“Martyr of the Head Scarf”

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji-oon, may Allah help out the family of the victim through these hard times inshaAllah. Please read this article and try to play the ‘What-if” game in your head [read the article and you'll understand.]

Egyptians cry racism in woman’s slaying in Germany

By MAGGIE MICHAEL – 2 days ago

CAIRO (AP) — Thousands of Egyptian mourners marched behind the coffin of the “martyr of the head scarf” on Monday — a pregnant Muslim woman who was stabbed to death in a German courtroom as her young son watched.

Many in her homeland were outraged by the attack and saw the low key response in Germany as an example of racism and anti-Muslim sentiment.

Her husband was critically wounded in the attack Wednesday in Dresden when he tried to intervene and was stabbed by the attacker and accidentally shot by court security.

“There is no god but God and the Germans are the enemies of God,” chanted the mourners for 32-year-old Marwa al-Sherbini in her hometown of Alexandria, where her body was buried after being flown back from Germany.

“We will avenge her killing,” her brother Tarek el-Sherbini told The Associated Press by telephone from the mosque where prayers were being recited in front of his sister’s coffin. “In the West, they don’t recognize us. There is racism.”

Al-Sherbini, who was about four months pregnant and wore the Islamic head scarf, was involved in a court case against her neighbor for calling her a terrorist and was set to testify against him when he stabbed her 18 times inside the courtroom in front of her 3-year-old son.

Her husband, who was in Germany on a research fellowship, came to her aid and was also stabbed by the neighbor and shot in the leg by a security guard who initially mistook him for the attacker, German prosecutors said. He is now in critical condition in a German hospital, according to al-Sherbini’s brother.

“The guards thought that as long as he wasn’t blond, he must be the attacker so they shot him,” al-Sherbini told an Egyptian television station.

The man, who has only been identified as 28-year-old Alex W., remains in detention and prosecutors have opened an investigation on suspicion of murder.

Christian Avenarius, the prosecutor in Dresden where the incident took place, described the killer as driven by a deep hatred of Muslims. “It was very clearly a xenophobic attack of a fanatical lone wolf.”

He added that the attacker was a Russian of German descent who had immigrated to Germany in 2003 and had expressed his contempt for Muslims at the start of the trial.

At its regular news conference on Monday, a German government spokesman Thomas Steg said if the attack was racist, the government “naturally condemns this in the strongest terms.”

The killing has dominated Egyptian media for days, while it has received comparatively little coverage in German and Western media.

A German Muslim group criticized government officials and the media for not paying enough attention to the crime.

“The incident in Dresden had anti-Islamic motives. So far, the reactions from politicians and media have been incomprehensibly meager,” Aiman Mazyek, the general secretary of the Central Council of Muslims, told Berlin’s Tagesspiegel daily.

Egyptian commentators said the incident was an example of how hate crimes against Muslims are overlooked in comparison to those committed by Muslims against Westerners. Many commentators pointed to the uproar that followed the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-born Islamic fundamentalist angry over one of his films criticizing the treatment of Muslim women.

Abdel Azeem Hamad, chief editor of the independent Egyptian daily el-Shorouk, said that if the victim had been a Jew, there would have been an uproar.

“What we demand is just some attention to be given to the killing of a young innocent mother on the hands of fanatic extremist,” he wrote in his column.

An Egyptian blogger Hicham Maged, wrote “let us play the ‘What If’ game.”

“Just imagine if the situation was reversed and the victim was a Westerner who was stabbed anywhere in the world or — God forbid — in any Middle Eastern country by Muslim extremists,” he said.

The Egyptian Pharmacists’ Association called for a boycott of German drugs. The victim was a pharmacist.

According to numerous interviews in Egyptian local papers with el-Sherbini family, the man who stabbed al-Sherbini used to accuse her of being a “terrorist,” and in one incident, he tried to take off her head scarf. Mourners at her funeral called her the “martyr of the head scarf.”

Laila Shams, al-Sherbini’s mother, told the el-Wafd daily that her daughter said she’d difficulty finding a job in Germany because of her head scarf.

“One (employer) suggested she remove her head scarf to get a job. She said no,” she said.

Officials from a German Muslim group and the country’s main Jewish group made a joint visit Monday to the Dresden hospital where the victim’s husband is being treated.

“You don’t have to be a Muslim to act against anti-Muslim behavior, and you don’t have to be a Jew to act against anti-Semitism,” said Stephan Kramer, the general secretary of the Central Council of Jews.

