In Part 2 of Out of Context, Pastor Baughman asks me about verses & incidents of violence in the Quran and Sunnah.
Share the series with your Muslim and Non Muslim friends!
Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research will be dedicated to answering these questions in depth and will be launching in October insha'Allah!
Link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VCZ9sTc8S98&list=PLutdSTmJ7bAJQaNrfGlijtvLsDcERufni&index=2
Link:
In the 13th century, Ghazan Khan, the first Mongol ruler to convert to Islam, established various waqfs in Tabriz that provided for the distribution of food among the population. Specifically, sweet dishes were given out on Thursday evenings and holidays and even birds were provided with grain during the winter months.
Among the most notable and lasting contributions of Ottoman women were their waqfs (charitable endowments).
The Yeni Camii (New Mosque) in Istanbul was initiated as a waqf by Valide Sultan Safiye, the mother of Sultan Mehmed III in 1597 and was completed Valide Sultan Turhan Hatice in 1665.
Kösem Sultan, the mother of Sultans Murad IV and Ibrahim I, established a waqf in the early 17th century that provided dowries for poor women.
Listen: if you are suffering in silence: stop. This is not what patience looks like. It is not what God is asking you for. The Prophet endured and patiently persevered but he never never stopped moving, stopped looking for a way out, a different path to a better situation. If it hurts, complain to the One who never tires and then get up and work. Do your part. Be your own advocate. Seek assistance. Be fearless. I'm not discounting the possible danger. Only telling you that we were put here for striving. Hajjar didn't sit and "suffer in silence"-- she was running. She was sweating. She was striving. That was your mother. You are more than the brokenness of this moment.
Sadly, sectarianism is still well and alive in the Ummah.
Recently, a large group of scholars, primarily of a Sufi/Ashari trend, gathered in Chechnya for a conference whose pre-planned and coordinated conclusion was to claim that Atharis (or 'Salafis') were not a part of Sunni Islam, and hence were to be considered a heretical school. The fact that this conference was sponsored and planned by some of the most repressive government regimes in the world, for political purposes, and with a sectarian agenda, and indirectly supported by Western powers, was ignored by followers of that strand of Islam as the conference reached its foregone conclusion, simply because some of their own esteemed figures, such as Habib Ali al-Jifry, were involved in and in charge of organizing it. Narry a word of protest was heard against this shameless debacle of a conference by mainstream, moderate followers of that trend.
Love makes one blind to one's beloved's faults.
Not to be outdone, recently the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, as a result of comments of a political nature, criticized the Shi'ites as being 'sons of fire-worshippers' (in reference to their Zoroastrian heritage) and effectively excommunicated the entire mass of them from Islam. Again, the realization that regional powers are actually being played against one another by super-powers who have a vested interested in seeing an intra-Muslim civil war (in this case, America on the one side and Russia on the other, and Saudi Arabia and Iran as regional proxies), and the simple grasp that such ancient theological disputes are only being made relevant due to modern political struggles, is completely lost on those who issue, or support, such statements.
Meanwhile, as some followers continue to cheer such rhetoric and blindly defend it, millions of Muslims around the world continue to live in the most unimaginable of circumstances. And even as these clerics issue their fatwas from the comforts of their stable lives, it is the innocent and helpless men, women and children, of Syria, of Yemen, of Iraq (and others...) who suffer as a result of the policies of power-intoxicated Western and Russian backed politicians being supported by the zealousness and short-sidedness and political naïveté of religious fundamentalist clerics.
Yes, I'm angry and frustrated at the situation in the Muslim world. And so should you.
Sallim, Allahumma sallim....
In a new episode, Julie Stephens challenges the binary juxtaposition of secular reason and religious sentiment through an exploration of debates over the meaning of religious and political liberties, secularism, and legal transformation during British colonial rule in South Asia.
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2016/09/stephens.html?m=1
