The Purpose of Life in an Hour and a Half
Why would God, who needs nothing, create us to worship God, especially given that God has angels to do so and do so flawlessly?
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The Lunacy of Lunar Sightings
The following piece is an important article written by Dr. Youssef Ismail, who is one of the few people I really trust on the issue of determining lunar dates in order to know when the Hajj and Ramadan have begun, when it’s Eid, etc. I trust him for two reasons: firstly, he has been traditionally trained in Maliki fiqh and granted an ijazah to teach
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War is Not the Way: Peace is the Path
The following is the foreword to the booklet entitled, “Pursuit of Peace: 2014 Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies.”
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Striking Necks: It Must Be the Kharijites!
To paraphrase an aphorism coined by a 20th century philosopher, those who fail to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them until they learn them. The earliest strain of extremism in Islamic history emerged in the late 7th century with the Kharijites, a sect that scholars have said will continue until the end of the Ummah’s time. In
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Falling Down – and Taking Innocents with You
How do we make sense of the murder of three American Muslims? Sudden and brutal murders are always troubling but never so much as when they seem inherently mad and senseless. When a young man strides into a school and annihilates little children without even wild and cruel vengeance as a motive, we are all the more confounded by the meaninglessness
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On the Passing of the Young Abdullah Abdullatif Alkadi* and a Postscript on Charlie Hebdo
*Abdullah Abdullatif Alkadi was the cousin of the noble scholar, Shaykh Abdullah Alkadi. For several years, I was fortunate to spend Ramadan in Mecca and Medina and to celebrate Eid in Dammam and Al-Ahsa in eastern Saudia Arabia. I came to know that latter city and its notable families well, and they had grown so accustomed to my celebrating Eid with
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