More reaction to the “Yahya Drama”
Assalamu alaikum / greetings, Ousman Ceesay gives the following account on his blog regarding the "Yahya drama" as he calls it, wherein Yahya Jammeh is seen "healing / curing" HIV / AIDS patients. The following account goes thusly:
"It is one thing to read about the madness that is Yahya’s claim to have a cure for AIDS, but to see the drama with your own eyes in moving video is priceless. Our scandanavian based brother Buharry captured the treatment session broadcast live on Gambian television on video. The session is interlaced with recitations from the holy Quran while Yahya could be seen in some scenes rubbing some kind of ointment on semi-nude women. How is that for all the religiosity he waxes poetic about."
Ugh! Why didn’t someone tell me? Or maybe they were just trying to save me the stress! Because I was already upset that the "treatment sessions" were interspersed with the recitations of the Qur’an which I found sickening enough!
Anyway, I’d wanted to leave a comment, but the visual verification is enabled and the "listen link" is not working. (as it turns out, I did eventually have help posting this to his blog). However, I really don’t know what else to add but "semi-nude women"?, oh that is real good!
Ugh, that is just sickening to me, and the image that popped in to my head when I read that was, well, eeewww! I got the creepy crawlies just thinking about it!
And there is some more footage on Buharry’s site, he has put up more footage of Yahya Jammeh supposedly treating asthma patients! And from what I’ve heard, the statements from the people who were "treated" are unconvincing.
However, by that time, I just didn’t have the stomach to listen anymore! As I said, hearing that poor child crying was enough to just about send me into tears myself! It’s one thing if grown-ups believe all of this, but when they subject their small children to this, and then bribe them with clothes, sneakers, etc., afterwords, and according to the person describing the scene to me, make fun of the child as well, well, that was just about it for me!
And this is the guy that the majority of Gambians, who bothered to vote anyway, said they wanted as their leader so what can you do? And the ones who didn’t vote, well, if they are complaining about their current situation, they have no right to complain. Say what you want about the disunity of the opposition, but even if the so-called tribalist Ousainou, who some seem to hate more than Yahya Jammeh, were elected (oh the horror), I don’t think you’d find him going on national TV, and even with an international audiance, proclaiming to be some kind of traditional / natural healer who can cure AIDS, asthma, diabetes, etc., and only God knows what it will be next week!
Jammeh is making a national disgrace of himself and The Gambia as a whole! I even heard a parody about the whole thing on, I think it was Network Africa, or some BBC programming! So, instead of people wowing over him, like I’m sure he’d like, they are laughing at him, or at least, the sensible ones are, or they are outright condemning him. If Halifa Sallah or Ousainou Darboe would have been elected, you’d not have seen this kind of foolishness!
But anyway, it seems that some think that Ousainou is just like Jammeh, tribalism and all, and when you have a member of NADD campaigning for the APRC candidate in the recent Parliamentary elections, well, you’ve just got some major problems in the party that was supposed to be the hope of all Gambians. So, basically, it seems to me that you have some who have such a personal disdain for Ousainou Darboe, to the extent that they will campaign for a party whose leader has been responsible for all kinds of trouble, just because they don’t want the opposition candidate, who is a member of the party whose leader they seem to dispise, to win the seat! Which makes me wonder sometimes who, in the opposition, really wants Jammeh to go? Or do any of them? I read something somewhere, basically stating the opinion that none of the opposition really wants Jammeh out, because they are not forceful enough, and they are just content to remain "the opposition".
I don’t know how true that is, so I don’t want to go there. But, suffice it to say, I don’t buy the "Gambians didn’t vote because they were so disenchanted wit the break-up of the opposition that they … " either felt they didn’t have a clear choice, or they wanted to get back at the oppostion somehow. Yeah, and hurt themselves int he process. And I just find all of those excuses to be hooey to me, the people had a clear choice, and it seems that most cchose the status quo, or money, or whatever inducements were handed out to keep them from voting, and they have no one to blame but themselves for that. Democracy only works when you participate, if you don’t participate in the electing of your own leaders and representatives, if you don’t make your voice heard, then democracy doesn’t work. And as they are only 4? opposition members of parliament now, the Gambian people are seeming to say that they are happy with their lot, that they think Jammeh is OK, and that an almost one-party state is OK with them.
