Book Review: AL' AMERICA: Islamicity

By: Paul M. Barrett

Peace Be Upon UsIslamic and Arabic traditions have long been part of American culture.
It was a rough election season for American Arabs and Muslims. The McCain-Palin ticket shamelessly amplified the Internet smear that Barak Obama is a crypto-Islamic fanatic who fraternizes with terrorists. Obama responded by insisting, persuasively, on his credentials as an observant Christian. But in the process, he did little to point out the inherent bigotry in the Republican strategy Colin Powell, during his televised endorsement of Obama, eloquently challenged the assumption that Arabs and Muslims deserve to be held at arm's length. But the former secretary of state couldn't single-handedly do much to change the perception of these groups as a political liability.

Jonathan Curiel intends his book Al' America as an antidote to the fear. Ignorance, unsurprisingly, lies at the heart of it. Start with basic demographics: Most Arab-Americans are Christian, not Muslim, and most American Muslims are not Arab. Private surveys show that the largest segment of the American Muslim population -- about one-third -- traces its roots to South Asia, primarily Pakistan and India. Arabs make up only about a quarter of the Muslims in this country; African Americans, mostly converts and their children, another fifth.

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Welcome to the Human-Machine Civilization: Islamicity

By: Dr. Aslam Abdullah

From the midst of the modern civilization is emerging yet another set of ideas that would probably exhaust all possible means to reportedly make human beings smarter to the extent of promoting a new scientific world known as human-machine culture.By year 2009, as predicted by Ray Kurzwell, one of 18 thinkers chosen by the US National Academy of Engineering to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century, "we will have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons." These nanobots, he concluded, would make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system."

We are on the brink of advances that, many argue, will change the face of the world, in a dramatic fashion, unknown and unseen by anything in the past. We thought the computer was the smartest invention we ever had. The emerging new changes will make every scientific discovery up till now seem primitive.
The idea of placing tiny robots implanted in our brains to give us more intelligence will indeed change the way we think, act and respond, some argue.

However, in the realistic terms, those who will design the software for such a robotic implantation, would essentially control the definition of everything that goes with the word "smart". The software engineers will determine based on the guidelines given to them by consumer driven multinational-controlled capitalism, how to interfere with human nature in terms of proposing courses of actions that would serve their interests.

Under this new so called nanobot technology, we would be virtual slaves to those who will manufacture the best software, something that the rulers of the world were unable to do in the past. We witnessed in our long recorded history several attempts to subjugate human will to the dictates of the most powerful people at the helms of affairs, yet none could even come close to controlling human thinking and actions as this nanobot inventors intend to do.

This will create the ability to make us eat drink and do what we are told by robotic implanting. We could be thinking the way we are programmed. But how will that be done?

According to the Quran we believe that human beings are created by the divine with part of His spirit infused in us (Quran; 32:9, 15:29, 38:72, 21:91, 66:12). We believe that God is the one who creates, invents, and designs (40:64,59:24, 64:3)? We believe that He is the one who are created us with the faculty of rationality that gives us options to choose between various alternatives available to us in all aspects of life (3:191). We also believe that in a world that is yet to come, we will be questioned for all our actions in this world (2:210).

In a nanobot controlled and driven world, rationality would be determined by the investors in the device, alternative actions will be drafted by programmers, choices will be pushed by competing entrepreneurs and so on so forth.

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US takes a closer look at Islamic banking: Islamicity

By: Mohammed Rasooldeen

The US government is currently studying the salient features of Islamic banking to ascertain how far it could be useful in fighting the ongoing world economic crisis, Robert M. Kimmitt, US deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a press conference held at the US Embassy here yesterday.

Kimmitt, who is on an official visit to the Kingdom, also held discussions with Finance Minister Ibrahim Al-Assaf. Today, he is scheduled to meet Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) Gov. Hamad Al-Sayari, Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) Gov. Amr Al-Dabbagh, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, chairman of the Kingdom Holding Company, and Saudi investors and bankers. He said that the agenda for the G-20 summit to be held in Washington on Nov. 15, has to be carefully prepared since important topics are to be discussed in just one day. "I am not sure that Islamic banking will also be itemized in the agenda, but it is a subject that is often dwelt in the public and private sectors," he noted. He said that experts in the US Treasury Department are currently learning the important features of Islamic banking.

However, he added that his country is focusing on activities of various governments and central banks in tackling the economic issues. He pointed out that the member countries in the G-20 also includes Islamic countries such as Indonesia and Turkey, besides the Kingdom which has been a member for the past 10 years. Representatives from these countries could present their experiences of Islamic banking in the light of the prevailing situation.

