As-Salaamu Alaikum wa Rahmutullah wa Barakatuhu
First of all, happy new year to all (Hijri or otherwise!)
I just had to come out of hiatus to announce this: IJTEMA announces a photo competition with the title:
Do take part, and let the photographers know! Good Luck Y’all!
After reading( www.hindu.com/2007/07/17/stories/2007071755660800.htm ) Hasan Suroor in The Hindu dated Jul17, I remembered a laconic fable I read as a kid.
A wolf and a kid are drinking water from the same stream. The wolf upstream, the kid downstream. The wolf wants to savour the kid. So, he goes-
“Hey, why are you making my water dirty?”
“How can I, sir? I am downstream!”
“What! Such impertinence?”
“I did not say anything bad, sir!”
“Okay, you did not, but once your father abused me. You will pay for it.” -says the wolf, and jumps on the kid.
The crux of Suroor’s argument is that Muslims can not deny a collective responsibility for what happened at Glasgow.
Misdirected Hyderabad Bomb Blast Investigations
It is being suggested by the authorities that are looking into the bombings that the real purpose of “Islamic Terrorists” is to provoke communal riots. If after planting bombs in mosques in Malegaon and Hyderabad, the “Islamic Terrorists” could not provoke communal riots, they must be either naïve or running out of options to tread the same path again and again to see yet another failure in achieving their objective of communal riots. The “Islamic Terrorists” risk demoralizing their cadres by their consistent failure in creating riots. If provoking communal riots is the objective of “Islamic Terrorists” then they could do better by studying Reports of Enquiry Commissions appointed by various governments like, Raghubar Dayal Commission (Ranchi-Hatia, 1967), [...] and scores of other reports which have brought to the fore that those riots were not accidents but well planned and executed and it required days, if not months of continuous and sustained provocative and divisive speeches and publication of communal propaganda and collection of arms and ammunitions. Then a spark like throwing stone on a religious procession, hitting a cow, [...]. These rumours enhance the threat perception of an ordinary citizen and mobilizes him / her and even leads them to attack “rivals”.
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Shooting at the victims
A fact finding commission’s report made me seethe in anger.
The committee equally condemns the police firing on innocent people killing 9 and injuring several others with out any provocation.
What the hell is going on?
You don’t shoot at Gujjars who are creating arson and attrition, and you shoot at people angered by justifiable reason? You attack the victim? Is that it?
[digg=http://digg.com/political_opinion/Police_Shot_at_Innocents_At_Mecca_Masjid]
A hundred and fifty years ago, a huge battle raged in India. This battle, often dubbed the Mutiny, or India’s First War of Independence, has many aspects we don’t know.
As an Indian and a Muslim, as I am, let me quote an article(by Firoz Bakht Ahmed) that talks about the role of Muslims in the Mutiny-
More than half a million Muslim clerics sacrificed their lives for India during the various phases of the great 1857 revolt – a fact almost buried like the mutineers themselves. These Indian freedom fighters came from the same madrasas that have been under scanner all over the world since 9/11.
In 1997, I was witness as well as part of the grand celebration of India’s completion of 50 years of independence. Not one word was mentioned during that event about the role of the ulema and the madrasas in the battle against the English. It was hurting. Celebrated Punjabi litterateur Kartar Singh Duggal says in his autobiography that the Indian maulvis were one with the pandits on the issue of retaining the age-old Indian traditions – both Vedic and Islamic.
Relates Maulana Umar Gautam of Madrasa Markaz-ul-Ma’arif that madrasas are a legacy of the Mughal rule when these “institutions of higher learning” were set up to promote both religious and scientific knowledge. In the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, as the English call it, the madrasas had become hubs of nationalism and had to bear the wrath of the British.
The madrasas remained the hub of the anti-British movement even later.
A new group blog has taken off.
Check it out. It has some real good writers (my opinion, of course! )
UPDATE: This is not the one I was talking obout. That is under construction. (Thanks Homeyra for making me realise the confusion)
Why do you pick US to blame all the problems of the world? It is not possible that the US has done all the mischief!
So let us redistribute the blame. Let us start from the times of America’s independence and civil war. We can blame the slave trade on, maybe, Uganda. Had these countries not existed, there would have been no slave trade at all.
We can blame the dropping of nuclear bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki on China. They are enemies of Japan for long time. Japanese won’t dislike that at all. And if they do (how ungrateful!) we’ll nuke them. The blame is, of course, on Ahmadi-Nejad. If they deny that, we will nuke them too.
The war on vietnam can be blamed on USSR. The chemical and biological weapons used, sure enough, came from Iraq. Saddam, that brat!
The oppressions and killings at Palestine can be blamed on Iran. Had Iran not threatened to change the Zionist regime into something else, nobody would have touched anybody’s hair.
The dictators and oppressor of Africa were supplied and supported by, none other than, (In)fidel Castro.
The blame of Iran-Iraq war goes to Java. They armed, funded and trained Iraqis. Not only that, they supplied them with the dreaded WMDs.
You are completely wrong if you claim that the US is occupying Guatemano bay. It is Chile that is doing that. US has only gone in to liberate the Afghans living there.
Everybody knows that Taliban was funded and trained by the Russians. To justify their oppression of the local people, they made this phoney group. Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, was Tibet’s creation. Unable to free their own country, they were taking revenge on China at Afghanistan.
The only known case of a passenger plane, of Iran, being shot down, was not due to the US, if you thought so. There was no shootout at all. It was barmuda triangle.
DISCLAIMER: By no means I am trying to say that US is the source of all evil. In summary my point is: even though not all, much of the mess of today is due to US. Simply because it is the most powerful political, economic and military power in the world and it wants to remain so, by hook or by crook.
By the way, the term US refers to the US administration, not the general public.
Moving on from yesterday’s post.
I just found this video where Jack Straw clarifies his stand. It does not sound like rheotic to me at all. He sounds quite reasonable.
What do you think?
I had decided not to post the movie only on the front page. On a rethink, I am posting it on the blog too. Enjoy the masterpiece.
I was not able to answer many questions and comments for the past week or so. I will not be spending much time on the blog for some time from now. The blog will be up; but I will not be able to answer comments. I am sorry about it.
I have uploaded the movie ‘Children of Heaven‘ onto google video(they are here and here). They are also in my videos page.
I highly recommend the movie. It is about 85 minutes long. I just can not say this enough times: this is a masterpiece.
The images that surface from that first visit are fragmentary but vivid: the deep red of the pomegranate juice served to us from a bucket by a street vendor; the fresh laundry smell of the steamed rice and kebabs that we ate pretty well every day, and a truly hallucinatory hotel where, as we were waiting to check in, I turned and saw – or thought I saw – a goat munching sugar from one of the bowls in the restaurant.
There are other more typical impressions, of course: the turquoise and apricot coloured domes of the mosques in Isfahan and the insanity of the traffic in Tehran.
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manas