Jamada al-Thani 24, 1425/ August 11, 2004 #80
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LOCAL NEWS
Jamaat al-Muslimeen's
National Shoora will meet in Atlanta on August 21, inshallah
Former Black Panther calls for march for reparations [to compensate for
400 years of slavery] on August 28. [See message below.]
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WAR NEWS
SIX DAYS OF RESISTANCE in NAJAF,
Iraq:
MOQTEDA Al-SADR Defiant: DECISIVE DAYS for FUTURE of SHI'ISM
from our Iraq observer
For six days,
U.S.
forces backed by renegade Shias supporting U.S. -installed "Prime Minister"
Allavi, have been fighting the emerging leader of Shi'ism, the youthful
Sayyid Moqteda al-Sadr. His lightly armed militia are trying to fight
the U.S. in face to face fighting and suffering heavy losses, both in
Najaf and in Sadr City, Baghdad.
[British forces in BASRA have also been facing resistance and lost one
killed, five wounded.]
The U.S. is using tanks, helicopter gunships and air strikes in Najaf, the
holiest city of Shi'ism. U.S. air bombardment of a Shi'ite graveyard in
Najaf is also reported. The U.S. is awaiting a signal from Allawi to attack
the mosque of Imam Ali.
END OF
IRAN'S
CREDIBILITY AMONG SHI'AS?
With Najaf under attack, and turmoil in Karbala, Basra and Sadr City,
the silence of Iran is intriguing for observers. It appears that Iranian
nationalism has outweighed Islamic considerations in the post-Khomeini Iran.
The Iranian strategies coincide so accurately with U.S. strategies that Iran
continues to play the waiting game.
Earlier in the war, under British occupation of Basra, a
Qur'an
written by Imam Ali himself was set on fire, with deafening silence from
Iran.
Iran is already discredited in most of the Muslim world owing to its
support for
Russia
over
Chechnia,
its extreme hostility to the Taliban, it's neutrality over the
Jihad
in
Kashmir,
its support of the sanctions on Iraq for 12 years, and it's constant
propaganda about
Palestine
without any weapons for the Palestinians.
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AFGHANISTAN
In a Taliban attack in the Ghazni area, six U.S. troops and their
interpreter were killed, according to
Pakistani
newspapers. The U.S.
media
say two U.S. troops and the interpreter were killed.
Pakistani reports says the Taliban now control four districts of Oruzgan
province even during the day. Vast areas of southern and southeastern
Afghanistan are under Taliban control at night, [not during the day owing
to control of the air by the U.S.]
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On his arrival at the
Arab
Foreign Minister's conference in Cairo, the Sudanese foreign minister told
reporters that
ISRAEL
is involved in the rebellion in Darfur. The rebels are using heavy weapons
against poorly armed Sudanese troops.
As
New Trend
noticed, as if at a signal, the
Zionist
propaganda machine AROUND THE WORLD went into high gear to claim that
"genocide" had taken place in Darfur! The
Washington Post
was the most shameless of all, claiming in a front page story that
'mass rape' had taken place in Darfur, ABSOLUTELY without evidence.
[BY CONTRAST, the Zionist
media
ignore atrocities against Muslims on a daily basis in Palestine and Kashmir.]
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Anniversary of Abu Bakr Siddiq, r.a., Greatest Muslim Male
after Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), Father of
'Ayesha Siddiqa, r.a., greatest Muslim Woman.
First Rightly Guided Caliph, Referred to in the Qur’an as
"Second of Two"
by
Kaukab Siddique
"If ye help not (the Prophet), (It is no matter): For Allah did indeed help
him, when the unbelievers drove him out:
being the second of two. They two were in the cave, and he said to his
companion, "Have no fear, for ALLAH is WITH US": Then Allah sent down His
peace upon him, and strengthened him with forces which ye saw not, and
humbled to the depths the word of the unbelievers. And the Word of Allah
is exalted to the heights: For Allah is Exalted in might, Wise."
