#Shi'as

[tamamita]

Hmmmmm

[ibn-agim]

Al Imām Aḥmad bin Ḥanbal said,

"Whoever does not affirm the Khilāfah for 'Ali (رضي الله عنه),

then he is more misguided than the donkey of his family.

[اعتقاد الأئمة الأربعة ص٧١]

[secular-jew]

DAILY CALIPHATE NEWS

If you want to understand what Islam is up to, you need to see what ISLAMIC POLITICAL AND MILITARY LEADERS and their spokespeople (Imams at weekly sermons, sheikhs, Ayatollahs, and the Arab global press), are saying daily in their own language. These headlines scream racism, hate, genocide and encourage daily acts of suicidal jihad of civilians, for the purpose of creating terror and eventually leading to global domination. These are just from yesterday:

Columnist In Qatari Daily: Hatred And Hostility Are Ingrained In The Jews;

Palestinian Author Hassan Hamid: The Israelis Know They Will Leave Palestine;

Lebanese Analyst: Only The Rich Jews Who Practiced Usury Were Burned In The Holocaust

Islamic State Khurasan Province (ISKP) Poster: Shi'ites Of Iran Orchestrated October 7 Hamas Attack;

Michigan Islamic Scholar In 2016: Israel Must Be Annihilated

Trinidad And Tobago Islamic Scholar: Russia Knows October 7 Was Planned By Mossad, Just Like 9/11

ISIS Supporters Eulogize Gazan Who Swore Allegiance To ISIS, Participated In October 7 Attack;

Following US Treasury Designation, 'Gaza Now' Condemns Sanctions As Attempt To 'Silence The Voice Of Wounded Gaza'

Los Angeles Director of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Ayloush @ Nov 2023 Islamic Society Of Orange County Event: Israel Should Be Attacked, Has No Right To Defend Itself;

Growing Influence Of Wagner Private Military Company (PMC) In The Central African Republic (CAR);

Under the heading: "You can't Make this Shit Up":

Islamic Scholar Shakir: Trump May Create A Palestinian State If Told He Will Be On Mount Rushmore

[go-ro]

Sayyid Muhammad Husain Fadlallah, “We Must Think Before We Act”

[acomradea]

As someone who is Zaidi, it is so weird to understand that the only thing people around me know about Zaidia is that it is "what those terrorists in Yemen follow" like they are some scary foreign sect of Muslims which doesn't line up with my experience at all.

Lol like hello right here! I'm not shooting rockets in Yemen, I'm scraping the ice off my windshield asking you "how ya doin there! Pretty chilly today eh?"

Also the Houthi are an ethnic group who happen to make up a large number of the rebels but not all Houthi are rebels and not all rebels are Houthi, they aren’t a terrorist group and it's weird when people pretend like they are. And before you ask, I'm not a Houthi.

[hungee-boy]

this edible have me saying "dear jesus" and "lord almighty"

this fucking church gummy the protestant kush

[imaminoccultation]

Letters of the Imam of the Oppressed - Introduction

I am a queer Muslim dude who worships Allah as my God, considers the Prophet Muhammad his final true Messenger, and recognizes the final descendant of his viceregent Imam Ali, peace be upon him, as the Imam of the Time, the Imam in Occultation, the Imam of the Oppressed of the Earth, Imam Muhammad al-Mahdi peace be upon him. I was persuaded of this by rational argument: I saw the clear signs of God in the form of spiritual peace and happiness in the teachings of his students. The teachings of Hikma. The teachings of the Muslim Neoplatonists.

If you’re upset by any of that, fuck off and go home. Seriously. There are a billion other spaces for you in the Muslim community, you could really just use your time better. Personally, isn’t this a good time to read Surat ‘Al ‘Imran? It usually makes me feel better after a long day. 

If you’re like…wait…tell me more…please, come in. I’d love to have you. There is a lot we need to talk about. As a queer Muslim man who left Islam in high school, I had internalized an inferiority complex formed by a combination of Sunni Neo-Traditionalist dawahganda, marketed to impressionable young faithful boys like me, and Orientalist polemics that had forced the dawahganda discussion into an utterly unsustainable apologist mythology that implodes the moment you investigate any real history on Islam. And yet I’m Muslim. I have very, very strong reasons for that. I do not accept God on blind faith, trust me. I’m a linguist, student of Arabic, raised by people from a Mahasi Sufi community located in southern el-Gezira: I love Islamic scripture. I am a practicing Muslim. Even as an atheist, I would pray occasionally. But I was disappointed, as such a practicing and spiritual Muslim, to see the utter spiritual impoverishment in the queer Muslim discourse as I had encountered it. But also having suffered from the consequences of growing up queer in an orthodox Muslim household, over the six years of nihilistic atheistic naturalism I’d built in high school, a profound sense of anger and disgust at the injustices I saw in my community. My father built the first Islamic center in our small town white Mormon and Christian community. My first Muslim role model. His dad was a high-ranking Sufi sheikh in the Sammaaniya tariga, extremely passionate about his faith, but extremely flexible in his doctrine. For him, Islam was about community. The tribe, and keeping it together. 

