Salaam All, i've gotta say this was a killer event! the brothers that went with me would agree. When we got to the venue we looked at the Q it was going all the way around d massiv building! the atmosphere was very lively! Some ppl were acting very strange somewat guilty ( jaffa lol ).

ne way we finally got in after an hour waiting outside. I saw so many familiar faces everywhere! The speakers included:

 

Moez Masud - young egyptian speaker - very charasmatic and full of energy and hope!

Shaykh Abdul Hakim Murad - He had a slow but witty stlye which I and most of the Audience enjoyed!

Shaykh Ali Goma - The Grand mufti of Egypt - Talked about the examples we need to look for in the Seerah of the Prophet Muhammad (saw).

Professor Tariq Ramadan - 'Be as a gift, not only a gift but a question to the non muslims of the community you live in!' Zidane!! Give Give Give!!!!

Yusuf Islam - was a special guest ask to say a few words!

Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah - 'Save the ship from sinking...' - 'Be as fire fighters...' - The longest talk of the night!

Imaam Sheub Webb  - 'The DMX sydrome!' - 'cry for a few hours, forget it all within a week!'

Shaykh Ali Al Jifri - His linenege goes back to the prophet (saw)

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf - talked about 'the 40yr long war of the horse' & new wife of a leader an arab tribe who made her husband stop the war!

 

Professor Tariq Ramadan - 'Allah is your educator!' - 'no peace without justice, no justice without peace!'

 

Nasheeds followed the event, with performances from:

 

Assalaamu alaikum

I first heard him the day me and JK went to Markfield to the DI Annual Members Meeting, He was asked to join them in the final session to give a short nasihah. I was not really aware of who he was but understood that he was someone who was very highly regarded from the behaviour of everyone else who was there at the time. He spoke about a few areas that we should look to concentrate on. One of the areas he stressed was importance to the youth! I was amazed when he said: [Paraphrasing] "Youth today need Logical anwsers to everything" he talked about how young people are different from young people of the past! I felt glad that there are people like the Professor who understand the issues regarding the youth!

 

He came to Darul Ummah yesterday to talk to the Ulama Council Members abouth the challenges they face and to giv them advice on how best to appoarch them! I was fortunate enough to be there. I learnt he is actually british born and has a residence in africa. He is currently a visitng lecturer for MIHE. He gave the Ulama this advice that they should broaden there knowledge in term of fiqh. he talked about how the muslims should not live in a cacoon, Social ghettos and  should instead have contact with there nieghbors and surrounding community. He mentioned one thing that I can remember very clearly he said if you were selling your house you would tell your relatives or your friends or the muslim family that live  down the street right? well in fact it is actually the right of your nieghbor to know first, regardles of if he is a christian, jew, hindu or any other type of person that you are selling your house. He said its easy for the older generation to keep themselves to themselves but it is not so easy for the youth1 he said that the ulama need to recognise that they need to be well equipted to dal with the questioned the youth will ask. They should be able to provide logical anwsers and speak to them in a language them will understand.

 

To conclude I belive young people can benefit alot from what Professor Salman Al Nadwi has got to offer we all need to take these opportunities to learn from such knowledgable people.

 

Wasalaam Raf

 

 

 

 

MACWORLD SAN FRANCISCO - January 9th, 2007

Apple today introduced iPhone, combining three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, Web browsing, searching and maps — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting users control iPhone with just their fingers. iPhone also ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, which completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones.

“iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone”, said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We are all born with the ultimate pointing device — our fingers — and iPhone uses them to create the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse”.

iPhone is a Revolutionary Mobile Phone
iPhone is a revolutionary new mobile phone that allows users to make calls by simply pointing at a name or number. iPhone syncs all of your contacts from your PC, Mac or Internet service such as Yahoo!, so that you always have your full list of up-to-date contacts with you. In addition, you can easily construct a favourites list for your most frequently made calls, and easily merge calls together to create conference calls.iPhone’s pioneering Visual Voicemail, an industry first, lets users look at a listing of their voicemails, decide which messages to listen to, then go directly to those messages without listening to the prior messages. Just like email, iPhone’s Visual Voicemail enables users to immediately randomly access those messages that interest them most.