[The Qur’an 9:40]
Abu Bakr, r.a., died on Jamada al-Thani 22, in the year 13 of the Islamic
calendar. He was the First Rightly guided Caliph and ruled over the
original Islamic community, the pure model of
Islam,
for two years, six months and 10 days.
The verse of the Qur’an quoted above [9:40], refers to one of the most
poignant moments in Islamic history when Muhammad (p) and Abu Bakr (r.a.)
were hiding in a cave, during their escape from
Makka,
on the way to
Madinah.
The oppressors pursued them and were about to discover them in the cave.
Muhammad’s (p) words, Allah is with ‘us,’ sealed this holy companionship
for ever.
There are numerous
Hadith
about Abu Bakr, r.a., because he was with Muhammad (pbuh) in the Prophet’s
ENTIRE struggle to create the original Islamic community. Here are a few
narrations from TAQBAT al-KUBRA, a high quality book of Hadith which is
composed of biographical texts, and a few summaries from other books of
Hadith:
"Abi Arvi al-Dausi (and numerous others) narrate that the FIRST PERSON TO
EMBRACE ISLAM from the Prophet, p, was Abu Bakr Siddiq, r.a."
"Ibrahim narrates that the first to establish salat [formal prayer] with
the Prophet, p, was Abu Bakr Siddiq, r.a."
When Abu Bakr embraced Islam, he had 40,000 dirhams, When he migrated to
Madinah with the Prophet, p, he had 5000 dirhams. When he died as Caliph,
he had NONE. He had given ALL he had to the Way of Allah. [Allama Iqbal,
the Poet of the East has written a beautiful couplet about the "giving all"
quality of Abu Bakr, r.a.]
[There are narrations about how Abu Bakr, r.a., used his wealth to free
slaves, the most famous of whom was BILAL (r.a.) and who in turn became
one of the greatest Muslims.]
When the Prophet, pbuh, was dying, he commanded Abu Bakr, r.a., to lead the
Islamic community in prayer, thus pointing out his successor.
The Prophet, pbuh, prayed BEHIND Abu Bakr, r.a., in his final illness.
Hence the community was sure that Abu Bakr, r.a., would be their leader
after the Prophet, pbuh.
In his life style, he left examples of honesty, simplicity, humility and
equal treatment of people which are impossible to find anywhere else in
human history, other than in the examples of Muhammad, p, ‘Umar ibn
al-Khattab, r.a., and Ayesha Siddiqa, r.a.
Abu Bakr, r.a., was with the Prophet, pbuh, in Jihad, and when the Prophet,
p, passed away, the first concern of Abu Bakr, r.a., was to send out the
Islamic army led by a very young man named Osama, r.a.
Ali, r.a., was asked about Abu Bakr, r.a., and ‘Umar, r.a., and this is
what he said: "Both were Imams of right guidance: They found the Way, they
were pioneers forward, they were ones who always set things right, and they
were successful. They left the world in a condition that their stomachs were
never full."
Abu Bakr's, r.a., daughter from his first marriage, Asma, r.a., also a
great Muslim woman, is famous for bringing food for the Prophet, p, and
her father, when they were fleeing from Makka. Owing to the emergency
situation, they had left with nothing. There was no utensil in which to
store the food. So Asma, r.a. tore up her dress to tie the food in. [Later
in life, she is famous for urging her son Abdullah ibn Zubair, r.a., to
resist the Ummayad tyranny.].
There was a dynamic daughter-father relationship between ‘Ayesha, r.a., and
Abu Bakr, r.a. When he was dying, she expressed her sorrow in poetry and he
answered her in poetry.
His body was washed and prepared for burial by his wife ‘Asma, r.a., the
daughter of ‘Umais. [This too was a great mujahid woman about whom a
separate book could be written.].
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MARCH FOR REPARATIONS: RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, Aug.28
[From famous former Black Panther leader,
Jihad Abdul-Mumit.]
