Shariah (also spelled shari’ah or sharia or shari’a) is the Arabic word for “the road to the watering place.” In a religious context, it means “the righteous path.” Loosely, it can mean simply, “Islam.”

There are six principles of shariah. They are derived from the Qur’an, which Muslims believe is the word of God. All Islamic religious rules must be in line with these six principles of shariah.

Aha! The six principles must be about killing infidels, veiling women, stoning people for adultery, honor killings and female genital cutting, right? Nope.

Here they are, the six principles of shariah:

1. The right to the protection of life.
2. The right to the protection of family.
3. The right to the protection of education.
4. The right to the protection of religion.
5. The right to the protection of property (access to resources).
6. The right to the protection of human dignity.

Well, bless me, as a pledge-of-allegiance-reciting, California-raised Muslim girl, these six principles sound a lot like those espoused in my very own Constitution of the United States. Except that these were developed over a thousand years ago.

This is the core of shariah — these six principles. The term “shariah law” is a misnomer, because shariah is not law, but a set of principles. To Muslims, it’s the general term for “the way of God.”

But how do we know what the way of God is? Early Muslims looked to the Qur’an and the words of the Prophet Muhammad to figure this out. They filled books of interpretive writings (called fiqh) about how to act in accordance with the way of God. They rarely agreed — the fiqh is not just one rule, but many differing opinions and contradictory rules and scholarly debates.

Sometimes, shariah also refers to the whole body of Islamic texts, which includes the Qur’an, the sayings of the Prophet, and the books of interpretive literature written by medieval Muslim scholars. The first two are considered divine. The interpretive literature, the fiqh, is not.

The fiqh was meant to develop and change according to the time and place — it has internal methodologies for that to happen. It is not static, but flexible. No religion gets to be 1400 years old and the second largest in the world unless it’s flexible and adaptable.

The Qur’an is old. The fiqh books of jurisprudence are old. To modern eyes, they can look just as outdated as other ancient texts, including the Bible and Torah. That’s why, just like the Bible and the Torah, the Islamic texts must be read in their historical context.

Assuming all Muslims follow medieval Islamic rules today is like assuming that all Catholics follow 9th century canon law. Islam, like Christianity, has changed many times over the centuries, and it continues to change. Focusing only on the nutcases who advocate a return to medieval times is ignoring the vast majority of modern Muslims.

For example, stoning for adultery is a punishment that appears in fiqh, as well as early Judaic law. But it does not appear in the Qur’an. In Islam, therefore, stoning was a result of cultural norms imposed on the religious texts. Moreover, in the fiqh, though the punishment for adultery was stoning, adultery was made such a fantastically difficult crime to prove that the punishment was impossible to apply. Historically, stoning was very rarely implemented in the Islamic world, which is ironic, since today the Saudi and Iranian governments apply it as though they’d never heard of the strict Islamic constraints on it.

The vast majority of Muslims today do not believe in stoning people for adultery, and many are working hard to eradicate it. Stoning is horrific and has no place in our world. The miniscule percentage of Muslims who advocate it are imposing the medieval penalty while ignoring all the myriad limitations meant to make it inapplicable.

As for other scary stories attributed to shari’a, like honor killings, veiling of women, and female genital cutting, these are cultural practices and not Islamic. They are practiced by non-Muslims of certain cultures as well as Muslims.

Shari’a is a set of religious principles and is not the law of the land anywhere in the world. The 50-some Muslim-majority countries are all constitutional states and nearly all of them have civil codes (many of these based on the French system). Being Muslim does not require a governmental imposition of something called “shari’a law,” any more than being a Christian requires the implementation of “Biblical law” (though there are, of course, a tiny minority of both Christians and Muslims who do advocate such things, including Sarah Palin).

As for Islam being a political system, there is nothing in the Qur’an about an “Islamic state,” and the Prophet himself never tried to implement an “Islamic state,” despite hysterical accusations to the contrary. Those under his leadership practiced a variety of religions.

