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Why did I start a blog? I started blogging a few years ago as I have mentioned before to talk abut some issues that I didn’t see being discussed in other places and I think I have been able to address a wide-variety of topics and stimulate a lot of discussion. Other bloggers have doe the same like Tariq Nelson, Abu Sinan, Margari Aziza Hill, Dawud, Umm Adam, and those before me like Umm Zaid .I am a big fan of the Muslim blogoshpere and some of the best stuff I see is on blogs that hardly anyone reads it is just one person expressing themselves. Probably, they are like me, in that when I started this I had no one to discuss my experiences in the Muslim community and my ideas about certain things and was given this vehicle with which to do it.

While there is a lot of good in the Muslim blogosphere there are also things that I don’t like. There are people who are idiots with blogs expressing dumb opinions, there are people who are smart and just express things I don’t agree with, there are extremists with blogs calling to violence, and there are those blogs that remind me of the boring and lame Muslim print media in that they are predictable and discuss nothing in any new way and then criticize others who seek to do so for being “tabloid bloggers”.

The blog was also meant to be a means to an end for me. It was meant to be something that could grow into something else such as a magazine, film production company, or an organization that could address some of the problems in the community. As the blog grew there was also talk of monetizing it and different people came up to me with suggestions and proposals but that never took off. Magazine efforts proved to be too costly and out of my reach with no financial backing and the film thing never quite took off although it is something I am still pursuing along with other people. 

On an organizational level most have nothing to do with any of the things that I am pursuing and with the acceptation of MAS none has shown me any support at all and call me biased but based on the vision I have seen from MAS they are a part of the solution and not the problem, although like any human entity, there are problems. MANA I may like, but at the end of the day it is a black thing and if you aint black you don’t have sh** coming from them, and the other mainstream Muslim organizations are still too uncle and engineer dominated and still do the same old boring stuff (making the bazaar the most exciting thing at the big conventions).

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 10. Getting Sick…No matter how many veggie burgers you eat and laps you run you still gonna get sick and one day you gonna die. So read the Quran a little more while you at the gym instead of reading sex tips from Men’s Health Magazine while fantasizing bout crushin the kafir girl on the treadmill.

9. Being broke…I don’t care if you Trump, from time to time you gonna be low on cash. So, when you have some save some.

8. You have to be tested…unless you have been tested things aren’t real cuz you can make your mouth say anything until you get baptized in fire. So watch what you say and keep quiet unless you are ready to stand on it.

7. Friends are few….people use the word friend too lightly. Most people, at the end of the day, have very few if any friends and when times are tough most will flee. But, when you have a good friend, cherish them.

6.Family is always family…at the end of the day you can change your religion, kill people, get high, whatever, but your family will be there after everyone else has moved on so keep that in mind.

5. People use religion…for many people deen is just something else to game and get out of it what they can. So, correct your intentions.

4. People lie…when they want something from you people will say anything to get what they want and after they get it they are gone so don’t believe most of what you hear.

3. Fighting…doesn’t matter who you are from time to time you gonna be drawn into conflict so you should always be ready.

2. Making enemies… if you don’t have enemies then you don’t stand for nothing and if you don’t stand for nothing then you aint sh**.

1. All women are crazy…maybe at first they are sweet and nice and say the right things but at the end of the day they are all made from that crooked rib and as they say you cant live with them and you cant live without them so a man is just destined to have to deal with their craziness and irrationalism.  Just don’t lose your mind trying to figure them out  cuz it aint never gonna happen and thank Allah for the benefits you can give one another.

 There are only two episodes left of the best written, most well-acted, realistic, and complex show in my lifetime and as The Wire is leaving us it is doing so with a bang.

David Simon, the author and former police reporter who created the Baltimore-based show, created a masterpiece that always got a lot more critical acclaim than it did viewers. Which I attribute to the fact that there are no real good or bad guys in the show and most of its characters whether they be street dealers, kingpins, cops, politicians, kids, or reporters are all painted in shades of grey.

The show also has always had a strong educational component to it for those who are paying attention. Lessons can be learned and windows are opened to nuances that many observers have not previously had access to. For those not interested in that there is still just an entertaining show to watch.

The Wire, in reality, was probably never a good fit for TV, even premium cable TV like HBO, and was more suited for independent film ( or even being written as an epic novel) so in retrospect it is amazing it made it five-seasons and was able to carve out a loyal niche audience. 

