Wednesday, August 16, 2023
Tuesday, August 15, 2023
Thursday, August 10, 2023
Monday, August 7, 2023
NYT: Tish Harrison Warren: "Why We Need to Start Talking About God," (Aug. 22, 2021)
Karl Barth, a 20th-century Swiss theologian, is credited with saying that Christians must live our lives with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Barth, who was a leader of a group of Christians in Germany resisting Hitler, understood that faith is not a pious, protective bubble shielding us from the urgent needs of the world. It is the very impetus that leads us into active engagement with society. People of faith must immerse ourselves in messy questions of how to live faithfully in a particular moment with particular headlines calling for particular attention and particular responses.
[...] As a pastor, I see again and again that in defining moments of people’s lives — the birth of children, struggles in marriage, deep loss and disappointment, moral crossroads, facing death — they talk about God and the spiritual life. In these most tender moments, even those who aren’t sure what exactly they believe cannot avoid big questions of meaning: who we are, what we are here for, why we believe what we believe, why beauty and horror exist.
These questions bubble up in all of us, often unbidden. Even when we hum through a mundane week — not consciously thinking about God or life’s meaning or death — we are still motivated in our depths by ultimate questions and assumptions about what’s right and wrong, what’s true or false and what makes for a good life. [...]
It won’t look the same every week: Though the Bible may remain the same, the newspaper changes each day. And different events and seasons in our lives and in society throw us back on old questions about truth, beauty and goodness in new ways. In a cultural moment when faith is often used as a bludgeon for our political and ideological enemies, we need space to talk about belief and practice with nuance, curiosity and reflection.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/22/opinion/faith-spirituality.html
NYT: Tish Harrison Warren: "My Hope for American Discourse," (Aug. 6, 2023)
The “outsides” of holy things, to me, describes the difference between speaking about divine or sacred things and encountering the divine or the sacred directly. To be sure, we need more and better religious discourse in America. In my very first newsletter for The Times, I wrote that “we need to start talking about God,” and I still believe that. I believe that religion and, more broadly, the biggest questions in life are the driving forces behind much that is beautiful, divisive, unifying, controversial and perplexing about our culture and society.
Yet there is danger in becoming a pundit, particularly on matters of faith and spirituality. It can be deadening. I plan to continue to write about faith, to explore its impact on politics, study it sociologically, think about its metaphors and claims of truth. But for any person of faith, public engagement must be balanced with times of withdrawal, of silence, prayer, questioning and wonder beyond the reach of words. Otherwise, faith with all its strange and startling topology becomes a flat and sterile thing, something to be dissected, instead of embraced. And typically once something is fit only for dissection, it is dead. I bring this up because it is a temptation for all of us now. Social media and digital technology have made us all pundits. We are faced with a constant choice: Every experience, belief, feeling and thought we have can be shared publicly or not. In a single day, we can take in more information and ideas than was ever possible, yet at the end of the day we can still lack wisdom.
Constant connectivity empties us out, as individuals and as a society, making us shallower thinkers and more impatient with others. When it comes to faith, it can yield a habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things, fostering an avoidance of those internal parts of life that are most difficult, things like prayer, uncertainty, humility and the nakedness of who we most truly are amid this confusing, heartbreaking and incandescently beautiful world.
Public debate and dialogue are the crux of our democracy and an important way to seek truth. It is good to speak up and be heard — and I’m very grateful that I’ve been able to do so as a writer. [...]
We become like Linus in the old “Peanuts” cartoons who famously said: “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.” True community, however, is made of real people with names, of friends with true faults, of congregations with faces, of the local, the small. Don’t get me wrong: Global and national news is important and I will continue to read news and opinion pieces nearly every day. But for me, as for most of us, the places we meet God — the places we become human — are not primarily in abstract debates about culture wars or the role of religion in society, but in worship on a Sunday morning or in dropping off soup for a grieving friend, in a vulnerable conversation or in making breakfast at the homeless shelter down the street, in celebration with a neighbor or in the drowsy prayers uttered while rocking a feverish toddler in the middle of the night.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/06/opinion/saying-goodbye-social-media-prayer.html
Thursday, August 3, 2023
(Dr. Hamza el-Bekri Şerhu'l Akaid 1. Dersi) شرح العقائد الدرس ١
Wednesday, August 2, 2023
Thursday, June 29, 2023
NYT: Affirmative Action Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and U.N.C. (6/29/23)
"In disavowing race as a factor in achieving educational diversity, the court all but ensured that the student population at the campuses of elite institutions will become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino."
