of Egyptian men to Syrian sisters. That’s why there shouldn’t be any questions regarding this issue in any of the offices of the organization. May Allah punish those responsible for spreading these rumors.”

The painter is undeterred. “Maybe there are Syrian women around the corner?” he asks.

The Syrian, who asks that he be identified only as Khalid, just shakes his head.

Before the sign, Khalid said, he fielded the question 100 times a day; now it is only 50. It’s difficult to know if he’s exaggerating.

“They ask us where the office is to buy a Syrian woman, as if they are buying a chicken. They don’t believe us when we tell them it doesn’t exist,” said Khalid, who said he was 26. “Our women are not for sale. We are here because we did not want to be killed.”

Men across the region are now seeking Syrian brides. In Turkey and Jordan, where refugee camps pepper the landscape, the desperation of the Syrians is far easier to spot as rich Persian Gulf men scour the camps to buy brides living in tents. Rape, child brides and temporary marriages are prevalent.

“People are marrying off their daughters for as little as 100 Jordanian dinars ($70) because of the bad circumstances inside the camp in return for money,” said Marwa al Saloumy, who works on women’s issues for a regional advocacy group called Al Zahra.

But in Cairo, where there are no camps, the dashed dreams of both Egyptians and Syrians in the post-Arab Spring world meet on more equal terms. Egyptian men, now poorer as the economy founders, find hope in the desperate Syrians, who can’t live in their own nation because a war that once promised revolutionary change has brought devastation and forced flight instead.

Syrian women say the men instantly spot them by their dress and approach them constantly. Alaa, a woman who fled Damascus three months ago to the Helwan neighborhood that has now become a Syrian enclave, said the harassment has been one of her biggest challenges.

In light of what is happening in Syria, “this is not the time to marry and celebrate and enjoy life,” Alaa said. And because of it, “Egyptian women now are starting to hate Syrian woman.”

That Egyptian men believe they could marry someone for less is changing marriage across Egypt. Men are demanding more of women and are willing to offer less, women report, and the standards for taking a bride are falling. Where an Egyptian man was once expected to provide a home and prove he can work before he could marry, now many believe they can have a Syrian bride for as little as $45.

The men come to the areas where Syrians have congregated all day, hoping to escape forced marriages or no prospects at all. They go to the mosque, to the makeshift Syrian vendors, to apartment complexes where Syrians are known to live. They approach one stranger after another, asking for a woman in the same tone they would ask directions – security guards at apartment complexes, Muslim clerics, anyone whose accent identifies them as Syrian.

For the Syrians, defending the women in their community has become a means to maintain their dignity even as they are living in dire circumstances.

“The thugs of Bashar Assad have spread these false rumors,” explained Khalid. “He has destroyed our nation and now he is destroying the reputation of our women.”

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are nearly 70,000 Syrian refugees living in Egypt, most in and around Cairo, all arriving in the last year.

But it is unclear how many Egyptians have taken a Syrian bride. Instead, it is a crisis built on rumor.

One regional women’s organization reported recently that 12,000 Syrian women have married Egyptian men in the last year. But according to the Ministry of Justice in Egypt, the official number of marriages between Egyptian men and Syrian women between January 2012 and March 2013 is 170, with 57 of those nuptials between January and March 2013, according to an Al Ahram online newspaper report.

Moreover, neither side wants to admit they are partaking. Syrians here find such claims insulting, and Egyptian women don’t want to admit that their men could find Syrians more attractive.

Some Muslim clerics have urged Egyptian men to marry Syrian women as an act of charity, and there are even rumors that top members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the secretive religious society through which Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi rose to prominence, have taken Syrian women as second wives.

Earlier this month, the National Council of Women condemned the push to marry Syrian women, urging Egyptian officials to intervene. It even set up a hotline for Syrians to call and complain.

The number doesn’t work.

Egyptian matchmakers say they keep getting requests for Syrian women but refuse to oblige. They say they do not want to create yet another problem for Egyptian women – another obstacle to marriage.

Nashwa Soltan has worked as a matchmaker for a decade. For the first time, in the last year, two of every 10 men she meets ask for a Syrian bride.

“He has difficult demands,” Soltan said, referring to one such man she is working with. “He is a 54-year-old widower and he has three children, two of them are in college and the third is in sixth grade. And he wants a beautiful woman in her 40s who doesn’t have children and who doesn’t want to have any children.

“He wants someone to cook for his kids and wake up early for him and his children. He wants a servant,” Soltan said.

Soltan tried to hook him up with three Egyptian women, but the Egyptian women always turned him down.

“He tells the women from the first date that he won’t change anything in the house and that each one of his children likes certain types of food and he is expecting her to cook for each one of them,” Soltan said. When he asks to only see Syrian women, Soltan said she refused.

The painter, who refused to give his name, appeared to be just as unlucky. After the sellers lectured him on why he was on a fool’s errand, he walked quietly around the corner where no Syrian women awaited him.

Frustrated, he walked away. The Syrians vendors smirked as though they had won a fight.

“We still have our dignity” Khalid explained.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/05/14/191195/in-cairo-desperate-egyptian-men.html#.UZoe1LVwrp4#storylink=cpy

Source

Taj Hargey is wrong on grooming

2013-05-22T09:00:00.000+01:00

Last week seven men from Oxford were found guilty of various sexual offences, including rape, for ‘grooming’ young girls and ultimately raping and allowing other men to rape them. Many of them were in local authority care and others (as in Rochdale) were placed in care by their parents in an attempt to stop the abuse that they were complaining about, but carers refused to listen to the girls’ and their parents’ complaints, in one case telling one of the victims that it was ‘inappropriate’ to talk about the issue at that time. On Wednesday’s Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2, he had two guests: John Brown of the NSPCC’s sexual abuse programme, and Taj Hargey, an “imam” that the media commonly wheels out to issue sweeping negative generalisations about Muslims. The programme can be listened to here until next Wednesday and is the first feature (which starts after Michael Jackson’s Thriller ends).

I’ve written about my problems with Jeremy Vine’s type of “journalism” here before, and then as now it was a Muslim issue: the supposed “no-go areas” in east London that Muslims were trying to establish; this came after the then (thuggish New Labour) Home Secretary John Reid was heckled by Muslims during a speech there for coming to a “Muslim area” with threatening talk. Then, Vine pitted Anjum Choudhary of al-Muhajiroun with Sara Khan, someone who had been on “The Apprentice”. Apparently just being a famous Muslim gave her the authority to talk about any issue related to Islam. The encounter became a slanging match with Choudhary speculating on whether she prayed or did the ritual ablutions. The purpose of the exercise was to give the impression of a “robust debate”, but was really just a good barney for entertainment’s sake.

In this encounter, John Brown made the point that the crime was about abuse of power and particularly male power, rather than anything to do with the perpetrators’ religion, and he also made the point that when sex crimes in general, the most common type of perpetrator was a white man, not an Asian one, and that there were currently cases under investigation of sexual abuse by groups of white men. This is one particular sex crime among many and the fact that “all” the perpetrators are of a given race or religious background is statistically less significant if the actual numbers are tiny. There were seven men convicted here. We are not talking percentages of the Asian community. The same statistical trick was played in reports of Muslim men’s involvement in rape in Norway, in which it was alleged that all rape in Oslo was perpetrated by Muslims. In fact, it was one category of rape, and the total number of perpetrators over the period referred to was six.

During Brown’s contributions, Vine persistently interrupted him, such as when he mentioned “the economy” as a possible reason for why Pakistani men were disproportionately involved in this particular type of crime (he explained that he meant their involvement in the “night-time economy” such as cab driving and take-away restaurants). I could tell that Brown was talking faster to try and fit things in before Vine interrupted him. By contrast, Vine did not interrupt Hargey, who was telling him what he wanted to hear, namely that the gangs do this because Muslim society and Muslim imams condition them to believe that white women are immodest, are pieces of meat and are there for the taking. Vine then suggested that they believe that “white women, and by extension the host society, are trash” and Hargey readily agreed with him.

Vine then presented Hargey’s claims to Brown and emphasised the fact that Hargey was an imam, clearly playing on Brown’s ignorance of Hargey’s position, or lack thereof. Hargey is a self-appointed imam in a self-established organisation and has no standing in the Muslim community whatsoever. He is known only for publicity stunts consisting of acts of fake worship calculated to embarrass the Muslims by making them look backward, such as prayers led by women, ‘religious’ marriages of women to non-Muslim men, and most recently, a Friday sermon given by a Christian bishop, and his take on the sources of Islamic law make his claim to be a Muslim, let alone an imam, extremely dubious. There were plenty of Muslims who could have given a more constructive answer to Vine’s questions, but would not have delivered the answers Vine wanted and suspected his audience wanted. Brown did not have any answer to Vine’s “but he’s an imam” line, and Vine persistently played the card that he had no explanation for why Asian men were responsible. Asking this is a bit like asking why Italians are disproportionately involved in the mafia.

