On Friday, Zilhij 9, 10AH, (March 6, 632CE), the day of gathering on the plain of Arafat, the Prophet climbed up the hill known as Jabal al-Rehmat, or ‘the hill of mercy’, and addressed the pilgrims who, according to some accounts, were 124,000 in number. He went on to say, “Therefore, an Arab is not superior to a non-Arab, nor is a non-Arab superior to an Arab. Neither is a black person superior to a white, nor is a white person superior to a black. All human beings are from Adam, and Adam was created from dust. All claims to preference and superiority, all claims of blood and wealth and all rights of vengeance have been crushed under my feet.” -- Nilofar Ahmed

Another important point to be noted is that that the Quran uses two different words for the young boys in the heaven. In the Surah Waqiah (17-18) and Surah Al Dahr (19) they are referred to as Wildan while in Surah Al Toor (24) they have been called Ghilman. Does it mean that the young men in the heaven will come under two catergories? About Ghilman, the Quran says that they will be like pearls covered and protected in their shells in the same way as the houris are described as hidden pearls. The exegetes are of the opinion that by saying that houris will be like hidden pearls the Quran means that they will be virgins not consummated by men before. On the same lines, we can infer that Ghilman who also have been described as pearls in their shells will be virgins not consummated by women before.  ‘Boys of theirs” also hints at that.  In other words, Ghilman means the young men who will be specifically meant for women and Wildan will be the boys who will serve as attendants to men and women, serving them the holy drink called Sharab-e-Tahoora. --- S. Arshad, NewAgeIslam.com

The verse suggests that the people in the pre-Islam Arab society did not respect the privacy of others, not even the privacy of their family members. For example, they entered their houses through the back door probably with an intention to catch them unawares.  It also speaks of lack of confidence and trust among the family members.  Islam guaranteed the right to privacy to the family members and asked them to trust each other. It declared entering the house from the backdoor a sin and asked people to enter their houses through the front door. The holy Prophet (PBUH), whenever returned from a journey, would first stay at the mosque and send the news of his return to his household so that they could be mentally ready to greet him. -- S. Arshad, NewAgeIslam.com

Many verses have been misunderstood out of context and some people think that the Quran contradicts itself and says in some places that intercession is valid and in others that it is not. According to the Quran, those denied intercession are the ones who did not believe, or those who transgressed: “The intercession of the intercessors will be of no use to them” (74:48), referring to those in hell. The Bani Israel are told, “Fear the Day (of Judgment when) … No fine will be acceptable and neither will any intercession be useful” (2:123). A Hadith states that on that day people will be running to and fro looking for an intercessor, until they come to the Prophet Muhammad, who will answer, “I am for intercession”. The Lord will then ask him to “…intercede, for your intercession will be heard” (Bukhari). -- Nilofar Ahmed

The war on terror has provided an opportunity to xenophobes to give vent to their religious fury against Muslim immigrants. If we cast a cursory glance over the world’s religions we find that many people generally practice religion either to obtain a spiritual thrust (mostly unsuccessful) or just to keep their ancestral tradition alive without having to implement it in their lives. Most of the time, religious seminars and gatherings are little better than socialising parties where a religious figure harangues a discourse on the significance of adhering to religious tenets and covenants. However, people can easily discern the nuance in the precept and practices of such figures. None of them possesses a vision to improve the lives of the general public. They inspire a blind and ignorant form of practicing the faith. When people abandon their faith to a mere practice of rituals assigned by clerics, and accept religion as a means of social acceptance rather than for personal reform, the whole concept of moral right and wrong becomes distorted. Muslims need to regain the moral high ground and escape their current paradigms. Consider Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi and his famous book Quran ka Shaoor-e-Inqilab” (Revolutionary Sense of the Quran). Maulana said: “The purpose of Abrahamic religion is to get mankind to excellence in accordance with nature.” -- Hisham Mazhar Qureshi

