Saudi Customs not Related to Islam being Shoved down Throats of Muslims as Islam .

Mrs Obama without Hijab in Saudia Arabia 

COMMENTATORS, mainly non-Saudis, made a hullabaloo when Michelle Obama, America’s first lady, turned up in Saudi Arabia on January 27th in colourful, loose-fitting clothing and no headscarf. The oil-rich kingdom is known for its women being swathed in long, black cloaks known as abayas, usually paired with the hijab (headscarf) or niqab(which leaves a slit for the eyes), or a burqa (which covers the body from head to toe, with a mesh for the eyes). So what do women, Saudi and foreign, actually have to wear in Saudi Arabia?

The key to understanding Saudi customs is the country's history. When the modern nation was founded in 1932, it was based on an 18th-century pact between the ruling Al Saud monarchy and a devout bunch of clerics who followed a fiery version of Islam, dubbed Wahhabism (after its founder Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab). Ever since, Saudi Arabia’s laws have been based on this creed’s strict version of sharia, or Islamic law, which in reality incorporates many desert traditions that have been cloaked in Islam. The full covering for women is considered to be one of these customs. But today it is enforced by the religious police and zealous volunteers.

While all versions of Islam suggest a woman should dress modestly, often covering her hair and body, Saudi Arabia is one of the only Muslim-majority countries that legally imposes a dress code (Iran is another). Women, foreign and local, must wear an abaya (a few get away with long coats) in public places. Muslim—often equated with Saudi—women are said to have to wear a headscarf; foreigners needn’t. The face need not be covered, much to the chagrin of some hardliners. There are margins and uncertainties, too. The western coastal of Jeddah is far more relaxed than Riyadh, with abayas often brightly coloured or worn open to expose the clothing beneath. At home with relatives, in compounds and all-female settings, women can shed their outer layers. At some posh private Red Sea resorts, they go in bikinis. While many women head to aeroplane lavatories just before landing, not being fully covered is tolerated in the airport.

The strict dress code doesn’t mean there is no room for personal expression or fashion.Abayas come in different cuts, colours, styles and fabrics, from plain black to ones with cartoon characters on the back, and from cotton daywear to lacy or frilly ones fit for an evening out. Most women have a wardrobe of options; abaya shops abound. Moreover, women can wear whatever shoes they like, from trainers to Jimmy Choos. The accessory business is booming in Saudi Arabia as bags, sunglasses and jewellery become the markers of taste. A number of women are heavily made up. Some suggest that defeats the point. As with other rules in the kingdom, many young people find ways around them. But asurvey in January 2014 found that conservative attitudes remain pervasive among the population: despite half the sample saying women should be free to choose what to wear, two-thirds reckoned women should wear the niqab and another 11% the burqa—stricter forms of dress than the one currently enforced.

source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/01/economist-explains-20?fsrc=scn/tw/te/ee/tr/saudiarabiasdresscodeforwomen

Taliban Supreme Leader Mullah Omar in Karachi

Taliban leader Mullah Omar hiding in Pakistan in Karachi Sindh Province :  Afghan spy chief

One Eyed Mullah Omar Supreme Leader of Taliban with One Eye Intact in Old Picture  

The report said that Mullah Omar has always functioned more as the spiritual and ideological leader of the movement than as an operational commander.

NEW YORK: Taliban's reclusive leader Mullah Muhammad Omar is alive and hiding in the Pakistani city of Karachi, a top Afghan intelligence official has said, echoing a similar assessment by Western intelligence officials.

"There is a lot of doubt whether he is alive or not. But we are more confident that he is in Karachi," acting Afghan intelligence chief Rahmatullah Nabil was quoted as saying in the New York Times regarding Omar's whereabouts.

An European official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said in the NYT report that there is a "consensus among all three branches of the Afghan security forces that Mullah Omar is alive".

"Not only do they think he's alive, they say they have a good understanding of where exactly he is in Karachi," the Pakistani metropolis where some say Mullah Omar is hiding.

The report said that Mullah Omar has always functioned more as the spiritual and ideological leader of the movement than as an operational commander.