These were criminal gangs. The majority of Muslims are not criminals and religious Muslims, as is well-known, are not supposed to drink alcohol, take other drugs to get high, or sleep with prostitutes or otherwise have sex outside marriage. What it is against Islam to consume, it is against Islam to sell, although some Muslims do indeed run shops that sell alcohol. You can find all of this on any Islamic website, and particularly on the fatwa websites that the media like to attack and mock every so often. It is all so well-known that there would not have been a need for any imam to tell his congregation that it was also haraam to ply teenage or pre-teenage girls with alcohol, to rape them and to offer them to other men to rape them, to take them away from their homes and parents to other towns for several days to do all this to them. It was probably completely beyond their imagination until the facts were revealed in the media recently, much as was the case with many other people. If these men had been to mosques and read any books on Islam, they would have known that everything they did was against Islam, but did it anyway. There is also a significant misunderstanding as to what an imam can and cannot do: they can only tell their congregations what is right and wrong, but they cannot stop anyone doing something they have said is wrong, let alone something they haven’t because they did not know it was happening. Imams are not responsible for everything their community does. They are not rulers of their communities and they cannot ‘deliver’ them. Individuals are responsible for what they do, not their supposed leaders (and Pakistani imams have even less influence over Kurdish and Eritrean Muslims, who were involved in these gangs, than over Pakistani Muslims).

There is a common argument that “Muslims regard white women as easy meat / trash”, besides being a huge slur which has very little truth in it, is entirely irrelevant when we take into account that several of the girls abused by the Oxford gang were only about 11 when first targeted. These rapes would likely have been their first sexual encounters. These were not young men casually taking advantage of young women of the same sage; this was calculated sexual abuse of children by a criminal gang of adults. Melanie Phillips made the same mistake in her article in the Mail in January 2011:

Who can be surprised that young white girls willingly go with these sexual predators who pick them up when so many stagger in and out of pubs and nightclubs in a drunken haze wearing clothes that leave little to the imagination and boasting of ‘blow jobs’ or how many guys they have ‘shagged’?

Who can be surprised when even sex education materials in schools advise on oral sex and other sexual practices; teen-targeted magazines, clothing and popular culture are saturated by sexuality; and family life has often disintegrated into a procession of mum’s casual pick-ups and gross parental indifference, leaving young girls desperate for affection from any quarter?

The disgust felt by some Muslim youths at such sexually promiscuous girls can then feed into a more general hatred and hostility towards Britain and the West. Such youths form themselves into gangs bound by a common feeling of being outsiders united by a profound hostility to the society into which they were born.

The fact is that girls seen around nightclubs are mostly adults, and regardless of what one may think of their dress and behaviour, they are not easy marks for these gangs because they are a bit older and wiser, they often have college courses or jobs to go back to, and the things offered by the gangs, such as alcohol or drugs, are no longer novel or exciting to them. The young girls exploited by these gangs were vulnerable; many of them were in care (and clearly not adequately supervised), but clearly it seems that they were easily led by the promise of ‘adult’ pleasures such as alcohol and the promise of ‘love’. These gangs not only know they cannot exploit Muslim girls; they also cannot exploit adult women of any cultural background either.

Hargey, in his Mail article published last Tuesday, blames pretty much every aspect of Muslim culture, generalising that Muslims in general regard women as second-class citizens and that mosques, including in Oxford, preach that women are “little more than chattels or possessions over whom they have absolute authority”. This is something that mosque committees in Oxford should take notice of, as if no such sermon has been delivered recently, Hargey’s claim is libellous. To claim that a sermon endorsing women obeying their husbands or wearing the hijab or even more than that amounts to a green light for criminal gangs to rape young girls is an enormous leap of logic. He then spuriously connects this to the “growing, reprehensible fashion for segregation at Islamic events on university campuses, with female Muslim students pushed to the back of lecture halls”. The fact is that separation of men and women at Islamic events, public and private, has always been standard practice and they are either in a separate room or on a different side of the hall from the men, not at the back. (In the recent event that caused so much fuss, there was actually a mixed seating area in the middle, with separate men’s and women’s areas in the wings.) It has become a matter of controversy only recently, due to agitation from secularist groups.

The media should not be blaming the generality of the Muslim community or “Muslim attitudes” when there were very real failings by the people who were meant to be looking after the girls, but there is also evidence that they are not empowered to protect the girls and prevent their abuse, by restricting their liberty if necessary. In the past, children (and particularly young girls) were not allowed out at night, and often not even in the daytime unless supervised or with trusted friends. These days, care homes are powerless to prevent them leaving if they want to, unless the home is a designated secure facility, and such places have been closing one after the other for years, mostly for economic reasons. This should change, and the police should return children to their homes or a place of safety if found hanging around at night or with strange men or ‘undesirables’. The fact of adults hanging around with young girls they are not related to should, in itself, be a cause for investigation, and should be prevented if there is not a very good explanation; supplying minors with alcohol is illegal, and if this had been stopped at that stage, the rape and trafficking could have been prevented. Finally, when the girls complained that they were actually being abused, they were told to go away, as were parents when they complained to both police and social services. There is ample evidence that care workers, social workers and the police knew that this was going on (they even took the girls to a sexual health clinic in Reading), but did nothing until the abuse had been going on for years.

There are attitudes to women among whites that match anything found in the Muslim community. There is a casuality about rape nowadays in some quarters; there are rape jokes told in theatres and on TV and people talk about a sports team getting “raped” rather than beaten. This translates into actual rape when a bunch of juvenile sportsmen get together and a drunk 16-year-old girl stumbles into their midst, and come within a hair’s breadth of getting away with raping and publicly humiliating her until international outrage force the authorities to take action. There have been plenty of surveys carried out that show that many white people, not only Pakistanis, think a woman who wears a short skirt is “asking for it” if she gets raped. So, it is not unsurprising that the same negative attitudes may have influenced the actions of the social services and police when told that young girls on council estates in Oxford, Rochdale and elsewhere were being abused — oh, they were in care (nuff said), they were from broken homes and/or council estates, they were hanging around with older men, they were half-dressed, they were drinking and having sex … no better than they should be. It’s not imams’ job to police Asian criminals or to look after girls in care. It’s the state’s job, and the people whose job it was didn’t do it. Source

What the Western World Can Learn from the Prophet Muhammad

2013-05-22T08:30:00.000+01:00

Women's Prison in Gaza Swells With 'Moral' Criminals Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/05/gaza-women-prison.html#ixzz2Tpyaya6y

2013-05-21T09:00:00.000+01:00

Al-Monitor gained access to this high-security, one-story facility with the permission of the Hamas-run Ministry of Interior, on condition that the correspondent be accompanied by a guard, names of prisoners are not published and that the final report was reviewed by the ministry before publishing.

For many people in Gaza, crimes committed by women are rarely heard of due to the conservative nature of Gazan society. Families of female convicts usually don’t disclose their whereabouts, and even lie about it.

The head of the prison, Jazya Abu Mousa, said that this year has witnessed the largest number of female prisoners since she began working there in 2007.

“The number changes from time to time as most of the prisoners here are detained and not sentenced,” Abu Mousa said.

Criminals in the prison are divided into three categories: thieves, security convicts of crimes often related to cooperating with the Israeli occupation and "moral" convicts, which includes prostitution or sexual relations without marriage. This final category holds the largest number of prisoners.

Abu Mousa blames the increasing number of crimes in the Strip on weak religious awareness among locals, family disintegration and the poor financial situation of most people in Gaza.

Collaboration

RH, 47, collaborated with the Israeli occupation along with her husband, until they were both arrested in 2010. RH’s husband was among six spies who were publicly executed and dragged through the streets of Gaza by Hamas' armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, during the last Israeli offensive in November 2012.

RH and her husband worked in Israel until Israel denied access for Palestinians from Gaza to enter in 2000, following the second intifada. The couple turned to the Egyptian market for survival.

As Gaza was still under Israeli occupation, RH said that her husband met Israeli intelligence en route to Egypt. There, he was offered a permit to go back to his work in Israel.

The economic situation in Gaza had become dire with Israel’s severe siege, imposed in 2007, tempting RH’s husband to cooperate with the Israelis.

“At the beginning, they told him that they didn’t want anything in return, and it was only a matter of humanitarian support, but as time passed they started asking him for information about specific people,” RH recalled.

With their father killed and their mother in prison, RH’s children found themselves alone. Her son turned to robbery and is now serving a three-year sentence in another section of the same prison. Her daughter-in-law divorced her son, as she no longer wanted to remain part of this “shameful” family.

When asked if she felt guilty for betraying her people, RH said she doesn’t believe she committed a big crime, adding that she was a victim of Israel exploiting her needs.

"The only thing I did was transfer money from Israelis to other spies in Gaza while I was going to Israel to treat my son. It wasn't a serious collaboration," she told Al-Monitor.

RH’s narrative follows a report by Al-Monitor last month that highlighted Israel’s attempts to recruit Palestinians from Gaza seeking medical attention in Israel.

While RH makes attempts to engage and joke with fellow inmates, she said she remains totally devastated inside.

“My man was killed, my son is arrested and I’m away from my children; we are no longer a family. Every day I wish this were just a horrible nightmare. I still can’t believe it,” she said, struggling to contain tears.

