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adventuresoutsidethegenderbinary · 4 years ago

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As a queer Muslim, I 100% want to believe that it's permissible in Islam to...you know, be queer.

The thing is, majority of people say its not. Even Islamic scholars who I follow and respect, like Mufti Menk, and other Islamic pages run by straight people, say its wrong to act upon it. It upsets me, because why would Allah SWT love us, but not want us to love? Why would he want us to suffer alone? Why would he want us to feel restricted? Islam is not about restriction at all. Islam is the religion of peace, is it not?

Idk if IS the truth, or just my internalised homophobia talking, but I feel like queer Muslim pages say it's okay to be queer...because they're queer themselves. And they're trying to find ways bargain with themselves to say that its okay. And lots of (straight religious) people don't agree with them (like a scholar for example) I feel like there's just too much evidence on the opposing side for me to believe that it's not a sin.Idk what to do. I even tried to pray so that I could find out the truth or find out answers. Then the next morning I saw yet another person who said acting upon queerness is a sin. I know that it was just one opinion, but I feel like it just happened too soon for it to be a mere coincidence. I ask for signs to find out the truth, but then I don't like the signs.

What makes me even more angry is that all this questioning is happening to me during Ramadan - the time where you're supposed to become closer to Allah.

In the end, I'm just glad I like all genders and can marry a man, if being queer really is a ,,sin" 😔

Hello friend!

I have struggled with these same feelings myself. I often wonder if I am just interpreting the Quran in a certain way to make myself feel better. I don’t think these feelings will ever go away.

However, there is substantial evidence that homosexuality didn’t use to be such a haram concept in Islam, or at least, not homosexuality the way we think of it. For instance, there were many notable Muslim figures who practiced homosexuality or were thought to practice it, particularly from the 8th - 10th centuries. Such figures included Caliphs, and in later centuries, Ottoman sultans. However, this “homosexuality” often referred to men sleeping with young boys (typically too young to have a beard).

I can’t seem to find it right now, but I saw a post somewhere talking about an Old Testament verse (I believe it was Leviticus) which said, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman, for it is an abomination”, but people later determined that this was a mistranslation and that it originally said “you shall not lie with young boys as with women”. This would make sense given how widespread such pedophilia was at the time, especially in the Greco-Roman world.

Thus, I think there’s substantial evidence that the Quran was actually banning pedophilia, especially since the word “homosexuality” was never in the book and people had to come up with one when translating it. When we also consider our Allah, most kind and most merciful, we know that he does things with a purpose. Saying that pedophilia, lust, and rape is a sin makes sense because these are all bad things that hurt others. I struggle to understand why Allah would ban relationships between people of the same gender when they pose no threat to others and can actually be quite beneficial in that same-gender couples often adopt or take care of children.

Currently, many Islamic leaders are quite conservative, and that has more to do with geopolitical forces than religious ones, so I think that also contributes to the fact that most of the people re-examining homosexuality in Islam are queer. Additionally, many Muslim-majority countries are very conservative and the leaders are very oppressive, and hence any major scholars who challenge the “traditional” interpretation of the text may be silenced.

Sorry for the long response - I’m still trying to figure all this out too. All I know is that I have a hard time imagining Allah casting someone down into Hell if they spent their whole life helping others but unapologetically loved someone of the same gender.

Peace be upon you,

River

#asks #answered #lgbtq #lgbtq muslim #lgbtq islam #islam #ramadan mubarak #queer muslim #long

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diorbabe66 · 3 years ago

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I'm the anon who u know awhile ago said all that stuff.

I'm apologising for what I said. I'm really sorry, it wasn't my intention to shame any religion, your former religion. I never named any religion did I? I was just ranting, I'm sorry.

Although I would like to clarify about the whole EIYPO thing. I was like every normal person once I guess, sincerely believed that everyone in the world is nice, only few bad people exist. Until I tried to study major world religions to find a connection u know? Like what if everyone is saying the same thing?? Maybe we are all connected, I was very much into spirituality. So I started reading some books about major religions of the world, the scriptures per se. If someone writes in a book, apples are the best and oranges are lesser fruits, they are the "worst of fruits" how am I suppose to interpret that? The writing is very clear isn't it, no metaphors intended by the writer. It's clear cut.

I would like to add one thing. My family has been a victim of blatant religious discrimination before I was born, my family basically had to flee to a another country. My family has suffered a lot. The perpetrators weren't world's 2nd largest religion btw. Nd I didn't know about it, until I delved into history later on. My family's experiences were not something unreal, they were very much real. The writings in the book is very much real, not something I manifested, cuz I clearly didn't know about it.

I very much agree with you about the people vs religion thing. Yes, people are individuals with their own thoughts and emotions, they can interpret differently. Yes exactly ‼️ that's what I am saying, people shouldn't be blamed, but the ideology should be‼️ you can't snare the fundamentalists and spare the fundamentals. It's an injustice.

I was forced into accepting your former religion. I am trying to shift into a reality where it never happened. I'm an ex Muslim too. I have seen things, experienced things. All I will say is I'm safe due to law of assumption.

After I post this , I will do revision and pretend this never happened. I don't want to ruin my mental diet as well and manifest some stuff again in my reality. I just want you to introspect. People interpret differently, yes they do. But people who do violent things, why they interpreted differently? Yes LGBTQ people from those religions exist, which I'm glad they do and I applaud them for their courage. If doesn't change the fact about the violent things written in those books about homosexuals does it?

If someone says stone men who sleep with men, how am I suppose to interpret differently?

That's it. That's all I ask. Introspect a little. The fundamentals are important ‼️ don't hate the people, hate the ideology. that's it.

i understand however, i would like to say that you don't have to take everything you see various religions and act on them, and i said that you shouldn't be shaming the religion but the people that perpetuate the ideologies, take the bible for example in no where did it say anything about homosexuals it was a word that was added later on, that's why i'm saying people twist these religions to make it look bad. i am not trying to dismiss your experience i am very sorry about that, but what i am saying that there are people that have found solace in these various religions, there are people who love these religions and value them and find happiness within them. the various harmful acts were commuted by people who used the religion as a scapegoat to harm those that they want to hurt. at the end of the day it's all up to how people look at it and what they choose to do with what they read, and unfortunately people choose to use it as a means to hurt others, which is never okay. the ideologies are created by the people, you would not have such ideas if people didn't create such ideologies to be taught.

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rainbowandstardust · 3 years ago

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Death, a reappearing event in the Gandhi family

The Nehru-Gandhi family governed India for almost 50 years out of the total 74 years since our independence. As we approach our 75th Independence day, we should learn about the period of deaths the history of our politics saw in the early years. All of this started with the assassination of the father of India-"Mahatma Gandhi" who was not in politics but his death was the beginning of a series of deaths. First, let's rewind a little bit.

While there are various theories revolving around how the Gandhi name was acquired. The first story that I was told as a kid which has now been proven to be wrong by the internet goes as follows, Feroze Jehangir Ghandy was a Muslim and Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India did not approve of an inter-religion marriage of his daughter Indira Gandhi, the first and only woman prime minister of India. Mahatma Gandhi decided to adopt Feroze and then convince Jawaharlal Nehru to marry him with Indira. His name changed to Feroze Gandhi and Indira Nehru became Indira Gandhi. Thus, started the legacy of The Gandhi Family.

On further research from different articles on google, a different story was discovered. Feroze Ghandy was a Parsi and a politician along with being an activist who was inspired by the works of Mahatma Gandhi and hence changed the spelling of his surname. He married Indira Nehru who then became Indira Gandhi.

The first death the Gandhi family saw was Mahatma Gandhi's assassination which occurred on 30th January 1948 when Nathuram Godse shot 3 bullets for what he thought would lead him to be celebrated across the whole nation. Instead, he was hanged.

Indira Gandhi one the day of her death. She was wearing a beautiful saffron saree.

Then followed Indira Gandhi. While some people celebrate Indira Gandhi's era some believe it to be the darkest period of Indian democracy. She was shot 33 bullets on 31 October 1984 by her two Sikh bodyguards Satwant Singh and Beant Singh. Operation Blue Star was ordered by Indira Gandhi and was carried between 1 June to 8 June 1984. It was to remove leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his followers from the buildings of the Harmandir Sahib complex in Amritsar, Punjab. This operation led to many casualties from both sides and the reason many people turned against Indira Gandhi-The Iron Woman of India. Allegedly Indira Gandhi had predicted her own death a day before in her speech given at Bhubaneswar. She said, "I am here today, I may not be here tomorrow. Nobody knows how many attempts have been made to shoot me I do not care whether I live or die. I have lived a long life and I am proud that I spend the whole of my life in the service of my people." The Sikh bodyguards were to be removed after the blue star operation but Indira believed this would create her image as anti-Sikh, a life-threatening mistake she did. Following her death, riots broke out across the whole country.

Rajiv Gandhi was in Contai, 150 km away from Calcutta when Indira Gandhi was shot. He was asked to be the next prime minister following his mother's demise.

Rajiv Gandhi on the day of his death.

This was not the end of the circle of death looming over the Gandhi family. The successive prime minister Rajiv Gandhi took the office in 1984. He was the youngest prime minister of India at the age of 40 and governed from 1984-1989. Like Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi also anticipated his own death a few moments before the bombing. Neena Gopal asked Rajiv whether he felt his life was at risk, to which Rajiv Gandhi said, "Have you noticed how every time any South Asian leader of any import rises to a position of power or is about to achieve something for himself or his country, he is cut down, attacked, killed look at Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Sheikh Mujib, look at Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, at Zia-ul-Haq, Bandaranaike."

Gopal says within minutes of making the statement that hinted he was aware that he was a likely target of dark forces at play, Rajiv himself would be gone (Statement from India today). Following the Civil war in Sri Lanka, Rajiv Gandhi sent the military to end the uprising. Many soldiers lost their lives and LTTE could not be stopped. India then stopped its involvement in the Sri Lankan civil war, but LTTE became the enemy of Rajiv Gandhi.

He was campaigning in Madras on 21 May 1991. When he was on his way to deliver his speech, Thenmozhi Rajaratnam bent down to touch his feet and took out RDX explosive-laden belt from underneath her dress. Rajiv Gandhi, his assassin, along with 14 others died in the suicide bombing orchestrated by LTTE.

The LTTE leveraged genuine issues of linguistic discrimination, political disenfranchisement, and anti-Tamil riots in the island nation where Sinhalese-Buddhists are a majority — but adopted the politics of violence and terror as the method to attain their objective. And it was this terror that cost India’s former PM his life. (Hindustan Times)

LTTE then lost its support from Tamil. “Rajiv Gandhi was expected to come to power in the 1991 general elections. The results showed that in his death, he was stronger than in his life,” says Thiyagu.

Sanjay Gandhi in his plane

This was not all. Prior to these assassinations occurred the death of Sanjay Gandhi, the youngest son of Indira Gandhi. During the emergency period in India, Sanjay Gandhi is believed to have a really strong hold on what was happening around the country. He had a liking for adventures and did acrobats in planes. One day prior to his death he was travelling in the same plane with Maneka Gandhi who then came home and informed Indira about the plane ride, telling her to stop Sanjay from flying in that plane again. Indira talked to Sanjay about the safety of the plane. To which he replied that it would be fixed in 2-3 days. The very next day i.e 23 June 1980 Sanjay died in a plane crash. One more person who was flying the plane along with him died. He was supposed to be his mother's successor in politics.

There are many conspiracy theories regarding some of which state that Indira had her son killed. I don't think a mother and one like Indira Gandhi can do such a thing. After his death she said. "It feels like my right arm has been taken away." No one can understand the love of a mother. Moreover, there are no strong arguments backing up this conspiracy theory. One must keep in mind that Sanjay had a liking for adventures and he had been doing such acrobats in the planes for a long time. But, he was still not so experienced. It is most likely that it was an accidental death.

Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi

Flashforward to 2021 when Sonia Gandhi is the leader of the Indian National Congress, Rahul Gandhi is often portrayed as a person who is dumb in front of the public. One cannot neglect the fact that he and his sister, Priyanka Gandhi, and his brother, Varun Gandhi had a very traumatic childhood. At the mere age of 10, Rahul Gandhi saw his uncle's death followed by his grandmother who was killed by people he thought were his friends. In one of his interviews, he said he thought they were his friends. They once taught him to play badminton and out of anger, they killed his grandmother. Following Indira's death, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi were homeschooled for security reasons. This led to their seclusion from society. After this when he was studying at Harvard he heard the news of his father's death. He shifted to Rollins College in Florida again for security reasons. The amount of trauma this family faced is a lot. Their childhood had been full of deaths and social seclusion. No one can even imagine the trauma surrounding the Gandhi family. Sonia had pleaded with Rahul not to take up politics, "I begged him not to let them do this. I pleaded with him, with others around him, too. He would be killed as well. He held my hands, hugged me, tried to soothe my desperation. He had no choice, he said, he would be killed anyway." What has politics ever given Rahul? It has taken away everything from him.

-Vrinda Kwatra

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quarterlifecrisisandconfessions · 3 years ago

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Love is all we need.

I haven’t posted in here in a while but I need to get this out. This last year has been so challenging for all of us. I can’t think of a single person that will look back on the year 2020 (and maybe even 2021) and have much more to say about it than “I made it”.

I’ll go a step further and say “we made it”. Because in the end, most of us did. Perhaps some of us made it hanging by a tiny thread, but we did make it.

