Nabi di Masa Kita

Book Review: Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time

The religion with the most adherents on the planet is Christianity, and few people would say they are unfamiliar with the story of its founder and prophet, Jesus.

The second largest faith is Islam, and yet there is boundless ignorance among non- Muslims about the story of its founder and prophet, Muhammad, even after Sept. 11 caused unease about whether Islam fuels terrorism.Since then Muhammad has been defined by his detractors, who have called him a terrorist, a lunatic and most colorfully — by the Reverend Jerry Vines, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention — a "demon-possessed pedophile.

"Several new biographies picture Muhammad through the lens of a suicide bomber, and ultimately these books reveal more about suicide bombers than Muhammad.To glimpse how the vast majority of the world's Muslims understand their prophet and their faith, Karen Armstrong's short biography is a good place to start. The volume is part of a series called "Eminent Lives": small profiles of big-name subjects by big-name authors.Armstrong, best known for "A History of God," is a scholar and a former nun with a genius for presenting religions as products of temporal forces — like geography, culture and economics — without minimizing the workings of transcendent spiritual forces.

She profiles Muhammad as both a mystic touched by God on a mountaintop and a canny political and social reformer. He preached loyalty to God rather than tribe; reconciliation rather than retaliation; care for orphans and the poor; and in many ways, empowerment of women, which will be a surprise to some. The Koran gave women property rights and freed orphans from the obligation to marry their guardians: radical changes at a time when women were traded like camels.In a nod to her subtitle, "A Prophet for Our Time," she argues that as of Sept. 11, 2001, we have entered a new historical era that requires an equally thorough re-evaluation.

This notion that we have entered a new era was one of the reasons that Armstrong decided to revisit a subject she had already covered in 1992 with "Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet."Muhammad (570-632) was born in a nouveau riche Mecca. Unlike most Arabs, the Meccans were not nomads but traders and financiers who profited from the caravans that stopped in Mecca for water from its underground spring. The site was holy to the Bedouin because it housed the Kabah, a cube- shaped granite building that was tended by Muhammad's tribe, the Quraysh.At 25, Muhammad married Khadija, a widow who hired him to manage her caravans. At 40, he declared he had been seized by a terrifying force and commanded by God to recite scripture.

Khadija was his first convert. At first he shared his revelations with a small group of friends and family members, who became his disciples, "convinced that he was the long-awaited Arab prophet." As Muhammad, who was illiterate, recited new passages, believers wrote them down: a compilation that became the Koran.The Meccans were offended by Muhammad's preaching that the ideal was submission. ("Islam" means submission.) He taught that the proper way to pray was to bow, forehead to the earth, "a posture that would be repugnant to the haughty Quraysh," Armstrong notes.Muhammad and his followers were exiled to Medina, 250 miles, or 400 kilometers, north of Mecca. He did not conquer Medina so much as form alliances and win converts. But there were epic battles with the Quraysh and other tribes, and Muhammad was a fighter and tactician.

"Muhammad was not a pacifist," Armstrong writes. "He believed that warfare was sometimes inevitable and even necessary."

This is why some passages in the Koran are rules for warfare.Terrorist groups cite these selectively — or contort or violate them.Armstrong declines to stand in judgment of events that have scandalized other biographers; as when Muhammad falls for the wife of his adopted adult son and takes her as his fifth wife.

Muhammad ultimately took back Mecca and reclaimed the Kabah. Armstrong argues that he prevailed by compassion, wisdom and steadfast submission to God. This is the power of his story and the reason more parents around the world name their children after Muhammad than any other name.

Muhammad SAW

Muhammad: 'Braveheart meets Butch Cassidy'

