Israel / Palestine - This Needs To Be Heard

Outrage after Pakistan PM Imran Khan blames rape crisis on women

 

 Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, is facing backlash after he blamed victims of rape for wearing “very few clothes”.

The former cricket captain was questioned by the Axios journalist Jonathan Swan about the ongoing “rape epidemic” in Pakistan and responded by saying: “If a woman is wearing very few clothes it will have an impact on the man unless they are robots. It’s common sense.”

He did not elaborate on what he meant by “few clothes”, in a country where the vast majority of women wear conservative national dress.

More than a dozen women’s rights groups, including the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, released a statement demanding an apology. “This is dangerously simplistic and only reinforces the common public perception that women are ‘knowing’ victims and men ‘helpless’ aggressors,” they said.

The politician Maryam Nawaz, who is the vice-president of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and daughter of the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, said Khan was a “rape apologist” and that people who validated rape had the same mindset as the perpetrators.

Kanwal Ahmed, a campaigner for women’s rights, tweeted: “Makes my heart shudder to think how many rapists feel validated today with the prime minister backing their crime.”

Weekend protests have been organised in the cities of Karachi and Lahore.

Earlier this year the prime minister was accused of “baffling ignorance” by one of the country’s top rights groups after he advised women to cover up to prevent rape.

His media team later insisted the comments in the national language of Urdu had been misinterpreted.

When questioned by Swan about his previous remarks about rape victims, Khan responded saying it was “nonsense” and he was instead referring to Islam’s “concept of purdah” which is to “avoid temptation of society”, often done through covering oneself.

Victims of sexual abuse are often viewed with suspicion and criminal complaints are rarely seriously investigated in Pakistan. Much of the country lives under a so-called “honour” code where women who bring “shame” on their families can be subjected to violence or murder.

The country regularly ranks among the worst places in the world for gender equality.

Nationwide protests erupted in 2020 when a police chief admonished a gang-rape victim for driving at night without a male companion. The French-Pakistani mother was assaulted in front of her children on the side of a motorway after her car ran out of fuel.

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Love Jihad in India’s Uttar Pradesh

Sins We Commit When We’re Scared and Vulnerable | Khutbah

 

Hadith: Mind your own business

 

Ali ibn Husayn reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Verily, among excellence in Islam is for a man to leave what does not concern him.”

Source: Sunan al-Tirmidhī 2318

Khawla Bint Hakim & Uthman Ibn Madhun: The Righteous Couple

 

How to Rule in the Islamic World

 

Muslim Family Brutally Attacked By Hindutva Mob

 

Reports have surfaced that a Muslim family was brutally beaten up by a group of men after they barged into their home in Yamna Vihar locality in New Delhi on Friday night. According to an Urdu news portal Roznama Khabrein, 11 family members including children and women were injured in the attack by the gang led by certain Vipin. A delegation of Jamait Ulama-e-Hind met the victims and expressed their solidarity and support with the family of Yamin Khan.

 The report said that the family told the Jamiat delegation that they were attacked for their Muslim identity. Yamuna Vihar was one of the worst hit localities in the riots that shook the national capital last year leaving 53 dead, majority of them Muslims. The family said that even though the iron gate of the lane was shut, Vipin beat up the guard who attempted to resist their forced entry. He and his men then entered into Yamin Khan’s house, beat up family members and misbehaved with women folks.

 After the family dialed the police helpline the goons ran away. Jamiat delegation led by Maulana Hakimuddin Qasmi took up the matter with top police officials of the area including DCP. The police told the delegation that a case has been filed and gang leader Vipin has been nabbed. The police assured them that all the accused will face the law. 

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Miqdad Ibn Aswad (ra) : Better Than A Thousand Men

Hadith: On Jerusalem

 

 

“Glory be to the One Who took His servant Muhammad by night from the Sacred Mosque to the Farthest Mosque whose surroundings We have blessed, so that We may show him some of Our signs. Indeed, He alone is the All-Hearing, All-Seeing.” (The Qur’an, 17:1)

Khuṭbah: The Divine Test of Life | Shaykh Dr. Yasir Qadhi

Islam’s anti-racist message from the 7th century still resonates today

 

One day, in Mecca, the Prophet Muhammad dropped a bombshell on his followers: He told them that all people are created equal.

