check out:

http://www.inspiredbymuhammad.com

Also check out these shocking stats about how Muslims are perceived in the UK!

Knowledge of Islam

• 60% say they don’t know very much about Islam
• 17% say they know nothing at all
• 33% would like to know more about Islam

Sources of Information on Islam

• 57% obtain most of their information about Islam from the TV news
• 41% obtain their information about Islam from newspapers
• Just 3% get most of their information on Islam from Muslim organisations
• 31% feel that information about Islam is not very accessible
• 5% say that information is not accessible at all

Perceptions of Islam

• 58% associate Islam with extremism
• 50% associate Islam with terrorism
• Just 13% associate Islam with peace
• 6% associate Islam with justice
• Only 16% think that Islam promotes fairness and equality
• Only 6% believe that Islam promotes active measures to protect the environment
• 41% disagree or strongly disagree that Muslims have a positive impact on British society
• 69% believe that Islam encourages the repression of women

http://www.inspiredbymuhammad.com/yougov.php

Iranian researchers have announced the birth of Iran and the Middle East’s first transgenic animals in the Rouyan Research Institute in Isfahan.

A transgenic animal is one that carries a foreign gene, constructed using recombinant DNA methodology, in its genome. Sheep and goats produced through this method express foreign proteins in their milk and are, therefore, considered valuable sources of protein for human therapy.

Such animals are commonly produced in countries such as the US, France, the UK, Japan, Denmark, Canada, Scotland, the Netherlands, and China to extract alpha-antitrypsin, plasminogen activating factor, factor VIII, fibrinogen, lactoalbumin, lactoferrin, human albumin, collagen I and II, and monoclonal antibodies from their milk.

The two Iranian transgenic kids named ‘Shangoul’ and ‘Mangoul’, the leading characters of a famous traditional children’s story in Iran, were born in Rouyan Institute on Saturday morning.

“The two kids are in a good health condition,” said Hamid Gourabi, the head of Rouyan Research Institute.

Tests revealed high concentrations of human factor IX, an anticoagulant agent used to treat patients with hemophilia B, in their blood. More time, however, is needed to study the availability of the factor in their milk.

A lamb named ‘Royana’, a kid named ‘Hanna’ and two calves named ‘Bonyana’ and ‘Tamina’ were the first animals successfully cloned in the country.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=117456&sectionid=3510208

Quantum physicist Jim Al-Khalili grew up in Iraq and has become an expert on the golden age of Islamic science. He explains to Sanjida O’Connell how science in the Muslim world will flourish once more

Few westerners know about the golden age of Arabic science. How did it come about?

The Arab empire was hugely powerful by late 8th and early 9th century; its rulers were getting taxes from across the empire and had money to spend on translations and patronage of scholarship. About this time the House of Wisdom was set up in Baghdad by one of the Abbasid caliphs, al-Ma’mun. It began as a translation house, translating Greek texts into Arabic and rapidly started to attract the greatest minds in the Islamic world, while Arabic became the international language of science. There was also a strong influence from Persia; an Arab scholar once said, “We Arabs have all the words but you Persians have all the ideas.”

In the west there is a widely held misconception that the Islamic world did no more than act as steward of Greek science

In fact, an incredible number of important and original advances were made by Arab scientists, who were the first to undertake real science - theory and experimentation - several hundred years before the scientific revolution in Europe.

Can you give an example of this legendary Arabic science?

An Islamic mathematician, al-Khwarizmi, wrote a book, the title of which gives us the word algebra from the Arabic al-jabr, which means “restoration”. He is regarded as the father of algebra but I wasn’t sure whether this was true. It turns out that no one was really doing proper algebra until he came along. The concept of an equation that you solve to find the unknown quantity, x, goes back to this one scholar. There’s also a scholar whom I regard as the greatest physicist of the medieval world, Ibn al-Haytham, who used geometry to prove how vision works. It’s obvious to us now but at the time no one understood that light travels in straight lines.

Why did Arabic science go into decline?

Some say it went into decline in the 11th century because Islam suddenly took a turn for orthodoxy and conservatism and became anti-scientific. There’s also an argument that it went into decline with the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, which destroyed Baghdad, including the House of Wisdom.

