Shaykh Tahir al-Qadri’s Phd: PUNISHMENTS IN ISLAM THEIR CLASSIFICATION & PHILOSOPHY

PUNISHMENTS IN ISLAM THEIR CLASSIFICATION & PHILOSOPHY

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SeekersGuidance: Growing & Needs You

Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah, SeekersGuidance needs your assistance. If you can help, email outreach@SeekersGuidance.com. Alhamdulillah, SeekersGuidance (www.SeekersGuidance.com) has been growing rapidly, and we’re adding to our lineup of teachers, courses, and programs–both online and on the ground. SeekersGuidance is continuously growing its team of volunteers in order to keep pace with its goal of offering affordable and relevant classes. Currently, we are looking for help in the following areas: Legal Affairs Graphic Design Technology Management Administrative Support Programming (PHP and HTML) Finance Management & Accounting Fundraising Website Management Project Management Marketing Writing Promotional Marketing Program Management If you are interested in helping us out, please write to outreach@SeekersGuidance.com with the following information: Position that you are interested in volunteering for, Number of hours you can realistically commit on a weekly basis and Your skills in the areas in which you are interested in providing assistance or a recent resume May Allah help us benefit others by making the sacred knowledge accessible to those who seek it, in the spirit of of the words of the Prophet (may Allah’s blessings and peace be upon him). Wasalaam, SeekersGuidance Human Resources Faraz Rabbani

Islamic Guide to Sexual Relations (Mufti Muhammad Ibn Adam Al-Kawthari)

Islamic Guide to Sexual Relations (Muhammad Ibn Adam Al-Kawthari)

An original work written by the esteemed scholar Mufti Muhammad ibn Adam al-Kawthari and published by Huma Press, Islamic Guide to Sexual Relations is a serious endeavour to tackle these sensitive matters in a clear and meticulous manner. While being respectful and dignified in the language he employs, the author does not shy away from discussing sensitive issues. He records, in thorough detail, the guidance Islam provides regarding sexual encounters with one’s spouse. The book covers a wide range of issues, and thus, answers many frequently asked questions on the topic of sexual intimacy. It concludes with a short chapter addressing Islamic etiquettes and practises pertaining to newlyweds on their first night.

“I have found this work to be beneficial and highly informative, and strongly recommend the study of this book to all prospective couples, and indeed, to all couples.”

(Mufti Zubair Bayat, Director; Darul Ihsan Centre, Durban, South Africa)

“I highly recommend this excellent, thorough book by Mufti Muhammad ibn Adam on an important and sensitive topic that many-if not most-Muslim couples are woefully unaware of.”

(Shaykh Faraz Rabbani, Seekers Guidance, www.seekersguidance.com)

“This guide essentially aimed at Muslims reveals a surprisingly liberal view on sexuality considering many of the rules and etiquettes for matrimonial relationship were established 1400 years ago. Modern psychosexual medicine has been a relatively young member of the field of medicine and echoes much of the Islamic view contained in this book. Muslims will no doubt be surprised by some of the legal rulings regarding intimate relationships between the married couple which has in essence removed many cultural concretions that have distorted concepts. This is a thorough and essential guide for scholars, doctors and other practitioners of psychosexual health care as well as couples and answers thoroughly many scenarios pertinent to conjugal relations in the modern day.”

(Khalid Ghufoor, Consultant Surgeon & Dr Zahid Ghufoor, General Practitioner)

Imam Zaid Shakir - Journey to Timbuktu (in 8 Parts)

New Islamic Directions - Imam Zaid Shakir

For the last several yeas I have had the great honor and pleasure of assisting Islamic Relief on a variety of fundraising projects. Those efforts assisted Muslims challenged by various disasters and calamities in places ranging from Darfur to Muzzafabad, Pakistan, to Gaza. For the past two years, I had been discussing a trip with Islamic Relief to Africa with Naeem Muhammad, one of Islamic Relief’s key operatives in the United States, but probably more famously known as a member of the Muslim musical group, Native Deen. That was after I had learned of the work Islamic Relief was doing in that vast continent. What had impressed me most about that work was its proactive nature. As opposed to responding to a crisis, Islamic Relief was working to help people develop the infrastructure to help themselves. This involved digging wells for clean drinking water, irrigation and sanitation, building schools, clinics and other vitally needed services.

Click here to read part one
Click here to read part two
Click here to read part three
Click here to read part four
Click here to read part five
Click here to read part six
Click here to read part seven
Click here to read part eight

The Prophet - A Tremendous Blessing - Faraz Rabbani on SeekersGuidance Islamic Knowledge Podcast

SeekersGuidance Islamic Knowledge Podcast

In His Book, Allah Most High describes the Prophet, may Allah grant him eternal peace, as a person of tremendous character. In this khutba, Shaykh Faraz Rabbani explains what a tremendous blessing the Prophet is, and provides practical advice on how to establish a living connection with Allah’s Final Messenger.