There was the nation of the Prophet Shuaib. The Quran calls them the residents of Madian. They would indulge in corruption while weighing or measuring things. While selling their wares they would not give full measure to the buyers or would not weigh things honestly in order to make more profit. It was the primitive form of corruption. The practice had become so widespread among them that it had got common acceptance in the same way as bribery has assumed the status of an indispensible tool. --- S. Arshad, NewAgeIslam.com

As the revelation advanced and the Muslim community in Medina flourished, the Qur’an made repeated calls to spend for the needy. This encouraged the affluent believers to give charity all the year round and more generously during the month of Ramadan for the special blessings of this month. Towards the end of the revelation, the Qur’an mandates charity through its verse 9:60 – the verse also lists the category of recipients, conceivably to avoid any misappropriations: “Charities (sadaqat) are for the poor (among the Muslims) and the poor (among non-Muslims) and the workers (who administer) them, and for those who have embraced faith, and for (freeing) the slaves, for (assisting) the debtors, (for spending) in God's way, and for the homeless – an ordinance (faridah) from God. (Remember,) God is All-Knowing and Wise” (9:60). -- Muhammad Yunus, NewAgeIslam.com

The great Sufi Mansur Hussain al-Hallaj gave the best possible answer to this question when he installed a stone cube in the backyard of his house and began to circumambulate it. To his puzzled interlocutors, he said, “If the hajj means no more than making circles around stone, I can do it in my own backyard.” But this is precisely what the Saudi royals with their Salafi ideology want the pilgrims to do, ignoring that hajj is one of the few occasions, perhaps the only one, when Muslims from all over the world can come together and discuss their problems. Thus in principle, hajj is a great opportunity for freedom of expression and a great opportunity to breathe freedom in the holiest Muslim place in the world. But then freedom is anathema to the House of Saud. -- Abbas Zaidi

I began by pointing out that the maulvi as an economic profession came into being in the face of unambiguous edicts of the Holy Quran, Hadith and the great interpreters and experts of Islamic Fiqh or jurisprudence to the contrary. Somewhere during the 15th century AD, what was absolutely haram was turned into halal by those who monopolised the divine word. Then I mentioned the salient features of the system of imparting and disseminating religious learning which existed before the advent of the new modes of communication, travel and education. The traditional system ensured that religious knowledge was kept within the reach of a small bunch of families, that considered themselves of high birth, and away from the majority of common people, who received nothing but contempt because of their supposed low birth. Since each competent Deobandi maulvi is his own master in his religious kingdom — you need only to look around to find contemporary examples of madrasa-Masjid-hostel complexes owned and run by a prominent maulvi families — there has been a gradual loss of any central authority in the Deobandi circle. -- Ajmal Kamal

This line of religious argument was useful for the Deoband school because the prominent Maulvis associated with it wanted to campaign against the local content of the lived religion, although they did not at all wish to touch — let alone demolish — the system of caste hierarchy. Being a product of Deoband, Thanvi was a strong proponent of cleansing the Indian Muslims’ religion of the locally developed forms of devotional and social practices and rituals. The influence of Muhammad ibn Abdal Wahhab (1703–1792) of Najd had reached the subcontinent mainly through Shah Ismail (1779–1831), who wrote a book called Taqwiyyat-ul Iman, which has been shown to be a more or less an exact Urdu translation of a risala by Wahhab. As the latter had taken a hard, rigid and violent stand against the practiced form of religion which in his view was to be abandoned in favour of a ‘puritan’ form. Wahhab’s (and Shah Ismail’s) detractors said that the ‘puritan’ Islam was nothing but a modern invention with specific political and social purposes. -- Ajmal Kamal

They say the imams and Ulema say Qur’an prohibits family planning and quote a verse which says, “And kill not your children for fear of poverty – We provide for them and for you. Surely the killing of them is a great wrong.” (17:31). In no way this verse refers to family planning because it is talking of ‘killing’ and you kill one who exists. No law in the world will permit killing one who is already born and hence Qur’an rightly condemns killing of children. In fact in view of paucity of resources it has become necessary to adopt family planning. When Qur’an was being revealed there were neither any properly organized state nor education or health services being provided by any state agency. It is important to note that Qur’an which shows eight ways to spend Zakat, does not include education or health which is so essential for the state to provide today. Some scholars referring to the verse 23:14 conclude that one can terminate pregnancy up to three months as Qur’an, in this verse describes stages of development of sperm planted in mother’s womb and it takes three months for life to begin.--- Asghar Ali Engineer

