3-Zakah

The financial obligation upon Muslims.

An important principle of Islam is that everything belongs to God, and that wealth is therefore held by human beings in trust. The word zakah means both "purification" and "growth." Our possessions are purified by setting aside a proportion for those in need and for the society in general. Like the pruning of plants, this cutting back balances and encourages new growth.

Each Muslim calculates his or her own zakah individually. This involves the annual payment of a fortieth of one's capital, excluding such items as primary residence, car and professional tools.

An individual may also give as much as he or she pleases as sadaqa-h, and does so preferably in secret. Although this word can be translated as "voluntary charity" it has a wider meaning.
The Prophet said, "Even meeting your brother with a cheerful face is an act of charity." The Prophet also said: "Charity is a necessity for every Muslim." He was asked: "What if a person has nothing?" The Prophet replied: "He should work with his own hands for his benefit and then give something out of such earnings in charity." The Companions of the Prophet asked: "What if he is not able to work?" The Prophet said: "He should help the poor and needy." The Companions further asked: "What if he cannot do even that?" The Prophet said: "He should urge others to do good." The Companions said: "What if he lacks that also?" The Prophet said: "He should check himself from doing evil. That is also an act of charity."

4-Sawm or Fasting

Every year in the month of Ramada-n, all Muslims fast from dawn until sundown--abstaining from food, drink, and sexual relations with their spouses.

Those who are sick, elderly, or on a journey, and women who are menstruating, pregnant or nursing, are permitted to break the fast and make up an equal number of days later in the year if they are healthy and able. Children begin to fast (and to observe prayers) from puberty, although many start earlier.

Although fasting is beneficial to health, it is mainly a method of self-purification and self-restraint. By cutting oneself from worldly comforts, even for a short time, a fasting person focuses on his or her purpose in life by constantly being aware of the presence of God. God states in the Qur'an: "O you who believe! Fasting is prescribed for you as it was prescribed to those before you that you may learn self-restraint." (Qur'an 2:183)

5-Hajj or Pilgrimage

The pilgrimage to Makkah (the hajj) is an obligation only for those who are physically and financially able to do so. Nevertheless, over two million people go to Makkah each year from every corner of the globe providing a unique opportunity for those of different nations to meet one another.

The annual hajj begins in the twelfth month of the Islamic year (which is lunar, not solar, so that hajj and Ramada-n fall sometimes in summer, sometimes in winter). Pilgrims wear special clothes: simple garments that strip away distinctions of class and culture, so that all stand equal before God.

The rites of the hajj, which are of Abrahamic origin, include going around the Ka'bah seven times, and going seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwa as did Hagar (Hajir, Abraham's wife) during her search for water. The pilgrims later stand together on the wide plains of 'Arafat (a large expanse of desert outside Makkah) and join in prayer for God's forgiveness, in what is often thought as a preview of the Day of Judgment.

The close of the hajj is marked by a festival, the 'Id al Adha, which is celebrated with prayers and the exchange of gifts in Muslim communities everywhere. This and the 'Id al Fitr, a festive day celebrating the end of Ramada-n, are the two holidays of the Islamic calendar.

Respect Your Mother

Religious Tolerance: Islam vs. Other Religions

While discussing the violence aspect of religious texts, Goldberg wrote,

"At one time or another all religions have been nasty. For all of the passages in the Koran that have been used to justify violence, one can just as easily find passages in the Jewish or Christian Bibles justifying violence. The difference is that Europeans and Americans, broadly speaking, no longer have the desire to use religion to justify violence. Vast numbers of Arabs, North Africans and East Asians still do. Our inquisitions are in the past, their inquisitions happen every day. Much of Muslim world simply lives in a different time than in the West. Oh sure, some of the big cities, with their cars and satellite dishes, may look modern. But their culture is horribly behind the times."

In other words, Goldberg is implying that people of Jewish and Christian faith may not take their respective religions quite literally. For many of them, they may accept their texts with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, for millions of people of Islamic faith, blasphemy is such a buzzword that it can trigger a violent outburst autonomously in no seconds.

Some analysts may blame this mindset as the main hindrance to progress in Muslim societies. The Hindus have their share of intolerance in the age-old inhuman caste system in the societal domain. Nevertheless, they are showing more and more signs of tolerance in their antiquated belief system. When an Indian artist of Muslim heritage drew a nude portrait of a Hindu Goddess who personifies art and education, there was an outcry in parts of India. But soon the controversy subsided and the artist is now alive and well roaming freely all over India.

What could have been the aftermath if the artist dared to enter the Islamic cultural space?

One of my friends of Hindu heritage told me an interesting story. He went to a Saraswati Puja a few months ago. The priest and his spouse were the guests of honor in the festivity. While the priest was busy performing the Puja, his spouse was utilizing the time chitchatting with some of the worshipers in a different room. The most incredible thing was utterances that came from the priest's spouse mouth. She said to the devotees, "Ram was a homosexual and Krishna was nothing more than a womanizer."

I asked my friend about the reaction of the devotees, whether they jumped to the priest's spouse to choke her to death.