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/29/us/affirmative-action-supreme-court
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
Jill Lepore's This America (2019)
Just completed reading this little book called This America which I enjoyed for its erudition, snapshots of significant events, thinkers/writers, and lively writing style. I would like to further investigate explorations of liberalism. I'm particularly interested in the ability of contemporary believers, especially Muslims, and their ability to practice their faith commitments and flourish in a US context, but also elsewhere in Europe or Muslim-majority countries.
The book is based on her previously published articles linked here:
Abraham/Ibrahim
Abraham/Ibrahim is mentioned nearly seventy times throughout the text of the Qur'an, and only Moses's/Musa's name appears more frequently in the book. [...] A title the Qur'an uses for Abraham/Ibrahim that is also shared by both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is "friend of God" [khalil Allah] (Q4:125; cf. Isa. 41:8; Jas 2:23).
The Qur'an presents Abraham/Ibrahim as a true believer who, even though he predated the Prophet Muhammad by centuries, is the prototype for all Muslims to follow because he lived his life in complete submission to God's will.
His exemplary character is summed up in this verse, which explains both what Abraham/Ibrahim was and what he was not. "Abraham was not a Jew or a Christian, but he was an upright person [hanifan] who submitted [musliman] and was not one of those who associate [mushrikin]" (Q3:67).
Because he lived long before both Judaism and Christianity, he should not be identified with either of those religions. He was also not someone who committed the sin of shirk, or association, by violating the unity of God and associating something or someone in creation with the uncreated diety.
Abraham/Ibrahim is described in this verse as a hanif, which is translated as "upright person," and is often understood to be someone who practices monotheism. The word hanif appears twelve times in the Qur'an with eight of them referring to Abraham/Ibrahim, who is the only person identified this way by name in the text. [...]
The important role that Abraham/Ibrahim plays as a model believer can be seen in another way in Q3:67. The Arabic word that is translated here as "who submitted" is "muslim," a term that describes a person who engages in the act of submission that gives the religion of Islam its name. The verse reflects the belief that, long before the coming of Muhammad, prophets like Abraham/Ibrahim and their followers were living lives of submission to God's will. This is why Muhammad is repeatedly told in the Qur'an that he should follow the "religion of Abraham/Ibrahim" -- his task was not to found a new faith, but to call people back to the way that God had intended for humanity from the beginning. "Then We revealed to you (Muhammad) to folllow the religion of Abraham, who was an upright person and was not one of those who associate (Q16:123; cf. Q2:135; Q3:95; Q6:161; Q22:78).
[...] Abraham/Ibrahim was not guilty of shirk (association) because he practiced shukr (thankfulness).
"Truly, there is a good example for you in Abraham" (Q60:4).
--John Kaltner & Younus Y. Mirza, The Bible and the Qur'an: Biblical Figures in the Islamic Tradition (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 10-15.
Sunday, June 11, 2023
Thursday, June 8, 2023
NYT Opinion: Molly Worthen: "Why Universities Should Be More Like Monasteries" (May 25, 2023)
Dr. Worthen is a historian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who writes frequently about higher education.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/opinion/college-students-monks-mental-health-smart-phones.html
Mark Van Doren on the magic of teaching; the "secret" between teachers and students
If I speak of the students last it is not merely because they were the crucial persons with whom I spent my time, as must be true in any college; it is also because no way exists of describing what really goes on in a classroom once the door is closed. What goes on is a kind of secret between him who stands and those who sit. I knew this from the first; it was my secret even more than it was theirs. They had their own responses which I could hear or see them make: they raised their hands, they talked, they shook their heads, they laughed, they looked bored; and special approval or disapproval they expressed -- the custom is now obsolete -- by stamping or shuffling their feet on the floor. But even then I could believe that if anything of true moment was happening in their minds there was no immediate way for them to show it, any more than I could show, except by talking in the maturest way I could, and following any new idea as far as it would take me, how much our conversations interested me and how much I learned from them.
