In the middle of the night…

When wolves become Shepherds

Lazy Boy

Bathe yourselves in Money

Lessons from the life of Eessa ibn Maryam

These are titles that I’m sure some of you remember. I believe it to be around 2004. Shaykh Muhammad Alshareef was in the “EmanRush Zone”, and each lecture quickly fell into the category called “Classic” ma sha Allah.

It’s been 5 years since that time. EmanRush hasn’t released singles in years.

Get ready, for today is the launch of Muhammad Alshareef 2.0.

Who said that World class lectures are out of style? If they are, they’re coming back anyway..just like Tafsir Juz Amma

Tuesday, July 14th tune into www.ilminar.com at 5pm EST/10PM BST

Related posts:

• Sh. Muhammad Alshareef – Mama I’m waiting for you in Jannah
• Sh. Muhammad AlShareef – The Fasting and the Furious – Fri. Aug. 17, 2009 – Online
• Shaykh Muhammad Alshareef – Perished Nations – 4 Episode Lecture Series

I request everyone to share 2-3 minutes by registering for this site and submitting your questions as well as voting yes to the questions that matter to you most.  Especially the ones related to Islam, Muslims and the Muslim world.

Where the Obama haters at?

Related posts:

• An Open Letter to President Obama from Michael Moore
• Open Letter to Sen. Obama – From Ralph Nader
• To the Hacker called “Ghost61″ from Turkey

KhutbahCentral.com is for the aspiring khateeb in your community. We provide the tools to:

• Generate a Khutbah. Go to Khutbah Generator, enter your first Khutbah and second Khutbah in the text boxes and hit “Generate Khutbah”. We’ll make you a PDF version of the Khutbah that you can print. We have included enough text in the template to avoid any difference of opinions amongst the scholars. And you can even include translations, if you want.

• Draft a Khutbah. How to make a Khutbah? What are the steps? What kind of research do I need to do? It’s all here in a small, handy guide.

• Get ready to deliver your Khutbah. What was the sunnah of the Prophet [SAWS] as a khateeb? How to deliver the Khutbah? What about the salaah afterwards? We got it all covered in the Khateeb’s Guide, alhamdulillah.

• Looking for some sample Khutbahs? We got these covered too.

Check it out: http://www.khutbahcentral.com/

The Khutbah generator is hot, mashaAllah!

Related posts:

• The Akhlaq Khutbah
• Quilliam Foundation’s Fear-Mongering “Alert” on Islam Channel
• Gandaghee Crew Needs Your Help for 1 Minute!

Ramadan Mubarak to everyone!

Google has released their browser in comemoration of the holy month of Ramadan.  Just kidding!  haha

But still download it here!

Related posts:

• Ramadan Mubarak
• Ramadan Mubarak!
• Google Health

It is so much faster than FF2 and it owns IE7.

Related posts:

• Firefox View vs. Internet Explorer View
• MR improvements for dial-up users

Let me break it down to you in numbers just to prove my point:

Facebook Friends:

1. Barack Obama has 882, 733 friends on his facebook profile.
2. Hillary Clinton has 159, 281 friends on her facebook profile.
3. John McCain has 135, 362 friends on his facebook profile.

YouTube Subscribers:

1. Barack Obama has 52, 616 subscribers on his YouTube page.
2. Hillary Clinton has 13, 852 subscribers on her YouTube page.
3. John McCain has 5, 117 subscribers on his YouTube page.

MySpace Friends:

1. Barack Obama has 382, 377 friends on his MySpace.
2. Hillary Clinton has 197, 450 friends on her MySpace.
3. John McCain has 53, 435 friends on his MySpace.

Digg Popularity (Digg the Candidates):

1. 18, 159 people dugg Barack Obama
2. 2, 197 people dugg Hillary Clinton
3. 1, 804 people dugg John McCain

From the above statistics taken as of 6/4/08 at 11:40 AM, we can see that the majority of the American youth are Democratic.  The majority of these Democrats support Barack Obama.

Why are the young Americans, like myself, supporting Barack Obama?