As-salaamu 'alaykum!
Dear Sisters and Brothers,
Insha Allah, there will be a March for Reparations in Richmond, Va. on
Saturday, 8/28/04 from 12 Noon to 3:00pm. Please do all you can to attend
and participate. We are in need of speakers to do 5 minute relevant
presentations at the rally to take place at the State Capital. If you are
willing and able to address this topic, please contact me (Jihad Abdulmumit)
at 804-270-4478.
Also, [please forward this Email to everyone you can and distribute amongst
the people this invitation. We need numbers to legitimize our point here in
Richmond. Insha Allah, if the March is successful, then after the city
elections we will use the March as a precedent and request that the City
adopt and pass a Resolution in support of Reparations. This Resolution
will in turn be used to support the Nation effort for Reparations.
There will be Marches throughout the South during the Month of August.
Thank you for your support!!!!!!!
Sincerely,
Jihad Abdulmumit
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TERRORIST OR VICTIM? The Case of British Muslim Babar Ahmad
Famous British journalist Yvonne Ridley looks at a case which has been
uncritically publicized in the U.S.
media.
Earlier this month in London Babar Ahmad was arrested by Anti-Terrorist
police acting upon an extradition request from the US.
According to a 250-page document, American intelligence says he planned
attacks and laundered money for terrorist activities.
However, there are many who believe that Babar is being persecuted and has
been singled out because of his voluntary work setting up a pressure group
called Stop Police Terror.
The highly successful pressure group urges all British people to resist
being bullied by George W
Bush
and Tony Blair and fight injustice on behalf of Muslims in the UK.
The high-profile case of the brother, formerly referred to as Suspect A,
who was arrested as part of December raids in London, will continue to
inspire the pressure group.
Therefore it comes as no surprise that the British establishment are
seeking to remove this thorn in their side. His arrest comes at a time
while investigations as part of the official complaint he lodged are
still pending in this case which had attracted much media attention and
aroused deep anger in the community.
It is rather convenient that the British establishment are now seeking to
eliminate the very individual who has exposed and widely publicised the
extent of police brutality and the arbitrariness of their arrests.
Br. Ahmad is a law-abiding, upright British citizen, born and educated in
South London, Described as an 'intelligent, articulate graduate with a
lovely family', he is a well-known, highly beneficial member of the
community, who has contributed particularly to the preservation of the
Muslim youth and ensuring they are occupied with Islamic activities.
Is he really a dangerous terrorist, a key Al-Qaida planner of operations as
they would have us believe, or simply a political pawn? Where is the
much-lauded British justice? Why must we bend at Bush's every beck and call?
Was it not sufficient that the Anti-Terrorist officers burst into his home
and brutally beat Babar Ahmad, inflicting more than 50 potentially
life-threatening injuries in December 2003?
Shocking pictures of his injuries were shown to Muslims in Florida earlier
this year who attended a special video presentation given by UK sister
Yvonne Ridley on the
War on Terror.
If there had been a shred of incriminating evidence it would have been found
in the forensic searches of his property, in the intricate scans of his
computers or in the raid of his workplace, she told New Trend this week.
And if that were not enough, then exhaustively sending samples of his DNA
and fingerprints around the globe should have been more than adequate in
securing some charge, but unsurprisingly - yet again - they were able to
find nothing. So from where arises the need to extradite this British
citizen to a country infamous for its human rights abuses?
Members of the Stop Police Terror group have asked the following questions.
Can we really have faith in an administration which has arrested more than
a staggering 5,000 Muslims on its own soil since 2001, whose soldiers
continue to torture and humiliate innocent civilians from Afghanistan to
Iraq to Guantanamo?
Can we rely upon an administration which extracts confessions under torture
and duress - or who renders individuals to foreign governments to torture
on their behalf - and makes such confessions the basis for arrests and
charges levelled against individuals across the globe?
