Shaykh AbdulNasir Jangda’s Message #PrayforBoston

20 Comments

1. 

   Umm-Ammaarah

   April 16, 2013 at 9:38 PM

   It is heart-breaking that any one would want to harm innocent lives in this way. It’s senseless and bewildering. May Allah Ta’Ala grant sabr and aafiyah to those who suffered and their families, may Allah Ta’Ala protect all of mankind from these vicious acts, may Allah Subhanahu wa Ta’Ala bless you Imam Jangda for being a voive of reason and teching temperance and good manners. Aameen to your du’a.

   Reply
   • 

     Baasel

     April 22, 2013 at 7:13 AM

     Dear Sheikh Abdul Nasir and Imams of North American, Australia, and Britain:

     Allah bless you and your family, and guide you, increase you in ikhlaas and taqwa. Fear Allah.

     My dear Sheikh, can you please make a video about the following situation in Burma?

     BBC article published Monday, April 22, 2013:
     http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22243676

     http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/burmamyanmar/10008702/Burmese-officials-filled-mass-graves-with-Muslims.html

     As well as the recent article covered by the BBC: It’s really worth taking an hour out of your day to research the situation, especially the Muslim leaders here in the West, Then coming up with some kind of action plan (i.e. contacting politicians, donating, fundraiser, writing letters — similar to what was done here and spreading AWARENESS, so that this Ummah continuously feels like one body.

     Perhaps a similar action plan published by Muslim Mattters in 2009:
     http://muslimmatters.org/2009/01/04/action-gaza-can-we-spare-60-minutes-can-we-walk-the-talk/

     JazakAllahu Khair

     P.S. It would be nice if we could dedicate one Friday, and coordinate between all the Imams, that they would dedicate one Friday Khutbah to this issue, as well as how we can improve ourselves internally….

     Reply
     • 

       Baasel

       April 22, 2013 at 7:20 AM

       Sorry, just wanted to share something else:

       https://www.facebook.com/MuslimsBurma

       Again, those articles I posted as to keep updated with the situation there via this facebook page is so important.

       And also what Muslim Matters has published, you may want to include that information in your video. Maybe you and Nouman Ali khan can make something together: http://muslimmatters.org/?s=burma

       Reply
       • 

         Gibran

         April 22, 2013 at 3:38 PM

         Assalamualaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh

         JazzakAllahu khair Baasel!

         Reply
2. 

   Tanveer Khan

   April 17, 2013 at 10:39 AM

   Sad times we live in….

   Reply
3. 

   Kalim Siddiqui

   April 17, 2013 at 3:09 PM

   i support his message but as I listen to his comments I wonder where were these thoughts when the massacre of innocent muslims took place in Quetta and Abbas Town Karachi, a city where Brother Jangda has frequented. Why no words of support for fellow muslims who don’t belong to our school of thought? Religious and sectarian violence exists because the people in the leadership aren’t setting the right examples.

   Reply
4. 

   pinkflowers231

   April 17, 2013 at 4:43 PM

   Im looking for a page on what is happening for the Muslims in Guantanamo Bay right now. Almost one hundred Muslims are suffering to the point of death from starvation but I cannot seem to find one.To me, that is far more important than what happened in Boston. These brothers are being robbed of their dignity, humanity and lives and you want to say pray for Boston? Where are the priorities?

   Reply
   • 

     Billy Bob

     April 18, 2013 at 1:42 AM

     But pink flowers, they are not important. Plus, that takes courage, and that’s something we don’t have at the moment. But we did do a fundraising dinner for some victims I can’t remember about 50 years ago. See, I did something! Can’t accuse me now!

     Also, you fail to understand that if we comment on the Boston case, we win points with the American government.

     Also, what’s Guantanamo? I don’t read the news except for what I see on the CNN and Fox News. I have no empathy for those guys. They look poor and extreme. I’m moderate :)

     – A message from your local celebrity sheikh, whose sincerity has been corrupted by his arrogance

     Reply
     • 

       Abu Asiyah

       April 19, 2013 at 11:10 AM

       Brother, keep your judgments to yourself. You didn’t open anyone’s heart and looked at what corrupted who.

       Reply
     • 

       Aly Balagamwala | DiscoMaulvi

       April 20, 2013 at 3:54 AM

       As a comment moderator, my first instinct was to delete the comment. But then I said that would be criminal. Why not let Billy Bob air his views out. He is, after all, a wise man who has been blessed with the ability to see into the heart of people and guage how “corrupt” their “sincerity” is.