But that isn’t the point of this post. I watched a movie today. It was called “Breakthrough”. You may have seen it. You may not have. It’s one of those ‘feel good’ movies. A lot of people would call it one of those “Christian movies”. I am one of those ‘a lot of people’. I tend to avoid those movies because my feelings about Christianity aren’t that popular these days. Organized religion in general - but again, not the point of this post.

I am so glad I watched the movie because for me it was so much more than that. I think that many people have their own, personal beliefs when it comes to faith. When it comes to a higher power. Even when it comes to miracles.

**SPOILER ALERT** Do not read if you haven’t seen the movie and want to. Carry on if you have or don’t care to be spoiled.

In the movie, a young boy falls into an icy lake when he and his friends were playing. He is underwater for roughly 20 minutes before he is rescued. As you can imagine, he was without a pulse when he was pulled from the icy water. His rescuer heard his Captain say ‘go back’ when they were close to giving up the rescue mission. That’s when they found him.

At the emergency room, they tried everything medicine and science and technology has given us but could not restore the boy’s pulse. His mother arrives and is told to say goodbye. She prayers over her son’s body. She demands that the Spirit give life back to her son. And his heart begins to beat.

You can call it what you want. A God thing. A miracle. A coincidence. A fluke. You can explain it with science. Perhaps the cold water caused his heart rate to slow down to the point that his body was merely frozen and had to be warmed up to wake up.

He was transferred to a Children’s hospital where the specialist there gave grave news to the parents. This grave news came from his experience with these situations and what he had seen with his own two eyes. It came from his training, his education. From a Physician’s point of view, should the boy wake up, he would be neurologically impaired. And that’s just if he woke up. Most people know that when the heart isn’t beating or you aren’t breathing for an extended period of time, the organs shut down. Your body and brain are deprived of a necessary ingredient - oxygen. So, science says: this boy will not survive.

Guess what? The boy survived. All of the things that were supposed to happen with his body based on science, experience, training....happened. Then, he woke up. And he was himself.

Believe it or not, though, it wasn’t the miracle that moved me. It wasn’t the coincidence or the fluke.

It was the love. It was the people questioning how this happened. It was the firefighter who heard his Captain say “go back” find out that his Captain never said a word, though he knew without a doubt he heard “go back”. This firefighter doesn’t believe in God but he know what he heard.

And one thing I love about the movie is that they didn’t push that issue. They didn’t make it into the firefighter learning to believe in God. You don’t have to believe in God to believe in miracles.

Call him hearing “go back” what you want. Call it intuition. Call it luck. Call it a fluke. Call it a miracle. Call it fate. Or, if you’re like me, call it God. I don’t really care what you call it. I have experienced something similar to this more than enough times to know its existence and I think, in some form, most of us have, whether we know how to elaborate it or want to admit it.

The movie does portray the power of prayer. And that was another thing I loved. If you grew up in the church as I did, you learned that prayer was bowing your head and clasping your hand and speaking to God.

In other practices, prayer comes in a much different form. Catholics have a routine for prayer. Muslims do as well. Buddhists don’t necessarily ‘pray’ in the sense of the word. But even those who don’t believe in God, believe in a form of prayer in a less-literal sense.

The movie really portrays the the universal form of prayer is just love. If you think of every form of religion or spirituality, there’s always some form of literature that talks about love. In the Bible, it says “Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance (1 Corinthians 13:7).

Buddha said “radiate boundless love towards the entire world”.

Love is translated so many different ways. But one thing is true. Love is powerful. If you don’t believe in God, you believe in Love.

In the movie, Joyce Smith (Chrissy Metz from This is Us) said “I think it’s been said that love is the most powerful force on this Earth.....without love, we cannot grow, we cannot flourish. We cannot find our place in this world. The power of love, especially God’s love, is truly the one thing that makes all things possible”. (That is a paraphrase)

That part really moved me. It really hit me in my heart. The thing about it was our love IS God’s love. Our love is the most powerful force on this Earth. Love moves mountains. It was love that saved that boy’s life. It is love that keeps us moving on the daily.

I want to personally thank everyone who has ever loved me. Whether you knew it or I knew it, the love you gave me kept me going. I have so many friends and family that struggle with a relationship with religion or God or whatever but they still give and feel love, and that keeps them going. That keeps them grounded. Because love is everything. Love IS religion. We don’t need a book or a movie to show us that, not really. It is a nice reminder though.

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gayoperatorgunclub · 4 years ago

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For the ultimate ship meme, Lion and Doc? I'm sorry, I'm LionDoc trash-

it’s all good!! whenever someone sends in an ask, i get an excuse to talk/write about one of my interests! really, it makes me so happy to be able to create content that people hopefully enjoy!! 💝💝💝

General:

How long will they last? - until the end of time, babey

How quickly did/will they fall in love? - it was love at first sight but then they started talking i do think it was some form of ~interest~ in one another at first sight, but then all that drama and lack of communication happened so they didn’t really allow themselves to even dream about the possibility of a relationship. HOWEVER! once lion joined rainbow and they talked their shit out like people who know how to cope, there was a period of a few months that is now referred to as The Four Months of Pining™, during which glaz did a lot of paintings where the subject (who usually bears an uncanny resemblance to doc or lion) is staring at something (or someone) longingly. he calls it his french period. when they finally get together, a LOT of money changes hands. and goes straight into sledge’s pocket (he was the only one who bet that it would take them this long). diana gets a brand new collar (handmade), bed (handmade), dish (handmade), and many new toys (some handmade, some store-bought. sledge’s craftsmanship can only get him so far)

How was their first kiss? - you know how the french are supposed to be super suave and confident??? and how gay people are trying their hardest but they’re just Not Good at things????? (i know these are stereotypes but stay with me). well, with their 5/8 french blood (i hc one of doc’s parents is fully algerian while the other is half french, half algerian), and their 4/4 gay blood, they have an 81.25% chance of success in matters of the heart. sadly, that 18.75% chance of failure came into play during this situation. picture it. doc and lion. romantic, home-cooked dinner. le festin is playing in the background. they’re holding hands over the table. suddenly, doc’s cat goes into labour. all hell breaks loose. lion is getting flashbacks to his son’s birth, so now he’s hyperventilating. doc carries him to the couch and turns on the fan so he can cool off and catch his breath, before carefully moving his cat, Rayie (arabic for gorgeous, pronounced rye-ah) to the living room in his handmade Birthing Box, then grabs a pile of blankets and a heat lamp and situates himself on the ground nearby so he can help her if she needs it. once the kittens are born (they’re twins!! Sadiqi is the boy, and Amirti is the girl!!!) doc makes sure they’re nice and warm and that Rayie is recovering, and gives her pets while she cleans her babies. once the happy family is all settled in for the night, doc walks over to the couch and just. lays down on top of lion. once he’s gotten over the adrenaline of the birth, he takes lion’s face in his hands and says “promise me you’ll be more calm if we ever decide to have kids” and gives him a BIG smooch while lion’s just short-circuiting like “does he know i have a son???? did i forget to mention my son?????? also what about these kittens??? are they not sufficiently childish to count as children????? DOES HE WANT KIDS????? does he want to marry me??????? wait why is he getting so clo-”

Wedding:

Who proposed? - lion. it was the day of their two year anniversary (yes i AM saying they got together the august after outbreak don’t @ me) and they were on vacation at doc’s family’s Secret Beach House. they were vibing on the balcony, watching the sunset, when lion suddenly clears his throat. doc turns to look at him and finds his boyfriend down on one knee, looking like he might flee to Bermuda. he’s reaching for something in his pocket. doc starts laughing. lion, completely misunderstanding his reaction, flushes and stammers out an apology. doc sees this, and immediately stops, though he’s still smiling gleefully as he catches lion by the biceps, then reaches into his own pocket and pulls the ring he was going to give olivier. they exchange rings, giggling like little kids, and spend the rest of the night making out on whatever surfaces are available.

Who is the best man/men? - for lion? montagne. (his son is the ring bearer and doc’s niece is the flower girl). for doc? rook. he’s so happy he gets to participate in his dad’s wedding

Who is the bride’s maid(s)? - for lion: finka. for doc: twitch

Who did the most planning? - both of them!! do you know how hard they worked to ensure the ceremony was valid in the eyes of both of their religions

Who stressed the most? - s e e a b o v e

How fancy was the ceremony? - Back of a pickup truck | 2 | 3 | 4 | Normal Church Wedding | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Kate and William wish they were this big.

Who was specifically not invited to the wedding? - lion’s parents. they tried to call him during the reception but doc’s grandma grabbed his phone and started cussing them out, talking about dishonor and how they tried to disown him so they’re not his parents anymore, and besides, his new family absolutely adores him, so really, it’s their loss. once she hangs up, she pulls lion into a hug and he calls her his favorite, if only, grand-mère

Sex:

Who is on top? - who’s topping? lion. but sometimes doc gets bitchy so he gets to set the pace if you know what i mean

Who is the one to instigate things? - they are both lowkey horny 24/7 so 👀👀👀

How healthy is their sex life? - Barely touch themselves let alone each other | 2 | 3 | 4 | Once a couple weeks, nothing overboard | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | They are humping each other on the couch right now (only because they do get to see each other fairly often. if one goes on a long mission without the other, once they get back they will bump it up to a 10 real quick)

How kinky are they? - Straight missionary with the lights off | 2 | 3 | 4 | Might try some butt stuff and toys | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Don’t go into the sex dungeon without a horse’s head

How long do they normally last? - idk long enough ig. maybe longer if someone feels they’ve been left ~unsatisfied~ they might go a few more rounds ;))

Do they make sure each person gets an equal amount of orgasms? - ok it depends on what they’re doing but usually it’s one or two each, but on ~special~ occasions it’s either doc getting edged and denied for hours, OR doc getting forced to come over and over again until he’s begging for something, whether it be more or a goddamn break even he isn’t really sure. either way he’s crying and lion is consistently asking if he needs to safeword and otherwise checking in because they may like it rough but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care

How rough are they in bed? - Softer than a butterfly on the back of a bunny | 2 | 3 | 4 | The bed’s shaking and squeaking every time | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Their dirty talk is so vulgar it’d make Dwayne Johnson blush. Also, the wall’s so weak it could collapse the next time they do it.

How much cuddling/snuggling do they do? - No touching after sex | 2 | 3 | 4 | A little spooning at night, or on the couch, but not in public | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | They snuggle and kiss more often than a teen couple on their fifth date to a pillow factory.

Children:

How many children will they have naturally? - unless someone’s hormones and organs get fucked, zero

How many children will they adopt? - probably none?? idk they’ve already got lion’s son and they’re both busy enough with work so

Who gets stuck with the most diapers? - NEITHER!!!!! DISGUSTANG!!!!!!!!!

Who is the stricter parent? - god i wanna say both. like lion and his attachment to rules??? but doc and his Mom Friend energy????? but ig lion BUT HE’S NOT STRICT TO THE POINT HE’S A BUZZKILL OR ANYTHING HE’S JUST RESPONSIBLE (he will NOT allow his husband and son to go vandalize the property of some islamaphobic brits, as much as he agrees with the sentiment)

Who stops the kid(s) from doing dangerous stunts after school? - doc will only allow vandalism if it’s in the name of righteousness. meaning, he’ll allow their son to spray paint the walls of a goddamn walmart with shit like “eat the rich” and a portrait of robespierre and a guillotine, but it is a HARD NO on defacing places like the library or community center (unless he has a good reason to do so). lion spends his time praying and making sure his son knows which acts of civil disobedience are acceptable and which are distorting their goal

Who remembers to pack the lunch(es)? - doc. he (privately) dreams of retiring (eventually) and living out his lifelong dreams of being a househusband. so

Who is the more loved parent? - SHUT THE FUCK UP RIGHT NOW GET OUT OF MY HOUSE IM GONNA BEAT YOUR ASS. but ig lion??? BUT ONLY BECAUSE THEIR SON HAS KNOWN HIM LONGER. doc is half Dad and half Cool Uncle Who Gives Me Spray Paint And Tells Me To Make Myself Heard (to clarify, i know doc is a pacifist, but im kinda projecting my own sentiment of “we’ve tried to be peaceful but you wouldn’t give us the time of day. now that we’ve “acted out” we’ve gotten your attention, and rest assured, things are going to change.” he won’t hurt anybody, he’s just tired of having to be everyone’s “muslim friend” and educating people on things they could google themselves)

Who is more likely to attend the PTA meetings? - it used to be lion out of necessity, but when people started asking about his “wife” he was really torn between telling them that he and his son’s mother separated, but now he has a partner and his son seems very happy about it. when doc finally attends a meeting with lion, people really struggle to hide their shock. a few clunky but well-meaning “we support you”’s and “we’re sorry for everything that’s been going on”’s later, doc has used his charm to make friends with literally everyone. from then on, he is on pta duty on behalf of lion and his ex

Who cried the most at graduation? - lion! his parents purposefully didn’t show at his, so it’s a big deal for him to show his son just how proud he is. doc tears up a little too, but manages to mostly keep it together so he can support lion, who spends most of the day heave-crying about how proud he is into his husband’s shoulder. gustave just pats him on the back and tells him that they’ll run out of donuts if they don’t get to the concession stand soon

Who is more likely to bail the child(ren) out of trouble with the law? - doc. civil disobedience, baby!! he has never been caught. lion fears the law after his youth, so he tries to avoid any visits to law enforcement. he also can’t stand to see his son behind bars

Cooking:

Who does the most cooking? - doc. househusband, remember?

