Nelson Mandela has returned to his Creator. 

The Prophet ﷺ praised Mut`im b. Adi because he was a man who stood up for what was right, and helped the downtrodden Muslim community at a time when the Quraysh was guilty of the height of injustice. 

It is my opinion that if there was one man in our time who truly embodied that spirit of Mut`ims struggle, it was Nelson Mandela. Of the rewards that Allah gives a person in this life is respect and fame, and it is very likely that the genuine love all felt towards him was a result of his sincere efforts to help the weak and oppressed of his nation, and fight the unjust, tyrannical, inhumane and un-Islamic notion of white supremacy and Apartheid. 

Another benefit that we as Muslims can derive from Nelson Mandela's life is that truth shall always win in the end. For much of his life, Mandela was labelled a terrorist (even by the US and UK). Eventually, he won the Nobel prize and became his country's president. 'Terrorists' are relative, and when one is fighting for the truth, in a legitimate and Islamic manner, eventually his cause shall be victorious, even if the opposers of truth despise it. 

May Allah guide us all to truth, humility and sincere action. ~ Yasir Qadhi

A fresh crackdown on Islamist extremism risks backfiring by fuelling anti-Muslim prejudice and driving hardliners underground, the Government was warned last night.

A group that monitors attacks on Muslims said it was preparing for an upsurge of violence as a result of the moves being announced today by David Cameron.

Under the Prime Minister’s proposals, Islamist radicals face being expelled from mosques, Muslim community groups and universities in a fight-back against fundamentalism.

The courts would be given new civil powers – similar to Asbos – to ban suspected extremists from preaching or indoctrinating others.

At the same time internet companies have been asked to block terrorist material from overseas being accessed in this country.

The measures were proposed by the Prime Minister’s extremism task force – which included ministers, community groups, the police and the security services – set up after the killing of Lee Rigby.

Last night Fiyaz Mughal, the director of Tell Mama, which records anti-Muslim incidents, said he feared Mr Cameron’s announcements would reinforce negative perceptions of Muslims.

Mr Mughal said he had asked extra staff to be on standby because of an anticipated surge in hate attacks. He added that the new rules should cover all forms of extremism, including the activities of the far right.

“There has to be parity and not a feeling that Muslims are being singled out,” he said.

Chris Allen, an expert on Islamophobia at Birmingham University, said: “The more the lens is turned on the Muslim community, the more society begins to think, ‘There’s no smoke without fire’.”

Isabella Sankey, the director of policy at Liberty, said it was important to confront “ugly ideologies across the spectrum”. But she added: “Driving those who despise diversity further underground does nothing to expose their beliefs and only acts as another recruitment tool. You cannot protect our democracy by shutting down the very freedoms that sustain it.”

Full article: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/government-crackdown-on-r…

Hunger in Britain has reached the level of a “public health emergency” and the Government may be covering up the extent to which austerity and welfare cuts are adding to the problem, leading experts have said.

In a letter to the British Medical Journal, a group of doctors and senior academics from the Medical Research Council and two leading universities said that the effect of Government policies on vulnerable people’s ability to afford food needed to be “urgently” monitored.

A surge in the number of people requiring emergency food aid, a decrease in the amount of calories consumed by British families, and a doubling of the number of malnutrition cases seen at English hospitals represent “all the signs of a public health emergency that could go unrecognised until it is too late to take preventative action,” they write.

Despite mounting evidence for a growing food poverty crisis in the UK, ministers maintain there is “no robust evidence” of a link between sweeping welfare reforms and a rise in the use of food banks. However, publication of research into the phenomenon, commissioned by the Government itself, has been delayed, amid speculation that the findings may prove embarrassing for ministers.

“Because the Government has delayed the publication of research it commissioned into the rise of emergency food aid in the UK, we can only speculate that the cause is related to the rising cost of living and increasingly austere welfare reforms,” the public health experts write.

