In the era of the Companions (sahaba) the learned were termed “Qur’aa” -the literate ones. In a later phase in the Read the rest of this entry »
…It has been years since my visit to Brooklyn, NY with my cousin in the early 90’s and much has changed since then. New York has a new face a far cry from projects, grafitti and filth. The city is a new city and actually it is quite friendly and inviting and yes always awake. In any event, my stay in NY has been quite interesting, it is growing on me.
One of the things that is amazing about Brooklyn is the Islamic scene there are masjids in which maghrib and isha look like Jumah due to the large number of people. Another amazing thing is the amount of places in Brooklyn one can memorize Qur’an with qualified people. I thought about the possibility of just traveling NY and seeking knowledge. There are just so many resources to work with and community settings. And did I mention Halal food spots are all over the place and yes they even call the adhan out loud too in some masjids. Islam in America, Muslims are doing ok. Every where you look in Brooklyn there is Muslim. All one can say is that NY is a far cry from the days of projects and grafitti and street gangs. -Islam is well established in New York and it may be a good place to start a knowledge quest and especially to memorize the Qur’an. Overall, of what I have seen during my stay in NY -in Astoria, Bay Ridge, and Brooklyn- is that NY has great reciters of Qur’an who teach tajwid, help in the process of memorization and have ijaza.
Hope New Yorkers take advantage of the resources to seek knowledge in the Big Apple.
Abul-Hussein
By Dr Mosseri AvrahamThe David Azrieli School of Architecture, Faculty of the Arts,Tel Aviv University, Israel
Cross-disciplinary teaching is one of the most
important and complicated issues in pedagogy
characterised mainly by specialisation and the
appearance of new disciplines today. In this new
reality, there is a big need for courses that provide
students with a wider view of lateral connections
between disciplines.
When dealing with cross-disciplinary teaching, it
is first necessary to clarify the distinction between
disciplinary courses and cross-disciplinary courses.
Disciplinary courses usually deal with a specific field
of knowledge, delving relatively deep into details and its micro aspects.
Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.
Of the tasks of Islamic thought is to determine and clarify various principles that are grounded in, and permeate Revelation and Islamic tradition, (constants and themes) principles which are essential to culture, thought, ethics and more importantly the project of civilization. A fundamental principle to be considered is that of orientation and meaning, in short, purpose. (the principle of orientation) The Muslim in the West must primarily be a person of orientation and principle given the cultural dominance of cultural and moral relativity (disorientation) that is taking hold in Western thought and society. The principle of orientation holds to the notion that the Muslim gains orientation from a number of spiritual and natural realities all which constitute life as a Muslim and are accounted for by the triad: Iman, Islam, Ihsan and are subsumed under the key concept Shar’iah.
There are numerous efforts to explain, or explain away, the emergence of “Islam” as a political force in the Muslim countries. The revolution in Iran is the event that brought the problem of Islam to the top of the agenda for the policy makers of the rich and the powerful countries (”North Atlantic plutocracies” in Bobby Sayyid’s terminology). And the armies of academics were soon turning out papers, books discussing the phenomena. Bobby Sayyid provides a critique of the major strains of the “Fundamentalism/Islamism” scholarship and gives an alternative framework to situate the Islamist emergence.
Bobby Sayyid ultimately argues that Islamism is a challenge to conceptualization of the West as the universal and that it is an attempt to articulate an alternate –Muslim– subjectivity. After convincingly demonstrating the uselessness of the category of “fundamentalism” in the first chapter, Sayyid declares that he is going to write about “Islamism”. Sayyid says, “an Islamist is someone who places her or his Muslim identity at the centre of her or his political practice. That is, Islamists are people who use the language of Islamic metaphors to think through their political destinies, those who see in Islam their political future.”
The criticism of the use of “fundamentalism” as an analytical category focuses on fundamentalism as it relates to women’s bodies, political pluralism, and conflating religion Read the rest of this entry »
(Shaikh Ahmad Raysuni (h))
“Upon a survey of Islamic jurisprudence (al-fiqh al-islami), we find various tendencies, which have entrenched themselves. Of these tendencies we find a tendency inclined toward an exaggeration in stringency by expanding the sphere of the prohibited (haram) under the claim of Read the rest of this entry »
[Introductory Remarks]
One of the major diseases plaguing the Muslim world today is forthrightly, ignorance. Muslims have become disengaged from the primary sources the Qur’an and the Sunnah and this is bad enough. In addition, what exacerbates matters is that Muslims have become disengaged from qualified, rightly-guided, wise and judicious scholars and by extension distanced from the coping mechanism of Fiqh (Islamic Jurisprudence) as derived law applicable to daily life. In effect, this has left Muslims in general like a plant neglected without water. Our lives are no longer cultivated upon scholarly principles (judicious, ethical or theological in nature).
I suppose this is why I am refreshed and excited to discover little-discussed points of law that help contextualize and enlighten my understanding of Islam Law. I have found the breadth and depth of this scholarly discourse to be overwhelming satisfying. What follows is a brief but timely discussion about Muslims contracting marriages under secular civil law codes. This discourse is a far cry from the type of provocative “Clash of Civilizations” discourse that is tossed about in the media. What it demonstrates is the conciliatory nature of Islam at its very foundations and as applied to marriage.
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