In order to become the kind of ratings champ it needed to be to go longer it would have made the cops into saints, dealers into diabolical villains, and politicians either into martyrs of the faith or crooks. It would have also had to tell stories less nuanced and more quickly. And, lets face it, even with the finest cast of African-American actors in American TV history, for many the show is just too black.

As far as my thoughts on the final season of The Wire go I will say that there have been some things I have liked, and a few I have not liked, but that it is finishing with a huge bang and the last few episodes have been off the chain.

Omar Little:

I have said all along that if Omar ( Michael K. Williams) does not get killed than The Wire is not real; because no on does that much robbing and killing and does not eventually get popped himself. Furthermore, I always found the character of Omar to be a little unrealistic. On the hunt for Marlo Stanfield this season and taking on his muscle after  Marlow’s muscle killed his blinded uncle Omar once again dropped bodies left and right in Baltimore and struck fear into the hearts of corner boys and stash house squatters. Eventually though, Omar got what was coming to him, and I believe that how he got killed was very appropriate and real. Omar, the most feared man in Baltimore, was dropped with one shot in the head while buying a pack of Newport’s in a Korean deli by a young junior ( Kenard) on the corners of about 12 years of age. A little boy dropped the baddest stick-up man in Baltimore, and that was real, because a gun is a great equalizer, and some of the hardest have been dropped by some of the weakest with a gun. It also shows that some of the worst killers, who will kill for the helluva it, are the youngest.

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There is a new book out by an Atlanta-area Muslim attorney by the name of Melody Moezzi titled “War on Error: Real Stories of American-Muslims”.The book is an attempt by Moezzi to give another vision of the lives of young American-Muslims to the public in order to say “look, we are not evil, and we have all the complexities and diversities everyone else has” in order to combat the stereotype that all Muslims are terrorists or extreme in nature.The effort to give non-Muslims a more accurate portrayal of who Muslims are is noble and to a certain extent Moezzi does this in some of her profiles; but at the end of the day as an American-Muslim I am offended by the manner in which Muslims are portrayed in this work ( aside from the good intent I am sure Moezzi had, I am sure).

With her tales of Muslim lesbians, people with Muslim names who do not believe or practice, rootless and shifty Muslim yuppies, Muslim body builders, she is not lying because it is true that all of these elements exist in significant numbers in the Muslim community and there story is valid. What I am offended by is her implying that these groups represent either a majority of young Muslims in America or that these are the good Muslims who are acceptable as opposed to the bad Muslims who do things such as pray, fast and observe the basic tenets of Islam and generally have a Third World mentality.

That is why this book is pointless in my mind. Muslims already know that if you completely assimilate into non-Muslim society and take the values of secular humanism as your own you will be accepted, that is no big surprise. If you are a Muslim male who is an effete latte sipper carrying a man bag in Manhattan on the way to the art gallery you will be accepted by that crowd because you have accepted their values as your own and given them supremacy over the values of Islam. The same can be said to any other number of Muslims who assimilate into different segments of American society. It is a given, it is a known, that if you leave your deen, or at least have a very loose commitment to it, you can gain acceptance into mainstream American society by most people ( outside of the Ann Coulter, Robert Spencer, Joe Kauffman crowd).

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I think that there have been a lot of good comments to the piece the other day on the killing of the two Muslim girls in Texas, masha’Allah. I am in agreement that it is true that many in the media and outside political forces will use whatever they can to give a bad reputation to Muslims and there are those who will take advantage of this case and use it for propaganda purposes. However, I think that if Muslims are keeping it real, and being honest with themselves, they will also admit that we have a problem in the community and saying that others do the same thing is not exactly addressing the problem.An example of this came to me this morning when a Muslim couple was having a conversation on this topic. The husband, an African-American Muslim said he wished he would see the guy who killed his daughter so he could either beat him or collect the reward for capturing him; but the wife, a Muslim woman from Morocco, defended the man, chastised the dead girls, and said that “America is a bad society” because fathers are not “real men” and do not “defend the honor” of their girls.

This is not the first time I have heard something like this and it will not be the last. A Palestinian brother who was a friend of mine who I used to do security at the masjid with told me that he saw what is known as “honor killings” as a part of the deen. He was not a bad person, as a matter of fact this was a very nice brother who volunteered a lot of his time to the community; but he grew-up in a culture where this was seen as a part of the deen and it had never been challenged in his mind.