The authors of the letter, who include Dr David Taylor-Robinson and Professor Margaret Whitehead of Liverpool University’s Department of Public Health, say that malnutrition can have a long-lasting impact on health, particularly among children. 

Chris Mould, chief executive of the Trussell Trust, the largest national food bank provider said that one in three of the 350,000 people who required a food bank hand-out this year were children.

He called the BMJ letter a “timely warning” and criticised the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) for keeping its report into the problem “under wraps”.

(full article) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/food-poverty-in-uk-has-re…

One morning, Enas Abdel Wanis was about to leave home to go to work at the National Council for Civil Liberties and Human Rights (NCCHR) in Benghazi, in Libya, when she discovered her car had been burnt. Her crime had been to advocate for better security for civilians and the disarmament of militias that had been terrorising her city. Since then, Wanis has had to comply with the security restrictions set by her family: to do her job (document and monitor human rights violations), she now has to be chaperoned by her father on field visits.

It is the same story in Yemen, where Morooj Alwazir, co-founder ofSupportYemen, says: "It is a struggle to even be part of society, it is a struggle to speak your mind, to feel safe in your own neighbourhood, your only safe space is your bedroom."

While the deteriorating security situation is hard for everyone, Alwazir says it is especially hard for women, whom it discourages from leaving their homes. Women who have lost husbands in the conflict in Yemen find they are stigmatised, and opportunities to earn a living are severely restricted because the streets are unsafe. "Every time I am on my way to the airport, I feel like civil war is about to happen tomorrow. I see trucks and trucks of weapons coming into the country – it is very scary," Alwazir says.

READ MORE AT : The Guardian

An Islamic charity is to open a third hostel to cope with the demand of homeless Muslim women.

The National Zakat Foundation (NZF) already has two refuges, in London and Birmingham.

The charity said that since the hostels opened a year ago, almost 100 Muslim women have contacted them, most of them victims of abuse.

Fifty four women have been given places and NZF has now secured funding for a third hostel in Greater Manchester.

Read more on: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-24578426

What's it all about?

I only heard about it yesterday.

The school is in a mess because the Board of Governors have appointed a non-Muslim head teacher along with couple of non-Muslim female teachers.There is no place for a non-Muslim child or a teacher in a Muslim school.  They do not understand and respect the needs and demands of the Muslim children. Majority of children are from Pakistan, they need to learn and be well versed in Urdu to keep in touch with their cultural heritage and enjoy the beauty of Urdu literature and poetry. It is their social and emotional language. The school does not teach Urdu language. The school only teaches Arabic language which is a religious language. A Muslim must learn and be well versed in standard English, Arabic and Urdu and other community languages. A Muslim is a citizen of this tiny global village. He/she does not want to become notoriously monolingual Brit.
 
There is no requirement for teaching staff to hold appropriate qualifications or have the necessary experience; there is no requirement to follow the national curriculum, which does work towards recognised qualifications. In my town the children attending the state schools have below average attainments at GCSE compared to the national average. The children are not achieving their full potential and are being let down by the qualified teachers at these schools. Although I’ve no doubt that there are many non-’qualified’ people who could teach as well as, or better than, many of those certificated to do so. A very real concern is that those who teach in state schools (often also including “assistants”) lack proficiency in the subjects they teach, even at the most basic levels. In those circumstances, what they are doing is not teaching, but inculcating wrong information or none at all. Curriculum seems to have been dumbed down to accommodate teachers who probably would never have passed the subject at O level in times gone by – let alone A level or a degree.
 