Muhammad disdained people with bad breath. He's the Muslim prophet who lived from 570-632, long after Jesus and long before Listerine.
Did Muhammad preach nonviolence, a debate swirling since Sept. 11? Yes, says Karen Armstrong, but he also instigated and led wars.
Was Muhammad a "demon-possessed pedophile," as some Southern Baptists claim? No, Armstrong says, though he wed women as well as girls, including a 6-year-old. The girl didn't attend the ceremony, but neither that nor polygamy was unusual at the time, says Armstrong, the best-selling author of A History of God.
"There was no impropriety," she writes in Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time. They didn't consummate the marriage until the girl reached puberty "when she would have married anyway." Armstrong is the would-be nun who specialized in English at Oxford. She's made her mark, however, as a scholarly narrator of religion books. Muhammad is extraordinary -- short, on point, scholarly and beautifully written.
The tone of the writing resembles Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Armstrong weaves a tale of two cities, Mecca and Medina, and of a reluctant prophet. He battled for people's souls and then for power. Armstrong's Muhammad is "Braveheart" meets "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." She empathizes and defends her main character, though she sees him as flawed. But even that serves Muhammad's point.
He didn't claim to be Allah or the son of Allah. He was simply a man who, for 23 years, said he received direct messages from God. The revelations survive in the Quran, the Muslim holy book first compiled about 20 years after Muhammad's death.
Armstrong's story picks up with Muhammad at 40, the year the messages began. At the time, Muhammad was a merchant in Mecca. Back then, most Arabs were nomads and not city folk. Theirs was a day-to-day struggle for food and water; that is, basic survival. Mecca was a stopover for caravans and for pilgrims.
They came for hajj, a time of intense prayer and for circling around the Kabah, a huge granite cube embedded with a black stone. Muhammad's clan, Hashim, dispensed water to the pilgrims. Muhammad also made an annual retreat to Mount Hira' during Ramadan to give money to the poor. While on retreat in 610, the first revelation came.
Upon God's command, Muhammad fell to his knees and touched his head to the ground -- a prayer posture that distinguishes Muslims today. Muhammad was terrified and initially didn't understand what was happening. In time, he became convinced he was Allah's prophet -- a role he didn't want.
He would probably be expelled from Mecca, a spiritual leader warned him. Echoing words from the New Testament, Armstrong writes: "A prophet was always without honor in his own country." In an age of many gods, Muhammad taught monotheism, specifically a surrendering (islam) of hearts to Allah.
Faith wasn't merely a matter of belief, but a journey of the heart. Muhammad's sensitivity to the poor stemmed from being orphaned as a boy, Armstrong says. He called for giving alms to the needy and a prayer discipline.
"His life was a tireless campaign against greed, injustice and arrogance," she writes. But so strong was the hostility toward these views, Muslims resettled 280 miles away in Medina. There Muhammad made a fateful decision -- to attack caravans headed to Mecca.
Armstrong says he justified the attacks to secure the financial survival of Muslims. But he also wanted the power that comes with victory to ensure the spread of Islam. "He had felt impelled to war in order to achieve a final peace," she writes.
But violence led to more violence. In one gruesome episode, Muslims captured and executed 700 men, and sold their wives and children into slavery, she says. Muslims divided the property -- all with Muhammad's awareness.
"It is not acceptable to us today," Armstrong writes. "His original aim had been to end the violence ... but he was now behaving like an ordinary Arab chieftain." She says Muhammad eventually abandoned war as an answer.
He was a "profound genius" who founded a religion that liberated women and cultivated peace, she concludes. "Muhammad was not a man of violence," Armstrong writes.
To say otherwise is nothing less than bigotry. "It is a gift to extremists who can use such statements to prove that the Western world is indeed engaged on a new crusade against the Islamic world."

Muhammad SAW and Yesus?

