BBC NEWS | Europe | Iraq bomber ‘was Belgian woman’
A Belgian woman who converted to Islam after marrying a radical Muslim carried out a suicide attack in Baghdad earlier this month, say Belgian prosecutors.
Taking someone who found guidance, and leading them astray… la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah.
TheStar.com - Europe’s very own `annus horribilis’ In her understated way, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth termed 1992 an annus horribilis. Fire struck Windsor Castle, royal marriages fell apart, and the monarchy came under public scrutiny. In 2005, that Latin phrase could easily apply to Europe as a whole.
Stan Berenstain, Co-Creator of Those Fuzzy Bears, Dies at 82 - New York Times
Stan Berenstain, who with his wife, Jan, churned out more than 250 books showing how the warm and fuzzy Berenstain Bears - Mama, Papa, Brother and Sister - confronted and learned from life’s little crises, died on Saturday in Doylestown, Pa. He was 82.
TipMonkies » Blog Archive » The Ultimate Guide to Yahoo! Services About a week and a half or two ago, our newest contributor, Jay Koby, wrote a guide to Google services which proved to be more popular around the web than we ever thought possible. As a result, we decided to put together a similar guide for Yahoo! services, which proved to be a little tougher, because, believe it or not, Yahoo! has many more services than Google! Some of these are well known, particularly Flickr and the various search features, but some you may never have heard of, or even known that they were part of the Yahoo! family. Read on for the full guide.
The Black Iris of Jordan » Confronting the Takfiri Culture For the second time since the Amman bombings, hundreds of clan members of the Bani Hassan tribe, which Zarqawi can trace his roots to, have disowned him publically in a letter printed in the Jordanian newspapers bearing 370 signatures which I’m guessing is all the papers would allow them to print. This was done again in response to a message Zarqawi sent from Iraq which condemned his excommunication from the clan saying:
The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs - Free Audio One billion people on the planet are struggling with extreme poverty according to Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University. In this March 31 lecture, Sachs discusses his new book, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, which explores the challenge of global poverty. Sachs also shares accounts of his recent visits to Africa and offers practical solutions to the challenge of global poverty, which he contends can be eliminated by 2025.
EconLog, India Fact of the Day, Arnold Kling: Library of Economics and Liberty
From an article by Radha Chaurushiya in the Milken Institute Review.
The information technology sector employs only one million people – a quarter of a percent of a labor force of more than 400 million. Output in the services sector as a whole has been growing by more than 8 percent per year since 1994, and represents more than half of India’s GDP. But this sector employs less than a quarter of the workforce.
The majority of Indians are still in its relatively backward agriculture sector.
The article paints a sobering picture. India’s lack of infrastructure discourages manufacturing. How will unskilled and low-skilled labor share in economic growth?
Opus Dei is an international lay Catholic group whose core ideal is the sanctification of work. But critics and some former members have accused the group of having cult-like practices and promoting a right-wing agenda….
The Cross and the Sickle Moon - New York Times RUSSIA is a Slavic nation, and historically an Orthodox Christian one. But it is also Islamic, and since the fall of the Soviet Union 14 years ago, Islam has grown increasingly visible and influential.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | May the forces be with us Aid workers in earthquake-hit Pakistan have found the help of the army indispensable, writes Robin Lodge…
Simple Memorizing Techniques “I have a memory like a sieve.” Who hasn’t heard that lament many times from people convinced they have a terrible memory? The fact is, what we remember often has more to do with factors such as. . .
A Reader on Islamic Spirituality (Sufism)
Answered by SunniPath Fiqh Q&A Support Team
Alhamdulillah,I know sufficient Fiqh to fulfil my daily obligations. What I findmissing is the spiritual side to this. How would I go abound learningthis, are there books you would recommend? What about the Sufi tariqas- are they bida? My Arabic teacher told me that tassawuf didn’t existin the sahabas time, but that there was zuhd, is this true? Also whatbooks/subjects would you recommend to further my knowledge of fiqh?
Audacity: The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor
Audacityis free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It isavailable for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and otheroperating systems. Learn more about Audacity…
NPR : Religious Education Issues Divide Spain
Spanish Catholics are opposing education reforms of the Socialist government, which makes religion classes optional. The previous administration had promised to make religious education compulsory.