I heard 3 parents being interviewed on the radio a little while ago, and god help me they were actually quite happy with the school! It would seem that the spirit of the Crusades is alive and well. Al-Madinah is certainly not the only failing school in the country. However, seasoned Ofsted report readers will I hope agree that we have never read such a damning report. Words like “dysfunctional”, “woefully inadequate” and “chaotic” do not normally feature in Ofsted reports, even when they are slating a school. The evidence is surely the 173 Free Schools that have, minor teething troubles aside, opened perfectly successfully – many opened by teams that have never opened a schools before. That’s the reality. So a Muslim school (which it seems retains a great deal of parental backing) has come a cropper with serious questions to answer. It seems however, despite the odd teething troubles (buildings, Ofsted confusion over Montessori methods, etc.) here and there, that the other 173 Free Schools have opened successfully against a backdrop of ideological sniping from local authorities, the Labour Party and teaching Unions. So the Free School failure rate so far is 0.6%. Disarray for sure. State schools get appalling Ofsted reports as well. There will be good and bad state schools and good and bad free schools.
 
State schools get appalling Ofsted reports as well. There will be good and bad state schools and good and bad free schools. Muslim Girls school tops state school rankings in Blackburn. Yet, the only news we get is about a failing school in Derby. There are good Muslim schools and there are bad ones. However, let’s be blunt, negative stories about Muslims predominate. There is a reason for that. And no, it’s not because Muslims predominantly do negative things. While it’s great that a Muslim school toped some ranking that isn’t news – just like the many Christian and secular schools that top local rankings aren’t. There is a very obvious reason why there are more negative stories about Islam than positive ones.It is funny how negative Muslim stories are given front page and positive Muslim stories are packed away where you have to actively look for them. What about the Catholic church for example: White British men who abused boys and were just placed in different institutions when caught and protected by their superiors.Or is it because we are white that we don’t behave badly or are blameless for any bad behaviour?

Muslim children need state funded Muslim schools with Muslim teachers as role models during their developmental period. This is the only solution for them to keep away from the evils of western society. Let them teach what ever the native Brits would like to teach their children. It is a crime against humanity to keep sending Muslim children to state and church schools with non-Muslim monolingual teachers. This is why the legal definition of genocide includes cultural killing, not only actually killing. British education is the home of institutional racism and British teachers are chicken racist.

 What gives OFSTED the right, or indeed any Brit, to preach to minority groups about how they should live their lives. This is a cosmopolitan country, the Muslim community have the right to educate their children how they choose. Studying the Qur'an will certainly help towards these children becoming fully integrated citizens of the UK.
A quarter of a million extra school places will be needed in England by autumn 2014 to meet rising demand, the National Audit Office (NAO) is warning. The spending watchdog said one in five primary schools in England was full or near capacity and there were signs of "real strain" on places. The demand for places has been driven by the birth rate rising more quickly than at any time since the 1950s.
 
The solution of this problem is very simple. There are hundreds of state and church schools where Muslim children are in majority. In my opinion all such schools may be opted out as Muslim Academies.
 
It will satisfy the needs of those native parents who do not want to send their children to those schools where the number of Muslim children is on the increase.
 
Bilingual Muslim children need state funded Muslim schools with bilingual Muslim teachers as role models during their developmental period. There is no place for a non-Muslim child or a teacher in a Muslim school.
 
The Muslims don't want to integrate or abide by western law. Just because they don´t want to wear nude clothes or at least cloth that can show how big her breast are... so these people failed to integrate. Just because they don't like free sex, then these people failed again.. what a dirty Bush mind you have!
 
Speaking English does not promote integration into British, American and Australian societies, and broaden opportunities. English speaking Muslim youths are angry, frustrated and extremist, thanks to state schools with monolingual non-Muslim teachers and English language. English language is not only a lingua franca but also lingua frankensteinia. Human right are also covers linguistic right. Cultural and linguistic genocide are very common. British schooling is murdering community languages like Arabic, Urdu and others. English is today the world killer language. Linguistic genocide is a crime against humanity and British schooling is guilty of committing this crime. Language is not just a language. It defines one's culture, identity and consciousness. It defines how we think, communicate and express ourselves. The fact is the most South Asian Muslims have come to know Islam by way of Urdu, the children's alienation from the language that connects them the heritage of their parents and grand parents is disturbing. As a matter of fact, one has to get to know his mother tongue well if one is to master any other language.
 Iftikhar Ahmad
London School of Islamics Trust
http://www.londonschoolofialmics.org.uk

