Ramadan is coming to a close. May Allah allow me, in the last few days, to make up for my neglectful treatment of the month!

MuslimLivesMatter

To God do we belong and to whom do we return. Our hearts go out to the families of the three young Muslims who were recently slaughtered in NC: Deah Barakat; his wife, Yusor; and her sister, Razan. May the Almighty have mercy on them.

Yawm al-`Arafah. Go in.

As I have been asked by several friends, here is a quick update on what is going on with me and what I am doing this summer in sha'Allah:

1. Having retired from my positions as Muslim Chaplain @ Harvard Islamic Society and Muslim Chaplain @ the Harvard Chaplains this past year, I continue to work with our beloved Harvard Muslim community, particularly around wonderful initiatives such as the Harvard University Muslim Alumni and Harvard Islamic Society-sponsored Muslim Life Fund.

2. After 19yrs, my tenure as Affiliate @ the redoubtable Islamic Finance Project (IFP)  (Islamic Legal Studies Program, Harvard Law School) ends this summer.

3. I am participating in majlis fiqh (facilitated and offered by the Imam Shafi`i Institute| Shafiifiqh.com) in which we are reading Imam al-Nawawi's Minhaj al-Talibin with Sh Habib Mustafa Sumayt al-Hadrami (hafizahu llahu ta`ala).

4. I am teaching Hanbali fiqh (Sunday mornings) (I am currently reading al-Rawd al-Murbi/Zad al-Mustaqni` with a small group of select students) and `ulum al-qur'an/`ulum al-hadith on Mondays  (expected to resume after Ramadan).

5. As a member of the Academic Working Group sponsored by the Initiative on Islam and Medicine (Program Medicine & Religion, U Chicago), I am preparing for our second retreat in the beginning of August.

6. I am working on catching up on the back log of questions that I have received this Spring on nawazil fiqh al-mu`malat (Islamic financial ethics and law) at Straightway Ethical Advisory, the shari`ah-compliant finance advisory group at which I am Managing Partner.

`Id Mubarak! May each year find you well and may Allah accept our deeds!

NY Times Op-Ed

No Room for Radicals in Mosques
By SUHAIB WEBB and SCOTT KORB
Published: April 25, 2013

JUST hours after the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were identified as Muslims, Representative Peter T. King of New York, the Republican chairman of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, called for an "increased surveillance" of Islamic communities in the United States. "I think we need more police and more surveillance in the communities where the threat is coming from," he told National Review. "The new threat is definitely from within."

Mr. King's hypothesis, and the widespread surveillance policies already in effect since 9/11, assume that the threat of radicalization has become a matter of local geography, that American Muslims are creating extremists in our mosques and community centers.

But what we're learning of the suspects, the brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, suggests a different story, and one that has itself become familiar: radicalization does not happen to young people with a strong grounding in the American Muslim mainstream; increasingly, it happens online, and sometimes abroad, among the isolated and disaffected.

The YouTube page of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, for example, does not contain a single lecture from a scholar, imam or institution in America. One report suggests that he found the theology taught in a local Cambridge mosque, the Islamic Society of Boston, unpalatable: while attending a Friday service in which an imam praised the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Tsarnaev shouted that the imam was a "nonbeliever." The younger Tsarnaev brother seems to have rarely attended a mosque at all.
Representative Peter T. King of New York, the Republican chairman of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, called for an "increased surveillance" of Islamic communities in the United States. "I think we need more police and more surveillance in the communities where the threat is coming from," he told National Review. "The new threat is definitely from within."

Mr. King's hypothesis, and the widespread surveillance policies already in effect since 9/11, assume that the threat of radicalization has become a matter of local geography, that American Muslims are creating extremists in our mosques a terror, we'll all find ourselves increasingly secure as more Muslims heed the call - coming to Islam as it is in the United States, as a real, living community.

Suhaib Webb is the imam of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center. Scott Korb, who teaches writing at New York University and the New School, is the author of "Light Without Fire: The Making of America's First Muslim College."

NYT

Facing Our Deepest Challenges (Ustadh David Coolidge)

Ustadh David Coolidge: a gem of an essay on Prophetic character, compassion, guidance and inner transformation:

Facing Our Deepest Challenges: One of the beautiful things about the sirah of the Prophet (may God bless him and grant him peace) is that it shows how the Prophet directly...

A few months ago, our community's very own Professor Martin Nguyen (Asst Prof @ Fairfield U; Harvard AM '06; Harvard PhD '09) posted an entry on his blog  in which he called attention to several recently published introductory reference works for budding Arabic manuscript experts. Enjoy!