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Essays
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Written by Ginan Rauf
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Wednesday, 09 November 2005 |
Homecoming
by Ginan Rauf
Ramadan is a long time to reflect upon belonging and the human need to
belong to a community. Holidays tend to intensify feelings of human
solidarity or to accentuate countervailing states of alienation.
Thanksgiving dinners are often gatherings for strange familiars during
which one experiences the uncanny as described by Freud; one is both at
home and without a home; one is among family members and among
strangers in whom the strange-ness we think we know might unexpectedly
erupt. Yet there is also something predictable about these sudden
eruptions that we intuitively sense but often exile to the repressed
strangeness within ourselves.
Last weekend I attended a conference entitled "Toward A New
Enlightenment" sponsored by the Council for Secular Humanism on the
occasion of its 25th anniversary. It was something of a homecoming
tempered by the knowledge that homecomings are always fraught with
lingering discomforts. Exile simply is; it is an inescapable part of
the human condition and it propels our quest for comfort in an
increasingly bizarre world. Nonetheless, it was a spectacular
homecoming and for the first time in my life I experienced a truly
exhilarating sense of belonging. This- I thought to myself- is how
Malcolm X must have felt as he stood among other Muslims during the
pilgrimage to Mecca.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 11 November 2005 )
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Written by Zaid Shakir
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Monday, 31 October 2005 |
American Muslims, Human Rights,
and the Challenge of September 11, 2001
By Imam Zaid Shakir
Introduction
The tragic events of
September 11, 2001, have called into question many fundamental Islamic
principles, values, and beliefs. The ensuing discourse in many critical
areas reveals the weakness of Muslims in making meaningful and
substantive contributions towards a clear understanding of the Islamic
position on a number of critical issues. The purpose of this paper is
to examine one of those issues, human rights, in an effort to identify:
1. How human rights are defined in the Western and Islamic intellectual traditions;
2. Why human rights issues are of central importance to Islamic propagation efforts in North America;
3. What are the implications of the tragic events of September 11, 2001 for prevailing Muslim views of human rights?
This paper is not designed
to respond the attacks of those authors who assail the philosophy,
conceptualization, formulation, and application of human rights policy
among Muslims. Such a response would be quite lengthy, and owing to the
complexity of the project, would probably raise as many questions as it
resolved. Nor is it an attempt to call attention to the increasingly
problematic indifference of the United States government towards
respecting the civil liberties and other basic rights of its Muslim and
Arab citizens. We do hope that this paper will help American Muslims
identify and better understand some of the relevant issues shaping our
thought and action in the critical area of human rights.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 11 November 2005 )
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