Direct download: The_Prophet_-_A_Tremendous_Blessing.mp3

To Subscribe to the SeekersGuidance Islamic Knowledge Podcast through iTunes, click here.

Help Imam Siraj!: Nasihah: An Online Fundraiser for Imam Siraj Wahhaj - with Imam Zaid Shakir, Imam Suhaib Webb, and Faraz Rabbani

Help Imam Siraj!: Nasihah: An Online Fundraiser for Imam Siraj Wahhaj

Register at www.HelpImamSiraj.com

Imam Suhaib Webb
Imam Zaid Shakir
Faraz Rabbani

Friday, April 25th, 2009, 7:00pm EST
Come join us with Muslims all throughout the globe to help raise funds for our beloved Imam Siraj Wahhaj.

Faraz Rabbani
SeekersGuidance (www.SeekersGuidance.com)

Ethiopia’s famine: deny and delay | open Democracy News Analysis

Ethiopia’s famine: deny and delay | open Democracy News Analysis

Millions of Ethiopians once again face misery and famine. Addis Ababa’s desire to project an image of a new dynamic country has led to callous denial of the reality

Pupils to study Twitter and blogs in primary shake-up in the UK - Guardian Education Education | The Guardian

Pupils to study Twitter and blogs in primary shake-up -The Guardian

Children will no longer have to study the Victorians or the second world war under proposals to overhaul the primary school curriculum, the Guardian has learned.

However, the draft plans will require children to master Twitter and Wikipedia and give teachers far more freedom to decide what youngsters should be concentrating on in classes.

The proposed curriculum, which would mark the biggest change to primary schooling in a decade, strips away hundreds of specifications about the scientific, geographical and historical knowledge pupils must accumulate before they are 11 to allow schools greater flexibility in what they teach.

It emphasises traditional areas of learning - including phonics, the chronology of history and mental arithmetic - but includes more modern media and web-based skills as well as a greater focus on environmental education.

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What did you learn? - Deep Words from Shaykh Hamza Karamali - SunniPath Blog

SunniPath Blog - » What did you learn?

This is an excellent article by Shaykh Hamza Karamali, of SunniPath Academy, one of the truly brilliant scholars of our Umma (may Allah preserve him and all true inheritors of the way of our beloved Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him)).

Well worth reading and reflecting deeply upon.

http://blog.sunnipath.com/2009/03/21/what-did-you-learn/

Faraz Rabbani
SeekersGuidance (www.SeekersGuidance.com)

Michael Pollan’s 7 Rules for Eating

Michael Pollan’s 7 Rules for Eating

We Americans suffer a national eating disorder: our unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.

That’s the diagnosis delivered by food author Michael Pollan in a lecture given last week to an overflow crowd of CDC scientists.

As part of an effort to bring new ideas to the national debate on food issues, the CDC invited Pollan — a harsh critic of U.S. food policies — to address CDC researchers and to meet with leaders of the federal agency.

“The French paradox is that they have better heart health than we do despite being a cheese-eating, wine-swilling, fois-gras-gobbling people,” Pollan said. “The American paradox is we are a people who worry unreasonably about dietary health yet have the worst diet in the world.”

In various parts of the world, Pollan noted, necessity has forced human beings to adapt to all kinds of diets.

“The Masai subsist on cattle blood and meat and milk and little else. Native Americans subsist on beans and maize. And the Inuit in Greenland subsist on whale blubber and a little bit of lichen,” he said. “The irony is, the one diet we have invented for ourselves — the Western diet — is the one that makes us sick.”

Snowballing rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease in the U.S. can be traced to our unhealthy diet. So how do we change?

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A Religious War in Israel’s Army - NYTimes.com

A Religious War in Israel’s Army - NYTimes.com

The publication late last week of eyewitness accounts by Israeli soldiers alleging acute mistreatment of Palestinian civilians in the recent Gaza fighting highlights a debate here about the rules of war. But it also exposes something else: the clash between secular liberals and religious nationalists for control over the army and society.

Zionism is the problem - Los Angeles Times - Ben Ehrenreich

It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with “the concept of a racial state — the Hitlerian concept.” For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American Judaism.

Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious attempt to “push the hand of God”; and Marxist Jews — my grandparents among them — tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential struggle between classes.

To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated, slaughtered. Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone else’s. If they offered us anything exceptional, it was a perspective on oppression and an obligation born of the prophetic tradition: to act on behalf of the oppressed and to cry out at the oppressor.

For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel’s actions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.

