Thinkers Forum USA Proudly Announces
Special Event on Allama Iqbal
” Iqbal’s Concept of Adam in Poetry & Prose”
Speaker” Saiyid Ali Naqvi”
(Scholar & Author)
Moderator : Mirza Iqbal Ashraf
( Scholar & Author)
At
Lecture Hall, Islamic Center Of Rockland
481 Mountainview Ave, Valley Cottage, N.Y. 10989
On Sunday, November 24, 2013 at 2;30 PM (After Asar Prayer)
Refreshments shall be served
( Shared By Tahir Mahmood )
This week, 1.2 billion Muslims will celebrate Eid-al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, or Tabaski as it is known in West Africa. Very few among them will have a thought for the hundreds of thousands of enslaved West Africans who, during almost four centuries, practiced Islam in the Americas. Although they left significant marks of their faith, cultures, and traditions, the Africans who first brought Islam to these shores have been mostly forgotten.
Muslims were among the very first Africans to be introduced into the Americas. They arrived as early as 1503 mostly from Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, and Nigeria. Among them were teachers, students, judges, religious and military leaders, pilgrims to Mecca, and traders. The United States, where Senegambians represented almost 24 percent of the Africans, probably had the largest proportion of Muslims in the Americas, even though their actual numbers were higher in Brazil.
Many Muslims were literate, reading and writing Arabic and their own languages in the Arabic script. From North Carolina to Georgia, from Brazil to
Some Muslims who knew the Qur’an by heart wrote their own copies. Among them was Ayuba Suleyman Diallo, whose portrait opens this post. Part of the religious elite in Senegal, he was kidnapped and enslaved in Maryland in 1731. He wrote three copies of the Qur’an once in London after being freed in 1733 thanks to a letter in Arabic he wrote to his father asking to be redeemed. One copy, 223 pages long, has just surfaced (it was owned by a Californian since 1960) and was sold at auction on October 8 for $34,362.
In Georgia, Bilali Mohamed wrote, in Arabic, excerpts of an eleventh century Islamic text; and Brazilian Muslims operated underground Qur’anic schools. Sufism (the mystical side of Islam)was overwhelmingly present in West Africa and so too in the Americas where its influence can be seen in the Muslims’ writings and practices
Click link for full article;.
http://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/10/13/americas-first-muslims#
As Conor Cruise O’Brien once remarked, “Violence is sometimes needed for the voice of moderation to be heard.” And indeed, violence, contrary to what its prophets try to tell us, is a much more effective weapon of reformers than of revolutionists. (The often vehement denunciations of violence by Marxists did not spring from humane motives but from their awareness that revolutions are not the result of conspiracies and violent action.) France would not have received the most radical reform bill since Napoleon to change her antiquated education system without the riots of the French students [in May 1968], and no one would have dreamed of yielding to reforms of Columbia University without the riots during the [1968] spring term.
Still, the danger of the practice of violence, even if it moves consciously within a non-extremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end. If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will not merely be defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversible, and a return to the status quo in case of defeat is always unlikely. The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jul/11/hannah-arendt-reflections-violence/
Karachi, Pakistan — Pakistan’s flag, a white star and crescent on a green background taken from the flag of the Muslim League, also has a broad white stripe on the left to represent its minority faiths, which include Christians, Hindus, Zoroastrians and others. But for many, a growing trend of violent attacks by religious militants against these groups has made that white stripe begin to feel like a tightrope — or a noose.
The most egregious of these attacks (not that any of them are less than egregious) took place in September, when two suicide bombers detonated their jackets at the gates of the All Saints Church in Peshawar, killing at least 80 worshipers, most of them women and children, as they streamed out the doors after Mass.
After the attack, a young lawyer from Karachi, Mohammad Jibran Nasir, called on citizens in his city to form a human chain around St. Patrick’s Cathedral there during Mass the following Sunday. A Sunni mullah, a Shiite imam and a Catholic priest prayed together during that event, and it was replicated at St. Anthony’s Church in Lahore and Our Lady of Fatima Church in Islamabad. Clerics from different faiths and sects sat together in the pews and made heartfelt speeches about religious tolerance while a small but passionate group of citizens held up placards that read, “One Nation, One Blood.”
In another smart move, the interfaith campaign, called “Pakistan for All,” is being enacted on social media. There it has attracted the attention of moderate and progressive Pakistanis, educated and tech-savvy, who detest seeing their country plunge into violence motivated by Pakistan’s right wing, and are desperate to wrest back their country from the forces of religious intolerance.
But Mr. Nasir recognizes that the work ahead for his burgeoning movement is immense. “We have a long way to go,” he said. “The human shields around the churches are just a symbolic gesture to get people’s attention.” What’s needed after people have been awakened, he says, is a public discourse that will produce policy recommendations to Pakistan’s Parliament for legal reform and heightened punishment for terrorism committed in the name of religion.
According to Akbar S. Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, D.C., Jinnah practiced the interfaith harmony that he preached. Not only was his wife, Ruttie Jinnah, a woman from the Zoroastrian community, but he also spent Christmas Eve of 1947 attending Mass with the Christian community in its church in Karachi. In the tense months surrounding India’s partition, he declared his willingness to take on the role of protector general of the Hindu community. During his lifetime, those highly visible acts and statements assured the minorities of their protection from friends in high places.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/opinion/shah-reviving-an-interfaith-legacy.html?ref=opinion