Tag: Muslim

As church bells tolled and a muezzin called Muslims to prayer, a crowd of 300,000 Lebanese gathered for a huge rally in Beirut that opened with a renewed call for Christian-Muslim unity. AsiaNews reports that the peaceful rally began with welcoming words from Ghassan Tueni who invited the crowd to repeat the oath pronounced by Tueni's son Gibran - also assassinated in December 2005 - after Hariri's murder: "Never again war between Christians and Muslims." Waving flags, handkerchiefs and balloons in the blue colour of Lebanon's ruling coalition, the crowd shouted slogans against Syria and its Lebanese allies. At exactly 12:55 pm - the time of Hariri's assassination - the crowd fell silent except for a muezzin making the Islamic call to prayer and the tolling of church bells.

A Bangladeshi-American Scientist has just won a prestigious American engineering award called The Grainger Challenge:

The Gold Award-winning SONO filter is a point-of-use method for removing arsenic from drinking water. A top bucket is filled with locally available coarse river sand and a composite iron matrix (CIM). The sand filters coarse particles and imparts mechanical stability, while the CIM removes inorganic arsenic. The water then flows into a second bucket where it again filters through coarse river sand, then wood charcoal to remove organics, and finally through fine river sand and wet brick chips to remove fine particles and stabilize water flow. The SONO filter is now manufactured and used in Bangladesh.

Hey Thabet, good to see a Muslim engineer using his powers not to make explosives or be boring (uh, nevermind, it is still boring).

This prize is worth one million dollars. 

This organization is headed by an extremely strange man who, these days at any rate, is calling himself "Stephen Suleyman Schwartz." In some of his previous incarnations he had been known, among other things, simply as Stephen Schwartz, Suleyman Ahmed Steven Schwartz, Suleyman Ahmad al-Kosovi, S. Solsona and Comrade Sandalio (and, for all we know, possibly Rumpelstiltskin as well). Details of his bizarre and sordid life are to be found on the internet for those who wish to bother, but suffice it to say here that Schwartz is a red-diaper baby born into an ardently Trotskyite family and who has spent most of his life consequently obsessed with the struggle between Stalinists and Trots within the communist movement. In essence, Schwartz, who came by Islam in the Balkans in the late 1990s, has taken this worldview, in which everything is reduced to a Manichaean struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness within a single overarching system, and transplanted it willy-nilly onto the world of Islam. In this case the Baddies are Wahhabis, substituted for the Stalinists, and the Goodies are the Sufis, substituted for the Trotskyites.

Made you look.  I thought about writing "niqab!" in the title just to get your attention.

<img src="http://www.mobipocket.com/eBooks/coverpage/ID238/femalechauvinistpigs4.jpg"> 

The issue is, however, about mistreating women.

I'd like to ask Eteraz readers and writers for help. 

There are at least 5 million Muslims living in my country (America).  That means at least 5 million people can potentially brainstorm based on a whole different set of principles than those I learned in my mainstream suburban culture and my not-so-mainstream liberal academic culture.

Both of these cultures of mine have done a lot of reaching out to people of other backgrounds, trying to help them.  "Oh, you don't have running water?  Glad you identified the problem--we can help.  We know how to build pipes that stay shut and pumps to make the water flow.  Here, how about we send some engineers your way..."

<img src="http://www.cafod.org.uk/var/storage/images/media/cafod/images/africa/ethiopia/bain_in_ethiopia/9147-1-eng-GB/bain_in_ethiopia_medium.jpg">

There ain't so many calls for Pacific Islanders, Maoris, Muslims, native Chileans, etc. to chime in with THEIR assertions of, "Oh, we know how to fix that!" to problems that we've identified in our society.

So here's my call:  community of Eteraz, please come help me.  Come help all the sympathizers with my ideas.  We need a good brainstorming session.