The Muslim prophet born in Bethlehem

December 26, 2006
The story of Jesus held a special place within early Islam. There is no need for a clash of civilisations
In 632, after five years of fearful warfare, the city of Mecca in the Arabian Hijaz voluntarily opened its gates to the Muslim army. No blood was shed and nobody was forced to convert to Islam, but the Prophet Muhammad ordered the destruction of all idols and icons of the Divine.
There were a number of frescoes painted on the inner walls of the Kabah, the ancient granite shrine in the centre of Mecca, and one of them, it is said, depicted Mary and the infant Jesus. Immediately Muhammad covered it reverently with his cloak, ordering all the other pictures to be destroyed except that one.
This story may surprise people in the west, who have regarded Islam as the implacable enemy of Christianity ever since the crusades, but it is salutary to recall it during the Christmas season when we are surrounded by similar images of the Virgin and Child. It reminds us that the so-called clash of civilisations was by no means inevitable.
For centuries Muslims cherished the figure of Jesus, who is honoured in the Qur'an as one of the greatest of the prophets and, in the formative years of Islam, became a constituent part of the emergent Muslim identity.
There are important lessons here for both Christians and Muslims - especially, perhaps, at Christmas. The Qur'an does not believe that Jesus is divine but it devotes more space to the story of his virginal conception and birth than does the New Testament, presenting it as richly symbolic of the birth of the Spirit in all human beings (Qur'an 19:17-29; 21:91).
Like the great prophets, Mary receives this Spirit and bears Jesus, who will, in his turn, become an ayah, a revelation of peace, gentleness and compassion to the world.The Qur'an is horrified by Christian claims that Jesus was the "son of God", and depicts Jesus ardently denying his divinity in an attempt to "cleanse" himself of these blasphemous projections. Time and again the Qur'an insists that, like Muhammad himself, Jesus was a perfectly ordinary human being and that the Christians have entirely misunderstood their own scriptures.
But it concedes that the most learned and faithful Christians - especially monks and priests - did not believe that Jesus was divine; of all God's worshippers, they were closest to the Muslims (5:85-86).It has to be said that some Christians have a very simplistic understanding of what is meant by the incarnation. When the New Testament writers - Paul, Matthew, Mark and Luke - call Jesus the "Son of God", they do not mean that he was God.
They use the term in its Jewish sense: in the Hebrew Bible, this title was bestowed upon an ordinary mortal - a king, a priest or a prophet - who had been given a special task by God and enjoyed unusual intimacy with him. Throughout his gospel, Luke is in tune with the Qur'an, because he consistently calls Jesus a prophet. Even John, who saw Jesus as God's incarnate Word, usually made a distinction, albeit a very fine one, between the eternal Word and God himself - just as our own words are separate from the essence of our being.
The Qur'an insists that all rightly guided religions come from God, and Muslims are required to believe in the revelations of every single one of God's messengers: "Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob ... and all the other prophets: we make no distinction between any of them" (3:84). But Jesus - also called the Messiah, the Word and the Spirit - had special status.Jesus, it was felt, had an affinity with Muhammad, and had predicted his coming (61:6), just as the Hebrew prophets were believed by Christians to have foretold the coming of Christ. The Qur'an, possibly influenced by Docetic Christianity, denied that Jesus had been crucified, but saw his ascension into heaven as the triumphant affirmation of his prophethood.
In a similar way, Muhammad had once mystically ascended to the Throne of God. Jesus would also play a prominent role beside Muhammad in the eschatological drama of the last days.
During the first three centuries of Islam, Muslims came into close contact with Christians in Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, and began to amass a collection of hundreds of stories and sayings attributed to Jesus; there is nothing comparable in any other non-Christian religion.
Some of these teachings were clearly derived from the gospel - the Sermon on the Mount was particularly popular - but were given a distinctively Muslim flavour. Jesus is depicted making the hajj, reading the Qur'an, and prostrating himself in prayer.In other stories, Jesus articulated specifically Muslim concerns.
He was a great model for Muslim ascetics, preaching poverty, humility and patience. Sometimes he took sides in a political or theological dispute: aligning himself with those who advocated free will in the debate about predestination; praising Muslims who retired on principle from politics ("Just as kings have left wisdom to you, so you should leave the world to them"); or condemning scholars who prostituted their learning for political advancement ("Do not make your living from the Book of God").
Jesus was becoming internalised by Muslims as an exemplar and inspiration in their own spiritual quest. Shias felt that there was a strong connection between Jesus and their inspired imams, who had also had miraculous births and inherited prophetic knowledge from their mothers. The Sufis were especially devoted to Jesus and called him the prophet of love.
The 12th-century mystic Ibn al-Arabi called him "the seal of the saints" - deliberately pairing him with Muhammad, the "seal of the prophets".
Some Sufis went so far as to alter the shahadah, the Muslim profession of faith, so that it became: "I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, and that Jesus [not Muhammad] is his prophet."The Muslim devotion to Jesus is a remarkable example of the way in which one tradition can be enriched by another.
It cannot be said that Christians returned the compliment. While the Muslims were amassing their Jesus-traditions, Christian scholars in Europe were denouncing Muhammad as a lecher and charlatan, viciously addicted to violence. But today both Muslims and Christians are guilty of this kind of bigotry and often seem eager to see only the worst in each other.The Muslim devotion to Jesus shows that this was not always the case.
In the past, before the political dislocations of modernity, Muslims were always able to engage in fruitful and stringent self-criticism. This year, on the birthday of the Prophet Jesus, they might ask themselves how they can revive their long tradition of pluralism and appreciation of other religions.
For their part, meditating on the affinity that Muslims once felt for their faith, Christians might look into their own past and consider what they might have done to forfeit this respect. (Karen Armstrong is the author of Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time.)