The truth is that the decline in Arabic science happened much more slowly than people think: there were great scholars in the Islamic world all the way up to and including the 15th century.

Why is this era of science so little known in the western world?

Europe was flush with money around the time the Islamic empire was fragmenting. When the Renaissance began, Europeans went through the same process that the early Muslims did: they learned Arabic and rediscovered Greek texts that had been translated into Arabic. So we really only know about those scholars whose work was translated from Arabic into Latin. One of the greatest philosophers of Islam, Ibn Sina, is known in Europe as Avicenna. His work was very easy to get hold of and it hugely influenced European philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and Francis Bacon.

Some argue that colonialism played a role. When the British and the French were invading Asia, the Middle East and Africa they didn’t want to hear that these places were once wonderful, flourishing civilisations; in order to justify what they were doing, they had to show that these people were ignorant savages.

So do you think there’s an element of racism to the suppression of Arabic science?

In a sense, yes. It’s tied in with modern-day Islamophobia and the idea that all Muslims have backward attitudes to life, from women to politics; and there’s the additional tension because of fundamentalism and terrorism. So there is a natural tendency to think that surely these people couldn’t really have been far more civilised and advanced than us.

Is it true that what really concerns you is that the Islamic world itself isn’t proud enough of its own heritage?

Yes, it is a shame that there are anti-scientific attitudes in Islam today, almost to the level of - why do you want to go and do science, it’s all written in the Qur’an? The Muslim world needs to be reminded where it was 1000 years ago: it was tolerant of other religions, it was enlightened, it was doing curiosity-driven science.

Many developing countries have poured money into science but only to drive their economy. You won’t get real advances in science - real blue-sky thinking - unless you forget about what might come out of it and you do science for the sake of it. That’s what the Islamic world was like 1000 years ago and until it gets back to that sort of mindset it will always be trying to catch up with the rest of the world.

The King of Saudi Arabia has created a new university, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Could that lead to a renaissance in Islamic science?

The king has specifically said that he wants KAUST to be the new House of Wisdom, so I hope so. A lot of leading western universities are falling over each other to join in collaborations with KAUST hopefully not just because of money, but because they think there’s going to be some real, fundamental research carried out there. Billions of dollars of Saudi oil money have gone into building the university in less than three years. KAUST does seem to be genuinely interested in doing pure, curiosity-driven research - not research to support the oil industry or any political or religious agenda. There are other pockets of excellence and we will see it tentatively growing: the Qatar Foundation is trying to transform their universities into something much more modern and blue-sky research driven. The Royan Institute, a genetics lab in Tehran, Iran, is also doing remarkable work.

Are any of these institutions operating under any constraints?

At the Royan Institute a religious body oversees what research fits into the remit of Islamic teaching. Even KAUST has to be very politically sensitive about what it’s doing. After all, Saudi Arabia is an Islamic country and many people are anti-science.

Your own research is into quantum physics. What was your biggest breakthrough?

The “quantum” world of atoms behaves very differently to the everyday world of Newtonian physics. I apply quantum physics to the atomic nucleus: understanding what it looks like, how its constituents - the protons and neutrons - all fit together. For years we’ve thought of the protons and neutrons as being tightly packed together inside the nucleus. But what we’ve discovered is that some neutrons can orbit the rest of the nucleus much further away than we’d thought. My most cited paper was one in which I’d calculated the size of this “halo cloud”.

A woman swathed in black to her ankles, wearing a headscarf or a full chador, walks down a European or North American street, surrounded by other women in halter tops, miniskirts and short shorts. She passes under immense billboards on which other women swoon in sexual ecstasy, cavort in lingerie or simply stretch out languorously, almost fully naked. Could this image be any more iconic of the discomfort the West has with the social mores of Islam, and vice versa?

Ideological battles are often waged with women’s bodies as their emblems, and Western Islamophobia is no exception. When France banned headscarves in schools, it used the hijab as a proxy for Western values in general, including the appropriate status of women. When Americans were being prepared for the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban were demonised for denying cosmetics and hair colour to women; when the Taliban were overthrown, Western writers often noted that women had taken off their scarves.