He hoped the G-20 summit will provide an effective platform for the member countries to exchange their views on the current economic problem and lay out a plan for the countries to draw out their respective national plans to ease the situation.

Commenting on his meeting with Al-Assaf, Kimmitt said the items that could be included in the agenda were also discussed. "The geographical representation from member countries would provide a broader view of the crisis and would also benefit the non-member countries through their experiments," he added.

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Videogame delayed over ‘offence’ to Muslims: Dawn

LONDON, Oct 20: Developers delayed release of one of the most eagerly anticipated games in the history of the Sony PlayStation because of concerns that some of the background music might offend Muslims, the developers said on Monday.

LittleBigPlanet, in which gamers can customise the rag-doll protagonist Sackboy and allow it to roam through an interactive world filled with different challenges, had been hailed by video games website IGN as “nothing short of astounding” and given a review rating of 9.5 out of 10.

But its release date has been put back after one of its background music tracks, a song by Mali-born artist Toumani Diabate, was found to have included expressions from the Holy Quran, which could be interpreted as an offence to Muslims.

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Islamic Finance appeal growing in face of credit crisis: Islamicity.com

By: Umesh Desai
International Herald Tribune* -

The global credit crisis presents the $1 trillion Islamic finance industry with an opportunity to expand its appeal beyond Muslim investors, as a haven from speculative excess.The message may have particular resonance in the West after the crumbling of the U.S. mortgage market left banks holding hundreds of billions of dollars of nearly worthless credit instruments tied to home loans by a web of complex structures.While conventional banks worldwide are nursing losses of more than $400 billion from the credit crisis, Islamic banks are virtually unscathed. And they are playing up the contrast to scalded shareholders, bondholders and borrowers and fearful depositors."It's very much a return to old-fashioned conservative lending," said David Testa, chief executive of Gatehouse Bank, which began operations in April as the fifth Islamic bank in Britain.

"The current global market condition has given Islamic finance a great opportunity to show what it can do - help to fill the liquidity gap," he said.Investors traumatized by the credit crisis could seek comfort from the stricter rules imposed on lending by Islamic law, which bans some of the structures and financing methods that quickly unraveled during the U.S. mortgage crisis.Testa said that Islamic finance practices were more fiscally conservative, with direct participation by investors in plans that do not involve parking assets in off-balance-sheet vehicles.Islamic finance is based on Shariah, or Islamic law. It requires that gains be derived from ethical and socially responsible investments and discourages interest-based banking and investments in sectors like pork, gambling and pornography.The Asian Development Bank estimates that Islamic assets globally have a combined value of about $1 trillion, with annual growth of 10 percent to 15 percent a year. Al-Rajhi Bank of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait Finance House are the two biggest Islamic banks in the Gulf region. In Malaysia, the largest Islamic lender is Maybank Islamic, a subsidiary of Malayan Banking.

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Muslim population is growing: ConnPost

By MICHAEL P. MAYKO and MARIAN GAIL BROWN
Staff writers

Look down the street. They are here.

And they are among us, making contributions to the community the way immigrants always have -- by paying their dues -- often starting at the bottom and working their way up. They are bakers, barbers, waiters, soft-drink distributors, merchants, mechanics, teachers, engineers, lawyers and doctors. Many of them own small businesses, from mom-and-pop grocery stores to gas stations to restaurants.

They are Muslims.
Muslims like Ruzhdi Vogli, a mason who spent five days avoiding soldiers ordered to shoot to kill, climbing mountains and living off the sweat he could wring from his shirt as he escaped from communistic Albania only to land in a Yugoslavian prison for 31 days.

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The Ship and the Lifeboats: Islamicity

By: Khalid Baig
Albalagh* -

We are living at a time when the daily news about the world, especially about the Muslim world is quite depressing. In Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iraq, and many other places Muslim life, property, and honor have been declared fair game by those who wield worldly power. It is not just armies waging this war. A whole gamut of institutions, from sophisticated research centers to slick media, is dedicated to the campaign to sow doubts, to spreads confusion, and to denigrate Islam. In hot spot after hot spot around the world, the sword is busy prosecuting a war on Islam. The pen is busy in both conducting a war on Islam and in trying to foment a war within Islam. While the unprecedented and unexpected momentum gained by the anti-war movement has given some hope that the mad rush to slaughter may be deflected, the overall picture remains grim.

And yet these are also the times when people all over the world are coming to Islam in unprecedented numbers. At a time when Muslims have lost control of the sword and the pen, Islam is finding new followers everywhere everyday. (It is quite revealing that even as Islam continues to spread despite the sword, some people should continue to insist that it spread by the sword. As the Qur'an repeatedly reminds us, the opponents of Islam are a very closed-minded lot).

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