Traditionally, in the Islamic world, the institutions that governed were always separate from the institutions that developed religion. In fact, they often checked and balanced one another. Although no civilization has been free from all conflict, every Islamic empire was a multi-religious, multicultural empire, in which religious minorities were governed by their own laws.

The term “Islam as a religion and a state” really only became popular in the 1920s, as a reaction to Western colonization of the Muslim world. In fact, Islam contains plenty of concepts consistent with modern democracy — for example, shura (consultation) and aqd (a contract between the governed and the governing). In other words, Muslims can be perfectly comfortable in America, following state and federal laws.

The Qur’an contains many verses advocating religious tolerance, too, though the anti-Islam protesters won’t believe it. The Qur’an says that: God could have made everyone into one people, but elected not to (11:118); God made us into different nations and tribes so that we can learn from one another (49:13); there is no compulsion in religion (2:256); and that we should say, “to you your religion, to me mine” (109:6).

The only verses about fighting in the Qur’an refer specifically to the polytheistic Arab tribes who were trying to kill the Prophet in the 7th century. So the Islamophobes who look in the Qur’an for the fighting verses and assume that these verses refer to them personally are simply being narcissistic. Contrary to counting Jews and Christians as “infidels,” the Qur’an repeatedly commands particular respect of Jews and Christians. It is established in Islam that you don’t need to be Muslim to go to heaven.

Repeating a lie over and over again doesn’t make it true; but it certainly results in people believing the lie. That’s what the Islam-haters are counting on. That, and the ignorance about Islamic tenets.

So the best thing to do is find out what Islam really is about. Talk to a Muslim in person. Read an introduction to Islam (try a fun one like mine). Read Loonwatch to read about the holes in the anti-Islamic rhetoric. Or take a look at the University of Georgia’s informational website on Islam, for some quick answers and further reading. If you read the anti-Islam fear-mongering websites, all you’ll learn will be tall tales.

Bigotry may be a human tendency, but America has never stood for bigotry. I believe in an America that stands for pluralism and multicultural understanding. The hysteria and hate toward Muslims – resulting in several acts of violence against Muslims just this week, such as a stabbing and arson – is un-American. We must stop it, and the first step is understanding and education.

Sumbul Ali-Karamali is an attorney with an additional degree in Islamic law, as well as the author of “The Muslim Next Door: the Qur’an, the Media, and that Veil Thing.”

Source: Huffington Post

Fordson Trailer from Fordson The Movie on Vimeo.

The film is called FORDSON, and it follows four talented high school football players from Dearborn Michigan as they gear up for their big senior year rivalry game during the last ten days of Ramadan, a month when Muslims traditionally fast every day from sunrise to sundown.

The story is set against the backdrop of the stunningly beautiful Fordson High School, a public high school built by Henry Ford in 1922, which was once all white, but now boasts a 98% Arab population.

As our team readies itself to play its affluent, cross town rival, we unearth the adversity faced by a community that is desperately holding onto its Islamic faith and trying to gain acceptance from their fellow U.S. citizens in post 9/11 America. Through the eyes of the team, their coaches, and their fans, we get an unprecedented glimpse inside the lives of a community that is home to the largest concentration of Arabs in any city outside of the Middle East, and their determination to hold on to the American Dream.

Source: http://www.eidness.com/2010/09/01/fordson-feature-length-documentary/

Source: http://www.cair.com/ArticleDetails.aspx?ArticleID=26610&&name=n&&currPage=1

'The Tower of Babel' by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1563.

(Please see Corrections & Amplifications below.)

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take “Humpty Dumpty sat on a…” Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say “sat” rather than “sit.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you’d use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you’d use a different form.

Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?

These questions touch on all the major controversies in the study of mind, with important implications for politics, law and religion. Yet very little empirical work had been done on these questions until recently. The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world.