But are we in the West radically misinterpreting Muslim sexual mores, particularly the meaning to many Muslim women of being veiled or wearing the chador? And are we blind to our own markers of the oppression and control of women?

The West interprets veiling as repression of women and suppression of their sexuality. But when I travelled in Muslim countries and was invited to join a discussion in women-only settings within Muslim homes, I learned that Muslim attitudes toward women’s appearance and sexuality are not rooted in repression, but in a strong sense of public versus private, of what is due to God and what is due to one’s husband. It is not that Islam suppresses sexuality, but that it embodies a strongly developed sense of its appropriate channelling - toward marriage, the bonds that sustain family life, and the attachment that secures a home.

Outside the walls of the typical Muslim households that I visited in Morocco, Jordan, and Egypt, all was demureness and propriety. But inside, women were as interested in allure, seduction and pleasure as women anywhere in the world.

At home, in the context of marital intimacy, Victoria’s Secret, elegant fashion and skin care lotions abounded. The bridal videos that I was shown, with the sensuous dancing that the bride learns as part of what makes her a wonderful wife, and which she proudly displays for her bridegroom, suggested that sensuality was not alien to Muslim women. Rather, pleasure and sexuality, both male and female, should not be displayed promiscuously - and possibly destructively - for all to see.

Indeed, many Muslim women I spoke with did not feel at all subjugated by the chador or the headscarf. On the contrary, they felt liberated from what they experienced as the intrusive, commodifying, basely sexualising Western gaze. Many women said something like this: “When I wear Western clothes, men stare at me, objectify me, or I am always measuring myself against the standards of models in magazines, which are hard to live up to - and even harder as you get older, not to mention how tiring it can be to be on display all the time. When I wear my headscarf or chador, people relate to me as an individual, not an object; I feel respected.” This may not be expressed in a traditional Western feminist set of images, but it is a recognisably Western feminist set of feelings.

I experienced it myself. I put on a shalwar kameez and a headscarf in Morocco for a trip to the bazaar. Yes, some of the warmth I encountered was probably from the novelty of seeing a Westerner so clothed; but, as I moved about the market - the curve of my breasts covered, the shape of my legs obscured, my long hair not flying about me - I felt a novel sense of calm and serenity. I felt, yes, in certain ways, free.

Nor are Muslim women alone. The Western Christian tradition portrays all sexuality, even married sexuality, as sinful. Islam and Judaism never had that same kind of mind-body split. So, in both cultures, sexuality channeled into marriage and family life is seen as a source of great blessing, sanctioned by God.

This may explain why both Muslim and Orthodox Jewish women not only describe a sense of being liberated by their modest clothing and covered hair, but also express much higher levels of sensual joy in their married lives than is common in the West. When sexuality is kept private and directed in ways seen as sacred - and when one’s husband isn’t seeing his wife (or other women) half-naked all day long - one can feel great power and intensity when the headscarf or the chador comes off in the the home.

Among healthy young men in the West, who grow up on pornography and sexual imagery on every street corner, reduced libido is a growing epidemic, so it is easy to imagine the power that sexuality can carry in a more modest culture. And it is worth understanding the positive experiences that women - and men - can have in cultures where sexuality is more conservatively directed.

I do not mean to dismiss the many women leaders in the Muslim world who regard veiling as a means of controlling women. Choice is everything. But Westerners should recognise that when a woman in France or Britain chooses a veil, it is not necessarily a sign of her repression. And, more importantly, when you choose your own miniskirt and halter top - in a Western culture in which women are not so free to age, to be respected as mothers, workers or spiritual beings, and to disregard Madison Avenue - it’s worth thinking in a more nuanced way about what female freedom really means.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/behind-the-veil-lives-a-thriving-muslim-sexuality/2008/08/29/1219516734637.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

A telephone and internet helpline offering advice about the true teaching of Islam is being launched in the UK today.

Callers to the Islamic Hotline will get answers to their questions within 48 hours, from scholars trained at one of the world’s principal Islamic universities. Users are also able to email their enquiries through the service’s website.