The Guardian

US and UK struck secret deal to allow NSA to 'unmask' Britons' personal data

• 2007 deal allows NSA to store previously restricted material
• UK citizens not suspected of wrongdoing caught up in dragnet
• Separate draft memo proposes US spying on 'Five-Eyes' allies

The phone, internet and email records of UK citizens not suspected of any wrongdoing have been analysed and stored by America's National Security Agency under a secret deal that was approved by British intelligence officials, according to documents from the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In the first explicit confirmation that UK citizens have been caught up in US mass surveillance programs, an NSA memo describes how in 2007 an agreement was reached that allowed the agency to "unmask" and hold on to personal data about Britons that had previously been off limits.

The memo, published in a joint investigation by the Guardian and Britain's Channel 4 News, says the material is being put in databases where it can be made available to other members of the US intelligence and military community.

Britain and the US are the main two partners in the 'Five-Eyes' intelligence-sharing alliance, which also includes Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Until now, it had been generally understood that the citizens of each country were protected from surveillance by any of the others.

But the Snowden material reveals that:

• In 2007, the rules were changed to allow the NSA to analyse and retain any British citizens' mobile phone and fax numbers, emails and IP addresses swept up by its dragnet. Previously, this data had been stripped out of NSA databases – "minimized", in intelligence agency parlance – under rules agreed between the two countries.

• These communications were "incidentally collected" by the NSA, meaning the individuals were not the initial targets of surveillance operations and therefore were not suspected of wrongdoing.

• The NSA has been using the UK data to conduct so-called "pattern of life" or "contact-chaining" analyses, under which the agency can look up to three "hops" away from a target of interest – examining the communications of a friend of a friend of a friend. Guardian analysis suggests three hops for a typical Facebook user could pull the data of more than 5 million people into the dragnet.

• A separate draft memo, marked top-secret and dated from 2005, reveals a proposed NSA procedure for spying on the citizens of the UK and other Five-Eyes nations, even where the partner government has explicitly denied the US permission to do so. The memo makes clear that partner countries must not be informed about this surveillance, or even the procedure itself.

The 2007 briefing was sent out to all analysts in the NSA's Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID), which is responsible for collecting, processing, and sharing information gleaned from US surveillance programs.

Up to this point, the Americans had only been allowed to retain the details of British landline phone numbers that had been collected incidentally in any of their trawls.

But the memo explains there was a fundamental change in policy that allowed the US to look at and store vast amounts of personal data that would previously have been discarded.

It states: "Sigint [signals intelligence] policy … and the UK Liaison Office here at NSAW [NSA Washington] worked together to come up with a new policy that expands the use of incidentally collected unminimized UK data in Sigint analysis.

"The new policy expands the previous memo issued in 2004 that only allowed the unminimizing of incidentally collected UK phone numbers for use in analysis.

"Now SID analysts can unminimize all incidentally collected UK contact identifiers, including IP and email addresses, fax and cell phone numbers, for use in analysis."

The memo also set out in more detail what the NSA could and could not do.

The agency was, for example, still barred from making any UK citizen a target of surveillance programs that would look at the content of their communications without getting a warrant. However, they now:

• "Are authorized to unmask UK contact identifiers resulting from incidental collection."

• "May utilize the UK contact identifiers in Sigint development contact chaining analysis."

• "May retain unminimized UK contact identifiers incidentally collected under this authority within content and metadata stores and provided to follow-on USSS (US Sigint System) applications."

The document does not say whether the UK Liaison Office, which is operated by GCHQ, discussed this rule change with government ministers in London before granting approval, nor who within the intelligence agencies would have been responsible for the decision.

The Guardian contacted GCHQ and the Cabinet Office on Thursday November 7 to ask for clarification, but despite repeated requests since then, neither has been prepared to comment.

