Saturday, November 23, 2013

On Mainstream Muslims' Refusal to Learn about the Violence against Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan

A couple of weeks ago, the Ahmadi association at my university sponsored a talk by an Ahmadi scholar who was to come talk about the persecution of Ahmadis and other minorities in Pakistan. The cover designed for the talk mentioned nothing about whether Ahmadis are Muslim or not (I think it's stupidity, ignorance, and evil on the part of whoever denies them their right to declare themselves Muslims!), and it was definitely not about--and was not advertised to be about--Ahmadis' response to mainstream Muslims' claim that Ahamdis are not Muslims and therefore deserve to be killed, as is happening in Pakistan every. single. day. I cannot stress enough that the cover and the talk were simply about the persecution of Ahmadis in Pakistan. It was intended to be, and it indeed was, about the violence committed against Ahmadis on a daily basis in Pakistan, mostly by terrorists but the government, too, has its role in the persecution.

So when an officer from the Ahmadi organization contacted the community/campus mosque Facebook page and requested that the talk be shared on the page so more people become aware of it, the mosque rejected it. Twice. The second time, the mosque's administration responded to the officer with something that I don't know if I'm allowed to paste here but will paraphrase.  (I know because the officer posted about it on his Facebook.) So the mosque goes something like: We can't share this on our page because there's concern among students and parents that there's an Ahmadi on the MSA board; just like you don't consider us (Sunni) Muslims, we don't consider y'all Muslims.

Friday, November 8, 2013

On the Beauty of Music - and on being in an Arabic choir, yayy!!

I love music. I love all kinds of music. Eastern music in general, though, rocks my world! (Not at all a fan of English--American, British--music or poetry, and what attracts me to eastern music, besides the killer sound of the instruments, is the depth of the poetry.) I listen to a Pashto song and go crazy thinking about how deep that stuff is. Even plain old Bollywood songs are often so deep you're like where did these writers come from. I can't make up my mind over whether I love Pashto music more than Urdu or Hindi or Persian or Arabic or Turkish.

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