The Islamic scholars behind the helpline hope it will combat radicalism in Britain and help ordinary Muslims answer difficult questions about their faith.

The Islamic Hotline believes it has good news for British Muslims - keeping the laws of Islam is not as difficult as you thought.

But it also sounds a warning - the UK has a large and growing population of young Muslims who are dangerously out of touch with the older generation, and often cut off from the real teaching of their religion.

Prof Aboshady gives advice to those who call the hotline

The hotline’s backers have singled out Britain as the country most urgently in need of the service.

El Hatef, as the hotline is known in Arabic, was set up in Egypt eight years ago to counter radicalism by bringing the minds of the nation’s best Islamic scholars to bear on people’s doubts and questions about their religion.

Since then, two million questions from Egyptians have been answered, mostly from women, and many about sex.

Some are naive, deeply personal and only obliquely related to religion.

Others betray the sort of ignorance or error onto which militants fasten when recruiting Muslims to their cause.

Is violence sometimes justified to defend Muslim interests? Should Sharia take precedence over domestic laws?

Should Christians be considered infidels? What should be the punishment for converting to another religion?

‘Tranquil Islam’

The hotline’s founder, Cherif Meguid, accuses the radicals of trying to enforce only a single, narrow and oppressive form of the religion.

“Radicals have hijacked our faith,” he says. “This brand of Islam is radical, is harsh, is hard-line, as opposed to the brand of Islam which is available in Egypt, which is quite tranquil… at peace.”

But does the hotline not simply promote Mr Meguid’s own alternative interpretation of the religion?

This gives Islamic law some flexibility Professor Anas Aboshady Al Azhar University

He says its authority rests on the prestige of Al Azhar University in Cairo and its thousand-year tradition of examining all four of the main schools of thought within Islam.

Al Azhar, which carves out an oasis of relative tranquillity amid the bustle of Cairo’s chaotic Islamic quarter, is the closest thing that Sunni Islam has to a central source of authority, a sort of Muslim Vatican.

Compared to the Salafi movement in Saudi Arabia, its rulings might be considered liberal, except for one important principle, one which the Islamic hotline hopes to export to the UK.

That is that Muslims have always been offered latitude in the rules of their religion, a choice as to which of the schools of thought they follow.

One of the Al Azhar scholars who answers hotline questions, Professor Anas Aboshady, says only 10% of rulings within Islam are generally agreed. In 90% of cases there is disagreement.

Prof Aboshady provides callers with a sense of the varying interpretations of Islamic law and then recommends one in their particular case.

“We are not sticking to one view, or one school of law,” he says. “What we present is what we believe is suitable to people in different times and places and let them choose which is suitable to them.

“This gives Islamic law some flexibility, so we are not changing the religion or creating new religion, but simply give people the chance to choose which is suitable to them.”

The effect, according to Prof Aboshady, allows Muslims to live as easily in modern times as in the past - and in Britain as easily as in Egypt.

Abuse

Hanaa Ismail called the line about what she calls “issues in the family, about the relations between a man and his wife, what a wife’s duties are”.

She says one key to the hotline’s effectiveness is the anonymity it offers to callers perplexed by deeply personal issues.

“They get embarrassed to ask even their own mother about them.

Hanaa Ismail says she values the anonymity the hotline offers

“She might be abused by a man for a long while and yet she could get embarrassed to talk about it. This has been… an Arab tradition.

“With this helpline she can ask for help without any embarrassment, and [the scholar] won’t know who she is, and she can ask about all the details.”

Rizwan Ali dropped into an internet cafe in north London to examine the Islamic hotline’s British website.

It will be possible to place questions online as well as by phone, in Urdu and Arabic as well as English. It will cost about £4 to have a question answered.

For Rizwan, the advantage lies in being able to get tailor-made advice appropriate to life in Britain - help he says is otherwise hard to find.

“For someone like myself born and raised in the UK and living a London-orientated life, this website is great, giving me one-to-one contact with scholars who offer impartial advice.”

Rizwan types in his own question - about whether the traditional Islamic rule that women should travel only with their husband’s permission applies in modern Britain.

