KARACHI: Senior clerics of India’s top seminary whose version of Islam the Taliban claim to follow have denounced the actions of the hardline militia, saying the group does not qualify to enjoy affiliations with the historic madressah.
In an interview with a correspondent of the BBC Urdu Service, the rector and the head of faculty of Darul Uloom (Waqf) Deoband said attacks by ‘vigilantes’ in which innocent people died was not jihad but ‘individual zulm (oppression)’.
Seen in this light, attacks on shrines, barber shops and educational institutions were all un-Islamic. Maulana Saalim Qasimi went to the extent of characterising the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which was ousted by the US forces in 2001, as ‘un-Islamic’.
He said the Taliban did not comprehend fully the tenets of Islam even though much was made of their ‘Islamic government’.
He said Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman, who supported the Afghan regime, was not a religious scholar. ‘He is more of a politician than a scholar.’ ‘However, his father, Mufti Mehmood, was a scholar,’ he said.
Maulana Aslam Qasimi, great grandson of Qasim Nanotvi, the founder of the madressah, said the recent statement by Sufi Mohammad that judiciary in Pakistan was un-Islamic was based on misconceptions and ignorance.
He said that Islam embraced concepts like democracy. ‘The spirit of democracy is very much there in Islam, though concepts like democracy have been taking new shapes and forms.’
American Islamic scholars plan Muslim US college in tradition of Brandeis, Notre Dame
By RACHEL ZOLL
The Associated Press
PLAINSBORO, N.J.
A group of American Muslims, led by two prominent scholars, is moving closer to fulfilling a vision of founding the first four-year accredited Islamic college in the United States, what some are calling a “Muslim Georgetown.”
Advisers to the project have scheduled a June vote to decide whether the proposed Zaytuna College can open in the fall of next year, a major step toward developing the faith in America.
Imam Zaid Shakir and Sheik Hamza Yusuf of California have spent years planning the school, which will offer a liberal arts education and training in Islamic scholarship. Shakir, a California native, sees the school in the tradition of other religious groups that formed universities to educate leaders and carve a space in the mainstream of American life.
The land of Chinguett, more commonly known to the English-speaking world as Mauritania, is renowned for producing great scholars, saints, and erudite women of note. Scholars traveling to Mauritania have observed that “even their women memorize vast amounts of literature.” Mauritanian women have traditionally excelled in poetry, seerah, and genealogy, but some who mastered the traditional sciences were considered scholars in their own right.
Maryam Bint Bwayba, who memorized the entire Qur’an and the basic Maliki texts, was one such Mauritanian woman worthy of note. I had the honor of knowing Maryam, a selfless and caring woman, and the noble wife of Shaykh Murabit al-Hajj, having first met both of them twenty-five years ago in a small tent in the remote spiritual community of Tuwamirat in Mauritania.
My journey to that destination began four and a half years earlier, in 1980, at a bookstore in Abu Dhabi, where I met Shaykh Abdallah Ould Siddiq of the renowned Tajakanat clan. I knew immediately he was from West Africa, given the dir’ah, the distinct West African wide robe he was wearing, as well as the turban, a rare sight in the Gulf at that time. I had met scholars from West Africa when I was in Mali two years before and was interested in studying with them, so I asked the shaykh if he knew anyone who taught the classical Maliki texts in the traditional manner. He affirmed that he himself was a teacher of that very tradition, gave me his number, and said I was welcome anytime to come to his house for lessons. That began my Islamic education in earnest.
The few who know me personally, know I have a fascination and love for “ghetto” neighborhoods and giving dawah to the people there. Any city I visit, I’m always asking about the ghetto areas and how to get there. Some think I’m crazy, but I just feel the need to help these people because Islam has many solutions for their problems. They don’t need to look at the Hip Hop or sports stars to get out. The just need to get out with Islam. Which brings me to an amazing community that is unheard of, for the most part, outside the DC area in the Maryland-Virginia suburbs and most definitely the entire country.
‘Asr time was almost ending and my wife and myself were in DC enjoying the beautiful weather. I remembered there was a masjid in South East DC that my wife had been to before for a wedding. For those who don’t know SE (South East) is the ghetto of DC. If you told the average resident of the Maryland-Virginia suburbs that you went to SE DC, they’d probably react with the “OMG” and then some stereotypical question that involved robbing, fried chicken, drugs, street corners, boarded up houses, etc. Alhamdulillah for Islam and alhamdulillah we are Muslims. I put my foot to the pedal and we were off to Masjid al Islam in SE DC.
Aside from fastidious academic notions of the ‘West’, it is satisfactory for us to define the ‘West’ as “Europe and the largely English-speaking nations of North America, Australia and New Zealand”. The spirituality of Islam is a profound experiential reminder to human beings about their origin, reality, and ultimate destination. This call to the heart of things, quite literally, is the meaning of man. The beautiful religion of Islam is not the preserve of the Arabs, the Indians, the Turks, the Persians, the Africans or the Asians (in the American sense); but, rather, it is a universal call to universal man, and the West has every right to it. However, the West has, of late, been largely exposed to a warped view of Islam that often borders, and sometimes crosses, the limits of what appears to be psychological pathology; and which has hardly any glimpse of the touching spiritual tradition of Islam. All of this is all the more tragic when one considers how meaning and spirituality itself have been ravished by the tidal waves of unfettered materialism. In the process, this race towards materialism has not quenched the inner yearning of many in the West for meaning; a fact that has also meant that the failure to fill with the void with the spirituality of Islam has led to many pseudo notions of spirituality that are unable to provide a sip, never mind the full measure that man’s true nature requires.
The Rihla 2009 Summer program will be held in Washington, D.C., Insha’Allah. Estimated dates are July 16 -August 7th. The program will based on the Deen Intensive Core Curriculum and will include subjects such as Aqidah, Fiqh, Ihsan, Quranic studies, Adab and special topics including contemporary issues. We feel it will be a well-rounded program. Applications will open on the website by the end of the week, Insha’Allah.
This will be not to far from me, although I’ll be working so I might not be able to full participate. I hope that they have evening or weekend passes available.