“All humans are descended from Adam and Eve,” said Muhammad in his last known public speech. “There is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab, or of a non-Arab over an Arab, and no superiority of a white person over a black person or of a black person over a white person, except on the basis of personal piety and righteousness.”

In this sermon, known as the Farewell Address, Muhammad outlined the basic religious and ethical ideals of Islam, the religion he began preaching in the early seventh century. Racial equality was one of them. Muhammad’s words jolted a society divided by notions of tribal and ethnic superiority.

Today, with racial tension and violence roiling contemporary America, his message is seen to create a special moral and ethical mandate for American Muslims to support the country’s anti-racism protest movement.

Apart from monotheism – worshipping just one God – belief in the equality of all human beings in the eyes of God set early Muslims apart from many of their fellow Arabs in Mecca.

Chapter 49, verse 13 of Islam’s sacred scripture, the Quran, declares: “O humankind! We have made you…into nations and tribes, so that you may get to know one another. The noblest of you in God’s sight is the one who is most righteous.”

This verse challenged many of the values of pre-Islamic Arab society, where inequalities based on tribal membership, kinship and wealth were a fact of life. Kinship or lineal descent – “nasab” in Arabic – was the primary determinant of an individual’s social status. Members of larger, more prominent tribes like the aristocratic Quraysh were powerful. Those from less wealthy tribes like the Khazraj had lower standing.

The Quran said personal piety and deeds were the basis for merit, not tribal affiliation – an alien and potentially destabilizing message in a society built on nasab.

As is often the case with revolutionary movements, early Islam encountered fierce opposition from many elites.

The Quraysh, for example, who controlled trade in Mecca – a business from which they profited greatly – had no intention of giving up the comfortable lifestyles they’d built on the backs of others, especially their slaves brought over from Africa.

The Prophet’s message of egalitarianism tended to attract the “undesirables” –people from the margins of society. Early Muslims included young men from less influential tribes escaping that stigma and slaves who were promised emancipation by embracing Islam.

Women, declared to be the equal of men by the Quran, also found Muhammad’s message appealing. However, the potential of gender equality in Islam would become compromised by the rise of patriarchal societies.

By Muhammad’s death, in 632, Islam had brought about a fundamental transformation of Arab society, though it never fully erased the region’s old reverence for kinship.

Early Islam also attracted non-Arabs, outsiders with little standing in traditional Arab society. These included Salman the Persian, who traveled to the Arabian peninsula seeking religious truth, Suhayb the Greek, a trader, and an enslaved Ethiopian named Bilal.


All three would rise to prominence in Islam during Muhammad’s lifetime. Bilal’s much-improved fortunes, in particular, illustrate how the egalitarianism preached by Islam changed Arab society.

An enslaved servant of a Meccan aristocrat named Umayya, Bilal was persecuted by his owner for embracing the new faith. Umayya would place a rock on Bilal’s chest, trying to choke the air out of his body so that he would abandon Islam.

Moved by Bilal’s suffering, Muhammad’s friend and confidant Abu Bakr, who would go on to rule the Muslim community after the Prophet’s death, set him free.

Bilal was exceptionally close to Muhammad, too. In 622, the Prophet appointed him the first person to give the public call to prayer in recognition of his powerful, pleasing voice and personal piety. Bilal would later marry an Arab woman from a respectable tribe – unthinkable for an enslaved African in the pre-Islamic period.

For many modern Muslims, Bilal is the symbol of Islam’s egalitarian message, which in its ideal application recognizes no difference among humans on the basis of ethnicity or race but rather is more concerned with personal integrity. One of the United States’ leading Black Muslim newspaper, published between 1975 and 1981, was called The Bilalian News.