My friend's reply was there was no negative outcome. It seemed as if nothing extraordinary happened in the Puja Mandap.

If you care to do an exegesis, you will observe that many of the educated Hindus are not apologetic of Krishna's philandering escapades. Some are even critical of Ram's social behavior especially when he subjected his spouse Sita to undergo a test of her marital fidelity by walking through an open fire. However, their critical scrutiny does not throw them into atheists' camp. Many of them still believe in the basic tenets of Hinduism. In a sense, they are quite tolerant as far as scrutinizing their faith is concerned.

The other day, I was watching "Mission Impossible," the movie on TV. In one sequence, the character played by Tom Cruise threw away a copy of the Bible from the computer table to the floor. He showed his casual approach to the "Holy book" as if it was just an ordinary book.

I do not know if any evangelical Christian group raised any outcry for showing such disrespect to the Bible. Can you possibly imagine what could have happened if it had been a Koran instead of the Bible?

The zealots could have burned the movie theater to the ashes. And don't kid yourself!

Let me also do here a short exegesis of Serrano's art that stirred a controversy as his expression of artistic freedom touched upon sacrilegiousness of the Christendom. Believe it or not, with the able help of American taxpayers' money, the National Endowment of Arts put the Serrano exhibit in New York City. The controversial art that drew criticism was Jesus in a bottle of urine.

Many of the US lawmakers expressed their outrage and disgust in congressional hearings. However, their opinion centered on not to get rid of the artwork, rather not to fund such "sacrilegious" artwork with American taxpayers' money. They therefore drew a line of distinction.

A similar situation arose in New York City again. The famous New York Museum of Modern Art had a display of African arts. One of the exhibits had been Mother Mary covered with the elephant dung. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani understandably had boycotted the show; nevertheless, the exhibition was allowed to continue.

Imagine, what could have happened if both of these art works touched upon subjects relating to Islam! Many of the readers may remember the famous lawsuit of the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) against U.S. Supreme Court. The CAIR wanted to get rid of the frieze of Prophet Muhammad which was an important Supreme Court artifact. The Supreme Court's desire to keep the frieze of Muhammad, the Justice, prevailed. CAIR probably learned to be tolerant a little bit, I may say.

Let me now get to the final part of my brief exegesis on religious tolerance. A recent PBS documentary covered the linkage between Judaism and Christianity. The documentary showed a dramatization of Jesus Christ's circumcision. Jesus, a born Jew, ought to have been circumcised before third weeks of his birth. This ritual had been historically a social custom in Jewish community for thousands of years.

Many religious scholars find significant similarities between Islam and Judaism. It is as if the two religions are two sides of a coin. How male circumcision became part of Islamic tradition is a puzzle to many. There is no evidence that Prophet Muhammad's ancestors of the Quraysh tribe followed this ancient Judaic practice and there is no historical clue to support this notion. Yet, as male circumcision became part and parcel of Muslim social practices, many Muslims in South Asia even fondly call it Mussalmani or Sunnat.

Although Jesus Christ was definitely circumcised, most of the Christians of the western world did not embrace the ritual as part of their faith. Could these contrasting scenarios be the possible flight paths to probe another historic riddle?

Religion Islam

Islam is a monotheistic,Abrahamic religion originating with the teachings of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad, a 7th century Arab religious and political figure. The word Islam means "submission", or the total surrender of oneself to God (Arabic: الله‎, Allāh).An adherent of Islam is known as a Muslim, meaning "one who submits [to God]". The word Muslim is the participle of the same verb of which Islām is the infinitive. There are between 1 billion and 1.8 billion Muslims, making Islam thesecond largest religion in the world, after Christianity.

Muslims believe that God revealed the Qur'an to Muhammad, God'sfinal prophet, through the angel Gebrail, and regard the Qur'an and the Sunnah (words and deeds of Muhammad) as the fundamental sources of Islam. They do not regard Muhammad as the founder of a new religion, but as the restorer of the original monotheistic faith of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and otherprophets. Islamic tradition holds that Jews and Christians distorted the revealations God gave to these prophets by either altering the text, introducing a false interpretation, or both.

Islam includes many religious practices. Adherents are generally required to observe the Five Pillars Of Islam, which are five duties that unite Muslims into a community.In addition to the Five Pillars,Isamic Law (sharia) has developed a tradition of rulings that touch on virtually all aspects of life and society.This tradition encompasses everything from practical matters like dietary laws and banking to warfare and welfare.Almost all Muslims belong to one of two major denominations,the Sunni (85%) and Shi'a (15%).The schism developed in the late 7th century following disagreements over the religious and political leadership of the Muslim community. Islam is the predominant religion in much of Africa,as well as in major parts of Asia.Large communities are also found in China,the Balkan peninsula in Eastern Europe and Russia.There are also large Muslim immigrant communities in other parts of the world, such as Western Europe.Of the total world Muslim population, about 20% live in the Arab Countries (where Muslims comprise majority populations, with Christian and other religious minorities of differing sizes by country), 30% in the countries of the Indian Subcontinent and 15.6% in Indonesia alone,which is the largest Muslim country in absolute numbers.