       -Aly

       *Comment above is posted in a personal capacity and may not reflect the official views of MuslimMatters or its staff*

       Reply
       • 

         Billy Bob2

         April 21, 2013 at 9:37 AM

         Billy Bob here again. Not my real name obviously.

         I love Sh. Abdul Nasir hafidhukkah, and was referring to the house Muslim mentality that we give so much attention to this and so much less to what’s going on around the world

         But please do delete my comment as it is misunderstood.

         And tell all Imams to make a Khutbah and video about my brothers and sister that are killed overseas that we are so silent about. If we were them, would we like to be forgotten about?

         Reply
       • 

         Gibran

         April 21, 2013 at 7:52 PM

         Assalamualaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh

         Why no video comes out from a sheikh every time this happens?

         http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dvqsDs_oCrA

         Reply
         • 

           Aly Balagamwala | DiscoMaulvi

           April 22, 2013 at 12:58 AM

           WaAlaikum Assalam Wa Rehmatullahi Wa Barakatuhu:

           I guess you would have to ask the Shaykh directly. You can drop a message to Shaykh ANJ on his facebook asking why.

           Regards
           -Aly
         • 

           Gibran

           April 22, 2013 at 3:37 PM

           Assalamualaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh

           Don’t have a Facebook and I’m not allowed one. Why don’t you do it?
         • 

           Aly Balagamwala | DiscoMaulvi

           April 23, 2013 at 5:07 AM

           WaAlaikum Assalam Wa Rehmatullahi Wa Barakatuhu:

           http://www.abdulnasirj.com/contact/
5. 

   O H

   April 17, 2013 at 5:52 PM

   Some valid points made in the video. No doubt the incident is a tragic one as human lives were lost without right & we as Muslims should respect & acknowledge the seriousness of such an attack. The reason a lot of Muslims compare different incidents are because of the incessant attacks on Muslim lands & the relative silence of heads of state & scholars on many of the issues leading to their frustration as the scale of violence is much more horrific. Some perspective is needed. We should condemn all acts of violence, whether it be in Boston or it be in Baghdad & this is where injustice occurs & bias shows up when it comes to reporting such incidents. Peace…

   Reply
6. 

   AbuJ

   April 18, 2013 at 9:46 AM

   The Boston bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions As usual, the limits of selective empathy, the rush to blame Muslims, and the exploitation of fear all instantly emerge

   By Glenn Greenwald
   guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 16 April 2013 14.52 BST

   http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/16/boston-marathon-explosions-notes-reactions?commentpage=10

   Runners continue to run towards the finish line of the Boston marathon as an explosion erupts near the finish line of the race Photograph:
   Stringer/REUTERS
   There’s not much to say about Monday’s Boston Marathon attack because there is virtually no known evidence regarding who did it or why.
   There are, however, several points to be made about some of the widespread reactions to this incident. Much of that reaction is all-too-familiar and quite revealing in important ways:

   (1) The widespread compassion for yesterday’s victims and the intense anger over the attacks was obviously authentic and thus good to witness. But it was really hard not to find oneself wishing that just a fraction of that compassion and anger be devoted to attacks that the US perpetrates rather than suffers. These are exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and over again for the last decade, with very little attention paid. My Guardian colleague Gary Younge put this best on Twitter this morning:

   Juan Cole this morning makes a similar point about violence elsewhere.
   Indeed, just yesterday in Iraq, at least 42 people were killed and more than 250 injured by a series of car bombs, the enduring result of the US invasion and destruction of that country. Somehow the deep compassion and anger felt in the US when it is attacked never translates to understanding the effects of our own aggression against others.

   One particularly illustrative example I happened to see yesterday was a re-tweet from Washington Examiner columnist David Freddoso,
   proclaiming:

   Idea of secondary bombs designed to kill the first responders is just sick. How does anyone become that evil?”

   I don’t disagree with that sentiment. But I’d bet a good amount of money that the person saying it – and the vast majority of other Americans – have no clue that targeting rescuers with “double-tap”
   attacks isprecisely what the US now does with its drone program and other forms of militarism. If most Americans knew their government and military were doing this, would they react the same way as they did to yesterday’s Boston attack: “Idea of secondary bombs designed to kill the first responders is just sick. How does anyone become that evil?”
   That’s highly doubtful, and that’s the point.

   There’s nothing wrong per se with paying more attention to tragedy and violence that happens relatively nearby and in familiar places.
   Whether wrong or not, it’s probably human nature, or at least human instinct, to do that, and that happens all over the world. I’m not criticizing that. But one wishes that the empathy for victims and outrage over the ending of innocent human life that instantly arises when the US is targeted by this sort of violence would at least translate into similar concern when the US is perpetrating it, as it so often does (far, far more often than it is targeted by such violence).