His inner circle, made up of village mullahs who have known one another for decades, has provided the active leadership of the Taliban's many local factions.

"But now one man, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, has risen to the No 2 role and become the main link to Mullah Omar, allowing him to place his loyalists up and down the ranks," Nabil said in the report.

Nabil, in his assessment, saw Pakistan's security establishment driving the changes, an appraisal shared by some Western officials.

"Some said it was a bid for greater control over the insurgency; others saw it as the evolution of a long-running Pakistani effort to avoid the embarrassment of having Mullah Omar discovered being sheltered in their country," the report said.

The report comes even as Pakistan tries to clamp down on terrorists following the Taliban attack on a Peshawar school this month that killed 148 students and their teachers.

Sharif vowed not to show any distinction between good or bad Taliban and "resolved to continue the war against terrorism till the last terrorist is eliminated."

Other Afghan officials, along with some European and American counterparts, said the suggestions that Mullah Omar had died were a propaganda ploy intended to weaken Taliban morale, not a reflection of the true thinking within the Afghan government.

Maulvi Najibullah, a senior Taliban military commander, said in a telephone interview from Peshawar, that he has "not seen Mullah Omar in a very long time".

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid credited Omar's reclusiveness with his survival, claiming that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was found because he had couriers coming and going with videos and letters.

"We are attempting to eliminate any possible opportunity that could end up helping our enemies find our leader," the report quoted Mujahid as saying. 

source :  http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/Taliban-leader-Mullah-Omar-hiding-in-Pak-Afghan-spy-chief/articleshow/45675485.cms?intenttarget=no

The Destruction of Mecca by Wahabi / Salafi Saudi Kings with Hate of History of Islam.

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR By ZIAUDDIN SARDAR

SEPTEMBER 30, 2014

WHEN Malcolm X visited Mecca in 1964, he was enchanted. He found the city “as ancient as time  itself,” and wrote that the partly constructed extension to the Sacred Mosque “will surpass the  architectural beauty of India’s Taj Mahal.”

Fifty years on, no one could possibly describe Mecca as ancient, or associate beauty with Islam’s holiest city.

Pilgrims performing the hajj this week will search in vain for Mecca’s history. The dominant architectural site in the city is not the Sacred Mosque, where the Kaaba, the symbolic focus of Muslims everywhere, is.

 It is the obnoxious Makkah Royal Clock Tower hotel, which, at 1,972 feet, is among the world’s tallest buildings. 

Islamic Historic Sites Destroyed in Mecca 

Old Map Mecca and with Marking for historic Sites 

It is part of a mammoth development of skyscrapers that includes luxury shopping malls and hotels catering to the superrich. The skyline is no longer dominated by the rugged outline of encircling peaks. Ancient mountains have been flattened. 

The city is now surrounded by the brutalism of rectangular steel and concrete structures — an amalgam of Disneyland and Las Vegas. The “guardians” of the Holy City, the rulers of
Saudi Arabia and the clerics, have a deep hatred of history. They want everything to look brand-new. 

Meanwhile, the sites are expanding to accommodate the rising number of pilgrims, up to almost three million today from 200,000 in the 1960s.

The initial phase of Mecca’s destruction began in the mid-1970s, and I was there to witness it. Innumerable ancient buildings, including the Bilal mosque, dating from the time of the Prophet Muhammad, were bulldozed.

 The old Ottoman houses, with their elegant mashrabiyas — latticework
windows — and elaborately carved doors, were replaced with hideous modern ones. Within a few years, Mecca was transformed into a “modern” city with large multilane roads, spaghetti junctions, gaudy hotels and shopping malls.

The few remaining buildings and sites of religious and cultural significance were erased more recently. 

The Makkah Royal Clock Tower, completed in 2012, was built on the graves of an estimated 400 sites of cultural and historical significance, including the city’s few remaining millennium-old buildings.

Bulldozers arrived in the middle of the night, displacing families that had lived there for centuries.
The complex stands on top of Ajyad Fortress, built around 1780, to protect
Mecca from bandits and invaders. 