6. Talk and Play

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with objects it loves." (Carl Jung)

"The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play." (Arnold Toynbee)

We develop and refine our own models of reality by interacting with others, by checking out our own ideas and attitudes against those of our peers and our elders. This is mainly done through talk, conversation, discussion, and play, and the need for this is all the more urgent now that children are increasingly mesmerised by screens and monitors which detach them from interaction with real people in three-dimensional space with all the extra gestural and emotional cues which real contact with people offers.

Unfortunately, the rigidly prescribed content-heavy curriculum, narrow band of skills, and over-assessment favoured in certain Western school systems (the British National Curriculum, for example), do not foster a "talking" culture. I also know from my experience observing teachers that a climate of inspection and accountability leads to over-managed lessons which deliberately leave no room for spontaneous and unpredictable events, creative departures (including unplanned digressions) or lively discussions, which might "get out of hand" and be construed by inspectors as a breakdown of effective "classroom management" or loss of discipline. Again and again, despite pleas to teachers not to produce supposedly "model" lessons but simply to show their normal practice, I have observed lessons in which nothing is allowed to happen except the "delivery" of a specific "objective". Questioning is geared only to test that knowledge in conformity with the objective has been assimilated. Lateral thinking and divergent questioning is discouraged. This is playing safe, ensuring that the lesson will be at least satisfactory in the eyes of the inspector.

A specific example will suffice. On a training course for inspectors, one of our tasks was to evaluate a lesson on video according to a scale of 0-7, where 0 was excellent, 4 was satisfactory and 7 was very poor. The lesson was one on "creative writing" for a class of Year 5 pupils (9-10 year-olds). Every moment of the lesson was managed. The topic was chosen by the teacher. Every word the children were to use in their "creative" writing was chosen and written on the board by the teacher. When children tried to suggest ideas from their own personal experiences and words from their own vocabularies they were cut short and re-focused sharply on the "objectives" set out by the teacher. The whole lesson was entirely dominated by the teacher. There was virtually no discussion of the topic, no allowance for the alternative ways in which the topic could be approached. I gave it a grade of 6 ("poor") because it had manifestly failed to foster any creative activity or to engage the children through the medium of their own knowledge or experience.

The inspector leading the session commented on my judgment by saying that we had to give it a grade of 4 ("satisfactory") or better because it was a "well-managed lesson". We can see what is happening here: mediocre education is being promoted by the inspection system, because one of the criteria for success in an undisciplined learning environment is that a teacher at least manages to keep control of the class.

This process of strictly manageable objectives reflects a trend which is now increasingly evident even in the approach to "play" amongst very small children. This is the self-contradictory notion of play with "predictable outcomes", a managed kind of "play" in which the thrills of discovery and the unexpected are replaced by pre-determined "objectives" and "targets", and in which natural and infinitely varied objects like sticks and stones are replaced by plastic components. It is not play at all. It is a totally inappropriate transplantation of a rigid performance management culture. In Britain, teachers are now expected to "assess" pre-school children. Over-management is now a disease in the adult workplace, but to impose it on children in their play is a travesty of the nature of play. I dare to say that adults need to learn to play too.

Play relates to talk too, because playful talk is a creative activity in itself. Play can express itself through talk in a variety of ways: in joke-telling, riddling, parody, satire, repartee, dramatic enactment, mimicry, having fun with language - in all kinds of ways.

We need to foster high quality 'talk', including much oral interaction, questioning and discussion in the classroom. We need to facilitate orderly discussion work, including dialectic and debate, so as to foster confident self-expression, respect for alternative points of view, and receptivity to new ideas. The dumbing down even of science programmes on television (which are increasingly little more than special effects shows) means that students are not being taught how to develop and sustain coherent and extended explanations and logical arguments through the process of discourse (thankfully, the quality science programme "Horizon" still does it but it may not be able to hold out for much longer against the theatrical effects and epic music department of dumber programmes).

An Islamic education system geared to excellence needs to show how its methodology facilitates a vibrant culture of conversation and talk within classrooms and the wider school community.

Such a culture is an active learning culture, not a top-down instructional regime based on what Roland Barth calls the "Transmission of Knowledge Model" with its disproportionate amount of didactic teacher talk. Barth reports the estimate of John Goodlad and others that 85 percent of lesson time in American schools is taken up by a prevailing pedagogy based on teachers talking and students listening, occasionally interspersed with teacher-directed discussion.

As Barth points out, "one of the central reasons for the incredible persuasiveness and pervasiveneness of the Transmission of Knowledge model is that it allows learning to be evaluated and numbers attained" and, through these numbers students and teachers can be held "accountable". Einstein speaks of the way in which mere cramming of content undermined his love of science: "One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year."

A wide survey of British secondary schools has revealed that less than ten percent of teacher talk is concerned with the development of higher order thinking skills. Most of it is directed to mere control and management, including keeping order and giving instructions. The rest of it (apart from the paltry amount involved in getting students to think) is low-level transmission of facts and information.

In all of this, we must be true to our commitment to distinguish real education from mere schooling and instruction.