The Center for Global Muslim Life

04/02/2024

Salaam friends thank you for all your support with the launch of our founder book Decolonizing the Heart! If you want to support the project you can give a gift on our LaunchGood of $100 where you will receive the book next Ramadan inshallah and the Decolonize Your Heart hoodie as soon as we print them in the next few weeks. We are also looking for Muslim owned hoodie printers to work with on this campaign. Please comment below if you have any suggestions. Link for the campaign is in the bio! LaunchGood.com/DecolonizeYourHeart

03/25/2024

Final Call for the Seattle Iftar tomorrow night at Seattle City Hall. Tickets are almost sold out. Tickets are at the link in our bio. We invite Muslim leaders, leaders from across the city of Seattle, our social movement friends, and our friends in philanthropy to join us at our Iftar dinner.

This event will also mark the launch of the Center for Global Muslim Life’s Seattle Muslim Impact Project which will take place over the next year. This project looks to research and map Muslim social and spiritual impact starting in Seattle and spreading more broadly throughout the Cascadia corridor reaching from Portland to Vancouver. This work will include a set of research looking at the demographics in the region, public workshops, and public art projects looking at the state of Muslim impact and issues of belongingness in the region. We will recognize a group of these impact leaders from the Muslim community during our iftar program.

The dinner will be catered by the Neighborly Needs project of Wasat which provides free meals to community members as a form of mutual aid, while also working to build the economic power of Muslim-led businesses. Launching during COVID in 2020 Neighborly has served more than 75,000 meals and will serve over 5,000 meals throughout Seattle this Ramadan.

03/23/2024

Beautiful

📢 *UPDATE*

This Ramadan, we’ve been giving the gift of the Qur’an to those donating as part of our Qur’an 100 campaign – and masha Allah, what an incredible response we’ve had. 🤲

If you’ve donated, thank you for your generosity – we’re packing yours right now! 💖 And if you haven’t, what are you waiting for? Get yours in Ramadan, the month of the Qur’an, before they’re gone for good! ⏳

ℹ️ Visit https://cambridgecentralmosque.org/quran100 for more information.

03/17/2024

The month of the Quran. The Heart of the Quran. Yasin. Read in the name of your Lord.

02/27/2024

So beautiful to see this story go viral, inshallah the media does the right thing here and picks up the story. Mashallah thank you Justin Mashouf for all you do in spreading love. For those of you who didn't see it this brother gave his $17 in savings he made in prison making 13 cents an hour as a janitor to the children of Gaza. He is coming home next month after 40 years in prison and those blessings he gave are coming back to him in a big way giving him a new opportunity at life inshallah

An Incarcerated Man's Extraordinary Act of Generosity for Gaza! In… Justin Mashouf needs your support for Help a Generous Soul Reenter Society from Prison

02/22/2024

59 years gone but never forgotten. May his message continue reaching millions around the world for generations to come, Ameen.

01/14/2024

From Turtle Island to Gaza End the Occupation! Prosecute all the criminals! Landback!

12/25/2023

Beautiful program from our friends at CelebrateMercy

BETHLEHEM BLESSINGS: The Muslim Stories of Mary & Jesus (Peace Be Upon Them) | A Commemoration of their Lives through Qur'an, Lessons, and Poetry⭐ Sun, Dec. ...

12/12/2023

11/30/2023

“If the American foreign policy establishment is a grand citadel, then Henry Kissinger is the ghoul haunting its hallways. For half a century, he was an omnipresent figure in war rooms and at press briefings, dutifully shepherding the US empire through military interventions and underhand foreign policy. For generations of antiwar activists, Kissinger personified the depravity of the American war machine.

The world Kissinger wrought is the one we live in today, where ideal investment conditions are generated from the barrel of a gun. Today, global capitalism and US hegemony are underwritten by the most powerful military ever devised. Any political vision worth fighting for must promise an end to the long-running cycle of wars rolling through the twenty-first century. Breaking that cycle means placing the twin evils of capitalism and imperialism in our crosshairs.

In this edited collection, Jacobin follows Kissinger’s trajectory across the globe, across Central and South America, Africa and the Middle East, Europe and Southeast Asia — not because he was evil incarnate, but because he, more than any other public figure, illustrates the links between capitalism, empire, and the feedback loop of endless conflict that plagues us today.”

The Verdict Against Henry Kissinger

09/21/2023

Now that’s a serious student of sacred knowledge Mashallah

The 25-year-old travelled for four months from Guinea to reach top university Al-Azhar in Egypt.

09/08/2023

Mukha Cafe one of the greatest cafes in the world! 🇲🇾

It didn't just want to serve coffee.

08/25/2023

Great interview with our friend Peter Gould, "The year is 2087 and Istanbul is a glittering, technological metropolis — but is this digital utopia more, or less, religious than today? Religious affiliation and the category of “religion” itself is changing along with technology, politics and the environment. So in the middle of all this upheaval, what future do religious people imagine for themselves?"

