Shari’a in the UK

I found an interesting blog post on the question of Shari’a in the UK. Here is an excerpt:

Between naiveté and intellectual dishonesty: debating Shari‘a in the UK « Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist

During my research in the UK, I have concluded that:

1. there is no unitary view about Shari’a among Muslims in the UK (even among Muslims of the same ethnic group or tradition) an unitary Shari’a court is impossible at the present;
2. among the various priorities, this is not the most reported;
3. the debate on Shari‘a is often a consequence of particular political and mass media based debates than an internal one;
4. some of the most hardcore ‘traditionalists’ (if I can use such term) have clearly argued that there should not be a Shari‘a court in a non-Muslim country, and in any case a Shari ‘a court which derives authority from a non-Muslim law is not Islamic by definition;
5. even without the Arbitration Act 1996 version of Shari‘a court, Muslims can always decide, as part of their freedoms granted in the UK, to live under a self-defined Shari‘a, hence the reason for why today we can find many fatwa websites (which often contradict each other in ‘opinions’).

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Read the whole post here.

Information at my fingertips

As promised in my post about Computer gains I will present some of the programs I use and find useful.

Let’s start with the Reference section of my computer. Not everybody needs so much reference material on their computers, but until recently I have lived in a village without internet access. Now I usually have internet access and started using more online references, but you never know … the next power cut will come for sure and when I am on a plane (or wherever) I am happy to have all the references right there on my laptop without being at the mercy of electricity companies and internet providers.

The first group are the electronic dictionaries since I am living and working in at least three languages most of the time (English – German – French) and often need to translate things from one to the other. And who wants to carry all these as books with them? Not me!

Langenscheidt Standard Dictionary CDs German-French, German-English – I bought these dictionaries years ago and I am still using them whenever I don’t have Internet access.

Duden Fremdwörterbuch CD (Foreign Word Dictionary) – In German there are special dictionaries that explain words whose origin is another language than German. Very helpful.

De Gruiter Etymologisches Wörterbuch CD (Etymological Dictionary) – not a necessity but often very interesting, especially for linguists.

Bertelsmann Die deutsche Rechtschreibung CD (The German Orthography) – this was an important addition to my collection when the spelling rules in German got changed.

Ultralingua English-French dictionary – their dictionaries work on several different platforms, including Palm. While I needed only English-French on my laptop, I used several others on my Palm. You can download them online for a free trial and pay later.

Lexique Pro – is a free program that allows linguists to share their dictionaries of a local language. There are many less known languages from all over the world available for download. I use it to look up words in Bambara, one of Mali’s trade languages. The downloadable lexicon file is trilingual (Bambara-English-French-German) and comes with or without photos.

I have used several programs with general references, but the following two are the ones that I have always kept and reinstalled on every new computer:

LinguaLinks – is a great collection of electronic reference materials, including 149 books which are organized into several “bookshelves” according to the disciplines: Anthropology, Consulting, General Reference Works, Language Learning, Linguistics, Literacy, Sociolinguistics, Translation. So far I’ve mainly used the material in the Anthropology and Language Learning section.

Microsoft Encarta Reference Library – is a handy reference collection but I loved the maps most. Even remote villages in Mali are mapped and it is easy to look up longitude and latitude or calculate distances.

A different kind of maps are the following three – star charts. In the village where I lived, watching the stars and identifying the constellations was a fascinating hobby, especially when we slept on the roof during the hot season and the Milky Way would pass over us during the night. Awesome!

Cartes du ciel – can be downloaded for free.

Coolsky – planetarium program which can be downloaded free to try, registration costs $25.

Stellarium – is a free open source planetarium for different platforms.

Over the years I have used different Bible reference programs:

Power Bible CD – available for only $19, includes a lot of good stuff for Bible study, comparing different translations, cross references, etc.

Logos Bible Software – I got a special deal as student, otherwise I might not have bought it. It costs a lot but it also offers a lot. Only disadvantage – it still does not include a German Bible translation that is more recent than 1912.

I also have several reference works for my study of Islam. The Divine Islam webpage offered several free downloads but is no longer available. The programs are described here. Now another webpage stared offering them for download:

Qur’an Viewer – allows to read the Qur’an in several languages and translations. The text is searchable and it is easy to copy individual Qur’an verses in Arabic (Unicode) and English for quotations.

Hadith Viewer – a multilingual Hadith software (sayings/actions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad).

Hadith Qudsi – includes the “Forty Sacred Hadith.”

Stories of the prophets – contains the complete English translation text of Al-Imam Ibn Khathir’s book, translated by Mustafa Geme’ah, of Al-Azhar institute, Cairo.

Hijri Calender – a calendar which converts and displays the corresponding Islamic calendar dates for each day in the Gregorian calendar.

There are two more programs that belong in this category but do not come from the same source:

Moon calculator – this program falls more in the “utility” section but it belongs to my Islamic “tools.” It’s a DOS program that allows you to calculate the Islamic holidays (similar to the previous program which I have not used as often). This is very useful when you want to include Islamic holidays in a calendar that you are producing for the next year.

The World of Islam – is a CD-Rom with a lot of resources on Islam, including 39 complete books and many articles.

So much for my reference material. You can probably guess that I use a large hard disk to accommodate for all this material “at my fingertips.” Hopefully, some of this information will be useful for you, too.

