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Politics : The Miracle of Islamic Science -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck who wrote (165)	8/20/2006 12:42:06 PM
From: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 273

Muslims Look to Science, Not the Moon, for Calendar By Rachel Zoll Associated Press Saturday, August 19, 2006; Page B09 washingtonpost.com Kari Ansari recalls getting ready to celebrate one of the most important religious holidays of the year -- the end of the month-long Ramadan fast. She and her husband bought new clothes and gifts for their three children and planned a special family meal. But there was one obstacle to starting the celebration: Leaders of the two local mosques couldn't agree when the feast, called Eid al-Fitr, should begin. "We would just be sitting up at night waiting to hear the decision," said Ansari, who lives in Herndon and is editor of America's Muslim Family magazine. The Muslim practice of following a lunar calendar, requiring a naked-eye sighting of the new moon to start a holiday the next morning, has divided the Muslim community on its most sacred days. Now a scholarly panel that advises American Muslims on religious law is trying to end the confusion. The Fiqh Council of North America announced last week that it would no longer rely on moon sightings to determine the start of holidays and would instead use astronomical calculations. The panel released an Islamic calendar that runs through 2011, hoping Muslims in the United States and Canada can be persuaded to trade the old way for the new. The schedule problem is more than a minor inconvenience. School calendars and vacation time from work, for instance, depend on knowing dates in advance. "There will be a lot of resentment at first," said Khalid Shaukat, an astronomer and research physicist with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who calculated the calendar for the Fiqh Council. "But I expect that as the time goes on and we educate them, people will see the benefit of this and understand that what may seem like a new approach to them is not against Islamic jurisprudence." The date of the Eid is based on the Hadith, traditions taken from the life of the prophet Muhammad. The prophet taught that the holiday marking the end of Ramadan comes the morning after a nighttime sighting of the new moon. Under the most conservative interpretation, two credible witnesses with expertise in Islamic sharia law have to see the crescent moon with the naked eye before their observations can be accepted, said Sulayman S. Nyang, an expert on Islam at Howard University. But the Fiqh Council says that the prophet used direct sightings only because no other method was reliable in his lifetime. "Now, we know scientifically whether the moon is there, even if it is not sightable because of the weather conditions," said Muzammil Siddiqi, the council chairman. Kareem Irfan of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, where an estimated 400,000 Muslims live, said the uncertainty of the old system has been costly. Organizers of the massive community worship services that mark the holiday had to reserve convention halls for two different days, losing money on the double deposit, he said. Muslims who needed a day off from work or had to make plans for pulling their children out of school could not say when the celebration would be. A patchwork of practices developed, even within the same town. Some foreign-born imams would follow moon sighting announcements from their native countries. Others followed the decision of the government of Saudi Arabia, where millions of Muslims make pilgrimages each year. It was not unusual to have members of the same family celebrating the holiday on different days. "It makes you feel sad," Ansari said, "because not everyone is doing the same thing." The Fiqh Council has spent years trying to end the chaos. The Islamic Society of North America ran an Eid hotline that took calls from Muslims nationwide who said they had seen the new moon. Once the sun set on the West Coast, scholars and astronomers would hold a conference call, listening as eyewitnesses described what they saw so leaders could decide whether the descriptions were credible, Siddiqi said. The council would then pronounce the start of the holiday, hoping the date would be observed continent-wide. "The whole decision would take a long time," said Siddiqi, who is also director of the Islamic Society of Orange County in Garden Grove, Calif. "On the East Coast, it could be 10 o'clock at night, 11 o'clock at night." The announcement this month about the calendar is the next step in what scholars say will be an intensive effort to win over Muslim communities. Muslims worldwide disagree about the right method of setting the date. In Turkey, astronomical calculations are used. The Saudi government has a "double-track approach," Nyang said. Officials there use calculations from an observatory but decide on a date only after consulting with scholars who follow actual visual sightings, Nyang said. The first test of the new North American system will come Sept. 23, when, according to the Fiqh Council's Islamic calendar, Ramadan begins. "The American Muslims aren't going to resolve this problem for the whole Muslim world or even for themselves," Nyang said. "But, gradually, I think science is going to prevail."