Who is the most picky in their food choice? - doc, but only because he can be a bit of a spice supremacist. he has to get his ingredients from these very specific farms and markets or else his great grandmother will begin manifesting in their house to curse them

Who does the grocery shopping? - doc, bc he does NOT trust lion to not just sweep all of the microwave ramen and kraft mac n cheese into the cart then sprint to self-checkout

How often do they bake desserts? - whenever possible. doc and maestro live by the philosophy “don’t do anything halfway” if they’re going to go through the trouble of making a meal, it will have multiple courses.

Are they more of a meat lover or a salad eater? - doc is more of a salad eater but only for ease of consumption with halal laws. he adores filet mignon

Who is more likely to surprise the other(s) with an anniversary dinner? - lion! maestro enlists himself as assistant head chef after walking into the base’s kitchen one day to find lion covered in flour and lying facedown on the floor, crying

Who is more likely to suggest going out? - also lion! though he’s memorized doc’s order at all of their favorite restaurants, so he usually just gets take out and puts on a big show of being a “tired housewife who works in the kitchen all day just for this one meal” and setting up the table so it’s all nice and romantic

Who is more likely to burn the house down accidently while cooking? - lion. he tried crème brûlée once. never again

Chores:

Who cleans the room? - lion. organization is everything to this man. doc helps with laundry and such, but for the most part he leaves organization to lion and his systems (think leslie knope levels of planning and organization)

Who is really against chores? - neither! they both understand that teamwork makes the dream work, baby!!

Who cleans up after the pets? - doc, since lion’s already asked him which color hanger should represent “clothes i can tear off my husband before we fuck” and he needs a Moment

Who is more likely to sweep everything under the rug? - neither. they don’t own a broom

Who stresses the most when guests are coming over? - lion because of the deep-seated catholic urge to appear perfect in front of others, and doc because people will gossip, olivier!

Who found a dollar between the couch cushions while cleaning? - lion. he immediately called doc into the room and asked “is this your stash of drug money?” doc, who had been asleep because it was 3 in the morning on a saturday, just stares at him

Misc:

Who takes the longer showers/baths? - it is so bold to assume they don’t shower together to “cut costs”

Who takes the dog out for a walk? - lion is known in their neighborhood as the man who walks cats. there is a facebook page where people post pictures of him walking his cats. vigil is an admin

How often do they decorate the room/house for the holidays? - LITERALLY EVERY HOLIDAY GETS DECORATIONS. lion makes his own for the muslim holidays since there really aren’t many “of good quality” in stores. when they first started dating, doc came home to find his house covered in ramadan decorations, and lion standing precariously on a ladder, trying to string up fairy lights while learning how to pronounce important arabic words. needless to say, doc cries

What are their goals for the relationship? - mutual joy and contentment!!!!

Who is most likely to sleep till noon? - doc. he’s sleepy

Who plays the most pranks? - lion, but they’re stupid ones like replacing certain pictures with danny devito. doc gets back at him by replacing pictures of jesus with ewan mcgregor, and putting yoda into his nativity scene. lion doesn’t notice

#ask #anonymous #r6s doc #r6s lion #doc/lion #ass alert!#could you tell i forgot whether or not lion's ex and son had names #thank you for interacting!

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qqueenofhades · 4 years ago

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i love your medieval posts! i think you wrote a while back on how a first crusade film might go, and i have a question if you don’t mind me asking: I’m writing fiction around the third crusade and approaching the massacre of the acre garrison. do you have any advice on how to portray such incidents in a way which isn’t cheap/horror-porn, while not skating around the fact that this was a genuinely horrifying thing? (1/2)

(also on a lighter note: what moments from the third crusade would you absolutely love to be included in historical portrayals of the period? apart from richard x philip which is an obvious given) (2/2)

Oooh. This is good.

I have written about the massacre at Acre three times that I can think of: twice in fiction (in my novel about Richard and then in chapter 3 of DVLA) and once in nonfiction, in my academic book about the crusades. It’s one of the events in the crusades which gets a lot of attention when somebody has a particular Point To Make, usually about the barbarity of the crusades/crusaders, attempts to portray them as simple excesses of religious zealotry, Ye Olde Bad Violent Medieval Times, parallels to modern-day Western invasions and occupations of the Middle East, well-meant attempts to critique the West’s treatment of Muslims, etc. (I seem to recall that the 2010 Robin Hood has a Bad Take on this, though the rest of it is fictional anyway, so hey.) So if you’re coming into it trying to make a Point for your reader, I advise you to think carefully about what that Point actually is, and how you’re conveying it. Because while it’s certainly a thing that happened and should be dealt with sensitively, it’s also important to think about the larger context of the crusade and how this was treated by both sides, both before and after its occurrence.

First, Saladin’s army had killed or taken prisoner the entire Christian army at the battle of Hattin in 1187, and while there are a few high-profile stories about him personally ransoming Christian captives, there was also an episode where Richard and company freed several thousand (supposedly 12,000, though medieval round figures often have problems) captives from where they were destined to be sold into the slave markets of the Islamic world. Saladin has a well-deserved reputation as a great commander and leader, so this isn’t to attempt some kind of hatchet job on him, but point out that this was a way he would have (logically) expected to make money for his army and to fund his ongoing battles against the Third Crusade. The slave trade was a major part of the medieval economy, often concentrated through the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, and the Silk Road (as I’ve mentioned before, the word “slave” comes from “Slav.”) On this note, despite their Tumblr-darling reputation as champions of conscience and liberal society and personal cleanliness, the Vikings were also big-time slave traders (which probably isn’t that surprising for people who made their living by jumping off boats and stealing other people’s shit; though the word wicing denotes a particular kind of sea raider within this society and not the entire society itself). Anyway: the point is that people were routinely used as human collateral, both as slaves and as hostages, in medieval society and warfare alike, and that included the crusades. The giving and taking of hostages was a very, very common feature of forcing trust and incentive to cooperate between warring sides; it happened in Europe, it happened on the crusades, it didn’t matter who the enemy was.

In fact, by the time the massacre took place, Richard had already taken a lot of flak (and would continue to take it throughout the crusade) for being so friendly in his diplomatic negotiations with Saladin, which was supposedly one of the reasons Philip decided to leave early. The fact that Richard kept entering into negotiations with the Saracens and trying to resolve Acre’s disputed status with diplomacy as well as warfare was a bit of a shock to the other crusade leaders, who figured that they were just there to kill the Muslims and have done with it. (They also had a grudge against Richard for swiftly dispossessing them and doing everything himself, which was just the way Richard rolled, my bros.) As also mentioned in DVLA, Richard was one of the Western leaders most sympathetically inclined to the Muslims (and especially Saladin and his brother Saif al-Din) during the entire crusades, not just the Third. We can’t know how serious he was, but he did offer to marry his sister Joanna to Saif al-Din, he and Saif al-Din hit it off during their in-person negotiations and referred to the other as their friend, he and Saladin wrote to each other fairly often even if they never met, they are both on record saying how much they admired each other, Richard was open about finding the Muslims more honorable than his Christian allies, and Hubert Walter (the bishop of Salisbury) had dinner with Saladin (when Saladin had invited the crusaders to Jerusalem after the Treaty of Jaffa in 1192, though Richard didn’t go) and told him that if he and Richard ever decided to join forces, nobody would be able to stop them. (I also had to write a novel based on that premise, for reasons.) So Richard and Saladin negotiated for the entire period of the crusades, they fought on the battlefield, they engaged in diplomacy, they respected the hell out of each other, they had a cordial-enemies relationship, and Richard became outright friends with Saif al-Din. And most of this happened AFTER the events at Acre.

That is to say: the Acre massacre, while it may appear particularly shocking to our eyes, did not end up being a major episode for either side during the crusade, at least in its ultimate course of events. Saladin and the Muslim high command had repeatedly dawdled and prevaricated and tried to avoid fulfilling the terms of the arrangement under which they had handed the hostages over, trying to delay Richard in Acre and prevent him from marching down the coast to Jaffa or Jerusalem, and thus, as utterly cold-blooded as it sounds: by the simple rules of medieval battlefield logic, the hostages were fair game. They were POWs and military combatants, and while hostages weren’t USUALLY killed, simply because it was the threat that they could be hurt that was the most effective at exerting compliance... they also could be killed, and both sides recognized that this was a possible option if the arrangement wasn’t fulfilled.

This again, as noted, wasn’t unique to the crusades. You gave up hostages precisely because they were supposed to impel you to keep your word, and if you didn’t, that reflected badly on your own honor, as much or as more than on your enemy’s. That’s why Yusuf is also pissed with Saladin in the aftermath of the massacre in DVLA; Saladin had a responsibility as a commander to free these men, he did not do that and deliberately used their safety as a pawn, so Richard called his bluff and had the prisoners executed. Which again: this was about what anyone in that situation had a right to expect, and Richard was often much more ruthless with rebellions against him by his European Christian subjects back in France; he had given Saladin over six weeks to cooperate, which was a lot more than he usually did. So this wasn’t a case where he was doing it specifically because of the religion of the captives or some mindless excess of religious bigotry, but because a military agreement had been broken. (Richard was many things, but not, so far as I can tell, really a religious bigot at all. This goes for his relations with the Jews as well as the Muslims.)

Obviously, it’s not a wonderful thing that this did happen, the Muslims were rightfully angry about it, and harassed the crusaders’ march repeatedly during the two weeks between the massacre (August 20, 1191) and the battle of Arsuf (September 7, 1191) where Richard defeated Saladin for the first time in the open field. Both of these events contributed to a dent in Saladin’s reputation, which heretofore had been about as glorious in the Islamic world as it was possible to get. There was a lull in hostilities after Arsuf as the fighting season ended, negotiations between Richard and Saladin were soon underway again, he met Saif al-Din not long after, and it doesn’t appear that the Acre massacre had a major impact on the resumption of that diplomatic relationship. This supports the interpretation that both sides recognized it as a valid if regrettable move in the circumstances, and Saladin had some awareness that he’d been outplayed twice in a row and this was, to some degree, his fault too. So while this should obviously be treated with care and not sensationalized, and given its due weight as an episode of warfare in the crusades, the broader context of this particular incident does not support it being some sort of terrible black-mark incident of mindless religious zealotry; the Muslims themselves did not view it that way and were once more negotiating with Richard a month later.

As far as lighter episodes: you DELIGHT me in giving me the opportunity to inform you about the Dueling Dirty Songs of the Third Crusade, featuring Hugh, duke of Burgundy (the commander of the French forces after Philip’s departure in July 1191) and Richard himself. This happened in July 1192, after the final failed advance on Jerusalem and before the battle of Jaffa, when relations between the French and English contingents had completely broken down. Take it away, Itinerarium Peregrinorum:

On top of all this, Henry [Hugh] duke of Burgundy, prompted by a spirit of worthless arrogance or perhaps led on by the most unbecoming malicious envy, composed the words of a song to be sung in public. Such shameful words should never have been made public if its composers had retained any sense of propriety, for they were revealed not so much as men but men beyond raping women [non tantum viris, sed et viros ultra rapientibus mulieribus]. Those who applied their efforts to such shocking and silly activities certainly made themselves conspicuous and revealed the hidden intentions of their hearts […] This invidious composition was sung all through the army. The king [Richard] was extremely annoyed about it, and thought that he should punish them by paying them back in their own coin. So he also sang something about them, and it was little trouble to compose because there was plenty of material at hand.

As I write about in my Queer Richard paper: The IP’s shocked tone in reporting this anecdote, the clear sense that Hugh’s song was too shameful to even be hinted at, and the curious comment that the ones responsible were men “beyond even raping women” gives the distinct impression that this was a musical slander on Richard’s sexual habits, especially given his public repentance in Messina prior to the crusade. It also fits in a tradition wherein which songs were used as one of the most versatile and popular methods of mass communication in crusading armies, praising crusaders’ successes and lambasting their failures. The IP author, for whom Richard was a figure of hero-worship, deflected the charges of sexual irregularity by the straightforward tactic of claiming that the French must be engaging in it instead, and thus by inference, homosexual sodomy was an even worse sin than heterosexual rape. It also shows that Richard’s own reaction was simply to sing a wittier and more scathing song about his accusers. And seriously, his nemesis (well, the henchman of his nemesis, since Philip was already gone) throws a shit fit and is all I’LL TELL EVERYONE THAT RICHARD LIKES DUDES NAH NAH NAH like it’s a middle school playground slap fight? And Richard just goes, “bring it on bro, I’m smarter than you, I’m a better singer than you, there’s TONS OF MATERIAL for me to write about how much you suck, and I will now proceed to destroy you in a diss track competition because I’m Queer N’ Awesome?”

I’m sorry. Legendary. We stan.

#history #medieval history #medieval warfare #dvla asks #ish #the old guard meta #richard the lionheart #long post #anonymous #ask

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creepingsharia · 4 years ago

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Iowa Law Enforcement Academy Course Features Pro-Sharia Muslim Speaker and DOJ Whitewashing Jihad

Civilization jihad... “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated.”

image above via Youtube speech by Dr. Zahra Jamal

The Iowa Law Enforcement Academy Meets Fantasy Islam

By Stephen M. Kirby

According to its website,

The Iowa Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) was created by an act of the Iowa legislature in 1967 with its purpose being to upgrade law enforcement to professional status. The specific goals were to maximize training opportunities for law enforcement officers…[1]

In furtherance of this training goal, on November 9-10, 2020 the ILEA sponsored an online course titled “Engaging and Building Partnerships with Muslim Americans.”