Source: The Associated Press

Take care inshaAllah, and keep everyone in your du’as.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

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Invincible

INVINCIBLE
By: C.A. Webb

When you’re young it’s easy to feel you’re invincible…
Nothing can do you harm or cause alarm to the world you’ve created in your mind, and everything seems perfect.
You say that tragedies can happen to so and so, but to you? No, nothing can get close enough to burst the bubble you’ve come to know as your life.
In your mind accidents, cancer, and STDs are sad calamities that befall those not as fortunate as yourself because for some reason they’re not as special as you.

And that’s sad.

Daily you throw caution to the wind,
Not realizing that any day could be the day your good fortune ends.
You silly rabbit. Don’t you know that the tricks your mind play are only your way of trying to escape what you know to be a possibility?
It could easily be you that a disease is eating its way through, until it claims your body, mind and soul.
As hard as you try to deny, it could be you who loses an arm, leg, or eye to an unforeseen occurrence that could forever change your life.

And then what?

Will you give up, letting your spirit die, not even giving yourself time to try to live with your new lot in life?
Or will you finally realize that the rose-colored eyes you were looking through before were showing you the lies you wanted so much to believe?
You see, as hard as it might be to accept, we all came here the same way, and though we may have seemed t live better or worse than someone else— at the end of the day, we are all one and the same.
So instead of us living just for what me, myself, and I can enjoy today, let us pray that before it’s too late we find out how we can count our days to make this a better place for all of us.

Take care inshaAllah, and keep every single person in the world in your du’as.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

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467,000 Jobs Lost in June

I didn’t lose my job, I juss felt that my ob wasn’t doing anything for me, I mean it gave me money but I felt like it was making me a worse person slowly-retail is juss not for me. As I continue job hunting, such headlines don’t really help:

U.S. Job Losses Rise in June as Unemployment Reaches 9.5%

By PETER S. GOODMAN and JACK HEALY

Published: July 2, 2009

The American economy lost 467,000 jobs in June and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent in a sobering indication that the most painful downturn since the Great Depression has yet to release its hold.

“The numbers are indicative of a continued, very severe recession,” said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. “There’s nothing in here to show that the economy and the market are pulling out of the grip of recession.”

The latest monthly snapshot of the nation’s job situation, released on Thursday by the Labor Department, reinforced a consensus that high levels of unemployment were likely to remain for many months and perhaps years. That will almost surely increase the difficulties of finding work for millions of jobless people while limiting wages and working hours for those employed.

After a May report that showed the pace of deterioration was moderating — with a revised figure of 322,000 net jobs lost for the month — some economists expressed hopes that an economic recovery might finally be emerging. But the June report tempered such visions with the monotony of continued decline.

For another month, manufacturing jobs disappeared, dipping by 136,000, while construction jobs shrank by 79,000 and retail by 21,000. Health care remained a rare bright spot, adding 21,000 jobs.

The losses for June brought the tally of jobs shed since the beginning of the recession to 6.5 million — a figure equivalent to the net job gains over the previous nine years.

“This is the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all jobs growth from the previous business cycle,” Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said in a research note. She called this fact “a devastating benchmark for the workers of this country and a testament to both the enormity of the current crisis and to the extreme weakness of jobs growth from 2000 to 2007.”

The figures for June did show signs that the pace of job losses is continuing to slow. From November to March — after the collapse of several prominent financial institutions — the labor market lost an average of 670,000 jobs each month. From April to June, the decline slowed to 436,000 a month.

The Obama administration seized on those numbers to argue that its $787 billion spending program aimed at stimulating the economy was gradually working.

“We’re seeing a kind of leveling off here,” Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis said in an interview. “We would have done much worse had we not put the recovery plan in place.”

Early this year, the administration projected that the unemployment rate would peak near 8 percent with the stimulus in place. With joblessness already well above that target, some economists are arguing for another dose of government spending — a call Ms. Solis dismissed as premature. Much of the spending is still in the pipeline and trickling out slowly into the economy, particularly in construction projects that require government permits and planning, she said.

In offering the slow pace of stimulus spending as a partial explanation for higher unemployment, Ms. Solis effectively echoed the criticism that some leveled at the spending package when it was devised: that many of the projects would take too long to have their intended effect.

But Ms. Solis expressed assurances that the program was proceeding according to the administration’s plans.

“We’re making progress,” she said.

Some economists contend that a recovery is indeed in its early stages, cautioning that the job market tends to lag behind progress in other areas.

Michael T. Darda, chief economist at the research and trading firm MKM Partners, pointed to a recent rally in the corporate bond market as a sign that normalcy was returning to the financial system, asserting that this presaged the resumption of economic growth in the second half of this year and vigorous activity next year.

“The labor market is going to lag the recovery process to a certain degree,” he said.

But other experts noted that employment was a more crucial source of spending power than in downturns past, given how many alternate sources of cash had been lost.

