Islamic Finder - Lectures Khutbas

On preserving the environment

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXQ7VpYcGzgyhmL9fFC7GfKif_hmKVNH5L0kkIB9O-aEH4GDWeDawOfgZRz5qsvL_z_5vAgdoDQzCt_8bQ5UcHihg94bqcY1s2XbxK9tsQggDPWzc_b0HySDSN0zRY3fYtW1IJ89KLKuNm/s1600/nature-islam.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="370" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXQ7VpYcGzgyhmL9fFC7GfKif_hmKVNH5L0kkIB9O-aEH4GDWeDawOfgZRz5qsvL_z_5vAgdoDQzCt_8bQ5UcHihg94bqcY1s2XbxK9tsQggDPWzc_b0HySDSN0zRY3fYtW1IJ89KLKuNm/s640/nature-islam.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
 
All praise is due to Allah. He dispersed in the environment signs for those of vision. I bear 
witness that there is no deity save Allah, having no associates. I also bear witness that our Master 
Muhammad is the servant of Allah and His Messenger. May the peace and blessings of Allah be 
upon him, his pure grateful family and companions, and all those who follow them in 
righteousness till the Day of Judgment. 
 
As to what follows, 
O servants of Allah, I urge you you and myself to be aware that you are asked to obey Him, the 
Most Sublime, in line with His orders: “But if you do good and fear Allah - then indeed Allah 
is ever, with what you do, Acquainted.” (Al Nisaa: 128). 
 
Dear Muslims, 
Observing our surrounding environment, one will see a land that is rich in resources, spread for 
the creatures, full of firmly set mountains, plants and fruits. In the following Aya, Allah, the 
Almighty, reminds us of all these bounties. He says, “and it is He who spread the earth and 
placed therein firmly set mountains and rivers; and from all of the fruits He made therein 
two mates.” Indeed, all of these elements are in magnificent harmony, pointing to the greatness 
of their Creator. Allah says, “so blessed is Allah, the best of creators.” (Al Muminoon: 14). 
Furthermore, Allah, the Exalted is He, made a large number of creatures and spread them on the 
earth. He says, “dispersed therein from every creature.” (Luqman: 10). No doubt, each of these 
creatures was brought into being for a purpose and each has a value and a function, all 
contributing to the ecological balance by which the creation is maintained, as evidenced in this 
Aya: “and caused to grow therein [something] of every well-balanced thing.” That is: in His 
wisdom, Allah has created everything in the universe in due proportion and measure, in terms of 
quantity, quality and benefits. The Almighty says, “[it is] the work of Allah, who perfected all 
things. Indeed, He is Acquainted with that which you do.” (Al Naml: 88). 
 
O Servants of Allah, 
Please know that the environment encompasses all things surrounding the human being including 
land, air, plants and water as well as the interaction amongst these elements. Allah, the All-Wise, 
has created for us the environment as a place to settle in and perform our worships. So because its 
elements and resources have a great direct effect on our health, our religion has laid down a set of 
measures and rules to protect them and ensure that the ecosystem is undisrupted. On the same 
matter, Allah says, “and cause not corruption upon the earth after its reformation.” (Al 
Aaraf: 56). That is: do not cut fruitful trees. Indeed, messing with trees and flowers or killing 
animals at random are some acts that lead to the corruption of earth. 
 
Moreover, Allah has granted man the right to utilise and harness natural resources, yet He ordered 
him to be moderate, as He says, “and eat and drink, but be not excessive. Indeed, He likes not 
those who commit excess.” (Al Aaraf: 31). In this regard, the Prophet pbuh has set an example 
in moderate utilisation of natural resources, especially water which is essential for life. Allah, the 
Exalted is He, says, “and We made from water every living thing.” (Al Anbiya: 30). He also 
says, “and Allah has sent down rain from the sky and given life thereby to the earth after its 
lifelessness. Indeed in that is a sign for a people who listen.” Thus, water is a divine blessing 
which we all preserve by using it rationally, whether for irrigation or any other daily life purposes 
like bathing and car washing. 
 
The UAE government spends substantially on water purification. Thus, it is a precious resource 
that we must use sensibly. Excessive use of water is forbidden in Islam, whether it is scarce or 
abundant. It is not permissible to overuse it for whatever purpose, including worship, even if one 
is by a flowing river. The aim is to ensure the sustainability of this vital element, preserve it for 
the generations to come and ultimately protect the environment. 
 
Dear Muslims, 
 
Another precious element of the environment that must be conserved is plants. The Prophet pbuh 
was keenly interested in growing plants and developing agriculture. He pbuh promised those who 
would take care of planting the reward of a charity, as he said, “there is none amongst the 
Muslims who plants a tree or sows seeds, and then a bird, or a person or an animal eats from it, 
but is reckoned as a charity for him.” 
 
Such prophetic ordains are conducive to minimising the effects of many environmental issues, 
like desertification and land erosion. Therefore, Islam prohibits practices that can result in any 
form of damage or corruption to the environment, the aim being to maintain its cleanliness and 
beauty. Thus whoever takes part in removing what causes harm to the environment shall be 
promised great reward. 
 
In this regard, the Prophet pbuh said, “faith has sixty-some or seventy parts, the greatest of which 
is to say ‘I bear witness that there is no deity save Allah’ and the least of which is to remove a 
harmful object from the road.” And he also said, “the deeds of my people, good and bad, were 
presented before me, and I found the removal of harmful objects from the road among their good 
deeds.” What is meant by harmful objects, here, is stones, garbage, waste, thorns or any other 
disturbing elements. 
 
Indeed, it is part of good conducts and civilised behaviours to maintain the public areas, including 
streets, parks, beaches, sidewalks, farms and deserts, keeping them clean and allowing ourselves 
as well as others to cherish their beauty. This is because all generations have equal rights to 
utilise and enjoy the earth and its resources. It is our duty, therefore, to keep it in as tidy as 
possible. For instance, construction waste, food leftovers, glass containers, plastic bags should be 
carefully disposed of lest animals eat them and get harmed, or probably die. For that reason, 
instead of getting rid of such materials as trash, one can leave them in designated containers that 
are intended for recycling. In so doing, one will help eliminate their harmful effects on the 
environment and also win Allah’s satisfaction and rewards. On this account, the Prophet pbuh 
said, “there was a branch of a tree that annoyed the people. A man removed it, so he was admitted 
to Paradise.” 
 
O worshipers, 
Amongst the abundant bounties that Allah, the Most Gracious, has bestowed upon us is that He 
created for us the animals and livestock. He says, “and the grazing livestock He has created for 
you; in them is warmth and [numerous] benefits, and from them you eat.” (An-Nahl: 5). 
Some of the things that we can benefit from these animals are their milk and meat . Allah, the 
Almighty, says, “and Allah has made for you from your homes a place of rest and made for 
you from the hides of the animals tents which you find light on your day of travel and your 
day of encampment; and from their wool, fur and hair is furnishing and enjoyment for a 
time.” 
 
Because it is a vital element of the environment, the Prophet pbuh ordered us to conserve 
livestock and forbade inflicting harm to them. He also emphasised the importance of keeping 
animals in good condition. In this regard, he pbuh once came upon an abnormally weak and thin 
camel because of hunger and thirst. Thereupon, he said, “fear Allah regarding these helpless 
animals.” Moreover, he promised great rewards to those who take care of them, so when a group 
of his companions, may Allah be pleased with them, asked him: “is there for us a reward even for 
(serving) such animals? He said, “yes, there is a reward for service delivered to every living 
animal.” That is: there is a reward for serving living animals by offering them water, food and 
protection. 
 
Air is another essential part of the environment that we need to safeguard by avoiding actions that 
may result in polluting it, such as smoking, exhaust fumes, smoke from factories in addition to 
other pollutants. It should be noted that all people have the right to enjoy a pure and clean air. 
Thus, we should not undervalue such a right, nor should we cause any harm to their health. 
 
With this in mind, we implore to Allah, the All-Wise, to set right for us the affairs of our world 
wherein our living is, and set right for us our Hereafter on which depends our after-life. 
O Allah, may You guide us all to obey You and obey Your Messenger Muhammad pbuh and 
obey those You have commanded us to obey in line with Your orders: “O you who have 
believed, obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you” (An-Nisaa: 
59). 
 
May Allah direct us all to the blessings of the Glorious Quran and the Sunna of His Messenger 
pbuh. I say this and ask Allah for forgiveness for me and you, so invoke Him for forgiveness, for He is the Most Forgiving, the Most Merciful. 
 
All praise is due to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds. I bear witness that there is no deity save Allah, 
having no associates. I also bear witness that our Master Muhammad is the servant of Allah and 
His Messenger. May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon our Master Muhammad, his pure 
family, companions, and all those who follow them in righteousness till the Day of Judgment. 
 
As to what follows, 
O worshipers, 
Please be aware that the first thing we should advise each other about is obeying Allah, the Most 
High, preserve the environment, maintain its cleanliness and sustain its resources. Indeed, our 
environment is a trust that we need to fulfill. From this perspective, the UAE’s wise leadership’s 
strategy was based upon the development and conservation of the natural resources for the benefit 
of the present generations and the next. To this end, forestation undertaken, natural sanctuaries set 
up, hunting regulated, the roads improved, public parks established and cleaning staff employed 
across country. All these great achievements were aimed at ensuring that we live in a healthy 
environment. As a result, the UAE has become one the most beautiful and least polluted countries 
around the world so much so that it has become the capital of sustainable clean energy. 
 
