Don’t Block the Blog

I am able to post, but I was unable to view my blog. It now turns out that some ISPs have blocked the entire blogspot.com site. well, now I have found ways to view.

I support blocking those specific blogs which carry the cartoons depicting the last prophet (saw), but not the entire blogspot site which carries millions of blogs.

LAUNCHED BY THE ALVI-E TEAM (Awab Alvi & Omer Alvie) on March 3rd 2006, this is an online campaign to support free speech of Pakistani bloggers and internet free speech in general. Support our cause by copying the banner code (below) to your web site.

Since 28th February (2006), Pakistani Bloggers’ Freedom of Speech has been under attack by some, if not all, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who has chosen to block all blogs hosted on the blogspot.com domain. Political pressure groups have protested to the government to block those web sites displaying the controversial cartoon images of Prophet Muhammed (PBUH) that were hosted on the net. But instead of blocking specific sites, ISPs have simply blacklisted the entire domain, causing thousands of blogs to be inaccessible for viewing in Pakistan.

It is our point of view, that any censorship of blogs is unacceptable, be it a few offensive sites inciting a hateful stereotype, or hundreds of blogs protesting controversial caricatures or even the thousands of sites that remain indifferent to the issue.

News Reports Appearing Globally Fighting for the Cause
Washington Post - Jefferson Morley
The News - (Ethan Casey - www.ethancasey.com)
Reporters Without Borders
Global Voices Online
International Freedom of Expression eXchange

We as Pakistani Bloggers object to this action and would like to request you to join in our cause and display either one of the banners condemning this action and appealing for an immediate change.

The Last Hour

The Last Hour

Ahadith about Dajjal and Portents of the Hour

The Signs Before The Day Of Judgment by Ibn Kathir

Read Stories of the Quran, Stories of Prophets by Ibn Kathir

refutations

The name of God:

The word "Allah" does exist in the original Bible

Refuting the moon-god lie against Islam

Another refutation of the moon-god lie


The Qur'an:

Regarding there being a "different Qur'an" in Yemen

Regarding the foreign vocabulary in the Qur'an

Examining the Qur'an

Prophecies made by Prophet Muhammad


Prophet Muhammad and the sources of the Qur'an:

Lookin at the influence of Judeo-Christian Societies at the time of the Prophet

Proofs of Muhammad's prophethood

Muhammad's Prophethood: An analytical view

Refutation of the Borrowing Theories of the Qur'an

Did Prophet Muhammad really recognize the Bible as an error-free book?


The Language of "Jesus":

"Jesus" spoke aramaic

What language did "Jesus" speak?


Alberto Rivera and Jack Chick:

Jack Chick's Lies: The Real Alberto Rivera

Alberto Rivera's false anti-Catholic story

The religious hoax of the century: The true story of Alberto Rivera uncovered

Catholic answers to Alberto Rivera

stress disorder

What arrogance and self centredness

1 in 10 U.S. Iraq veterans suffers stress disorder

Survey finds returning soldiers haunted by nightmares, flashbacks

CHICAGO - Nearly one in 10 American soldiers who served in Iraq were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, most after witnessing death or participating in combat, according to a Pentagon study that could add fodder to a budget battle in Congress over veterans' health care.

Overall, the study found more than a third of U.S. soldiers received psychological counseling soon after returning from Iraq.

Nineteen percent met the military’s “risk criteria for a mental health concern” such as post-traumatic stress or depression. That's compared to 11.3 percent among veterans who served in Afghanistan and 8.5 percent from deployments elsewhere, the report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association said.

The survey covered 222,620 Army soldiers and Marines returning

from Iraq, 16,318 from Afghanistan and 64,967 from other deployments.

The researchers did not find the results surprising, because the military has a new mental health screening program for returning soldiers and is encouraging them to get help early to prevent serious problems later, said study co-author Dr. Charles Hoge, a colonel at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

Because of the new screening program, the findings cannot be compared to those from previous wars, Hoge said.