The prison head said she is proud of most of the prisoners, as she senses a willingness among them to change. The prison administration focuses on raising religious awareness among the prisoners so they won’t return to crime after their release, said Abu Moussa.

“Besides giving them traditional training like handicrafts and embroidery, Islamic lectures are the main focus,” she explained to Al-Monitor.

Forced prostitution

When M’s husband found no source of income, as he never had a career, he resorted to drugging his wife and prostituting her for less than $15 a night.

“I only knew about what was going on when the police invaded the house and arrested us. My ex-husband used to drug my drinks. I don’t even remember the people I had sex with,” M. told Al-Monitor, embarrassed.

Prostitution in Gaza barely exists due to strict monitoring by Hamas authorities.

When M’s father discovered what her husband was doing to her, he insisted on a divorce. Six years later, she remarried and returned to a normal life until she received a phone call from one of her former “clients.” She said, “He told me he was from a humanitarian organization and that I should go to get my handout, but when I reached the place, I found it was a trap and I was arrested again.”

The “client” gestured to M to enter his apartment when she got out of the taxi to meet him. She refused and tried to escape, but nearby police saw the altercation and grew suspicious. They were both arrested.

M has so far served two years of her six-year sentence for both her previous conviction of prostitution and the latest incident. She thinks of nothing but finding a way to reach her three children.

“I was told that my children are not proud of me for what they heard about me. I wish I could hug them and tell them it was not my fault,” said M, tears streaming down her face.

Stories about Headscarf worn by Muslim women (Hijab)

2013-05-20T14:23:00.000+01:00

This is how racism takes root

2013-05-18T09:00:00.000+01:00

By now surely everyone knows the case of the eight men convicted of picking vulnerable underage girls off the streets, then plying them with drink and drugs before having sex with them. A shocking story. But maybe you haven't heard. Because these sex assaults did not take place in Rochdale, where a similar story led the news for days in May, but in Derby earlier this month. Fifteen girls aged 13 to 15, many of them in care, were preyed on by the men. And though they were not working as a gang, their methods were similar – often targeting children in care and luring them with, among other things, cuddly toys. But this time, of the eight predators, seven were white, not Asian. And the story made barely a ripple in the national media.

Of the daily papers, only the Guardian and the Times reported it. There was no commentary anywhere on how these crimes shine a light on British culture, or how middle-aged white men have to confront the deep flaws in their religious and ethnic identity. Yet that's exactly what played out following the conviction in May of the "Asian sex gang" in Rochdale, which made the front page of every national newspaper. Though analysis of the case focused on how big a factor was race, religion and culture, the unreported story is of how politicians and the media have created a new racial scapegoat. In fact, if anyone wants to study how racism begins, and creeps into the consciousness of an entire nation, they need look no further.

Imagine you were living in a town of 20,000 people – the size of, say, Penzance in Cornwall – and one day it was discovered that one of its residents had been involved in a sex crime. Would it be reasonable to say that the whole town had a cultural problem, that it needed to address the scourge – that anyone not doing so was part of a "conspiracy of silence"? But the intense interest in the Rochdale story arose from a January 2011 Times "scoop" that was based on the conviction of at most 50 British Pakistanis out of a total UK population of 1.2 million, just one in 24,000: one person per Penzance.

Make no mistake, the Rochdale crimes were vile, and those convicted deserve every year of their sentences. But where, amid all the commentary, was the evidence that this is a racial issue; that there's something inherently perverted about Muslim or Asian culture?

Even the Child Protection and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), which has also studied potential offenders who have not been convicted, has only identified 41 Asian gangs (of 230 in total) and 240 Asian individuals – and they are spread across the country. But, despite this, a new stereotype has taken hold: that a significant proportion of Asian men are groomers (and the rest of their communities know of it and keep silent).

But if it really is an "Asian" thing, how come Indians don't do it? If it's a "Pakistani" thing, how come an Afghan was convicted in the Rochdale case? And if it's a "Muslim" thing, how come it doesn't seem to involve anyone of African or Middle Eastern origin? The standard response to anyone who questions this is: face the facts, all those convicted in Rochdale were Muslim. Well, if one case is enough to make such a generalisation, how about if all the members of a gang of armed robbers were white; or cybercriminals; or child traffickers? (All three of these have happened.) Would we be so keen to "face the facts" and make it a problem the whole white community has to deal with? Would we have articles examining what it is about Britishness or Christianity or Europeanness, that makes people so capable of such things?

In fact, Penzance had not just one paedophile, but a gang of four. They abused 28 girls, some as young as five, and were finally convicted two years ago. All were white. And last month, at a home affairs select committee, deputy children's commissioner Sue Berelowitz quoted a police officer who had told her that "there isn't a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited".

Whatever the case, we know that abuse of white girls is not a cultural or religious issue because there is no longstanding history of it taking place in Asia or the Muslim world.

How did middle-aged Asian men from tight-knit communities even come into contact with white teenage girls in Rochdale? The main cultural relevance in this story is that vulnerable, often disturbed, young girls, regularly out late at night, often end up in late-closing restaurants and minicab offices, staffed almost exclusively by men. After a while, relationships build up, with the men offering free lifts and/or food. For those with a predatory instinct, sexual exploitation is an easy next step. This is an issue of what men can do when away from their own families and in a position of power over badly damaged young people.

It's a story repeated across Britain, by white and other ethnic groups: where the opportunity arises, some men will take advantage. The precise method, and whether it's an individual or group crime, depends on the particular setting – be they priests, youth workers or networks on the web.

Despite all we know about racism, genocide and ethnic cleansing, the Rochdale case showed how shockingly easy it is to demonise a community. Before long, the wider public will believe the problem is endemic within that race/religion, and that anyone within that group who rebuts the claims is denying this basic truth. Normally, one would expect a counter-argument to force its way into the discussion. But in this case the crimes were so horrific that right-thinking people were naturally wary of being seen to condone them. In fact, the reason I am writing this is that I am neither Asian nor Muslim nor Pakistani, so I cannot be accused of being in denial or trying to hide a painful truth. But I am black, and I know how racism works; and, more than that, I have a background in maths and science, so I know you can't extrapolate a tiny, flawed set of data and use it to make a sweeping generalisation.

I am also certain that, if the tables were turned and the victims were Asian or Muslim, we would have been subjected to equally skewed "expert" commentary asking: what is wrong with how Muslims raise girls? Why are so many of them on the streets at night? Shouldn't the community face up to its shocking moral breakdown?

While our media continue to exclude minority voices in general, such lazy racial generalisations are likely to continue. Even the story of a single Asian man acting alone in a sex case made the headlines. As in Derby this month, countless similar cases involving white men go unreported.

We have been here before, of course: in the 1950s, West Indian men were labelled pimps, luring innocent young white girls into prostitution. By the 1970s and 80s they were vilified as muggers and looters. And two years ago, Channel 4 ran stories, again based on a tiny set of data, claiming there was an endemic culture of gang rape in black communities. The victims weren't white, though, so media interest soon faded. It seems that these stories need to strike terror in the heart of white people for them to really take off.

What is also at play here is the inability of people, when learning about a different culture or race, to distinguish between the aberrations of a tiny minority within that group, and the normal behaviour of a significant section. Some examples are small in number but can be the tip of a much wider problem: eg, knife crime, which is literally the sharp end of a host of problems affecting black communities ranging from family breakdown, to poverty, to low school achievement and social exclusion.

But in Asia, Pakistan or Islam there is no culture of grooming or sex abuse – any more than there is anywhere else in the world – so the tiny number of cases have no cultural significance. Which means those who believe it, or perpetuate it, are succumbing to racism, much as they may protest. Exactly the same mistake was made after 9/11, when the actions of a tiny number of fanatics were used to cast aspersions against a 1.5 billion-strong community worldwide. Motives were questioned: are you with us or the terrorists? How fundamental are your beliefs? Can we trust you?

Imagine if, after Anders Breivik's carnage in Norway last year, which he claimed to be in defence of the Christian world, British people were repeatedly asked whether they supported him? Lumped together in the same white religious group as the killer and constantly told they must renounce him, or explain why we should believe that their type of Christianity – even if they were non-believers – is different from his. "It's nothing to do with me", most people would say. But somehow that answer was never good enough when given by Muslims over al-Qaida. And this hectoring was self-defeating because it caused only greater alienaton and resentment towards the west and, in particular, its foreign policies.

Ultimately, the urge to vilify groups of whom we know little may be very human, and helps us bond with those we feel are "like us". But if we are going to deal with the world as it is, and not as a cosy fantasyland where our group is racially and culturally supreme, we have to recognise when sweeping statements are false.

And if we truly care about the sexual exploitation of girls, we need to know that we must look at all communities, across the whole country, and not just at those that play to a smug sense of superiority about ourselves. Source

Supermum Revert Spreads Inspiration of Islam

2013-05-17T09:00:00.000+01:00

She’s sassy. She’s outspoken. She’s opinionated.

And she wears the hijab.