It is our duty, therefore, to maintain these achievements, preserve the beauty of the environment 
and teach our children to keep the country’s magnificent buildings and facilities. It is our 
responsibility also to make sure they do not scribble on the walls, distort the public parks, distort 
the beaches or throw trashes in the public areas. The Prophet pbuh said, “everyone of you is a 
guardian and everyone of you is responsible for that which in his custody.” Additionally, anyone 
of you who has an idea or an initiative that may help in preserving or developing the 
environment, he can get in touch with the concerned authorities to explore ways of implementing 
them. 
 
That is said, please bear in mind that you are commanded to invoke peace and blessings on the 
Prophet pbuh. The Messenger of Allah pbuh said, “for everyone who invokes a blessing on me 
will receive ten blessings from Allah.” 
 
O Allah, please confer Your blessings and grant peace upon our Prophet Muhammad pbuh, his 
family and all his companions. 
 
O Allah, may we ask you to make us amongst those who fulfill their duties towards their 
homeland and conserve the environment. O Allah, please grant us success to be grateful to your 
blessings and bounties, O Lord of the Worlds. 
 
May Allah have mercy on the honourable martyrs of our country and those of the coalition and 
gather them with the righteous. May Allah make their dwelling with the ones upon whom Allah 
has bestowed favour of the prophets and the steadfast affirmers of truth, O the Most Gracious the 
Most Forgiving. 
 
O Allah, please grant the best reward for the families of the martyrs and offer them patience and 
solace. May Allah grant victory to the soldiers of the Arab Coalition who gathered to restore the 
rights to their owners. O Lord, please be by their side and guide the Yemeni people to everything 
 
that is good. O Allah, make them rally for the word of truth and legitimacy, and bless them with 
welfare and stability, O the Most Generous. 
 
May Allah be pleased with the Rightly Guided Caliphs: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali, and 
all of the Companions. 
 
O Lord, may we ask You to help us with what gets us closer to Paradise and furthers us from 
Hell. O Allah, we seek Your grace to admit us, our parents, whoever has done a favour to us and 
all Muslims to Your Paradise. 
 
O Allah, please forgive all of the Muslims, men and women, living and dead. May Allah have 
mercy on Sheikh Zayed, Sheikh Maktoum and the Late UAE Sheikhs. O Lord, forgive and show 
mercy on our parents, relatives and whoever has done a favour to us. 
 
O Allah, we pray to You to grant Your forgiveness and reward to who built this mosque and to 
his or her parents as well as to anyone who gave to this mosque. O Allah, we also supplicate to 
You to forgive whoever built a mosque where Your name is remembered. 
 
O Allah, make this gathering one of compassion, and our dispersion after it one that is infallible. 
 
O Allah, do not let anyone amongst us be deprived or desperate. 
 
We pray to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds, to protect the UAE against any of temptations, both 
apparent and hidden, and continue blessing the UAE with safety and security. 
 
O Allah, we implore you to send upon us wealthy rain and make us not amongst those who are 
desperate. O Allah, relieve us! O Allah, relieve us! O Allah, relieve us! O Lord, provide us from 
the blessings of the sky a beneficial rain and make our crops grow. 
 
Our Lord, give us in this world that which is good and in the Hereafter that which is good, and 
save us from the torment of the Fire. 
 
O Servants of Allah “indeed, Allah orders justice and good conduct and giving to relatives 
and forbids immorality and bad conduct and oppression. He admonishes you that perhaps 
you will be reminded.” (An-Nahl: 90). 
 
Remember Allah and He will remember you. Be grateful of His benevolence and He will increase 
His blessings to you. Allah says, “and establish prayer. Indeed, prayer prohibits immorality 
and wrongdoing, and the remembrance of Allah is greater. And Allah knows that which 
you do.” (Al Ankaboot: 45). 
 
Translation: 
Edited and revised by Mostapha El Mouloudi 
Note: The English translation of the Quran and Hadith is an interpretation of their meanings and 
does not have the status of their original Arabic text. 
http://awqaf.ae/Uploads/Friday_Speach/26-02-2016-en.pdf </div>

On preserving the environment

All praise is due to Allah. He dispersed in the environment signs for those of vision. I bear witness that there is no deity save Allah...

Friday, March 25, 2016

Repel evil deeds by superior good deed

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG8YLLyF-2q4Zo0AcRlJ7zXWqWic1VuWrrVbPRPBQUxH8KzrVI9X7WZ2RvFtmKPP0xh_T1weKpkOWzq6SK43uGSN6dqL5pnvhgKu8IAhJJrl8ffg-J_ROH_RG7Uha7yrRtwVzqBWpkS8Y7/s1600/good-deeds-muslims.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="436" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG8YLLyF-2q4Zo0AcRlJ7zXWqWic1VuWrrVbPRPBQUxH8KzrVI9X7WZ2RvFtmKPP0xh_T1weKpkOWzq6SK43uGSN6dqL5pnvhgKu8IAhJJrl8ffg-J_ROH_RG7Uha7yrRtwVzqBWpkS8Y7/s640/good-deeds-muslims.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
 
All praise is due to Allah, the One and the Judge. He ordered us to counter the mischief with a 
better attitude. I bear witness that there is no deity save Allah, having no associates. To Him 
belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth and all the praises are due to Him. He is 
the Omnipotent. I also bear witness that our Master Muhammad is the servant of Allah and 
His Messenger. May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, his pure family and 
companions, and all those who follow them in righteousness till the Day of Judgment. 
 
As to what follows, 
O servants of Allah, I urge you and myself to be aware that you are asked to obey Him, the 
All-Just, in line with His orders: “and fear a Day when you will be returned to Allah. Then 
every soul will be compensated for what it earned, and they will not be treated unjustly.” 
(Al Baqara: 281). 
 
Dear Muslims, 
In the following two Ayas, Allah, the Almighty, makes it clear to His servants that goodness 
and evil are not equal and that evil should be resisted by a superior good. As such, if a person 
ill-treats us we should forgive him and treat him in kindness. Allah says, “and not equal are 
the good deed and the bad. Repel [evil] by that [deed] which is better; and thereupon the 
one whom between you and him is enmity [will become] as though he was a devoted 
friend. But none is granted it except those who are patient, and none is granted it except 
one having a great portion [of good].” (Fussilat: 34-35). On the same matter, Umar Ibn al 
Khattab, may Allah be pleased with him, said, “there is no better punishment for one who has 
disobeyed Allah with regard to you, than your obeying Allah with regard to him.” 
 
Indeed, those who fend off evil with good will find that their enemies become like close 
friends. This can be achieved by being patient when one feels angry, forbearing when 
confronted with ignorance, and forgiving when ill-treated. Such behaviours reflect 
understanding and wisdom and whoever possesses them shall be rewarded with abundant 
welfare and happiness in this world and in the Hereafter, as evidenced in this Aya: “and 
prevent evil with good - those will have the good consequence of [this] home.” (Ar-Raad: 
22). 
 
Glad tidings, therefore, to those who are patient and able to restrain anger, counter 
mistreatment with kindness and adorn themselves with good words and noble deeds. Verily, 
those are the true believers who will be rewarded with Paradise as their eternal dwelling, and 
who are praised by Allah, the Most Sublime, in the following Aya, “and when the ignorant 
address them [harshly], they say [words of] peace.” (Al Furqan: 63). That is: when 
mistreated by ignorant people, they do not treat them likewise, but rather forgive them and 
treat them in kindness. In this regard, a poet once said what it meant: if you were tested by 
him who has no share in the Hereafter, act as if you have never heard him or he had never 
spoken. 
 
O Worshipers, 
The Prophet pubh set an example for the believers in countering the misbehaviour with good 
conduct, both in words and deeds. In this regard, when Aisha, may Allah be pleased with her, 
was asked about the Prophet’s merits, she said, “Allah's Messenger pbuh neither talked in an 
insulting manner nor did he ever speak evil intentionally. Nor did he shout in the bazaar. He 
did not avenge a bad deed with a bad one, but forgave it, and thereafter overlooked it”. He 
pbuh also emphasised that the best of deeds is to be good to those who were evil to you. On 
this account, it was narrated that Uqba Ibn Nafei, may Allah be pleased with him, said, “when 
I asked the Prophet pbuh about the best of deeds, he said, ‘O Uqba, reconcile with whoever 
cuts you off, give to whoever deprives you, and turn away from whoever wrongs you.” It is, 
therefore, such a great thing to forgive who mistreats you, excuse people, be amongst those 
whose goodness is hoped for and people are safe from their evil, as well as those who show 
mercy to relatives and strangers, maintain connections with those who severed relations with 
them and forbearing when treated unjustly. 
 
Furthermore, not only the Prophet pbuh was good to people during his life, but he also 
enjoined them to be good to one another after him. He pbuh said, “so anybody who becomes a 
ruler of the followers of Muhammad and has the power to harm or benefit people then he 
should accept the good from the benevolent amongst them (Ansar) and overlook the faults of 
their wrongdoers.” In this Hadith, there is a call for forgiveness and reconciliation in line with 
Allah’s revelation: “and the retribution for an evil act is an evil one like it, but whoever 
pardons and makes reconciliation, his reward is [due] from Allah.” (Ash-Shura: 40). This 
means, Allah does not allow the reward of the doers of good be lost. Rather, He rewards them 
abundantly, praises them and expresses His love to and satisfaction with them. The Almighty 
says, “and who restrain anger and who pardon the people - and Allah loves the doers of 
good.” (Al Imran: 134). That is: those who restrain their anger and forgive others if they illtreat 
them, so that their hearts will be free of any hatred or envy. 
 
