Karen Armstrong: The Prophet Muhammad's Compassion

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

Since moving to Ireland in late 2003, Dr Umar Al-Qadri has become a prominent figure in representing the Islamic voice in Ireland. Having received a traditional Islamic education in Pakistan, Al-Qadri went on to obtain a master’s degree in Islamic Sciences. Making frequent appearances in Irish publications like the Irish Times, he also lectures across the country in mosques, community centres and universities about Islam and the the challenges that Muslims face today.

For Al-Qadri, the integration of the Muslim community into wider Irish society is something of a priority. In Ireland, there are now an estimated 70,000 members of the Muslim community, and at home and abroad, Muslims are increasingly facing marginalisation, persecution and criticism. As the spotlight is placed on Muslims the world over, I sit down with Al-Qadri, the Head-Imam of Al-Mustafa Islamic Educational and Cultural Centre Ireland, in Trinity’s Science Gallery café to discuss our Muslim community here and the challenges they face.

Our Muslim community is not immune to the sensationalised and inaccurate representation the religion sometimes receives in the media across the world. Neither too do they avoid the fate of being too often rendered largely invisible within Irish society. Al-Qadri’s response to this is to stress the idea of people all living as one. He stands for equality and mutual respect between groups as something essential for modern nations, an ideology that informs many of his own actions.

Our interview begins with Al-Qadri tracing the origins of Ireland’s Islamic history to one man, Mir Aulad Ali Khan, one of Dublin’s first Muslims, as well as a scholar and professor of religious studies in Trinity in the 1860s. Al-Qadri describes him as very well integrated, and who at the same time maintained his own identity and wore his traditional Muslim clothing. It was only in the 1950s, however, that Muslim students began to come from South Africa to Ireland to study medicine. It was these students who formed the first Muslim community to establish themselves here. This tradition, continuing throughout the 1990s, allowed for a well-educated Muslim population to develop in Ireland. Since then, the numbers have grown from 33,000 in 2003 to upwards of 70,000 now, Al-Qadri tells me. The community has changed too. While it was previously based around the medical and scholarly professions, it now represents a diverse group of people from many walks of life, ranging from taxi drivers to IT professionals. Often, he adds, you cannot tell a Muslim apart from any other Irish person. They often do not have dark skin, while many choose not to wear traditional Muslim dress, he explains, gesturing down towards his sharply tailored suit. He humorously adds that perhaps only the beard would give it away.

Muslims, when they have friends that are consuming alcohol … 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’s early years were spent in the Netherlands, where the he remained until he’d completed secondary school. He highlights this time as a formative period in his own ideological development: “I wouldn’t be the same person I am if I didn’t grow up in the Netherlands … I think my ideas have been shaped by my experience growing up in the Netherlands as a second generation Muslim.” It was there he witnessed first-hand the challenges that many Muslims face across Europe. The years he spent here were during a period of Dutch history characterised by the dominance of right-wing conservatives, who were in finally in government after years of steadily increasing their vote in elections. The party, which he describes as “anti-Muslim and anti-Islam”, pushed Muslims to live in isolation and caused them to be segregated from the greater population. The reason that Al-Qadri believes that these problems arose is because the “Muslim communities that lived in the Netherlands somehow failed to reach out to the other and failed to integrate”. By this he means integration beyond purely language and dress, with the community perhaps not doing enough to counter those who sought to marginalise them.

Motivated by the desire to do something for his religion, Al-Qadri wanted to avoid making the same mistakes in the newly-diverse Ireland’s young Muslim community. In an earlier stage of development and with an educated and professional Muslim population, he perhaps thought he could help Irish Muslims and write a different narrative for the minority group. The way in which to achieve this, he believes, is by reaching out. This, after all, is the teaching of the Prophet Mohammed, he tells me, who “welcomed communities and opened the doors of the Mosque to others”. This is something that Al-Qadri firmly holds to be true.

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:

Transformed - Motivating Life Story Of Musab Ibn Umair

Romania, a beacon of coexistence for Muslims in Eastern Europe

The Grand Mosque of Constanta in southeast Romania has a hulking minaret nearly 50 metres high overlooking the Black Sea.