To: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck who wrote (165)	8/22/2006 9:18:12 AM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 273

Islamic Leaders Urge Children To Be Bombers New York Sun ^ \| August 16, 2006 \| STEVEN STALINSKY nysun.com "Young Israelis dream of being inventors, and their role models are the Israeli innovators who made it to the Nasdaq. Hezbollah youth dream of being martyrs, and their role models are Islamic militants who made it to the Next World." — Thomas Friedman, New York Times, August 9 The act of infanticide, the practice of intentionally causing the death of an infant, is rarely practiced today. Yet in the Middle East, it has taken on a new form. Under the direction of some leading Muslim religious figures, some parents in the region are encouraging their children to commit suicide as a religious act — then celebrating it. Since Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has led Hezbollah, the terrorist organization has put the death of Lebanese children on a pedestal. His Ashura speech of May 1997 praised parents who beseeched Allah to "bless" their children with the honor of martyrdom. Four months later, Sheik Nasrallah's 18 year-old son became a "martyr" after battling Israeli forces. The Hezbollah leader appeared on Al-Manar TV and thanked Allah for his son's "martyrdom," saying it brought him "the greatest feeling of joy that a father can know." Many Lebanese Shiites were inspired by his words and to this day they want the same for their children. Sanaa Younes told the San Jose Mercury News on August 3, "He gave his son to Islam. … It's what every parent would want." On July 23, another Shiite mother told the Boston Globe,"We are ready to give our children for Sheik Nasrallah." Hezbollah begins brainwashing young children to be willing to kill themselves from an early age."Hezbollah," a 1997 book on the terrorist group by a Reuters Middle East correspondent, Hala Jaber, details how the terror organization and its TV channel incite Muslim youth to terrorism: "Al-Manar ... is dominated by religious programs. Pictures and names of martyrs are screened, supported by verses from the Koran which glorify such deaths. The aim is simple: to indoctrinate the minds of the young ... with the idea that those who seek martyrdom will be rewarded with more pleasure than can ever be achieved during this earthly lifetime." In an interview with the Boston Globe on August 1, two young members of Hezbollah, "Hussein" and "Hamid," described their meticulous training, which began at age 14. Hussein explained, "It is the matter that we are not afraid of death. ...This is the center of the training of a fighter, to make him unafraid of death, so you prefer to die rather than live humiliated." The mother of a Hezbollah martyr, Bassel Al-Din, appeared on Al-Manar on May 22, 2005. She wept with happiness as she told the channel what happened when her child became a martyr: "Bassel had a wish. ... Whenever I told him I wanted to marry him off, he would say, ‘Yes, mother, you'll marry me off like this in paradise.' And indeed, the martyr Bassel got married in paradise. I congratulate the black-eyed virgins who took Bassel from me." A "Mother's Day Special" on Al-Manar on November 11, 2004, featured comments from many mothers of martyrs. "All I want is martyrdom. I'm willing for all my children to become martyrs," one said. "It's true I sacrificed a son, but others have sacrificed two or three. I hope more of my sons will become martyrs," another said. As "Nasrallah, a Name for Arab Children," an article on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting News Network, reported August 13, over the past month, many parents in the Arab world have become so smitten with Sheik Nasrallah that they are naming their babies after him.This is especially true in the Palestinian Arab territories, where more than 50 newborns have been given the name Nasrallah in the past few weeks. Sheik Nasrallah's Islamo-infanticide is also popular in Iran, where it originates. The speaker of the Iranian parliament, Gholam-Ali Haddad Adel, praised the "lion cubs of Hezbollah" in a speech that aired July 18 on the Iranian News Channel. Iran's Fars News Agency covered a July 31 rally by representatives of Lebanese women's organizations who chanted, "Lebanese people are proud of being martyred." Pictures from the rally show Iranian teenage girls sporting the latest suicide belts and holding posters of their heartthrob, Sheik Nasrallah. Some of the girls also carried pictures of female Palestinian Arab suicide bombers such as Hanadi Jaradat and Wafaa Idris. A daughter of Ayatollah Khomeini, Dr. Zahra Mostafavi, sent a letter to Sheik Nasrallah on July 31 that appeared in the Tehran Times. "The jihad you have commenced at present is not to defend a land alone, but the entity of Islam, Quran, and all Muslims. … The only bitter and heartrending side of the holy jihad is the martyrdom of the Lebanese and Palestinian hero children … whose martyrdom is moving for every free man," she wrote. Until Muslim religious leaders in countries such as Lebanon and Iran speak out against child martyrs, this phenomenon can only be expected to grow.