Why is there no sectarian divide in the transgender community?

Importance of Tolerance - Mufti Menk

How Muslims should respond to Charlie Hebdo/Caricatures/Propaganda

Distinguished New York City imam preaches tolerance, unity

Religion has a galvanizing force that can catalyze both prejudice and social change. Geneseo highlights this power with the annual MacVittie Theology Lecture: “Racialized Religion.” 

Executive Director of the New York University Islamic Center and Chaplain for the New York Police Department Khalid Latif spoke on Tuesday Nov. 14 for the Robert MacVittie lecture series. 

“The reality that numerous minority populations in this country face … are things that we have to be acutely aware of,” Latif said. “Foundationally, in my opinion, we can understand the country to be rooted in anti-blackness.”

Latif clarified the insidious ways that prejudice can even affect people like him, despite his privileged position as a leader in the New York City Muslim community. 

“I’ve shared stages with the Dalai Lama, been interviewed by Stephen Colbert and Katie Couric, been on the cover of Newsweek,” Latif said. “I’ve still had the FBI up in my house … despite all that though, I can’t tell you what it’s like to be black in America.”

Latif further wove his own experiences, his theology and the perspectives of others into a series of interconnected stories. One of the main memories focused on the different ways people treated him and other Muslims who lived in New York City during and after the World Trade Center attack on Sept. 11, 2001. 

As a Muslim student at NYU on 9/11, Latif was often shoved into the spotlight as people profiled and either verbally or physically attacked people they thought looked Muslim. Following 9/11, Latif experienced Islamophobia in the form of questioning at the ninth anniversary 9/11 ninth anniversary ceremony. 

“I was at the ceremony in my police uniform—an Inspector’s uniform—talking and mingling, but I still had my beard and my head cover,” Latif said. “Three men approached me wearing suits and said that Secret Service had spotted me from the top of a building and wanted to check my credentials ‘just in case.’” 

Latif urged the audience to use the tenets of love and religiosity when approaching injustice in the United States and the world.  Latif—who recently accompanied international aid organizations on a relief trip for Rohingya Muslims refugees in Bangladesh—emphasized the apparent Western disregard toward the ongoing genocide in Myanmar of Rohingya Muslims.

Above all, Latif implored the audience to really listen and try to understand other people, especially those who are unlike themselves. The only way to approach the crises and injustices that pervade the country and the world today is through a real love and devotion for other people, according to Latif.

“You are at a university—a space that embraces and appreciates dialogue and diversity,” Latif said. “You can sit down and become informed and then you think of yourselves as potential partners.”

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https://www.thelamron.com/posts/2017/11/16/distinguished-new-york-city-imam-preaches-tolerance-unity

Can we stop pretending there’s just one kind of Muslim?

In your heart, it’s fine if you are praying they find guidance to a more pious path if that’s what you believe, but do not impose your practice on them. Let them meet and be among other Muslims. Invite them to your homes. Sometimes these people are strangers, but sometimes they will be your children, your cousins, your best friends. But it doesn’t matter because they are your sisters and brothers in Islam and they deserve to feel like a part of the Muslim family.

We should not be perpetuating a culture of such intolerance that children feel like they need to live double lives. When they are comfortable asking questions and talking to their parents and community about faith and when they know that despite mistakes and rebellion they are still loved, they are more likely not to resent this faith and culture. They will be more likely to find spirituality. 

I also want to take a moment to point out that this spectrum of faith is not a circumstance of being Muslim in the West. It happens everywhere. It is not a consequence of being young. Muslims of all ages have different perspectives. Muslims at any age in any country engage in all types of activity and I know this for a fact. Maybe people are sneakier or less public about their personal lives in stricter cultures, but I promise that it doesn’t matter where you are, Muslims are not uniform in any society.

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A 1400 YEAR-OLD RELIGION AND ITS 21ST-CENTURY REPRESENTATIVE

Love this brother. He is an inspiration alhamdulilah.

