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ISRAEL --how and why??!!!!!!!!!!
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[quote]Here is one pic of an intellectual muslim women(??),we all need to see. ----------------------------- I'm the one who defines myself as a Muslim Perspective is something that is sorely lacking in a society so ready to vilify an entire religion it knows precious little about. TASNEEM JAMAL - Thursday, June 8, 2006 Recent articles in The Globe and Mail and elsewhere imply that Islam is inherently violent. It must be, they insist, because some Muslims carry out violence in its name. I'm not going to defend Islam. It needs no defending. A religion that is 1,300 years old and practised by some two billion people has withstood greater foes than opinionated scribes. In any event, I'm not interested in engaging in battles, which I suspect might surprise some, since I am a Muslim. Many Canadians, I fear, believe they know a Muslim when they see one. Muslims have names like Mohammed, they have Taliban-like beards and their women are draped in burkas. I am a Muslim woman but I am not shrouded in mystery or yards of fabric. Like many Muslims who quietly go about living their lives, I'm simply trying to ensure that the world my child lives in is safe and kind, that I have a roof over my head and food on the table and some fun once in a while. Many Muslims like myself live and work next to many unsuspecting Canadians. As a matter of fact, I work on The Globe and Mail's news desk. (I'm one of those invisible hands that catches typos and writes headlines and lays out pages.) I don't pull out my prayer mat at work. I don't own one. I don't pray five times a day. My relationship with my creator, with my faith, is personal and private. Like many Christians and Jews and Hindus, I go to my place of worship for funerals, weddings and the big holidays. But like many Christians and Jews and Hindus who also only occasionally practise their faith, I believe I have the right to call myself a Muslim, not a moderate Muslim or a good Muslim, just a Muslim. It is a part of who I am, a part of what I come from. It does not define me, just as my race does not define me. It is my religion. That's all. I don't wear a burka. No one in the history of my family ever has. No women in my family wear hijab. None of the men have Taliban-like beards. All of the young men, in fact, are clean-shaven in the fashion of most young Canadian men. Some have names like Mohammed; many don't. My family, like the majority of Muslims, is not Arab. It is not even Middle Eastern. And our names reflect this fact. Like most members of my family, including my parents, I drink alcohol. (My father couldn't imagine inviting someone to his home without finding out beforehand what his or her tipple is.) I go to bars. I wear my hair short, as my mother has most of her life. I wear bikinis and tank tops and short skirts, as my mother did in her time. We are not heretics. We are Muslims. I live with a man, a non-Muslim man, out of wedlock. We recently had a child together. My parents and my community did not disown me as a result. In fact, only days ago my child had a bayat ceremony, a baptismal-like entry into Islam. Her father and I wanted to give her a gift, not a Koran or future lessons in Arabic (I don't know Arabic), but a much greater gift: perspective. Because she will grow up in a predominantly Judeo-Christian society, we want her to know there are different, not better or worse, but different ways of looking at the world, different ways of expressing its spirit and its beauty. Perspective is something that is sorely lacking in a society so ready to vilify an entire religion it knows precious little about. Not all Muslim women are oppressed; not all Muslim men have beards; not all Muslims go to Mecca once in their lives; and not all Muslims are violent. How absurd to have to state this. But because of the gross vacuum of knowledge about Islam in this country (as some writers unwittingly proved in their written assaults on Islam), it must be stated, and stated often. Neither a Globe and Mail columnist nor the Taliban nor Osama bin Laden gets to define what a Muslim is. As a Muslim, I get to define it for myself. This is not a battle cry. It is my truth. Tasneem Jamal is an editor at The Globe and Mail.[/quote]
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