Mental health screening of veterans showed 21,620 out of 222,620 returning from Iraq and assessed over the year ending April 30, 2004, suffered from post-traumatic stress -- a disorder that can lead to nightmares, flashbacks and delusional thinking.

Of those diagnosed with post-traumatic stress, 80 percent said they had witnessed people being killed or wounded or had participated in combat and fired their weapon, the report said. Of those not diagnosed, half had experienced violence or combat.

Medical authorities first accepted post-traumatic stress disorder as a psychiatric condition in 1980 at the urging of Vietnam veterans. A previous study by Hoge and his colleagues found 15 percent to 17 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq showed signs of the disorder, and many were reluctant to seek help because of the stigma attached to mental illness.

Post-traumatic stress disorder and other combat-related mental problems can lead to family strife, divorce, alcohol and substance abuse, and unemployment.

Veterans' advocates said the finding supports their call for increased spending on mental health care for Iraq veterans.

President Bush's budget plan includes a 6 percent increase in spending for the Department of Veterans Affairs. But some in Congress say that is not enough because the increase hinges on more than $1 billion in cuts in other VA spending and the approval of new fees and co-payments for some veterans.

"This budget would ultimately shortchange veterans who need mental health services," said Ralph Ibson, a vice president of the National Mental Health Association. "This study can and should be a wake-up call in terms of veterans' mental health needs."

Shortly after starting the ground war in Iraq in 2003, the Pentagon began requiring returning service members to complete a three-page survey that is used to decide who needs further help.

In prior wars, mental health issues weren't studied until years, sometimes decades, after the soldiers came back," Hoge said. "For this war, we're doing it differently. Research is influencing policy and we're adjusting policies as the data come in."

1 in 10 U.S. Iraq veterans suffers stress disorder

___________

Have these animals considered the effect of their murderous bombings and use of DU and phosphorus? How many they have killed? How much they have destroyed? What havoc and suffering they have inflicted on how many innocent civilians.

All they can think of is the effect on the poor American soldier.

Why the hell did that animal go to Iraq in the first place?

Hate!

Despite my faith in Allah (SubHana Wa Ta`ala) that whatever happens is for the best; despite all my wisdom and sanity, there are times, far too many of them, when I wish ...

And it is due to betrayal. I talk to people in all innocence, with a view to help them, and they turn it into someting against me. I do not talk, and they still turn it against me.

I do not like my colleagues, I am afraid. I hate them. I wish they did not exist, or that I didn't.

---

Here is some advice for me. I post it here so I can refer it whenever I need it. I think it is good in many situations, not just the workplace.

UmmWafi
Madina Citizen
Madina Muhsin




Yaa Rabbiy, grant me an understanding heart....


Gender:
Posts: 556
Re: Hate!
« Reply #2 on: Feb 27th, 2006, 10:13pm » Quote » Modify

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Twice I have worked in an all-Muslim environment. I naively thought that things would be all rosy and ukhwah-like. I was wrong. In all counts. Whatever suggestions I made was greeted with suspicions, whatever comments was derided as pompousness etc etc. I saw lots of power politicking and backstabbing going round and many a times I was soo tempted to give back as good as I got. I quit because I didn't want to commit more sins, Astaghfirullah.

However, one important lesson I learnt from all these is, its too too tiring and painful to hate. Hate is an all-consuming emotion that destroys anything good in us. I also learnt that I am as good as the emotions I harbour and I am as good as my response to tests from Allah SubHana Wa Ta`ala. That kept me sane. After a while I begin to seriously ask about MY niyyah. If I am ikhlas in my actions then I shouldn't be affected by other people's response. So now, if a colleague gives me negativity, I just Istighfar and walk away and tell myself I have tried.

I guess right now in my life, after all I have gone through, hatred is something that will only cause me pain and defeat. Its just too tiring.

May Allah ease your burdens Inshallah.