So, I am not going to say that this is not a problem in the Muslim ummah and then try and say this happens with other people too, because it has no logical bearing on the situation within the Muslim community.

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Normally I make a conscious effort to not watch Fox News because every time I do I end up getting angry at all the nonsense I am hearing and I am not trying to let Sean Hannity send me to a premature death by giving me a heart attack.This morning I decided to watch all three major cables news channels and C-Span to get as much coverage of the Iowa Caucus as possible from all angles and in particular I wanted to hear the conservative take on FOX regarding the victory of Mike Huckabee on the Republican side ( I was already in a good mood because of the Obama win the night before and had my fill with that).

It just so happened while watching FOX I saw the coverage of the murders of Sarah (17) and Aminah (18) Said by their father Yaser Abdel-Said in his taxi in Irvine, TX. For those of you unfamiliar with the story these were two Muslim girls allegedly killed by their Egyptian father and there is speculation that he may have killed them because he was angry over the way they dressed and their interactions with non-Muslim boys. For now this is just speculation and we don’t really know what happened.

If this is the case of a so-called “honor killing” or there was some supposed “Islamic motivation” for this killing then that is a tragedy, not only because these girls died for no reason, but because there is nothing honorable or Islamic about these murders.

For the record there are hundreds of thousands of young Muslim women in America and the vast majority of them are well-adjusted, loved by their families, and are on paths to success. If you do not believe me go to any large college campus anywhere in America and you will see Muslim women well-represented who have not been killed by their families; but have rather been nurtured and supported into success. These young Muslim women represent the majority of Muslim women in America and are far more representative of the community than tragic isolated incidents such as those of Sarah and Aminah.

Having said that there are problems with the treatment of girls and women in our community and I have written on this topic on numerous occasions in the past. There is a problem of domestic violence, abuse, abandonment, and ill-treatment of women in the Muslim community. This is not Islam, and this is not what the Quran teaches and it is not the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) or the way of the Salaf, but it is something that occurs in the community due to backwards and outdated cultural notions.

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I did not go to bed until late last night and was still sleeping when word of the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto began to spread. I got several calls on my cell phone which I place next to my head and put the ringer on high so it can act as some form of an unofficial alarm clock and everyone was calling about the same thing.

Lazily I turned on the TV and began watching the coverage of the death of Ms. Bhutto complete with snapshots of her family, the tragedy they have endured, the controversy surrounding them, her days as the “Islamic Bombshell”, and her history in politics and exile leading up to her death. The nature of the American coverage seemed to look solely at the possibility that the attack was the result of “Islamic terrorism” and logically there is a reasonable chance that a violent Muslim organization made have had a role in this; but if you talk to Pakistanis, as I have been doing all day, you are much more likely to hear that there is a likelihood that the intelligence services of the Pakistani Dictator Pervez Musharraf may had had a role in eliminating his main threat to power and Allah knows best. Read more »

Last week I picked up the CD of the Muslim rapper from Philadelphia named Freeway. Many people probably have not heard of him as he has hovered between fame and obscurity for the last several years as a member of the Roc-a-Fella label often only getting widespread recognition on compilations with other more famous members of the label such as Kanye West, Jay-Z, and the more famous Muslim brother from Philly Beanie Segal.

Freeway is a reflection of the North Philly neighborhood he came from; hard, from the streets, lyrical, astute, and a Muslim brother with a large beard who still battles demons.

There are a lot of Muslims out there who are reading this, or who know of Freeway, and will say that for me to even highlight him as a Muslim artist is foolishness since he often talks about the street life involving drugs, hustlin, violence and women. These things are un-Islamic and people will say that how can a Muslim artist glorify these things?

My response to this is two-fold; first, if you listen to the lyrics of Freeway, he is not glorifying the ghetto lifestyle he came from but rather giving a portrayal of where he came from and to a large extent where he still is both psychically and psychologically, and secondly Freeway is a reflection of where a lot of Muslims in America are. Maybe they should be in a better place, but they are not, and Freeway and the brothers in Philly and other places like them make up a significant number of the Muslims in America. You can not wish them away and you can not put them out of the deen. These are men with rough pasts that do not magically go away upon shahadah and their lyrics often reflect the struggles in their lives of being a Muslim and a product of their very un-Islamic environments.

