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The easy, and obvious, answer to the question of can you be critical of Israel without being anti-Semitic is, “Of course.” But the waters are not easy to keep pure, and all too often legitimate criticism of Israel is mixed with anti-Semitic sentiments.
In my mosque, we don’t have a single imam, but rather the sermon is delivered by different people from week to week. I don’t go to the imam of the week and ask, “Are you Arab or Indian? Syrian or Lebanese? African American or Somali? Did your parents hail from Karachi, Kabul, or Kerala?”
Public schools should not teach religion, but they should teach about it. They should not be in the business of inculcating children with religious creeds, tenets, beliefs, or values. But they should inform their students about religions and cultures that they are likely to encounter in their daily lives.
Of course the earth isn’t going to last forever. Scientists currently estimate we’ve got about 5 billion years (give or take a couple billion) until the Sun wipes out our planet.
The American media is falling down on the job when it comes to reporting on Muslim communities both here in North America or world wide.
With the forum discussing what it means to apologize and to ask for forgiveness, I thought it would be timely to look at what the Qur'an and the Prophet have to say about God's response to our repentance.
The question of whether the doctor's obligations outweigh his/her morality or religious faith would seem to pit the freedom of conscience of the doctor against the freedom of conscience of the patient. Particularly in the case of end of life decisions, it raises the question of whose conscience should win out if the doctor and patient disagree about the morality of a particular course of action.
Christopher Hitchens, in the style of many pundits these days, elucidates only partial truth. Religion can indeed be, "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children." It does not, however, have to be.
Naturally, parents are responsible for their children's health and medical care. However, in cases where parents cannot, or will not, provide for their children, then the community has the responsibility to step in.
The choice to have children engenders the responsibility to take adequate care of them. But we have to acknowledge that there are parents who can not do so, whether because of poverty, illness, disability, death, etc. Even worse, there are parents who will not, again for a multitude of reasons including alcoholism or other addictions, religious convictions, or sheer negligence.
In the weeks before the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj), which is coming up the end of next month, Muslims who are planning to make the journey will visit friends, family, neighbors and acquaintances to ask forgiveness for any wrongs they may have done to them. This simple request for forgiveness has always touched me as a great act of humility and a beautiful expression of a core Islamic value. That of humility.
The Qur'an is quite clear that engaging in consensual sexual relations outside of marriage is a grave sin. That, however, does not mean that what two people do in privacy is a criminal act, as we see in certain Muslim countries, nor is it a matter for public gossip. And the Prophet was quite clear that there is no sin so grave that it is unforgivable, with the sole exception of idolatry.
With public officials and people in positions of authority, however, there is always concern about coercion. Complicating the matter, is the fact that public officials are role models for the public -- while we can accept that they, like us, are flawed human beings with weaknesses and short comings, we would hope that they live lives worthy of emulation.
The Qur'an describes Satan's fatal flaw as that of pride. "I am better than him!" Satan cries when God would have him bow down before Adam. Satan's pride, and his hurt ego, lead him to defy God, and to a host of other sins, including a couple of the deadly ones...envy and anger. Today too, it seems there is a plethora of ills arising from the same sin.
What Islam Really Says About Violence, Rights and Other Religions
Gomaa, Fadlallah, Mubarak, Khan, Siddiqi, Ellison, others | On Faith
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