   Regardless of your views of justification and intent: whatever rage you’re feeling toward the perpetrator of this Boston attack, that’s the rage in sustained form that people across the world feel toward the US for killing innocent people in their countries. Whatever sadness you feel for yesterday’s victims, the same level of sadness is warranted for the innocent people whose lives are ended by American bombs. However profound a loss you recognize the parents and family members of these victims to have suffered, that’s the same loss experienced by victims of US violence. It’s natural that it won’t be felt as intensely when the victims are far away and mostly invisible, but applying these reactions to those acts of US aggression would go a long way toward better understanding what they are and the outcomes they generate.

   (2) The rush, one might say the eagerness, to conclude that the attackers were Muslim was palpable and unseemly, even without any real evidence. The New York Post quickly claimed that the prime suspect was a Saudi national (while also inaccurately reporting that 12 people had been confirmed dead). The Post’s insinuation of responsibility was alsosuggested on CNN by Former Bush Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend (“We know that there is one Saudi national who was wounded in the leg who is being spoken to”). Former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman went on CNN to grossly speculate that Muslim groups were behind the attack. Anti-Muslim bigots like Pam Geller predictably announced that this was “Jihad in America”. Expressions of hatred for Muslims, and a desire to do violence, were then spewing forth all over Twitter (some particularly unscrupulous partisan Democrat types wereidentically suggesting with zero evidence that the attackers were right-wing extremists).

   Obviously, it’s possible that the perpetrator(s) will turn out to be Muslim, just like it’s possible they will turn out to be extremist right-wing activists, or left-wing agitators, or Muslim-fearing Anders-Breivik types, or lone individuals driven by apolitical mental illness. But the rush to proclaim the guilty party to be Muslim is seen in particular over and over with such events. Recall that on the day of the 2011 Oslo massacre by a right-wing, Muslim-hating extremist, the New York Times spent virtually the entire day strongly suggesting in its headlines that an Islamic extremist group was responsible, a claim other major news outlets (including the BBC and Washington Post) then repeated as fact. The same thing happened with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, when most major US media outlets strongly suggested that the perpetrators were Muslims. As FAIR documented back then:

   “In the wake of the explosion that destroyed the Murrah Federal Office Building, the media rushed — almost en masse — to the assumption that the bombing was the work of Muslim extremists. ‘The betting here is on Middle East terrorists,’ declared CBS News’ Jim Stewart just hours after the blast (4/19/95). ‘The fact that it was such a powerful bomb in Oklahoma City immediately drew investigators to consider deadly parallels that all have roots in the Middle East,’ ABC’s John McWethy proclaimed the same day.

   “‘It has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East,’ wrote syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer (Chicago Tribune, 4/21/95). ‘Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working,’
   declared the New York Times’ A.M. Rosenthal (4/21/95). The Geyer and Rosenthal columns were filed after the FBI released sketches of two suspects who looked more like Midwestern frat boys than mujahideen.”

   This lesson is never learned because, it seems, many people don’t want to learn it. Even when it turns out not to have been Muslims who perpetrated the attack but rather right-wing, white Christians, the damage from this relentless and reflexive blame-pinning endures.

   (3) One continually encountered yesterday expressions of dread and fear from Arabs and Muslims around the world that the attacker would be either or both. That’s because they know that all members of their religious or ethnic group will be blamed, or worse, if that turns out to be the case. That’s true even though leading Muslim-American groups such as CAIR harshly condemned the attack (as they always do) and urged support for the victims, including blood donations. One tweeter, referencing the earthquake that hit Iran this morning, satirized this collective mindset by writing: “Please don’t be a Muslim plate tectonic activity.”

   As understandable as it is, that’s just sad to witness. No other group reacts with that level of fear to these kinds of incidents, because no other group has similar cause to fear that they will all be hated or targeted for the acts of isolated, unrepresentative individuals. A similar dynamic has long prevailed in the domestic crime context: when the perpetrators of notorious crimes turned out to be African-American, the entire community usually paid a collective price. But the unique and well-grounded dread that hundreds of millions of law-abiding, peaceful Muslims and Arabs around the world have about the prospect that this attack in Boston was perpetrated by a Muslim highlights the climate of fear that has been created for and imposed on them over the last decade.