Foolishness?

This week I read “Foolishness to the Greeks” by Lesslie Newbigin for the upcoming class. It gave me lots to think. Here are a few remarkable quotes:

Islam denies the Christian doctrine of original sin and therefore believes that it is possible to achieve a total identification of the laws of a state with the law of God. Church and state in Islamic thought are one, without distinction of function. That way we cannot go. The sacralizing of politics, the total identification of a political goal with the will of God, always unleashes demonic powers.

I am aware of this teaching in Islam and found it a very interesting analysis. He goes on to say:

We are witnessing the same thing, but under Christian auspices, in the emergence of what is called “the Religious Right” in the United States. The leaders of this movement, while accepting the biblical doctrine regarding the radical corruption of human nature by sin, in effect exempt themselves as “born-again Christians” from its operation. They identify their own cause unconditionally with the cause of God, ….

Wow! This seemed so unbelievable. Newbigin wrote this in 1986 !!! – more than 20 years ago. This left me nearly speechless. It reminded me so much of what I had heard and seen over the last few years and what had seemed to me a recent development. I was not aware that this “Religious Right” had started much earlier. I know very little of what it looked like twenty years ago. The remainder of the paragraph is much more dated, but I can still see certain parallels:

… regard their critics as agents of Satan, and are apparently prepared to see the human race obliterated in an apocalyptic catastrophe in which the nuclear arsenal of the United States is the instrument of Jesus Christ for the fulfillment of his purpose against the Soviet Union as the citadel of evil. This confusion of a particular and fallible set of political and moral judgments with the cause of Jesus Christ is more dangerous than the open rejection of the claim of Christ in Islam, just as the shrine of Jereboam at Bethel was more dangerous to the faith of Israel than was the open paganism of her neighbors, for the worship of Ba’al was being carried on under the name of Yahweh. The “Religious Right” uses the name of Jesus to cover the absolute claims of one national tradition. (See 1 Kings 13; and see Karl Barth’s extended commentary thereon in Church Dogmatics II / 2, 393ff.)

But the rhetoric of the “Moral Majority” is only a further development of the ideologizing of politics that stems from the Enlightenment. … The Enlightenment gave birth to a new conception of politics, namely, that happiness can be provided by a political system and that the goal of politics is happiness. The project of bringing heaven down to earth always results in bringing hell up from below. (pp 116-7)

Even though the reference to the Soviet Union is outdated and the present situation with Iraq is different, there are enough parallels to make us think. This and other parts of the book are a powerful reminder that church and state have different tasks and this distinction needs to be maintained even if every citizen were a member of the church. On the one hand, it is wrong to accept the relegation of the church (faith, values, purpose) to the private sphere as a result of the Enlightenment. On the other hand, it is equally wrong to identify any single country or political party with God’s will on earth. We are all fallible.

We ARE called to engage the culture and world-view of our societies, shape public life, challenge politic rulers with God’s standards, give people a taste of God’s reign through Kingdom activities, but we cannot establish God’s kingdom through political achievements.  We need to have the courage to testify to a reality that cannot be proven true according to the rules of our society (where only scientific facts count), and we need to give others the opportunity to observe us in community, worshiping our loving King, and experience through it the “radiance of supernatural reality” which can draw people into His kingdom.

Loving Muslims thru prayer * Muslime durch Gebet lieben

In one week begins the month of fasting for all Muslims. As every year, many Christians will pray for them during this time.

“30-Days International produces the well-known “30-Days of Prayer for the Muslim World” Christian prayer guide coinciding with Ramadan each year.

The origin of this international prayer network came about as a group of Christian leaders were praying during a meeting in the Middle East in April 1992. God put a burden on the hearts of these men and women to call as many Christians as possible to pray for the Muslim world.”

You can find more material about the Muslim world, material for prayer, testimonies about answers to prayer and more here.

You can also receive the daily prayer material via e-mail (subscribe here.)

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In einer Woche beginnt das Fastenmonat der Muslime. Wie jedes Jahr gibt es die Aktion 30 Tage Gebet. Dazu gibt es Gebetsmaterial in 42 Sprachen.

“Um den 1. September herum beginnt für 1,3 Mrd. Muslime weltweit der Monat Ramadan, in dem jährlich im Gedenken an die Herabsendung des Korans gefastet wird. Genau zu bestimmen ist der Beginn des Ramadan im Voraus nicht; er richtet sich nach der Sichtung des Neumondes. Erst wenn die Mondsichel an bestimmten Orten der islamischen Welt – wie z. B. in Kairo – erkennbar ist, kann der Ramadan offiziell beginnen. Und auch das Ende des Fastenmonats ist nicht von vorneherein mit ganzer Sicherheit zu bestimmen, sondern hängt wiederum vom Erscheinen des Neumondes ab.”

“Ein großer Teil der etwa 1,3 Milliarden Muslime weltweit beteiligt sich am Fasten und hält in diesem Monat auch die anderen rituellen Pflichten strenger als sonst ein. Muslime denken im Ramadan viel an Allah und hören oft Koran-Rezitationen. Sie möchten mit alledem Allahs Wohlgefallen erlangen und Sühne für ihre Sünden leisten.”

Mehr dazu hier. Man kann das Gebetsheft online lesen oder hier herunterladden oder bestellen.