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDW5brs3FGyCywBxiQniR5PrZNUsppDiu6N5cpZWqe5tSTOMoJ6krqP4uJpx7O7XnWH4b0Fn58fVBHdhp2mZ7S5AKJi7CW066gZxO2PJy3HcTwysXyIfto1aVzHljwPbhnJe6rio_TJbCl/s1600/pray-muslim-women-111.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="390" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDW5brs3FGyCywBxiQniR5PrZNUsppDiu6N5cpZWqe5tSTOMoJ6krqP4uJpx7O7XnWH4b0Fn58fVBHdhp2mZ7S5AKJi7CW066gZxO2PJy3HcTwysXyIfto1aVzHljwPbhnJe6rio_TJbCl/s640/pray-muslim-women-111.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
 
Definitely, these are the ideal traits because by repelling a bad deed with a good one, hatred 
will turn into love and enmity into friendship. A good example on this is what once happened 
with a pious man who was on his way to the mosque when another man insulted him. He 
went close to him and said, “what is hidden from you from our affairs is greater.” Then he 
asked him, “is there anything that I can help you with?” At that moment, the abusing man felt 
ashamed. Thereupon, the pious man gave him thousand Dinars and threw his garment on him. 
The man was then very grateful and left hailing him. 
 
In another instance, a man once insulted one of the same pious man’s relatives, so he replied, 
“if what you said is the truth, then I implore to Allah to forgive me. And if you are telling a 
lie, may Allah forgive you.” Therefore, it is such a great conduct and honourable behaviour 
that one has to possess when he uses his reason and be considering in his judgment in line 
with Allah’s orders: “repel, by [means of] what is best, [their] evil.” (Al Mouminun: 96). 
By so doing, compassion will prevail amongst people, whether relatives, friends or 
neighbours. Thus, disputes will be resolved, happiness will spread and hearts get purified 
from animosity and envy. Indeed, the reward for such purification is no less than Paradise as 
one’s perpetual abode. 
 
In this regard, it was narrated that Anas Ibn Malik, may Allah be pleased with him, said, “we 
were sitting in the company of the Prophet pbuh when he said, ‘soon there will appear before 
you a person from amongst the dwellers of Paradise.’ Soon thereafter, a person from the 
Ansar (Helpers of Medina) appeared… When the Prophet pbuh got up and left, Abdullah Ibn 
Amr Ibnu Alass followed the man and stayed with him for three days. Then he said to him, ‘I 
heard the Prophet pbuh say on three occasions about you: ‘soon there will appear before you a 
person from amongst the dwellers of Paradise.’ And on each of these three occasions, it was 
you who appeared. I therefore decided to live with you and see what deeds you do. However, 
I did not see you doing many good deeds. How, then, have you reached the rank concerning 
which the Messenger of Allah pbuh said about your being from amongst the dwellers of 
Paradise?’ The man replied, ‘I do not do anything more than what you have seen. However, I 
do not bear any deceit to any Muslim nor do I envy anyone for the good which Allah has 
given him.” 
 
With this in mind, we beseech Allah, the Almighty, to continue blessing us with love and 
compassion and protect our hearts from the whispers of Satan. 
 
O Allah, may You guide us all to obey You and obey Your Messenger Muhammad pbuh and 
obey those You have commanded us to obey in line with Your orders: “O you who have 
believed, obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you” (AnNisaa: 
59). 
 
May Allah direct us all to the blessings of the Glorious Quran and the Sunna of His 
Messenger pbuh. 
 
I say this and ask Allah for forgiveness for me and you, so invoke Him for forgiveness, for He 
is the Most Forgiving, the Most Merciful. 
 
All praise is due to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds. I bear witness that there is no deity save 
Allah, having no associates. I also bear witness that our Master Muhammad is the servant of 
Allah and His Messenger. May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon our Master 
Muhammad, his pure family, companions, and all those who follow them in righteousness till 
the Day of Judgment. 
 
As to what follows, 
O worshipers, 
Please be aware that the first thing we should advise each other about is obeying Allah, the 
Most High, and respond to evil deeds with that which is better. It was narrated that Ibn Abbas, 
may Allah be pleased with them, said, “repel with forbearance when confronted with 
ignorance.” Indeed, this is such a great and honourable quality that brings about abundant 
benefits and lots of good impacts. It reflects submission to Allah’s instructions and 
disobedience to Satan who only wants to cause animosity between people as evidenced in this 
Aya, “and tell My servants to say that which is best. Indeed, Satan induces [dissension] 
among them. Indeed Satan is ever, to mankind, a clear enemy.” (Al Israa: 53). 
Please also bear in mind that repelling evil with good is a key element of social coherence. It 
is conducive to strengthening ties amongst people, allowing them to live in peace and 
tranquillity. Indeed, those who treat people in good, forgive their mistakes and be humble, 
Allah will bless them and receive the respect of people, and see their status raised. In this 
regard, the Prophet pbuh said, “Allah increases the honor of him who forgives, and no one 
will humble himself for Allah’s sake except that Allah raises his status.” 
 
Thus, all of us should reconsider always our judgments and take the lead step towards 
forgiving those who ill-treated us. We should also reconcile conflicts and be the key to 
spreading goodness amongst people. 
 
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifkb-kyGBFNx5Rz7mGWKsGkidZSOzTHdnSdiLHB_ami7-YkvjxNSOjGCuaOCOksW4WjV7YkWFtbLPcX9uAGMIV2hbRDpR1Yr8G3_8TLzPI88tqHhKcJE31e2lxPZhS24UgIieKFo7XHC3a/s1600/muslim-man-praying.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="370" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifkb-kyGBFNx5Rz7mGWKsGkidZSOzTHdnSdiLHB_ami7-YkvjxNSOjGCuaOCOksW4WjV7YkWFtbLPcX9uAGMIV2hbRDpR1Yr8G3_8TLzPI88tqHhKcJE31e2lxPZhS24UgIieKFo7XHC3a/s640/muslim-man-praying.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
 
That is said, please bear in mind that you are commanded to invoke peace and blessings on 
the Prophet pbuh. Allah, the Exalted is He says, “indeed, Allah confers blessing upon the 
Prophet, and His angels [ask Him to do so]. O you who have believed, ask [Allah to 
confer] blessing upon him and ask [Allah to grant him] peace.” (Al Ahzab: 56). 
O Allah, please confer Your blessings and grant peace upon our Prophet Muhammad pbuh, 
his family and all his companions. 
 
O Allah, may we ask you to purify our hearts, make true our words and grant us success to be 
forgiving and doers of good deeds, O Lord of the Worlds. 
 
May Allah have mercy on the honourable martyrs of our country and those of the coalition 
and gather them with the righteous. May Allah make their dwelling with the ones upon whom 
Allah has bestowed favour of the prophets and the steadfast affirmers of truth, O the Most 
Gracious the Most Forgiving. 
 
O Allah, please grant the best reward for the families of the martyrs and offer them patience 
and solace. May Allah grant victory to the soldiers of the Arab Coalition who gathered to 
restore the rights to their owners. O Lord, please be by their side and guide the Yemeni people 
 
to everything that is good. O Allah, make them rally for the word of truth and legitimacy, and 
bless them with welfare and stability, O the Most Generous. 
 
May Allah be pleased with the Rightly Guided Caliphs: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali, 
and all of the Companions. 
 
O Lord, may we ask You to help us with what gets us closer to Paradise and furthers us from 
Hell. O Allah, we seek Your grace to admit us, our parents, whoever has done a favour to us 
and all Muslims to Your Paradise. 
 
O Allah, we pray to You to grant Your forgiveness and reward to who built this mosque and 
to his or her parents as well as to anyone who gave to this mosque. O Allah, we also 
supplicate to You to forgive whoever built a mosque where Your name is remembered. 
O Allah, make this gathering one of compassion, and our dispersion after it one that is 
infallible. O Allah, do not let anyone amongst us be deprived or desperate. 
 
We pray to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds, to protect the UAE against any of temptations, both 
apparent and hidden, and continue blessing the UAE with safety and security. 
 
O Allah, we implore you to send upon us wealthy rain and make us not amongst those who 
are desperate. O Allah, relieve us! O Allah, relieve us! O Allah, relieve us! O Lord, provide us 
from the blessings of the sky a beneficial rain and make our crops grow. 
 
Our Lord, give us in this world that which is good and in the Hereafter that which is good, 
and save us from the torment of the Fire. 
 
O Servants of Allah “indeed, Allah orders justice and good conduct and giving to 
relatives and forbids immorality and bad conduct and oppression. He admonishes you 
that perhaps you will be reminded.” (An-Nahl: 90). 
 
Remember Allah and He will remember you. Be grateful of His benevolence and He will 
increase His blessings to you. Allah says, “and establish prayer. Indeed, prayer prohibits 
immorality and wrongdoing, and the remembrance of Allah is greater. And Allah knows 
that which you do.” (Al Ankaboot: 45). 
 
Translation: 
Edited and revised by Mostapha El Mouloudi 
Note: The English translation of the Quran and Hadith is an interpretation of their meanings 
and does not have the status of their original Arabic text. 
http://awqaf.ae/Jumaa.aspx?Lang=EN&SectionID=15&RefID=6020</div>

Repel evil deeds by superior good deed

All praise is due to Allah, the One and the Judge. He ordered us to counter the mischief with a better attitude. I bear witness that th...