   (4) The reaction to the Boston attack underscored, yet again, the utter meaninglessness of the word “terrorism”. News outlets were seemingly scandalized that President Obama, in his initial remarks, did not use the words “terrorist attack” to describe the bombing. In response, the White House ran to the media to assure them that they considered it “terrorism”. Fox News’ Ed Henry quoted a “senior administration official” as saying this: “When multiple (explosive) devices go off that’s an act of terrorism.”

   Is that what “terrorism” is? “When multiple (explosive) devices go off”? If so, that encompasses a great many things, including what the US does in the world on a very regular basis. Of course, the quest to know whether this was “terrorism” is really code for: “was this done by Muslims”? That’s because, in US political discourse, “terrorism”
   has no real meaning other than: violence perpetrated by Muslims against the west. The reason there was such confusion and uncertainty about whether this was “terrorism” is because there is no clear and consistently applied definition of the term. At this point, it’s little more than a term of emotionally manipulative propaganda. That’s been proven over and over, and it was again yesterday.

   (5) The history of these types of attacks over the last decade has been clear and consistent: they are exploited to obtain new government powers, increase state surveillance, and take away individual liberties. On NBC with Brian Williams last night, Tom Brokaw decreed that this will happen again and instructed us that we must meekly submit it to it:

   “Everyone has to understand tonight that, beginning tomorrow morning early, there are going to be much tougher security considerations all across the country, and however exhausted we may be by that, we’re going to have to learn to live with them, and get along and go forward, and not let them bring us to our knees. You’ll remember last summer, how unhappy we were with the security at the Democratic and Republic conventions. Now I don’t think we can raise those complaints after what happened in Boston.”

   Last night on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show, an FBI agent discussed the fact that the US government has the right to arrest terrorism suspects and not provide them with Miranda warnings before questioning them. After seeing numerous people express surprise at this claim on Twitter, I pointed out that this happened when the Obama administration exploited the attempted underwear bombing over Detroit to radically reduce Miranda rights over what they had been for decades. That’s what the US government (aided by the sham “terrorism expert” industry) does in every single one of these cases: exploits the resulting fear to increase its own power and decrease everyone else’s rights, including privacy.

   At the Atlantic, security expert Bruce Schneier has a short but compelling article on how urgent it is that we not react to this Boston attack irrationally or with exaggerated fear, and that we particularly remain vigilant against government attempts to exploit fear to impose all new rights-reducing measures. He notes in particular how the more unusual an event is (such as this sort of attack on US soil), the more our brains naturally exaggerate its significance and frequency (John Cole makes a similar point)

   In sum, even if the perpetrators of Monday’s attack in Boston turn out to be politically motivated and subscribers to an anti-US ideology, it will still be a very rare event, one that poses far less danger to Americans than literally countless other threats. The most important lesson of the excesses arising from the 9/11 attacks should be this
   one: that the dangers of overreacting and succumbing to irrational fear are far, far greater than any other dangers posed by these type of events.

   http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/16/boston-marathon-explosions-notes-reactions?commentpage=10

   Reply
   • 

     O H

     April 18, 2013 at 6:41 PM

     Great article. A really sad reality is that whether it be in the protests for the release of Aafia SIddique or whether it be for other crimes & incidents involving Muslims, the Non-Muslims on many occasions seem to do a better job defending the Muslims than we do for our brothers & sisters who have been wronged or blamed unjustly. Allaahu Musta’an

     Reply
7. 

   abdullah

   April 18, 2013 at 5:54 PM

   Boston Runner: I’ll run until my body can’t take it anymore
   http://www.icna.org/boston-runner-ill-run-until-my-body-cant-take-it-anymore/#more-13942

   Reply
8. 

   stand up for the ummah

   April 20, 2013 at 8:10 PM

   Honestly I feel there is a lot wrong with the above video,firstly no salam sent upon the viewers(most likely Muslims),but we are being asked to pray for non Muslims??
   Also we have heard how we should be sympathetic to the people effected by this “tragedy”…
   How about our response or relationship to those who did,or are blamed for carrying out the bombing.I will only believe a Muslim did it when he says he did it,and then what is our relationship with him??from Quran and sunnah should have been in this video,or is that not important??
   Allah gives and takes life and in regards to the 8 year old he has inshallah been given a place in jannah,so why are we so upset?As for the others killed are we now going to say that they will be in jannah just to please the non muslims?
   What is wrong with our sheuk,why can they not speak about the true victims,those who are shot and prisoned,like the 19 year old MUSLIM who is supposedly the bomber,is it not the sheikhs responsibility to free him,or pray for him,or help his family.and Allah knows best

   Reply