Consumer spending amounts to 70 percent of overall American economic activity. In recent times, Americans have found myriad ways to fuel spending even as incomes for many households have stagnated, borrowing against the once-rising value of homes and tapping credit cards.

Now, millions of households owe more to the mortgage lender than their house is worth. Millions more have exhausted their credit. The paycheck has returned as the primary source of spending. Yet, as the June jobs report reinforced, paychecks are eroding even for those who have jobs.

The average workweek for rank-and-file employees in the private sector — roughly 80 percent of the work force — slipped by a fraction, to 33 hours, the lowest level since the government began tracking such data in 1964.

Average hourly earnings for such workers have increased by 2.7 percent over the last year, to $18.53. But weekly earnings have risen less than 1 percent, reflecting how millions of people have lost working hours.

The so-called underemployment rate — which captures not only the jobless but also those working part time because their hours have been cut or they cannot find a full-time job — increased to 16.5 percent.

Some economists contend that as long as such numbers prevail, millions of Americans will continue to hunker down, withholding their dollars from car lots, shopping malls and other places of business, thus constraining hiring at auto plants and retail shops and elsewhere.

“It looks really bad,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “People can’t spend when they don’t have the money.”

For another month, the average length of official unemployment continued to increase, this time to 24.5 weeks — the highest level since the government began tracking such data in 1948. The Labor Department did report separately that the number of newly laid-off workers filing for unemployment insurance dropped last week. Initial jobless benefit claims fell by 16,000, to a seasonally adjusted 614,000.

While layoffs have slowed in recent months, hiring has yet to pick up, meaning that jobless people face a more agonizing search than ever — a human toll not captured by the data.

In the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Jeffrey Jones, 40, has found nothing since losing his job as a cook at a senior center in October. He worries about paying rent and caring for his four children. His blood pressure is up, and some nights he stays up and watches television to distract himself from the worries that keep him from sleeping.

“I know I’m not supposed to be letting it stress me out,” he said. “The way I’m going now, I won’t be able to make it too much longer. I can’t go this long without doing something for my family.”

Source: The New York Times

Take care inshaAllah, and keep every single person in the world in your du’as.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

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Let’s Get off for Muslim Holidays!

All this aside, I still don’t endorse Bloomberg-not a fan of him, but still read the article: [Also click the links in the article they lead you to other interesting articles as well.]

Razvi, a Msulim Who Endorsed Bloomberg, Wants Islamic Holidays in Public School

By Azi Paybarah

Moe Razvi, a Muslim who endorsed Michael Bloomberg, said incorporating two Muslim holidays into the public school calendar is “imperative to the Muslim community.”

Yesterday, Bloomberg signaled his opposition to the plan, which the City Council overwhelmingly voted to support.

“Every time I have to tell them, ‘It’s a holiday but you have to go to schools’; it’s heartbreaking to go through that,” Razvi, who runs a Brooklyn nonprofit, said in an interview this morning. He said getting the holidays recognized by the school system is “imperative to the Muslim community.”

Razvi declined to comment specifically about Bloomberg, since control of the school system is in flux at the moment. Razvi did say Bloomberg “has been a very good friend” to the immigrant community in supporting their other legislative initiatives.

When asked if there was any symbolic value in having the holidays incorporated into the school calendar, Razvi said, “Big time, man. Come on, kids, they need that acceptance feeling. We’re not the quote-unquote outsiders.”

Source: PolitickerNY.com

Take care inshaAllah, and keep every single person in the world in your du’as.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

Confused? Didn’t understand something? Click here!

Smile!

Smile, it’s sunnah I have a friend who always tells me that when I’m feeling down and surprisingly it does get me to smile, hamdulillah Smiling is pretty contagious so from now on juss smile, who cares if you look crazy I mean people look crazy all the time these days-people talking on their blue tooth always looks like they’re talking to themselves, when you actually do LOL etc… I came across this poem on fisaad book, it’s beautiful:

She smiled at a sorrowful stranger.
The smile seemed to make him feel better.

He remembered past kindness of a friend
And wrote him a thank you letter.

The friend was so pleased with the thank you
That he left a large tip after lunch.

The waitress, surprised by the size of the tip,
Gave part to a man on the street.

The man on the street was grateful;
For two days he’d had nothing to eat.

After he finished his dinner,
He left for his small dingy room.

He didn’t know at that moment
that he might be facing his doom.

On the way he picked up a shivering puppy
And took him home to get warm.

The puppy was very grateful
To be in out of the storm.

That night the house caught on fire.
The puppy barked the alarm.

He barked till he woke the whole household
And saved everybody from harm.

One of the boys that he rescued
Grew up to be President.

All this because of a simple smile
That hadn’t cost a cent.