The year is 2087 and Istanbul is a glittering, technological metropolis — but is this digital utopia more, or less, religious than today? Religious affiliation and the category of “religion” itself is changing along with technology, politics and the environment. So in the middle of all this up...

07/25/2023

“Around 1500, forced to convert to Christianity or leave his homeland, he decided to do the latter. In the hope of returning, he hid three manuscripts in a wall of his house: the two books written by him and a Koran dating from the 12th or 13th century. They were never seen again until workers dislodged them while doing renovation work at a house in the village.“

Two decades have passed since the discovery of the manuscripts that the imam of Cútar hid in a wall in his home around the year 1500, one of them an Almohad-period Koran

05/31/2023

This is our last bit of dignity,” a local witness told CNN. “It’s like coming to our house to demolish our home. We can’t allow that to happen.”

Thousands of ethnic minority Muslims surrounded a mosque in southwestern China over the weekend in a last-ditch effort to prevent what they said was an attempt by authorities to remove its dome and minarets, as a crackdown on religious freedoms widens.

05/27/2023

What if the future isn't all that Hollywood has trained us to imagine it as?

What if some of us go deeper inside together rather than trying to constantly build up and out?

What if we build intentional communities where we make our own rules rather than being driven by the monoculture of the globalized West.

This imaginative vision is based on Dar Al Islam founded in Abiquiu, New Mexico in 1979 by a group of converts working to start an intentional community together. What if that idea took root and it had thousands willing to change their lives rather than only a handful of people.

What if we dug in from that founding and built something more natural in touch with this land on Turtle Island, today called New Mexico, what was once an ocean thousands of years ago and is today desert, mountains, and plains.

What if instead of some Zaha Hadid imagined architecture of the future we instead used the original architect of Dar Al Islam, Hassan Fathy, for inspiration and his book "Architecture for the Poor." Where he writes about getting in touch with indigenous design methods that can teach us how to live together and how not to waste so much.

We think too much about an imagined future of wealth and luxury without thinking about the stratification of our cities, the isolation that we live in, and the need for real connection with our Creator and with one another. Another world is possible but it's one that needs to true visionaries to birth.

05/24/2023

This film is also playing at theatres around the United States, "The main character, Unnikrishnan, portrayed by Indian actress Adah Sharma, is depicted as an innocent, fun-loving Hindu girl, studying at a college in Kerala. She befriends her three roommates, including a young Muslim woman.

In the film’s trailer, the Muslim roommate is seen conspiring with older Muslim men at an “Islamic Study Center,” where they instruct a group of boys to “isolate” Unnikrishnan and her roommates from their families. “Develop physical relations… If required, make them pregnant,” an elderly, bearded man, wearing traditional Islamic clothes, says.

The Muslim roommate makes derogatory comments toward Hindu gods and claims that women who wear hijabs are never r***d.

Unnikrishnan and the two other women appear to become brainwashed to marry Muslim men, convert to Islam, and join ISIS. The trailer also depicts scenes of brutal violence against women, over chants of “Allah is great.”

Speaking to reporters in Mumbai last week, filmmaker Sen said they “have done a service to the nation” by making the film."

“My name was Shalini Unnikrishnan,” an actor dressed head-to-toe in a full Islamic veil, says in a mournful voice as she speaks to the camera.

05/16/2023

Living in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico is unlike any other place I have ever lived. Of course, in cities around the world, you have highly stratified realities of ultra-rich often gated communities, right next to very materially poor neighborhoods. But at the US / Mexico border you have what seems idyllic on one side in San Diego, what is generally a peaceful community literally right next to what seems like at times a war zone and one of the most dangerous cities in all of North America in Tijuana. The problem I have more than the physical reality of the border is how little people in San Diego, especially within the Muslim community, think about what’s happening just miles away from us.

It sure felt like a war zone this week when we were called by our friends at the border to alert us to the thousands of people who the Border Patrol had moved between the two 30-foot border walls and who had no access to anything - food, water, diapers, blankets, phone chargers, etc. Around 50% of these people were Muslims from all over the world, including Afghanistan, West Africa, Russia, and Europe, people from all over the world. So we packed our van with blankets and clothes from our house to take down to the people waiting there. Our kids were at school at the time so I was with my wife and our 2-year-old, as we approached the border wall she became overwhelmed with sadness. She wasn’t scared, she could just feel this heartbreaking reality.

Those of us who have worked at the border for years know this is the ultimate reality here, just heartbreak after heartbreak as we see families separated and as we see families struggle for basic dignity in the hope that they can live better lives than what they are escaping. The border patrol had separated the men from the women and families, and so on Thursday we saw the women and children and we served them as best as we could with local partners like the American Friends and Service Committee (a Quaker organization), Al Otro Lado (a legal services org that works on the Border), and local Muslim led organizations like PANA and Pillars of the Community. The only major Muslim charity organization we saw present there throughout the week was ICNA Relief which delivered boxes of oranges on Thursday.

