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

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.

“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.

Prince Bandar with Margaret Thatcher

Trespassing on Peaceful Sands — Marryam Haleem

Spring 1981
Bobby Sands on hunger strike in prison, dying
Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher in Saudi Arabia, visiting

Addressing the Saudi government
Who hosted her

He lay there on his side
Paled, eyes glazed, and weakened,
Battered, bereft, belied.
And you sit in the company of his killer.

In the very land where he was born –
The mantled one, opposer of the oppressors–
You honor and uphold that lady of scorn.
And the boy lay dying in dignity.

Read the rest of the poem.

Bobby Sands Street -- Tehran, Iran

You can read a piece here on how the Street became named Bobby Sands Street here. It ran in front of the British Embassy and was previously known as Winston Churchill St. I’ve got issues with both Shi’i theology and left wing ideology, but …..
that’s a beautiful thing.

“You cannot live a political life, you can’t live a moral life if you’re not willing to open your eyes and see the world more clearly, see some of the injustice that’s going on, try to make yourself aware of what’s happening in the world. And when you are aware you have a responsibility to act, and when you act you have a responsibility to doubt, and when you doubt you can’t get paralyzed. You have to use that doubt to act again and that then becomes the cycle. You open your eyes, you act, you doubt, you act, you doubt. Without doubt you become dogmatic and shrill and stupid, but without action you become cynical and passive and a victim of history and that should never happen.”

Note:  Mr. Ayers makes this statement at the end of this interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air.

Is this consistent with the (an) Islamic view of activism? Anyone? Any other thoughts?
Personally, I can admit that I’ve been in a rut for a little while where I am a bit paralyzed by my doubts about what is exactly the right thing to be doing so I’m retreating a bit into study and family…may Allaah (swt) guide all us to do what is right.

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.

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.”

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: