Subscribe to RSSA quick one while I’m away
Related to the previous post, Popaghandi has another post about the Bush visit. There’s also a pretty good discussion going in the comments of the post.
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Umm Yasmin from Dervish (from whom I nicked the theme for my blog) has some good posts in her Make Poverty History speech and “What does the word Islam mean?”.
The Prophet Muhammad , peace and blessings be upon him, is reported to have said that “poverty leads to disbelief”. That is not to say that the poor are unbelievers, or that the lack of material wealth is reflective of the morality of a person - indeed in the mystical tradition of Islam, as in other faiths, living a life of abstinence is seen as a great virtue.
What the Prophet is referring to, rather, is that when people live in oppressive, unstable societies on the margins of existence - and when we let them continue to live this way - then this leads to the breakdown of society. At this point, normal and health relationships break down as people attempt to fulfil their most basic needs of survival. We see this hopelessness, despair and nihilism in the act of the suicide bomber whose mother has been raped, whose father has been killed, whose house has been razed, and whose humanity and life has been sacrificed at the alter of evil.
More frighteningly, we also see it in the marginalised young men who are perhaps not surviving on less than US$1 a day, but who are alienated from our abundantly rich societies in which pay lip-service to equality and freedom but whose leaders and politicians constantly feed the message that there are two classes of people: us and them. In the past, it might have been easy to ignore the suffering of people who live on the other side of the world, or even turn a blind-eye to the suffering of the marginalised in our own societies, but it is increasingly becoming clear that we ignore them at our peril.
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And hello to anybody who’s visiting here from Balderdash.
Peace. Next up are the fashion posts, maybe.