In Cairo, Prof Aboshady gives his judgement.

He says the rule was designed to protect women at a time when travel was dangerous. In Britain that no longer applies.

Prof Aboshady says true Islamic teaching was designed to make life easier for Muslims and for the non-Muslims with whom they live.

The backers of the Islamic hotline believe it is an idea that can help defeat the radicals and their austere vision of Islam.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8078344.stm

Channel 4 recently broadcast two very different documentaries about Islam. Dispatches: “It shouldn’t happen to a Muslim” is a brilliant documentary about how the media has abused their position and published pure lies and have misinformed the public about the Muslims of the UK. It is a real eye opener and I highly recommend everyone to watch it. It’s on Youtube: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=eanrFTm6E9Y

On the other hand the other documentary promotes Islamaphobia and division in Islam. It’s a “Mockumentary” in that it’s purpose is to insult and mock the Muslims and the religion of Islam. It is unbelievably biased, highly inaccurate and poorly researched. When a program is simply called “The Quran” you expect it to be about the Quran but Channel 4 have sunk to an all-time low by making it a program that insults Islam and the Muslims. The title is a misnomer.

“The Quran” goes through many different and controversial subjects that have only a slight reference in the Quran but are effectively independent of it. They go through a gazillion incorrect notions and false understandings, misinterpreting the verses of the Quran and hadiths as they go along. They go through historical strife and where the Muslims across the world are at today - divided, poor and struggling - no thanks to western influence.

The 2 hour documentary was a very fragmented program - you could just tell the people who made it had chatted informally with a few “Muslims” (including some extremists and sectarians) and anti-Islamists here and there, done a few Google searches and then decided to make a documentary that managed to fit in all the controversial issues of Islam into the allotted time. It was a geniuinly poor effort. It wasn’t even slightly fair or impartial and it was factually wrong in numerous places.

First, they tried to dig a blade into the divisions of the sects of Islam by producing lies about arguments and the differences between the Shias and the Sunnis. They made the false claim that the Shia accuse the Sunnis of modifying the Quran (tahreef) and taking out the virtues of Ali (AS) from it!! Such a statement is so wrong it’s mind blowing how they could say that! As any educated Muslim knows, the Muslims, whether they are Sunni, Shia, Sufi or whatever, all believe in the same unaltered Quran as was revealed to the Prophet (SAW) and they certainly do not go around accusing the other groups of changing the Quran!

They completely misrepresented the concept of tawassul as a purely Shia practise which is a lie. Most Muslims: Sunni, Shia and Sufis believe in tawassul and accept it as part of Islam, but there is disagreement amongst the Muslims about its exact application however the majority of disagreements are because of lack of understanding of the other party and in recent times, the influence of some groups that completely reject tawassul has caused greater division. Effectively, the tawassul of all the Muslim groups is the same thing no matter if they are Sunni, Shia or Sufi. But yet the show went on a roll and said the Muslims are “fundamentally divided over the issue of tawassul”. Here is a horrendous, highly offensive quote from the film:

“The God the Sunni worship may not be described in human language, nor represented in any art form, for that would be blasphemous. Yet sometimes the human heart yearns for more. For a faith you can touch and feel, for drama, for music, for ceremony, for great stories of sacrifice, pain, martyrdom and salvation and for someone to pray to who has human form Shia Islam answers these needs … But the Qur’an makes it so clear that your prayer should only be directed to God.”

In another scene, having explained the apparent tenets of Shia Islam, the programme asked: “But do these specific beliefs have any substance in the Qur’an? The answer is no.” This is so biased and incorrect that it’s like they got the information about tawassul from a total idiot…  an Oxford “intellectual” called Taj Hargey who basically called all Muslims kafirs.

But that wasn’t all. They interviewed several Muslim “scholars”, and here is what these scholars basically said:

One person claimed the Injeel, the book sent to Jesus, was the New Testament of today (a part of the bible), which it is NOT; The modern day bible (NT) was written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and a few others. But the “scholar” Ajmal Maroor didn’t know this basic fact. In fact, this very person defended the documentary in a later interview!

