Minaret Less Mosques – Ban OR the Beginning of a Renaissance, Islam and the West, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam and the West

Minaret Less Mosques – Ban OR the Beginning of a Renaissance

By Syed B. Soharwardy

www.iscc.ca

Al Madinah Calgary Islamic Centre was established in 2005. It is located in a shopping mall. We purchased two shops and converted them into a mosque. If the sign outside the mosque is removed, no one would even know that this is a place of worship for Muslims. In less than five years our congregation grew from 27 people to almost 2000 people. We have more than 200 girls and boys learning Qur’an and Islamic teachings. In less than five years 23 non-Muslim Calgarians embraced Islam at the Al Madinah Islamic Centre. Every year hundreds of Calgarians; Christians, Jews, Atheists, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and others visit the Al Madinah Centre and take part in the Interfaith Dialogues. 99% of those who attend the interfaith activities at the Al Madinah Centre change their attitude about Islam and Muslims. Their misconceptions and misunderstandings about Islam are removed. They appreciate that someone has helped them in removing those fears and distrust of Muslims that the media tries to build every day. In Ramadan, every year for one month, more than 200 Muslims and non-Muslims eat together at the sunset time at the Al Madinah Mosque.

http://newageislam.com/minaret-less-mosques-%E2%80%93-ban-or-the-beginning-of-a-renaissance-/islam-and-the-west/d/2295

Indonesian lessons for secular India: insidious impact of Saudi-exported Wahhabism, The War within Islam, NewAgeIslam.com

The War within Islam

Indonesian lessons for secular India: insidious impact of Saudi-exported Wahhabism

By Sadanand Dhume

22 November 2009

If you had to pick the place in the Muslim world least susceptible to any kind of religious extremism, it would be hard to find a better candidate than Indonesia. The world's most populous Muslim country is on Islam's eastern edge, separated from the faith's Arabian birthplace by space and time. Islam washed up in the archipelago in the 12th century, took root in the 15th and became dominant as late as the 17th. For the most part, it arrived through trade rather than conquest, by Indian dhow rather than Arab charger. It was preceded by more than a millennium of Hinduism and Buddhism, whose achievements included Borobudur, a massive 9th-century Buddhist stupa.

As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in comparing Indonesia to Morocco: "In Indonesia Islam did not construct a civilization, it appropriated one."

In India, a strain of Islamic orthodoxy was sometimes in open conflict with Hinduism. But in Indonesia, the new faith sat comfortably atop a Hindu-Buddhist past. Like most Indians, and unlike the Arabs, most Indonesians continued to believe that there are many paths to God. Indeed, until recently, Indonesian Islam - steeped in a culture of music and mysticism - was synonymous with tolerance. By and large, the one-in-eight Indonesians who are Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or Animist, rarely faced discrimination, much less religious violence.

http://newageislam.com/indonesian-lessons-for-secular-india--insidious-impact-of-saudi-exported-wahhabism/the-war-within-islam/d/2123