For a while I’ve been
onthe trail of a saying usually attributed to Winston Churchill:”This is the sort of arrant nonsense up with which I will not put” (orsome
variation thereof). Typically the line appears in an anecdote where an officious clerk or editor tries to correct something Churchill has written by “fixing” his trailing prepositions, and Churchill then scribbles the famous comment in the margin of the revised text.
| ChicagoTribune, Feb. 28, 1944, p. 1 /// |
New YorkTimes, Feb. 28, 1944, p. 9 |
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Today, the corner offices of the nation’s largest companies aredominated by white men in a way that few other parts of society stillare. Only a handful of women hold prominent chief executive jobs, while81 women are in Congress. There are more female senators from Maine(two) than there are women running Fortune 100 companies (zero).
Yetthe full picture is not as simple as all this suggests. In ways lessobvious than race and gender, the corporate elite has become less eliteand more diverse over the last decade or two, while its counterpart inWashington has become more homogeneous….
:A Fair Success Refuting Motion of Earth: (Fauz-e-Mubeen Dar Rad-de-Harkat-e-Zameen (Imam Ahmad Raza Khan)
I wonder why this book in particular of the books of this imam was chosen for translation….
The world moves in funny ways. (oops)
EducationGuardian.co.uk | News crumb | £165,000 - the cost of bringing up a child The average cost of raising a child from birth to the age of 21 has risen this year to a record-breaking £165,668, a survey reveals today. The biggest single items of expenditure for parents are childcare and education, with the university years the most expensive of all. The total cost, equivalent to £657 a month or £22 a day, has risen by 8% during the past year, more than three times the rate of inflation, according to the friendly society Liverpool Victoria. At £165,668, the average cost of raising a child is only slightly less than the average cost of a house, which according to the Halifax stands at £168,210, or a top-of-the-range Ferrari 612 Scaglietti (£170,500). From birth to 21, the average UK household will spend £15,630 on a child’s food, £12,055 on clothing, £9,369 on hobbies and toys, £5,170 on pocket money and £12,109 on holidays.
LRB | Jeremy Harding : Diary from Paris Of the many graffiti to be found in the Paris banlieues just now – and creeping into the city itself – the most apt has surely been the simple injunction: ‘Riot!’
Khaleej Times Online World’s top pop singer Michael Jackson, who recently settled down in Manama has donated a huge amount of money, the figure was not disclosed, for building a state-of-the-art mosque near his luxury palace in the Bahraini capital, according to his spokesman. The proposed mosque would be designated for learning the principles and teachings of Islam, as well as teaching of English language, for which high-standard teachers would be brought from United States under his personal supervision, the spokesman said.
Of course, Google has always wanted to be more than a search engine. Even in the early days, its ultimate goal was extravagant: to organize the world’s information. High-minded as that sounds, Google’s ever-expanding agenda has put it on a collision course with nearly every company in the information technology industry: Amazon.com, Comcast, eBay, Yahoo!, even Microsoft.
It seems no one is safe: Google is doing Wi-Fi; Google is searching inside books; Google has a plan for ecommerce.
There seems to be deep seated confusion in society over the purposes of education and what constitutes a good education. Although we may not agree how it should be done, almost everyone agrees that self-respect and respect for others should be a result of having been educated. Martin Luther King warned us that:
‘The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals’.
Very intelligent… but keep your thinking cap on, and be patient… [Paragraphing above is my innovation.]
Firefox 1.5 - The best browser gets even better… - PC Mag review
In the space of a roughly a year, Firefox has gone from relative obscurity to being the second most popular browser in the world. It’s got only about 9 percent of the Internet browsing market, but that’s incredible for a version 1.0 product, especially since the top browser, Microsoft Internet Explorer, comes bundled with new PCs. The release of Firefox 1.5, the first major upgrade since Firefox 1.0 came out in November 2004, is almost certain to drive adoption rates even higher.
Read the Firefox 1.5 full review here.
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Saudi Stories: A series featuring remarkable interviews with people from the closed and often secretive society of Saudi Arabia.
Bill Law has made many trips to the kingdom, which is takingtentative steps towards greater openness. This time he succeeded ingaining access to reformers, officials and many of those people caughtup in the ongoing struggle between traditionalists and modernisers at acrucial time in the country’s history.
Hurricane Economics: America Booms as New Orleans Waits - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News Three months after the storm hit, America’s stock market and the economy have both rebounded from the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina. Experts are even predicting a year-end rally for Wall Street — but in New Orleans, the recovery remains elusive.
Mere Islam: Updates at Islamic Awareness
There have been several interesting updates posted to the Islamic-Awareness.org site in recent weeks.
These include images of the Arabic Islamic inscriptions on the interior of Dome of the Rock (Qubat al-Sakhirah) and the copper plaque inscriptions as well, both of which date to just 72 years after the Hijra.