The presenters were Darryck [sic] Dean, Senior Conciliation Specialist, U.S. Department of Justice, Community Relations Service, and Dr. Zahra Jamal, Associate Director at the Boniuk Institute for Religious Tolerance, Rice University, Houston, TX.

The online course lasted two hours each day, and most of the course focused on learning about Muslim Americans and their involvement in American society, and on ways to increase community engagement between the Muslim American community and law enforcement.

Dr. Zahra Jamal, a Muslim American, was the main presenter. On the first day she talked about the religion of Islam. Unfortunately, what she presented was her personal version of Islam which had little to do with the Islam based on the commands of Allah in the Koran and the teachings and example of Muhammad (the Sunnah). Let’s examine some of Jamal’s claims about Islam and related matters.

“Jihad is not Holy War”

Jamal was emphatic that jihad does not mean “holy war,” and she repeated it three times in a row. But in reality jihad is associated with “holy war” in many Muslim writings, e.g.:

Jihad: Striving, holy war.[2]

…the earliest (and therefore fundamental) Qur’anic reference to the question of jihad, or holy war… (This is found in a translation of the Koran endorsed and distributed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations – CAIR)[3]

…he was taken prisoner in a jihad – that is, a holy war… (CAIR Koran)[4]

…a woman taken captive in a “holy war” (jihad)… (CAIR Koran)[5]

And He (Allah) said: Jihad (Islamic holy war) is ordained for you (Muslims)…[6]

The holy war (jihad) is a collective duty… (In a chapter titled “The Book of the Holy War (Kitab al-Jihad)[7]

“Holy War.” See Jihad. (Subject Index)[8]

And jihad has also been referred to as “holy fighting” and “holy battles”:

Al-Jihad (holy fighting) in Allah’s Cause (with full force of numbers and weaponry) is given the utmost importance in Islam and is one of its pillars (on which it stands). By Jihad Islam is established, Allah’s Word is made superior…and His religion (Islam) is propagated. By abandoning Jihad (may Allah protect us from that) Islam is destroyed and the Muslims fall into an inferior position; their honour [sic] is lost, their lands are stolen, their rule and authority vanish. Jihad is an obligatory duty in Islam on every Muslim, and he who tries to escape from this duty, or does not in his innermost heart wish to fulfil [sic] this duty, dies with one of the qualities of a hypocrite.[9]

Narrated Abu Hurairah: The Prophet said, “Allah assigns for a person who participates in (holy battles) in Allah’s Cause and nothing causes him to do so except belief in Allah and in His Messengers, that he will be recompensed by Allah either with a reward, or booty (if he survives) or will be admitted to Paradise (if he is killed in the battle as a martyr).” The Prophet added: “Had I not found it difficult for my followers, then I would not remain behind any Sariya (an army-unit) going for Jihad and I would have loved to be martyred in Allah’s Cause and then made alive, and then martyred and then made alive, and then again martyred in His Cause.”[10]

Jamal can repeat as many times as she wants that jihad does not mean “holy war,” but there is a tremendous amount of Muslim scholarship that refutes her claim.

Muhammad said the Greatest Jihad was to Battle your own Soul

Jamal stated that “Muhammad said the greatest jihad was to battle your own soul and to fight the evil within you.” This statement of Jamal’s is probably based on a purported saying (hadith) of Muhammad in which he talked about the “lesser jihad” (warfare) and the “greater jihad” (the struggle to better oneself). This saying has become quite popular over the years and is found in many books and articles, and on many websites. But the reality is that this hadith, in its various forms, is not attributable to Muhammad. One 17th Century Muslim scholar said this was a statement from among the early Muslims, not from Muhammad.[11] And over many centuries other Muslim scholars have written about this hadith and labelled it as a fabricated hadith.[12]

However, here is an authoritative hadith in which Muhammad talked about the “best” jihad:

It was narrated that ‘Amr bin ‘Abasah said: “I came to the Prophet and said: ‘O Messenger of Allah, which Jihad is best’? He said: ‘(That of a man) whose blood is shed and his horse is wounded.’”[13]

So according to Muhammad, the best jihad is that which involves fighting. Nothing about a struggle to better oneself here.

We All Believe in One God

Jamal stated that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism have a shared belief “of one God”; the implication is that these three religions all believe in the same God. However, the reality is that the god of Islam, Allah, is not the same as the God of Christians and Jews.

For instance, here is what Allah has to say in the Koran about Christians and Jews:

Allah states that the only religion acceptable to him is Islam (e.g., 3:19 and 3:85); Christians and Jews are disbelievers[14] (e.g. 2:120, 3:99, 3:110, and 5:65), and Jews are among the worst enemies of Muslims (5:82); Allah curses Christians and Jews (9:30) and states that those who believe that Allah had a Son commit the one unforgiveable sin in Islam, Shirk[15] (e.g. 4:48 and 4:116); Allah states that those who commit Shirk will go to Hell (e.g. 3:151 and 5:72-73); Allah states that Christians and Jews are among the worst of creatures and “will abide in the fire of Hell” (98:6); Allah specifically forbids Muslims from being friends with Christians and Jews (5:51), and instead specifically commands Muslims to fight Christians and Jews (9:29).

Islam considers Christianity to be a false religion because Allah states that Jesus was not crucified, but it only appeared so (4:157-158). Islam teaches that Allah took Jesus bodily into paradise and made one of Jesus’ disciples look like Jesus; it was that disciple who was crucified. So Muslims who know their religion look at a crucifix or a painting of the Crucifixion and see an imposter hanging on the cross. And of course, if there was no Crucifixion, there was no Resurrection. So Islam teaches that Christianity is a false religion based on a fraud.

It was noted in the ILEA presentation that both Arab Christians and Arab Jews say “Allah” when speaking about God in Arabic. The implication being that Christians, Jews, and Muslims, by virtue of the fact that they are using the same Arabic word, are in effect all referring to the same divine being. As we have seen in the above section concerning what Islam teaches about Jews and Christians, there is no basis for that claim.

This 2012 ruling at Islam Question & Answer pointed out that Muslims are generally advised against using any other word than “Allah” when referring to the god of Islam in order to avoid confusion with what non-Muslims mean when they say “God”:

But what the Muslim should use in his worship… and all other circumstances when referring to Allah, may He be exalted and glorified, is the word “Allah” as it is, because that has become a symbol for the Muslims and something that distinguishes them, and it helps to avoid any confusion between what they mean and what others mean when they say “God” [my emphasis], as others may sometimes be referring to Allah, but sometimes they may be referring to something else…[16]

English-speaking Christians and Jews say God instead of Allah. So according to this ruling, English-speaking Muslims are supposed to use the name Allah instead of God in order to differentiate themselves from what English-speaking non-Muslims mean when they say God. This underlines again the fact that Allah, the god of Islam, is not the same as the God of Jews and Christians.

This difference is also noted in a 2010 fatwa from the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA). This fatwa stated:

Christians do not have a holy book or scripture to refer to. What they have is a man-made book that is, unfairly, attributed to Allah SWT [The most glorified, the most high].

Allah SWT is the one who told us that the Christians and Jews intentionally corrupt and change their scriptures.

Whoever takes Jesus or the Holy Spirit as a part of one God is a misguided one. Allah SWT has a divine nature, separated from His creatures, and is not integrated with another entity. Also, Allah SWT is the creator and the sustainer of the universe, and involving Prophet Jesus PBUH and the Holy Spirit in Allah’s entity necessitate that both Jesus & the Holy Spirit are creators and sustainers as well. Do they believe so? If yes, then they are polytheists, and if not, then they contradict themselves!![17]

...

At the ILEA website we find this:

Here at ILEA, we are excited to serve the people of Iowa as we bring excellence in training, testing, and standards to peace officers, telecommunicators, and jailers across the state.[32]

Unfortunately, with this particular class the “excellence in training” about Islam was replaced with Dr. Zahra Jamal’s Fantasy Islam.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Read it all and if you are in Iowa, contact your law enforcement representatives and ask why they are partnering with Islamic supremacists who are putting all Americans at risk.

You can see a video of a woman named Dr. Zahra Jamal giving a speech against the anti-sharia movement, meaning for sharia.

#Islam #Muslim #Sharia #Jihad #Legal #Law #LEO #News #Media #Politics #Immigration

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theevilsociopath · 4 years ago

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Everything is socially constructed except the Nature!

Our society has some norms set for us from the time we are born. It starts with when your sex is determined. If one is a boy the room will be blue, filled with things a boy is supposed to like, like cars and no soft toys. But if one is a girl her room will be pink with soft toys and dolls. The treatment the girl will receive depends in which community she is born; stereotypical and orthodox or a modern and affirming community. As these individuals grow they are assigned how their personality and character should be and how they have to present themselves. Boys will be told to be emotionally strong, never express themselves and to take care of the weak. Girls are expected to be submissive, pretty, slim and emotionally weak. These expectations, which are attached to the binary sexes, are laid down on every person in this world.

As individuals grow from their respective childhoods, they become a part of the youth and they gradually realise who they truly are and what they are capable of doing irrespective of what the world wants them to do and expects out of them. In some spheres people are unable to get out of the restrictions because of rigid societal norms while some voice themselves and go beyond the barriers. But somewhere in all of this there is a fear of what others will think? This fear is what the real challenge is. Does one get afraid of the societal constraints and become the person he is not, or he accepts who he is and tries to get an affirming position in the society no matter how many times he fails.

The intersectionality between these varieties of “How One can be” has created what we call discrimination. Because of discrimination we fear – Do we belong to the appropriate religion? My class is low, what will people say about my clothes? Will I ever have friends if I continue to live in this lifestyle? What if my gender does not match my sex? Why am I black or born in an untouchable’s family? Will everyone accept be disregarding the culture and tradition I follow? Will I be able to earn respect for myself? These are the kind of opinions people shape about themselves because instead of realising who they truly are they have to first adhere to the society and then think of them as an individual. We talk of freedom. Is this true freedom? Forcing an individual into a box of restrictions with which that person is not comfortable with. Adjustments can happen but why this segregation? Are those people, who one considers different or pathologized because he/she does not match one’s ideal way of normality - harming you in any way? Then why do we have so many arguments over people? Why do some become so judgemental and picky? Those in the minorities and the discriminated sects are also living beings that belong to this nature like others. They also have a right to make decisions of how they want their appearance to be, who they want to be with and how they feel about themselves. If those individuals are not comfortable with who they are they will automatically change themselves. Others do not have to intervene or rather barge into their lives. Let that person be a black, a lesbian, a gay, an intersex, a transgender, a disabled person, a Muslim, a Jew or even an Untouchable.

These divisions have only created chaos and nothing else. The incidents of inhumane policing, false accusations for crimes and using your sex as a female to protect yourself even when one is on the wrong side, rapes increasing at a rapid rate every day, brutality towards animals, exploitation of the biosphere are also a category within the social constructions. Societal norms are wholly based on supremacy which began from the ancient aristocracies to the present day divisions. These events segregate us from what truly humanity is, a liberal being is.

The reason why feminism came into being is because women were told to live within the restriction box of being a lady; the one who gives birth and takes care of the household. Rape was not considered a criminal offence till 1860. And women still fear about disclosing themselves to the world. We educate our girls to wear full clothes whenever she steps outside of the house and to not go out at night. Though it is necessary to be cautious, providing males intellectuality and education of how to treat women is also necessary. Equality, fraternity, secularism and abolition are not mere words described in the constitution rather they define an individual in relation with one's cosmopolitan identity.

Power, fame, glory, glitter and glamour all fade away. You come with nothing in this world and you go without everything you ever had. What we need is not overpopulation with less humanity and morality rather a population which accepts and makes existence worth it!! Together we need to bring a change for a better tomorrow with our honest thoughts, sheer determination and righteous actions.

The End

*ORIGINAL WORK*

#writing #awareness #social inequality #reading

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apenitentialprayer · 5 years ago

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I’ll say it again, just because you don’t approve of the practices of people who claim the same religion as you do doesn’t mean that those people aren’t actually part of your religion. Especially when those people are using discourses and ideas that are present within your tradition in order to create their theologies and worldviews, and aberrant and abhorrent as they may seem. Let’s look at ISIS real quick. ISIS kills Muslims and sells others into slavery. The average apologist may say that this disqualifies them from being Muslims, because you’re not supposed to kill fellow believers. But... ISIS doesn’t see those Muslims as fellow believers. They’re dirty kaffirs (Shi‘a) at worst, or tainted enough by the world to not be considered true Muslims (Sunnis) at best. And here��s the thing; the slaughter and enslavement of Muslims deemed “not Muslim enough” has precedent in the Islamic tradition; Imam al-Maghili encouraged Islamic states to wage jihad against states whose Islam was considered “compromised,” and produced fatwas allowing captives to be sold into slavery. This has been an undercurrent in Islamic tradition for nearly half a millennium. Let’s look at Robert Bowers and the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. What he did was horrible. He walked into a place of worship on the Sabbath and gunned down eleven people. To do so goes against everything I believe as a Christian. Yet Robert Bowers is a Christian, cited a New Testament passage that called some Jews “sons of the Devil,” and initiated a one-man pogrom. And here’s the thing; Christian association between Jews and the forces of evil has precedent in Christian tradition. Saint John Chrysostom, a beloved Church Father, called Jews Christkillers fit for the slaughter. This has been an undercurrent in Christian tradition for over a millennium and a half. Satanism and many other counter-cultural “Satanism-adjacent” movements sprung from engagements with Christian tradition. Talk to some Satanists, and chances are many of them will have come from Christian backgrounds. They bring their old prejudices into their new religious community, whether or not they do it consciously. Many Christians have semi-Marcionist views when it comes to Jews and the Old Testament (“the Old Testament is barbaric, Jesus made it better!”). Some theistic Satanists trade that semi-Marcionism for full on Marcionism (“the God of the Old Testament is a deranged serial killer, but Jesus is a cool dude even if Christians misunderstand him”). If semi-Marcionism is antisemitic, full on Marcionism is definitely antisemitic. And let’s not forget the writings of Aleister Crowley (Thelema, I know, but the movements influence each other), the fact that Anton LaVey himself tried to set up this weird “affinity” that his organization had with both Nazis and Jews, and organizations claiming the Satanic label while promoting a Neo-Nazi ideology or aesthetic. You are not guilty of the nasty things your community does just because you’re a member of that community. But you are responsible for decrying nasty things your community does. When you see it, call it out. When you see it, call it out. When you see it, call it out. This isn’t a hard concept to understand.