It was constructed as a symbol of gratitude to the city's Muslim community on the orders of King Carol I in 1910.

Much has since changed in Romania, but that sentiment remains.

Constanta lies in Dobruja, an ethnically diverse region split between Romania and Bulgaria, where the River Danube meets the sea.

Ottoman Turks invaded the region in the late 15th century and subsequently expanded further into Romania.

Several centuries of Turkish rule followed, bringing settlers from across the empire.

Northern Dobruja came under Romanian control only in 1878, after the young kingdom defeated the ailing Ottoman Empire with assistance from Russia.

Some of the region's Muslims left for Turkey, but others stayed on; their descendants now form the backbone of Romania's Muslim community of about 64,000 people, roughly 0.34 percent of the country's population.

Compared with other countries in Eastern Europe, Romanian Muslims say their experience has largely been one of peaceful coexistence.

"When Muslims here were still the majority in the 1870s, the Muslim mayor of the town of Medgidia appealed to the authorities in [Romania's capital] Bucharest for money to build a church for the local Christians," said Murat Iusuf, who has been Romania's Chief Mufti since 2005, speaking to Al Jazeera from his office in Constanta.

"Records of the meeting include transcripts of the mayor's broken Romanian. But a common language was found; it's a good example of Dobruja's history."

About 26,000 ethnic Turks, 20,000 ethnic Tatars, and an undetermined number of Muslim Roma - who generally declare as Turks in censuses - form the country's diverse Muslim community.

Turks and Tatars speak related Turkic languages and the two communities have a high rate of intermarriage.

However, some Tatars are trying, amicably, to assert their distinctiveness, highlighting their history as descendants of Tatars who fled the Crimean Peninsula after its annexation by Russia in 1783.

The Tatar Community Center in the suburbs of Constanta makes that point loud and clear; its walls are covered with Crimean Tatar flags and paintings of Khans who once ruled their ancestral homeland.

"In the last 10 years, people have become more curious about their history. Turks come from the southern shores of the Black Sea and Tatars from the North," said Dincer Geafer, chairman of the Ismail Gaspirali Tatar youth organisation and a local politician from the Tatar-Turkish Muslim Democratic Union.

This new awareness has surfaced politically; when Russia annexed Crimea again in 2014, local Tatars protested outside Russia's consulate.

Recent years have also seen the growth of a 10,000-strong Muslim community in Bucharest, comprising foreign citizens and converts.

They attend the Carol-Hunchiar Mosque on a leafy side-street in the capital, where 78-year-old Osman Aziz serves as the imam.

He remembers Romanian Islam under socialism.

From 1960 to 1962, Aziz was the imam at Ada Kaleh, an island fortress in the Danube populated by Turks, which remained Turkish territory well into the 20th century.

When the island was submerged after the construction of a dam in 1970, Aziz unsuccessfully campaigned to reconstruct the famous mosque.

For now, a more modest concrete one, under construction in the yard outside, will have to suffice.

"In any case, we managed to keep the faith alive," he said.

Although prayer was discouraged under communism, Romania's Muslims did not face the same level of repression as in other Eastern Bloc countries.

"Nicolae Ceausescu had good relations with several Muslim-majority states, from Iran to Lebanon and Libya; the mufti accompanied him when he visited them," said Iusuf, adding that students and workers from some of those "brotherly socialist states" eventually moved to Romania.

But Daniyar Cogahmet, an imam in the Dobromir area near the Bulgarian border, said many mosques were sparsely attended back then, especially by young people.

Muslims were free to practice their faith, he explained, but rural poverty saw many leave villages - a reality which affected Romanians of all backgrounds.

"Because of the common language, Turks and Tatars used to go to Turkey to do odd jobs," said Cogahmet.

By 2007, when Romania joined the European Union, that migration pattern had changed.

"Now everybody wants to go to Germany, and there are plenty of Turks there," said Cogahmet.

Constantin Voicu sits in his thriving vegetable garden in the village of Lespezi, Constanta, known in Turkish as Tekkekoy.