The question of whether languages shape the way we think goes back centuries; Charlemagne proclaimed that “to have a second language is to have a second soul.” But the idea went out of favor with scientists when Noam Chomsky’s theories of language gained popularity in the 1960s and ’70s. Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human languages—essentially, that languages don’t really differ from one another in significant ways. And because languages didn’t differ from one another, the theory went, it made no sense to ask whether linguistic differences led to differences in thinking.

The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world’s languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.

Of course, just because people talk differently doesn’t necessarily mean they think differently. In the past decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of experience as space, time and causality could be constructed by language.

For example, in Pormpuraaw, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, the indigenous languages don’t use terms like “left” and “right.” Instead, everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say things like, “There’s an ant on your southwest leg.” To say hello in Pormpuraaw, one asks, “Where are you going?”, and an appropriate response might be, “A long way to the south-southwest. How about you?” If you don’t know which way is which, you literally can’t get past hello.

About a third of the world’s languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space. As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes. They perform navigational feats scientists once thought were beyond human capabilities. This is a big difference, a fundamentally different way of conceptualizing space, trained by language.

Differences in how people think about space don’t end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions. So if Pormpuraawans think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?

To find out, my colleague Alice Gaby and I traveled to Australia and gave Pormpuraawans sets of pictures that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at different ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).

Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world’s languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.

In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. English speakers tend to say things like “John broke the vase” even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would be more likely to say “the vase broke itself.” Such differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others.

In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford, speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone got a surprise memory test: For each event, can you remember who did it? She discovered a striking cross-linguistic difference in eyewitness memory. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers. Mind you, they remembered the agents of intentional events (for which their language would mention the agent) just fine. But for accidental events, when one wouldn’t normally mention the agent in Spanish or Japanese, they didn’t encode or remember the agent as well.

In another study, English speakers watched the video of Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” (a wonderful nonagentive coinage introduced into the English language by Justin Timberlake), accompanied by one of two written reports. The reports were identical except in the last sentence where one used the agentive phrase “ripped the costume” while the other said “the costume ripped.” Even though everyone watched the same video and witnessed the ripping with their own eyes, language mattered. Not only did people who read “ripped the costume” blame Justin Timberlake more, they also levied a whopping 53% more in fines.

Beyond space, time and causality, patterns in language have been shown to shape many other domains of thought. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon in Brazil, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities. And Shakespeare, it turns out, was wrong about roses: Roses by many other names (as told to blindfolded subjects) do not smell as sweet.

Patterns in language offer a window on a culture’s dispositions and priorities. For example, English sentence structures focus on agents, and in our criminal-justice system, justice has been done when we’ve found the transgressor and punished him or her accordingly (rather than finding the victims and restituting appropriately, an alternative approach to justice). So does the language shape cultural values, or does the influence go the other way, or both?

Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs. Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn’t tell us whether it’s language that shapes thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the causal role of language, what’s needed are studies that directly manipulate language and look for effects in cognition.

One of the key advances in recent years has been the demonstration of precisely this causal link. It turns out that if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. When bilingual people switch from one language to another, they start thinking differently, too. And if you take away people’s ability to use language in what should be a simple nonlinguistic task, their performance can change dramatically, sometimes making them look no smarter than rats or infants. (For example, in recent studies, MIT students were shown dots on a screen and asked to say how many there were. If they were allowed to count normally, they did great. If they simultaneously did a nonlinguistic task—like banging out rhythms—they still did great. But if they did a verbal task when shown the dots—like repeating the words spoken in a news report—their counting fell apart. In other words, they needed their language skills to count.)

All this new research shows us that the languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express. The structures that exist in our languages profoundly shape how we construct reality, and help make us as smart and sophisticated as we are.