Heather Sandouga is one of those women who constantly defy the stereotype of the so-called ‘oppressed’ Muslim woman – an image we have all grown to expect from mainstream media. Of course, like most Muslim women, Heather doesn’t live her day-to-day life for the purpose of deliberately dispelling misconceptions; her blog posts, YouTube videos and social media content do this effortlessly.

Heather’s highest-viewed YouTube video is titled Why I Chose Islam. It is a sincere account of her life prior to reverting to Islam, and the brief snippets of information that she gives about this time – of her teenage pregnancy and decision to give the baby up for adoption – give the sense of a woman who has persevered through much difficulty and heartache. But Heather’s story isn’t told with a tone of pity or of sorrow or even regret. Instead, she takes the past in her stride and appears to have strengthened her soul with it.

Alongside her YouTube channel, Heather also manages her blog, Delusional Mom, which she regularly updates. It is one of my favourite blogs and always manages to make me laugh, nod in agreement, or feel inspired. Her posts are personable and witty, with a ‘Delusional Mom’ writing style and tone that has readers hooked. From her musings on everyday life events to her son Adam’s hilarious antics, Heather covers topics realistically and candidly. She’s a mum, a writer and a daycare provider, juggling enough to warrant a ‘Supermum’ title!

I ask Heather (an inspiring woman herself) who inspires her in her day-to-day life. To me, the most beautiful part of her response is that the first person she mentions is someone who inspires love for her faith:

‘My mother in law,’ she says, ‘manages to keep her heart bursting with Islam day in and day out – teaching my kids Qur’an as she cooks and cleans.’ Then, in her own, endearing story-telling style, she mentions others:

‘I could then move on to my own mother, who is able to take what most people would consider junk and turn it into something of beauty. Her ability to look beyond the rusted and dusty exteriors of people, places and things – to see their beautiful possibilities – is something I strive for.’

After mentioning her close friends, Heather next moves on to a point that brings a smile to my face as I read her heart-warming words:

‘Of course, there are my children. Those I’ve born of my own body and those I take care of daily. They inspire me with the everlasting wonder of a child at seeing the dew in the morning or watching a butterfly as it flutters past. My daughter, who’s becoming more and more of a woman every day, reminds me that I am her example and to live my life accordingly. My middle son, who has a quiet presence, reminds me to take a moment to just be and not be constantly on the run. And who could forget my Adam! This child reminds me daily that no amount of planning really matters in the end. The excitement, the energy, the pure curiosity that lives in this child gives me ample inspiration for my blog.

‘Finally, there’s my husband. He is my rock, my pillar of strength when I most need it. Without him, I don’t know where I would be. Those long days of Ramadan when I just want to zone out and watch some TV, I’ll come into my living room and see him quietly reading Qur’an – inspiring me to do the same. Or when I hear him wake in the early morning hours to offer his Fajr prayer, inspiring me to do the same. His devotion to his family is infallible – and I admire that. Being with him makes me a better person.’

Whilst it’s always a joy to be moved by characters in books, often we find individuals who are just as inspiring (if not more) in our real lives. Source

Saeed ibn Zaid (#Servitude) - Omar Suleiman - Quran Weekly

2013-05-16T09:00:00.000+01:00

Oxford sex abuse victim: 'At first they treat you like a princess'

2013-05-15T10:18:00.000+01:00

One of the victims who gave evidence in court against the Oxford child sexual exploitation ring has told the Guardian how she was groomed, raped and trafficked while in the care of Oxfordshire county council.

Girl C's abuse began just after her 13th birthday. By the age of 14, the gang had got her addicted to hard drugs and was regularly trafficking the teenager across the country to be raped by strangers.

By 16, Girl C was pregnant by one of her abusers. She finally managed to escape only after her son was born, when the gang threatened to murder the baby if she did not start recruiting younger girls into the same cycle of abuse.

Speaking exclusively to the Guardian, Girl C revealed that her adoptive mother spent two years begging the council for help with her daughter, first contacting the council when Girl C was 12 years old and starting to stay out all night, returning home drunk and dishevelled.

"Mum wrote to all the key people in social services, called her own case conferences, invited agencies and got them sitting around the table, but they just passed the parcel between them – and all the while, I was getting increasingly under the power and influence of the gang," said Girl C.

"My adoptive mum started asking Oxfordshire social services for help with me in 2004 and they refused and resisted giving even the most basic support for two years."

By the time the council agreed to put the girl in a temporary care home, she said: "It was too late: the grooming process had run its course. I was completely under their [the gang's] control."

Shortly after she was trafficked from Oxford to London for the first time, she said, she tried to talk to staff at the care home but was told the conversation was "inappropriate".

"A week after I moved into the care home, I tried to tell two members of staff all the things that had been happening to me but they told me it was inappropriate to have the conversation at that time," she said. "They promised we would discuss it later but that never happened.

"If they had listened to me, they would have known exactly what was going on and it would not have happened again. But they turned me away. I wouldn't trust them after that."

Five men – Bassam and Mohammed Karrar, Akhtar and Anjum Dogar, and Assad Hussain – were convicted on Tuesday on charges including rape, conspiracy to rape, trafficking for sexual exploitation and facilitating child prostitution against Girl C.

Two other defendants were found guilty of charges involving other victims. Two other men were cleared.

Girl C is reluctant to draw wider conclusions from the fact that all her abusers were Muslim and their victims white.

"Not all the men are Asian: at least two are Egyptian," she said. "They are, though, all Muslim – but not all Muslim men behave like that."

There did, however, appear to be a subset of Muslim men in Oxford who targeted white girls.

Girl C said that when the men asked her to recruit younger girls, they specified that they wanted only white girls. "But not all the punters were Asian or North African," she added. "Although they were all foreign."

Girl C eventually moved "halfway across the country" in a final, desperate attempt to escape her abusers. Now living with her adoptive mother and young child, she has described how the gang went to considerable effort to slowly draw her in over many months.

"The grooming was so clever. It takes about one year and then it's too late: you're completely under their control," she remembered.

"It was such a smooth, planned, deliberate process.

"At first, they treat you like a princess. They make you feel wanted, cared for and ask you about your life and your family. They buy you gifts and make you the centre of their attention.

"That goes on for about six months, by which time you've told them so much that they know exactly what to say to get under your skin. Slowly they turn you against your family.

"I was so wrapped up in them that I believed what they told me without questioning it. I thought they were so wise; that they knew everything. I thought they were the only people I could trust.

"When you're dependent on them emotionally, they tie you even closer with drugs and alcohol. They got me addicted to crack cocaine first, then started giving me heroin. They once gave me a massive overdose and I nearly died.

"I was resuscitated by an ambulance man who realised what had happened to me even though I had no idea: I didn't even know what drug it was that I'd been given. I was like a zombie.

"The next stage of the grooming process happens once you're completely dependent on them," she said. "At this point, they begin flicking between attentive and being suddenly rude and aggressive. But even before they begin explicitly threatening you, you instinctively know something really bad will happen to you if you don't do what they want."

The sexual abuse was the second stage of the grooming process, she said. "It took six months for sex with one person to start. The man who targeted me said he loved me.

"But soon the switch flicked and he started saying things like: 'You have to [sleep with other men] for me because of all the things I have bought for you and done for you.' By that point the threats and the violence become explicit.

"You know that refusing would be really dangerous but by that point it doesn't occur to you to refuse: you're too much of a zombie. You're completely at their mercy."

When Girl C became pregnant at 16, she tried to escape but the threats became worse. "They said that I had to work for them in another way, by recruiting younger girls to do the jobs I was saying I wouldn't do any more. I couldn't do that but because I refused, I had to carry on working for them, doing what I'd been doing before."

After she had given birth to her baby, Girl C tried once again to escape. "I was desperate to get away but I was too terrified: they threatened to chop my son's head off and put it in a suitcase, and then kill me and my mum.

"I knew they would do it, too. They're not human," she said. "I have no doubt they would have killed me and done it painfully and slowly.

"Eventually, I got to the point where I didn't dare to leave the house," she said. "Then one day, I just snapped and realised the only ways to get out of this were to commit suicide, be murdered or move with my family halfway across the country. Within a few months, we were gone."

Girl C agreed to give evidence against the gang in court. In January, she travelled to London and spent eight days in the witness box at the Old Bailey.

It was, she said, such a traumatic experience that, despite Tuesday's sentences, she would not go through it again and would advise other victims of sexual abuse not to do so either.

"The defence lawyer set out to destroy and humiliate me in court," she said. "The judge had to adjourn the hearing five times to make him stop various lines of questioning because they were so aggressive and awful.

"I understand they have to question me but that defence lawyer tried to destroy me. I almost gave up a number of times and walked away.

"In the end, I stuck it out but I was traumatised by the experience. I'm on antidepressants now as a result," she said.

Girl C said she knew other girls in Oxfordshire who were being "groomed and abused by other gangs in exactly the same way that I was".

"I know some of these girls personally," she said. "I know for a fact that they've been let down and failed by social services in the early stages of their grooming process, just as I was failed, and as a result, they won't tell anyone what's happening – and the abuse just continues." Source

STOP turning MECCA into a TOURIST ATTRACTION

2013-05-10T09:00:00.000+01:00

Moderation in All Things

2013-05-09T10:02:00.000+01:00

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) once asked a companion:

"(Is it true) that you fast all day and stand in prayer all night?" The companion replied that the report was indeed true.