#Christianity #Islam #Satanism #hatred #bigotry #antisemitism

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thepersephonecabin · 5 years ago

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Questions of Faith (fic)

Short daisy/basira fic about daisy stepping in when some Islamophobes in the station have something to say to basira.

Just as a heads up, I’m not a Muslim, so I’d love input from Muslims about Basira’s characterization and how Islamophobia is dealt with in this fic!

Check out full list of warnings and notes on AO3

The Hunt was the only religion Daisy had ever known, even before she’d known it had a name.

But that didn’t mean she had never had a crisis of faith.

Being a gay cop, even after the Thatcher era, was never easy. Turns out, that even if you did replace the bastards who led the witchhunts and raids on gay bars and BDSM clubs back in the day, it didn’t erase centuries of systemic oppression, no matter how hard you tried.

Believe it or not, Daisy first joined the force for that exact reason. To take out the trash.

She’d gotten the idea in the late 90s. She was sixteen at the time, and had snuck into a local gay bar with a fake ID. It was her first interaction with the gay community, the first time she’d tasted beer. She was so naive back then, a baby butch with a fresh boycut and leather jacket she wasn’t allowed to wear with her school uniform. Not that that had ever stopped her. In truth, she was rather proud of herself when the school’s nuns ripped her a new one for donning it over her green plaid skirt and white blouse, even if the traditional sweater was cozier.

She’d always been a bit of an agitator, just like her Dad, a staunch Welsh nationalist. So she did the things most “bad” kids did. Listened to loud music, snuck smokes outside the school gates, kissed girls she shouldn’t. Mum and Dad didn’t like that last one one bit.

But she did it anyway. Really, going to the bar was just the next phase of her teenage rebellion. She was pretty excited about it, too. At least until the butch bartender caught onto the fact that she was underage. That bartender was about halfway through manhandling her out the door saying, “Look, kid, it's nothing personal. It's just sometimes things go down in places like this that a kid shouldn't be here to se-"

Daisy was about to tell her to take a goddamn hike and that she'd seen plenty of things no one her age should've seen anyhow, thank you very much, when a whole squadron of police officers burst in and chaos erupted.

Long story short, an hour later, Daisy was sitting in the police station wearing a pair of handcuffs surrounded by a dozen or so drag queens and kings, men in leather, and assorted other characters from the club- the bartender, a young lesbian couple barely older than her who looked scared shitless, leaning on each other for support as much as their restraints would allow. The police were responding to an “anonymous tip” about a drug deal in progress, but from the looks on the faces of the others who were taken to the station with her, it seemed that this an excuse they’d heard many times over.

They were booked one by one, but it seemed that she was the only one shepherded into the captain’s office after fingerprinting.

The chief- Reynolds, collar number PC2729 according to his uniform and badge- was a white man with grey hair and facial hair that was still a tad brown in some places. He had smile lines and crow’s feet, and for some reason that made her angrier than anything else did.

He gave her a smile as she was pushed into the room and onto a cold, metal chair in front of Reynolds’ desk. Daisy sneered at the officer that had brought her in, pulling her arm from the woman’s iron grip with a little more force than necessary simply for the sake of being contrarian. Reynolds’ smile widened.

As the door shut behind the female officer, leaving Daisy alone with Officer Reynolds, the man cleared his throat and said, “Alice Tonner, sixteen years old, no priors. Booked on possession of a false driver’s license, underage alcohol consumption, resisting arrest, and assaulting an officer. Normally, for someone your age, a first-time offender, I would simply confiscate that fake ID, call your parents, and let them handle it.”

“But?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at him.

“But, assaulting an officer is a very serious charge, Alice. According to the briefing my officers gave me, you struck one officer in the face, elbowed and kicked several others until you were tackled. It makes me wonder if this is truly your first time getting into things you shouldn’t, or if you are simply a repeat offender who hasn’t been caught until now,” Reynolds said.

“Don’t see how it’s your business anyhow,” she challenged. “Maybe I have done something like this before and maybe I haven’t. If your subordinates can’t do their jobs and stop crime, that sounds like your problem, not mine. And if your subordinates didn’t assault innocent civilians in that club first, I don’t think that I would have had to defend myself against them.”

“When criminals pose a significant threat, it is sometimes necessary to use appropriate force to subdue them,” Reynolds said calmly, and still smiling. “It’s simply every officer’s duty to enforce the law.”

“Sure,” Daisy laughed, shifting forward in her chair. “Enforcing a tip from an ‘anonymous do-gooder?’ I don’t think so. Dispatch records and calls to the authorities are public record, after all. Charge me if you want, but the first thing I’m doing if you do is calling my father’s attorney and submitting a FOI request. Do you really want to pretend that I’ll find a call from some worried mum that would justify- what did you call it? Appropriate force?” Maybe having a nationalist parent wasn’t so bad after all. At least it taught her her rights.

Reynolds wasn’t smiling now. “How does a nice little girl like you get wrapped up in a place like that anyway? If you’re so concerned with the quality of policing in your-” he made a face, “ community , maybe you should try our jobs and see just how easy it is, Alice.”

Daisy saw red. “My name is Daisy, actually, and if you knew anything about me at all, you’d know this little girl isn’t so nice,” she snarled. “Thanks for the tip, 2729. Maybe I will try your job, and maybe when I do I’ll come for criminals in higher places. Like this office, for instance.” She took a minute to appraise the room exaggeratedly. “Nice trophies.”

Officer Reynolds stared her down for a moment. Daisy didn’t know what he saw, but whatever it was, the next thing he did was call the female officer back in and say, “Officer Nicholson? Take Miss Tonner up front and telephone her parents to pick her up. She’s free to go.”

Officer Nicholson wasn’t exactly pleased with the decision to let someone who had struck several of her fellow officers only an hour ago free without even being formally charged, but in the end it wasn’t her call. Daisy was released to her parents with nothing more than a slap on the wrist and a stern warning noted in her permanent record. All things considered, if mouthing off was all it took to get out of an arrest, it made a little more sense now why Calvin Benchley had gotten away with everything for so long.

Two years later when she appeared for her police academy interview, and the officer in charge asked why she wanted to be an officer, she remembered Reynolds, and his too-wide smile and his crow’s feet. She was coming for him. Maybe not even him, maybe just the very idea of him.

At first, it was tough. The other officers made no secret as to how they felt about a dyke like her in their ranks, but Daisy was more ruthless than any of them could hope to be. She closed more cases, by any means necessary and left those impotent, rent-a-cop, busybodies in her dust. When she got sectioned, it almost seemed like the natural next step for a person like her, but now she had scarier suspects to go after.

Years passed, vampires burned, and Daisy never really considered that along the way she might have started to become the same type of monster she joined up to stop. By the time a new officer fell into her precinct, the homophobic pricks that had fueled her for so long were afraid of her. They were at least smart enough to keep their slurs to the locker room. Whenever she did catch wind of them running their mouths, she made sure to give them a scare, and she reveled in the way they fled with their tails between their legs. Or she did, at least for a little while, but soon, it felt like it wasn’t enough. It was getting boring.

The new officer, Basira Hussain, was a new sort of breed, she thought. They didn’t know each other well at first, since at first, Basira wasn’t sectioned like her, but Daisy liked Basira. She liked the way her name rolled off her tongue- Ba-si-ra , she would whisper to herself in the comfortable isolation of her own darkened rooms at night, just to taste the shape of the syllables. But most of all, Daisy was surprised to find that she liked the way Basira wasn’t afraid of her. It was refreshing, she thought, to finally have someone around with a backbone.

When she wasn’t tracking, interrogating, or disposing of suspects, Daisy dedicated her time at the office to dissecting Basira’s movements and habits. It gave her an excuse to ignore the paperwork.

Unlike her, Basira likes paperwork. Once when Basira was happily depositing reports in the proper outbox, she caught Daisy staring and demanded in a teasing voice, “What? Unlike you, some of us actually complete our reports, and even enjoy getting work done. Shocking for you, I’m sure.”

She’s been watching me, too , Daisy thought with a delightful thrill. Daisy plastered on a playful smirk, and stretched her arms over her head, catlike and languid. “What’s that old saying? Something about working hard or hardly working?”

Basira rolled her eyes, but the corner of her mouth quirked up. “Mock me if you want, Tonner, but I don’t mind the tedium of it. It feels nice, to be able to mindlessly do a task and check it off your to-do list.”

How adorable , Daisy thought. How positively quaint. “I suppose I can understand that. But if you ask me, desk duty’s a waste of your talents. Also, you can call me Daisy.”

Basira raised one perfect eyebrow at her, “And what talents are those, Daisy ?”

Daisy shrugged noncommittally, hoping it wasn’t entirely too obvious how something deep inside her purred at Basira saying her name like that. “Well, you don’t seem to mind me being around, so I assume that means you’ve got balls. Someone like that should be out there,” she jerked her chin at the window, “handling the real police work. Not stuck inside.”

“Filing reports is just as important to our job as handcuffing people,” Basira retorted. “Otherwise, how would we account for everything, and make sure we’re not taking advantage of our authority.”

“And do you think everyone is truthful on those reports?” Daisy asked, leaning forward on her elbows, the way she did in interrogation rooms.

Basira was silent for a long time, appraising her, and finally she said, “You’re strange, Daisy Tonner.”

Daisy wasn’t sure she knew what that meant, but she categorized it as a win and moved on.

After that, Daisy and Basira were a bit closer, trading playful conversation whenever Daisy was actually in the office. It was strange, how Daisy was usually itching to go out on assignment, always ready for a stakeout, but now, she actually missed the opportunity to sit at her desk across from Basira for a while.

One day, she came into the office to find Basira crouched behind Daisy’s desk, facing the wall. She was rolling out what looked like a small rug, and tensed when she realized Daisy was standing there, watching.

“Sorry,” Basira blushed. “I just need a place to pray. I usually do it here since the position is right and you’re usually out. I can find somewhere else, if you like.”

Daisy blinked, feeling dumbfounded, “No, no, it’s fine. Carry on. I’ll be quiet.”

As she slid into her chair, and heard Basira shifting, and then begin muttering to herself softly carrying a quiet harmony, Daisy pondered this.

Daisy had never really spent much extended time around Muslims before Basira. She knew Islam was the second most common religion in Wales, but her community had been predominantly Christian. In London, of course, things were a lot more multicultural, with a high population of immigrants and asylum-seekers. But still, she’d never found herself thinking that much about it.

Suddenly, she felt overwhelmed by how much she really didn’t know about Islam, and she was a bit discomfited by it. She didn’t like feeling like she was fumbling around something, and she liked the knowledge that she’d spent a few months sitting across from Basira without giving any thought to her culture even less. Now she was sitting on her desk flipping through a folder and not taking in any of the information, just to stop herself from Googling stupidly obvious questions about Islam while Basira was right behind her.

Unluckily, she didn’t have much time to stew in this, because some of the other officers, Shadley and Packwell, her mind helpfully supplied, began stalking toward them with intent.

Daisy looked up from the file, brows furrowed, glare on, but Shadley and Packwell didn’t notice her at all, their gaze was decidedly fixed on Basira. A quick glance told Daisy that Basira was tuned out, still in the motions of raising and lowering her body to the ground in prayer. Daisy whipped an arm out, and moved to stand, to prevent the other officers from interfering, but she was a second too late, and Shadley pushed right by to stand inches behind Basira.

“Hussain, get back to work,” he ordered loudly. The whole room had to have heard him, but horrified, Daisy looked around, and everyone- every single person but her- was ignoring it, steadfastly going about their business with their heads down.

Basira’s brows furrowed, but otherwise, she made no sign of having heard Shadley. Clearly, she was used to this.

“Did you hear me, officer? Someone’s got to go over these traffic reports.”

“Step off, Shadley,” Daisy growled, fists clenched. “She isn’t bothering anyone. Go do your own damn reports.”

“She’s bothering me,” Shadley retorted.

“And me,” Packwell pitched in.

“I’m warning you,” Daisy told them, doing her best to shoulder her way between them and Basira. “Walk away.”

“Or what, Daisy dyke?” Packwell asked. “Got yourself a little girlfriend?”

Daisy ignored that. This wasn’t about her. It was about keeping Basira safe.