-Anonymous

Take care inshaAllah, and keep every single person in the world in your du’as.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

Confused? Didn’t understand something? Click here!

Say What?!?

So a whileee back I made up a post called “Trying to Understand Thoughts of a Hijaabi,” because I guess it is pretty hard to understand me sometimes. I decided that I would make up a page on my blog for that, so it’s finally up! You can find it on the top of the page-you know it goes ‘Home’, ‘About’, and ‘Say What?’ So if you wanna figure out what I’m talking about click on Say What?

That’s it, take care inshaAllah-if you don’t know what that means look it up on my page on the link above or the bottom of this post-see I try so hard to help you guys out

Du’as people, lots and lots of du’as!

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

Confused? Didn’t understand something? Click here!

Why Are People So Cruel?

Look at the world we live in, isn’t it sad that our youth know words like terrorist/terrorism, suicide bomber, hijack, rape, harassment etc… There are so many different violent words/things that kids these days know and are aware of that I never what they were when I was a kid. We need to make a difference in our world, we’re growing up, but we need to look around and see what we can do, try to do something that will make a difference and help out in order to create a brighter future for our kids. After all, those kids in the future will be our kids. InshaAllah we’ll all do something that will help create a better future inshaAllah. Anyway, all this came up when I read the article below, if you have time read through it:

In a Suburban Gang Land, Young Lives Cut Short

By SARAH GARLAND

Published: June 19, 2009

UNIONDALE, N.Y.

THE phone rang at 4 p.m., just as Francisco Dueñas was leaving his house here on a tidy Long Island block with trimmed hedges. He had no time to talk. He was serving at a wedding reception that started in half an hour, and was already dressed in his tuxedo with the sleeves pulled down over his tattooed arms.

Francisco answered anyway. He recognized the number as belonging to El Niño, a 15-year-old nicknamed for his baby face whom Francisco had taken under his wing the year before, tutoring him in the rules of his gang, Salvadorans With Pride.

“They just stabbed Mikey on the handball court,” the boy said. He sounded panicked.

“Who did?” Francisco asked.

El Niño answered with a curse in Spanish: the slang they used to refer to their rival gang, Mara Salvatrucha.

Mikey — Michael Alguera — was also 15, the younger brother of a friend Francisco had known since middle school. Francisco, now 20, had played hundreds of handball games on the court between Hempstead High School and the Garden City golf course. He usually lost when he was matched up against Mikey, a handball whiz.

The kid was not in a gang, and he was too good-natured to have enemies. Even El Niño was just a wannabe, who aspired to join Francisco’s gang.

Francisco had been seeing the gang less lately, since his family moved to Uniondale from Hempstead. He had dropped out of school after the move — Mara Salvatrucha members controlled the schools in Uniondale. He sometimes wore a balaclava to cover his face when he left the house. Lately, however, Francisco was spending less time on the street, more time in the tuxedo. His girlfriend was pregnant, and he was worried about ending up in jail, or worse.

“Call the homies and go to the park,” Francisco told El Niño that afternoon, Jan. 18, 2008, trying to sound both comforting and authoritative. “I have to go to work.”

At the Sandcastle, a catering hall in Franklin Park where Francisco was serving at a wedding that night, he pushed aside thoughts of Mikey and focused on the promise of good tips. He never mentioned the gang in front of his work friends.

Francisco had become adept at controlling his feelings. Three other friends had been attacked in gang violence since he moved to Long Island from El Salvador in 2001; two had died. Francisco had scars to mark his own close calls: an inch-long swipe across his left eyebrow, a long seam across his right bicep, dents in his shins and over his left knee where he had been sprayed by a pellet gun, a gouge in his lower back dug by an enemy knife.

Mikey died in the hospital early the next morning. That night, Francisco served tables at another wedding. On Sunday, he worked a Sweet 16 party, where his main task was to make sure the white teenagers were not hiding bottles of liquor under the tables. On Monday, he bundled up in a sweatshirt and coat and walked the two miles to Hempstead to find out what had happened to his friend.

Twenty members of Salvadorans With Pride stood around sipping Coronas on the scarred brown grass of a park near the high school. Francisco grabbed a beer.

A few minutes later, as classes let out, 50 others arrived. El Niño was there, and filled Francisco in on details about the attack: There had been about a half-dozen men and they had asked the boys about their gang affiliation, then one had pulled a knife. The S.W.P. members were not certain of the identity of the men, but they had an idea.

S.W.P.’s leader, an old-timer in his late 20s, ordered them to stay vigilant. Mara Salvatrucha was encroaching on their territory, the school grounds. They ended the meeting with the gang’s prayer.

“Sometimes I wonder how I will die, by the bullet wound or a knife in my side,” Francisco chanted along with the others. “Give my heart peace so I won’t have to fight. Heavenly father, please hear me tonight.”

The prayer soothed Francisco when he felt scared. He kept the text on a folded square of paper tucked in his wallet.

FRANCISCO arrived in Hempstead, a decaying inner-ring suburb in Nassau County, nine years after his mother. She had come ahead in the early 1990s, as the Salvadoran civil war was ending, leaving Francisco in the care of an aunt until she could save $5,000 to pay a smuggler to ferry him across the border to join her. Francisco was 12 when he crossed from Tijuana to San Diego in 2001, stuffed in the trunk of a Honda next to several strangers. The trip was terrifying, but later he would say it had toughened him for life on Long Island.

Many of the new classmates he met that year at Alverta B. Gray Schultz Middle School came the same way. They left behind grandmothers and aunts who served as surrogate parents and reunited with mothers and fathers they remembered only from photographs. Their parents believed that the American suburbs offered a better chance at education and jobs than the violent countries they had left behind. In 2002, the Immigration and Naturalization Service picked up more than 5,000 unaccompanied children trying to enter the United States illegally, more than 80 percent of them from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador; in later years, the number increased to 7,000.

On the first day of school, Francisco sat next to Jaime Alvarenga, who had made the crossing in 2001 through the Arizona desert. By the end of the day, the two boys were best friends. They played soccer after school, passed notes in class and kept watch for the bullies who picked on the newcomers. But they lived on opposite sides of town and that summer, drifted apart. Jaime lived in Mara Salvatrucha territory. Francisco’s apartment building was controlled by S.W.P.

The two rival gangs had appeared on Long Island around the same time in the mid-1990s, after the last of the white residents who built Hempstead into a bustling retail hub half a century earlier moved away and Hispanics filled the void. Mara Salvatrucha was formed by a group of older men, some of them veterans of the Salvadoran civil war, who were often victims of the village’s African-American gangs. They adopted the name from a gang gaining a reputation for ruthlessness in Los Angeles and Central America.

Salvadorans With Pride started as a civic organization, also with the intention of protecting members of Hempstead’s growing Hispanic population. The good intentions disintegrated when some of its members — most of them American-born — clashed with Mara Salvatrucha.

Nationally, Mara Salvatrucha was drawing the attention of the Justice Department and the F.B.I., which compared the gang to the Mafia and created a special task force to track it. In Hempstead, the police cracked down and alternated between arresting leaders of each group. The gangs always seemed to grow back: The Hempstead police estimate there are some 1,000 gang members, most of them black or Hispanic, in and around their village of 52,000; the Nassau police count 3,000 in the county.

Francisco had never encountered gangs in El Salvador, but he joined Salvadorans With Pride the summer after his first year on Long Island. His new friends promised to end the teasing and bullying, and, like other teenagers, he wanted to fit in. Back at school in the fall, he learned that Jaime had joined Mara Salvatrucha.

The two tried to stay friends. They still passed notes in class. But Jaime was having trouble at home and disappeared from school for days at a time. Francisco had his own problems. He was fighting constantly with his mother, who felt like a stranger after their years apart. When Jaime disappeared for two weeks in December, Francisco worried, but did not go looking for him.

On Jan. 17, 2003, Francisco woke up to a phone call. Jaime, 14, had been stabbed three times by members of 18th Street, a gang affiliated with S.W.P. that had originated in Los Angeles. Jaime had died alone on the steps of the Long Island Rail Road station. Francisco was devastated, but he was too afraid to go to Jaime’s funeral. Instead, he watched the local news for a glimpse of the coffin.

The next year, Francisco enrolled at Hempstead High, a struggling 1,700-student school. Its graduation rate hovered around 40 percent, and in a village that was more than 80 percent minority, it had a student population that was 99 percent black or Hispanic. He was involved in fights every other day as gangs vied for control over the school.

In November of 2004, Francisco ended up in a group fight with one of his old soccer buddies, Olman Herrera, who was associated with Mara Salvatrucha. As the high school security guards broke up the fight, Olman escaped. Moments later he was found across the street, stabbed to death. The police later charged two older teenagers linked to Salvadorans With Pride in the attack.

Francisco nearly lost another friend in the summer of 2007. On a scorching day in August, he had taken the day off from the catering hall to join friends at the beach. Afterward, they had gone to one of their favorite haunts, Taco Bell, in a dilapidated strip a block from Hempstead High.

It was S.W.P. territory, but Mara Salvatrucha often lurked around the auto body shops across the street. The group lingered over tacos. When it was time to go home, Francisco walked ahead with his arm draped across his girlfriend’s shoulders.

A movement across the street caught Francisco’s eye. He looked back to see a mass of people crossing toward them — Mara Salvatrucha. At least a dozen. Francisco ran, pushing his girlfriend ahead and scrambling to pull open the zipper of his backpack. He felt for the cold metal of his gun and turned around.

He was too late. One of his friends — who was not a member of either gang — lay crumpled on the ground, blood dribbling out of his neck and back. The men who had stabbed him were already running away. Francisco hailed a cab and tried to stop the bleeding as they sped across the highway overpass to Mercy Hospital.

That night Francisco kept a panicked vigil in the waiting room, leaving only after the doctors said his friend would survive. His voice shook when he recounted the story, but he insisted that, like the border crossing, the experience made him stronger.

ON Jan. 18, 2008, not long before El Niño called Francisco, the phone rang in the Hempstead home of Oscar and Clementina Alguera. It was their middle son, Oscar Jr. Their youngest, Mikey, had been stabbed on the handball court. They needed to hurry.

The couple had met in the 1980s, after Oscar made his way across the border from Costa Rica and Clementina came from Colombia. Work was plentiful on Long Island, and Hispanic immigrants were flocking to join the boom. The couple rented an apartment in a cul-de-sac next to an elementary school, and Clementina quit her job as a manicurist to raise their three boys.

The Algueras were strict — no television until homework was done and no friends the parents did not approve first. Mr. Alguera insisted that his sons graduate from high school so they could find better jobs than his, in construction. School was sacrosanct. When the boys called to say they were staying late that Friday afternoon, Mrs. Alguera said yes without a second thought.

After the phone call, Mr. Alguera dropped the tools he had been packing into the shed after a long day’s work. He drove as his wife frantically dialed the phone. But at the school, police officers held them back. They should not see their son this way.

The principal, Reginald Stroughn, had pushed his way through the underbrush behind the school to the handball court within minutes of the stabbing, the police shortly after him. The boys who had been playing with Mikey said a group of men had jumped the fence around the court and demanded to know which gang the boys belonged to. Mikey answered: none. The boys gave up their cellphones and an MP3 player without a fight, but as the men left, one pulled out a knife and jabbed Mikey in the side.

His brother Oscar held him until the paramedics arrived. Mikey died 12 hours later.

It was the first murder on school grounds in Hempstead, and Mr. Stroughn was stunned. After watching the ambulance drive away, he sat in his office in silence for a half-hour, wondering what he could have done differently.

Hempstead’s schools had once been the pride of Long Island, but they had deteriorated quickly as the village became racially and economically segregated. Besides its lagging test scores, state audits had cited the school district for financial mismanagement and violence.

But Mr. Stroughn, who arrived in the fall of 2003, had transformed the place. He reined in the fights, made an effort to get to know the Hispanic students and divided the school into more intimate academies. The graduation rate rose nearly 20 percentage points by August 2007 — though, at 64 percent, it still lagged far behind the 99 percent at the nearly all-white Garden City High School, three miles away. Mr. Stroughn had learned shortly before Mikey’s death that he was to be named the 2008 principal of the year by the School Administrators Association of New York.

But in the year that followed, the graduation rate dipped again. School administrators were too busy comforting grieving students and frightened parents to push Regents exams and college. Principal Stroughn is retiring this summer.

A year and a half after the murder, the Alguera family is broken. A bottle of maple syrup sits on a shelf in the kitchen, unopened: Mikey was the one who made pancakes every Saturday, and no one had the heart to take over his job.

Oscar Jr. dropped out of high school. He said every wall there reminded him of surreptitious games of handball he had played with his little brother when the teachers weren’t looking. Oscar Sr. was angry — at the school, at the gang, at the paramedics who had been unable to save his son. He began drinking. Clementina asked him to leave the house, and he moved out. She found a job as a crossing guard, shepherding middle school students to and from school.

The police investigation into Mikey’s murder yielded no arrests. Mara Salvatrucha’s influence in Hempstead began to wane, but it was replaced by new gangs that were less well known, but just as violent. Three more of Francisco’s acquaintances were killed in the months after Mikey’s death.

Francisco found a second job at a grocery store to support his baby. He told his gang he was “dropping the flag” — laying down his bandana and leaving the streets. Still, he felt compelled to go to the meetings at the park after each of the murders. He also still kept a pellet gun under the mattress in the room he shared with his girlfriend and his infant son, and the worn slip of paper with the gang’s prayer folded in his wallet.

