Children of Gaza, run to the angels

By Suzanne Baroud
Ironically, it was in Palestine, 20 years ago, that I concluded that there is no God. For how could a God, who claims to love all and treat all with impartiality, allow such horrors like those in Palestine to happen?
This unbelief grew stronger with each curfew, with each strike that mourned the death of yet one more martyr, with a decapitation induced by gunfire in the main square on a sunny Ramallah afternoon so many years ago. But it was cemented the day I had to tell one of my fifth grade students that his brother had just been taken away by the Israeli army. His expression, his body going limp, the shuddering of his shoulders as he wept with his classmates…that’s what finally did it.

Nearly 20 years have passed since that day, and I have now married into a Gazan family. I am a wife and mother, the sister and aunt of so many kids living the horror of what Gaza has become. As we watch the footage of Israel’s onslaught, I hear myself, whispering as I see one more martyred child, “Run to the angels….run.” After so many years, this living nightmare is fostering a burning desire to believe once again in the afterlife.

Caged, starved, sniped, suffocated. They are slaughtered like sheep, but the leaders of the free world just cannot seem to find a moment to comment. Golfing, vacationing, Obama, Bush, even the EU, they just aren’t important enough. My mutterings have become a like a canter. I call out to these stricken and shattered little bodies, who frankly never experienced life to lose it. The only consolation to offer is the respite found in death.

A crowd gathers, shrouded in gas, smoke and dust. In the front stand eight young fathers, each holding a white swaddled bundle of what used to be a son, a daughter. For a few moments there is no screaming, no chanting or crying, but a moment of quiet and stillness that presses one to wonder just whom has been granted the greater mercy, the toddler who caught the snipers bullet, or the young father, who will have to find some way to live beyond this moment?

A young boy sits on the sidewalk beside his mother. She is propped up against the wall of a collapsed building and her life is bleeding out all over the sidewalk. It is spattered on his face and smeared on his shirt. She uses the last of her strength to lift her arm and clutch his cheek in her palm and then she is gone. He rests his head in his hands and cries. He is all alone.

The camera zooms in on the scene of a freshly detonated building, a civilian home. A little girls brown curly hair covered in dust and eyes wide open is all that can be found of her. Her mother wails and pulls her hair while her father frantically searches among the rubble for the rest of his daughter, where could she be? I whisper again, “you will be made whole again in Paradise. Run to the angels”.

What amazing faith. What strong devotion that a father loses his mother, father, wife and eight children, that this man before anything can assert, “God is Great, Thank God for Everything”. He holds his child, now still and ashen, he smothers him with kisses and then gently pulls back the sheet to expose two bullet holes in his chest. He then tenderly places the child beside his brother and again, pulls the sheet back of his youngest son to reveal a single snipers bullet to the chest. He can barely compose himself and he moans to the sympathizing camera man, “God is Great, Thank God for Everything”.

An old and wrinkled Imam so lovingly cradles a little girl’s lifeless body, as if mishandling her now could inflict more pain, he mumbles a benediction and gently lies her beside her sisters and her brothers in the mass grave. I try to comfort her, saying, “Finally, a place of safety. Rest beside your sister. Your brother. Put your fears to rest and meet your beloved Prophet and the many of your little friends who have fallen before you.”

Hospitals, schools, mosques, civilian homes, UN shelters, all worthy targets. Doctors, medicines, food and water, truckloads of relief from all corners of the world line up for miles at the Egyptian border but they are refused entry. Security is high, food is scarce, water is completely gone.

Faith seems to spring forth in the strangest of moments. For me, it seems to be coming full circle out of desperation and in agony, for the sake of the snow-white souls of the many bloodied and dismembered innocents of Gaza.

UN workers coordinate with Israelis to get civilians to safety inside a UN school. Hundreds are tucked inside the mutually agreed safe haven. Soon after, the school comes under Israeli fire. Bruised and battered refugees stare Satan in the face, clad in his fatigues. Hundreds wounded, scores dead, many lost and unaccounted for.

Governments negotiate a cease-fire. Rumors buzz of conspiracies. The U.S. President-elect is forever silent. Parents search beneath the collapsed walls for what remains of their children. Shattered concrete, random arms and legs, broken glass, tossed together in a bloody hodge-podge. But, in my mind, I see them whole, their little bodies swiftly being swept up into Paradise and I call out to them, “Run!”

-- Suzanne Baroud is the Managing Editor of PalestineChronicle.com.