Wassalam
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"Knowledge is the arrival of meaning into the soul and the arrival of soul into meaning. Meaning is understanding and accepting the position of things in the order of Creation and the position of Allah in the order of Existence"
-Prof Syed Naquib Al-Attas

"Truth is Timeless, and returning to Truth is better than continuing in Falsehood"

- 'Umar Ibn al-Khattab ra


JustOne
Madina Citizen
Madina Mujahid




Wisdom begins in wonder


Gender:
Posts: 1428
Re: Hate!
« Reply #3 on: Feb 27th, 2006, 11:48pm » Quote » Modify

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Hate is all-consuming...that's brilliant, UmmWafi, because it really is.

I hate some of my coworkers too. What's worse is that I think it shows. I'll get up and leave the dining hall when contentious subjects come up so as to keep myself from replying.

What I've realized in my years of working (and yes, it's been years even if I haven't stuck to anything for too long)..this is a compilation of advice from other people and my own realizations

1. Be muslim, akhlaaq wise.

2. Set boundaries.

3. Your personal life and your professional life are entirely separate, and you need to let people know this. In fact, when you feel yourself blurring the line, it helps to say this out loud to anyone who can hear you, "My professional and personal life are entirely separate."

4. Do as much as you can, but make sure everyone knows what you're doing. Even if you filed a receipt, create a paper trail, CC it to 20 people, don't let anyone take credit for what you've done. Or worse, don't let anyone misconstrue what you've done. Don't be a nuisance, either.

5. If someone confides in you, no matter how much you feel the need to, do not, by ANY means, let anyone even get the whiff of what happened. Even if you only feel the need to express your amazement at humanity itself, do NOT talk about it.

6.Cut to the chase. When you find someone lingering around in your office (in my case, mostly middle-aged men), ask them what they want. It helps to actually use those words, "so what is it you want?"...If this doesn't work, get up and walk them to the door.

7. Be cordial.

8. Unless you have to be mean. In which case, be mean.

9. "You gotta do what you gotta do." That's another one to keep offhand.

10. Don't take things personally.

11. Sometimes it's easy to tell yourself that someone did something because they are malicious human beings. My advice? Save yourself the emotional trauma (which you do not need in a workplace anyway), and tell yourself that they are not malicious, but simply incompetent.

12. If your boss asks you, "when do you think you can get this in by?" In your head, do a time measurement, and then double it. So if today's monday, and you can get it done by tuesday. Tell him it'll be in by Wedensday. Two reasons: a) it gives you a margin for things to go wrong, b) if you hand it on tuesday, he realizes that you are truly the genius he hired you as.

13. Trust your instincts.

14. Do more than you can. As in, let them see your capacity.

15. Don't do more than your job description. As in, don't take the brunt of it and volunteer to do the filing for the secretary.

16. No gossipping.

17. No discussions on religion.

18. No discussions on politics.

19. No coming to work dressed like a bum.

20. Get there early if you must, but always leave on time. (Like I said, they need to know that you have a personal life which extends beyond your professional life, which is completely separate.)

So maybe these apply more to girls. Ah well.

Wasalaam.
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kickin'dustontheGT
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Humbling the vertical pronoun. "Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; thus unlamented let me die;...and not a stone tell where I lie."


bhaloo
Madina Administrator




Quran 25:63


Gender:
Posts: 2891
Re: Hate!
« Reply #4 on: Feb 28th, 2006, 9:43am » Quote » Modify

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...seek (Allah's) help with patient perserverance and prayer... (Quran 2:45)

"... But if you are constant and do right, not the least harm will their cunning do to you..." (Quran 3:120)

"And if you catch them out, catch them out no worse than they catch you out: but if you show patience, that is indeed the best (course) for those who are patient" (Quran 16:126)

"(Luqman said: -'O my son!... enjoin what is just, and forbid what is wrong: and bear with patient constancy whatever betide you, for this is firmness (of purpose) in (the conduct of) affairs" (Quran 31:17)

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Wasalaam,
Arshad
http://members.cox.net/arshad


ummnajmah
Madina Mumin





Qul Huwwa Allahu Ahad!