iPhone includes an SMS application with a full QWERTY soft keyboard to easily send and receive SMS messages in multiple sessions. When users need to type, iPhone presents them with an elegant touch keyboard which is predictive to prevent and correct mistakes, making it much easier and more efficient to use than the small plastic keyboards on many smartphones. iPhone also includes a calendar application that allows calendars to be automatically synced with your PC or Mac.

iPhone features a 2 megapixel camera and a photo management application that is far beyond anything on a phone today. Users can browse their photo library, which can be easily synced from their PC or Mac, with just a flick of a finger and easily choose a photo for their wallpaper or to include in an email.

iPhone is a quad-band GSM phone which also features EDGE and Wi-Fi wireless technologies for data networking. Apple has chosen Cingular, the best and most popular carrier in the US with over 58 million subscribers, to be Apple’s exclusive carrier partner for iPhone in the US.

iPhone is a Widescreen iPod
iPhone is a widescreen iPod with touch controls that lets music lovers “touch” their music by easily scrolling through entire lists of songs, artists, albums and playlists with just a flick of a finger. Album artwork is stunningly presented on iPhone’s large and vibrant display.

iPhone also features Cover Flow, Apple’s amazing way to browse your music library by album cover artwork, for the first time on an iPod. When navigating your music library on iPhone, you are automatically switched into Cover Flow by simply rotating iPhone into its landscape position.

iPhone’s stunning 3.5-inch widescreen display offers the ultimate way to watch TV shows and movies on a pocketable device, with touch controls for play-pause, chapter forward-backward and volume. iPhone plays the same videos purchased from the online iTunes Store that users enjoy watching on their computers and iPods, and will soon enjoy watching on their widescreen televisions using the new Apple TV. The iTunes Store now offers over 350 television shows, over 250 feature films and over 5,000 music videos.

iPhone lets users enjoy all their iPod content, including music, audiobooks, audio podcasts, video podcasts, music videos, television shows and movies. iPhone syncs content from a user’s iTunes library on their PC or Mac, and can play any music or video content they have purchased from the online iTunes store.

iPhone is a Breakthrough Internet Communications Device
iPhone features a rich HTML email client which fetches your email in the background from most POP3 or IMAP mail services and displays photos and graphics right along with the text. iPhone is fully multi-tasking, so you can be reading a Web page while downloading your email in the background.

Yahoo! Mail, the world’s largest email service with over 250 million users, is offering a new free “push” IMAP email service to all iPhone users that automatically pushes new email to a user’s iPhone, and can be set up by simply entering your Yahoo! name and password. iPhone will also work with most industry-standard IMAP and POP based email services, such as Microsoft Exchange, Apple .Mac Mail, AOL Mail, Google Gmail and most ISP mail services.

iPhone also features the most advanced and fun-to-use Web browser on a portable device with a version of its award-winning Safari Web browser for iPhone. Users can see any Web page the way it was designed to be seen, and then easily zoom in to expand any section by simply tapping on iPhone’s multi-touch display with their finger. Users can surf the Web from just about anywhere over Wi-Fi or EDGE, and can automatically sync their bookmarks from their PC or Mac. iPhone’s Safari Web browser also includes built-in Google Search and Yahoo! Search so users can instantly search for information on their iPhone just like they do on their computer.

iPhone also includes Google Maps, featuring Google’s groundbreaking maps service and iPhone’s amazing maps application, offering the best maps experience by far on any pocket device. Users can view maps, satellite images, traffic information and get directions, all from iPhone’s remarkable and easy-to-use touch interface.

iPhone’s Advanced Sensors
iPhone employs advanced built-in sensors—an accelerometer, a proximity sensor and an ambient light sensor—that automatically enhance the user experience and extend battery life. iPhone’s built-in accelerometer detects when the user has rotated the device from portrait to landscape, then automatically changes the contents of the display accordingly, with users immediately seeing the entire width of a Web page, or a photo in its proper landscape aspect ratio.

iPhone’s built-in proximity sensor detects when you lift iPhone to your ear and immediately turns off the display to save power and prevent inadvertent touches until iPhone is moved away. iPhone’s built-in ambient light sensor automatically adjusts the display’s brightness to the appropriate level for the current ambient light, thereby enhancing the user experience and saving power at the same time.