My mother was equally religious, if not more so, as she leaned more on the Sunni Neo-Traditionalist side, and seems to be growing more and more conservative. I see this a lot in the Muslim-American community, and it worries me. Mostly because, you know, it’s actually a threat to my mental health and safety, and the solutions the Muslim-American community are currently proposing are absolutely insufficient. The typical progressive reformist arguments may persuade those for whom the specific inner workings of doctrine aren’t particularly important, but unfortunately for my parents, I was not one of those people. 

I read Percy Jackson. 

You see, Logan Lerman was my first boy crush. I saw the trailer and was obsessed with pictures of him for reasons I didn’t quite understand. I started with the third book, the only one available in the library. When it was revealed in the Heroes of Olympus that Nico also had a crush on Percy, as a Muslim, I was bothered. As an Orthodox Muslim something about Rick Riordan’s religious pluralism itched at my conscience: I remember distinctly at one point recognizing there was no difference between my relationship with Allah and the relationship many of the Percy Jackson characters had with their gods. I asked: how do I know Allah is any more real than Zeus?

Muslim parents are terrible at answering this question, Muslim-American parents even worse, because they fear for the future of their culture and see the youth adopting new, strange values, and it affects how they talk about Islam. It’s lead to one of the most soul-sucking doctrines that I ever dealt with in Sunni Islam, at least from my perspective: qadar. Fate. Destiny. Predestination. How does qadar actually work? Muslim polemicists love to mock the paradox of the Christian Trinity, but the paradox of qadar disturbed me far more in my youth, as somebody who was taught Islam is about the Garden or the Fire, doing the right things to get let into the house. But then there’s a problem.

What if God sees fit that you like a boy? What could the Lord of the Worlds have planned for you if his natural inclination is to turn you towards those of your sex and away from those of the opposite sex? I was always able to make easy friends with girls, by the time I was in high school the overwhelming majority of my friends were girls: at the time I didn’t understand why, but now I have a hypothesis. Perhaps there was something about me that made them feel safe. Perhaps it was my limited lack of actual sexual interest in them. 

I don’t know. It’s not the point. The Qur’an tells you Allah is the most merciful, but if the most merciful sees fit that you have a natural inclination to what is one of the most blatant historical relics of medieval homophobia in the Uthmanic Bible (mushaf, meaning “bound in pages,” used as a guide for reciting the Qur’an – the Recitation – in prayer), you have to question this assumption. You end up on the bottom of a natural injustice in the social order, where there is complete invisibility and confusion, v.s. something like patriarchy or racism, which is simply just more visible. People always told me that, if I kept asking questions, I’d become an atheist. They were right, but there’s a reason I’m back. I didn’t become an atheist for intelligent reasons. I was coaxed out of Islam into the white supremacist cult that is American Neo-Atheism which is a source of endless cognitive dissonance when you’re also a gay Black Arab who also has Mahasi heritage, and thus a tight tribal link to an extremely old written culture. Tore me apart, but the mindset I’d been raised in as a Sunni Neo-Traditionalist had prohibited me from critical thought: I thought Islam was about salvation by faith alone. The parallel between this worldview and the equally spiritually impoverished worldview of white Evangelical Christians should be obvious, and it was a highway to a truly destructive lifestyle that lead me to have severe depression and totally incapacitated my ability to reach my life goals. 

There’s a reason I’m very concerned about Andrew Tate’s conversion. I’m not worried about him – I could give a rat’s ass if his faith is sincere or not. His rhetoric is dangerous and reductive. But I was really worried about Mohammed Hijab. Genuinely. He was the kind of person I would’ve listened to as a teenager. Confident speaker. Handsome. Even crazier, Egyptian: lots of Sudanese people are invested in this inane Egyptian-Sudanese rivalry I only ever invoke in jest. But I’m a history nerd. That’s what you get for getting into the Riordanverse in your youth. I know my relationship with Egyptians: our ancestors have been drinking from the same river since time immemorial. The cultural lines between Nubia, where my Mahas ancestors hail from, and its neighboring ancient Egypt, were once so blurred as to make their cultures at times indistinguishable. Both countries then converted from polytheism to Orthodox Christianity – soon, to Islam. The cultural context Mohammed Hijab hails from and the cultural context I hail from, and the ideologies I developed as a teenager and the ideologies he still preaches, they’re unmistakably connected. Noticing these parallels brought me to some conclusions about how I’d come to see Islam that were further disabused by my discovery of the Western academic study of the Qur’an and Islam: I once feared it, but even when I left Islam, I never lost my interest in the history of the faith of my parents. I think of a comment by Hassan at-Turaabi my father would quote to prove at-Turaabi was no true Muslim: “do you not know the history of your religion?”

I didn’t. Knowing it made me see something entirely new. A fundamental shift in life perspective that led me to convert to Shi’i Islam out of a deep sense of personal calling. I am not a traditional Twelver, by any means: perhaps it’s more accurate to call me a non-denominational Muslim, the truest heretic. My reading of history led me to the conclusion that Imam Ali had the best claim to the caliphate: I did not reach this conclusion due to any blind faith in doctrines such as infallibility, which is an orthodox Islamic doctrine in both Sunni and Shi’i Islam that I fully reject. In the community of Islamic Neoplatonists, rather than have my faith used to beat me down and have my answers questioned with instructions to faith, they instead had a patient conversation with me where, through simple rational argumentation that I’d become so fond of as a high school debater, they persuaded me of the truth of their position. Isn’t that insane?

This is the truth of my Islam. I do not care if you consider it to be authentic or proper doctrine. Islam is not about doctrine to me. It’s about principles, values, developing the skills you need to survive in the world in any time and place. Sunni Neo-Traditionalism is not saalih for kulli zamaan wa makaan, and I firmly believe that, even if I respect Sunnism in concept.

But I will not accept it. I cannot accept such irrationality. So I will speak my truth, explain my thought process, my doctrine, inspired by the spirit of this verse in my mother’s favorite chapter of the Qur’an, the Song of the Stories (Q 28:1-6):

طسٓمٓ (1)

Ta Sin Mim. 

تِلۡكَ ءَايَٰتُ ٱلۡكِتَٰبِ ٱلۡمُبِينِ (2)

These are the verses of the Record which makes things clear.

نَتۡلُواْ عَلَيۡكَ مِن نَّبَإِ مُوسَىٰ وَفِرۡعَوۡنَ بِٱلۡحَقِّ لِقَوۡمٖ يُؤۡمِنُونَ (3)

We narrate to you something of the Prophecy of Musa and Pharaoh in truth and justice, to a community of believers.

إِنَّ فِرۡعَوۡنَ عَلَا فِي ٱلۡأَرۡضِ وَجَعَلَ أَهۡلَهَا شِيَعٗا يَسۡتَضۡعِفُ طَآئِفَةٗ مِّنۡهُمۡ يُذَبِّحُ أَبۡنَآءَهُمۡ وَيَسۡتَحۡيِۦ نِسَآءَهُمۡۚ إِنَّهُۥ كَانَ مِنَ ٱلۡمُفۡسِدِينَ (4)

Indeed, Pharaoh seized great authority in the Earth, divided its people up into sects, slaughtering the sons of some of them, leaving their women to be assaulted; he was one of the corrupt.

وَنُرِيدُ أَن نَّمُنَّ عَلَى ٱلَّذِينَ ٱسۡتُضۡعِفُواْ فِي ٱلۡأَرۡضِ وَنَجۡعَلَهُمۡ أَئِمَّةٗ وَنَجۡعَلَهُمُ ٱلۡوَٰرِثِينَ (5) 

We wish to comfort those who have been oppressed in the Earth, and make them Imams, leaders, and make them its inheritors.

وَنُمَكِّنَ لَهُمۡ فِي ٱلۡأَرۡضِ وَنُرِيَ فِرۡعَوۡنَ وَهَٰمَٰنَ وَجُنُودَهُمَا مِنۡهُم مَّا كَانُواْ يَحۡذَرُونَ (6)

We will raise them to a great station, to show Pharaoh and Haman, his right-hand man, and their soldiers the exact thing they used to fear.

These verses speak to me as a queer, Black, Muslim-American man, and they have motivated me to this. I believe in the God that sides with the oppressed in the Earth, and he has entrusted it in our care, and we have a duty to show the oppressors exactly what they used to fear. Welcome to the Letters of the Imam of the Oppressed, the mukhannath Slave of Allah, who sees in the story of his spiritual leader, the Imam in Occultation, the key to his liberation.