Friday, March 25, 2016

Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains!!!

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
 <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBS2ImC8KviUwnK8ioL2JjeDzg5LKmoGyFruUd5HlVeR8rX5rVzBr7oboqn2SSjDRrroaXR5TgR6I_Bzijojes7ZMaqMHo2jhAMc0AEWfm7-OlPTBSBg-TSIkanjZjGOFdrtPzYWQDjXvA/s1600/parents-muslims.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="368" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBS2ImC8KviUwnK8ioL2JjeDzg5LKmoGyFruUd5HlVeR8rX5rVzBr7oboqn2SSjDRrroaXR5TgR6I_Bzijojes7ZMaqMHo2jhAMc0AEWfm7-OlPTBSBg-TSIkanjZjGOFdrtPzYWQDjXvA/s640/parents-muslims.JPG" width="640" /></a> 
 
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.” 
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. 
 
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.) 
 
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. 
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?” 
 
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” 
 
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report: 
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. 
 
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. 
 
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works. 
 
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page. 
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.” 
 
Also see:Living With a Computer(July 1982) "The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows 
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.” 
 
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.” 
 
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.” 
 
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock. 
 
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level. 
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV. 
 
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration. 
 
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules. 
 
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure. 
 
About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man namedFrederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared. 
 
More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.” 
 
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.” 
 
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to theHarvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. 
 
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers. 
 
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.” 
 
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it? 
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive. 
 
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction. 
 
Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom). 
 
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver. 
 
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. 
 
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake: 
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.” 
 
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.” 
 
I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence. 
 
By NICHOLAS CARR 
http://www.uaekhutba.com/index.php/articles/51-health/87-is-google-making-us-stupid-what-the-internet-is-doing-to-our-brains 
 </div>

Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains!!!

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave ...

Friday, March 25, 2016

What is a Madhab? Why is it necessary to follow one?

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdd-Afn2FZIKJX9wn3oJE1epKZpbFvZRkOMd7h4-IEshrXAhdKhTPtYty_94ZDsm3ouIOmVqMQbk3qT-xdq9thpXzOTfJNewfETG_xz28W6X50r89YcqqXdaW5pw9n8eFG2aRc6l7hY-we/s1600/forgive-others-muslims-111.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="392" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdd-Afn2FZIKJX9wn3oJE1epKZpbFvZRkOMd7h4-IEshrXAhdKhTPtYty_94ZDsm3ouIOmVqMQbk3qT-xdq9thpXzOTfJNewfETG_xz28W6X50r89YcqqXdaW5pw9n8eFG2aRc6l7hY-we/s640/forgive-others-muslims-111.jpg" width="640" /></a> 
 
"The slogans we hear today about 'following the Qur'an and sunna instead of following the madhhabs' are wide of the mark...In reality it is a great leap backward, a call to abandon centuries of detailed, case-by-case Islamic scholarship in finding and spelling out the commands of the Qur'an and sunna," argues Nuh Ha Mim Keller. 
 
The word madhhab is derived from an Arabic word meaning "to go" or "to take as a way", and refers to a mujtahid's choice in regard to a number of interpretive possibilities in deriving the rule of Allah from the primary texts of the Qur'an and hadith on a particular question. In a larger sense, a madhhab represents the entire school of thought of a particular mujtahid Imam, such as Abu Hanifa, Malik, Shafi'i, or Ahmad--together with many first-rank scholars that came after each of these in their respective schools, who checked their evidences and refined and upgraded their work. 
 
The mujtahid Imams were thus explainers, who operationalized the Qur'an and sunna in the specific shari'a rulings in our lives that are collectively known as fiqh or "jurisprudence". In relation to our din or "religion", this fiqh is only part of it, for the religious knowledge each of us possesses is of three types. The first type is the general knowledge of tenets of Islamic belief in the oneness of Allah, in His angels, Books, messengers, the prophethood of Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace), and so on. All of us may derive this knowledge directly from the Qur'an and hadith, as is also the case with a second type of knowledge, that of general Islamic ethical principles to do good, avoid evil, cooperate with others in good works, and so forth. Every Muslim can take these general principles, which form the largest and most important part of his religion, from the Qur'an and hadith. 
 
The third type of knowledge is that of the specific understanding of particular divine commands and prohibitions that make up the shari'a. Here, because of both the nature and the sheer number of the Qur'an and hadith texts involved, people differ in the scholarly capacity to understand and deduce rulings from them. But all of us have been commanded to live them in our lives, in obedience to Allah, and so Muslims are of two types, those who can do this by themselves, and they are the mujtahid Imams; and those who must do so by means of another, that is, by following a mujtahid Imam, in accordance with Allah's word in Surat al-Nahl, 
" Ask those who recall, if you know not " (Qur'an 16:43), and in Surat al-Nisa, " If they had referred it to the Messenger and to those of authority among them, then those of them whose task it is to find it out would have known the matter " (Qur'an 4:83), in which the phrase those of them whose task it is to find it out, expresses the words "alladhina yastanbitunahu minhum", referring to those possessing the capacity to draw inferences directly from the evidence, which is called in Arabic istinbat. 
 
These and other verses and hadiths oblige the believer who is not at the level of istinbat or directly deriving rulings from the Qur'an and hadith to ask and follow someone in such rulings who is at this level. It is not difficult to see why Allah has obliged us to ask experts, for if each of us were personally responsible for evaluating all the primary texts relating to each question, a lifetime of study would hardly be enough for it, and one would either have to give up earning a living or give up ones din, which is why Allah says in surat al-Tawba, in the context of jihad: 
" Not all of the believers should go to fight. Of every section of them, why does not one part alone go forth, that the rest may gain knowledge of the religion and admonish their people when they return, that perhaps they may take warning " (Qur'an 9:122). 
 
The slogans we hear today about "following the Qur'an and sunna instead of following the madhhabs" are wide of the mark, for everyone agrees that we must follow the Qur'an and the sunna of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace). 
 
The point is that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) is no longer alive to personally teach us, and everything we have from him, whether the hadith or the Qur'an, has been conveyed to us through Islamic scholars. So it is not a question of whether or not to take our din from scholars, but rather, from which scholars. 
 
And this is the reason we have madhhabs in Islam: because the excellence and superiority of the scholarship of the mujtahid Imams--together with the traditional scholars who followed in each of their schools and evaluated and upgraded their work after them--have met the test of scholarly investigation and won the confidence of thinking and practicing Muslims for all the centuries of Islamic greatness. 
 
The reason why madhhabs exist, the benefit of them, past, present, and future, is that they furnish thousands of sound, knowledge-based answers to Muslims questions on how to obey Allah. Muslims have realized that to follow a madhhab means to follow a super scholar who not only had a comprehensive knowledge of the Qur'an and hadith texts relating to each issue he gave judgements on, but also lived in an age a millennium closer to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and his Companions, when taqwa or "godfearingness" was the norm--both of which conditions are in striking contrast to the scholarship available today. 
 
While the call for a return to the Qur'an and sunna is an attractive slogan, in reality it is a great leap backward, a call to abandon centuries of detailed, case-by-case Islamic scholarship in finding and spelling out the commands of the Qur'an and sunna, a highly sophisticated, interdisciplinary effort by mujtahids, hadith specialists, Qur'anic exegetes, lexicographers, and other masters of the Islamic legal sciences. To abandon the fruits of this research, the Islamic shari'a, for the following of contemporary sheikhs who, despite the claims, are not at the level of their predecessors, is a replacement of something tried and proven for something at best tentative. 
 
The rhetoric of following the shari'a without following a particular madhhab is like a person going down to a car dealer to buy a car, but insisting it not be any known make--neither a Volkswagen nor Rolls-Royce nor Chevrolet--but rather "a car, pure and simple". Such a person does not really know what he wants; the cars on the lot do not come like that, but only in kinds. The salesman may be forgiven a slight smile, and can only point out that sophisticated products come from sophisticated means of production, from factories with a division of labor among those who test, produce, and assemble the many parts of the finished product. 
 
It is the nature of such collective human efforts to produce something far better than any of us alone could produce from scratch, even if given a forge and tools, and fifty years, or even a thousand. And so it is with the shari'a, which is more complex than any car because it deals with the universe of human actions and a wide interpretative range of sacred texts. This is why discarding the monumental scholarship of the madhhabs in operationalizing the Qur'an and sunna in order to adopt the understanding of a contemporary sheikh is not just a mistaken opinion. It is scrapping a Mercedes for a go-cart. 
 
Sheikh Nuh Ha Mim Keller, 1995 
http://www.uaekhutba.com/index.php/articles/53-essential-religious-knowledge/33-what-is-a-madhab-why-is-it-necessary-to-follow-one 
 </div>

What is a Madhab? Why is it necessary to follow one?

"The slogans we hear today about 'following the Qur'an and sunna instead of following the madhhabs' are wide of the mark...

Friday, March 25, 2016

Finale Championnat du Monde karate (Egypt Vs France)

Finale Championnat du Monde karate (Egypt Vs France)

Karate competition Egypt wins Final.

Saturday, March 12, 2016

Team Iran. World Karate Kata Championships

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
 
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/j9r-PWKD0NA/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="366" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/j9r-PWKD0NA?feature=player_embedded" width="620"></iframe></div>
 
Iran wins Bronze medal in Kata competition. 
 