Gender:
Posts: 150
Re: Hate!
« Reply #5 on: Feb 28th, 2006, 9:56am » Quote » Modify

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Co-Workers can be vicious, subhanAllah! Bro. Timbuktu, don't let anyone get to you that much that you wish you don't exist. Take Sis Just Ones advice. No wonder you see disgruntled pple who come back and kill other employees. Work can be very stressful, full of jealousy and backstabbing people. Hang in there bro, make dua and try to have patience because you will need it a lot of times. All the best timbuktu.

true story 004: Where is Khalil?

Where is Khalil?

In a dimly lit small room, with a damp mouldy smell, six humans sit huddled together,

· Two old parents, bent backs, cataract in the eyes
· A wife, looking old due to having seen a good day only once in a while,
· Three children, two school going, having had their schooling resumed only after stops, third ready to go

fear evident from their eyes, waiting, waiting for Khalil!

But where is Khalil?

Perhaps I should start at the beginning, and tell you who is Khalil.

But what is the beginning?

Is the beginning before Khalil’s birth, or even before his parents were married? Is it when his parents had to leave their respective homes in India as a result of anti-Muslim riots in the wake of Independence?

This is how it happened: Lulled by assurances of a peaceful life, and told that all weapons, even kitchen knives, were being collected from everyone in the province, so as to ensure communal peace, Khalil’s grandparents were also persuaded to give up everything in their house that could ever be used in defence. Little known to them, the Sikh and Hindu Mahasabha were being armed by the police and the paramilitary armies of the neighbouring princely Sikh States.

On the night of independence and after that, these were let loose on the Muslim villages, or houses of Muslims, with murder, pillage, rape and abduction, often led by the police, or the Sikh regiments.

When the attackers left the village of Khalil’s grandparents with their booty, including ornaments and some girls, there was little left except dead bodies and a few injured ones who were left for dead. Among those were Khalil’s grandparents and one teenage son. They managed to walk part of the way, and to take a train through part of it, along the route experiencing yet more attacks and yet more dead.

They reached Lahore, but to live their lives meant a lot of struggle. They eventually made Lahore their home. Struggling to make a new life, they married off their son, to whom was born Khalil, whose parents decided that their son would get the highest education. Also living in poverty, they impressed upon their son the virtues of honesty, hard work and education.

Khalil did not disappoint them.

He studied and worked hard.

When his father fell ill and was unable to provide for his family, Khalil worked tuitions to support the family. He was fortunate in that his hard work was rewarded, and he even took a gold medal from the University.

That is where his good luck, or rewards for hard work, ended.

He sent in applications for jobs in the thousands, he appeared in hundreds of them, but was not lucky enough to land a job. Apparently he needed a “good” reference, which means from someone high up in politics, bureaucracy or the army. He knew no one in these.

Khalil was interested in knowledge. He became a member of four libraries in the city, but his membership brought him in contact with people who are considered unsuccessful in this world, so these clubs did not help him either. His networking was in the wrong nets.

He tried starting businesses with money borrowed from friends, or from selling his family’s meager possessions, but here too he was unsuccessful. In the presence of adulterated and sub-standard goods and services, in the need to bribe police officers and protection racketeers (which he refused), his businesses never flourished except for brief periods.

In one of such periods, Khalil’s parents found a wife for their son, and Khalil soon became a father in his own right.

Tired of failure in his own country, he sold off the family “silver”, and bought a visa to Saudi Arabia, which turned out to be fake, but not by the immigration authorities at the airport. So he managed to stay and work for two years, naturally not in well-paying jobs. Enough perhaps to pay off the debts incurred in his visa, but not enough to breathe easy for a while even.

He had to return to Pakistan when the Saudi police, in one of their raids, found he had a fake visa, and the same old story of applications, small transient jobs, hunger and the kids’ intermittent education began.

He had a fine mind. He read a lot, and analysed it. He came to Islamabad once a week or so, met a journalist friend, told him what he had seen or analysed, and went back to Lahore. His journalist friend often used this input to write his column. Eventually, in one meeting, Khalil told his friend Javed that he could not take it any more. Life had been too difficult for him to carry on.

