Chris Hedges Speaks on Empire of Illusion July 20 in Berkeley: PLEASE FORWARD

Chris Hedges will discuss his major new book:

“Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle”

Monday, July 20, 7:30 pm

Berkeley Hillside Club

2286 Cedar Street

Berkeley, CA

Tickets: www.brownpapertickets.com/event/71755

phone order: 800-838.3006

Pegasus Solano, Pegasus Shattuck, Pendragon, Moe’s, Diesel, Walden Pond, Modern Times

$10 advance, $12 door, benefits KPFA Radio

Information: www.kpfa.org/events or 510.848.6767x609

Chris Hedges writes a weekly column for www.Truthdig.org that is published every Monday, for which the Los Angeles Press Club just honored him as Online Journalist of the Year and Best Online Column. He is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans, and has reported from more than 50 countries, while working for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, where he was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He currently writes for Harper’s, New York Review of Books, Granta, Mother Jones, and Foreign Affairs. The author of the best selling “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” - a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awardfor Nonfiction - Hedges received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He is the author of “American Fascists,” a book on the Christian right, and “I Don’t Believe in Atheists”. In 2007 he famously debated a sodden and belligerent Christopher Hitchens in Berkeley on “Is God Great?” (often viewed on YouTube)

“All periods of profound change occur in a crisis. It was a crisis that brought us the New Deal, now largely dismantled by the corporate state. It was also a crisis that gave the world Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic. We can go in either direction. Events move at the speed of light when societies and cultural assumptions break down. There are powerful forces, which have no commitment to the open society, ready to seize the moment to snuff out the last vestiges of democratic egalitarianism. Our bankrupt liberalism, which naively believes that Barack Obama is the antidote to our permanent war economy and Wall Street fraud, will either rise from its coma or be rolled over by an organized corporate elite and their right-wing lap dogs. The corporate domination of the airwaves, of most print publications and an increasing number of Internet sites means we will have to search, and search quickly, for alternative forms of communication to thwart the rise of totalitarian capitalism.” - Hedges on TruthDig

E-baad-e News

Chris Hedges quote

"The most insular communities, those whose lives intersect in worlds and subcultures that exclude outsiders, often seem to suffer the most crippling jealously and envy. The church and universities are notorious caldrons of intrigue and slander. Neglect breeds insecurity and fear of irrelevance. This fear does not tolerate dissenters within the ranks. There is, in such inbred communities, a need to be perceived as holding a pure, unchallenged orthodoxy. They constantly feel threatened with extinction. They need to hate. They must direct the venom felt toward an indifferent world onto the only people who would bother to listen or care, those who are like them."-pg. 146 of Losing Moses on the Freeway

E-baad-e News

Dr. Sulayman Nyang at MCA this weekend

Check out Dr. Sulayman Nyang's program at the MCA (Muslim Community Association) this coming weekend. There's the talk at the community night on Portrayals of Islam in the West and then a seminar on Sat beginning at 10:30 AM on Samplings of History - lessons from the spread of Islam in Spain, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and America.

MCA Community Night: Portrayals of Islam in the West

Friday, July 17th

Dinner served at 7:30pm, Lecture begins 8:45pm
Middle Eastern Cuisine will be served
$6 per person, $25 per family

About the Speaker

Dr. Sulayman S. Nyang is professor and chairman of the African Studies Department at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He served as a former deputy ambassador and head of chancery of the Gambia Embassy in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He has written extensively on Islamic, African and Middle Eastern affairs. He holds a master’s degree in public administration and a Ph.D. in government from the University of Virginia.

(from the MCA group on facebook)

E-baad-e News

Creativity and The Creator: Keeping It Real While Keeping The Spirit with Shaykh Abdullah Ali

With the recent passing of pop icon Michael Jackson, issues related to Islam, entertainment and pop culture are once again a hot topic that many are heatedly blogging about and debating. Recent documentary films such as "New Muslim Cool" and "Deen Tight" have given audiences nationwide an honest and eye-opening window into the world of Muslim hip-hop artists in particular. This timely workshop with Ustadh Abdullah is intended to bring empowering understanding and balance to the often controversial subject of entertainment, culture and creativity in the Islamic worldview.

Date:	Sunday, August 2, 2009
Time:	2:00pm - 6:00pm
Location:	Ta'leef Collective
Street:	43170 Osgood Road
City/Town:	Fremont, CA

Session I: Scholarly Consensus in the Purview of Culture (Ijma' wa 'Urf)
Session II: Islam & Popular Culture (Entertainment & Art)
Session III: Q&A

Taught by Shaykh Abdullah bin Hamid Ali

At the age of 17, Abdullah bin Hamid Ali, begun a serious study of Islam and the Arabic language. A native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania born to Muslim parents, he took advantage of many of the local scholars and teachers, including Dr. Khalid Blankinship, Hafiz Anwar Muhaimin, Ustadh Anas Muhaimin, their father―Imam Nafea Muhaimin, Imam Aberra―a native of Eritrea who studied Islam and Arabic in Egypt, and others. Abdullah has served as resident scholar for Zaytuna Institute (http://www.zaytuna.org) since 2007. Prior to moving to California from Philadelphia he served for five years as the fulltime Assistant Head Chaplain for the State Correctional Facility of Chester, Pennsylvania. In 2001, he became the first and only Westerner to attend and graduate from the University of al-Qarawiyyin’s Faculty of Shariah located in Fes, Morocco, having acquired a four-year collegiate license (al-ijazah al-‘ulya) to teach the Islamic sciences. Prior to studying under the tutelage of a number of Morocco’s prestigious scholars, he acquired fluency in the Arabic language having spent close to seven years in the US studying with some of America’s most influential academics and leaders in Philadelphia and surrounding cities. Before traveling to Morocco to pursue higher studies in Islam, he attended Temple University for two years majoring in Computer Science, while concurrently attending graduate level lectures on Islam with Dr. Khalid Blankinship. He has worked as an Islamic school teacher, a barber, a painter, and was as an active member of the hip hop generation being at one time a breakdancer and a rap artist who produced a single in 1986 and an LP in 1990 with a local Philadelphia group, Rock Hard Delegation. Abdullah has authored over 40 scholarly articles, authored and translated four published works: Muslim Funeral Guide (Lamppost Productions); Explanation of Murshid Al-Mu'een: Ibn Ashir Recited: Part 1 (Lamppost Productions); The Attributes of God (Amal Press); and A Return to Purity in Creed (Lamppost Productions). His work can be found at:http://www.lamppostproductions.com

Order tickets via Eventbrite:
http://zkrtaleef-fbevent.eventbrite.com

Payment (CASH ONLY) can be made at the door, online ticket purchases are preferred.

(from the facebook event page)

E-baad-e News

Fadak Bookstore is Moving

Fadak Books, perhaps the best Arabic Islamic bookstore in the United States that I know of (and to be honest I don't know of too many) is moving from Milipitas, CA to Indianapolis in about 7-8 days!

You can still order from the website and the brother who owns the store can process and ship those books out before he loads them up into a moving truck.

E-baad-e News