But then quick as a flash, when her eyes were on Packwell, Shadley reached down, put his hand on the headscarf Basira wore, and yanked .

Red flooded Daisy’s vision, and distantly she heard Basira make a surprised, pained grunt. Daisy’s body was on autopilot as one hand reached over, grabbed her leather jacket off her seat and tossed it at Basira, and her leg kicked out and smashed into Shadley’s shin hard.

Shadley howled with pain, but Daisy didn’t give him time to recover. She wrapped her hands around his collar and threw him up against a file cabinet with an audible bang. A dispatcher manual toppled from the top of the cabinet from the impact, but Daisy didn’t hear it over the almost inhuman growl that ripped through her throat.

“Don’t fucking touch her,” Daisy snarled, putting her nose right up to his, “or the next time I swear to everything, I’ll rip you limb from limb, do you hear me? Do you hear me?”

Shadley whimpered, pathetic, and nodded. He was shaking. She liked that.

“I don’t want either of you to say a word to her unless it’s specifically related to a case. If I catch you so much as looking at her with ill-intent, you’ll regret it. Now get out of my fucking sight.”

She pushed him with all her might at Packwell so that they collided and toppled to the floor messily. They both scrambled to their feet and got away as fast as they could. The other people in the room hastened to look away, pretending as if nothing happened once again.

Daisy was still seething, sneering at the place Packwell and Shadley had vacated. She wanted to hit something, she wanted to kill something.

Then, as suddenly as they came, the thoughts dissipated as she felt a gentle but firm hand on her shoulder, and heard Basira say, “Daisy.”

Daisy let the tension in her shoulder release, and foggy through the adrenaline, she turned to look at Basira’s stern face, her hijab readjusted so it looked as if it had never been out of place at all.

“It’s alright,” Basira said. “I can handle myself.”

“I…” Daisy began, and then blinked a few times to clear her head. Shame began to creep in. She hadn’t meant to overstep her boundaries. “I know you can, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made such a scene.”

There was something unreadable in Basira’s eyes, but her mouth twitched, and she said. “It’s alright. It’s good to know you’re looking out for me. But maybe next time, don’t assault another officer in the middle of a police station with everyone watching, yeah?” She pressed Daisy’s leather jacket into her hands. “Thanks for letting me use this, by the way.”

Daisy was too stunned to make heads or tails of how quickly the mood had shifted, and soon Basira had gathered up her prayer mat, and had returned to her own desk, quick as you please.

The next day, when it was time for Dhuhr (Daisy had spent some time that night looking up the proper times for prayer throughout the day), Basira gave her a nod as she walked around Daisy’s desk and rolled out her mat. This time, Daisy stood once she was through, and made herself a physical curtain between her desk and the file cabinet, so no one would get through. She idly looked over and ticked boxes on the report she’d been working on before Dhuhr started, but mostly she just stood, feet shoulder width apart so she was ready to protect if anyone tried anything, throwing looks at anyone who passed by.

When she was finished and had rolled up her mat, Basira asked, “What are you doing now?”

Daisy tried to sound playful, but also a little submissive as she spoke, wanting to show Basira that she would listen, if Basira told her to stop. “Doing my paperwork as you’ve so frequently recommended, Basira, dear, and stretching my legs of course.”

“I see,” Basira said, quirking a smile. “And the timing of your leg stretching wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with yesterday, would it?”

“Of course not,” Daisy said with mock surprise. “Not everything is about you, you know.”

Basira rolled her eyes and snorted, “Sure, it’s not. Whatever, see you again at afternoon prayer.”

“Looking forward to it.”

From then on, during all their time at the Met, whenever it came time for Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, and oftentimes even Isha, because Basira so frequently worked late, Daisy stood watch, and they never had any incidents like the one with Shadley and Packwell again. Basira often rolled her eyes at Daisy’s “guard dog” nature as she called it, but never objected to it. Daisy knew she was being overprotective, and territorial, but as long as Basira was safe and happy, it didn’t matter.

No, Daisy Tonner had never known a religion but the Hunt, but she was beginning to think whatever she had with Basira could be one.

#tma #the magnus archives #fanfic #daisira #daisy tonner #basira hussain #alice tonner #femslash #fic #rebloggable

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militant-holy-knight · 5 years ago

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Published Studies after the Arab-spring revolutions have recommended, to the western decision-making circles, the idea of the conditioned integration for the Islamists.

The studies stipulated the Islamists’ acceptance of consociationalism with secularists. This condition requires trained them to accept the rules of democracy, respect the human rights, freedoms, renouncing violence, diversity of the legislation’s sources and maintains the rights of the religious minorities.

To enter this condition into force, the westerners sought to Islamist force to be as the bridge between the East and West. They aimed to combat terrorism and extremism, through a good Islamic-Western relation, achieving stability in the ME for the various interests of the west.

Erdogan loomed for the western confidence as he was the trusted leader who can tame the Muslim Brotherhood group. That is because he has presented himself in the beginning of his political life as a strong Islamist partner reflects the spirit of democratic modernism in an Islamist style.

After two decades, this path and western choice reflects a lack of knowledge of the nature of the religious movements and currents in the East. Turkey, under the rule of Erdogan and his allies within the political Islamist Movements, has become a bridge of tensions, instead of being the attenuation coefficient of the Islamist hostility to West. Moreover, features of Neo-Ottomans and Arab Islamists caliphate shaped to threat the European interests.

Currently, Erdogan’s Islamist allies spread the hatred and extremism against the west. In addition to the Turkish sharp shifts against the Western interests through an alliance with Russia and Iran.

Tensions escalate between Europe and Turkey, over the latter exploiting refugee’s crisis and backing terrorists to move to the European countries, in order to achieve its interest. Turkey sought to this malevolence slap to cover the fallen of the political Islam project in the Arab region.

The flow of terrorists into Europe is linked to Erdogan’s and Brotherhood’s promoting to the past conflicts between the West and East. They used the history of the Crusades to escalate these disputes, especially after Turkey fail to join the European Union.

Erdogan ... The Neo-Ottoman invader

With the Turkish and Arab Islamists, Erdogan has great aspirations to viciously expand its influence over the Islamic World through the imaginary of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey’s president considers that Muslims throughout the Middle East and Balkans have a desire to restore the empire’s former glory and release the Islamic world from dependency for West.

Erdogan used his alliances with the Islamism political and jihadist organizations as a reprisals and settling of accounts with Europe, after his accusation Europe of participating in the coup attempt, and supporting Fathallah Gulin group. As well as he did not want his new activity to remain in the context of a phased revenge, but among strategic project.

Erdogan considered Europe direct threat to the Turkish national security, this reflected on the Turks’ convictions. In a survey conducted by a think-tank, 87.6 % of participants agreed that “European countries want to divide Turkey”.

Erdogan has promoted the idea of existence a European conspiracy targets Islam, through Western scenario seek to eliminate the unity of the Islamic world. He has tried to rally Muslims behind the Turkish Sultan in defense of religion and sanctities, which produced in his speeches a classification of the world in the way of al-Qaeda, based on the dichotomy “Darusslam and Dar al-Harb or (Dar al-Islam and territory of war)”.

In his previous speeches, Erdogan expressed his emphasis on the historical conflicts between the Ottoman Empire and the European countries. He also has claimed that he represents the Islamic world to confront the Western threat.

The Turkish president poses himself as a sole guarantor to save the Islamic identity from the international conspiracy. He intentionally aims at spreading feelings of hatred and provoking violent reactions against the West.

“A dirty scenario is being carried out to destroy the unity, future, common sense and richness of the Muslim world,” Erdogan said. The Turkish president accused the West of exporting all its historical diseases to the Muslim world.

In his victory speech, Erdogan alluded to his aspiration to be a voice in the West for the Islamic world and Muslims, saying “Believe me, Sarajevo won today as much as Istanbul, Beirut won as much as Izmir, Damascus won as much as Ankara, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, the West Bank, Jerusalem won as much as Diyarbakir”.

Erdogan sought by these sweet, low-crooked words to secure his existence and influence in the ME, to restore the historical extent of the Ottoman Empire.

The intellectual reference of Erdogan’s Caliphate

The alleged Ottoman Empire, Erdogan has utilized the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to establish an Islamic caliphate, so he developed prosperous relations with them. He also shares them in rejecting the Western civilization and the values of pluralism and democracy.

Erdogan’s Caliphate based on two basic principles, first; the nationalism ideology of Hassan El-Banna, who founded the Brotherhood in 1928, in response to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, to accommodate the goal of restoring the Caliphate in the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology.

The second principle is Sayyid Qutb’s idea, in which he lays out a plan and makes a call to action to re-create the Muslim world on strictly Quranic grounds, casting off what Qutb calls Jahiliyyah. According to Qutb, the Muslim community has been extinct for a few centuries and reverted to Jahiliyyah, so this society and its current governments should be fought.

These two principles allow Erdogan to legitimize overthrowing of the Arab regimes, to replace these regimes with an Islamic caliphate under his leadership.

In order to lead major change projects and lead the political and jihadist Islam in the face of supposed Western conspiracies, Turkey has to establish a complex religious caliphate through tools controlled by Erdogan, starting from the status of the caliphate, which must be transformed into an inspired religious state model. This project based on several axes:

First: Ideologize Turkey

Erdogan sought to reform the ideology and identity of the Turkish people by re-instilling Ottoman heritage within the collective memory by carrying out an internal revolution that would lead to establishing a theocracy ruled an authoritarian state, sought to an expansionist empire.

As an Ottoman sultan, Erdogan practiced his political hegemony and undermine the opponents. He also has stigmatized the opponents with a betrayal of the interests of Turkish people. Freedoms and the values of democracy and pluralism have retreated.

After Turkey became a unitary state, the horror of having a contrary opinion widespread as what happens in Daesh state, as both Turkey and Daesh accuses the opponents with betrayal.

The practices of the Turkish president in power in recent years have the sane ideology roots of Daesh, although he does not appear in the traditional Islamists’ appearance, such as beard.

He is acting as head of one faction of the Turkish people, not all of them. Erdogan has a philosophy similar to that used by the Emirs of terrorist groups. After the last elections, Turkish political is expected to be affected by Daesh with regard to the individualism of power, discrimination against minorities, and the elimination of the citizenship.

It also demanded the reintroduction of compulsory religious education in Turkish basic schools and changes the curriculum of education, religion, and ethics by deleting topics that handle with morality and general virtues.

The concept of jihad also included in the curriculum, after changes approved by the Turkish Minister of Education in early 2017.

Second: Recruits the Arab Islamists

Turkey received the Arab Islamists after the failure of the Islamist party situation in the Arab countries. Erodgan has had two approaches to take: first: the traditional Arab regime based on main basics included Egypt, UAE, KSA, or support the Caliphate project.

Two main factors contributed in the failure of the party experience of the Arab Islamists in their countries. The first is inconsistent with the local Arab situation, which seeks to maintain and protect the state institutions and save its borders and cohesion, while it consistent with the draft of the Caliphate led by Erdogan.

The second was Erdogan’s keenness to benefit from these entities, in the context of his plan to remove his local political rivals.

Hence, Erdogan exploits the frustrations of the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies within the political Islamists, after their failure in power, to promote his alleged Caliphate.

The Islamists, on the other hand, put their last hope on Erdogan and his regime to get out of their major crisis after their isolation from power, and the restriction on their activities in the Arab world.

Third: The Jihadists... the deterrence tool of Erdogan’s Caliphate

Erdogan’s government has maintained the relationship with the Takfiri and Jihadi armed organizations such as Daesh and Al-Qaeda. The current stage is more appropriate than the previous one for the Turkish government to achieve its Caliphate model.

Therefore, the leaders of the Brotherhood promoted to Turkey under the leadership of Erdogan as it represents the hope to save the reputation of the Islamist ideology in general, and the leadership of what they call “Holy Jihad” in the Arab countries, especially after Daesh’ setbacks.

The Brotherhood’s leaders named Erdogan as a historical Islamic leader who has succeeded in eradicating secularism in Turkey. He has succeeded in subjugating the Turkish army to his authority, as well as his challenging to the West and the US.

Erdogan and the Muslim Brotherhood exploit the decline and losses of the jihadi organizations and sought to regional regimes and a strong state to compensate for the defeats they suffered. This is accepted by jihadist circles to complete the Caliphate project.

Summary and recommendations

Turkey and Qatar are responsible for the instability of the security situation in Europe through supporting the political Islam outside their country after the Arab countries tried to absorb it and give it a chance to work in the context of local Arab experiences.

Some Western political and intellectual circles are also responsible for that. This frightening ideological alliance contributed in supporting a Misunderstanding for the nature of the political Islam in the West, especially the Brotherhood, and the truth of its objectives.

The following should be considered:

First, Understanding that The threat of the political and jihadist Islamist, in addition, its sponsors no longer only to the Middle East, but also has reached to Europe, so we have to understand how should we deal with it.

Second, studying the effect of isolating the Brotherhood on its sponsors. The Arab countries hindered the Turkish project, and the isolation of the Muslim Brotherhood within the Arab world was the strongest Arab action to combat Erdogan’s plans.

Third, the efforts of the Arab countries should be supported by the European countries and the USA. The main factor that strengthened the Arab position is their unity to fight such these terrorist groups.

Fourth, respect the Arab league and the other regional organization, as they are the appropriate partner for establishing stability and security in the world.