There’s also a nice refutation of the Orientalist Nöldeke’s claim that the Prophet Muhammad—salla Allahu ‘alayhi was salam—was "ignorant" of everything outside of Arabia. The example given to support this assertion was that the Prophet—salla Allahu ‘alayhi was salam—made the fertility of Egypt, where precipitation is generally rather light, dependent on rain instead of the inundation of the Nile. As to who exactly is ignorant about the facts of ancient Egypt is discussed in the article Theodor Nöldeke And Fertility In Ancient Egypt. Similarly, it has been claimed by Christian missionaries that al-`Aziz is "an anachronistic title" given to Potiphar in the story of Joseph (Yusuf) in the Qur’an. What is actually anachronistic is made clearer in the article Al-`Aziz & Potiphar: A Confused Nomenclature?
Writing, Clear and Simple - Notebook - Challenge yourself
"Undertake something that is difficult; it will do you good. Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow." —Ronald E. Osborn
Guardian Unlimited Books | News | A history of plagiarism (not my own work) "
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal" - TS Eliot Plagiarism - the attempt to pass off the ideas, research, theories or words of others as one’s own - is a serious academic offence….
but:
Plagiarism is a very ancient art. Shakespeare stole most of his historical plots directly from Holinshed. Laurence Sterne and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were both accused of plagiarism. The extent of Coleridge’s plagiarism has been debated by scholars since Thomas de Quincey, himself an accomplished borrower, published an exposé in Tait’s Magazine a couple of weeks after Coleridge’s death. Oscar Wilde was repeatedly accused of plagiarism: hence the celebrated exchange with Whistler: "I wish I’d said that, James."
Saying that these great authors "stole" is rather inappropriate, however, as acceptable "borrowing" of ideas and words in one age could be considered "stealing" in another….
William Dalrymple reviews some books for the New York Review of Books in “ Inside the Madrasas. ” Many of Dalrymple’s works can be found here.
“Shortly before four British Muslims, three of them of Pakistani origin, blew themselves up in the London Underground on July 7, I traveled along the Indus River to Akora Khattack in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Here, straddling the noisy, truck-thundering Islamabad highway, stands the Haqqania, one of the most radical of the religious schools called madrasas.”[…..]
[T]heBrits . . . have long needed help in punctuation. Not that Americanscan’t use some as well, but the British need it even more. Infact, it’s fair to say that in edited prose, American standardsof usage are generally higher than British ones. That may seem hard tosubstantiate, but 25 years of close professional observation, andvoluminous research and writing on the subject, make it pretty clear tome.
(Bryan A. Garner, “Don’t Know Much About Punctuation: Notes on a Stickler Wannabe,” review of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss, Texas Law Review 83 [April 2005]: 1443-52, at 1444 [footnote omitted])
Americans are ina perpetual state of angst about the future of their educationalsystem. How can they remain the world’s strongest economy ifAmerican schoolchildren are soundly beaten by their Hungarian peers ininternational tests? How can they avoid social breakdown if 40% ofchildren in many inner-city schools fail to graduate? Yet here is agold-plated prediction for 2006: in one vital area of educationalachievement—higher education—America will continue to leavethe rest of the world in the dust.
newsobserver.com |Triangle Grammar Guide - Sneaked or snuck? The past tense of the verb “sneak” seems to be mutating (and I do mean like a germ). I always change “snuck” to “sneaked” because I consider “snuck” nonstandard. I have some support from usage experts. Bryan Garner in “A Dictionary of Modern American Usage” calls “snuck” nonstandard. But it appears that the usage might be changing….
Poverty forces parents to send their young children to work….
Bastion of wealth andprivilege, or academic hothouse? With David Cameron poised to lead theTories, fellow old boy Nick Fraser asks what Eton means now…
A few months ago I sent in a query to Sunnipath.com and just a day or so ago, I received a reply from Faraz Rabbani. He gave me the crappiest reply ever. I feel like shooting him right now. How can a sheikha whirl when in Islam women are not allowed to dance? Whirling or Khattak dance is allowed, but only for men! I think he has lost it….
Alhamdulillah! I couldn’t help smiling at that one… Anyways, I didn’t say that a sheikha can whirl in front of non-mahram men. However, wisdom and tact entail not giving answers that could turn someone away–and one must be especially careful when one doesn’t know who the questioner is. Thus, when the questioner asked about some rather dubious "Sufi-without-much-Shariah" group and their practices, I simply responded:
Walaikum assalam wa rahmatullah,
The mentioned site’s commitment to the Shariah, as understood by mainstream Islamic scholarship, seems tenuous.
And Allah knows best.
Faraz Rabbani
