Muslim Fest and more...

Several good articles/postings on the Living Tradition blog ---

A review of Muslim Fest (The Muslim Arts Festival that the PMU NA loves to hate.)

One would think that an event like this would have earned the appreciation of the whole community. But wait,the usual suspects were up to their old game. Jawad at MWU ran a diatribe against the organisers accusing them of discrimination against women. Never mind that nearly half of the organising committee consisted of women, that there were more women than men in attendance and that apart from the Salah there was no real segregation of the sexes.

The one thing that these regressives are good at is indulging in unwarranted and baseless attacks on those who disagree with them.You can quote from the Quran and the Sunnah but that is of little consequence.It is always their way or the Highway.

Do we need avice from an apostate - on Salman Rushdie's fatwa on Islam.

However, my beef is not with Rushdie alone; it annoys me that the Western press runs articles on the need for reformation by people who are either out of the fold of Islam or who are barely hanging in there. It may serve the purpose of satisfying the ill informed, the naive, and the gullible but every such publication erodes their credibility even further in the eyes of Muslims. The Manjis, Nomanis, and Nassefs may be wildly popular with the average North American viewer( because they say what the audience wants to hear, not what Islam stands for) but they have little or no following within the larger Islamic community.

The are at it again...:

But like I said, if you don't agree with their agenda, don't go. Or better, have your own group. Have your own festival with like-minded Muslims who don't mind making salat with those who don't believe in God or who think that scrapping the Qur'an and liking briyani makes one a Muslim. I mean, you're getting tons of dollars from the Harvard Pluralism Project to hold your "Islamic Conferences." Why not have them foot the bill to a poetry slam on the Sex and the Umma section and have Muslims wax proudly on their "first time" while our sisters in Iraq are being sold into prostitution?

The Avari/Nameh and Marxists and PMUNA

On reflection, Dr. (Muqtedar) Khan seems to be talking about a bunch of Salafis. Except, of course, they don't really care if you believe in God. This is, I must say, absolutely ridiculous: This trend that "what I want to believe" defines what Islam is and is not. If we are to be a civilized people, with real culture and real progress, we need respect for knowledge. Only morons walk around talking about history being "what I want it to be" or anthropology being reduced to "my stereotypes and biases," and these are restricted to fringe movements -- holocaust denial and what-not.

City of Brass writes

Groups like the Progressive Muslims Association go even further and try to deny that Islam is a religion of Faith at all.