I will give interpretations of narratives from the Qur’an and hadith, as well as explain the doctrines of Islamic Neoplatonism as well as expose the radical historical and scientific fallacies being committed by the akh-right dawahbros. I do so pseudonymously, for the same reason the rightful heir to the position of the Prophet Muhammad remains in Occultation: my community faces violent oppression. I fear I may be targeted, but I will not leave my community without guidance. I feel the call to help lead the oppressed in the Earth.

Prepare to be shown the mercy of the exact thing you used to fear. 

[ghelgheli]

I don't think now, at the time Iran is viciously defending against US imperialism, is the time to be making left-communist critiques of them.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is not some unimpeachable bastion of anti-imperialism in western asia and it is dangerous to withhold critique just because it is opposed to US hegemony. The IRI is a theocratic ethnostate pushing back against euro-american imperialism while enacting its own centuries-long imperialism on the ethnic and religious minorities that fall within and around its borders. On a weekly if not daily basis, the IRGC, the paramilitary basijis, as well as the regular police harass, arrest, and kill not only such minorities as Kurds, Balochs, and Ahwazi Arabs (don't have to look far for this), but also ethnic Persian political dissidents and gender and sexual minorities.

The history of the 1979 revolution speaks to the development and rise of Khomeinism in the 1970s as a bourgeoisie opportunism that claimed the martyrs of Iranian communists while at every turn promising the disenfranchised baazaaris the protection of their private property. The purge of the Mojahedin in the months after the revolution, the associated purge of all deemed communist, and the immediate suppression of Kurdish autonomy movements in the northwest, all form the legacy of Khomeinism. It is important to be honest about this, to be honest about the reformulation of institutional misogyny and the other ills of Pahlavi Iran under the IRI, while simultaneously recognizing that the revolution was successful in one thing: exorcising the puppeteering hands of the united states from the country. It is important not to fall into the trap of valorizing an imperial power, while understanding that the only liberatory future for the people on the plateau and surrounding regions is revolution from within and below, not external intervention. These are compatible and, indeed, complementary halves of a whole politic!

As a Tehrani, and particularly as an ethnic Persian/Iranian Azerbaijani (Iranian Azerbaijanis being subject to linguistic and cultural suppression, but nonetheless perhaps the most integrated minority), it strikes me as my responsibility to talk about this. And it is something I talk about regardless of what is going on. As an esoteric Shi'a, it especially seems like my responsibility to talk about what Khomeinism has wrought.

And all of that is to say nothing of the fact that in my post I was just critiquing left-Shi'a infatuation with Khomeinism qua ideology, with no mention of the IRI—whose relationship with Khomeinism is varied, nebulous, and I would say secondary to the three decades of theocratic nationalism that has developed since Khomeini's death.

[zvaigzdelasas]

If ur worried about helping w Qatari govt propaganda by only relying on AlJazeera for Palestine coverage then here's two non-Qatari outlets that usually cover Palestine well without calling for the mass death of Shi'a on the side

[captain-price-unofficially]

Abu Azrael, ex-insurgent and leader of the Kataib al-Imam Ali PMU, an Iraqi Shi'a militia group fighting ISIS in Iraq. He has become a public icon of resisting ISIS in Iraq among Shia Iraqis with a large following on social media. His motto and catchphrase is "Ella Tahin", literally meaning "Until/into dust" interpreted to mean "Grind you to dust." June 2023

[tamamita]

This is so funny

[molkolsdal]

Tomb or grave cover (cenotaph) with Shi'i inscriptions

Sycamore wood, carved

Iran, 11th-12th century AD, Seljuq Period

Many tombs or graves of holy figures in parts of the Islamic world are marked by a casket-shaped box (cenotaph) in wood or stone, although the burial itself is in the ground below. This tomb cover (sunduq) made of sycamore wood, is finely carved with Arabic inscriptions in angular Kufic script with the names of the Imams of Twelver Shi'ism as well as verses from the Qur'an (complete Surat al-Fatiha, 1:1-7, and part of the Ayat al-Kursi (Throne Verse) from Surat al-Baqara, 2:255). Also inscribed are sayings (Hadith) attributed to the Prophet Muhammad: "This world is the sowing ground for the next. The grave is the storage chest (sunduq) of good works." The names of the Panj Tan/Ahl al-Bayt (five special figures of the Prophet's family) are featured on the side: the Prophet, his daughter Fatima, his cousin and son-in-law Ali, and their two sons al-Hasan and al-Husayn. The inclusion of the names of the Twelve Imams identifies the deceased as a member of the Ithna Ashari Shi'a community. The casket is signed by the maker, Muhammad b. Ahmad, but the name of the deceased is not present.