Obama is the first President to attract so many young American voters to come out and participate in the Democratic primaries. Honestly, before this election, I did not know a single thing about primaries. I didn’t even know they existed. I thought everyone voted during the Presidential elections. Not only did he break history with that but he is the first presidential candidate to attain massive amount of less then $100 donors via the Internet. Who uses the Internet most out of any age group in America? The youth.

Now as a young Muslim American, Obama is clearly the person to vote for. John McCain is very clear on his position on Islam, his position on Iraq and Afghanistan. You know Obama is the right choice when the Zionist Israeli Jews don’t support him. In fact Clinton is the favorite amongst the Jews in America, but yet even with them, Barack Obama will most likely seal the deal and become the Democractic nominee.

The Future for young Muslim Americans?

Only God knows what will happen, but we have the choices in our hands.  We can make a difference starting off locally and bringing about changes for the better.  Whether its within the Islamic centers or working within your local government.  We as young Muslim Americans need to step up and do our part living in this American society.  The overwhelming majority of us were born in this country and we have yet to claim our part in society.  The Jewish Americans have done this.  The Irish Americans.  The Italian Americans.  And so on.  Where are the Muslim Americans at?  We are starting but there are plenty of us sleeping and dozing off to the same salafi-sufi, shia-sunni, my aqidah-your aqidah, etc. agendas.  Not that those aspects of our life are unimportant but we should share the energy with positive work for the betterment of the society our children are going to live in.

May Allah (swt) guide us all, protect us all and protect the innocent Muslims suffering around the world.
May Allah (swt) give the Muslim American ummah the power, the wisdom, the knowledge and the iman to keep this deen strong and implement justice that will spread throughout the world.  Ameen!

Related posts:

• The Future of America is less Religious – Good or Bad for Muslims?
• Malik Obama, the Half Brother of Barack Obama: “I don’t think that my being a Muslim has got anything to do with my brother being the President of the United States.”
• Would Malcolm X support Barack Obama?

To Alhambra Productions, IlmQuest, MeccaCentric, SoundVision, Astrolabe, and any other Muslim media company that provides Islamic video lectures.

First of all, I would like to thank you for your efforts and work in order to provide high quality lectures for the Muslim Ummah to benefit from. Before I begin discussing Islamic video lectures and the Muslim community, I’d like to spend some time discussing the broader scale of videos, movies, etc. and the common practice of downloading using BitTorrent or other file sharing protocols.

The current reign of BitTorrent has completely taken piracy to a new level. Any person with some basic knowledge of installing software and downloading files can get their hands on almost any movie, music album, software, and practically almost anything that can be stored on a computer off the Internet using file sharing sites and BitTorrent networks.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about then continue reading. If you do understand how torrents work then skip down to the section entitled “The Situation of Piracy in the Muslim Ummah“.

What is a torrent? What is BitTorrent?

A BitTorrent (.torrent) is a small file that contains an empty puzzle to an entire file(s). A BitTorrent client loads this torrent file and searches though other BitTorrent hosts who have the complete puzzle already completed. In order for you to complete your puzzle you will have to download from those who already completed it. This is what the BitTorrent client does. Once your puzzle is completed, you have fully downloaded the file(s) and now you are also sharing it as well, unless you take it off from sharing. Also while you are finding the puzzle pieces you need, other people are also looking to complete their puzzles and if you have a piece they need, then you will be sharing it with them and they will be able to download it. That’s pretty much the best analogy I can come up with. If you didn’t fully understand, then I’d check Wikipedia here for a thorough definition of BitTorrent.

Where does the piracy come in?

If you search through many of the BitTorrent search engines and BitTorrent hosting sites, you’ll find complete software packages and full length movies that are still in theaters or just released on DVD or complete seasons of popular TV shows. Literally thousands of people are downloading and uploading them all at the same time this very second as you read this. It’s that popular through out the world.

What have major TV channels done to help stop piracy?