Pricing & Availability:
iPhone will be available in the US in June 2007, Europe in late 2007, and Asia in 2008, in a 4GB model for US$499 and an 8GB model for US$599, and will work with either a PC or Mac. iPhone will be sold in the US through Apple’s retail and online stores, and through Cingular’s retail and online stores. Several iPhone accessories will also be available in June, including Apple’s new remarkably compact Bluetooth headset.

iPhone includes support for quad-band GSM, EDGE, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 EDR wireless technologies.

iPhone requires a Mac with a USB 2.0 port, Mac OS X v10.4.8 or later and iTunes 7; or a Windows PC with a USB 2.0 port and Windows 2000 (Service Pack 4), Windows XP Home or Professional (Service Pack 2). Internet access is required and a broadband connection is recommended. Apple and Cingular will announce service plans for iPhone before it begins shipping in June.

Learn More About iPhone
To learn more about iPhone, please visit Apple.com or watch the video of the iPhone introduction at www.apple.com/iphone/keynote.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning desktop and notebook computers, Mac OS X operating system, and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital music revolution with its iPod portable music players and iTunes online music store.

Prince Charles, Heir to the British Monarchy in a recent public speech at Oxford University stated:

"If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilisation owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure, which stems, I think, from the straight-jacket of history, which we have inherited. The medieval Islamic world, from central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society, and system of belief, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history."

http://www.muslimheritage.com/Default.aspx

First water pump in world!

Elephant clock

The City Circle promotes the development of a distinct British Muslim identity. It seeks to assist the process of community cohesion and integration by building bilateral strategic alliances between Muslim and non-Muslim communities and harness and channel the skills and resources of Muslim professionals into practical projects thereby facilitating and empowering young Muslim women and men to 'put back in' to the wider British community.

The City Circle is an open circle for open minds. The City Circle provides an atmosphere where individuals are pushed to think outside the box. The City Circle hosts weekly events where ideas develop, the soul is nourished and issues highlighted. It seeks to promote practical and progressive solutions to community problems. The City Circle runs targeted community based projects and highlights social and welfare causes as well as servicing third party initiatives. The City Circle is a registered charity.

Check This Link 4 Some very good Talks:

http://www.thecitycircle.com/pastevents.php

RUDYARD Kipling - not nowadays an author immediately associated with liberal approaches to issues of race and empire - was fond of quoting an Urdu proverb: "Where there are Muslims there is a comprehensible civilisation."

Scroll forward three generations, and bedfellows as strange as Martin Amis, Jean-Marie le Pen and Ayaan Hirsi Ali pen indictments that imply that Islam is not a form of civilisation at all, but its polar opposite. Given the fractious and overheated tenor of much contemporary comment, what is sorely needed is calm explication of the beliefs of both sides.

As part of a more measured debate, Tariq Ramadan's The Messenger is to be welcomed. In part it is a biography of Muhammad, with especial emphasis given to the moral meanings that can be adduced from his life. There are biographies already available in English - notably, from Karen Armstrong and Michael Cook - but one distinction Ramadan offers is that he is, as well as a diligent scholar, a practising Muslim.

This in itself may, unfortunately, be cause for further antagonism rather than the hoped-for clarification. Ramadan, who has been described as "a Muslim Martin Luther" by the Washington Post, was denounced as "more dangerous" than Abu Hamza by a British tabloid newspaper. He was invited to join a UK government task force on terrorism, but had his visa withdrawn by the US for supposedly "providing material support to a terrorist organisation". Such contradictory responses seem indicative of the gulf of misunderstanding that infects any frank discussion of the history and future of Islam.

THE MESSENGER is important, readable and intelligent: in Christian theological terms, it might be described as a work of apologetics. For non-Muslim readers it gives an eloquent account of the religion's founder and his core teachings, dispelling many of the accreted myths and misrepresentations.