Source: AJP

Paris' Grand Mosque is at center of effort to build a moderate French Islam (1)

By Daniel Strieff

PARIS — Mustapha Tougui says he has the Quran in his blood. The Moroccan-born, Saudi-educated lecturer at the Muslim theological institute at the Paris Grand Mosque uses earthy language as he tries to preserve what he calls his students’ “spiritual hygiene.” His enthusiasm is infectious.

"If you eat always your mother's cooking, what a pity. I like other cooking, and Islam invites me (to appreciate) that. Islam shows me that," Tougui said as his students laughed. "The situation is a bit difficult now because (terrorists) give us an image and it's too difficult to clean … this dirt from the image of Islam."

The government hopes that moderates like Tougui at this Algerian government-funded mosque will play a leading role as this country tries to forge a so-called French Islam — one that is not only compatible with Islamic tradition but also palatable to the French government, mainstream society and, not least of all, Muslims themselves.
The mosque is serving as a kind of incubator for a moderate strain of France's second religion, which the government hopes will head off any drift toward radicalism within Europe's largest Muslim minority.

"We are an open Islam," Dr. Djelloul Seddiki, the head of the theological institute at the mosque, said. "But there are other Islams in France," including fundamentalists and radicals, he said.

The Paris Grand Mosque oversees the affairs of around 400 of the 1,800 facilities described as mosques throughout France, which can include simple one-room structures. The head of the mosque, Dr. Dalil Boubakeur, described by the Le Monde newspaper as "the ideal Muslim," is the most prominent Muslim in France and a friend of President Jacques Chirac.

"We prefer that [the radicals] are inside than outside, because it keeps them close," Seddiki said. "The best defense is education."

That's where Tougui comes in.
The 56-year-old's courses are open to all, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The mosque's theological institute also runs courses that it hopes will train a new generation of French-born imams, which is a hot topic in France.

"I hope to bestow the right religion so that they can educate themselves. I want to preserve them from spiritual pollution," Tougui said.

"Unfortunately you have very few teacher-lecturers who know how to lecture. They have gold in their hands, but they don't know how to manage it," he said.

France, along with other countries across Europe, is eager to limit its dependence on foreign imams.

"In the mosque, if the imam is not a French citizen and if he does not speak French, you can not speak about a 'French Islam'," Seddiki said.
Imams expelled
In 2004, at a time when the Interior Ministry estimated that perhaps two-thirds of France's imams were not citizens, the government began expelling foreign clerics judged to be preaching hate.

All students enrolled at the government-sanctioned courses at the Paris mosque who ultimately want to become imams must prove proficiency in French. The mosque is working with secular universities to allow Muslims also to study French history, civics and culture alongside other students, Seddiki said.

"The demand is growing because the new generation, they don't want to be preached by a poorly educated guy coming from Pakistan or Egypt, and who speaks bad French. They are not interested," said Dr. Olivier Roy, professor at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris and the author of "Globalized Islam."

But Roy is skeptical about how wide an impact this effort could have, particularly in the poor suburbs, where experts like him have warned of the possibility that radical strains of Islam could take hold.

"You can have a well-trained and relatively well-paid imam only when you have a huge constituency and, by definition, in the suburbs they have no huge constituency. But you can find some of these large constituencies in Bordeaux, in Lille, in Lyon, in Paris … (there) you have a bourgeoisie, or a growing Muslim middle class. But in the suburbs it's a different story," he said.

The government financed the construction of the mosque in 1926 as a gesture of thanks to Muslims from France's colonies who fought for the then-colonial power in World War I. The complex, just across the street from the Jardin des Plantes in southeast Paris, is the oldest mosque in France.
France's oldest mosque
Built as a hybrid of Islamic styles, the imposing structure features a large, sunken garden, fountains and a 33-meter high minaret. The internal courtyards, lined with Andalusian mosaics, are offset by dark eucalyptus and cedar trim. The mosque's adjoining cafe and restaurant, which serves North African cuisine such as couscous, tajine and sweet mint tea, is popular with tourists and Parisians alike.

In 2003, the government hand picked Boubakeur, the mosque's rector, to head the newly created Council of the Muslim Faith, which was intended to be an official interlocutor between Muslims and the government, although questions have lingered about the Council's effectiveness.

In France, as elsewhere in Europe, traditional Islamic practices are being influenced by conditions specific to the broadly-defined West, helping to forge what some observers have called “Euro-Islam.”

A key issue for Muslim immigrants is how to adjust to the pluralism so deeply ingrained in European society, said Dr. Jocelyn Cesari, a French expert on Islam. "This is the major challenge," she said.

"Muslims adapt to contexts, and the contexts in turn shape the kinds of reactions they may have," Cesari, a professor at Harvard and the author of "When Islam and Democracy Meet."

Source : msnbc