Javed tried to console him, but Khalil was now past consolation.

Javed advised him to start his own business.

Khalil listed the businesses he had started, finances he had gotten together, the hurdles in the way of principles he had encountered, and how his businesses had failed.

Javed felt too deeply for his friend, so asked him to think of a business he could handle best.

Khalil was a good driver. He mentioned this, and together they concluded that running one’s own private commuter van would be a good business for Khalil.

Javed asked around, and found a second hand van for Rs 1.10 million.

Khalil went quiet, but on encouragement, and Javed promising he would also chip in with Rs. 200,000. Khalil calculated and by selling his parents’ house, his wife’s jewelry, and loans from other friends, he could come up with only Rs. 450,000 – thus the total between the two friends was Rs. 650,000.

They were quiet for some hour or so, when Khalil said he would try to get the rest somehow, and to have the van kept for some time.

After a few days, Khalil returned with the balance.

He had sold his kidney and obtained his price in advance.

After a suitable match from one of those who needed a kidney transplant, his kidney was removed, and when he had recovered, he started driving his van. He enjoyed his work, and it paid him well.

It looked as if his troubles were now over.

Far away, in a land of which people like Khalil can only dream, a Danish paper decided that the time to test Muslims had come again, and commissioned 12 caricatures of the prophet (saw), mocking him and the religion which is all people like Khalil have left.

Peaceful negotiations failed; the Prime Minister of Denmark refused even to see the ten ambassadors of Muslim countries about the issue. The Muslims of Denmark sent a delegation to the ME countries, apprising them of the attack on their religion, and seeking support to have this resolved.

Little by little Muslims, tired of centuries of abuse, tired of an elite imposed upon them, protested, some burning down the consulates of the countries where this provocation had taken place.

Pakistan was late on the scene. A protest took place in Lahore. It was meant to be peaceful, but from somewhere an organized gang of motorcyclists appeared, bent upon destruction. They smashed windows, looted stores, set fire to buildings, and to transport.

Khalil was driving his van when the arsonists caught him.

He pleaded with them, to no avail.

In no time his van was on fire.

He tried to extinguish it with his shirt, but what an inadequate fire extinguisher a shirt is.

Finally, he threw his shirt towards the burning van, and disappeared.

He has not been heard of since.

Modern Crusades

The curse of the infidel

A century ago Muslim intellectuals admired the west. Why did we lose their goodwill?

Karen Armstrong
Thursday June 20, 2002
The Guardian

On July 15 1099, the crusaders from western Europe conquered Jerusalem, falling upon its Jewish and Muslim inhabitants like the avenging angels from the Apocalypse. In a massacre that makes September 11 look puny in comparison, some 40,000 people were slaughtered in two days. A thriving, populous city had been transformed into a stinking charnel house. Yet in Europe scholar monks hailed this crime against humanity as the greatest event in world history since the crucifixion of Christ.

The crusades destabilised the Near East, but made little impression on the Islamic world as a whole. In the west, however, they were crucial and formative. This was the period when western Christendom was beginning to recover from the long period of barbarism known as the Dark Ages, and the crusades were the first cooperative act of the new Europe as she struggled back on to the international scene. We continue to talk about "crusades" for justice and peace, and praise a "crusading journalist" who is bravely uncovering some salutary truth, showing that at some unexamined level, crusading is still acceptable to the western soul. One of its most enduring legacies is a profound hatred of Islam.

Before the crusades, Europeans knew very little about Muslims. But after the conquest of Jerusalem, scholars began to cultivate a highly distorted portrait of Islam, and this Islamophobia, entwined with a chronic anti-semitism, would become one of the received ideas of Europe. Christians must have been aware that their crusades violated the spirit of the gospels: Jesus had told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. This may be the reason why Christian scholars projected their anxiety on to the very people they had damaged.

