![]() “And as we renew this faith,” he continues, “it is so unshakable that it is as if you saw Allah with your own eyes.” More male Muslims watch from the basement, via a closed-circuit broadcast, and several hundred students listen from the school’s gymnasium, where the flags of the world’s Muslim-majority countries hang from the rafters. Bright-eyed and wearing a neatly trimmed beard, he has a second career of sorts as a traveling speaker, a job to which he brings a certain fervency. “I do not perceive him, and he is aware and sees all things,” says a visiting speaker, Mohamed Abutaleb, a systems engineer who works for a Medicare contractor in Washington, D.C. Egyptians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Indians, Bosnians, Albanians, Turks, Southeast Asians, Malaysians, natural-born Americans – they’re all here.Īs with every week, prayers begin with men and women listening quietly to a sermon. “ Asa lama lakum,” Middle Eastern, African-American and Asian men say to each other, walking onto the hall’s green carpet, where they sit down cross-legged or with their legs splayed out to the side. When the society added the masjid onto the school in 1995, the goal was to put up a simple, functional space, not a more traditional mosque decorated with geometric patterns. He looks through a plate of glass at the wooden pulpit in the prayer hall – the masjid, the place for prostration – and back around at the growing crowd of men. ![]() Nearby, a short, brown-skinned man covered in a windbreaker sits nervously on a plastic chair, waiting for Friday prayers to begin. Men, some wearing ornate taqiyah hats and crochet skullcaps, enter to the left, walk into the hall sandwiched between the mosque and the ISM’s school, and take off their shoes. Women wearing flowing jilbab clothes and hijab head coverings enter through the far-right door at the entrance to the ISM and climb a staircase to a balcony looking out over the mosque’s white-walled prayer hall. So as I stand here, frustrated yet reassured, a travelled Muslim on the long, long road journeying towards changing the attitude of some of my fellow Malaysian Muslims, I say to one and all Malaysians of every creed, colour, religion or atheist 'Assalamualaikum' and I will hear your whispered (and perhaps censored) replies accordingly.FRIDAY PRAYERS at the Islamic Society begin with a sermon.Īt noon, cars begin rolling into the parking lot behind the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, a plainly clad building at South 13th Street and Layton Avenue. Unfortunately and immaturely, their editors censored the opening part of Pak Lah's enlightening and warm speech. Parts of this BN component party's dinner function was broadcast over Malaysian TV channels RTM and TV3. 'Nobody should have a monopoly over the Arabic language and I say to all of you present here, Muslim and non-Muslim to reply appropriately in Arabic if you choose to.' 'The proper reply by Muslims is 'Wasalamualaikum waratu'allah' which invokes the name of Allah as the one true God.' Pak Lah continued: The proper reply by non-Muslims is 'Wasalamualaikum' which in Arabic means 'Peace be also with you'. Which in Arabic simply means 'Peace be upon you'. 'Dato Kayveas, you have expressed your thanks in four languages but you forgot to say 'Assalamualaikum'. And then my beloved Pak Lah took to the podium for his opening speech. PPP president M Kayveas ended his opening speech with parting words of 'Terima kasih', 'Shyer Shyer ni', 'Romba nandri" and 'Thank you'. Years ago, I remember attending a dinner held by the People's Progressive Party (PPP) attended by a crowd numbering in the hundreds with the then deputy prime minister Pak Lah as the VVIP in attendance. Why is it in this my country, a majority of fellow Muslims propagate a monopoly over who can and cannot greet one another? 'Assalamualaikum' generally means 'peace be unto you' (or, 'peace be with you') and the appropriate general non-Muslim reply is 'Mualaikumsalam' which means 'peace be also with/upon you' in the Arabic language. This speech referred to a city where lay the ruins of the Jewish temple, the Christian church and the Muslim mosque, all in worship of the same god (an excellent statement for inter-fatih reflections). ![]() In the world's largest Muslim nation, Indonesia, Christians of various denominations refer to God as 'Tuhan Allah' without having to worry about possible rioters waiting outside their churches.Īs another traveled Muslim, it frustrated me to watch the movie 'Kingdom of Heaven' on Astro where greetings of peace between Muslims and Christian were censored along with the speech made by the character Balian before the attack and siege of Jerusalem by Salahuddin's army.
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