Language is a uniquely human gift. When we study language, we are uncovering in part what makes us human, getting a peek at the very nature of human nature. As we uncover how languages and their speakers differ from one another, we discover that human natures too can differ dramatically, depending on the languages we speak. The next steps are to understand the mechanisms through which languages help us construct the incredibly complex knowledge systems we have. Understanding how knowledge is built will allow us to create ideas that go beyond the currently thinkable. This research cuts right to the fundamental questions we all ask about ourselves. How do we come to be the way we are? Why do we think the way we do? An important part of the answer, it turns out, is in the languages we speak.

Corrections and Amplifications

Japanese and Spanish language speakers would likely say “the vase broke” or “the vase was broken” when talking about an accident. This article says that Japanese and Spanish speakers would be more likely to say “the vase broke itself.”

—Lera Boroditsky is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Rain continues to fall and flooding is expected to worsen, as officials now estimate that more than 14 million people have been affected by severe flooding and landslides in northwest Pakistan.

A senior United Nations official said the scale of Pakistan’s floods is worse than the 2004 tsunami in Asia and this year’s earthquake in Haiti.

Islamic Relief workers are helping in the evacuation effort, administering aid, and helping serve thousands of flood victims, but the need is still immense.

Shortages of food, water, clothing, shelter, and supplies are making it difficult for the victims. Waterborne diseases like diarrhea and cholera have contaminated nearly all the water wells and the deadly diseases are beginning to infect the most vulnerable of the people. Children are especially at risk.

After devastating Pakistan-administered Kashmir and the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province, floodwaters are now affecting areas of Punjab and Sindh.

Two million people are now homelessand more than 1,600 lives have been lost.

Flashfloods and landslides washed away entire villages and uprooted thousands of acres of farmland.

Due to the sheer magnitude of the rains, which caught most victims off-guard, many have lost their livelihoods and have no idea how they will survive after the disaster.

Islamic Relief USA’s Vice President of Programs, Adnan Ansari, is part of the IR team in Pakistan helping with aid efforts and assessing the needs of the people. He reported, “Outside the camps, many people were staying put in their villages, despite their homes being destroyed and the roads being cut off.  ’This is all we have left,’ one of the victims who stayed home (which had no walls left) told me. ’I can’t risk leaving my belongings unattended.’”

“People’s dreams were hit hard by the floods. But their ability to overcome the hardship is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Still I wonder how long they can hold up.”

Read more of Ansari’s blog post here.

Adnan Ansari’s Interview with Al-Jazeera English

More information @ Islamic Relief USA.

What else can we do?

• Du`a’. Pray for them.
• Donate food and clothing. There are organizations that are working to ship in-kind donations to Pakistan.
• Spread Awareness. This can be as simple as changing your Facebook status.
• Fundraise. If you’re on campus, have a bake sale or pass around a coin jar in your classes. Have a fast-a-thon to raise funds.
• Brainstorm. What else can we do?

Source: SuhaibWebb.com

A clean-shaven Jon Stewart returned from a long weekend last night to tackle the recent controversy over the building of a mosque at the World Trade Center site. Critics of the Islamic cultural center claim it would be built on hallowed ground, but it would actually be built several blocks away from Ground Zero on top of a former Burlington Coat Factory.

Stewart wondered: what distance from Ground Zero is it acceptable to build a mosque? He then showed clips of pundits saying everything from 5 blocks, to 20 blocks, to Woody Allen’s bulding on the “Upper West Side.”

“Woody Allen? That’s your go-to, out-of-touch, New York liberal Jew reference? What is it, 1976?” Stewart asked, adding “I’m right here!” before conceding that perhaps a mosque anywhere near Ground Zero was too close.

It turns out it’s also not OK to build mosques in Staten Island, Tennessee, Wisconsin, or California, as Stewart exemplified with clips of protests in each state.

“Why does everyone think America is divided?” Stewart asked. “It appears distrust of Muslims is the only thing that goes from ’sea to shining sea.’”

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/11/stewart-takes-on-ground-z_n_678224.html?ref=fb&src=sp