Islam is becoming the norm in many parts of Philly and young people are growing up in an Islamic culture that is fused with their ghetto surroundings. This is happening in Philly at a higher-rate than anywhere else where big beards and short pants are the norm, but it is happening in most Northern American cities in the African-American community to some level, and these areas are producing the likes of Freeway.

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I was contacted over the weekend by a very thoughtful sister concerned about the issues surrounding Muslims sisters as outlined in my blog who thought it would be a good idea to include some resources for helping sisters and has said she is working on compiling a list of Muslim organizations set-up to counter domestic violence and the like. This weekend I also was moved by the comments of sister Musleema referring to the number of Muslim youth from broken homes who are angry and teetering on the edge of disaster. These comments led me to begin to wonder about practical things we can do to help some of those in our community who are in a state of anger, disillusionment, frustration, and at the doors of apostasy. Of those who are in this group one of the largest would be our Muslim youth especially those whose parents were a part of “movements” that gave them false hopes of an Islamic Utopia that turned into nightmares for their children.

In crafting an effort to help the youth we must first recognize that many are wounded, may have conflicted or negative perceptions towards many aspects of Islam, may not have a great relationship with at least one of their parents, and have heard all of the corny one-liners and catch-phrases of those who do not recognize any problems and have an Islamic Utopian mentality before, namely their parents and those adults they grew-up with.

These young people are from a generation of Muslims in America who have either grown-up in Muslim schools, been home schooled by Muslim parents, have grown up in the masjid and went to public schools, or are the products of parents who made “hijrah”. They read Quran, have memorized a significant number of suras, possibly speak Arabic, have never celebrated a non-Muslim holiday, have never eaten pork, and have a fairly high level of knowledge and understanding of the deen.

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A brother I was talking to yesterday reminded of a situation that I had forgot about. I think I have mentioned before that once upon a time in Northern Virginia there was a 2 bedroom apartment that at any time would house between 10 and 15 Muslim brothers (mostly American brothers and always a heavy representation from Philly). The apartment even had a name, Dar us Sunnah, and it was used to mostly house students studying at the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America in Fairfax, VA when it was open and I even briefly stayed there.It was housed in a generic suburban apartment complex in Fairfax near to the hospital. One bedroom in the apartment was for the brother who actually had the lease in his name, the other bedroom was for a few brothers who were paying a little more per month who would all sleep on the floor, and the other brothers were all lined up sleeping on the floor in the living room.

The rent for each brother would be like 130 a month and even at that rate a lot of brothers would get evicted and leave without paying the rent. There was no TV or internet in the place and only a stereo to listen to lectures or Quran along with a lot of books. The only activity brothers really engaged in was reading and arguing about the opinions of the scholars and who was and wasn’t a deviant and upon biddah.

The place was usually pretty clean and it smelled of fragrances oils and the incenses that constantly burned and outside of the occasional turmoil created by theological disputes things seemed to be pretty calm. It was one thing that the brother reminded me of that made me think though and that was the fact that for a one or two month period a sister lived in the place with her husband.

In order to accommodate the sister a makeshift tent was set up about 4 or 5 long and tied to the wall and she stayed in this little corner behind the tent all day unless she had to use the restroom. Since she was not from the area she rarely went out and was confined to living in a space a little smaller than a jail cell. The brother who was telling me the story said “she is probably not even Muslim anymore.”

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With all the problems the Muslim Ummah is facing, MR posted a fatwa on the permissibility of eating mermaids that all of us can use and shows just why these movements really are not dying out at all and shows that they talk about all the relevant issues

Here are some other questions of imminent importance to us (some questions taken from others):

- When the Mermaid takes human form, is it still permissible to eat her?

- Is it permissible to eat a Merman?

- After transforming into a werewolf, does one have to make ghusl after transforming back into human form? What about the Incredible Hulk?

- Is Godzilla’s feces najas?

- Is it permissible to wear a dragon skinned belt?

- Is the Salaat behind Optimus Prime valid? 

- Can we wipe over Superman Boots?

- If an intergalactic dictator conquers the earth, is he bay’ah due to him?

- Is it permissible to have sex with an Elf if it is your Right hand possession

- Is it permissible for Vulcans to have plastic surgery on their ears?

Meanwhile, there seems to be “no benefit” in helping in the community as it has been declared to be “nationalism”