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ml7OtFisJsQ/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="366" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ml7OtFisJsQ?feature=player_embedded" width="620"></iframe></div>
 
 
What is Karate?  
The word karate is a combination of two kanji : kara, meaning empty, and te, meaning hand; thus, karate means "empty hand." 
 
What is Kata? 
The word kata comes from the Japanese meaning formal exercise. In Japan kata is not just something that is done in the martial arts. Kata is a series of movements and techniques that are practiced in a pattern. Kata is similar to shadow boxing except each move is prearranged and choreographed in a geometrical pattern. 
 
Each kata is designed to teach a central principle or a set of common technique. Each kata is done at a certain speed and tempo. Some kata the speed varies from move to move while others are done at one speed and at one tempo. Through kata we learn proper stance, focus and transition between technique. </div>

Team Iran. World Karate Kata Championships

Iran wins Bronze medal in Kata competition. What is Karate? The word karate is a combination of two kanji : kara, meaning empty...

Saturday, March 12, 2016

First Night in the Grave

First Night in the Grave

First Night in the Grave | Be Prepared! - Mufti Menk

Friday, March 11, 2016

Hell has been veiled with desires, and Paradise has been veiled with hardships

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLA20QPxjPOb4VJyCnW9AVb_hLSslKK2gnxhMEtFzHD3seTJbupr2sIv52uezwsOtqAaAG7ysCk_RY7E4m9VyHFokPwxil-AtwFeLEAVU84iJb5w4aL_bxArxi83c6RGOq1gra_DYhznTw/s1600/Allah-dollilah.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLA20QPxjPOb4VJyCnW9AVb_hLSslKK2gnxhMEtFzHD3seTJbupr2sIv52uezwsOtqAaAG7ysCk_RY7E4m9VyHFokPwxil-AtwFeLEAVU84iJb5w4aL_bxArxi83c6RGOq1gra_DYhznTw/s640/Allah-dollilah.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
 
Paradise is very high, and ascending to lofty places takes a great deal of effort. The way to Paradise is filled with things that go against human wishes and inclinations. This needs strong determination and willpower. In a hadith narrated by Bukhari and Muslim from Abu Hurayrah, the Messenger of Allah, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, said: "Hell has been veiled with desires, and Paradise has been veiled with hardships." 
The version recorded by Muslim says "surrounded" instead of "veiled." [Jami al-Usul, 10/521, no. 8069] 
 
An-Nisa’i, Tirmidhi and Abu Dawud report from Abu Hurayrah that the Messenger of Allah, sallallahu `alaihi wa sallam said: 
"When Allah created Paradise, He told Jibril, ‘Go and look at it.’ So he went and looked at it, then he came back and said: ‘By Your Glory, no one will hear of it but he will enter it." So He surrounded it with hardships and siad, ‘Go and look at it.’ So he went and looked at it, then came back and said: ‘By Your Glory, I fear that noone will enter it."[Jami al-usul, 10/520, no. 8068. Tirmidhi said: It is a gharib sahih hasan hadith] 
 
An-Nawawi commented on the first hadith: 
"This is an example of the beautiful, eloquent and concise speech of which the Prophet, sallallahu `alaihi wa sallam, was capable, in which he gives a beautiful analogy. It means that nothing will help you to reach Paradise except going through hardships, and nothing will lead you to Hell but whims and desires. Both are veiled as described, and whoever tears down the veil will reach what was hidden behind it. The veil of Paradise is torn down by going through hardships, and the veil of Hell is torn down by giving in to whims and desires. Hardship includes striving consistently and patiently in worship, restraining one’s anger, forgiving, being patient, giving in charity, being kind to those who mistreat you, resisting physical desires, etc." [Sharh an-Nawawi `ala Muslim, 17/165] 
 
Source: Dr. `Umar Al-Ashqar 
The Final Day – Paradise and Hell In the Light of the Quran and Sunnah© 1999 IIPH, Riyadh</div>

Hell has been veiled with desires, and Paradise has been veiled with hardships

Paradise is very high, and ascending to lofty places takes a great deal of effort. The way to Paradise is filled with things that go aga...

Friday, March 11, 2016

Martial Arts Practice & Technic

Martial Arts Practice & Technic

Chinese Wushu martial arts in Iran !!!

Friday, March 11, 2016

Close Look at the Bible by Yusuf Estes

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5Yq2btEeBGxFX45bTF5H0UYMn45Cfk-Rmsa61Z5Kz8kHqrekf1Su7BIAXW4-NHL6i6RVRdTbrtQv8R0Lu3Ggauf27v0wasNVUjvhMBSKzQBpvRECRoR70YRP_cWbv22yfp8Dgzhh56DHT/s1600/love-for-Allah.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="344" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5Yq2btEeBGxFX45bTF5H0UYMn45Cfk-Rmsa61Z5Kz8kHqrekf1Su7BIAXW4-NHL6i6RVRdTbrtQv8R0Lu3Ggauf27v0wasNVUjvhMBSKzQBpvRECRoR70YRP_cWbv22yfp8Dgzhh56DHT/s640/love-for-Allah.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
 
First of all, let me begin by saying that I am a former Christian, preacher (Yusuf Estes), minister of music and organist for a long number of years in the Disciples of Christ Church, Baptist, Methodist churches and The Church of God. I totally and completely accepted the teachings and concepts of salvation within the Christian church many years ago. My parents were very religious and their parents were also very instrumental in building and supporting the work of the church throughout their entire lives. So, it is not my aim to discredit the efforts of those who came before me whatsoever. This is totally the opposite of my purpose in this presentation. 
 
Second, I am still most active in the spreading of the True Word of God as much as HE will allow me to be. I have found that some of the teachings of the translations of the Bible contain errors and mistakes which must be examined and thought through so as to bring about a better understanding for both the Christians and the non-Christians, especially those of the Muslim (Islam) faith. 
 
Third, I am presently an institutional chaplain and I hold the position of Delegate to the United Nations Peace Conference for the World's Religious Leaders. As such I hold all the leaders of other religions in proper regard and with due respect. Many of my associates and co-workers are from the Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Hindu faiths. 
 
Therefore, it is not my intention to cause people to loose their belief in God, His divinely-inspired prophets and messengers, or the holy scriptures that they brought. I humbly request all who read and study these pages to be considerate of those who are committed to believe in the scriptures of the Bible and not use this material as a tool for attacking and harming the faiths of others. The opposite is what I request the reader to do. Please take time to learn the materials and then share in a positive light with those whom you honestly feel can handle a discussion on this topic without being confrontational. 
 
May Almighty God guide all of us to the truth, amen. 
 
An examination of the Bible is necessary today because of the many questions being raised by religious people of all circles, including Jews and Christians, as to its inconsistency with contemporary church teachings as well as its inconsistency within itself. 
 
Today, there are thousands of different versions of the Bible in circulation and the transcript has been freely translated from one language to another numerous times. According to Bible scholars themselves, the original scripture is no longer extant. It is nowhere to be found. We have no idea if what we are reading and implementing into our lives and belief system is, indeed, God's teaching. 
 
Muslims believe in the same Omnipotent, All-powerful, Unseen God that the Jews have believed in since Adam. However, unlike the Jews, Muslims join in with the Christians by also believing in Jesus as the "Christ"; "Messiah"; "Logos"; and "Miraculous Conception"; as well as all the previous Biblical prophets and their original scriptures that they brought. Muslims also believe that God is merciful and just to His creatures. So, they deny the concept of the 'Original Sin' [all children are born into the sins of their parents] and the 'Sacrificial Lamb' concept which requires the blood of Jesus, peace be upon him, to atone for the sins of the sinners. This being the case, how can Muslims say that God is just and that His revelation, the Bible, is corrupted? Where is it in God's great plan that His revelation loses all credibility? These are all very excellent questions. 
 
It is a known fact that Jesus was regarded by his followers as a prophet and that what he preached was written down into physical form by his disciples. However, God placed the responsibility on humans to preserve the integrity of this message over time. When the people failed in their duty, it was made necessary for the Holy Quran to come into existence in order to correct the teachings that were changed. By God's mercy He revealed His will once again to Muhammad over 600 years later, and his companions similarly wrote it down and compiled it into what became known as The Holy Quran. By God's justice He promised that He would preserve it therefore making it the last revelation to humanity. Today an actual seventh century Quran, complete and intact, is on display in a museum in Istanbul, Turkey. 
 
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/c3U0DV1yuvo/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="366" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/c3U0DV1yuvo?feature=player_embedded" width="620"></iframe></div>
 
Amazing Revelation 
 
Strange as it may seem I came across astonishing information. By Allah's Mercy I have learned the Arabic language sufficient enough to read the Holy Quran in the original language. I have found the answers to problems of understanding meanings of scriptures in the Bible while studying the Holy Quran. 
 
Every Arabic Quran in the world today is, letter for letter, identical to this ancient script. Due to this preservation, the Quran exists today exactly as it did over 1,400 year ago in a language which is still alive today. I have found the Quran's teachings to be quite clear, consistent, and practical for application even in today's so called "modern world." 
 
The whole idea behind this work is to present the clear truth about the Bible, the Quran and the two religions of Islam and Christianity. If you do not have a good Bible, it would be a good idea to acquire at least two. Namely, the King James Version (based on the 1611 AD edition) and the Revised Standard Version (published in 1953). As you go through the many Biblical inconsistencies which I will be referring to in this material, please refer back to your Bible and examine it objectively. 
 