The Prophet then said: "Do not do that! Observe the fast sometimes and also leave (it) at other times; stand up for prayer at night and also sleep at night. Your body has a right over you, your eyes have a right over you and your wife has a right over you."

Sahih Al-Bukhari

Abu Ubaidah (#Simplicity) - Omar Suleiman - Quran Weekly

2013-05-09T09:36:00.000+01:00

Jesus Will Return

2013-05-08T09:00:00.000+01:00

Jesus ('Isa) (Upon whom be peace), just as all the other prophets, is a chosen slave of Allah whom Allah assigned to summon people to the true path. However, there are some attributes of Jesus distinguishing him from other prophets, the most important one being that he was raised up to Allah and that he will come back to earth again.

Contrary to what most people believe, Jesus was not crucified and killed nor did he die for any other reason. The Quran tells us that they did not kill him and they did not crucify him and that Allah raised him up to Him. In none of the verses, is there an actual reference to his murder or that he was killed, apart from the verse (ayah) which denies that it happened. Furthermore, the Quran acquaints us with some events from the life of Jesus which have not yet happened. Thus, his second coming to earth is a prerequisite for these events to happen. There is no doubt that the Quran's revelations will surely happen.

Despite this, however, many people assume that Jesus passed away some thousands of years ago and that thus it is unlikely that he will return. This is a misconception arising from lack of knowledge about the Quran and the Sunnah. A careful scrutiny of the Quran will render an accurate understanding of the verses about Jesus possible.

Our Prophet also told us that Jesus will be sent back to earth and related that in that time, which is called "the end of time", there may be a period in which the earth will attain unprecedented peace, justice and welfare. The "end times" refers to the period of time close to the end of the world. According to Islam, in this time, there will be the terrible trials of the Dajjal (Anti-Christ), many earthquakes and the emergence of Yajuj and Majuj (Gog and Magog) after which the ways of the Quran will prevail and people will extensively adhere to the values it introduces.

In their dreams, people always long for better. A more beautiful landscape, a more delicious food, a more socially promising society .. The later period of "the end of time" expresses a period which entirely embraces all these favorable concepts, "the better", "the more beautiful" etc. It is a blessed period people have been longing for ages. It is the glorious time of welfare and abundance, of justice and peace. It is the time when all these blessings will supersede injustice, immorality, conflict and wars. It is surely the blessed time when Islamic morals will penetrate to every aspect of life.

THE EXPECTED SAVIOR

In every age, Allah answered the call of His slaves who desperately needed His help. This also holds true for this age and for the future. As it was the case with the earlier ages, in our day, too, it is expected that Allah will save people from the injustice of the system of disbelief and present them with the beauties of Islam.

It is especially expected that the Islamic world will find a way out of the corruption it experiences today and the sincere believers will communicate the values of Islam to the whole world. Surely, as in every age, today people hope that a savior will appear. This savior, who will take mankind from the "darkness to the light," is the religion of Islam. The people leading the way to live by these superior values will defeat all the systems that deny Allah, and they will render corrupted ideologies invalid.

In brief, Allah will help each people as He did in previous ages. Allah promises this to His slaves who sincerely turn to Him and have deep fear of Him.

THE RETURN OF JESUS TO EARTH

An examination of the verses about Jesus in the Quran indicates that Jesus neither died nor was killed, but he was raised to the presence of Allah. In Surat an-Nisa, it is related that Jesus was not killed but raised to the presence of Allah. The related verse follows:

And (on account of) their saying, "We killed the Messiah, 'Isa son of Maryam, Messenger of Allah." They did not kill him and they did not crucify him but it was made to seem so to them. Those who argue about him are in doubt about it. They have no real knowledge of it, just conjecture. But they certainly did not kill him. Allah raised him up to Himself. Allah is Almighty, All-Wise. (Surat an-Nisa: 157-158)

From what has been related so far, it is clear that Jesus did not die but was raised to the presence of Allah. However, there is one more point that is underlined by the Quran: Jesus will come back to earth. That Jesus will come back to earth towards the end of time is related in another verse 43:61. [detailed references are available in the book related to other verses: 3:45-48; 3:55; 4:157-159].

Starting from Surat az-Zukhruf: 57, there is reference to Jesus :

When an example is made of the son of Maryam ('Isa) your people laugh uproariously. They retort, "Who is better then, our gods or him?" They only say this to you for argument's sake. They are indeed a disputatious people.

He is only a slave on whom We bestowed Our blessing and whom We made an example for the tribe of Israel. (Surat az-Zukhruf: 43-59)

If We wished, We could appoint angels in exchange for you to succeed you on the earth. (Surat az-Zukhruf: 43-60)

Just after these verses, Allah declares that Jesus is a sign of the Day of Judgment.

He is a Sign of the Hour. Have no doubt about it. But follow me. This is a straight path. (Surat az-Zukhruf: 43:61)

Ibn Juzayy says that the first meaning of this verse is that Jesus is a sign or a precondition of the Last Hour. We can say that this verse is a clear indication that Jesus will come back to earth at the end times. That is because Jesus lived six centuries before the revelation of the Quran. Consequently, we cannot interpret his first coming as a sign of the Day of Judgment. What this verse actually indicates is that Jesus will come back to earth towards the end of time, that is to say, during the last period of time before the Day of Judgment and this will be a sign for the Day of Judgment. Allah surely knows the best.

The Arabic of the verse "He is a Sign of the Hour" is "Innahu la 'ilmun li's-sa'atiÉ" Some people interpret the pronoun "hu" (he) in this verse as the Quran. However, the preceding verses explicitly indicate that Jesus is mentioned in the verse: "He is only a slave on whom We bestowed Our blessing and whom We made an example for the tribe of Israel" [1]

In Sahih Muslim, it is also stated that the Hadith in which it is said that the Prophet Jesus will descend amongst people at the end of time have reached the degree of being mutawatir, i.e. narrated by so many people in each generation that it is not possible to have any doubt of their authenticity, and that it is counted as one of the major signs of the Day of Rising. (Sahih Muslim, 2/58)

Hudhayfah ibn Usayd al-Ghifari said, "The Messenger of Allah (saas) came to us all of a sudden as we were (busy in a discussion). He said: 'What are you discussing?' We said: 'We are discussing the Last Hour.' Thereupon he said: 'It will not come until you see ten signs before it' - and (in this connection) he made mention of the smoke, the Dajjal, the beast, the rising of the sun from the west, the descent of 'Isa the son of Maryam, Yajuj and Majuj, and landslides in three places, one in the east, one in the west and one in Arabia at the end of which fire will burn forth from the Yemen, and drive people to the place of their assembly." (Sahih Muslim)

JESUS IN THE RISALE-I NUR COLLECTION

In the Risale-I Nur collection, a Quranic commentary written by Said Nursi, also known as Bediuzzaman (the Wonder of the Age),one of the greatest Islamic scholars of the 20th century, there is extensive reference to the end of time and the second coming of Jesus .

It is a fact that today Muslim communities embrace different thoughts. However, a great number of Muslims from various cultures agree that Bediuzzaman was one of the greatest scholars of the 13th century (Muslim Calendar). That is why the detailed descriptions of the end of time by Bediuzzaman are of great importance for all Muslims.

In his explanations regarding the end of time, Bediuzzaman states that two philosophical movements, described as serious endeavors to establish disbelief, would cause disorder on earth. The first one will be a covert threat to Islam while the second class of movements will openly reject the existence of Allah. The second current is materialist and naturalist understandings that affirm that matter is an absolute being, which has existed since eternity and which will exist until eternity. The two movements further hold that living beings accidentally came into existence from non-living matter. (Naturalism is known as the philosophical dimension of Darwin's theory of evolution.)

This definition surely provides the basis of all ideologies denying the existence of Allah. Since early times, materialists opposed all religions revealed by Allah, fought against their supporters, oppressed people, waged wars and opened the way to every sort of degeneration in society.

