they should scan Daniel Pipes’ brain either. He’ll make a good object because the research really describes him lol. But overall this reminds me of the many fanatical anti-Islam people. Look at how they react with hatred emotions, instead of a clear logic. May Allah guide them.

the ‘how’ matters though. look at how our true scholars do it – in its intellectual tidiness, very close to the scientific method. and sometimes you gotta prioritise your replies based on whether the issue is actually prevalent in your audience, or actually a very minor concern compared to others.

as an example, the hadith on prohibiting hijab where the hair is piled on the back like the hump of a camel. i really haven’t seen many – if any at all – hijabi women in my country who actually do this, so for starters the real target demographic is already tiny. at most, there may be a bump as a side effect of hair being pulled up in a bun for practicality rather than ostentation. and i live in the urban area where perhaps you might see a fashion-focus more. and yet, there are cartoons and stuff passed around condemning them as not hijab. i don’t have the knowledge if this is in context, but it seems odd if the hadith context really meant ‘any visible hair bun’. and there are cartoons of women who are totally covered up, loose clothing, lowered headscarf with just a tiny ridge at the sides of their heads denoting a bit of visible ear silhouette – the caption/speech balloon condemning this as ‘not hijab’. there might be an arrow pointing to the ear in case you didn’t notice what might be wrong with the picture.

yet we have many mosques surrounded by housing across the nation blaring out lectures and sermons and taped recitations for several hours a day, every day, in communities where not everyone is Muslim, some people might be sick, small children may be asleep, or people have abnormal sleep/shift work patterns, interrupting quiet and rest. think about it a moment if you can’t imagine how stressful this is. imagine or ask someone to play for you at any time they want and for a length of time unknown to you, loud things audible everywhere in your house, particularly when you’ve just come home from an hour of traffic, *during* the time when you want to pray your maghrib after such arrival from work, imagine if you’re a doctor returning from on call having only the window of sleep and there the loudspeaker goes again, etc. and you can’t complain because the mosque committee simply ignores you, and your family would be derided as having no commitment to islam. not a single one of the local religious brigade on the internet is preaching the value of neighbourliness. if i had no knowledge of my religion, i may indeed think that i must be a bad muslim, for valuing this basic neighbourly respect, over things like whether i can make out someone’s ears under her hijab. God knows what would have happened to my faith then.

i guess my disquiet comes from not being able to see if my community’s efforts in religiosity has a prior big picture thought of what is it that we want to achieve.

Enthusiasm is great but needs to be kept in check. The over zealous nature that many off us have cause us to loose sight of the greater principles that we have been given that we are to strive to follow. Speaking poorly of another due to an incorrect decision or an incorrect act, even deliberate ones is NOT how the Prophet dealt with things.

How many times did the Prophet (peace be upon him)openly condemn people by name? With all the persecution that he and the Sahaba suffered, if we apply our behavior today, we would have books of all the people that would have been reviled and cursed for harming the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him). Those that are meantioend were the worst of the worse, those that killed, tortured maimed, etc. Now a little challenge, how many names can we actually find, a meager handful or two?

One thing all Muslims need to ask themselves, what did the the Prophet (peace be upon him) and the Sahaba (ra) have that we do not have? Character and more importantly true submission.

May Allah guide us all, ameen

Imam Malik also stated, “If I was given 99 reasons to declare a person deviant and one upholding their orthodoxy, I’d go with the latter!”

Also
Imam al-Ghazali stated, “The hypocrite looks for faults, the believer looks for excuses.” Al-Hafidh al-Dhahabi wrote, “I heard our Sheikh, Ibn Taymiyyah, d. 728 a.h, say towards the end of his life, ‘I will never declare anyone from the people of the Qiblah (Muslim direction of prayer) as an infidel.’”

asalamu `alaykum,

The link works from our end. It should link to: http://www.virtualmosque.com/category/islam-studies/

JazakAllahu khayr!