Do not let pride, ego, bias or prejudice affect your judgment as you review the pages. If you do not free your mind and heart from these obstructions, then it will be near to impossible to see the light of truth to which we will be referring so often. 
 
Bear in mind also, that if a book were revealed from Almighty God to the humans, it should not have even a single mistake or error anywhere in it. Otherwise, it would indicate that it is not from a Perfect God, but rather from an imperfect human. 
 
While traveling around the world, I have found that many Jews and Christians are opening their eyes to this fact and are willfully accepting Islam and the Last and Final Testament of Almighty God (the Holy Quran) wholeheartedly. 
 
We have to examine the facts in order to be able to better understand the value of this information on our society today. One statement that is clear and repeated often these days is that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world today and the largest religion in the world today with over 1.5 billion souls claiming to be Muslims. The word of God has been preserved in the Holy Quran and has been changed in the Bible. So, I am merely attempting to produce material which will help to clarify the matter. Due to the many years of traditional religious teachings and upbringing, it may be very difficult for you to accept this. If you are sincere in your heart and pray to the One Who Created you in the first place, then it will be totally up to Him to Guide you to all truth, not me. Islam is a complete Way of Life and it is based on total surrender to Almighty God, submission to Him in complete obedience and sincerity and in peace. 
 
"Is 'King James' Version the Actual Bible?" 
 
Note: The word "Bible" comes from the Koine Greek word "biblios" and it simply means the same as the word "book" in English. Nowhere in the Bible do we find the word "Bible." However, it is interesting to note the word "kitab" (Bible in Arabic) appears many times in the Quran, referring to the Bible and the People of the Book (Jews and Christians). 
 
Let me begin by saying that the King James "version" of the Bible is in English. There was no English language until the year 1066 AD when the Normans invaded the Saxxons. Therefore the English Bible cannot be anything like what any of the prophets spoke or understood, as it did not exist in their times. 
 
Next, my grandfather, who was a devout and wonderful Christian man gave a gift of the Holy Bible to my sisters and I almost fifty years ago. It was an authorized version of the Bible, being The Revised Standard Version of the Bible which was a revised version of the American Standard Version, published in 1901, which was a version of the King James Version, published in 1611, which was revised and corrected for the first time in 1612, etc. I was very much impressed with the easier to read text and clarification of some of the wording which was presented in this version and began to read the Bible on a daily basis for hours at a time. The removal of the Elizabethton English terms, phrases and expressions made the Bible a more accessible and understandable and intimate Book for me. But that is not all the RSV did for me and many others, as well. 
 
My love and respect for the Word of God increased the more that I spent time reading and understanding the message. The Bible became my most prized and respected book in my life. I often turned to it throughout the rest of my life in times of joy, happiness, sadness, troubles and pain. It was my compass, my road map, my weather vane and my friend. However, there were still some problems with this IMPROVED VERSION of the Holy Bible. It began to disturb and concern me to the extent that I made consultation with my father, who was also an ordained minister and student of the Bible since childhood. Based on his research and background in the origin and sources for modern day Christianity, I began to go deeper into the problems which had plagued my thinking and faith since childhood. 
 
I prayed to Almighty God and then found the answers to some of the problems were spelled out very clearly in the very beginning of the exact same book. I have that book lying in front of me on my desk as I write this article and would like to quote to you from some of the PREFACE page iii and iv: 
 
"The King James Version has with good reason been termed 'the noblest monument of English prose.' Its revisers in 1881 expressed admiration of 'its simplicity, its dignity, its power, its happy turns of express... the music of its cadences, and the felicities of its rhythm.' It entered, as no other book has, into the making of the personal character and the public institutions of the English-speaking peoples. We owe to it an incalculable debt." 
 
"Yet the King James Version has grave defects. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the development of Biblical studies and the discovery of many manuscripts more ancient than those upon which the King James Version was based, made it manifest that these defects are so many and so serious as to call for a revision of the English translation. The task was undertaken, by authority of the Church of England, in 1870. The English Revised Version of the Bible was published in 1881-1885; and the American Standard Version, its variant embodying the preferences of the American scholars associated in the work, was published in 1901." 
 
"Because of the unhappy experience with unauthorized publications in the two decades between 1881 and 1901, which tampered with the text of the English Revised Version in the supposed interest of the American public, the American Standard Version was copyrighted, to protect the text from unauthorized changes. In 1928 this copyright was acquired by the International Council of Religious Education, and thus passed into the ownership of the churches of the United States and Canada which were associated in this Council through their boards of education and publication." 
 
".... decision was reached that there is need for a thorough revision of the version of 1901..""In 1937 the revision was authorized by vote of the Council." 
 
"Thirty-two scholars have served as members of the Committee charged with making the revision, and they have secured the review and counsel of an Advisory Board of fifty representatives of the co-operating denominations." 
 
"Each section has submitted its work to the scrutiny of the members of the charter of the Committee requires that all changes be agreed upon by a two-thirds vote of the total membership of the Committee." 
 
"The problem of establishing the correct Hebrew and Aramaic text of the Old Testament is very different from the corresponding problem in the New Testament." 
 
"For the New Testament we have a large number of Greek manuscripts, preserving many variant forms of the text. Some of them were made only two or three centuries later than the original composition of the books." 
 
"For the Old Testament only late manuscripts survive, all (with the exception of the Dead Sea Texts of Isaiah and Habakkuk and some fragments of other books) based on a standardized form of the text established many centuries after the books were written." 
 
"The present revision is based on the consonantal Hebrew and Aramaic text as fixed early in the Christian era and revised by Jewish scholars (the 'Masoretes') of the sixth to ninth centuries. The vowel signs, which were added by the Masoretes, are accepted also in the main, but where a more probable and convincing reading can be obtained by assuming different vowels, this has been done." 
 
"... vowel points are less ancient and [less] reliable than the consonants." 
 
"Departures from the consonantal text of the best manuscripts have been made only where it seems clear that errors in copying had been made before the text was standardized" 
 
"Most of the corrections adopted are based on the ancient versions [translations into Greek Aramaic, Syriac, and Latin], which were made before the time of the Masoretic revision and therefore reflect earlier forms of the text." 
 
"Sometimes it is evident that the text has suffered in transmission, but none of the versions provides a satisfactory restoration. Here we can only follow the best judgment of competent scholars as to the most probable reconstruction of the original text." 
 
"Many difficulties and obscurities, of course, remain." 
 
"Where the choice between two meanings is particularly difficult or doubtful, we have given an alternative rendering in a footnote." 
 
"If in the judgment of the Committee the meaning of a passage is quite uncertain or obscure, either because of corruption in the text or because of the inadequacy of our present knowledge of the language, that fact is indicated by a note." 
 
"It should not be assumed, however, that the Committee was entirely sure or unanimous concerning every rendering not so indicated." 
 
"To record all minority views was obviously out of the question." 
 
"The King James Version of the New Testament was based upon a Greek text that was marred by mistakes, containing the accumulated errors of fourteen centuries of manuscript copying." 
 
"It was essentially the Greek text of the New Testament as edited by Beza, 1589, who closely followed that published by Erasmus, 1516-1535, which was based upon a few medieval manuscripts." 
 
"The earliest and best of the eight manuscripts which Erasmus consulted was from the tenth century, and [yet] he made the least use of it because it differed most from the commonly received text; Beza had access to two manuscripts of great value, dating from the fifth and sixth centuries, but he made very little use of them because they differed from the text published by Erasmus." 
 
"We now possess many more ancient manuscripts of the New Testament, and are far better equipped to seek to recover the original wording of the Greek text. The evidence for the text of the books of the New Testament is better than any other ancient book, both in the number of extant manuscripts and in the nearness of the date of some of these manuscripts to the date when the book was originally written." 
 
The words are in plain English. The second paragraph says it all, "Yet, the King James Version has grave defects. 
 
Therefore, we must conclude the "King James Version" is NOT the Actual Bible sent by God to mankind. 
 
Contradictions in The Bible? 
 
First and foremost, let me be perfectly clear on the position of Muslims regarding the authenticity of the Holy Bible. It is a condition of faith for believers to believe in all of God's Books and scripture as stipulated by the Quran, the Last and Final Testament from Almighty God to mankind, that the previous scriptures, including of course the Old Testament (Arabic = Torah), the Psalms (Arabic = Zabur) and the New Testament (Arabic = Injeel) were all from Almighty God (Arabic = Allah) in their original form. The beginning verses of the Quran clearly spell out the position of the 'Believer' with regard to these scriptures. As the translation from Arabic may be rendered regarding the conditions of believers: 
 
"And they (believers) believe in what is being sent down to you (Muhammad, peace be upon him) and they believe in what has been sent down before (previous Holy scriptures to Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and of course Jesus, peace be upon them all)." 
[Noble Quran 2:4] 
 
Therefore, it must be established that Muslims do accept that Almighty Allah did send down many Holy Books and He did allow the people to alter, change, delete and make additions to these Books, and as such, they can not longer be considered as the "Word of God" in their present condition. This is something immediately agreed upon by all qualified Biblical scholars. 
 
Incidentally, there is sufficient evidence in the Quran to prove the remainder of the Bible still contains many of the original teachings and sayings of the prophets to whom the various scriptures were revealed. 
 