New Delhi: Maulana Syed Mohammad Ashraf Kachhochhwi, Sajjada Nasheen (Head Priest) of Kachhochha Sharief described Wahhabi ideology as “a virus for the society and a danger for Muslim unity.” This is the first time a mainstream Muslim leader representing 80 to 90 per cent of the Muslim community has taken on the Wahhabi ideology and called a spade a spade. As most Muslim leaders and the Muslim Press are themselves under the influence of Petrodollar–funded Saudi Wahhabi ideology, what is obvious to the world and is destroying the peace of the community is never said in public. 

This understandably shocked the Urdu Press correspondents attending the briefing organised by All India Ulema and Mashaikh Board, says Mr. Shakeel Ahmad Rahmani of Urdu daily, Akhbar e Mashriique. Apart from Akhbar-e-Mashrique, no Urdu newspaper dared to publish the story. Edited by veteran journalist M. W. Haque, Akhbar-e-Mashrique put the story on its front page. -- New Age Islam News Bureau

The death sentence given to Youcef Nadarkhani in Iran is an affront to universal moral values and a disservice to Muslims. Meanwhile the silence from the world's Muslims – especially the UK's usually voluble Muslim organisations and self-appointed "community leaders" – has been shameful. The irony is that I have yet to come across an ordinary Muslim who agrees that a fellow believer who loses, changes or abandons his or her faith should be hanged. Yet frustratingly few Muslims are willing to speak out against such medieval barbarism. We mumble excuses, avert our eyes. Muslims have to ask ourselves: Is the God we worship so weak and needy that he requires us to force our fellow humans to worship him? Is our religion so frail and insecure that it cannot tolerate any rejection whatsoever? And why are we silent as an innocent Christian is sentenced to death in the name of Islam? To hang a man for refusing to believe in Islam is theologically and morally unjustifiable; it is not just unIslamic but anti-Islamic. -- Mehdi Hasan

It is the fundamentalist Deoband Dar-ul-Uloom brand of Islam that inspired the Taliban movement. Many of the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan and in Pakistan are graduates of the Deobandi-influenced seminaries in Pakistan. Mullah Omar, for example, attended the Deobandi Darul Uloom Haqqania madrasa in Peshawar. The mission of the Deoband is to cleanse Islam of all Western influences, and to propagate their teachings with missionary zeal. Increasingly, the Deobandi movement has been funded by the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, leading to the former being co-opted by the latter. The Deoband HQ has recently sought to distance itself from violent extremism. For the powers that be in the War on Terror, what matters is the graduation from extremism to violence. But, for societies such as the Maldives, and for the people who have to live under its precincts, what matters more is the oppression that extremism imposes on daily life. This is the reality that a Maldivian people living under the Religious Unity Regulations will have to face. -- Azra Naseem

Finally, my previous forecasts have turned true, once again! American President Barack Hussain Obama is very cunningly implementing his hidden desire of giving birth to few more Sharia states in the world. With this mission in mind, Obama helped ouster of secularist government of Ben Ali in Tunisia, Husni Mubarak government in Egypt and now Muammar Gaddafi government in Libya. No doubt, sensing his imminent defeat in the next Presidential election, Barack Hussain Obama has accelerated his 'mission Islamization'. Here we all need to remember one point that, Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah – all welcomed the ouster of Gaddafi in Libya. Earlier they welcomed ouster of Ben Ali and Husni Mubarak. And of course, such 'over-whelming' excitement by the radical Islamist as well as Jihadist groups, clearly show to the world that, in all the three cases, radical Islam became winner while United States and the West are losers. -- Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury