2 posts tagged “islam”
Megan provided a copy of Hassan M. Fatah's opinion on New York Times, The Price of Progress: Transforming Islam’s Holiest Site. That article was published on 8 March and told about "progress" happens around Ka'bah and Masjid al-Haram, the holiest site of Islam, which had been built by Abraham hundreds years ago.
It is actually questionable what kind of progress to skyscrapers, amusement places, and many luxury hotels which are built around Masjid al-Haram. It is a cultural problem to see how the holiest site will be surrounded by "hedonism" symbols; it is a religion problem if someday people fall into dilemmatic situation between praying and shopping; and, that leads to a serious social problem consider that many of moslems pilgrimage to Mecca coming from poor countries are now facing what they think about social injustice.
The reality that Mecca is divided into "holy site" and "luxury place" can turn Hajj issue into social awareness and moslems get into confused between Hajj ritual itself and other obligations to spend money wisely for helping other people out from poverty.
My simple question is: if it is about business and money at the end, isn't it enough for them receiving every day profit from people flow for pilgrimage in Mecca?
I am a moslem. Since the beginning I started using Internet, I joined several forums talking about Islam. Some of them I dig more carefully, but more often I only read or observe the situation around. I noticed that many of them – especially in our Indonesian language – are not built upon good conversations or well-respect to others. That is one reason I prefer to read and think about my religion by spending more time with books.
That similiar reason happens to blogs. To be careful, I choose having not yet written blog talking about Islam but simply told some of my experiences when practising it or argued some topics using Islam's viewpoints. Other side, I frequently do blogwalking started from tags like islam or moslem. I find interestingness reading entries having such tags because bloggers like to talk about something they did or they believe in practical sense. Sure, there also exists many ideological or political entries which also deal with Islam.
Vox's public tag islam guided me to entry about Islam and feminism. To my experience, feminism is one of topics I realize as sensitive not only between men and women, but also between our so-called modern viewpoint and many Islam classic references. More interesting that the author explained that she converted to Islam after several times learning several religions and beliefs, using feminism issue as one of foundation.
She is Megan, who expresses her thought that Islam is the most feminist religion. I kept her entry in Favorites box, she responded by commenting on my Flickr entry, and finally we set ourselves as neighboorhod. This eases me to track her next entries and I expect to be able to read her views about Islam more.
Trivia enough that one of early Movable Type bloggers I knew was Al Muhajabah who also wrote topics about Islam; and now Megan is second "new person" connects to me via Vox.