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaJMIPUFzu-67LB77yinWuTPAeaI0QTGfhlyxE_hXCpAEHwhN4QluheaeEPaZ6V_OCP6Lu4G-BPb6BXXpI2op2YLhqGyn_TzdbtHPo1i4BukNaChSQyK0ffan8EtS0sxzdsD49gZ00gghf/s1600/sad.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaJMIPUFzu-67LB77yinWuTPAeaI0QTGfhlyxE_hXCpAEHwhN4QluheaeEPaZ6V_OCP6Lu4G-BPb6BXXpI2op2YLhqGyn_TzdbtHPo1i4BukNaChSQyK0ffan8EtS0sxzdsD49gZ00gghf/s640/sad.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
 
From the previous chapter we can easily determine that the original source of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments have been lost and are no longer extant in any language. What has remained and been referred to for translations, is in fact nothing more than old copies that do not necessarily agree with each other and there does exist in them obvious corruption in additions and deletions. Additionally, they are not complete and do not have full agreement of the scholars of the Bible as to their meanings. 
 
Just to offer a few of the many contradictions and errors of that which is being presented as the "Word of God" in the Bible I would like to quote the research of scholars of the Bible: 
 
VERSES THAT CONTRADICT THEMSELVES 
 
Genesis 6:3 and Genesis 11:11 - Life limited to 120 years? 
Genesis 32:30 and Exodus 33:20 - Jacob's life was preserved? 
Exodus 4:22 and Jeremiah 31:9 - Who was God's firstborn? 
Numbers 23:19 and Genesis 6:6-7 - Does God repent or not? 
2 Samuel 6:23 and 2 Samuel 21:8 - Did Michael have children? 
2 Samuel 8:4 and 1 Chronicles 18:4 - 700 or 7000 horsemen? 
2 Samuel 8:9-10 and 1 Chronicles 18:9-10 - Toi or Tou? Hadadezer or Hadarezer? Joram or Hadoram? 
2 Samuel 10:18 and 1 Chronicles 19:18 - 700 or 7000 charioteers? 40,000 horsemen or footmen? Captain's name? 
2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1 - Who provoked David? 
2 Samuel 24:9 and 1 Chronicles 21:5 - 800,000 or 100,000? 
2 Samuel 24:13 and 1 Chronicles 21:11-12 - 7 or 3 years? 
1 Kings 4:26 and 2 Chronicles 9:25 - 40,000 or 4,000 stalls? 
1 Kings 5:15-16 and 2 Chronicles 2:2 - 3300 or 3600? 
1 Kings 7:26 and 2 Chronicles 4:5 - 2000 or 3000 baths? 
2 Kings 8:26 and 2 Chronicles 22:2 - 22 or 42 years old? 
2 Kings 24:8 and 2 Chronicles 36:9 - 18 or 8 years old? 3 months or 3 months and 10 days? 
Ezra 2:65 and Nehemiah 7:67 - 200 or 245 singers? 
Matthew 1:12 and Luke 3:27 - Who was Salathiel's father? 
Matthew 1:16 and Luke 3:23 - Who was Joseph's father? 
Matthew 9:18 and Mark 5:22-23 - Dead or not? 
Matthew 10:5-10 and Mark 6:7-8 - Bring a staff or not? 
Matthew 15:21-22 and Mark 7:24-26 - The woman was of Canaan or Greece? 
Matthew 20:29-30 and Mark 10:46-47 - One or two beggars? 
Matthew 21:1-2 and Mark 11:1-2 - What happened to the ass? 
Matthew 26:74-75 and Mark 14:72 - Before the cock crow once or twice? 
Matthew 27:5 and Acts 1:18 - How did Judas die? 
John 3:16 and Psalms 2:7 - Only begotten son? 
John 5:31 and John 8:14 - Was Jesus' record true or not? 
 
VERSES THAT CONTRADICT THE TRINITARIAN DOCTRINE AND/OR THE DIVINITY OF JESUS: 
 
Exodus 33:20, John 1:18, 1 Timothy 6:16 - No one saw God. 
Isaiah 42:8 - Do not praise and worship images. 
Isaiah 45:1 - "Anointed" does not mean "God". 
Matthew 14:23, 19:13, 26:39, 27:46, 26:42-44 - Jesus prayed. 
Matthew 24:36 - Jesus was not all-knowing. 
Matthew 26:39 - Jesus and God had different wills. 
Matthew 28:18 - All power was given to Jesus. 
Mark 1:35, 6:46, 14:35-36 - Jesus prayed. 
Mark 10:17-18 and Luke 18:18-19 - Jesus denied divinity. 
Mark 12:28-29 - God is one. 
Mark 13:32 - Jesus was not all-knowing. 
Mark 16:19 and Luke 22:69 - Jesus at the right hand of God. 
Luke 3:21, 5:16, 6:12, 9:18, 9:28, 11:1-4, 22:41 - Jesus prayed. 
Luke 4:18, 9:48, 10:16 - Jesus was from God. 
Luke 7:16, 13:33, 24:18-19 - Jesus was a prophet. 
Luke 10:21 - Jesus gave thanks. 
Luke 23:46 - The spirit of Jesus was commended to God. 
John 4:19 - Jesus was a prophet. 
John 4:23-24 - Worship in spirit and truth. 
John 14:28 - One was greater than the other. 
John 5:19, 5:30, 7:28, 8:28 - Jesus was helpless. 
John 5:20 - The Father showed the son. 
John 5:30 and 6:38 - Jesus and God had different wills. 
John 5:31-32 - Jesus' witness was not true. 
John 6:11 and 11:41-42 - Jesus gave thanks. 
John 6:32 - The Father was the provider, not the son. 
John 7:29, 16:5, 16:28 - Jesus was from God. 
John 7:16, 12:49, 14:24, 17:14 - Jesus' words were not his. 
John 8:42 - Jesus did not come of himself. 
John 10:29 - "My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all." 
John 14:1 - Jesus said, "...believe also in me." 
John 14:16, 17:1, 17:9, 17:11, 17:15 - Jesus prayed. 
John 14:31 and 15:10 - Jesus followed commands. 
John 17:6-8 - "I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me." 
John 20:17 - Jesus had a God. 
Acts 2:22 - Jesus was "a man approved of God." 
Romans 8:34 - Jesus was an intercessor. 
1 Timothy 2:5 - Jesus was the mediator between God and humans. 
 
Incidentally, these are really only some selections of contradictions and inaccuracies found in the modern versions of the Bible. There are many more but for the sake of time and space we have limited ourselves to those listed above. 
 
Again I would like to repeat, the Muslim must believe in all original texts coming from Almighty God. The only subject being discussed here is whether or not the Bible being offered today in the English language is in fact, the real "Bible". 
 
Who is The God of The Bible? 
 
"ONE" - SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN LITERALLY 
 
[Mark 10:6-9 and John 14:20, 15:1-7, 17:11, 17:18-23, 17:26] 
 
There are many verses in the Bible that speak of Jesus and God as being "one". 
But does this necessarily mean that Jesus is God? If you read the six selections above then you will see that we cannot take the word "one" so literally. If we do, then we are God, as Jesus said, "...they also may be one in us" and "...they may be one, even as we are one." What the Bible means when it says that Jesus is "one" with God is that he is extremely close to god, "as if" they are one. John 17:18-23 tells how we normal human beings can attain this "oneness" (or "closeness") with God by being "sanctified through the truth." Aside from this, neither the word "trinity" appears anywhere in the Bible nor any explanation of such a thing. 
 
"LORD" DOES NOT NECESSARILY MEAN "GOD" 
 
[Matthew 18:23-34, Luke 19:11-21, and John 20:26-29] 
 
Many of Jesus' disciples referred to Jesus as "Lord". Even Jesus himself said that he is their Lord. But does this mean that he is their God? If you read the three short stories above then you will realize that back in the Biblical time period most servants referred to their masters as "lord". This was a common practice because it showed honor and respect for a person of such high stature. 
 
"LORD" - A LOFTY TITLE 
 
Even today in many countries around the world such as England, "lord" is used in referring to kings, princes, and others who deserve such a lofty title. The disciples and followers of Jesus viewed him as their earthy master and themselves as his servants. He was a man from God who brought them God's message of truth, justice, and peace. Who could be more deserving of the title "lord" than Jesus Christ? Besides, "lord" is defined by Webster in many curious ways. 
 
A few of them are as follows: 
 
A man of high rank in a feudal society. 
A king. 
A general masculine title of nobility or rank. 
A man of renowned power. 
A man who has mastery in a given activity or field. 
 
Commenting on the word's history, Webster says that "lord" literally means 'guardian of the bread'. He continues, "Since such a position would be the dominant one in the household, lord came to denote a man of authority and rank in society at large." 
 
The Noble Quran also uses "lord" in the same context (see 12:23 and 12:41-42). This was simply the language of the time. 
 
The word "lord" does not render the person which it is being applied to as God. If this were the case, then many human beings in the Bible would have to be considered God. 
 
Does Bible Say 'Jesus is God'? 
 
JESUS DENIED DIVINITY 
 
[Mark 10:17-18 and Luke 18:18-19] 
 
These verses are most indicative of Jesus' position and real nature. The verse in Mark reads: 
 
"As he [Jesus] was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, 'Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?' Jesus said to him, 'Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone." 
 
If you analyze this verse in truth you will see that Jesus, quite simply, is not God. If he was, why then would he say "No one is good but God alone"? Jesus did not want to be called "good" because he was not God. That title, as Jesus admits, belongs to none but God. 
 
This subject was actually a part of another book that I have been in the process of writing for a number of years. Considering the fact that I may never finish it, I have taken the liberty to put some of it down on paper and then compared it to findings of other Christian preachers who have come to Islam and you can read that online at: Son of God? 
 