Jesus , too, in his second coming to earth, will struggle against these materialist and naturalist movements and, by the will of Allah, will gain victory over them. Bediuzzaman draws attention in his books to the materialist movement:

The Second Current: A tyrannical current born of Naturalist and Materialist philosophy will gradually become strong and spread at the end of time by means of materialist philosophy, reaching such a degree that it denies God. [2]

Bediuzzaman heralds that Jesus will come to earth at such a period when disbelief will dominate the earth. As stated in the following words of Bediuzzaman, in his second coming to earth, Jesus will rule with the Quran and eliminate all bigotry in Christianity. Uniting against disbelief, Christians who have embraced Islam and Muslims will prevail over the disbelieving ideologies by the guidance of the Quran. The related section in the Risale-i Nur follows:

At that point when the current appears to be very strong, the religion of true Christianity, which comprises the collective personality of Jesus , will emerge. That is, it will descend from the skies of Divine Mercy. Present Christianity will be purified in the face of that reality; it will cast off superstition and distortion, and unite with the truths of Islam. Christianity will in effect be transformed into a sort of Islam. Following the Quran, the collective personality of Christianity will be in the rank of follower, and Islam, in that of leader. True religion will become a mighty force as a result of its joining it. Although defeated before the atheistic current while separate, Christianity and Islam will have the capability to defeat and rout it as a result of their union. Then the person of Jesus , who is present with his human body in the world of the heavens, will come to lead the current of true religion, as, relying on the promise of One Powerful Over All Things, the Bringer of Sure News has said. Since he has told of it, it is true, and since the One Powerful Over All Things has promised it, He will certainly bring it about. [3]

In all his descriptions of the second coming, Bediuzzaman indicates that Jesus will remove all the systems of disbelievers in that period. He further adds that he will receive great support from Muslims. Jesus will act as a Muslim and pray behind the imam of the Muslims, and work together with the right-acting people from the Islamic world, and will assume leadership in spreading the Quran and its teachings, and remove the ongoing violence of the system of the disbelievers:

It will be the truly pious followers of Jesus who will kill the gigantic collective personality of materialism and irreligion which the Dajjal will form - for the Dajjal will be killed by Jesus' sword - and destroy his ideas and disbelief, which are atheistic. Those truly pious Christians will blend the essence of true Christianity with the essence of Islam and rout the Dajjal with their combined strength, in effect killing him. The narration: "Jesus will come and will perform the obligatory prayers behind the Mahdi and follow him," alludes to this union, and to the sovereignty of the Quran and its being followed. [4]

CONCLUSION

In the history of mankind, that Jesus will be sent back to earth for a second time by Allah is surely a divine favor to all humanity. Only a minority of people will enjoy this occasion. He will then be a blessed "savior" sent to all mankind. Indeed, in times when violence and disorder were increasingly experienced in the world, human beings begged a "helper" from Allah. Accordingly, Allah responded to their plea:

What reason could you have for not fighting in the Way of Allah - for those men, women and children who are oppressed and say, "Our Lord, take us out of this city whose inhabitants are wrongdoers! Give us a protector from You! Give us a helper from You!"? (Surat an-Nisa: 75)

As mentioned earlier, the "savior" in our time is the penetration of the Quranic values to our souls and society. Upon his second coming, Jesus will wholeheartedly adhere to these revealed values favored by Allah and strive purely to spread them to people all over the world.

The knowledge of unseen and future events is something only known to Allah. Yet, it is certain that those who expect this blessed period and this person must at that time undertake important obligations. Just as Jesus will protect and guide all believers, the believers will also have to give wholehearted support to Jesus and help him in the services he renders for the sake of Allah. This time, in other words, during his second coming, believers should never make him ask again, "Who will be my helpers to Allah?"(Surah Al 'Imran: 52) Otherwise, one will feel deep regret and torment both in this world and hereafter. Allah clearly threatens those who are ungrateful:

Then we sent our Messengers one after another, at intervals. Each time its Messenger came to a community they called him a liar so We made them follow one another too and turned them into myths and legends. Away with the people who have no faith! (Surat al-Muminun: 44)

On the other hand, those who follow him, who provide him sincere support and adopt the revealed values brought by him may well hope to earn the good pleasure, mercy and eternal paradise of Allah. This is a definite promise and good tidings given by Allah:

Allah has sent down a reminder to you, a Messenger reciting Allah's Clear Signs to you to bring those who have faith and do right actions out of the darkness into the Light. Whoever has faith in Allah and acts rightly, We will admit him into Gardens with rivers flowing under them remaining in them timelessly, for ever and ever. Allah has provided for him excellently! (Surat at-Talaq: 11)

We are grateful to Allah, the Almighty, Who will honor such of His slaves as He wills on such a great occasion as the second coming of Jesus and grant them this important opportunity to gain merit for their lives in the hereafter.

And peace be upon the Messengers. And praise be to Allah, the Lord of all the worlds! (Surat as-Saffat: 181-182)

Notes:

*. : Upon whom be peace

1. Prof. Suleyman Ates, Yuce Kur'an'ın Cagdas Tefsiri (The Contemporary Tafsir of the Holy Quran, vol. 6, p. 4281)

2. Said-i Nursi, The Letters, The Fifteenth Letter, p.53

3. Said-i Nursi, The Letters, The Fifteenth Letter, p.54

4. Said-i Nursi, The Rays, The Fifth Ray, p. 493

Excerpts taken from Harun Yahya's book, titled "Jesus will Return". First English edition published in February 2001. To order this book, click here.

Source

How I Discovered & Converted To Islam: My Conversion Story♥

2013-05-07T09:00:00.000+01:00

American Female Converts To Islam Facing Growing Scrutiny

2013-05-06T09:29:00.000+01:00

When Karen Hunt Ahmed and her Muslim husband divorced four years ago, many friends asked her, "Now you can stop this Islam stuff, right?"

Some friends, she thought.

"Like it was a hobby I took up when I got married and now I'm supposed to drop it," said Hunt Ahmed, president of the Chicago Islamic Microfinance Project, which she founded with two colleagues in 2009.

Hunt Ahmed, 45, is part of a growing sorority of female American converts to Islam, especially those who are or were married to Muslim men, who must deal with the perception that they converted to Islam because of domineering boyfriends or husbands.

The stereotype was revived in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, when news emerged that the wife of bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Katherine Russell, converted to Islam after meeting Tsarnaev in 2009 or 2010 when she was about 21.

Tsarnaev, 26, was shot and killed during a standoff with Boston police while his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar, was taken into custody and now faces a raft of terrorism charges.

"It's not just Fox. A lot of the media have portrayed her as someone who was brainwashed and who didn't know what she was doing," said Edlyn Sammanasu, who was born to Catholic parents and started studying Islam when she met her Muslim husband in college, and converted when she was 21.

"When I saw the coverage, I thought this was ridiculous," said Sammanasu, now 32, a technical writer in Fremont, Calif.

Seema Imam, an education professor at National Louis University in Lisle, Ill., has seen the same thing. She grew up as an observant Methodist but converted to Islam 40 years ago at age 17.

"Whenever someone talks about Muslim converts being involved in something negative, it's done in a way in which people say, 'Be careful, look what happens when you become Muslim,'" she said.

Converts to Islam are as diverse as the rest of America, racially and ethnically, as well as in their interpretations of the faith. Some female converts wear a headscarf, some don't. What they share is the perception from others that they are incapable of making their own choice in a decision that involved substantial spiritual wrestling.

It's as insulting as it is inaccurate, they say.

"These reports are misogynous in nature, reducing women to creatures who cannot think for themselves," said Malika MacDonald Rushdan, who converted in 1995 after divorcing her Christian husband. She made her "shahada," or declaration of faith, at the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, which the Tsarnaev brothers occasionally attended.

"My faith, by definition, is for the Creator, not for my husband," wrote Ohio attorney Sarah Anjum, who converted almost 10 years ago, while she was in college studying Islamic political movements and Arabic, and four years before she met her husband.

While some American Muslim women converted while single, those who started reading about Islam after meeting future husbands are incredulous over the idea that they converted to please them.

When Kelly Wentworth, 35, told her Yemeni boyfriend that she was interested in learning about Islam, he pointed her to a Muslim professor who taught at Tennessee Tech, where the two were students at the time. When she later told him she wanted to convert, he didn't celebrate.

"He was worried people would think that I converted because of him, or that I was being forced to convert," said Wentworth, a software engineer in Atlanta and board member of Muslims for Progressive Values, a national advocacy group. "The stereotype is out there. That's something I fight with now."

Wentworth became so worried about how friends and family would judge her after the Katherine Russell stories that she couldn't sleep for several nights.

A 2011 study from the Pew Research Center found that about 20 percent of an estimated 1.8 million Muslims in America are converts, while a 2007 Pew study found that 49 percent of converts converted by the age of 21. The 2007 study also found that 58 percent of converts converted for religious reasons, and 18 percent for family and marriage reasons.

Female Muslim converts acknowledge that they have heard about Muslim women trapped in abusive relationships, but say that such relationships affect women of other faiths as well.

"That has nothing to do with religion," Wentworth said. "That's a problem with personality."

Katherine Wilson, a convert and Rhode Island resident who works with female victims of violence and sexual assault, said the media, by focusing on Russell's faith, missed a chance to speak about domestic violence. She believes Muslim women converts are perceived negatively because some people see their choice of faith as a knock against their own decisions.

"I believe this is partially due to white privilege in that there is not an understanding why an 'all-American girl' would give up her privilege-assumed, carefree lifestyle," said Wilson. "I think it bothers people that an 'all American woman' would walk away from what they think is a great life, which is a stereotype within itself."

While such stereotypes still annoy these women, many say they have grown tired of having to explain their decisions to convert. Which doesn't mean they aren't trying to change minds.

"There will always be those who judge based upon ignorance. They are of no concern to me," said MacDonald Rushdan. "I will keep on doing what I've always done. I will not apologize for being a God-fearing woman whose faith provides her with inner peace and contentment." Source

Meet A Muslim Person

2013-05-03T09:00:00.000+01:00

A Very Nice Conversion/Reversion To Islam Story - Brother Reuben(Abu Bakr)

2013-05-02T09:00:00.000+01:00

Not 'brainwashed': American converts to Islam speak out

2013-05-01T09:00:00.000+01:00

When an American convert to Islam was revealed as the wife of the dead Boston bombing suspect, Lauren Schreiber wasn't surprised at what came next.