Thus it was, at a time when Christians were fighting brutal holy wars against Muslims in the Near East, that Islam became known in Europe as an inherently violent and intolerant faith, a religion of the sword. At a time when the popes were trying to impose celibacy on the reluctant clergy, western biographies of the prophet Mohammed, written by priests and monks, depict him, with ill-concealed envy, as a sexual pervert and lecher, who encouraged Muslims to indulge their basest instincts.

At a time when feudal Europe was riddled with hierarchy, Islam was presented as an anarchic religion that gave too much respect and freedom to menials, such as slaves and women. Christians could not see Islam as separate from themselves; it had become, as it were, their shadow-self, the opposite of everything that they thought they were or hoped they were not.

In fact, the reality was very different. Islam, for example, is not the intolerant or violent religion of western fantasy. Mohammed was forced to fight against the city of Mecca, which had vowed to exterminate the new Muslim community, but the Koran, the inspired scripture that he brought to the Arabs, condemns aggressive warfare and permits only a war of self-defence. After five years of warfare, Mohammed turned to more peaceful methods and finally conquered Mecca by an ingenious campaign of non-violence. After the prophet's death, the Muslims established a vast empire that stretched from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas, but these wars of conquest were secular, and were only given a religious interpretation after the event.

In the Islamic empire, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians enjoyed religious freedom. This reflected the teaching of the Koran, which is a pluralistic scripture, affirmative of other traditions. Muslims are commanded by God to respect the "people of the book", and reminded that they share the same beliefs and the same God.

Mohammed had not intended to found a new religion; he was simply bringing the old religion of the Jews and the Christians to the Arabs, who had never had a prophet before. Constantly the Koran explains that Mohammed has not come to cancel out the revelations brought by Adam, Abraham, Moses or Jesus. Today, Muslim scholars have argued that had Mohammed known about the Buddhists and Hindus, the native Americans or the Australian Aborigines, the Koran would have endorsed their sages and shamans too, because all rightly guided religion comes from God.

But so entrenched are the old medieval ideas that western people find it difficult to believe this. We continue to view Islam through the filter of our own needs and confusions. The question of women is a case in point. None of the major world faiths has been good to women but, like Christianity, Islam began with a fairly positive message, and it was only later that the religion was hijacked by old patriarchal attitudes. The Koran gives women legal rights of inheritance and divorce, which western women would not receive until the 19th century. The Koran does permit men to take four wives, but this was not intended to pander to male lust, it was a matter of social welfare: it enabled widows and orphans to find a protector, without whom it was impossible for them to survive in the harsh conditions of 7th-century Arabia.

There is nothing in the Koran about obligatory veiling for all women or their seclusion in harems. This only came into Islam about three generations after the prophet's death, under the influence of the Greeks of Christian Byzantium, who had long veiled and secluded their women in this way. Veiling was neither a central nor a universal practice; it was usually only upper-class women who wore the veil. But this changed during the colonial period.

Colonialists such as Lord Cromer, the consul general of Egypt from 1883 to 1907, like the Christian missionaries who came in their wake, professed a horror of veiling. Until Muslims aban doned this barbarous practice, Cromer argued in his monumental Modern Egypt, they could never advance in the modern world and needed the supervision of the west. But Lord Cromer was a founder member in London of the Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage. Yet again, westerners were viewing Islam through their own muddled preconceptions, but this cynicism damaged the cause of feminism in the Muslim world and gave the veil new importance as a symbol of Islamic and cultural integrity.

We can no longer afford this unbalanced view of Islam, which is damaging to ourselves as well as to Muslims. We should recall that during the 12th century, Muslim scholars and scientists of Spain restored to the west the classical learning it had lost during the Dark Ages. We should also remember that until 1492, Jews and Christians lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain - a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe.

At the beginning of the 20th century, nearly every single Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, admired its modern society, and campaigned for democracy and constitutional government in their own countries. Instead of seeing the west as their enemy, they recognised it as compatible with their own traditions. We should ask ourselves why we have lost this goodwill.

· Karen Armstrong is the author of Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (Weidenfeld); The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (HarperCollins), and Islam: A Short History (Weidenfeld).

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