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Ali Eteraz: Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad has a positive message for young British Muslims | guardian.co.uk

Ali Eteraz: Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad has a positive message for young British Muslims | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The founder of the Cambridge Muslim College looks likely to create a positive, British culture among young followers of Islam

A Troublesome History?: The Pope’s Past with the Right Wing

A Troublesome History?: The Pope’s Past with the Right Wing - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Pope Benedict XVI admitted that he made mistakes in his handling of the far-right Society of St. Pius X and the Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson. But the pope has a history of being used by the extreme right.

Rise of the sharia-compliant hotel? - Economist.com

Rise of the sharia-compliant hotel? | Gulliver | Economist.com

FIRST there was sharia-compliant banking. Now, apparently, demand for sharia-compliant hotels is the next big thing. According to an article in Emirates Business 24/7, Muslim business travellers are now demanding hotels that are fully sharia-compliant:

Islam in Prisons - Reflections from Within

My Cuban Colleague « Saeed Wooten

Vatican offers Islamic finance system to Western Banks - World Bulletin

World Bulletin [ Vatican offers Islamic finance system to Western Banks ]

The Vatican offered Islamic finance principles to Western banks as a solution for worldwide economic crisis.

Daily Vatican newspaper, ‘L’Osservatore Romano, reported that Islamic banking system may help to overcome global crisis, Turkish media reported.
The Vatican said banks should look at the ethical rules of Islamic finance to restore confidence amongst their clients at a time of global economic crisis.

‘The ethical principles on which Islamic finance is based may bring banks closer to their clients and to the true spirit which should mark every financial service,’ the Vatican’s official newspaper Osservatore Romano said in an article in its latest issue late yesterday.

Author Loretta Napoleoni and Abaxbank Spa fixed income strategist, Claudia Segre, say in the article that ‘Western banks could use tools such as the Islamic bonds, known as sukuk, as collateral’. Sukuk may be used to fund the ”car industry or the next Olympic Games in London,’ they said.

They also said that profit share, gained from sukuk, may be an alternative to the interest. They underlined that sukuk system could help automotive sector and support investments in infrastructure area.

Islamic sukuk system is similar to bonos of capitalist system. But in sukuk, money is invested concrete projects and profit share is distributed to clients instead of interest earned.

Pope Benedict XVI in an Oct. 7 speech reflected on crashing financial markets saying that ‘money vanishes, it is nothing’ and concluded that ‘the only solid reality is the word of God.’ The Vatican has been paying attention to the global financial meltdown and ran articles in its official newspaper that criticize the free-market model for having ‘grown too much and badly in the past two decades.’

The Osservatore’s editor, Giovanni Maria Vian, said that ‘the great religions have always had a common attention to the human dimension of the economy,’ Corriere della Sera reported today.

Rehman Baba’s Mausoleum in Peshawar Blown Up : ALL THINGS PAKISTAN

Rehman Baba’s Mausoleum in Peshawar Blown Up : ALL THINGS PAKISTAN

Khudaya dasey tanha na kei souk pe gham kei,
laka ze da yaar pe gham kei yum tanha!
Na ba ma ghundei shaheed wi pe jahan kei,
ne ba ta ghundei dilbar shi bal paida!

Lord, do not make anyone lonely in sorrow
like I am alone in grief for my beloved!
Never will there be on earth a martyr like me,
Nor a beloved like you be found!

Enemies of Pakistan are at it again. After blowing up girls schools in North West Pakistan, forcing traffic to drive on right hand side instead of left in Malakand, digging up the grave of a minority sect leader and hanging the already dead person in the public square in Swat, militants have now started blowing the resting place of those who are already dead….

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Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad: Islam, Gender, Marriage & Sexuality

cambridge khutbas etc.: Islam, Gender, Marriage & Sexuality: “Talk by Sheikh Abdal Hakim Murad - Rhodes House, Oxford - 9 February 2009 - 1 hr 00 mins 04 secs

In another talk for OUISOC’s Experience Islam Term, Sheikh Abdal Hakim offers some further thoughts on gender in Islam (which dovetail quite nicely with previous talks posted here and here). He begins, with characteristic catholicity, by discussing the career of Valentine de Sainte Point, an early French feminist and Futurist who in later life rejected what she perceived as the dehumanising trajectory of Western culture and converted to Islam, in which she found a more integrated and integrative understanding of human nature.

From that, the sheikh moves on discuss some aspects of the Islamic understanding of gender and sexuality, and how in this respect, as in others, the message of the Qu’ran and the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) acted as a rectification to misinterpretations of previous revelation; in this case, the rejection and excoriation of human sexuality often manifested by Christianity. The Prophet, by contrast, as ‘mankind perfected’, embraced this aspect of his humanity as he did every other, according to the Divine Guidance. His role as exemplar was thereby extended to women partly through his marriages, which provided multiple models of exemplary female behaviour. The sheikh finishes by discussing this in relation to the Prophet’s wives (may God be pleased with them) and Qur’anic examples of ideal women.

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