On Saturday morning our Tijuana-based friend and photographer, Manuel Ocano, reached out to us telling us that there were hundreds of Muslim men on the upper part of the Border in a difficult-to-access area who didn’t have food or water and the local shelters didn’t know what to feed them. This is one of the things we have founder here over and over again is the basic lack of literacy at the Tijuana shelters about Islam and Muslims despite Muslims making up a huge percentage of migrants coming to the borderlands over the last few years. If the big Muslim zakat-based charities really wanted to fund an effective position it would be an organizer who can work with the shelters in the borderlands to help better serve the Muslims that are staying at their shelters.

So again we put together what modest money we could find, we ran to a local Syrian restaurant and ordered some delicious halal food for these brothers. We drove back down to the border and I dropped off my wife and kids on the U.S. side of the border to help with the distribution there while I drove into Tijuana to drop off the food. About an hour later driving from one side of the border to the other with Mother’s Day weekend traffic I arrived at Casa de Luz, what I would find out is an LGBTQ-led shelter for women and children. They were one of the only shelters hiking between these border fences to find the men at the upper part of a very hilly area of the Border. If you can read Spanish you can check out Manuel’s story about the camp here.

No one we were working with on the US side knew about the situation of the men let alone how to find them. It turns out Casa de Luz is literally about 500 feet walking distance from the only Mosque in Tijuana so I went over there and tried to make a connection between the two organizations so we could send money directly to the Mosque to provide food to the shelter if God forbid this type of thing ever happens again. So I drove back through Tijuana back to pick up my family, 3 hours round trip in total. Alhamdullilah that night all the camps were cleared and the thousands of migrants stuck between the walls were taken to detention centers on the US side of the border for processing, although the majority will not qualify for asylum in the US and will either be sent back to Mexico or to their countries of origin.

I get home and post about the work online to thank those who had sent us some money and what do I get? Online trolls telling us the food we provided wasn’t halal because of who delivered it. May Allah guide our community. These are people doing the work of God, and doing work that no Muslims are doing and you want to tell me they can’t deliver food because they are an LGBTQ shelter? This type of logic would mean we can’t order food from Uber Eats or any of these online apps. Clearly, someone has never studied the Maqasid of Sharia, this is a literal life-and-death situation we are talking about here.

This coming weekend we will be back at the US-Mexico border again to fight for Friendship Park, the only place on the US-Mexico border where families who have been separated by US immigration policies can meet. Despite the Biden administration pledging to not build one more foot of Trump’s wall they will complete a replacement of the 18 foot wall at Friendship Park with a new 30-foot wall which could permanently close Friendship Park forever. The park has been closed since February of 2020 and border patrol has never allowed it to be reopened all these years. As many of you know we created a short film about this work in 2019, A Prayer Beyond Borders. Inshallah, with these actions this weekend at Friendship Park we will finally be able to complete our feature film about this space that we have titled - Pray Beyond Borders - A Requiem for Friendship Park. Look for that in late 2023, Inshallah, and join us this weekend if you are in Southern California.

04/26/2023

03/24/2023

Five times a day, we roll out our prayer rugs to connect with our faith and seek guidance from our Creator. Thirty-five times a week, we lay down our burdens and surrender ourselves to a higher power. In a month, we offer 140 prayers - each one a humble plea for mercy and forgiveness.

And over the course of a year, we bow our heads in supplication 1680 times. That's 1680 moments of reflection, gratitude, and hope.

But our prayer rugs are more than just a physical manifestation of our devotion. They are the living artifacts of our families, our histories, and our homes.

Each of these rugs carries its own story - a tale of love, loss, triumph, and of course tragedy.

Our prayer rugs bear witness to our lives and they are a reminder that we are not alone in this journey. That we are surrounded by the love of our families, and the support of our communities, and in some cases, we may even pray on the same prayer rug as our ancestors who have passed on.

These are the things that make us feel HOME, the things that make us feel like we truly belong.

Support the Global Prayer Rug Project on at - https://www.launchgood.com/GlobalPrayerRugs

03/21/2023

03/03/2023

That Turkish coffee life!

'Finjan' in Kearny Mesa offers Turkish coffee as well as a glimpse at your future.

02/25/2023

“All of life is a pilgrimage. All of life is a seeking of that primordial One-ness. Of God. A yearning towards the One who is our Beginning. Our End. Our All and Everything. And as Blessed Augustine has said in his Confessions, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee, O Lord.”

Who am I? I am currently a priest in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. A ‘traditional’ priest. Perhaps you can say ‘Traditionalist’, yet that term has some unwelcome connotations and baggage. At the moment, I am on a sort of semi-private leave while the practical arrangements of my move to Islam are made final.

I am also in the middle journey of my life, having reached middle age. Though at one time I would have felt as Dante did — reaching the mid part of my life and finding myself lost in the dark woods, I wouldn’t say this now, as I have found the ‘straight way’. There was no ‘mid-life crisis’ involved. It is simply that we all see things differently at different points in our lives. With different eyes. Looking back, as it were. Hopefully growing in wisdom. Inshallah.”

Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem