Maa shaa Allah Ginny I haven’t spent a lot of time on the blog circuit these days so I had no idea you were married. Mabrook!

Happy Thanksgiving and Eid mubarak!

UmmZaynab

I wasn’t clear in my comment (and I thought about my comment not being clear when I closed out… tells us to think twice before submitting). The fact that his brother is a Muslim, that he visited the Muslim world, and the fact that the rumours were spread, not only once, is reason enough to assume the possibility. When I read Shaykh Hamza Yusuf’s article I took it and decided that Allah is Merciful. If he didn’t, it doesn’t take from my Iman, but if he did, it does increase my Iman. We love when more people take shahadah alhamdulillah.

Now, when we get into the specifics of the Muslim community, I agree with you. I’ve never known a Muslim to report another Muslim for any reason, and I have been in social situations where a Muslim starts to talk about something bad a fellow Muslim has done, and the conversation becomes one sided as the rest of the group grow increasingly uncomfortable with it.

I grew up outside of the community, though, so I don’t feel qualified to say too much about it, except to say that I think protecting victims of abuse trumps societal niceties, etc., in my opinion.

That’s so touching! I love my little sister too.

My sis has always been self-conscious about a certain aspect of her appearance, but to me she has always been beautiful. There was a time in the mid-1990s when I felt really ill and had chronic low energy, and I was wandering aimlessly around Croydon, where I lived then. I saw a group of young women come towards me, and I noticed how beautiful one of them was, and it was only afterwards that I realised that it was her. (She was 16 then.) I heard my Mum tell someone later that I had told her that I saw my sis in public and “suddenly noticed that she was a pretty girl”, and I suppose it was the first time it had struck me like that, but what I really remember was that I saw a beautiful woman first, then my sister.

Sadly, we grew apart somewhat as teenagers. I remember how close we were when I was 12, and we used to play kick-fight games on the sofa and that sort of thing. After I came back from boarding school, we didn’t talk so much. We have very different personalities; she makes friends much easier, she has got herself into jobs very easily, and she is much more practical than I am.

I love my sister.

Hope they meet again in the playoffs.

Secondly, the thing is… I don’t think New England was even close enough for a field goal! They were on their own 28 or 29 and it was 4th and I think 2. Either way, they were ahead and should’ve punted it away! Instead, they decided to attempt to go for it! Apparently, they didn’t think our defense could hold them! That or perhaps they didn’t trust their own defense with giving the Colts the ball back with 2 minutes to go. Who knows but it was a terrible call on their part!

Having said that… as a Colts fan I’m not unhappy about it either! I can’t stand the Patriots and root for anyone in the world to defeat them, most especially the Colts! So I’ll take it!

I feel the same way – I had shocking experiences at boarding school, particularly when I was around 12 or 13 and they still sting years later. The school was meant to be very specialised but the staff were completely untrained, many of them apparently out of the army or navy and others who had been in the same system for years and knew no other way. The thuggish delinquents were allowed to get away with anything, and those who couldn’t fight were told not to provoke them as they basically weren’t responsible for their actions. I suspect that the staff actually admired and, in one or two cases, fancied the thugs.

I also remember what a shock it was to go from somewhere where I was a member of a family, a tightly-knit group, to an environment where I was at the bottom of the pile or just another “little shit” – actually not everyone was a little shit, only those who complained or said things weren’t right, but wouldn’t or couldn’t fight. I’ve had one guy telling me I sounded bitter and twisted, but this was someone who was at the top of the pile.

The friend I introduced you to (I won’t name her here, just in case people are reading who don’t know who I mean) said on an old blog that she was also abused and raped when she was at blind school in Canada in the 1990s. When she was in hospital a few years ago following a spinal cord injury, she had doctors trying to put her away in a nursing home because they couldn’t imagine that someone that disabled could possibly be independent (she even said that they got a psychiatrist to check her out so that she could be declared incompetent, but the psych said that she was the most competent person there!). I got the impression that the prospect of being institutionalised distressed her far more than being paralysed, which kind of shocked me. But perhaps it shouldn’t, given that I have some idea of what sort of things go on in them, and if you’re blind and paralysed then you might be able to speak out but not do much about them. I don’t know about Canadian nursing homes, but British ones are often full of underpaid staff who don’t speak good English and have no idea of how to treat the residents, and have no personal connection with them.

I wasn’t aware until yesterday that apologies were being delivered by both the Australian and the British Prime Ministers. I remember watching a mini-series (called The Leaving of Liverpool) about the child slavery racket in the 1990s. I read in the local paper back in Croydon of one boy who escaped being deported to Canada by hiding in the woods (he had family, but the state would not let him live with them), and the ship he was due to be deported on hit an iceberg and sank. There was an enormous racist element to it: the Australian government was saying that the country was in danger of being overrun by “Asiatics” and wanted kids of “English stock” or “white stock”. Also, Australia and Canada were then considered to be empty countries while Britain was perceived as overcrowded, so the British wanted rid of them much more than it wanted to help the kids or their families, and the Australians and Canadians were glad of the cheap labour. I think apologies are not enough; they need to compensate the victims, if necessary out of the funds of the organisations involved, particularly the churches.

I just voted for you.

Way to go, Rawkstar!!!!!!

Hope you win it!

Yeah that’s a good one. I’m sure it’s in there somewhere, but the way the concept gets elevated by some into this foundational principle for all our dealings with the non-muslims (Hating someone for the sake of Allah? Ick.) and withholding judgement about anyone calling themselves a muslim (“You don’t know what their intentions were”, said the imam on Friday, September 14.) is very strange.

There’s a pdf of an essay by Shaykh Salman Al-Oadah that puts wala and bara’a into perspective if you’re interested: “Between Natural and Religious Loyalties“.

See, I guess I had it lucky, because for the most part I was a day student, until HS when I started getting into extracurriculars and/or started working. Now I think that was for the best. And I did manage to get the public school experience, but it started in 6th grade, which is almost the time you were leaving.

As for the site you’re referring to, I’ve not gotten to check it out yet. Perhaps I’ll give it a look tomorrow, or some night when I don’t have a football game that demands my attention, LOL.