For Muslim readers, it re-emphasises the difference between the permanent ideals and their historical manifestations, and does not shirk from problematic issues such as the wearing of the veil (originally, an injunction designed solely to protect the wives of the Prophet). It will take some particularly Machiavellian intellectual gymnastics on the part of Ramadan's detractors to depict this as anything other than a sincere, conciliatory and positive contribution.

There are a number of ways in which Muhammad was a very different kind of prophet. He was born into a society that was already multicultural - a Jew and a Christian were among the first to attribute special significance to him, and his people, the Arab clan of the Quraysh, were polytheistic pagans. He had a career, as a merchant trader, before his religious calling (and Ramadan is acute on the contractual nature of the ethical code he promoted).

Unlike Jesus, he had sons and daughters, and also experienced the grief of losing six children. Unlike Moses, Elijah or Ezekiel, he performed no miraculous resurrections or transformations.

Throughout The Messenger, Ramadan takes pains to stress that Muhammad was an ordinary human being, with all the anxieties, temptations and emotions that make us human, albeit with an extraordinary message. When hectored by enemies about his failure to perform miracles, Muhammad retorted that the Qur'an - the text of which was revealed to him by the angel Jibra'el, and memorised, then transcribed, by his closest companions, since he was illiterate - was the miracle. The humanity of Muhammad is most evident in his relationships with allies and followers, many of whom felt free to ask if a particular strategy or plan was his personal opinion or a direct revelation. Similarly, Ramadan points to Muhammad's encouragement of his followers to cultivate their own conscience and creativity.

Ramadan extrapolates from incidents in the life of the Prophet, and the Qur'anic verses relating to those events, on to modern moral dilemmas. He covers such topics as the treatment of prisoners of war and the proper relationship with believers of other religions; and in each case the message is one of forbearance, mutual respect and patience. Ramadan takes a term like jihad - often, erroneously, now made synonymous with 'crusade' - and shows the multiple meanings and the important contexts. In the first instance, jihad was the struggle against the self's worst impulses. When it became a political struggle, it was against a genocidal campaign waged by the Quraysh. It was never an evangelical war of conversion.

What Ramadan's book reveals most clearly is the difficulties for the curious non-Muslim individual in approaching Islam. The Qur'an is poetic, oblique and almost impossible to render in a language other than Arabic. It is only recently that accurate and adequately annotated versions have been readily available - indeed, the first and most frequently reprinted edition produced by Penguin in 1956 rearranged all the suras - like a Bible that opened with Ephesians and ended with Jonah.

Moreover, the Qur'an is not the "story" of Muhammad, in the way that the Gospels tell us about Jesus or the Pentateuch tells us about Abraham, Joseph and Moses. There is a distinguished and extensive amount of Islamic biography, almost none of which is available in English - including the first biography of the Prophet, the Al-Sirah al-Nabawiyyah of Ibn Hisham. Likewise, it is relatively easy to buy quite esoteric works from other traditions (Meng-tzu, the Apocrypha, Plotinus's Enneads), but you would have to search long and hard for paperback editions of al-Hamadhani, Nezami or Ibn Fadlan.

The Onion, the best satirical magazine in America, recently carried a story with the headline "Local Man Sure He'll Never Understand the Difference Between Sunnis and Shias". It's easy to understand his difficulty. Although there have been some excellent recent books - Malise Ruthven's Islam In The World, Barnaby Rogerson on the heirs of Muhammad, Bruce Lawrence on the Qur'an, Hugh Kennedy on the Abassids and Robert Irwin on Orientalism - anyone inspired by The Messenger would find thin pickings in terms of informative material.

"Islam" itself is sometimes translated as "submission"; and the negative connotations of this are prime material for critics like Hirsi Ali. Ramadan continually explains it as a kind of profound awe in the face of the Almighty. As the German poet Goethe wrote, when studying Muhammad: "If this be Islam, do we not all live in Islam?"

The Messenger: The Meanings Of The Life Of Muhammad
By Tariq Ramadan

Penguin: Allen Lane, £20

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