More recently Yasir Qadhi, dean of the Islamic Seminary of America, in Texas, invoked Islam’s egalitarian roots. In a June 5 public address, he said American Muslims, a population familiar with discrimination, “must fight racism, whether it is by education or by other means.”

Many Muslims in the U.S. are taking action, supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and protesting police brutality and systemic racism. Their actions reflect the revolutionary – and still unrealized – egalitarian message that Prophet Muhammad set down over 1,400 years ago as a cornerstone of the Muslim faith.

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Are you Crazy, Lazy and Impatient? Watch this - Mufti Menk

Sh. Ibrahim Hindy speaks about the London attack on CBC Radio's 'As it Happens'

 

Abdullah Ibn Masood (ra): A Mighty Legacy of Qur'an | The Firsts with Dr. Omar Suleiman

 

𝗦𝗜𝗚𝗡𝗦 𝗢𝗙 𝗪𝗘𝗔𝗞 𝗜𝗠𝗔𝗔𝗡 (𝗙𝗔𝗜𝗧𝗛)

1. Committing sins and not feeling any guilt.
2. Having a hard heart and no desire to read the Qur'an.
3. Feeling too lazy to do good deeds
(eg. being late for Salah)
4. Neglecting the sunnah.
5. missing attention during Salah is, you should read your Salah like it's your last Salah! in fact it could be your last Salah since nothing can guarantee you that you would live to read your next Salah.
6. Having mood swings, for instance being upset about petty things, bothered and irritated most of the time.
7. Not feeling anything when hearing verses from the Qur'an, for example when Allah warns us of punishments and His promise of glad tidings.
8. Finding difficulty in remembering Allah and making dhikr.
9. Not feeling bad when things are done against the deen and Shariah.
10. Desiring status and wealth.
11. Ordering others to do good deeds when not practicing them ourselves.
12. mocking on people who do simple good deeds, or those who are just striving to be better muslim by sharing or posting Islamic reminders.
Remember the Prophet (sallallahu wa sallam) said: “convey the deen to the people even if it were a single ayah” so share to help us keep the Muslim youth on the right path, In Shaa Allah.
May Allah Subhanahu wa-ta’ala enliven and enlighten our hearts towards the deen and grant us closeness to Him.
Allahumma Ameen 🤲🏻❤

Hamza Ibn Abdulmuttalib (ra): The Lion of Allah | The Firsts by Dr. Omar Suleiman

 

A Threshold Crossed Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution

 

 About 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the latter made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Throughout most of this area, Israel is the sole governing power; in the remainder, it exercises primary authority alongside limited Palestinian self-rule. Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

Several widely held assumptions, including that the occupation is temporary, that the “peace process” will soon bring an end to Israeli abuses, that Palestinians have meaningful control over their lives in the West Bank and Gaza, and that Israel is an egalitarian democracy inside its borders, have obscured the reality of Israel’s entrenched discriminatory rule over Palestinians. Israel has maintained military rule over some portion of the Palestinian population for all but six months of its 73-year history. It did so over the vast majority of Palestinians inside Israel from 1948 and until 1966. From 1967 until the present, it has militarily ruled over Palestinians in the OPT, excluding East Jerusalem. By contrast, it has since its founding governed all Jewish Israelis, including settlers in the OPT since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, under its more rights-respecting civil law.

For the past 54 years, Israeli authorities have facilitated the transfer of Jewish Israelis to the OPT and granted them a superior status under the law as compared to Palestinians living in the same territory when it comes to civil rights, access to land, and freedom to move, build, and confer residency rights to close relatives. While Palestinians have a limited degree of self-rule in parts of the OPT, Israel retains primary control over borders, airspace, the movement of people and goods, security, and the registry of the entire population, which in turn dictates such matters as legal status and eligibility to receive identity cards.

A number of Israeli officials have stated clearly their intent to maintain this control in perpetuity and backed it up through their actions, including continued settlement expansion over the course of the decades-long “peace process.” Unilateral annexation of additional parts of the West Bank, which the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to carry out, would formalize the reality of systematic Israeli domination and oppression that has long prevailed without changing the reality that the entire West Bank is occupied territory under the international law of occupation, including East Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally annexed in 1967.