Mark Van Doren, My Columbia: Reminiscences of University Life, ed. Ashbel Green (New York: Columbia University, 2005), 110.
Sunday, June 4, 2023
NYT Opinion "When X = Literacy" Jan. 6, 1993
Malcolm X taught himself to read and write in prison, the hard way. He copied the dictionary, page by page, struggling to pronounce the words and to commit the definitions to memory.
In his autobiography he writes: ". . . as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. . . . I never had been so truly free in my life."
New worlds continued to open, but none would have if Malcolm hadn't first transformed himself this way. This crucial point has been missed in the recent reappraisals of the Malcolm X legacy.
Malcolm X's newly acquired reading skills allowed him to transform himself from hustler to disciple of the Black Muslim separatist, Elijah Muhammad. Eventually the disciple saw through Black Muslim racism and embraced a more inclusive humanism. The metamorphosis had yet to be completed when Malcolm was murdered in 1965.
In the wake of the movie "Malcolm X," newspapers and journals have carried reassessments and speculations about what he would be doing if he were alive today. Black conservatives, focusing on Malcolm's insistence on black self-sufficiency, call him the founder of their movement. But black liberals say Malcolm's nationalism would have kept him forever apart from those conservatives who doubt the need for civil rights laws.
It's striking that this debate ignores the central transformation of Malcolm's life. In prison he came to see illiteracy as a second, inner jail that could confine him forever. His autobiography is most moving when it shows him breaching those walls and making contact with the world of ideas. This example remains crucial because African-Americans still suffer alarming illiteracy rates.
What would Malcolm X be doing if he were alive? Politics, perhaps. But surely he would be among the fiercest literacy advocates that the nation has ever known.
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 6, 1993, Section A, Page 20 of the National edition with the headline: When X = Literacy.
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/06/opinion/when-x-literacy.html
Imam Malcolm on Reading
“I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there, in prison, that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My home made education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Saturday, June 3, 2023
Successful Ministry
“Do you know what successful ministry is?” he asked. “When you change and touch the lives of people, when you make a difference in their lives, when you give them hope, when you help them go back to school and get an education. That’s successful ministry. But even seminarians I teach are looking at ministry like it’s a “be like Mike” basketball role model they are pursuing. Instead of important and life-changing questions being addressed, the questions one hears are: How many members do we have? How many CDs and DVDs have we produced? How much money do we make? That’s not a successful ministry. Too many seminary students aren’t interested in making things better. They’re interested in becoming like T.D. Jakes, in building a megachurch. They’re not interested in being in the hood, with those who have lost hope.”
https://ebaadenews.blogspot.com/2011/09/chris-hedges-rev-jeremiah-wright.html
Preface and Chapter 1 to Mark Van Doren's On Liberal Education
From the Preface to the Beacon Press Edition:
"The conviction underlying this book is that as many persons as possible should do the thinking. Too few now recognize their responsibility. The age of science is an age of experts. It is also, judging by what most people say about themselves, an age of ignorance."
"Liberal education can never be quite perfect, since it is ideal but at any given time it is good in proportion to the clarity with which it is conceived and the effort which that clarity inspires. One unmistakable sign that it is good is that opinion flourishes and argument goes on: argument, that is to say about the greatest things, the difficult, the all but insoluble things that haunt us every morning as we wake. An unmistakable sign of its lapse would be a general disposition to leave things to those who are understood as specializing in them. The best time for a free society is the time when everybody believes it makes a difference what he thinks and knows; and the accent should be at last on knows. The only insurance against disaster is knowledge, widely diffused."
"The surest proof that any mind is free is its faith in itself when faced with hard questions. It may not be sure that it can solve them, but it does not doubt its capacity to make the attempt."
"The most it [liberal education] claims is that it prepares the intellect to search for it and to recognize it when or if it is available."
