Pearls of Wisdom

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As salaamu alaikum wa rahmatu Allah wa barakatu…

FYI

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http://www.masnet.org/contempissue.asp?id=4665

The Prophet (Peace be upon him) has said: ‘Your smile for your brother is Sadaqah. Your removal of stones, thorns or bones from the paths of people is Sadaqah. Your guidance of a person who is lost is Sadaqah.’ (Bukhari)

Sahih Muslim which says that: “Every good act is an act of charity”. In another version the hadith, it says: “Your smile to your brother is a charitable act. Ordering good is a charitable act. Forbidding evil is a charitable act. Helping a man who has bad eyesight to see things is a charitable act. Removing a stone, rubbish or bones is a charitable act. Emptying your cup in the cup of your brother is a charitable act.” Read the rest of this entry »

Monday, August 11th 2008, 4:00 AM

Barack Obama has had so much good fortune that it would be an overstatement to talk of his present problems as “tragic.” At the very same time, there is indignant opposition - or curdling unsureness - about what he actually represents and has represented from the very beginning of his long campaign.

At the beginning, even as he repeatedly announced his miscegenetic parentage, Obama most truly represented liberation from the dooming provincialism of that misbegotten thing we call identity politics, which is always so focused on a single group virtually blind to overwhelmingly important things.

Identity politics maintains an inability to comprehend the body politic. In the vision of identity politics, every group and every other thing functions independently of everything else.

That is narcissism of an ultimately self-destructive sort. The national debt, the dangers of selling out to wealthy corporate interests or to unions always ready to cripple us with inordinate entitlements are invisible. So are China and India as well as our eroding ability to compete in a global economy. Though they live in the United States, those are not their problems. Identity politics is independent of our common fate as Americans.

Recently, the writer Matt Bai asked if Barack Obama means the end of black politics and talked with a lot of elected black politicians who seemed ambivalent about him because he does not seem to fit the role of race hero as they define it. He seems to be a man of reconciliation, not confrontation. They seem to want a civil rights leader with a new coat of paint.

Bai wrote of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s response to Obama’s Father’s Day speech in which he was critical of absent black fathers, saying, “To Jackson, this must have sounded a lot like a presidential candidate polishing his bona fides with white Americans at the expense of black ones - something he himself steadfastly refused to do even during his second presidential run in 1988, when he captured more votes than anyone thought possible.”

I don’t know where Bai was in 1988. But I was on Jackson’s campaign tour for the Midwestern and Southwestern portion. I heard him say that, as President, he could not legislate against poor performance in school or irresponsible sexual conduct. But things change.

We have also seen Obama attacked by John McCain and heckled by black people for the same reasons: that he does not appear to represent or have a special place in his platform for black Americans, even though he is running for President of the United States.

This is a remarkable moment, or perhaps it is not. When the Republicans attack a candidate for not focusing on black Americans, we can only think of that as a ploy. Another black rabble-rouser demanding that Obama be true to “his” community is no more than the latest loudmouth mired in identity politics.

The biggest challenge facing black politicians is moving into the bigger game facing the nation as a whole. This might actually be done by making it clear, as the civil rights movement did, that the troubles and dilemmas of black Americans are only the troubles of the nation in microcosm.

Either our country will remake itself in order to sufficiently live up to the challenge of global competition or it will not. The more time we spend piddling around with identity politics, the better an edge we will give to China and India, neither of which has misread the neon handwriting on the wall.

That handwriting is very clear: Educate your people, especially in math and science, produce high quality products and don’t cry oppression if you have to work hard. That is beyond black politics, beyond color, beyond special interests groups. Reality usually is.

crouch.stanley@ gmail.com

Prepared by Muhammad Alshareef
Shaykh Sa’eed ibn Musfir tells the following account..

I was walking out of the Haram (the Ka’bah in Makkah) when I saw a man begging from everyone that passed by him.

Just then a man who had parked his tinted Mercedes excessively close to the Haram in a designated VIP parking walked passed the beggar on his way to his car. As he pulled the keys out and the alarm did the ‘whup whup’, the beggar raised his finger to the sky and said, “Please, for the sake of Allah!”

Trying to end the moment and avoid a dip into the pocket, the Mercedes man said back, “Allah will provide!”

The beggar said back, “What! Did you at any moment think that I thought YOU were my provider! I’m not asking for your provision, I KNOW Allah will provide for me.”

Shaykh Misfir continues.The two stood there staring at one another for a moment and then the Mercedes tinted windows came up and the man drove away.

A needy African sister who was sitting nearby on the street selling textiles was moved by the incident. She did not have much, but from what she did have, she pulled out 1 riyal and placed it in the hands of that beggar. He smiled and went on his way.

Meanwhile the Mercedes man could not drive on with the choke of guilt. He turned the car around and made his way through the crowd to the place where the incident had happened.

Shaykh Misfir says…I saw with my own eyes as he pulled out a 10 riyal bill from his briefcase to give to the beggar. But he looked left and right and could not find him.

What was he to do? He had already pulled out the bill to give for the sake of Allah and was not going to put it back. So he found the nearest person he thought was worthy of the bill, placed it in her lap and went on his way.

The 10 riyals sat in the lap of the sister that had given the beggar!

Rasul Allah (SAW) said,

“Charity does not in any way decrease the wealth…” (Sahih Muslim)