Many TV networks like ABC, NBC, MTV, etc. are streaming entire full length episodes of very popular TV shows. Instead of trying to fight the wide spread piracy like the music industry is, they are catching on to the drift and realizing that many people want to watch movies, TV shows, etc. on their computers. So how do they make money? It’s very simple: online commercials and advertisements. They sell “online airtime” in between the TV episodes online. You can see examples here from NBCs Heroes.

The music industry has come down hard on the BitTorrent community, suing people left and right and forcing many BitTorrent sites to shut down or to close business in the US (They are still active for non-US IPs). The solution for this has been iTunes. Apple’s iTunes has a monopoly over the legal use of allowing users to download music for a price of course.

The Situation of Piracy in the Muslim Ummah

Islamic lecture providers are also facing piracy of their lectures being uploaded to Google Video, YouTube and other video sites. What’s worse is that many Muslims have defended this as saying you shouldn’t sell knowledge. Knowledge was never been sold during the time of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) nor was it sold during the time of the companions (may God be pleased with them all) nor the salaf (the generations right after the Prophet Muhammad [peace and blessings be upon] ) and so on. They do have a point, because many scholars offer their lectures for free because they also feel that sacred knowledge shouldn’t be sold. The other view is that this is a means of living for some Muslims and that they need the money to survive and support their families. That point is also true. Both sides have substantial evidence to prove their opinions. My proposed solution will offer both sides a possible mutual agreement.

A Possible Solution?

I have thought about this for a while and I have been wanting to write about this for the past few months. Islamic lecture providers need to start providing free content online. Streaming videos with 15-60 second commercials is a way they can earn profit whilst providing it for free. They can sell commercial time and also sell online advertisements on their video pages. For example, extremely popular speakers like Shaykh Hamza Yusuf or Shaykh Yasir Qadhi would generate many hits, thus to buy a 30 second commercial spot would be expensive. To buy a 60 second commercial spot would be even more. Who wouldn’t want to advertise their product on a Shaykh Hamza Yusuf video or a Shaykh Yasir Qadhi video. Thousands will view the video. That alone should be enough for some companies to advertise if this system was implemented.

The only issue would be to find companies (Muslim and non-Muslim) that would be willing to be the first to advertise in this type of marketing strategy. Also, what is the cost per video to be put up for free instead of being sold by quantity. I personally believe that the number of lectures sold is less profitable than providing free videos online. The amount of people that watch the lecture for free is far greater than the amount of people that would buy the lecture. Providing commercial time would be more profitable than to sell the video lectures by the quantity.

What kind of Advertisements?

Well that’s up to the video producer.  It can be advertising Islamic events, fundraisers, or Muslim businesses.   It can be whatever the video producer and speaker agree on.

I hope, God willing, that this idea could become a reality in the near future. Please forgive me if I have said anything wrong. It was only out of good intention to help expand the online Muslim community with this idea and to provide Muslim businesses with other alternatives in making a profit.

Ma’salaama

MR

Related posts:

• Open Letter to the American People from the Iranian President
• Open Letter to Sen. Obama – From Ralph Nader
• An Open Letter to President Obama from Michael Moore

IslamCrunch recently posted about a site which offers one entire page listing rss feeds from various Muslim news, sites, blogs and basically anything related to Islam and Muslims. This is really good to find out what’s hot in the online Muslim ummah. It is also good to find blogging material that or blogs that you never knew existed. The creator of the website is Guy Kawasaki, who was very friendly with me suggesting some sites to add. I told him about MuslimMatters.org, Seekers Digest and some other blogs. You can tweet him here and ask him to add any other Muslim blog or sites that you may not see on the page.

Related posts:

• This is why Muslim Marriage sites are wack!
• Plans underway for monorail to link Makkah’s holy sites
• UPDATED: SeekersGuidance raises $252,000 in 2 hours for Islamic Relief’s Feed the Needy Campaign

On my blog you can click the “Share This” button at the bottom of every post and it will allow you to submit it to many of the social networking and news websites.  StumbleUpon is one of them.

Related posts:

• The Elections has Cast a Shadow over Terrorism and Islam
• Zaytuna College – Where Islam Meets America
• Only 4 Arab Prophets in Islam