"Liberal education, by introducing him to precision on many fronts, can make him at home with the intellect at its happiest, even though most of its masters are dead. To him they will not be dead; and to that extent his own life increases, for he knows how to think of every great mind as his contemporary. He is prepared then to add to the whole glory if he can. But he is only prepared. The fruits of a liberal education are still to come. Yet they will not come unless the preparation is precise."
[Chapter 1: Nobody Thinks He is Educated]
"The true enemy is within us and will eat on there until our hollowness of heart and head can by some miracle be cured. Not a day passes but education is told that it fights from the last ditch." (4)
"The world is in such a sore state that education would be its nurse if it could. It too knows pity; it is by ancient tradition one of the healing arts. Yet it can be pardoned for responding with bewilderment to the demand that it medicine at once a sick society. Its supreme artist, Socrates, called himself a midwife; but he ministered to one man at a time." (4)
"All educators are well-intentioned, but few of them reflect upon their intentions." (5)
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
Monday, May 22, 2023
Thursday, May 18, 2023
Daniel Walden: The Voice of Tradition and the Unheard Present (May 27, 2021)
Review of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, by Carl R. Trueman (Crossway, 2020)
https://christiansocialism.com/carl-trueman-rise-of-the-modern-self-review/ via ARM
Saturday, April 15, 2023
Wednesday, April 12, 2023
Abdal Hakim Murad: "A warning we should heed" (The Guardian, 10-12-2009)
O you who believe! Let not your wealth nor your children distract you from remembrance of Allah. Those who do so, they are the losers. (63:9)
This verse in the Qur'an is an invitation for humanity to make a relatively small effort in this world, in return for the eternal reward of the hereafter. It is a call to save ourselves from becoming fixated on our wealth and on providing our children with the latest gadget and games, which ultimately are mere distractions from our remembrance of the creator.
But humans are short-termist; we think primarily of our pleasures now rather than the harmony and serenity of the world to come. Chapter 102 of the Qur'an says that we are distracted by competing in worldly increase, until we finally end up in our graves where we will be questioned about our excesses.
Does this mean that it is wrong to own things? Of course not, as money and offspring can be positive things in the life of a believer, and we do of course have basic needs which need to be met. But we must remember that the pleasures of consumption are quickly gone, while lasting benefit comes only from using our wealth to uphold the rights of others; namely the orphan, the traveller, and the needy. Wealth is thus truly ours only once it has been given away.
Those who are genuinely distracted by worldly increase, and who make it an end in and of itself rather than as a means towards something better are in effect guilty of a form of idolatry. Ours is an age that has made idols of the great banks and finance houses, driven to frenzy by competition amongst billionaires who are kept awake at night by the thought that a rival might make a business deal more quickly than them. A banker who can asset strip companies and throw its employees out onto the street is someone who is in the grip of an obsession that has thrown him beyond of the normal frontiers of humanity.
Neo-classical economics has traditionally focused on four things: land, labour, capital and money, the first three of which are finite, while the fourth, money, is theoretically infinite, and is therefore where human greed has been particularly focussed. Thus arose a system where someone could, with approval, set up a bank with only £1, and then lend £100 using property and other assets promised by others as security.
The lender now has £100 including interest, which they earned by just sitting there and doing nothing. On the basis of this £100, they can then lend £1000, and on and on, until the cancerous growth lubricated by greed becomes so huge that it leads to a fundamental breakdown in the system. Such a system based on usury, with interest as the bizarre "price of money" which itself becomes a commodity, was once prohibited by all faiths. People had a simple and natural intuition that the commoditisation of a measurement of value would open the door to trading in unreal assets, and ultimately to a model of finance that would destroy natural restraints and even, potentially, the planet.
In the classical Islamic system, by contrast, money is the substance of either gold or silver. With a tangible and finite asset being the only measure of value, there is a great deal more certainty about the value of assets and the price of money. This basic wisdom was though not just a theoretical ideal; it succeeded. Muslim society at its height was mercantile, and it was successful. Never was money assigned its own value and never was it seen as an end in and of itself.