The 83-year-old told Al Jazeera how grateful his ancestors were to move here.

The poor Christian peasants from Transylvania had been given 10 hectares of fertile land after the annexation of the region.

It was a bid to resettle the land with loyal Christians, but any grudges are in the past.

"I'm no historian, just a simple man who knows things," said the pensioner, "but people know and like their [Muslim] neighbours and they don't believe everything they see on TV."

Romanian Muslims appear to have largely been spared the Islamophobic vitriol seen in neighbouring countries at the height of the refugee crisis in 2015.

But that year, while there were no rallies against refugees from Muslim-majority countries, protests did erupt over plans to construct a large Turkish-funded mosque in Bucharest, which was ultimately shelved in 2018.

"The presence of Muslims in Romania remains ... a marginal issue on the political and public agenda," concluded the authors of the 2017 European Islamophobia Report. "Much of society's anger in recent years has been directed towards corruption and the 'deep state' rather than poor migrants or Muslims," said Cristian Pirvulescu, a political scientist at the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration in Bucharest.

In 2017, Romania nearly got its first female Muslim prime minister when the Social Democratic Party nominated Sevil Shhaideh, a politician of Tatar descent who was serving as deputy prime minister at the time.

"You might find anti-Islamic discourse among some nationalist intellectuals, but if you stop ten ordinary people on the street here, you won't hear it," said journalist Vlad Stoiescu, who coordinates Sa Fie Lumina, an online magazine about religion in Romania.

"The Muslims in Dobruja are well integrated - Romanians are accustomed to their presence and so are they to the Romanians.

"When you visit those villages, take a look at the monuments to locals who in the First World War. Half the surnames on them are Turkish. They fought and died for this country."

Link

Debate: Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism

My story to Islam - Yusuf Chambers - Why I Converted to Islam?

Khutbah by Ustadh Nouman Ali Khan: Dua for the Ummah

Another very beautiful khutbah by Br. Nouman. The most important thing to highlight for the sermon is, “Posting a dua is not dua. A dua is a conversation with Allah, not with the internet. Not with people.”

You can check out our Dua (Supplications) page

In that, one of the most popular page are the Fortress of the Muslim section.

I GOT INTO MECCA!

Hearts and Minds

 From FB of Shakh Yasir Qadhi:

Once, the Caliph `Umar saw a group of people around a campfire in the middle of the desert. Instead of calling out to them with the phrase, 'O people of the fire!', he chose, 'O people around a light,' to make sure that a potentially negative phrase didn't affect them.

At another time, the grandsons of the Prophet (salla Allah alayhi wa sallam) saw an old man performing wudhu, but making many mistakes. Instead of berating him, they went up to him and said, 'The two of us are arguing which one has the better wudhu, and we'd like you to be the judge between us.' When he saw how perfect their wudhu was, he said, 'It is my wudhu that needs to be corrected, not yours.'

A famous preacher of the last generation - during a time when there was a raging debate regarding the theological verdict of the one who abandons the prayer, is he a Muslim or not - was asked, "What is your opinion about the one who abandons the salat?" The person that asked him was not a scholar, but rather someone who listened to debates and liked to revel in his self-taught knowledge. The Shaykh smiled and said, "My opinion is that we should hold on to the hand of the one who abandons the salat and encourage him to come to the masjid with us!"

A lot of times, its not the message itself, but how you present it, that moves hearts and changes minds. And not every single controversy needs to be laid out in front of every single person: speaking to your audience correctly is half of knowledge.

May Allah grant us the wisdom to preach in the wisest and best of manners!

Hadiith of the day

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: "After my time, governors will arise whose falsehood will be believed and who will be assisted in their oppression by those who enter their presence. They have nothing to do with me and I have nothing to do with them. . .But those who do not enter their presence, believe their falsehood and help them in their oppression, they belong to me and I belong to them." Al-Tirmidhi

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: "The people before you were destroyed because they inflicted legal punishments on the poor and forgave the rich." Sahih Al-Bukhari