Anyway, getting back to the oppositional split, everyone wants to blame *one man* for the break-up of NADD? OK, fine, you want to blame one man, sure, but it’s not Darboe? Who is it? Figure that one out for yourself, if you want to put the blame on *one person*, but I’ll give you a hint, it was a NADD member who campaigned for an APRC candidate, not a UDP one. So what does that say? Wa Juwara would have rather supported a murderous regime, than to either campaign himself (which he could have done, why didn’t he?), or see the UDP candidate get elected. What does that say about NADD? And why don’t the NADD supporters want to address this? Is NADD really the "hope for all Gambians" that some said so loudly and vehemently that they were? But no! They still want to blame Darboe! However, if you have a member of your organization who would so quickly turn on you and support the ruling party, what does that say? You can get upset at the UDP /NRP for breaking from NADD, but goodness! At least they didn’t go and join and campaign for the APRC!
And when this was brought up, someone said "oh a UDP candidate did the same thing, why aren’t you saying something about that!?" And my answer to that question is, that is not relevant here! The truth is, NADD, and by extention its members, were supposed to be "the big hope for all Gambians", they were supposed to be the revolutionary change for Gambian politics! But they weren’t! They were not, for whatever reason, able to check whatever personal problems they had between them at the door, and thus be able to come together to draft a way forward for Gambians. And for wahtever reason, the coalition did not work out. And I think that many were responsible for the break-down of NADD, and I’m not going to get into that now.
But you just can’t help people, the majority of whom, seem content with things as they are! In America, we’ve got an election coming up of our own, I think I’ll concentrate on that for a while!
Because you can’t help people who don’t want to be helped! It’s like drug addicts, or people in abusive relationships, you on the outside might be able to see their problem all too clearly, and they may even know they have a problem themselves, but they don’t want to do the hard work that it takes to change their situation. So they continue the destructive behavior, continue the downward spiral, which, in turn, makes things ever worse for them, until they decide that enough is enough for them and they take steps to break the cycle!
And Yahya Jammeh, like the addictive drug, or the abusive spouse, will forever get increasingly worse! He will become more abusive, and "increasing doses" of his madness would be needed in order to make the people think that he is invencible, super-human, and that nothing can get rid of him but God, and that even if the people don’t like him, tough! He is here to stay, and no "democracy" can change that.
Jammeh only has as much power as the people allow him to have! Once you challenge a bully, I mean really challenge him, they normally revert to the cowards they actually are and run away! Or, they summon their military men, the ones loyal to them, to subdue the people that they are challenging, but you *can’t* kill everyone, else you will have nothing or no one left to rule! If the people in Guinea or Senegal, or all of the many other places can challenge their leaders to be accountable, than what about The Gambia? There is no reason why the Gambian people can not stand up and demand change. That is, unless they *don’t* want change. And that is all I have to say for now, I could go on and on, but I won’t! It all just makes me too tired!
Footage of President? Jammeh Treating HIV /AIDS Patients! (you’ve got to see this, that is if you have a strong stomach)
Assalamu alaikum, I would say you’ve got to see this, but this is absolutely pathetic! And heartbreaking, they actually force a small child to be "treated"!
I almost cried hearing this poor child scream! And these "treatments" are interspersed with the recitation of the Qur’an! Of all things! Anyway, click here to watch, if you dare! I mean, really, it’s one thing to read about this in the news, or hear about it secondhand, but to see it!? Now that is a completely different matter!
The Absp;ite Inaccessibility of RealPlayer!
comes another rant about inaccessibility!
I was trying to burn a CD (am still trying to burn it as I type this), using RealPlayer. Now, the tracks I’d downloaded came from Rhapsody (where you can find a lotof nasheeds by the way), so you either have to use Rhapsody (which is completely inaccessible as far as trying to burn a CD goes), or you can use RealPlaery. Now, the problems I have with RealPlayer are many! Firstly, the keyboard shortcuts given in the Help documentation don’t seem to work (or they dont’ seem to work as far as I can tell). Neither does the Jaws commands, as they are for earlier versions of RealPlayer.
Also, when you tab arround the screen (assuming you don’t get stuck in a window which says "click here to find out more!" which I’m assuming is some sort of ad), when you tab to something, say "burn your CD", and hit your spacebar, as you would normally do when you come to a button like that, it will either do nothing, or do something entirely different than what you had wanted it to do! This morning, it was to play a song which I’d not even selected to put on my CD!
Now, for many programs which have not been the most accessible, if you just take your Jaws cursor andmove around the screen, most of the itme, you can find what you’re looking for and click on it. Now, the way I normally do this is to use the Control Tab key combination, find what I want and click on it. Now, Jaws will not let me do this! Thus, what I have to do is just use the plain arrow keeys, which means going space by space and hearing "blank blank blank blank" until I find the button I want, assuming that I even find it all and I don’t end up, say at the top of the screen when the button I’m looking for is at the bottom!
As you can imagine, trying to burn a CD, with such an inaccessible product, can be tedious and time-consuming, when it shoudl only tkae a few minutes!
And becuase online music providers (well most of them anyway) have come up with their own proprietary software that you have touse to burn their music, that means that I can’t just go and use a more accessible product. And Napster and Windows Media Player aren’t much better, at least the last time I tried them, and I liked the way that Real Player burns their CD’s anyway! Or better yet, I’d rather use Winamp which is a whole heck of a lot more accessible than RealPlayer. But as I said before, I can’t use it!
Anyway, Inshallah, I’ll come back and correct any typing (or other) erros! I’m just writing this while the CD was actually burning. Now, I’ve got to go and try this again! If anyone has any hints, please let me know! Because I just sat here for like 30 minutes trying to find the "burn your CD button, I mean, Jaws would read it, but the cursor wouldn’t actually be on it! I don’t know how to expalin that, maybe a blind computer user would understand! They really need to start hring more of us to test their products for accessibility! But I guess they think we can just get our sighted friends and family members to help us and they won’t have to invest that kind of time or money in making their products not only visually appealing but easy for someone with little or no vision to use as well.
And I’m so drained from this whole experience that I don’t even feel like putting any categories on the post!
Comments!
Assalamu alaikum, against my "better judgment", I’ve set comments to unmoderated. I apologize in advnace if an offensive comment gets through, and if that happens, I’ll try to take it down ASAP. We’ll see if tis makes it easier for people to comment, since I’ve had some people say that they have found it hard to comment on my blog, etc. So we’ll see if this doesn’t liven the discussion up a bit.
Super Bowl!
Assalamu alaikum, talk about really letting this dunya get the best of me, the Indianapolis Colts won the Super Bow last night!
Not as someone who is originally from Indiana, this is just absolutely wonderful for me!
I remember when the Colts first moved to Indianapolis. Now, I was about 8 or 9 years old or so, so I really don’t remember the specifics of how it happened, it was just like, all of a sudden, we had a football team! And I remember my dad would listen to the Colts games when we would be going to take me to meet the bus on Sunday afternoons, which would take me back to the school for the blind in Indianapolis.
and what I do remember is that the Colts pretty much couldn’t win a game to save thier lives! I mean, I think they were about the losingest team, at least it seemed that way to me!
So, for them to come back and wint he SuperBowl, is just well, exciting! It’s just too bad the Pacers couldn’t do the same when they made it to the NBA finals back in, goodness when was it, 2000? Was it that year or 2001? I can’t remember now lol.
But anyway. I’ll say a big Woo-hoo! and be gone for now!
Inshallah, tomorrow I’ll post my thoguhts on a new adapative technology toy I’m trying called FreedomBox, and I’m waiting on my Key to Freedom, which is a screen-reader called System Access which is loaded on to a U3 smart drive which allows you to plug the device into any comptuer which has anything from Windows 98 or later running on it and a USB port, and the software will start running off of the smart drive and will immediately start talking, thus you don’t have to install it onto the comptuer you are using.
I can think of a million reasons why this would be helpful, but Inshallah, once I try it, I’ll post my thoughts.
And the same for FreedomBox. But in the mean time you can go here to read more about the company behind Freedom Box, Ssytem Access, and their other products.
Clarification and more thoughts « Umar Lee
Assalamu alaikum, Umar Lee gives a clarification to his series regarding the "rise and fall of the Salafi dawa" in the US. I left a comment on his blog but am posting it below also. I really wish I could do a better job of conveying my "misgivings", as it wre, regarding the "Salafi dawa", while at the same time, also conveying the message that, in actuality, I don’t mean any ill will toward anyone who choses this path. Though I’m sure that some "traditional Muslims" have labelled the "Salafi dawa" as deviant, I hesitate in doing so, as well, I don’t have the knowledge to do that, and secondly, I’m not sure that I really feel comfortable with using a label which I don’t like, nor want, applied to msyelf, thus, I just wont’ use it on others! I’ll leave that to the schoalrs who actually know what they are doing. But anyway, find my htoguths below. After this, I’ll really do my best to try and stay away fromt he issue. And Inshallah, I’ll concentrate on pleasing and coming lcoser to Allah, and try my best not to worry too much about *mere mortals* will think or say of me.
Comments begin:
Assalamu alaikum, "following the madhhab of the Prophet" "following the Qur’an and Sunnah", all of that sounds really good. OK, so let’s just forget that I follow a madhhab for a second. Let’s just say that I came to Islam today, and don’t know anything except La ilaha ill Allah, Muhammadah Rasulullah.
Where do I go from here? If I want to "follow the Qur’an and Sunnah", where do I go? Who are the "correct" scholars, and who are the "deviant" ones? When you talk about Fiqh? What kind of "fiqh" do you follow? Who or what do you take your knowledge from? When you talk about "referring it back to the Qur’an and Sunnah" "the book and the messenger" how do you go about doing this?
What if I don’t know Arabic? Are the English translations of the Qur’an, Bukhari and Muslim, etc., are they good translations?
When you take into account the thousands of ahadith which are out there, how do you try to operationalize this and make this in to the "Sunnah"? Do you think that the hadith and Sunnah are the same thing? Do you think that Muslims were deviant from the time of the Salaf until Ibn Tamiyah came along? What of the disagreements between the prophet’s companions and the salaf as a whole? Should there be differences of opinion on a given issue? Would you think or consider that the prophet may have done something differently, such as praying in a slightly different way at a given time, as an example?
What exactly do you think is *wrong* with the people who do not follow the Salafi dawa? Where do you think we stand as Muslims? Do you think we are deviants, hypocrites, kafir?
Do you think that those of us who do not subscribe to the Salafi dawa are "not following the Quran and Sunnah"? If not, how so? What do you think we are doing wrong?
And all of these questions, along with the comments regarding your series of posts, are exactly why I *can’t* follow the Salafi dawa. Because which "dawa" is correct? Because even in the "Salafi dawa", you see people labeling Shaykh So-and-So as "on the haqq", while at the same time labelling another shaykh as "off it", as you term it, or "deviatn", or whatever. Is this really "getting back to the Qur’an and Sunnah"?
Methinks not. Getting back to the Quran and Sunnah means following what Allah commands of us, and staying away from what He dislikes. It means following the Sunnah, and this doesn’t mean quoting a few ahadith here and there, and making a ruling from that, but trying to find out, exactly how the Prophet lived, how he treated people, his wives, his family, his neighbors, his companions, and try to exemplify that! "traditional", as it has come to be called, does not mean "progressive", or a "watered-down" "feel-good" version of Islam. In fact, it seems to me that "traditional Muslims" and "Salafis", really have a lot more in common than we do wit the "progressives", etc. However, when reading comments and reading things by some who call to the "Salafi dawa", you’d think that they were the only "real" Muslims, and the rest of us are at best, "deviant" or "astray", and at worst, "kafir", or at least, heading dangerously close to kufr. It’s almost as if the rest of us aren’t even Muslim at all, which as we see, can lead to a dangerous slope, as it pertains to declaring Muslims as apostates, and then having the very fringe groups saying it is thus OK to kill them. It would seem to me that even if one follows the "Salafi dawa", there has to be some recognition as to the danger of abandoning the seeking of knowledge, or Islamic scholarship entirely for a "cut-and-paste" "everything reduced to a slogan", "anyone can be a scholar and make a fatwa" kind of Islam.