Either Side of The Coin

Two Leaders, Both Ambitions, Unified by Iraq (Hopefully)

Reputed as big influence in world and Middle East politics, both U.S. President George W Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad now have big opportunity to mediate their differences of all things (including Israel, maybe), thanks to their attention and big scheme on Iraq.
Wahta Bush thinks about Iran dan vise versa is completely different in so much manner. Bush suspects Iran try to develop nuclear weapon in covert of uranium enrichment program, something Ahmadinejad denies. On the contrary, Ahmadinejad accuses Bush only defend Israel's big interest to be the only nuclear state in Middle East. But Ahmadinejad knows well that Israel poses nuclear warheads and it means a threat to entire region. Israel never denies or admits it.
But Bush knows better how to serve Israel's interest without Iran interrupting America's foreign policy in the region, and to create 'bumper states' around the Jewsh.
It sounds ironic, when world crises escalate and the risk of world war III to explode, U.S. still maintain its repressive policy on Iran because the Mullah State have the right to develop nuclear energy as one of non proliferation treaty countries.
Apart from their different view, it will be wise if Mr Bush and Mr Ahmadinejad share their vision on how to manipulate nuclear energy at round-table negotiation. No one ia above the other.
With great respect to Iraq, U.S. and Iran will be able to find same solution for civil war ridden country. Bush should volutarily accept Ahmadinejad regime as influencing power on Iraq's Shiite and can give Iran the rights of nuclear research and development under IAEA rules. What makes them so stiff so far?

How Much We Satisfied Our Animal Instinct

Logic, Reason, is the supremacy Allah endows us that distinguish man from animal. But we have animal instinct, i.e. the one that encourages us to hunt, fight or defend, even enable man to adapt to most radical and hardest new environment exposed to us.
With reason we can think and try to go beyond our limit. We can reach the outspace by developing aircarft, creating systems that enable man to connect to each others.
But as times goes by, we never reach satisfaction of all we have gained so far. We kill each others, even to win one cent for our pocket.
Sometimes animal can satisfy their hunger only by feast on their prey and stop when they feel it enough. I may be natural that man only go for destruction but they don't realise it. When we win one cent, we never stop but hunt for two cents, three, five and so forth. And in the end, we will not get anything left. Only the strong wil win. The poor and weak recede.

North Pole Ice Cap Will Be Vanished in 34 Years. Do We Care?

The worrying shrinkage of Arctic sea ice could accelerate dramatically in coming decades, leaving the planet's most northerly ocean virtually devoid of ice in summer by 2040, according to a study published on Tuesday. The paper, which appeared in the US journal Geophysical Research Letters, mainly points the finger at greenhouse-gas emissions.
It warned that if carbon pollution continues to increase at present rates, the Arctic's normal cycle of freezing and thawing faces catastrophic disruption.
A simulation run by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Canada's McGill University predicted that the area covered by ice in September -- before new ice begins to form each year -- could shrink from about 5.9 million square kilometres to 1.9 million sq. kms. (2.3 million to 770,000 sq. miles) within a decade.
By 2040, "only a small amount of perennial sea ice" would remain along the north coasts of Greenland and Canada in summer, NCAR said in a press release.
In winter, ice thickness would be reduced from about 3.5 metres (about 12 feet) to less than a metre (three feet).
"We have already witnessed major losses in sea ice, but our research suggests that the decrease over the next few decades could be far more dramatic than anything that has happened so far," said NCAR scientist and lead author of the study, Marika Holland.
Greenhouse gases trap the Sun's heat, gradually forcing up Earth's surface temperature.
But several peripheral factors could also account for such a rapid meltdown.
Open water absorbs more sunlight than ice, accelerating the rate of warming and leading to more ice loss. In addition, global climate change is likely to drive warmer ocean currents into the Arctic region. "This is a positive feedback loop with dramatic implications for the entire Arctic region," Holland said.
The shrinkage of the Arctic ice cap is viewed with alarm by scientists, as it appears to perturb important ocean currents elsewhere, notably the Gulf Stream, which gives western Europe its balmy climate.
It also threatens animals such as polar bears and seals that depend on ice -- as well as Inuits and other native peoples who hunt these animals and have to travel on thinner ice in this quest.
There are geopolitical implications, too, as Canada, Russia and the United States jockey to claim rights over transpolar passages that open up within their newly ice-free waters.
In September, European scientists unveiled satellite images from late August showing that perennial sea ice -- thick ice that is normally present year-round and is not affected by the Arctic summer -- had disappeared over an area bigger than the British Isles.
The study released Tuesday concludes that reduced rates of greenhouse gas emissions could slow the ice loss. "Our research indicates that society can still minimize the impacts on Artic ice," Holland said. (reedited from washington post)
What Do You Think?

Human race apart

Wednesday 12, 2006

Neverland - Since 3.000 years past, human evolved in so complicated fashion that few realised how much we developed and finally come to the way we are here. By God, today we find nothing new in physically-formed modern human compared to those in the past. Can you find something that I can't compare between human race now and the first time Adam and Eve came?