International criminal law has developed two crimes against humanity for situations of systematic discrimination and repression: apartheid and persecution. Crimes against humanity stand among the most odious crimes in international law.

The international community has over the years detached the term apartheid from its original South African context, developed a universal legal prohibition against its practice, and recognized it as a crime against humanity with definitions provided in the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (“Apartheid Convention”) and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The crime against humanity of persecution, also set out in the Rome Statute, the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights on racial, ethnic, and other grounds, grew out of the post-World War II trials and constitutes one of the most serious international crimes, of the same gravity as apartheid.

The State of Palestine is a state party to both the Rome Statute and the Apartheid Convention. In February 2021, the ICC ruled that it has jurisdiction over serious international crimes committed in the entirety of the OPT, including East Jerusalem, which would include the crimes against humanity of apartheid or persecution committed in that territory. In March 2021, the ICC Office of Prosecutor announced the opening of a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine.

The term apartheid has increasingly been used in relation to Israel and the OPT, but usually in a descriptive or comparative, non-legal sense, and often to warn that the situation is heading in the wrong direction. In particular, Israeli, Palestinian, US, and European officials, prominent media commentators, and others have asserted that, if Israel’s policies and practices towards Palestinians continued along the same trajectory, the situation, at least in the West Bank, would become tantamount to apartheid.[1] Some have claimed that the current reality amounts to apartheid.[2] Few, however, have conducted a detailed legal analysis based on the international crimes of apartheid or persecution.[3]

In this report, Human Rights Watch examines the extent to which that threshold has already been crossed in certain of the areas where Israeli authorities exercise control.

Definitions of Apartheid and Persecution
The prohibition of institutionalized discrimination, especially on grounds of race or ethnicity, constitutes one of the fundamental elements of international law. Most states have agreed to treat the worst forms of such discrimination, that is, persecution and apartheid, as crimes against humanity, and have given the ICC the power to prosecute these crimes when national authorities are unable or unwilling to pursue them. Crimes against humanity consist of specific criminal acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack, or acts committed pursuant to a state or organizational policy, directed against a civilian population.

The Apartheid Convention defines the crime against humanity of apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” The Rome Statute of the ICC adopts a similar definition: “inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” The Rome Statute does not further define what constitutes an “institutionalized regime.”

The crime of apartheid under the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute consists of three primary elements: an intent to maintain a system of domination by one racial group over another; systematic oppression by one racial group over another; and one or more inhumane acts, as defined, carried out on a widespread or systematic basis pursuant to those policies.

Among the inhumane acts identified in either the Convention or the Rome Statute are “forcible transfer,” “expropriation of landed property,” “creation of separate reserves and ghettos,” and denial of the “the right to leave and to return to their country, [and] the right to a nationality.”

The Rome Statute identifies the crime against humanity of persecution as “the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity,” including on racial, national, or ethnic grounds. Customary international law identifies the crime of persecution as consisting of two primary elements: (1) severe abuses of fundamental rights committed on a widespread or systematic basis, and (2) with discriminatory intent.

Few courts have heard cases involving the crime of persecution and none the crime of apartheid, resulting in a lack of case law around the meanings of key terms in their definitions. As described in the report, international criminal courts have over the last two decades evaluated group identity based on the context and construction by local actors, as opposed to earlier approaches focused on hereditary physical traits. In international human rights law, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), race and racial discrimination have been broadly interpreted to include distinctions based on descent, and national or ethnic origin, among other categories.

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Hadith: Opression is a grave sin

 

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) quoted God as saying: “O My servants, I have forbidden oppression for Myself and have made it forbidden amongst you, so do not oppress one another.” 

Hadith Qudsi

The Prophet once prayed for pardon for his people and received the reply from God, "I have forgiven them all but acts of oppression, for I shall exact recompense for him who is wronged from his oppressor." 

Al-Tirmidhi

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