Source: The New York Times

Take care inshaAllah and keep all in your du’as, we all need some guidance and keeping Allah in our minds helps us get through whatever life throws at us.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

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Parents Are So Beautiful

So my youngest brother is in soccer-well the season juss ended. It’s kind of like this unwritten tradition in my family, all the boys play in the town’s soccer league. I’ve watched my older play all his games, my younger brother and now my youngest brother-who is 8- and ever since the semester’s been done I have been the substitute soccer mom for him. I take the youngest one, Habib, to his soccer games-it helps my mom out and I love sports so it’s a win win situation hamdulillah. At the final soccer game I saw something very different, something amazing, and simply beautiful! SubhanAllah it brought tears to my eyes and touched my heart. The teams were setting up and getting ready to start their game, everyone was getting ready in their positions and I noticed on the other teams side a father bent down on one knee talking to his son. He placed a cap on his head, checked his laces and the son was hugging and kissing his father, I juss thought ‘hey he must really his father a lot.’ The referee blew the whistle and I was kinda confused to why the father was still on the field, then what happened next reminded me of how we don’t appreciate parents or realize how amazing parents are. The father was holding his sons arms and running around with him giving him words of encouragement and direction. His son had special needs, the details I obviously don’t know, but subhanAllah look at this father. I was notified that he was present at every single practice and every single game and always giving 100% to make sure his son is happy. The father and son played all four quarters, subhanAllah it was so beautiful! Look at how much our parents do for us, look at how much they are willing to do for us. This child is so lucky you know, his father is literally there every step of the way for him, I saw them again at the trophy ceremony and they won 2nd place- my little brother’s team got 3rd this year but it’s good, I don’t want his ego to get too out of control Anyway the father and son were there on stage together receiving the second place trophy. Ya Latif I had never seen this before ever, I think what this father does is so amazing and inspiring, may Allah guide him inshaAllah. Parents who have children with special attention or needs are so beautiful, so inspiring, and they truly are ’super hero parents!’ I’m so glad that I was able to witness such a thing, I was also glad that my younger brother was able to witness such a thing. The kids on the team at first were kind of confused and didn’t really understand, after all they’re juss a bunch of 3rd grade boys that wanna play soccer. But the parents explained it to them, and they all understood. It was pretty amazing to see that these 3rd grade boys could teach adults a thing or two, don’t judge people and give everyone a chance! The whole thing is juss I don’t know, it’s so hard for me to explain but I hope you sort of got a small idea of how moved I was watching this beautiful relationship between a father and son. The length that a father would go to for the happiness of his son, subhanAllah. When I saw this another thought came to my mind, we always talk about how your parents love you so much and how Allah loves you more than than that and then you juss go on talking about other things. SubhanAllah, have you ever seen a new mother or a new father, and the way they look at their child? It’s so beautiful, you can actually see all the love by looking at the parents’ face. I wish everyone was there to experience watching this father and the way he interacted with his father, it was so beautiful watching the the love the father had for the child, no matter what the child would do he would juss smile and keep on saying positive encouraging things to his son, subhanAllah- as we look at these things here in the dunya, look at how amazing they are, how beautiful they are, I can’t even begin to imagine how Allah loves us so much more than this, and then look at the way we behave! SubhanAllah, Allah is so amazing, I can’t even begin to describe or praise Allah but ya Latif, may he be happy with all of us and help us all get closer to him.

Go to your parents and hug them, tightly and then juss sit with them. Sit down and listen to them, whatever they may be saying juss listen to them and even if you don’t exactly know what they’re talking about or if their jokes juss aren’t funny enough juss play along and you know what, you too will inshaAllah see that love on their face that I’m talking about. Except this time it will be for you and that will do nothing but make you wanna melt and spend all the time you can with them.

May Allah make us all obedient, helpful and always be there for the service of our parents. May Allah grant all of our parents Jannah and reward them for all that they go through for us, no matter how little or big it may be. May Allah inshaAllah grant us obedient Muslim children who will do the same for us and more for our parents [there grandparents].

Take care inshaAllah, and keep every single person in the world in your du’as.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

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Orphan Child

Lyrics for ‘Orphan Child’

She was just standing there,
little girl all alone
Barely covered head to toe,
barely just twelve years old,
Why is she all alone,
why’s the world just so cold,
Why don’t we play our part,
what has hardened our hearts?
What has hardened our hearts?

Underneath the waterfall,
million dollar shopping mall,
Two boys play their games,
helps to keep them nice and warm,
Thousand people walking by,
feeding their vain desire
Don’t they see, are they blind,
Allah loves the orphan child
Allah loves the orphan child

Like our Beloved Muhammad, Peace be upon Him
He was an orphan and Allah sheltered him
What status is given to these children…children?

Just by the riverside,
right next to that orphan child,
Families come to play,
they don’t see that’s where she stays,
Looking through empty eyes,
who cares that she might die,
O my child, don’t you cry,
Allah loves you more than I,
Allah Loves you more than.