The house of Khadijah, the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad, has been turned into a block of toilets. The Makkah Hilton is built over the house of Abu Bakr, the closest companion of the
prophet and the first caliph. Apart from the Kaaba itself, only the inner core of the Sacred Mosque retains a fragment of history. 

It consists of intricately carved marble columns, adorned with calligraphy of the names of the prophet’s companions. Built by a succession of Ottoman sultans, the columns date from the early 16th century. And yet plans are afoot to demolish them, along with the whole of the interior of the Sacred Mosque, and to replace it with an ultramodern doughnut-shaped building.

The only other building of religious significance in the city is the house where the Prophet Muhammad lived.

During most of the Saudi era it was used first as a cattle market, then turned into a library, which is not open to the people. But even this is too much for the radical Saudi clerics

who have repeatedly called for its demolition. The clerics fear that, once inside, pilgrims would pray
to the prophet, rather than to God — an unpardonable sin. It is only a matter of time before it is razed and turned, probably, into a parking lot.

The cultural devastation of Mecca has radically transformed the city. Unlike Baghdad, Damascus and
Cairo, Mecca was never a great intellectual and cultural center of Islam. 

But it was always a pluralistic city where debate among different Muslim sects and schools of thought was not unusual. Now it has been reduced to a monolithic religious entity where only one, ahistoric, literal interpretation of Islam is permitted, and where all other sects, outside of the Salafist brand of Saudi Islam, are regarded as false. 

Indeed, zealots frequently threaten pilgrims of different sects. Last year, a group of Shiite pilgrims from Michigan were attacked with knives by extremists, and in August, a coalition of American Muslim groups wrote to the State Department asking for protection during this year’s hajj.

The erasure of Meccan history has had a tremendous impact on the hajj itself. The word “hajj” means effort. It is through the effort of traveling to Mecca, walking from one ritual site to another, finding and engaging with people from different cultures and sects, and soaking in the history of Islam that the pilgrims acquired knowledge as well as spiritual fulfillment.

Today, hajj is a packaged tour, where you move, tied to your group, from hotel to hotel, and seldom
encounter people of different cultures and ethnicities. Drained of history and religious and cultural plurality, hajj is no longer a transforming, once-in-a-lifetime spiritual experience. 

It has been reduced to a mundane exercise in rituals and shopping. Mecca is a microcosm of
the Muslim world. What happens to and in the city has a profound effect on Muslims everywhere. 

The spiritual heart of Islam is an ultramodern, monolithic enclave, where difference is not tolerated, history has no meaning, and consumerism is paramount.

It is hardly surprising then that literalism, and the murderous interpretations of Islam associated with it, have become so dominant in Muslim lands.

Ziauddin Sardar is the editor of the quarterly Critical Muslim and the author of “Mecca: The Sacred City.”

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/01/opinion/the-destruction-of-mecca.html?_r=0

Abducted Nigerian girls are my sisters says Malala Yousafzai

WASHINGTON- Pakistani school girl Malala Yousafzai, who survived being shot in the head by the Taliban, said on Wednesday she sees 200 schoolgirls kidnapped by militants in Nigeria, as her sisters.

Speaking on CNN Malala said, the extremist group Boko Haram was behind the mass abduction, they do not understand Islam and have not studied the holy Quran. "They are actually misusing the name of Islam because they have forgotten that the word Islam means ´peace,´" Malala said. She added: "When I heard about the girls in Nigeria being abducted I felt very sad and I thought that my sisters are in prison and I thought that I should speak up for them."

Malala was shot by a Taliban gunman in 2012 over her outspoken views on education for girls in her home region of NorthWest Pakistan. After undergoing extensive medical treatment, she now lives in Britain. Malala told CNN that Boko Haram´s acts were appalling. "How can one imprison his own sisters and treat them in such a bad way?" she said, referring to the group´s threats to sell the girls into slavery. Several countries have offered their help to Nigeria to find the girls, whose abduction has prompted an international outcry.

source : http://www.nation.com.pk/national/08-May-2014/abducted-nigerian-girls-are-my-sisters-malala