Fifth: The elimination of terrorism shall be achieved with dismantling the Iranian-Turkish-Qatari ideological alliance and the alliance of the neo-Ottoman Islamists, which targets Arab national security and threatens the security and stability of Europe.

#terrorism #politics #news

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voodoogryffindor · 4 years ago

Text

Wednesdays were her favorite.

The reveille rang loud for devotion. Definitive loud strikes of an iron rod on the rim of a car tyre by 5:30 every morning. The Christians amongst the girls had to fly out of bed and run out to the devotion ground for prayers. The matron, Mrs. Ajayi never missed the ringing of the reveille even by a minute and five minutes later, she would go around the dorm rooms waking with her switch those the reveille could not.

Ajoke was never a heavy sleeper. Most times, she woke up before the reveille sounded. She would say she was just wired that way but once or twice she had been awakened by the matron's switch.

Today, she was awake before the reveille sounded. She had had a nightmare. A hooded figure had tried to grab her. When it was time for devotion, she went out with the other light sleepers in her room to the devotion ground and sat on one of the pavements on the side of the ground before Mrs. Ajayi would come around with her switch. Her yawn was loud. She had not slept enough. Today was a Wednesday and she couldn't possibly go for Physical Education class feeling tired. She needed a cool bath.

Worship songs were led by two girls from SS2. Ajoke thought their singing was beautiful. Why not? They were both in the school choir. She sang along. Worship songs were the best thing about being a Christian in her opinion. She needed to pee. Her bladder was burning, but she could not bear to leave the singing behind.

The bathroom was dark and eerily quiet. The sound of her urine hitting the floor was like that of a broken tap. Ajoke kept looking downwards, her eyes following the trail of her urine flowing into the hole of the latrine. This kept the dream off her mind for a while. Strangely, she felt like eyes were focused on her neck. She looked up quickly. She saw the hem of a cloak float past the open door of the bathroom. She got up quickly to see whatever it was, but she saw nothing.

Back at the devotion ground, Ajoke was able to catch up with the last of the worship songs. Mrs. Ajayi then climbed the podium to pray. After the prayer, the reveille was struck again to signal that the few Muslim girls and those of other religions who would be through with their morning prayers, could join the others for announcements. All the girls would stand to face her to listen.

Mrs. Ajayi's announcement started with the usual "Girls of Imole Ayo Girls School, welcome to a new day. I hope you have all slept well? Today..."

The matron's voice became mute to Ajoke's ears. She had slapped a mosquito sucking blood from her calf and as she rose back up, she felt the urge to turn and look behind her. In the darkness, Ajoke saw a figure with a cloak that reached down to the ankles and a hood over its head, going into her dorm room. It looked very much like a human being, but she could not be sure.

Ajoke squeezed her way through the gathering and headed to her dorm room. "What could that be?" she said out loud to herself. "Is it the same thing I saw in the toilet?"

She entered the room, the pounding of her scared heart audibly echoing in it. Or was it just to her ears? The hooded figure was gone. Nowhere to be found.

She made the sign of the cross and began to pray. "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil. For thou art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me..." As she turned to go back to the gathering of the girls, she heard her name. She turned sharply like a springbuck taking a bend to escape a cheetah hunting it. No one was there but she could swear she had heard her name. It was like whoever or whatever had called her name had put it on a zephyr and pushed it past her ear.

"Ajoke". She heard her name again. This time around, it was louder than the first and she could swear the voice came from her corner of the room. She walked quickly towards her bed and saw a person seated on her bed. The cloak on the person seemed like it was floating and the hood was floating too but it covered the person's face completely.

"Excuse me please", She said with uncertainty in her voice. The figure turned to face her but there was no face under the hood. Where there was supposed to be a face, there was an empty pitch black space like a moonless midnight sky. It did not talk, it did not move anymore, the hooded cloak on it kept rippling on it's human shaped body like it had its own wind around it. From beneath the hood shone two bright lights the size of human eyeballs, in the place where eyes should have been.

Her roommates returned to the room noisily. Startled by their chatter, Ajoke turned to see her classmates come in. When she turned back to face her bed, the figure was gone. Where had it gone to? What was it? Had anyone else seen it? Why did it vanish when others came into the room?

* * * *

Ajoke wore her sport wear shirt while gyrating her hips and singing along to Angelique Kidjo's "Agolo" with her roommates on top of her voice. Her red and silver sport wear complemented her espresso brown skin perfectly. Her head was clear. Music was her best medicine.

She was always the last to leave the room. She was the room head and had the key in her possession so she had to leave last in order to lock the door.

At 7:25, she was the only remaining person in the room. Ajoke sat on one of the beds in the center of the room to tie the lace of her sneakers. As she bent to stretch her fingers to the laces, from thin air appeared ten mangled skeleton fingers which grabbed them before she could. She was jolted by the sudden appearance and when she looked up, it was the figure again.

"Let me help you with this" it said in a most terrible voice. It tied the laces into a knot and two loops, exactly the way Ajoke tied her laces into bows. She could not place its voice. It sounded like a man or a woman, more like both and then neither at once. It was terrifying.

Ajoke drew back with a loud exhale. The thing she had seen in her dream, the thing in the bathroom, the thing on her bed, there it was right in front of her.

She stood up and the figure straightened up from its bent position. It looked a little over seven feet tall and the cloak and hood it wore rippled around it gently. Its feet were not touching the floor, they were floating three inches above it and when Ajoke looked closely, she saw mangled skeleton feet where flesh was supposed to be. It still had the pitch black space under the hood and two bright dots she assumed were its eyes.

It hovered in front of her like an helicopter performing a drop off of soldiers. She tried to speak but the words seized in her chest, held up by invisible hands. Her mind was swirling and working as fast as it could to try to understand what was going on. "What is this thing? Why have I been seeing it?" she asked in her mind, which seemed like the only place at the moment where her voice could function. Her throat was dry and itchy and no matter how much she tried, no sound came forth from it.

"I get that most times" said the figure to her. Her face looked even more bewildered to hear the unplaceable voice once again. "Yes that look on your face, I always get that wherever I go. I guess the Creator made me like this to highlight the situation of my appearance". Ajoke's mystified face deepened and her eyes began to water from the effort to force her throat to create sound. "Oh! Your voice. I can handle that".

The figure raised its hand up making its cloak to drop to its elbow. Where there would have been an arm, she saw bones wearing oddly grey and badly decayed flesh which kept falling off from the bones. The skin however fell off but hovered close to the bones, then reattached itself back and continued the cycle. It stretched the decaying hand which surprisingly had no smell at all, towards her throat and gave a gentle wave.

Ajoke felt a rush of wind leave her chest through her throat, forcibly escaping through her open mouth. Her chest was hot and she felt steam flowing up through her throat. She coughed as though to test her vocality and sound finally came forth loud and clear.

"What are you?" she asked. It was the first question she could find after vigorously searching her brain.

"It is a question of what or who" it said, making one of the dots beneath its hood seem to go a little bit higher and grow slightly bigger than the other. She had the feeling that this thing, whatever it was, had raised its eyebrow to her - if it had any.

"Who are you?" she then asked.

"I am a personification. I am what people of your tribe call Iku. I am the personification of death."

Ajoke's eyes rolled furiously in their sockets. She felt like her brain was short circuiting at hearing such an incredulous claim. She had read myths and legends of various cultures and loved them all. From reading these myths, she had come across several mythical beings in whose existence she believed and marveled about. But why was a figure that matched the description of the creature that she had read of called the grim reaper - except that this one did not have a scythe, a face and smooth bare bones under its cloak - doing in her dorm room?

She drew back from the figure once more and this time, it did not bother to close the gap. She looked at it and saw that the place where a head would have been was slighty bent to the side like that of a person having deep thoughts. She tried to think of what this thing in her presence could possibly be thinking of - if it had a mind at all.

"Have a seat, Ajoke Ojokogun Oluwadamida" the figure said, gently and with the voice of a lover whispering entreaties to his lover. Ajoke sat on the bed closest to her and stared intently at the figure floating towards her. It floated closer and then bent to sit on the bed opposite hers. It however did not touch the bed, but appeared to be in a sitting position, still hovering.

Ajoke opened her mouth to speak, but "I know you have questions. It's almost time so now is the only opportunity you have to ask" the figure said before she could produce sound. Its voice was soft and friendly and had a great effect on Ajoke's tense body, making her to become calm even if she was unwilling.

She drew a deep breath, squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. "Tell me the truth of whom or what you are. Who are you?"

"I am death. The personification of the entire idea of death you humans hold in fearful sentiment. " It said in its still still voice, unmoved.

"But how? How are you that?"

"Ajoke why do I taste fear and a little disbelief in your voice? How have you believed the myths and legends of this world and now try hard to disbelief when the truth has appeared before you?"

"No. I just... But I..." she struggled to answer.

"You do not have to answer Ajoke. Your fear, your fight or flight response to try to disbelief, it is all part of your being human. You humans believe in the unbelievable to find escape, but when faced with the truth and you find the truth scary and hard, you try so hard to forget that you believe. I do not blame you Ajoke". It said in a reassuring voice, surprisingly even more gentle than how it had been speaking.

"I just can't bring myself to believe that you are real, that this, this is real. It's unnerving."

"I understand Ajoke, I do."

"What exactly are you even? A man? A woman? Just a soulless being?" She asked, feeling surprisingly freer as the minutes passed.

"I am without a soul, both a man and a woman and neither of both. Even I cannot explain how this works to you. Only the Creator can. He made me."

"So the Creator, when you say Creator do you mean God?"

"Yes! The Creator is the God and maker of this universe. He made me, you, and all things here, therein and without."

"So you are a being without a soul, made by the Creator and given form to what? Harvest souls? Announce date dates? Transport the dead to the hereafter?"

"Well, that sums it up when you say it like that."

She wiped her now sweating forehead with the back of her hand. This information she was getting was too much for her to take in. Why would death come to visit her now? She was just sixteen, she had not lived a life yet, she had had sex only about five times. Why now? Why this early? Life was not supposed to be this cruel. Was this why her mother named her Ojokogun; the day is not long?

"What are you thinking?" the figure's genteel voice spoke and snapped her from her thought.

"Let me ask you this straight. You are here to take me aren't you?" she asked in a voice that sounded calm but still showed obvious signs of terrible fear and disappointment.

"Yes."

"Is that why my family named me Ojokogun? They knew I wouldn't last long?"

"Yes. Ojokogun, meaning the day is not long. It was a very brave thing for your parents to do. At your birth there was a speculation that you would die when you are sixteen and they accepted their fate and gave you that name. Very brave people i tell you, even if they secretly hope that it won't stand."

"And you are here now for me?"

"Yes."

"But I could almost swear that you sound disappointed to take me. The way you talk about how brave my parents have been, your gentle disposition, do you really want to take me?"

"This is the hardest part of my being; taking the young. It's never easy taking a child's soul. They haven't had a life yet and their time is already up. I may be death in person but taking the life of children, children who haven't even lived life at all is hard."

Ajoke thought she heard pain in its voice. The heat in her chest cooled down almost immediately. It didn't mean to come for her. It wasn't its choice. It had come because it had to. Because fate, nature and the creator had made it so. She would die at sixteen, die without having lived a life, die a child.

There was no turning back. Except by some heavenly intervention, her time was up. She had to accept this. Had her parents not accepted her fate from the beginning? Nothing could be done. Not now. This was how it had been written that she'd go. Visited by death and told straight to her face 'you die now'. The only thing that could be done now was to accept. To go without resistance.

She drew a long deep breath and closed her eyes. "So, I die now. I die today. Will it at least be painless? Will it be quick?"

"Yours will be like a long long sleep. You would not even notice."

"I feel at peace. Am I already dead?"

"Not yet, but soon."

"Alright then."

* * * *

She was laid on a bed, white and soft like fresh bread from the oven. The window was slighty open and the curtain fluttered noiselessly on the wall. The sun had risen and a few rays fell on her face through the window. If this was the afterlife, it seemed peaceful enough. Dying was not too bad after all.

"How is she now Nurse Chisom?"

That was unmistakably Matron Ajayi's voice. What was she doing here too? Had she been visited by death and brought to the afterlife too? And did the afterlife need matrons to watch over the younger dead?

"She'll be fine. She has stopped muttering incoherently in her sleep for now at least. She should be up any moment from now. But we should give her time" She heard Nurse Chisom say and then heard feet leaving the room or wherever it was that she was.

What was happening? That was the school nurse, Nurse Chisom's voice. What was she also doing here? Dead too? How would the school handle three deaths in a single day? But she had heard Nurse Chisom say she was muttering in her sleep. Sleep? She can't have been sleeping. She was dead. Visited by death and...

Wait! What had happened after her conversation with Death? Everything went black and she didn't feel a thing. It had promised her that dying would be painless and she wouldn't even notice. But she truly didn't notice anything from the moment their conversation ended. It felt strange. The afterlife felt strange.

"Look she's stirring. I think she's awake." It was Nurse Chisom's voice still saying she was sleeping. Didn't she not know the difference between sleeping and death?

"Hello Ajoke, how are you? How are you feeling?" Nurse Chisom who now appeared beside her bed, asked gently.

Ajoke turned to look at the face speaking to her. It was Nurse Chisom's face she was looking at. Strange. Beyond the face was the exact replica of the school clinic; neatly laid beds, the smell of disinfectant, various charts on the walls, a cabinet that held medications, three chairs and a desk.

"Where am I? Is this the afterlife?" Ajoke asked dreamily.