Comments from former acquaintances and complete strangers immediately suggested that 24-year-old Katherine Russell, a New England doctor's daughter, must have been coerced and controlled by her husband, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died last week in a firefight with police.

"She was a very sweet woman, but I think kind of brainwashed by him," reported the Associated Press, quoting Anne Kilzer, a Belmont, Mass., woman who said she knew Russell and her 3-year-old daughter.

That kind of assumption isn't new to Schreiber, 26, a Greenbelt, Md., woman who became a Muslim in 2010.

"The moment you put on a hijab, people assume that you've forfeited your free will," says Schreiber, who favors traditional Islamic dress.

The Boston terror attack and the questions about whether Russell knew about her husband's deadly plans have renewed stereotypes and misconceptions that U.S. women who have chosen that faith say they want to dispel.

"It's not because somebody made me do this," explains Schreiber, who converted after a college study-abroad trip to West Africa. "It's what I choose to do and I'm happy."

Her view is echoed by Rebecca Minor, 28, of West Hartford, Conn., a special education teacher who converted to Islam five years ago. When her students, ages 5 to 8, ask why she wears a headscarf, she always says the same thing: "It's something that's important to me and it reminds me to be a good person," says Minor, who is secretary for the Muslim Coalition of Connecticut.

Muslims make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, according to studies by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. In 2011, about 1.8 million U.S. adults were Muslim, and about 20 percent had converted to the faith, Pew researchers say. Of those converts, about 54 percent were men and 46 percent were women. About 1 in 5 converts mentioned family factors, including marrying a Muslim, as a reason for adopting the faith.

Accusations are 'harsh'
Women convert for a wide range of reasons - spiritual, intellectual and romantic - says Yvonne Haddad, a professor of the history of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations at Georgetown University.

"Islam is attractive to women that the feminist movement left behind," says Haddad, who co-authored a 2006 book, "Muslim Women in America: The Challenge of Islamic Identity Today."

Women like Lindsey Faraj, 26, of Charlotte, N.C., say that wearing a headscarf and other traditional Islamic garb in public often leads people to assume she sacrificed her American life to please a man.

"'You must have converted in order to marry him,' I hear it all the time," says Faraj, who actually converted simultaneously with her husband, Wathek Faraj, who is from Damascus, about four years ago.

She's also heard people say that her husband is allowed to beat her, that she's not free to get a divorce, that she and her two children, ages 4 months and 2, are subservient to the man. Such concepts are untrue, of course, she says.

"In the beginning, it did offend me a lot," says Faraj, who grew up in a Christian family in Florida. "But now as my sense of my new self has grown, I don't feel offended."

She's able to joke, for instance, about the woman who screamed insults from a passing car.

"They screamed: 'Go back to your own country' and I thought, 'It doesn't get more white than this, girl,'" says Faraj, indicating her fair features.

Like all stereotypes, such views are steeped in fear, says Haddad.

"Accusations of brainwashing are harsh," she says. "They cover up the fact that we don't comprehend why people like 'us' want to change and be like 'them.'"

All three women say they came to Islam after much thought and spiritual searching.

Islam 'entered my heart'
Schreiber, who is a community outreach and events coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says she was drawn to the religion after meeting other Muslims on her trip abroad before graduating from St. Mary's College of Maryland in 2009.

She grew up in an agnostic family where she was encouraged to discover her own faith.

"It was, whatever you decide to do - temple, church, mosque - I support you finding yourself," says Schreiber. She's now married to a Muslim man, Muhammad Oda, 27, whose parents were both converts to Islam. She said came to the faith before the relationship.

Faraj, a stay-at-home mom, says she never saw herself "as a religious person, in the least," but became enthralled after trying to learn more about Islam before a visit to see her husband's family.

"The concept of Islam hit me," Faraj recalls. "It was just something that entered my heart."

Minor, who is single, says she was intrigued by Islam in college, when she was close friends with a deployed American Marine but had Muslim friends at school.

"I saw a huge discrepancy in the negative things I heard coming from my (friend) and the actions I could see in my co-workers," she recalls. After spending 18 months learning about Islam, she decided to convert.

The response from family and friends has been overwhelmingly supportive, Minor says.

"The more you can do to educate people about Islam, not by preaching, but by actions, the better," she says.

Reports that Katherine Russell might have been embroiled in an abusive relationship, or that her husband intimidated her aren't an indictment of Islam, Haddad says.

"Abusive men come in all colors, nationalities, ethnicities and from all religions," she says. "No one says that Christianity teaches abuse of women because some Christian men are abusive."

Schreiber says she frequently gets comments from people surprised to see her fair skin and hear her American accent from beneath a scarf. She says she appreciates it when people actually ask questions instead of making assumptions.

"I just want people to know that there are American Muslim women who wear hijab by choice because they believe in it and it feels right to them, not because anyone tells them to."

Source: NBC News - JoNel Aleccia, Senior Writer, NBC News

What kind of woman is willing to share her husband?

2013-04-29T09:00:00.000+01:00

Farzana is a senior nurse, 36, attractive, selfpossessed and articulate. “I have begun to consider polygamy,” she tells me at a matchmaking event in central London for divorced and widowed Muslims interested in marrying again. “When you think about love in an Islamic way, the co-wife idea makes sense.”

According to Mizan Raja, who set up the Islamic Circles community network and presides over the east London Muslim matrimonial scene, women are increasingly electing to become “co-wives” – in other words, to become a man’s second or third wife. As I reported last year in the New Statesman, Raja gets five to ten requests every week from women who are “comfortable with the notion of a part-time man”. He explained: “Career women don’t want a full-time husband. They don’t have time.” So couples live separately, a husband visiting his wives on a rota.

A dapper City boy listening to Raja whispered to me: “Actually, that’s not right. In late twenties a girl is considered past it, so this arrangement is the best she can get.”

If you’re divorced, widowed or over 30 and Muslim, finding a husband in this country can be a challenge. Does polygamy, or more specifically polygyny (a man taking more than one wife, as opposed to a woman taking more than one husband), as sanctioned by the Quran, offer a possible solution?

Aisha (not her real name), a divorced single mother with two children, recently chose to become a second wife. She was introduced to her husband by a friend. She says that at first she was hesitant. “I was like, ‘No, I can’t do it. I’m too jealous as a person. I wouldn’t be able to do it.’ But the more that time went on and I started thinking about it, especially more maturely, I saw the beauty of it.”

They agreed on the terms of the marriage by email, covering details such as “how many days he’d spend with me and how many days he’d spend with his other wife, and money and living arrangements”. They then met twice, liked each other, set a date and were married. Her husband now spends three days with Aisha and her two children from her previous marriage and then three days with his other family, unless one of them is ill, in which case he stays to help but has to make up the missed time to his other wife.

She confesses that “if he was to stay all the time I’d love it”, but says that having time off “is definitely beneficial in some ways as well”. She has “more freedom” to see her friends and her family, and it is a relief “not having a man in your face half the time, when you are cranky, and he can go somewhere else and you can manage the kids on your own”.

As a divorcee, bringing up children on her own for three years before remarrying, she built up an independent life for herself: “It’s hard to let your goals go for a man all over again.” Although she concedes they have had a “few teething problems” and that it took his first wife “some time to come to terms with it”, now, she says, they “have come to an understanding . . . We are finding our feet.” Both sets of children are aware of the new situation and have accepted it. In fact, she says that her husband’s daughter from his first marriage “can’t wait to meet second Mummy” and her own son, who now has a father figure and “role model” that he was previously lacking, is “really happy with it”. They have yet to experience “a big family get-together”, but Aisha says she is “hopeful that will happen soon . . . I’ve spoken to her [the first wife] a couple of times. She seems really lovely. I would really like for us to become good friends . . . for there to be that kind of bond of sisterhood between us.”

The main obstacle to happiness, according to Aisha, “is the sense of ownership” and jealousy. “But that’s something that you’ve just got to use your wisdom to get past . . . It’s more important for me to have a father for my children . . . to have a helping hand when I need it.” She insists that problems arise only when the husband does not treat both wives equally, as explicitly mandated in the Quran, or when the wives are not mature enough to rationalise and accept the situation.

Anecdotal evidence, in the absence of the statistical kind, suggests that polygamy is on the rise in Britain. And according to a poll conducted over a week by Singlemuslim.com, 33 per cent of men and 9 per cent of women would choose to be part of a polygamous marriage. Because such marriages take place through an unregistered marriage contract, they do not constitute bigamy, a criminal offence in the UK.

The reasons for polygamy are complex. Aisha says that, from her point of view, “Single mums don’t have the pick of the bunch . . . [Polygamy] is there so we can still have the benefits of marriage, so we don’t have to be left on the shelf, so our children can still have role models, father figures, and so we can still have that emotional stability, financial stability and security.”