[tentacion3099]

Sunday Classic - Lebanese Shi'a Amal militiamen stop and watch the 1986 FIFA World Cup Morocco VS Portugal. 11 June 1986. 🇱🇧

[lilacmuse]

What is love?

بِسْمِ ٱللَّٰهِ ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

Love, in its deepest essence, is a bridge to the Divine. 

Love is God's way of calling us back to Him in the most beautiful of ways, because the true object, source, and final endpoint of all loves is Him. The true root of every desire, every yearning, and every aspiration is the yearning for Him. He is the Beginning and the End of everything, including love.

Every permissible form of love is beautiful and sacred in its own right, because every pure love the human being experiences is like a river that leads back to the infinite ocean of Him. But the wine of His love is the only one capable of fully quenching the primordial thirst of every soul. So everything we look for, everything we long for, and everything we love is, in its deepest essence, a longing to be quenched by Him.

Speaking from the lens of negation, love is the anthisesis of ego. The ultimate goal of ego is self-preservation, while the ultimate goal of love is self-annihilation within the beloved. So philosophically speaking, love is the intrinsic yearning of all contingent beings to experience absolute union with the Necessary Existent. In other words, the instinctual desire for human union is merely an echo of the soul's deepest yearning: reunion with the Beloved. 

The symbolic link between human love and Divine love is also why men are so deeply drawn to female beauty, and why women are so deeply drawn to masculine power; a woman who embodies divine feminine energy finitely mirrors the jamaal of Allah (swt), while a man who embodies divine masculine energy finitely mirrors the jalaal of Allah (swt). When union happens between the two, the resulting bond is like a lighthouse of Divine love in a dark world; powerful enough to bring new life into this world, which in itself is a sign. The completion the masculine and feminine find through union with each other is a metaphor for the ultimate completion every soul finds in its reunion with the Lord.

This is why marriage can mark the completion of half of one's faith: deep mortal love is one of the most transformative, transcendent, and spiritually powerful of all human experiences. Because the most profound human love teaches the soul how to forget itself in favor of one's beloved; in this way, it serves as a training ground for Divine sublimation. 

Not every mortal love meets this criteria, and not every person will experience this depth of love- because to seek it requires courage, patience, devotion, and sacrifice- but those who do experience it are able to taste spiritual transcendence to an incomparable degree. A prime example would be ibn 'Arabi, whose love for Lady Nizam became his catalyst into spiritual enlightenment (beautifully explained here), or Maulana Rumi, whose platonic love for Shams Tabrizi turned him from an 'alim (one who has knowledge) to an 'arif (one who truly knows).

In closing: if shaytan is the epitome of ego, waliullah is the epitome of love. This is why Shi'as and Sufis have a uniquely deep capacity for enlightenment: they understand the centrality of walayah- the purest, most concentrated form of mortal love- in attaining true Tawhid.

To summarize in one line:

Love is a measure of the soul's willingness to be annihilated for a mere taste of the Beloved.

❤️

[go-ro]

‘Yan cikin gari perceived ‘yan izala as shi’a!

[fiddles-ifs]

don't know if you've talked about this before but if nazeri is a Muslim and mc is an Atheist, is that something that could ever cause problems in their relationship? do you think any characters could have some type of strain in their relationship when one believes in a god/s and their partner doesn't? I've seen a lot of problems with this stuff in real life especially when it's a christian/atheist relationship because the religious person will get stressed and feel like they need to "save" their partner by converting them or else they'll go to hell, so from what I've seen a lot of those relationships break up in real life. I was curious on how similar/different it would be with your characters and the mc. How well do they deal with the differences I guess.

Btw I was not trying to be disrespectful with this question at all, and if it made you uncomfortable, I'm really sorry.

It doesn't particularly cause a lot of friction? Nazeri is content to stay in their lane when it comes to personal beliefs like religion. Obviously if you have a Gentlemens' Discussion about it, they're going to bring up what makes them happy about being Shi'a, and occasionally they might encourage their partner to attend ṣalāh just to see if they like it or not. Nazeri themself is pretty loosey goosey about their own beliefs, and some of the more religiously inclined consider them. Kind of a "bad" Muslim?? To their dismay.

Religion is a tough subject in a world where monsters exist but you can't tell anybody about them. In a lot of ways, Nazeri is using theirs as a crutch to stay sane. They try not to bother with anyone else.

One area that would grate on Nazeri would be alcohol, especially functional alcoholic Trackers. This has less to do with religion and more to do with the MC's overall health, but they also don't like the stuff in their house.