Since the signing in 1946 of the UKUSA Signals Intelligence Agreement, which first established the Five-Eyes partnership, it has been a convention that the allied intelligence agencies do not monitor one another's citizens without permission – an agreement often referred to publicly by officials across the Five-Eyes nations.

However, a draft 2005 directive in the name of the NSA's director of signals intelligence reveals the NSA prepared policies enabling its staff to spy on Five-Eyes citizens, even where the partner country has refused permission to do so.....

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Why do you not pray?

Oh my brother and sister, why do you not pray?

Why do you not pray when Allah has created you and has given you everything? And all he asks of you in return is a few minutes of each day and you cannot even give him that?

Why do you not pray when he could have made you a non believer yet he chose you and gave you imaan(faith)?

Why do you not pray when it is the very purpose of your life and creation?

Why do you not pray when the prayer is so important that Almighty Allah had to call the Prophet (Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam) to himself, through the 7 heavens to his throne, in order to give the Ummah of Muhammad (Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam) the prayer?

Why do you not pray when it is the prayer which distinguishes between faith and disbelief?

Why do you not pray when you know that you can die at any second and you risk dying without being able to utter the Shahada (proclamation of Islamic faith), due to the test of shaythan and therefore risk dying without imaan (faith)?

Why do you not pray when you risk seeing the Angel of Death in its worst and most ugly and disgusting form and appearance where it will handle the disobedient in a terribly harsh manner, forcing the soul from the body and dragging it away!

Why do you not pray when in the grave the two angels will ask you questions about your faith and you may not be able to answer them?

Why do you not pray when you know that you risk getting the grave punishment which is a punishment so severe that the Earth will constantly crush the body until the ribs interlock into each other, and the worst vermin of the Earth like snakes, scorpions and other creatures will constantly bite on the body?

Why do you not pray when you know you will certainly face Allah and the first question you will be asked is about the prayer? How will you answer it if you don't pray? If you fail to answer the first question then you will definitely fail to answer the rest of the questions!

Why do you not pray when you know that you are sacrificing the Hereafter which is for eternity just for this short temporary life which can end at any moment? You will not be able to take anything with you from this life except your deeds! Then what will you have to save you if you do not pray?

Why do you not pray when you know what a terrible day the day of Judgement day will be, where so many people will be in a state of terror and worry, and the sun will be above our heads and many will drown in their own sweat! There will be no water or shade except for the righteous!

Why do you not pray when you know you may end up in the fire, a place of terrible torture and torment that no one will ever have witnessed before. Where the fuel for the blazing fire will be of men and stones and there will be no drink except for boiling water and no food except for thorny plants and the blood, sweat and pus of the inhabitants! It is a place where it even seeks refuge from Allah against itself!

Why do not pray when you know you risk losing eternal happiness and bliss in Paradise where we can have whatever our hearts desire forever! It is a place where every inhabitant will be eternally beautiful and youthful without ever getting ill, or being inflicted with disease, nor will there be any depression nor unhappiness nor any pain. There will be no hatred, enmity, jealousy or malice. A life so pure and everlasting. Then how can we trade such a place for this short and temporary existence? How can eternity be traded for a short passing journey? The limited pleasures of this life can never be compared to the unlimited pleasures of Paradise!

Why do you not pray when you risk losing something better than Paradise. A gift to the believer like no other. Something that no other creation of Allah's has seen. Do you want to know what it will be? It will be the moment when Almighty Allah the most exalted and high reveals his beautiful face for the first time. It will be to the inhabitants of Paradise! How do you expect to be amongst the inhabitants of Paradise on that day when you do not pray?

 
Therefore you must pray and not ever miss another prayer again lest death overcomes you which can happen at any second. Do not waste anymore time as our time is short.

So know that all is not lost if you start from now and not intentionally miss another prayer again for your eternity depends on it! Otherwise there will be utter regret but by then it will be too late.