Since the abolition of the gold standard however, theoretical limits on the price of money were removed. Last year's meltdown, whose final consequences were unguessable, was a sign of the inbuilt dangers of a usurious world. Humans are naturally short-termist but in times of crisis we must take stock. As with the related environmental crisis, now is the time to be smarter and more self-restrained. The believer is in any case allergic to the mad amassing of wealth, since he or she expects true happiness and peace only in the remembering of God and in the next world.
Now is the time to think seriously about finding an economic system to replace the one whose dangers have just been revealed. Upon the conquest of Mecca, a verse of the Qur'an was revealed commanding people to give up what remained of their interest-based transactions, upon which a new system based on the value of gold and silver was initiated.
Those who relied so heavily on the old system would of course have been unable to understand a system without banking charges, but not only was such a system created but a successful civilisation was created using these ideas.
Last year we peered into the abyss; now we must apply self-restraint and wisdom, before complete catastrophe ensues.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/oct/12/islam-economics-religion
Saturday, April 8, 2023
Saturday, March 25, 2023
Shaykh Zaid Shakir 2/23/23: Imam Khalil Abdur-Rahman
BY IMAM ZAID SHAKIR
February 22, 2023 at 10:58 pm
So many blessed people have been passing away. May Allah have mercy on Imam Khalil. He attended a seminar I taught a few months ago and I was blown away by his humility and encouragement even as he was an intimate part of the history I was teaching. He has been working for the Deen for longer than I have been alive. May Allah accept him amongst the shuhadaa and reward him for his service.
إِنَّا لِلّهِ وَإِنَّـا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعونَ
To Allah we belong and unto Allah we all return.
Imam Khalil Abdur-Rahman has passed on as a result of cardiac arrest. Imam Khalil was the epitome of the activist Muslim. He came into Islam in his twenties and was an active member of the Darul Islam movement and Al Ummah. He also was the national spokesman for Imam Jamil Al-Amin, and a former manager of groundbreaking spoken words artists, The Last Poets.
Imam Khalil was a quiet warrior who never allowed his angst towards the oppressive forces in this country lead him to oppress anyone. He worked tirelessly on the case of his imprisoned Imam, Jamil al-Amin. When Imam Jamil was being held in a hi-tech cave in Florence, Colorado, Imam Khalil would travel monthly from his home in Greensboro, NC to aid and support him.
It wasn’t just the well-known and influential who were the beneficiaries of Imam Khalil’s attention. He was also a champion of the little guy. When a close relative of mine moved to North Carolina, Imam Khalil helped set him up with a job as a bus driver. That relative was unable to take the job because he could not pass the eye examination, but Imam Khalil spared no effort to assist him. This is just a small illustration of the efforts Imam Khalil would exert for anyone seeking his assistance.
Why do ninety-nine percent of those reading this not know his name? I would say for the same reason the noted scholar, American University professor Akbar Ahmad, could travel the length of this country doing an expose on Islam in America and not visit a single African American-led masjid. Many do not care to know. Now that you do know of the Imam, please remember him in your prayers.”
https://newislamicdirections.com/new_nid/note/imam_khalil_abdur_rahman
Sunday, February 26, 2023
Saturday, February 25, 2023
Friday, February 24, 2023
Thursday, February 23, 2023
Tuesday, February 21, 2023
Monday, February 20, 2023
Thursday, February 16, 2023
Powers Street Mosque in Williamsburg Brooklyn NYC
https://www.moslemmosqueinc.org/in-the-press
https://www.baltictimes.com/how_america___s_oldest_mosque_was_built_by_muslims_from_the_baltic/
https://islamicana.com/2013/03/13/new-yorks-first-mosque/
https://islamicana.com/2014/07/02/new-yorks-first-mosque-1-revisited/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_Street_Mosque
https://greenpointers.com/2019/01/18/north-brooklyn-is-home-to-one-of-americas-oldest-mosque/
https://bedfordandbowery.com/2018/12/americas-oldest-surviving-mosque-is-in-williamsburg/
https://noveltytheater.net/buildings/powers-street-m-e-church
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1182031/art-culture
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/08/04/dodds.mosques.new.york/index.html