She was just standing there,
barely just twelve years old,
What has hardened our hearts,
why’s the world just so cold

Take care inshaAllah and keep everyone in your du’as.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

Confused? Didn’t understand something? Click here!

Christian Hijabi

I found this on HAhmed.com

Covered Life Gives New Perspective

Ana McKenzie

Daily Texan Staff

// Published: Friday, June 5, 2009

Updated: Friday, June 5, 2009

I first noticed Spencer Wall in my religion and society class toward the end of last semester. She wasn’t particularly outspoken, but the shawl that covered her hair, neck and shoulders made her stand out in the large class.

I usually gave her nothing more than a completely unconscious glance. But when she revealed to the class the decision that she made on April 27, I suddenly became aware of the attention I gave her.

Wall, a 20-year-old sociology and English senior, decided to assume the characteristics and attire of a “typical” Muslim woman for a year starting in late April.

She wears the traditional veil, or “hijab,” and loose-fitting clothing everywhere she goes and does not consume pork or alcohol in public. She avoids eye and physical contact with men and has adopted modest habits like walking with her arms glued to her sides or crossed in front of her to hide her chest.

I witnessed the looks Wall gets on a daily basis when we met at Kerbey Lane on the Drag recently.

She’s wearing a hijab splashed with vibrant shades of green and blue. A long-sleeved, black shirt and floor-length aqua skirt reveals only a few inches of skin.

Some who pass us try to be inconspicuous with their intrigue, limiting themselves to quick side glances. But most don’t even try to be candid with their exaggerated double-takes or blatant stares.

She passes by a group waiting to be seated, and all of them stare at the back of her head as she walks away. One guy even rolls his eyes.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” she says when I tell her about the group. “But look around. They’re not the only ones.”

She insists her decision is not a social experiment but more of a personal learning experience. As a white female from a small, West Texas town, Wall says she wanted to know what it would be like to be part of a “noticeable minority.”

“I’m not representing Muslim women or the Muslim community,” she says. “I just want to know what it’s like to walk in their shoes for a while.”

Initially, Wall elaborates on her “learning experience” when people would ask her questions, the most common being “So, where are you from?” She has abandoned these efforts. Now, when people ask about her attire, she simply says she is not Muslim but wears the hijab because she chooses to do so.

This explanation is not entirely untrue, as Wall admits to not being able to leave her home without the clothing.

“I decided a while ago that I was going to try and not wear the hijab for 24 hours,” she says. “I couldn’t even make it for half that.”

Wall says she receives different reactions when she wears the hijab. A man once fell into a display at Wal-Mart because he was staring at her. One day a group of male patrons at the restaurant where she works refused to be served by her. The same group called her derogatory names. But most of the time she said she is just respectfully avoided.

“I wouldn’t say guys don’t hit on me, but they do so in a very different way now,” she says. “It’s more respectful, less forward.”

The experience has taught Wall to pay attention to smaller details that would make a traditional Muslim lifestyle difficult to follow in the United States.

One day at a clothing store, Wall had to ask for a sheet to cover a gap between the floor and dressing room door so she could hide her bare legs as she changed. Her job as a waitress presents one of the most awkward situations as it naturally entails a lot of physical contact with strangers, which is not allowed for Muslim women, she said.

Wall has grown to appreciate this sort of privacy and, in some ways, respect it. Perhaps the most unexpected outcome of the experience is a newfound devotion to her Christian faith. The Islamic faith requires followers to pray five times a day, the first prayer being at 5 a.m. Though Wall has not yet assumed this tradition, she admits she may in the future, and finds herself praying more often.

“You know we live in a society that is very unconscious of daily religious activities,” she said. “Throughout this experience, I have noticed myself becoming much more aware of God.”

Throughout our conversation, I find myself wanting to discuss the most obvious topic, but can’t bring it up without having to continually justify myself. Doesn’t she feel constricted and even oppressed by the practices she is assuming?

Wall’s candidness to discuss such issues validates my impression of her. She constantly reassures me to ask even the most probing questions and to present any debate, illustrating a maturity and intelligence uncommon for a 20-year-old.

“This experience has taught me to respect a woman’s decision to stay home with her children or wear a hijab or go out and become CEOs,” Wall said.

She finishes her sentence, as I notice a young woman staring at the back of Wall’s head.

Her eyes momentarily follow the outline of the brightly colored veil and then quickly move away. Instead of feeling sorry for Wall and assuming that the attention is warranted by feelings of resentment or fear, I soon wonder if the girl is instead intrigued by the hijab.

Wall admits to only showing her hair in the most intimate of settings, and I realize that I’m slightly jealous of someone who respects something I easily take for granted.

Source: The Daily Texan

Take care inshaAllah and keep everyone in your du’as.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

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