"The afterlife? What are you talking about? This is the school clinic my love, not the afterlife. Why would you think it's the afterlife?" Nurse Chisom asked perplexed.

"How did I get here?"

"Your roommates rushed you here immediately after devotion this morning. Apparently you screamed words they couldn't understand just before you fell to the floor and fainted. On getting here you were very still, lifeless even. If it wasn't for a steady thumping of your heart in your chest, you could have passed for a dead person. Your skin later became hot like something on fire and you kept muttering incomprehensibly in your sleep. But you're fine now. I need to go and inform the matron, she has been very worried."

The nurse left the clinic and shut the door behind her. Ajoke was alone in the room. This all felt wrong. If the nurse was correct, she had fainted after seeing the figure on her bed and was interrupted by her returning roommates. But she had seen the figure again, talked to it even. It was real. It felt real without doubt. It had said she'd die today. But if this wasn't the afterlife what did it all mean?

She rose up to sit. As she straightened up and faced the opposite side of the bed, her heart almost failed her as shock engulfed her entire body, crippling her with fear where she sat. There it was, the figure was hovering by the bed opposite hers and the two bright dots under its hood stared at her intently. She knew it. She was dead and this was just a confirmation. The nurse was wrong.

"Hello again Ajoke."

"Hello. It is you again. Is this the afterlife?"

"No it isn't Ajoke. This is your school clinic and no place different."

"How is that possible?" she asked, forehead furrowed and truly confused. "We had a talk. You said I'd die, that my time was up. How come I am still here? Did I die?"

"You will die Ajoke, just not today anymore. A day will come inevitable and irrevocable when you will surely die but for today, you are not dead and will not die." It spoke in a reassuring voice.

"But you sounded sure about it before. You were sure you had come for me."

"Ajoke, the ways of the Creator is that of never ending surprises. He does what He wants, when He wants, because He can. And today, He doesn't want you to die no more. You will have a life and die at a different time. Just not today."

Ajoke's body relaxed. The fear was gone. She wasn't dead. The air she breathed in seemed to taste like pineapples at the back of her throat. Someone had increased the quality of her vision in that she saw everything around her more clearly, in higher resolution. She gripped the bed and her finger sunk into its softeness like a knife sliding into butter. Being alive was sweet and she was truly glad to be alive.

"So I was dreaming when we had that conversation?" she asked, breaking the silence.

"You were here and there; the in-between. You were not dreaming. You were in the space between here and the hereafter." it said matter-of-factly.

"So I get to live a life?"

"Yes, you do."

"I'd see you later then." She said in a thankful tone.

"Yes, we will see later."

It floated closer to her and stretched its hand towards her. The terrible motion of falling and reattaching dead skin on its bones was still happening but she wasn't scared this time. It put its hand on her head and ran its hand through her braids like one would do a child. Her eyes were closed while it ran its hand through her hair. It was soothing.

"I'll see you later Ajoke."

She felt its hand leave her head and when she opened her eyes, it was gone. She felt good. The world around her was brighter. She would die but not today. She had a chance to live a life. She would start it by changing that strange name her parents had given her. This day would be a long one. Her day would be long and full.

The rays of the sun were even more soothing now. She could hear the ringing of the bell for assembly from a distance. The smile on her face was as full as a clear star studded midnight sky. This life was her gift and she'd live it fully.

#voodoo #spirits #mythical beasts #limbo #yemoja

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italkaboutbooks · 4 years ago

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An in depth analysis of Aurora Rising//Part 3

Read part one here

Here we are my fellow humans. Part three of my incoherent ramblings about Aurora Rising. This shall be the final instalment of the trilogy. Hopefully. I really hope so.

Worldbuilding

Seeing how it’s a sci-fi novel of course we need to talk about world building.

The Worldbuilding is mainly alright. It’s believable for me for the most part. I like the fold, and think it’s a cool way to explain fast space travel. I also like how they used Auri’s phone thing to explain everything in an entertaining way. Are they info dumps? Yes, absolutely. But it’s told in an unconventional fun way, so you’re not as pissed off about it. At least I wasn’t.

However like almost everything else, I have complaints. First off, there’s the mention of one world faith, basically meaning that there’s one religion, and everybody seems okay with this. How unrealistic is that? You cannot sit here and tell me that an entire galaxy agreed to believe in the exact same god, even going as far to leave their own religions. I can’t believe that, and I refuse to believe that. Give me Muslims in space, and actual religions in sci-fi because that sounds much more interesting to me.

Speaking of unoriginality, I hate the way aliens look. Every alien species in this book are like humans in some way. They walk on two legs, have humanoid faces (especially Kal,) and are just extremely uninspired to me.

These are aliens! Aliens are probably the creature with the most creative freedom because we have no idea what they look like! They can look like anything you want! And yet, you choose to make them all look like us humans? Unacceptable. I hate it so much.

I’ll cut some slack on the authors, because the aliens culture are very fascinating to learn about. Confusing, but fascinating, and so I think that they did a good job at that aspect of the Worldbuilding.

All in all, they could’ve done much more cool stuff with the world, but it was still fairly solid to me.

Themes/Intentions Again

If you somehow remember the beginning of part one, then you’ll remember me saying that this book was intended to be fun. You can tell by the synopsis that it’s supposed to be a fun space story. So themes don’t seem to be an important aspect of Aurora Rising.

But I think themes and messages always somehow make their way into stories whether you like it or not. A part of me feels that I should read the entire series before I talk about the theme of the book. But, I’ll have to make do with book 1.

The theme for Aurora Rising seems to be a fairly basic one. It’s that you can make friends in the most unexpected of places, and that you can do great things despite your reputation or past. Fairly basic, but it’s shown through different aliens and humans with different personalities all becoming “friends” and trying to stop a hive mind from taking over the universe.

As you can tell from my use of quotations over friends, I personally think that they could’ve done a better job of showing them actually hating each other and then learning to care about each other, because it would have made the story just a little extra special.

And I don’t think that every story needs to be profound or revolutionary, in fact I don’t want every story to have to make me think and ponder over certain topics. Those kinds of stories are great, but I can view/read those when I’m interested.

However, it feels like the authors were too focused on making the story fun. Remember when I mentioned that it was compared to Guardians of the Galaxy? And then I compared to to GotG myself? Yeah, well one of the main key differences in these two stories I think was that it let GotG be meaningful. It let the characters open up about their pasts, learn more about each other and their motivations, and actually had them form a bond that began with them trying to get the other arrested and such. I feel like the authors of Aurora Rising were too focused on making a fun story, that any meaningful substance was forced out.

I think that’s what most people’s biggest complaint was. Was that these characters weren’t really allowed to be people, only characters, and that spoils the real fun for some readers.

So...what are my thoughts on this book? Judging by the fact that I spent the majority of this 3-part review criticizing a lot of aspects, one would think that I hate it. But the truth is, I don’t. I can’t hate Aurora Rising, and I don’t think I can fully explain why to you.

The characters are a pretty big part of why I loved this book so much. The authors did a pretty solid job of making me care about most of the characters enough that I have to know what happens to them in the sequel. Other than that, I’m not really sure. I think it’s mainly because I still enjoyed it. I see a lot of flaws, but it was still enjoyable. And I think it’s okay to like objectively bad books. There’s nothing wrong with it. Unless you’re me, and you cannot go through your life until you make sure everyone on the Internet aware of your minute thoughts on that book.

But that concludes my “analysis.” Honestly, I’m sorry if the title was misleading. I tried to do analysis stuff at the end with themes, but this was really just an in-depth review.

However, if you actually read to the very end of this post, thank you. It means a lot to see that you actually cared about my thoughts on this book. You should probably follow me, as that will tell me that maybe I should post more on this blog. (And also because if you liked this, then I feel like we will get along very well.)

However if following me doesn’t seem that great, that’s okay. Have a slice of cake. I’m sure you’re hungry after all of that reading. 🍰

#bookblr #book reader #bookblogger #book review #ya book review #books #books on tumblr #bookish #ya books

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faridhafk · 4 years ago

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We Need to Accept that The World Today is not Okay

Bismillaahirrahmaanirrahiiim,

Right, just this morning after Fajr prayer, I got myself stumbled on very disturbing news in Tumblr and twitter and some media there and there. It is about the death of “another” black man in Minneapolis which triggered a protest that resulted in another death. Like a domino effect maybe.

While I was not really sure what the cause was and while trying to make a fair judgment about what was all about, I tried to find another resource. And here my opinion about it.

I am not here to tell how the story went or how it happened, you can just use “this link” to know more about it (and some relevant cases to this one). I want to sound my opinion and you can agree and some of you may have a different reason, and that's fine.

The most important, significant, and urgent matter right now is the novel corona virus which for about half a year has become the new global killer. Everyone's focus right now is directed to it. No matter where we go, we are forced to deal and learn how to live with it as “a new normal” lifestyle. That’s not wrong, and actually, we need to cope with it, just take it as another unlikely situation that we need to make a peace with.

However, we almost forget that even before the pandemic rises to the top of topic everywhere and anywhere, we have dealt with another massacre, another killer, one of the greatest and ruthless killers ever. “RACISM”. I apologize that I could not provide data to support my statement, but let say that this killer is always around us, though it won’t take our life directly, it will lead to the killing, one or in another way. From slavery, extreme discrimination, human right violation, unfair judgment, etc.

Racism is not only about the different skin color, and black people is not the only one who gets such cruel treatment (though the extreme case always about black people), Asian with their yellow skin also considered as colored people and sometimes, also get cruel treatment. Even within Asian countries itself, different face features, ‘slightly’ different skin color (for ex: East Asian and South-East Asian) will lead to racism. And, as I said, the treatment itself might not be the killer, but the event following the racist comment or unjust judgment may lead to it. If not the body, at the very least it will kill the mental health.

The problem with this racism issue is race supremacy. That some races think that they are way superior to other races (that the reason of Nazi movement right?), and it leads to this extreme issue of second class community that affects black people for so many years (especially in America where the fight between black and white people will rise to fight is common). The stereotype which follows black or colored people is that they are lower than white people, they are born to be a slave, they are not educated enough, they are a villain and they are not given the chance that white people have.

But Hey! We hate it when people belittle our origin, underestimate our dream, our passion, our way of life. But racism make us deliver such treatment to them. Means, that we are do the same thing to them because we think that since they are on different level they have the right of such treatment. That's just wrong. And they (the colored people) get it worse, they are not allowed to dream. In the biography of Malcolm X, he told that the teacher in his elementary school rejected his dream to be a lawyer. Frederick Douglass had to witness his mother became the object of a rapist. So, that the reason why so many prominent black figures raise their voice to fight for equality and stop racial segregation. Malcolm X, Frederick Douglas, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, and so on. Still, the people today hate the idea to live side by side with different skin color people.

Do we think, if we do not even grant the colored people the chance to learn, a chance to dream, chance to get a proper living, we expect them to behave the way we behave? To prove their worth? To have a prosperous living? Sure, there are many of them which struggle is paid off, but it does not neglect the fact that many of them still got poor treatment from their environment.

Thus, my point is, though our life is currently restricted and our focus is on the covid-19, we are not supposed to lose our human side, empathy, and the reality that we are should cooperate to living side by side without getting concerned by different skin color, different face feature, or physical appearance. We are not supposed to generalize that dark skin people will always have a bad intention. It is true some of them have it, but it is also true that some of us have the same bad intention. The bad intention is not about skin color, not reside in one community but it is independently created by each individual "who like to have it". Though it is true that our action may be got affected by with whom we are hanging out, but it does not make "the race" as the source of the problem.

You know, while I am writing this, I just realize that the harsh treatment black skin often gets is not that different from how Islamic community gets harsh treatment from every corner of the world. The action of some group of Islamic community should not be the reason to judge every Islamic person and it is the same as the action of bad dark people should not lead us to put villain label on them. You cannot point out your finger to all African-Americans just because there are some fools linger around them.

And I would also like to quote the view of someone who know what was it like to be discriminated, by an African-american, one of the most respected black man in American history, and a muslom on top of it.

Malcolm X said :

“The real religion of Islam does not teach anyone to judge another human being by the color of his skin. The yardstick that is used by the Muslim to measure another man is not the man's color but the man's deed, the man's conscious behavior, the man's intentions. And when you used that as standard measurement or judgement you never go wrong, but when you just judge a man because of the color of his skin then you are committing the crime. Because that's the worst kind of judgement. If you judged him just because he was a Jew that's not as bad as judging him because he is black. Because Jew can hide his religion, he can say he's something else, and which a lot of them do that, they say they are something else. But the black man can not hide. When they start indicting us because of our color that means we are indicted before we are born, that is the worst kind of crime that can be committed. And the Muslim religion has eliminated all tendencies to judge a man according to the color of his skin but rather the judgement is based upon his deeds.”

Last but not least, how Islam make things beautiful is that, if we get judge by our physical appearance then, Bilal ibn Rabah, The prophet muadzin, the man who’s sandals has arrived in the paradise while he was still reside in the earth, will never become one of the closest companion of the prophet. Or Julaybib, that the prophet care so much. Both of them were dark skin colored, but still able to get high respect by the prophet and are guaranteed a place in Paradise by Allah ar-rahman. Then we should be grateful that we are given this luxury to be a Muslim and have better understanding of it. That we have the same chance to get a place in paradise, to be able to mingle with anyone without worried to be isolated from the community no matter how we look on the outside.

Jakarta, Jum'at, 29 May 2020

#opinion #racism #george floyd

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