The stigma of divorce, as well as later marriages and the importing of foreign brides (15,500 women were admitted to the UK in 2011 as wives of British men, according to Home Office figures), have all exacerbated the problem for Muslim women looking for a husband.

Aisha tells me that her husband saw polygamy as his religious duty. “A lot of people think it’s just about sex but . . . sex goes out the window after a while. If you don’t want your husband marrying someone else, what would happen to these single mums, then, and these divorcees? Is it fair that they just stay on the shelf? We should be looking after our community. Islam is all about community and society and we should look after our brothers and our sisters equally, otherwise it’s every man for themselves.”

Kalsoom Bashir, the project manager of the Muslim women’s rights organisation Inspire, and Khola Hasan of the Islamic Sharia Council in Leyton, east London, both believe that forced marriage is another reason for polygamy. British men are forced into marriages, often with cousins imported from “back home” with whom they have nothing in common. “For a man who has been in the difficult situation of being forced into a marriage, and the numbers are huge in Britain, absolutely huge . . . for many of them, polygamy is a good way of being happy and keeping the family happy,” Hasan explains.

The Quran instructs Muslim men to “marry women of your choice two or three or four”, but warns that “if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly [with them] then only one or [your concubines]. That is more fitting so that you do not deviate from the right course.” The Prophet Muhammad said, “Whosoever has two wives and he inclines towards one to the exclusion of the other, he will come on the Day of Judgement with his body dropping or bending down.”

In other words, “It is mission impossible,” according to Mufti Barkatulla, a senior imam and sharia council judge in Leyton. He firmly believes that there is no place for polygamy in modern Britain. “There are a number of cases we have come across and there is hardly a case where a man can balance all the duties required in a polygamous situation . . . In today’s industrial society, it is impossible to observe the conditions laid down by the scriptures.” Polygamy, he points out, predates Islam and was permitted in Islam in the context of war to offer protection to war orphans and widows. Many of the Prophet’s 11 wives were widows.

Sara (not her real name) is a 40-year-old Muslim convert. She accepted the practice of polygamy as part of her religion and when she fell in love with a married man, she was the one who suggested that she become his second wife. “I was busy and studying. I felt I could cope with not having someone around all the time,” she tells me.

In reality, though, Sara now says, their marriage was more like a religiously sanctioned affair. “Because of the social taboos against [polygamy], it had to be secret from the community and I couldn’t have any children . . . because then it will be known that he has a second wife.” Although she met her husband’s first wife, going on holiday with her once and even offering to babysit her children, the first wife never fully accepted the situation. “I really had this idea that we somehow would eventually find some way of getting on . . . I was imagining it would be like these stories I have heard of where it works, so I thought it would just be a matter of time and we were destined to be together.” Eventually, after six years, Sara sought a divorce.

In his 25 years presiding over thousands of divorce cases at the Islamic Sharia Council, Mufti Barkatulla has heard many similar stories. Between 2010 and 2011, 43 out of the 700 applications for divorce to Leyton’s sharia council cited polygamy as the main reason.

Mufti Barkatulla and Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, the former director of the Muslim Institute, devised a Muslim marriage contract – in effect, a religiously sanctioned prenup, to be signed at the time of the nikah, or religious ceremony – that sought to address the imbalance in Muslim marriages, giving women equal rights to divorce, allowing them to feel safe from rape or abuse, and preventing husbands from taking a second wife. It also states that the nikah must happen in conjunction with a civil ceremony, for extra protection.

He tells me the story of a woman whose husband “had agreed to a civil ceremony but because dates and everything were not agreed the husband kept on delaying it”. One day when she got home, she found a notice on the door: “Everything is over. Collect your things from my sister’s house.” The woman told him that she felt as though she had been “on trial” but eventually was discarded.

An estimated 70-75 per cent of Muslim marriages in the UK are not registered under the Marriage Act, unlike Christian and Jewish marriages, which are registered automatically. Mosques have the legal right to register to conduct civil weddings, but only about one in ten have chosen to do so. A nikah or Muslim marriage can be performed anywhere, even using proxies or on Skype. When a marriage is not registered and the relationship breaks down, the unregistered wife has no rights to spousal or child support and can even be left homeless, denied her due share. In the event of the husband’s death, the registered wife and her children will inherit and the unregistered wife and children will not.

If Muslim marriages are unregistered, and take place outside of the jurisdiction of this country, there is no automatic recourse to justice through the British courts. Instead, an aggrieved party must go to an unregulated sharia council for mediation. The crossbencher Baroness (Caroline) Cox is concerned by this clash between sharia and civil law. “There is now operating in this country a kind of parallel quasi-legal system and that goes against the fundamental principle of liberal democracy of one law for all.” Of polygamy, she says: “To have more than one wife is not acceptable in the UK and people . . . must accept the laws of the land they choose to live in.” In 2011, she introduced the Arbitration and Mediation Services (Equality) Bill, which had its second reading in the House of Lords last October and “would make it illegal for any person or contacts to be established which would operate as a kind of alternative legal system. Anyone purporting to operate in that way in a judicial capacity would actually be committing a criminal offence that could [be punished with] a prison sentence for this alternative legal system.” The bill will be re-tabled in the next Parliament.

Khola Hasan of Leyton’s sharia council believes that forcing mosques to register all nikahs, and thereby banning polygamy, will only make Muslims feel more persecuted. “The Muslim community in Britain already feels victimised,” she says, and it will inevitably force the practice underground, leaving women more vulnerable. She argues that, rather than banning polygamy, which she views as a “solution to many complex and difficult situations”, the practice should in fact be recognised by British law.

According to the Singlemuslim.com poll, 61 per cent of Muslim men and 28 per cent of Muslim women agree with Hasan that British law should be changed to permit polygamy. “Britain is refusing to accept that polygamy takes place,” she says. “It’s a reality and I think the British legal system is going to have to open its eyes and accept that it’s a reality in Britain.

“Polygamy is not going to go away.” Source

Unity....

2013-04-27T13:47:00.000+01:00

Brothers, think before you speak!

2013-04-26T09:00:00.000+01:00

I Am Not Oppressed!

2013-04-25T09:00:00.000+01:00

India woman speak out on “sex marriages” with wealthy Arabs

2013-04-24T09:00:00.000+01:00

Geeta is 19-years-old. She is attending a local university in Varanasi, but she is unmarried and her family is not well off. As a result, she became the victim of what has been described in the country as “sex marriages” with wealthy Arab men, who come to the country on business trips and purchase Indian women to be their wives for a certain period of time.

She recently sat down with Bikyanews.com to discuss her ordeal with who she described as a “Saudi Arabian man” who had paid her family some $2,000 for one month of “services.”

“I couldn’t go through with it after the first week. It was horrible,” she said, asking that her surname remain anonymous.

For her, it began in February, when a man appeared at her house, offered money to her family and then had a “Qazi” – or Muslim cleric in charge of marriages – come to the house to marry the couple. In the contract, she said, there would be an automatic divorce after the man left the country.

“I was taken away to a hotel where he forced me to have sex with him repeatedly for days. It was rape and I didn’t know what to do,” she revealed.

After only a week with the man, forced to remain in the hotel as he went to business meetings, she packed her few belongings and fled, finding refuge at a friend’s house. There, she has remained, refusing to speak to her family and seeing a psychiatrist on a regular basis to help overcome the anguish and struggle she was forced to endure.

“I will never speak to my family after what they did. I was a sex worker and forced to do things against my will. I am shocked and so sad that this happened. I know other girls who are forced into similar things and it is wrong that our police and government do nothing,” she argued.

Women’s rights activists in the country have pointed out that these short term “contract marriages” are illegal in India and supposed to be illegal in Islamic law, but they are increasing across the country. In a recent Telegraph report, Hyderabad is becoming the central location for the marriages, as wealthy Arab businessmen come to the city in search of girls and young women to “service” them for their stay in India.

In a similar case, Inspector Vijay Kumar reported that one man “had paid 100,000 Rupees (around £1,200) to the girl’s aunt Mumtaz Begum, who in turn paid 70,000 Rupees to her parents, 5,000 Rupees to the Qazi, 5,000 Rupees to an Urdu translator and kept 20,000 Rupees herself. The wedding certificate came with a ‘Talaknama’ which fixed the terms of the divorce at the end of the groom’s holiday.

“The next day he came to the house of the victim girl and asked her to participate in sex but she refused. She is a young girl and the groom is older than her father,” Inspector Kumar told The Telegraph.

It is part of an ongoing debate over women’s issues in the country and one that is seeing young girls and women being used by families suffering from poverty. For social workers in the country, from Varanasi to Hyderabad to Mumbai and Delhi, they are seeing a rise in these marriages.

“We are having to deal with women and girls coming to our offices on a regular basis seeking help and we have to keep it silent for fear their families will force them again to go into these situations,” one social worker told Bikyanews.com in Delhi. “We just want the government and police to arrest these men and family members who are forcing their daughters into sex work.” Source

Between Militarism & Extremism: The Excluded Middle

2013-04-23T09:00:00.001+01:00

BLAME THE TERRORISTS

2013-04-23T09:00:00.000+01:00