The month of Ramadan, the Hajj season, and the days of the Eids are some of the most blessed moments of our calendar, let us try to fill them with peace, compassion, and good will towards all humanity; and let us start within our community. Have a blessed Eid, and please sign this pledge:

We pledge to engage with respect and good will towards those who hold views different from ours on the calendar of our festivals. Wa Allahu Aalam, only the Almighty has perfect knowledge.

Here’s the full statement from the MPV:

From the blog: The Religious Policeman:

The “virtue commission”, if you hadn’t figured it out, is the Religious Police. A complete misnomer, of course. Makes them sound like a group of choirboys. The reality is that they are the no-hopers, the social misfits, the failed Imams, the men who will never be married even though we have a surplus of eligible unmarried women. Ugly in looks, ugly in nature, ugly in behavior. If the Saudi gene pool had a pool boy, they’d have been sucked out with the dead insects and rotting leaves, and emptied down the drain long ago.

The full story is at the Arab News newspaper’s website, but The Religious Policeman’s commentary is an insightful, delightful piece of work…

From altmuslim.com:

Are We Really Supposed To Hate Non-Muslims?:
Is the relationship of the Muslim to the non-Muslim one of hatred and enmity? Hardly. Rather, it is one of peace and mutual respect. Islam does not call its followers to hate those who are not Muslim. This is a horrific misreading and misunderstanding of the Sacred Text of Islam, and it is high time for Muslims to abandon such destructive thinking.

This is a two-part series on the relationship of Muslims towards non-Muslims. Part I is here, Part II is here.

from third resurrection:

At the same time, in some contexts I think it can make a lot of sense. And in modern times, when Western societies are redefining in basic ways what the institution of marriage even means, it is kind of funny to me that there aren’t more people advocatating for what is arguably a very “traditional” and time-tested structure.

Uh…. Hedonist?

The Irony Of Being Hassan Al-Turabi – altmuslim.com:

One man’s extremist is another man’s progressive. And sometimes they can be both at the same time. Take Sudan’s Hassan al-Turabi, for example. Long derided in the West as an “Islamist extremist” that, as speaker of Sudan’s National Assembly, provided Osama bin Laden with a save haven in Sudan for five years (calling him a “hero” in the process), Turabi is probably best known for his involvement in imposing sharia law on Sudan, a move which exacerbated the 20-year north-south conflict that claimed thousands of lives and was only recently resolved.

Nice piece. Kudos to Shahed Amanullah for making the dichotomy between Turabi’s pre- and post-exile statements so stark. How does a bin Laden supporter go on to say stuff like this:

BBC NEWS | UK | Muslim hardship under spotlight:

Many Muslims in England face bleak employment prospects and endure poor standards of housing, a government-backed study has found.

The report revealed Muslims are more likely than any other faith group to be jobless and living in poor conditions.

It said half of Muslims aged over 25 are unemployed and one in three live in the most deprived areas of England.

In a dusty brown village outside this Shiite holy city, a once-humble yellow-brick mosque is undergoing a furious expansion. Cranes hover over two soaring concrete minarets and the pointed arches of a vast new enclosure. Buses pour into a freshly asphalted parking lot to deliver waves of pilgrims.

The Arab American News:

Baha’is struggle to win full rights as Egyptians, brought to you by African News Dimension:

In April, Egypt’s small community of Baha’is rejoiced that they had finally been granted full rights as Egyptians, despite deep-rooted differences in religious ideology. Just last week, however, the government put forward an appeal against the group in an attempt to maintain the status quo.

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One of the many reasons we did a revamp of the site is to clean up a lot of things from the old site that were giving us problems and to add new features the old system could not provide.

We are now running a Drupal-based site, and we think this gives us some pretty nice flexibility and extensibility we did not have before.

With the new system, come changes.