Can we trust an administration which deprives its detainees of legal
counsel, of access to witnesses, to independent enquiry for years, who
evade the rulings of their own Supreme Court?
Can we trust such an administration to treat Mr Ahmad with fairness and
justice, when its interests lie in raising and lowering the terror alert at
whim, to secure their seat in the upcoming elections, who revel in creating
an atmosphere of fear and paranoia amongst the British and American people?
SPT adds: 'Let us not forget recent examples of the December and the
Manchester raids, where all detainees were released without charge, or the
arrests of Algerians in Scotland, whose lives were destroyed in spite of
their innocence now being established. Let us not forget the 594 arrests
with only 6 charged.'
Unfortunately, Woodhill Prison where Mr Ahmad is being held has misinformed
members of his family and have issued the wrong prison number for Mr Ahmad.
The erroneous number has since been publicised widely via the internet and
to several hundred people present at the Stop Police Conference on Sunday
in London as part of the address to write to Babar Ahmad.
Moreover this is in spite of the fact that the family and others have sent
letters and money (without which he cannot purchase small items or make
phone calls) which will now be received by another prisoner.
The correct prisoner no. is MX5383
So please send letters and messages of support to brother Babar and let him
know that members of his family around the world are thinking of him, even
if you don't give reply details.
B Ahmad MX5383
HMP Woodhill
Tattenhoe Street
Milton Keynes
Bucks
MK4 4DA
Please disseminate the new address as widely as possible. For more
information please check out the website:
www.stoppoliceterror.com
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Heavily Publicized Story of Jordanian Woman's Murder for Dating a Christian
Was a Hoax: Exposed Below
A hoax and honor lost for Norma Khouri
By Ali Abunimah
The Daily Star
10 August 2004
http://dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=7113
A sensational book that purported to tell the "true" story of the
murder of a young Jordanian woman by her father because she dared
to date a Christian man has been exposed as a fraud. The scandal
was a setback for advocates of women's rights in Jordan and
provided a disturbing case study of how lies and distortions can
masquerade as "fact" in Western discussions of the Arab world and
Islam.
When Norma Khouri's book "Forbidden Love"
("
Honor Lost
"
in the
US) came out last year, it was a hit, selling more than 250,000
copies globally. In Australia, where the author has been granted
asylum, it was voted one of the country's 100 favorite books of
all time. Khouri's book told the story of how she and her friend
"Dalia," a Muslim woman, opened a unisex hair salon in Amman in
the early 1990s. Dalia fell in love with a Christian man,
"Michael," who frequented the salon, and despite the innocence of
the affair, she was brutally stabbed to death by her father in
1996. Khouri claimed she fled Jordan after this atrocity, fearing
for her own life, eventually making her way to Australia.
However, investigations by a Jordanian journalist, women's rights
activists and Australia's
Sydney Morning Herald
have revealed the
book to be a hoax. There is no evidence the events described took
place. If Khouri's ragged tale could fool major publishers like
Random House (in Australia) and Simon and Schuster (in the US),
her story fell apart immediately when Rana Husseini, an
investigative journalist at the Jordan Times, got hold of it.
Since 1994, Husseini has written countless articles on honor
crimes in Jordan and can be credited with a major role in
galvanizing public opinion against the practice.
This has been a hard road, as Husseini explained by telephone
from Amman: "I have always been accused of tarnishing Jordan's
image, of washing dirty laundry in public. But I have always been
very careful to explain that honor killing is not part of the
Muslim religion, and that although serious, there are only 15-25
cases per year, not thousands, like Khouri claimed falsely in her
book." Husseini pointed out that the practice also occurs among
Christian families.