They had a woman who also claimed to be a “scholar” and she represented the resistant feminists in the Muslim world in that she did not wear a hijab, claiming it is not a part of Islam. This is the typical response we hear from people in denial of their faith and who do not follow the Quran and Sunnah. But yet they had this woman on their panel of notable scholars. This woman does not represent but a very, very small number of Muslims.

Another “scholar” was promoting terrorism and saying the September 11th attack were justified and killing civilians is permissible, which, it is NOT! This Palestinian “scholar” thinks that killing civilians is acceptable in Islam as he justifies it when you can’t get to the soldiers because “they are killing our children”. Pffft.

Finally, leaving the worst till last (how could it get any worse you might be wondering?), they had a “scholar” from Egypt who advocated female circumcision, female genital mutilation! This is not an Islamic practise but this fool tried to make it out that it was! Anyway, while this guy is talking, an appalling video showing the genital mutilation of an African girl of about 10 or 12 with the girl being held down on the floor by two hijab-wearing women. Whilst this poor child screams in pain and begs for mercy, these women rummage under her skirt with a blade. The video ends with the girl’s mother slapping her and accusing her of lying when she said it hurt. The documentary states that 97% of girls in Egypt are circumcised. I seriously doubt that’s true! Anyway, the Egyptian “scholar” claims that Egypt’s women are honorable and chaste and that western women are whores and unchaste because they haven’t been circumcised. Not only is this an grievous insult to normal women across the world, it is an insult to every Muslim woman outside of Egypt and who has not been circumcised. Why on earth did they get such a mad man to appear on the show except to show Islam in a horrible light.

Later on in the documentary they try to shake the foundation that the Quran is perfect, unaltered. They interview a shadowed figure and his assistant about a Yemeni Quran found not long after the death of the Prophet (SAW), perhaps 30 years? This Quran lacks dots and other diacritics so the words in it can have several meanings since a change in a single accent of a word can change the meaning of a word. He goes through a few things he thinks are different between todays Quran and the Yemeni Quran. Any simple Muslim can laugh this off because they differences are based on his opinion claiming that certain words’ meanings stem from the Aramaic origins of the meaning. He says that the Quran mentions grapes instead of Houris which is a well known common joke on the internet that the infidels try to mock the Muslims with. Any Muslim that has read the Quran through (specifically surah 55) knows full well that the houris are not grapes. Further more, whatever claims he makes are pathetic since he is looking at pure text without the context of hadith. A very high number of the revealed verses of the Quran are accompanied by hadiths that explain and clarrify their meaning. His claims of a slightly different interpretation of what happened when the mother of Jesus (PBUH) gave birth to him was also faulty if we put it up against hadith. Even without hadith or diacritics in text, the words were preserved by the huffadh (hundereds of people who learnt the whole Quran by heart). All in all, a faithful, educated Muslim knows that the text of the Quran has been preserved and is perfect and had there been any differences then the different sects of Islam would have different Qurans and there would be many version but yet there is only one version of the Quran in existance from the very beginning of Islam.

It is a real shame that people will defend this program and call it a break-through. It received high ratings from many newspapers (4/5 Metro) and they actually believed what it said! It has left many Muslims angry. In future we wish to see fairer and accurate programs that weren’t researched and made by people who don’t know anything about Islam and we hope they don’t interview extremists, mad men, ignorants or liberals to represent the Muslims.

A lot of people don’t know about Audio Books - these are books that someone has read out aloud and recorded and you listen to them in the car, on your mp3 player when you’re out and about, or you’re too busy, tired (or lazy!) to read the book or you have a visual impairment.

The holy Quran has been made into English audio files and the recordings are available but difficult to find online. As well as being difficult to find their legal status is ambiguous. So, there is a solution out there in the making…

The Librivox Project is a volunteer-run resource that provides free and Public Domain Audio-recordings of public domain books. Not long ago the English translation of the text by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall (1875-1936) became available and it is currently being recorded.

The recording is incomplete and if you have any free time we urge you to support this excellent project by volunteering and/or spreading the word. Please click here to visit the forum post concerning this…