Free Gaza Now/Saor Gaza Anois

AlMaghrib Ilminar/Online Fundraiser for Gaza

Gaza/Rebel Song of the Day

I’ve provided some links at other places to important articles about Gaza that I recommend.  If people aren’t already, I recommend keeping up to date with news and analysis by reading MuslimMatters, Muddled Thoughts, Electronic Intifada, and Angry Arab.

I’m not recommending listening to music…but Irish American Muslim Hip Hop Artist Everlast has a nice video out for his song “Stone in My Hand” which includes the lyrics:

You build your fighter jets

You drop your bombs

You kill our fathers

You kill our moms

Kill our brothers and our sisters and our uncles and our aunts

And STILL I’m fighting with the stone that’s in my hand

…………

Blood runs the gutters

Smoke fills the sky

Every son that suffers

Every mother cries

So if you had enough and ready for your stand

I’ll be waiting with the stone that’s in my hand

Stone in my hand, Stone in my hand

All the love that’s in my heart and the stone that’s in my hand

Please Support IMAN

Muslim scholar Dr. Umar Abd Allah encourages everyone to support IMAN (the Inner City Muslim Action Network) a non profit organization with which I have been blessed to be associated since its founding.

You can learn more about IMAN and donate here.

Thought for the Day from Yahya Michot

“It is in fact revelation itself that makes Islam a religion of liberation for mankind, freeing God’s servants from all forms of sacerdotalism, ecclesialism, caesaro-papism, Ma ‘munism, esotericism, or neo-Mu’tazilism.”

From “Revelation” by Yahya Michot in The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology, edited by Tim Winter.

Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Islam?

I have a post over at Talk Islam in which I attempt to open up a discussion regarding continuing responses of various Muslims to modernity and our current situation and whether these can be analogized to Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative Judaism.

I should emphasize that of course I am in no way trying to call for or encourage division nor even labelling amongst Muslims, but attempting to understand different intellectual reactions to our situation through broad categories in an academic way.

My kids make their debut on this blog

These are three of my children last summer at the Printer’s Row BookFair with Brother and Sister Bear of Berenstain Bears’ Fame.

When I was just learning to read, my favorite book to read with my mom was the Berenstain Bears Classic “Old Hat, New Hat.”

Politicians as Saints or Messiahs

There’s been a lot of joking during this campaign about how the masses of people starved for change have been treating Obama as a “messiah” figure.

Two voices have recently emerged trying to share a different perspective.  First,  from the Weekly Standard, David Gerlenter tells us that John McCain is a tzaddik.  Then, in an equally bizarre if somewhat more self consciously ironic ranting, someone named Nibras Kazimi compares John McCain to the Prophet Muhammad’s son in law Al-Husayn, revered by all Muslims but especially venerated amongst the Shi’a.

Anyways, I would say especially to Mr. Gerlenter the following:

Rebel Nasheed of the Day : Ghurabaa

Thought for the Day from Emma Goldman