Friday Khutba (Sermon) 1: Be A Farmer For Your Soul

Happy Friday!  Inner peace… in the Qur’an?

Afterthoughts: 1. Good farmers are also consistent. 2. This does not refer to just people who label themselves Muslim— it refers to everyone. God made a covenant with each community– grow your own soul by following that promise.

Related verses from the Qur’an:

91:7-10 (Qur’an) By the Soul, and the proportion and order given to it; And its enlightenment as to its wrong and its right;- Truly s/he succeeds that purifies it, And s/he fails that corrupts it!

2:155-156 (Qur’an) And most certainly shall We try you by means [of danger, and hunger, and loss of worldly goods, of lives and of [labour's] fruits. But give glad tidings unto those who are patient in adversity -who, when calamity befalls them, say, “Verily, unto God do we belong and, verily, unto God we shall return.”

89:27 (Qur’an) [But unto the righteous God will say,] “O thou human being that hast attained to inner peace!

89:30 (Qur’an) yea, enter thou My paradise!”

5:105 (Qur’an) O you who have attained to faith! It is [but] for your own selves that you are responsible: those who go astray can do you no harm if you [yourselves] are on the right path. Unto God you all must return: and then He will make you [truly] understand all that you were doing [in life].

2:286 (Qur’an) God does not burden any human being with more than s/he is well able to bear….

59:18 (Qur’an) O YOU who believe! Remain conscious of God; and let every human being look to what s/he sends ahead for the morrow! And [once again]: Remain conscious of God, for God is fully aware of all that you do;

Hamza Yusuf Finally Admits It’s Permissible For Women To Lead Men In Prayer

Full disclosure: In this video, he does not say what his personal opinion is regarding this issue. However, he does finally admit that on every issue, there were multiple opinions. Specifically, on the issue of women leading men in prayer, al-Tabari held that women can lead men in prayer if they are more qualified. In addition, Ibn Taymiyya also held that if a woman was literate while the men in the congregation were not, she could lead them in prayer. This also confirms what Khaled Abou El Fadl has said the tradition states all along, that if women are more knowledgeable than men, then yes, they can (and should) lead men in prayer.

The most significant point that he makes, in my humble opinion, is what I’ve been waiting years for a mainstream Muslim scholar to say: that there were multiple opinions on every issue.

“I would argue that the ‘islamic tradition’ has within itself all of the needs to renovate ‘the house’ but its going to take an immense amount of intellectual energy, it’s going to take very very highly qualified people, which necessitates institutions, that can train and produce the types of people that are needed to engage in this activity.”

This is pretty huge, considering some of Hamza Yusuf’s previous statements. A few years ago, he was adamantly against the idea of women leading prayer. A few years before that he was even more conservative. Who knows, maybe he’ll turn out to be a progressive in another few years time. (I kid, I kid…).

Update: I’ve been thinking about this all day, and it reminds me of a discussion I had with @AzamHussain. When mainstream scholars hold back information that they know is correct but choose to withhold it they knowingly mislead people and disrespect their congregations. The most pertinent example is the subject of this post. When Dr. Wadud was getting (much more than) harassed for leading prayer in NYC, Hamza Yusuf didn’t say a darn thing. Now, years later, he finally admits that, yes, there was debate on the issue and some scholars say it’s just fine for a woman to lead men in prayer. Where was he back then? While I appreciate his and other’s contributions to the American Muslim community, this tendency among ‘mainstream scholars’ to err on the conservative side while withholding the full story still rubs me the wrong way.

This is just one reason why I choose to read the Qur’an in solitude, and not through the lens of the ‘scholars,’ whoever they may be.

Now for a personal note: A big thank you to Dr. Amina Wadud for pushing this issue in our time. I’m afraid the discussions surrounding women’s spaces in mosques (let alone, women leading prayer) would not have happened had it not been for her. May God bless you a thousand blessings, and thank you for being an inspiration to me when we first met in 1999 when I was 16– at the Islamic Hinterland conference in Toronto.

Which reminds me to thank Rahat Kurd and everyone else who made the Islamic Hinterland conference possible. In other words, BIG HUGS.

You can watch the entire discussion here. Here is a transcript of the video clip above plus what he said afterward, to give you some more context:
Read on »

The Linguistic Literalism of Four-Year-Olds: Muslims Missing the Point

Note: This Is The 3rd Part of a Guest Series By Pamela Taylor. See Part 1. See Part 2.

Have you ever given directions to a four-year old?
“Go to the end of the hall and turn left,” you say.
“Is this left?” he asks, holding up his left hand.
“Right!” you say cheerily.
He then lowers his left hand and puts up his right hand.
“Oh,” he says, “Then I have to turn this way.”
“No, no. That’s your right hand,” you say. “The other one was your left hand.”

The poor kid is now totally confused. His mind, focused on left and right, didn’t grasp the changed context of your initial response; he missed that you had switched from right/left to correct/incorrect, or, in other words, right/wrong.

I experienced a similar e-mail exchange the other day on a newsgroup I belong to.
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The Intellectual Thoroughness of Three-Year-Olds: The Crisis of Critical Inquiry

Note: This Is A Guest Post By Pamela Taylor

You may remember the email I shared with you last week, the one describing the rewards pious women were to receive for such deeds as nursing their infants, or consoling their husbands after a hard day at work, and so on. (If not, you can see the glorious details in the first of this series, The Moral Maturity of Two-Year-Olds.) This document declared in its headline that it bore “Glad tidings of Heaven for pious women in the light of hadith.”
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The Moral Maturity Of Two Year Olds: Reward & Punishment Mentality Among Muslims

Note: This Is A Guest Post By Pamela Taylor

The other day I got an email that ran something like this:

Subject: FW: Glad Tidings of Heaven for Pious Women!!
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful

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Non-Desi Like Me

Note: This is a guest post by Adam Sitte

Part of me wants to apologize for the relative melodrama of this title. I concede, of course, that my own experiences pale in comparison to the racially-based oppression John Howard Griffin recorded in his famous account of segregation in the American South. That said, all we have to share is our own perspectives and individual tribulations, and I feel the banality of my own need not suppress their relevance. There is a tacit expectation that converting to a new religion necessitates an alteration of your own culture.

Arabs dress you up in thobes and want you to smoke hookah, while Desis assume you’ll love Bollywood movie nights and bhangra. Read on »

Ask The Imams: A Romance With The Qur’an

Dear Imam(s),

”…. your site gave me my first real hint that Islam is not inherently patriarchal and conservative (“halal for me means sweatshop free”), an idea that I had previously dismissed.

Err, well, now I’m somehow compelled to lay my burdens down, hoping that you won’t feel obligated to pick them up but maybe to just visually estimate them.

Last year, KufiGirl recommended that I write to you while I was undergoing a spiritual crisis in which I went from being an atheist to being a believer (of some sort). At that time, I had been overpowered by an unexpected romance with the Qur’an that didn’t necessarily offer clarity.

I still haven’t totally converted, because I hate the idea of going back on it, and I am still full of doubt and concern at the idea of joining the Muslim world. I’m a very logical and critical person on the one hand, and a person of intense mysticist tendencies on the other. Also, I’m a rather hard core leftist/activist.
Read on »