What Does it All Mean? 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
If all of this has confused you it's probably because you've been trying to justify your belief in the Trinity. To believe in the Trinity goes against all of the teachings of Jesus, as well as the Bible. This is because the Trinity is a man-made doctrine that was drawn up several hundred years after Jesus. In this time period different interpretations of the Bible were causing serious debates among Christians. The various interpretations were, undoubtedly, due to human perversion of the original scriptures, poor preservation, and/or shoddy translations. One of the main things being questioned was the nature of God and Jesus. Was Jesus actually God, the son of God, or just a messenger? The Council of Nicaea was formed in an attempt to settle this dispute, and the Nicaea Creed (the Trinitarian doctrine) was subsequently hammered out. 
 
Again, as I stated in the beginning, this writing has not been complied to put down or destroy the true teachings of the Bible and the Prophets. I would like to quote from a version of the Bible wherein Jesus is represented as saying: 
 
"Think not that I came to destroy the Law [Torah] and the Prophets [prophethood]. I did not come to destroy them, but rather to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments [from the Law] and teaches men so, shall be called least in the Kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the Kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." [Matt. 5:17] 
 
It is wrong to assume that our beliefs are true simply because our teachers, preachers and parents have taught us something passed down to them by generations of forefathers before them. What I would invite all of us to do is to do research for ourselves and learn from reliable sources what is the origin of modern Christianity and what should be our perspective on true belief in general. We can only achieve this with open minds and hearts. 
 
So, may the Great God of the Universe guide us all with His perfect Guidance to all truth, Ameen. 
 
What to do Now? 
 
It is not at all logical to simply accept a belief system because it was passed down to you by your parents. After all, what if it is not correct? A system for belief should be based upon sound principles of reasoning and understanding, rather than feelings and emotions. 
 
As regards the Muslims treatment of Jesus, peace be upon him, it should be kept in mind that, although they do not hold him to be the 'son of god' in Christianity, he is definitely held in high esteem as great prophet, 'Miraculous birth" and also believe in the same unseen God that he referred to as "Your Lord and my Lord, your God and my God." 
 
Please take time to read the articles on this site. Print them out and share with others. Write to us and visit our website for more information about the world's largest and most compatible religions; Islam and Christianity. Research for yourself the Council of Nicaea and the preservation of the Bible, or lack thereof. 
 
There are a number of books which are easily accessible written by experts and scholars on the Bible which are very enlightening on this subject: 
 
"Who Wrote the Bible" - Richard Elliott Friedman [excerpts] 
"Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?" - Norman Golb 
"The Book of 'J'" - Harold Bloom & David Rosenberg 
"The Text of the New Testament - Its Transmission, 
Corruption, & Restoration" - Bruce M. Metzger 
 
Islam is truly and simply a complete way of life and set of rules taught by all the prophets to mankind, similar to Biblical teachings that were revealed to humankind after Jesus through the last and final prophet Muhammad. 
Why? Good Question... 
 
Bible a Close Look by Yusuf Estes <a href="http://www.guideus.tv/articles/bible" target="_blank">http://www.guideus.tv/articles/bible</a></div>

Close Look at the Bible by Yusuf Estes

First of all, let me begin by saying that I am a former Christian, preacher (Yusuf Estes), minister of music and organist for a long num...

Monday, March 07, 2016

What's an Ayah?

What's an Ayah?

What's an Ayah? - Nouman Ali Khan - Bayyinah TV Malaysia Tour Bayyinah TV The Qur’an is the most beautiful gift humanity has e...

Sunday, March 06, 2016

Is Catholic Concept Of Mercy At Heart Of True Islam?

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL3fYmhr0YsKxcvYaHWpBGIP4b9edtZxz_-53SZyP5L53MH3We0JSDpBcx1Mj3yQo6KeRulThC5fGEDev1PELLK8jRmsxe5EtG8gW-vxhdR9FUggLxta627OLkjG8JdvFs35PgEk_P-S7Y/s1600/mercy.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="356" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL3fYmhr0YsKxcvYaHWpBGIP4b9edtZxz_-53SZyP5L53MH3We0JSDpBcx1Mj3yQo6KeRulThC5fGEDev1PELLK8jRmsxe5EtG8gW-vxhdR9FUggLxta627OLkjG8JdvFs35PgEk_P-S7Y/s640/mercy.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
 
Professor Saeed Khan, an expert in Islam, has said that mercy is central to the Muslim faith – a mercy with roots in Catholicism and which is opposed to the misguided, fundamentalist interpretations of some extremist groups. 
 
Mercy is “the core of Islam,” Saeed Khan told CNA in a Feb. 25 interview, adding that the Muslim concept of mercy “is actually an expansion of Catholic notions of mercy.” 
 
While the conventional understanding of mercy is typically “showing compassion and forgiveness for those in need,” in Islam mercy also means “a blessing and a gift,” he said. 
 
The concept of mercy as both a blessing and a gift shows God’s omniscience and omnipotence in the sense that mercy is proactively given, rather than simply reactively received by someone seeking forgiveness, Khan explained. 
 
Because of this, creation itself “is a mercy to mankind,” he said, adding that the various prophets throughout history, including, in his words, Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jesus and Mohamed, “are also mercies on mankind because they have been the ones to transmit and convey the divine message.” 
 
Khan is a lecturer for Detroit-based Wayne State University’s Department of Near East and Asian Studies. He teaches courses on Islamic and Middle East History, Islamic Civilizations and the History of Islamic Political Thought. 
 
He was present in Rome as a speaker for a Feb. 25-26 conference organized by the Pontifical Council Cor Unum in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the publication of retired pontiff Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, “Deus Caritas Est,” meaning “God is love.” 
 
The document was published Dec. 25, 2005, just eight months after his election as Bishop of Rome. 
 
Conference participants came from all over the world to discuss the encyclical from theological and charitable perspectives, as well as the perspective of other religions such as Judaism and Islam. 
 
Khan himself spoke on the first day of the conference, offering participants his perspective on the Muslim understanding of mercy. 
 
In his comments to CNA, Khan said the Islamic concept of God’s closeness to humanity is that he “is closer to you than your own jugular vein.” 
 
This shows that a very intimate relationship that exists which can only be infused by love, he said. “So when Pope Benedict XVI mentioned in his encyclical that the primacy of love and how God then manifests that love then to his creation that is also an Islamic concept.” 
 
Khan said mercy is also closely linked to the concept of charity. In Islam, charity is “a devise of mercy” that goes beyond providing material needs such as food and clothing, but reaches the spiritual level, he said. 
 
As an example, he pointed to a famous saying of the Prophet Mohamed that “even a smile is a form of charity” since it forms a human connection. This is especially true, he said, at a time when humanity is becoming increasingly more impersonal, despite advancements in technology and communications. 
 
However, while mercy is “the core of Islam,” there is tragically a difference between “Islam as an ideal and Islam as it is applied and as it is practiced by people,” Khan said, noting that the same can be said of any religion. 
 
“Unfortunately there are people who will invoke the name of Islam to all kinds of unspeakable and egregious things,” he said. 
 
“Those may claim to be believers who act out in such vengeful and violent ways, but again, it is such an anomaly and such an aberration from the divine message that it’s very difficult to be able to say with a certain straight face that this is really what God intended.” 
 
The professor said that instead, to get to the heart of true Islam one has to go back to the sources of in order to see the real divine message and understand what God is really mandating. 
 
Mercy, Khan said, “is so embedded in Islam that in several places within the Quran it says ‘and establish regular prayer and charity.’” 
 
He noted how two of the 99 attributes Muslims recognize in God are “all-merciful” and “ever-merciful.” These phrases, he added, are invoked at least 17 different times during the five daily prayers Muslims recite throughout the day. 
 
The terms are also invoked by Muslims before they embark on “any act or deed,” so therefore the concept of an all-merciful God also exists in Islam, the professor explained. 
 
When it comes to verses in the Quran supporting vengeance and violence such as death by the sword, Khan said that Islam is “a totalistic religion” which also provides instructions on what to do in a time of war, persecution or when one’s life is threatened. 
 
He acknowledged that there are sanctions for war and for committing physical violence in the Quran, but said they are “a last resort,” and are heavily regulated to societies that would otherwise be “very unregulated, very anarchic, even more brutal than they already are.” 
 
Turning to the current Jubilee of Mercy, the professor touched on Pope Francis’ numerous affirmations that the Holy Year isn’t just for Catholics, but for people of all religions, including our “Muslim brothers.” 
 
When asked how Muslims can participate in the Jubilee, Khan said that one of the most important things to remember is that it’s not just God who is merciful, “but we who are his instruments on earth have an obligation as well as the opportunity to express that kind mercy.” 
 
He noted how the Quran speaks to two different audiences, namely, believers and non-believers, and that mercy is something that can and should be commonly expressed. 
 
“It is incumbent on Muslims to understand that when it comes to mercy, this is something that then binds both believers and all of humanity in the fact that mercy can be displayed, and should be displayed, to everyone,” he said. 
 
Source: <a href="http://www.eurasiareview.com/29022016-is-catholic-concept-of-mercy-at-heart-of-true-islam/" target="_blank">http://www.eurasiareview.com/29022016-is-catholic-concept-of-mercy-at-heart-of-true-islam/</a></div>

Is Catholic Concept Of Mercy At Heart Of True Islam?

Professor Saeed Khan, an expert in Islam, has said that mercy is central to the Muslim faith – a mercy with roots in Catholicism and whi...

Saturday, March 05, 2016