He believes that Muslims often isolate themselves in an effort to protect their faith and identity, something that is, in fact, damaging for the community. “We are living in a society where people do accept and tolerate other views. We should reach out and not be afraid”, he urges his fellow Muslims. His recent invitation to members of the LGBT community to the mosque’s end of Ramadan meal in June reflected this sentiment of inclusion. “As Muslims we must reach out to others’’, he says, “we must not treat people differently because of their lifestyle or beliefs”. Although such an expression of kindness and support appears radical in relation to the more stereotypical image the religion being strongly doctrinal, Al-Qadri cites the teachings of Islam as the foundation for his argument, where you must treat people as human beings first – something which he says has been lost among many Muslims.

Nonetheless his actions were still somewhat radical, and he came under criticism from the group that he represents for reaching out in this way. Some felt that this gesture was akin to him condoning homosexuality, but in the face of the controversy, he stands by his actions. “Inviting them does not mean that we condone or that we agree with [homosexuality]”, he explains. “It means that despite our disagreement we can still share a meal together”. Although he does not condone the act, he believes that the LGBT community, like Muslims, share similarities. The two minority groups have both been marginalised and should join together against a common injustice. He gives a practical example to support his decision to invite LGBT members to the event, which he hopes that Muslims will be able to appreciate, drawing a comparison between the two Islamic sins of drinking alcohol and homosexuality: “Muslims, when they have friends that are consuming alcohol, they would be okay with it, they will sit down together, they will interact together, but they won’t drink themselves and they will not treat the person that drinks alcohol differently. But they will treat someone who is gay differently, and that is something that is not understandable”. Al-Qadri emphasises that the teachings of Islam are to treat people as humans first, and the success of the meal, which had over over 20 LGBT members alongside some Muslims all enjoying themselves together, stands as testament to that.

Full article.

15 things I learnt about Islam and British values being a gay boy living opposite a mosque.

 

 

Loved this :)

1. 1. No mosque has enough parking and muslim men love to complain about it. I don’t care how young or trendy they are, within seconds they will be pointing at bits of pavement muttering about the number of cars you could fit in there — like my Granddad from Manchester does at Sainsbury’s
2. 2. You can do that look British people do to each other, when someone near by is making a scene, in a full face veil.
3. 3. Muslims pray a lot.
4. 4. You will be happy they pray a lot when you get stabbed on your door step and are too scared to go outside. So you time your trips to the shops to coincide with these prays as the streets are full of friendly people.
5. 5. Muslims, like all British people have that one problematic uncle that kinda ruins family occasions.
6. 6. When confronted with something out of their comfort zone, like me and my boyfriend in full drag dancing down the road, muslims like all British people get flustered and over compensate with being overly polite — a bit like Hugh Grant.
7. 7. When finding out you have been dating your boyfriend for 5 years your muslim neighbours will be disgusted that you haven’t proposed. You hear “get a civil partnership — for your mothers sake” a lot.
8. 8. Apparently there is usually half a cup of tea next to the pray matt when praying at home — especially for morning prayers.
9. 9. Like in the rest of Britain all muslim fathers think their daughter is smarter than everyone, even though she is only 6 years old…
10. 10.…and that their son is a heartbreaker even though its clear to everyone else that he spends all his time on his Xbox.
11. 11. Young muslim women are really, really, really ambitious.
12. 12. British people’s dry sarcasm works really well when confronting the times the more traditional parts of islam come face to face with modern gay culture. For example when I donated 3 sequined crop tops to the islamic relief Syria clothing drive, one of the older guys their smirked, shaking my hand and saying “our brothers and sisters in Syria thank you for the evening wear.”
13. 13. There is always an Aunt who gets too involved in the wedding planning and annoys the bride.
14. 14. During ramadan and eid there will be so many people on the streets going to mosque that the drugs dealers will have to move to other places — making your area really safe for a while.
15. 15. Mothers will say anything to stop their kids nagging them. I once saw a Muslim mother tell her kid that wanted some fried chicken, after Friday night prayers, that the shop wasn’t halal even though there was a 5ft sq neon halal sign in the window. Reminds me of when my mum told me that the chip shop was closed for a private event as she wanted some peace.