Husseini first heard about Khouri's book through a flow of
e-mails from Australia, since Khouri had published Husseini's
e-mail address without her permission. Some were from
Arab-Australians who felt slandered, but many more were from
readers who believed that Arabs and Muslims were monsters. "I
felt I had to do something," says Husseini. She contacted the
Jordanian National Committee for Women (JNCW), and with the
organization's president, Amal al-Sabbagh, she did a thorough
page-by-page analysis of the book and documented dozens of
serious errors and anachronisms, covering geography, history,
Islam, Arabic language and law.
On page two of her book, for example, Khouri wrote that the
Jordan River is "no longer strong enough to flow down to Amman."
Yet, the Jordan River has never flowed anywhere near Amman, not
least because it would have meant flowing uphill for an altitude
of 1 kilometer.
There were also errors about Jordan's legal system: Khouri
claimed that Dalia's killer was released on bail, even though
Jordan never releases suspects on bail in capital offences.
Khouri also described the lives of a majority of Jordanian women
as being akin to that of prisoners, slavishly serving men in
silence and eating their leftovers, She also described a society
of fear that was unrecognizable to anyone familiar with Jordan.
Husseini's investigation determined that no salon as described by
Khouri had ever existed (unisex salons are in any case illegal),
nor had anyone in Khouri's alleged Amman neighborhood ever heard
of her family, or of the brutal murder. Husseini was astonished
that Khouri's book contained not a single reference for any of
the thousands of "facts" it reported.
JNCW's Sabbagh sent a letter detailing these findings to Random
House in Australia, but so far the publisher has stood by Khouri.
However, the American publisher has withdrawn the book from sale
pending an investigation. While the facts of the Khouri hoax are
astonishing, it is, sadly, not surprising that so many were ready
to believe her. Husseini observes: "The timing of the book was
very suspicious, between Sept. 11, 2001, and the war on Iraq. The
alleged crime happened in 1996, so why did the book come out
after so long?"
In the post-
Sept. 11
era, Khouri's book met a certain demand in
the US and other Western societies, where the shortcomings and
"backwardness" of Arab and Muslim societies have become a focus
of intense interest to which precious little genuine expertise is
brought to bear. Indeed the desire to "rescue" Muslim women has
become a prominent theme in liberal justifications for US
intervention in the region. This was most common at the beginning
of the Afghanistan war.
There is also a Western tendency to assume that violence is a
pathology when it occurs among Arabs and Muslims, and to apply
spurious religious or cultural explanations to explain it. Murder
rates in general, and specifically for the murder of women by
male family members and intimates, are far higher in the United
States than in Jordan, though few analyses attribute this to
American culture generally, or to Americans' devout Christianity.
Husseini points to the well-worn stereotypes that infect Western
media discourse about the issues to which she has devoted her
career. She notes the exotic artwork on the cover of Khouri's
book, which shows a women clad in black head-covering with only
her long-lashed eyes peering out - dress that certainly exists,
but is not typical in Jordan, where women outnumber and
outperform men in secondary and higher education, and are
increasingly present in all sectors of the economy.
"We have this problem (of honor crimes) in Jordan and elsewhere,"
says Husseini; "(T)here are people here working on it, the
government is working on it and the royal family. The country
acknowledged the problem before anyone outside was talking about
honor crimes."
There is resistance to change from conservatives. For example
from the opposition Islamic Action Front or some tribal leaders,
who often justify their positions by claiming that the campaign
against honor crimes is a hostile foreign plot. However, Husseini
points out, noted Muslim figures, among them Jordan's Chief
Islamic Justice Sheikh Izzedin al-Tamimi, have come out firmly
against the practice, and in recent years there have been 10
major legislative reforms advancing women's rights in several
areas.
The stereotype of helpless women in need of escape, which
Khouri's book has fed, renders these debates and struggles
invisible, and disempowers the very women who are campaigning
successfully for change from within.
Ali Abunimah, a
Chicago-based
Palestinian-Jordanian analyst and
media critic, is co-founder of
Electronic Intifada.
He wrote this
commentary for THE DAILY STAR
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2004-08-11 Wed 19:40ct