│Azril Mohd Amin's personal views
As one of the local rulers was passing by in a parade on TV, a wonderful fanfare was playing in the background. Now, a good fanfare has all the feeling of pomp and splendour that we associate with royalty. It helps us to understand the FUNCTION of royalty. Above all, such a fanfare makes us feel very glad to HAVE a royalty.
Charles Dickens began “A Tale of Two Cities” with this sentence: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”He was writing of the period of the French Revolution of the late 18th Century and the sentence not only describes that time but also our time.
Continue reading “From my Chairman’s Chair – Islamic Outreach ABIM newsletter 4th quarter 2008”
‘He, therefore, is a wise and prudent man, who, after morning prayer, spends an hour renewing his own spiritual reckoning, and says, “My soul, you only have one life; no moment that has passed can be recovered, and in God’s mind the number of your breaths has been set down and cannot be increased. When life is done, no spiritual highways will hold the traffic of your freighted soul, therefore what you would do, you must do now; so treat this day as if your life were spent, and this, an extra day, was granted you by special favor of Almighty God. What folly greater than to lose this chance?”
– Selection from Al-Ghazali’s Alchemy of Happiness, interpreted by Javez L. Van Cleef
http://www.malaysiakini.com/letters/90465
Malaysia is a law-abiding country. We are a country which respects the rule of law and its just application to all citizens under our Federal Constitution and our Islamic guiding principles. In cases of perceived conflict between federal law and Islamic law, Muslims always have the option of choosing the syariah courts to resolve their difficulties.
There was at one point where we had some unidentified jihadis killed in Mumbai, and were having trouble finding gravesites. There are those, among Muslims as well as among others (likely the US government), who wish the Muslims to disavow these jihadis.
They do not wish to see their religion “besmirched”. Yet no one among the Muslims is raising the question of culpability of the entire Ummah in this massacre. The basic question for Muslims would be (if anyone were brave enough to ask it), “Are these nine terrorists or freedom-fighters?”
Like a lot of Arabic words, adab requires a bit of study rather than a simple definition in the English language. If we are among the 90% of Muslims whose native tongue is not Arabic, we must face this bottom-line need to study this language of the Arabs, word-by-word if not as a communication skill. The Qur’an itself extols Arabic as the language of Revelation par excellence, and so there is no avoiding its study.
Have you read the official constitution issued by the Palestinian Authority? This was during Yasir Arafat’s leadership, and, to the best of my knowledge, it is still in force, and Mr. Abbas has pledged to honor and protect this constitution.
On August 17th, 1945, Sukarno and Hatta of Indonesia proclaimed independence from the Dutch. It was a simple statement. These Founding Fathers felt that the proclamation had to be made post-haste, before the Dutch could re-invade Indonesia after the Japanese defeat. In this sense, the atomic bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki became birth pangs for the new Indonesian Republic.
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