The media stories about islam meant that I was genuinely a little nervous about moving in across the road to a mosque. What I have learnt in the four years since I moved is that the ridiculousness of British culture is universal. We all love tea, are really polite and tut rather than saying something, no matter our religion.

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Muntada "Tolerance and Compassion in Islam" | Khalid Latif | August 2012

When Islam was at its strongest, it was also at its most open-minded.

                      

Ours is the oldest religion in the world,” said the Mandaean high priest to me in 2006, when we met during my diplomatic posting to Baghdad. He did indeed turn out to be the religious leader of an ancient people whose traditions go back to third-century Babylonia; he was also, for me, the man who opened a door to an Aladdin’s Cave of forgotten faiths.

Since then, I have witnessed on a mountaintop in the West Bank a sacrifice of lambs, done by Samaritan priests in precise observance of the Book of Exodus. I discussed Greek philosophy with Druze elders, who regard themselves as a branch of Islam but believe in reincarnation. I searched for the Zoroastrians of Iran, whose founder Zarathustra was among the first to teach (perhaps three millennia ago) that our fate after death might result from the good or evil that we do in our lifetimes. I encountered the Church of the East, which sent the first Christian missionaries to China in the seventh century and once, from its base in Iraq, covered a larger span of the earth than the Pope in Rome or the Patriarch in Constantinople.

These religions have survived fourteen centuries of Islamic rule, and their survival shows not only their own tenacity but also the potential for tolerance within Islam. Now, though, they are vanishing faster than ever before.

The brutal terrorist group called the “Islamic State,” which the U.S. and its allies are now fighting in Iraq, burst onto the front pages in August with a massacre of a little-known people called the Yazidis. The Yazidis are an extraordinary people, who have preserved traditions dating back to the time of ancient Assyria and mixed them with ideas that emerged from the most radical and imaginative of Muslim thinkers. They have faced, by their own tradition, 72 persecutions. That number does not include the Islamic State’s campaign of rape and murder or, in 2007, the world’s second worst terrorist attack, which killed nearly eight hundred Yazidis at Qahtaniyah near Mosul.

When I went back to see the Yazidis in northern Iraq in August, it was like an immersion in a sea of misery. Stranded in tents and dependent on charity, Yazidi refugees saw no future for themselves in Iraq and asked only for asylum in the West. They want to join the 70% of Iraq’s Christians who have already left. As for the Mandaeans, almost all have now sought refuge in Europe, Canada and Australia.

Nor is it only war-ravaged Iraq from which the minorities are fleeing. I could hardly find Zoroastrians in the great cities of Iran, such as Shiraz and Esfahan; instead, I found their fire-temple in north London. I discovered that tens of thousands of Coptic Christians, who keep the language of ancient Egypt alive in their liturgies, now live in the suburbs of Detroit along with more than 100,000 Iraqi Christians.

What amazed me, though, about these religions was that they had survived into the modern era at all. Imagine discovering some island off the coast of Ireland where the Druids still held sway: meeting the Mandaean high priest in Baghdad was similarly a throwback to the distant past. How can a religion conceived in the era of paganism still exist today, after 1400 years of Islam? The answers teach lessons about Islam — and about ourselves.

First, they show the importance of religion. A warped form of religion is what motivated the Islamic State to slaughter the Yazidis. It is also however what helped the Yazidis to survive over the centuries and keep their traditions and their identity. Religion can be a great source of division, but that is intimately linked to its power to gather people and unify them.

Second, when minorities leave, countries are diminished. Islam was the religion of a great world empire, so prestigious that “Islamic State” wants to steal its name: the Caliphate. Islamic State’s brutal and narrow-minded imitation is quite different from the original. The first Caliphs had Christians among their closest counselors; later Caliphs used Jewish astronomers and pagan mathematicians to turn Baghdad into a center of world learning.

When Islam was at its strongest, it was also at its most open-minded. The West’s diversity and its prosperity have similarly gone hand in hand. It is a poor outlook for the Middle East if loses its ancient minorities.

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