But anyway, my point is, to me, the "Salafis" are not much different than those who would call themselves"Traditionalists", though I’m not sure I really like that word! I’d say that all of us are trying to follow the Qur’an and Sunnah, and I don’t think that any orthodox practicing Muslim worth their salt would say otherwise.
Even Salafis have to have some sort of methodology, some sort of fiqh (which is all a madhhab really is anyway). You have to have some methodology for deriving rulings and applying them in daily life. Not everyone has that ability. Not everyone can just go through the Qur’an, go through the varius collections of ahadith, and pick out rulings. We, even Salafis, have to follow people who know more than us, and get rulings from them.
To me "following the madhhab of the prophet and his companions" sounds good, but how, in actuality, do you put that into practice? To me, a "traditionalist" would say that you would pick a madhhab, as the four madhhabs do use the Qur’an and haddith to derive rulings (and you think that we dont?).
Basically, what I’m saying is that the slogans of "following the Qur’an and Sunnah", or "following the madhhab of the prophet", just don’t work, unless you can come up with some sort of framework to put those sorts of things into practice. My question is, among many others by now, is how do the Salafis do that? What is their foundation for their methodology? OK, "following the Qur’an and Sunnah" I get that, but how? How does the average, every day (and dont’ forget I’ve not put my madhhabi cap back on yet), Muslim do this? Let’s say I follow Scholar A today, but then all of a sudden, receive an email from a group declaring that Scholar A is "off the manhaj", what do I do? How do I, as an average, every day Muslim, know who is right and who is wrong? Do you see where this could get very confusing? Do you see how this could be not only confusing, but damaging to the faith of converts?
Anyway, I’m, frankly, getting very exhausted over this whole discussion. Watching the turn the comments on your series has taken is enough to make me want to stay as clear away from the "Salafi dawa", as I can. And frankly, perhaps this is the wrong place to either ask my questions or explain my position, because to the Salafis, or to most of them anyway, those of us who ascribe to "traditional Islam", are deviants who are not "following the Quran and Sunnah" anyway, (I mean why would your slogan need to be "going back to the Qur’an and Sunnah" anyway if you thought that "traditional" Muslims were already doing this?) and perhaps you feel that our questions just don’t need to be answered.
There may indeed be many cultural things that many Muslims have mixed up into Islam, however, throwing away 1,000 years of Islamic scholarship in the name of "going back to the Salaf us Salih" just doesn’t seem right to me, it’s like re-inventing the wheel, or throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Perhaps the healing can start by firstly not criticizing Muslims who follow a different "manhaj" than yourself, and also realizing that there may be different opinions on a given issue, and perhaps once people realize that there are more than *one way* or *one group of scholars* who are suitable to follow, we might start getting somewhere as Muslims. Perhaps instead of making sarcastic, snide remarks against scholars whose particular "manhaj" you don’t agree with, perhaps you, as somehow who says they follow the "Salafi dawa", could work on putting that house in order
Personally, we as Muslims are in some serious trouble and it’s really going to take some serious house-cleaning, both individually or collectively, before we can get our house in order. Going back to some mythical time, that perhaps never existed anyway (as there were schisms among the Muslims soon after the prophet’s death anyway), just isn’t going to work. Saying "Oh well the traditioanl Muslims had deviants among them too", doesn’t take away from the fact that there might be some "deviants" within the "Salafis" as well. And certain strains of "Salafism", such as the jihadi / takfiri varieyt, you can’t just sweep them under the rug, prtend it is the figment of the evil mind of the Western media’s imagination, and then just not address those and other issues which are uncomfortable to you.
But I guess it’s easier,and I include myself in this, to criticize everyone else, point out everyone else’s shortcomings, than it is to work on your own shortcomings and to strive to make yourself a better person.
