Moro Islamic Liberation Front

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) is a Filipino secessionist group based in Mindanao, Philippines seeking autonomy of the Moro people from the central government. Under President Gloria Arroyo, the government entered into a cease-fire agreement with the MILF and resumed peace talks.

Despite peace negotiations and the cease-fire agreement, the MILF attacked government troops in Maguindanao resulting in at least twenty-three deaths in January 2005. The bombing incident in Davao Airport in 2003 which the Philippine government blamed on MILF members, raised speculation that the peace negotiations might be ineffectual in bringing peace to Mindanao if the MILF is unable to control its operatives. The MILF denied responsibility, but Ampatuan sent police and civilian volunteers to arrest MILF members connected to the attack.

On January 24, 2014, Philippine government chief negotiator Miriam Coronel Ferer and MILF chief negotiator Mohagher Iqbal signed a peace agreement in Kuala Lumpur. MILF forces would turn over their firearms to a third party selected by the MILF and the Philippine government. A MILF soldier confirmed that some of its members had been involved in gun battles, despite the MILF peace treaty with the Philippine government. Forty-four members of Philippines National Police Elite Special Action Force (PNP-SAF) were killed in a clash with members of Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF), a breakaway group from MILF, on Sunday, January 25, 2015.

Qawwali

Qawwali is a form of music practiced by Sufis to inspire religious devotion and instruction. Sufism is a mystical school of Islamic thought where truth and divine love are achieved through personal experience.

Sufis are synonymous with the ‘Whirling Dervishes’ found in many parts of North Africa and the Middle East. Unlike Muslims, Sufis believe that one can reach God during your own lifetime and one of qawwali’s formal names means “royal court of saints”. The Qawwali form of Islamic song is practiced in India and Pakistan.

The roots of Qawwali began in the 11th Century with the tradition of sama, spiritual concerts which predate the birth of Muhammad. Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya, a follower of the Christi school of Sufism used music extensively in his prayer gatherings, creating tension with the orthodox Islamics in Delhi.

In Qawwali, Persian moqquams meet Indian ragas. Not all people were a fan of this new music. Qawwali alongside Sufism suffered a decline and repression during certain periods of Islamic history when fundamentalists attacked the liberalism of the Sufis and their ‘depraved’ experimental music.

Qawwali achieved a recent wave of popularity in film music, where it forms one of the key components of Hindi films.

Qawwali concerts are a musical gathering, containing a lead singer, second singer, harmonium and tabla and a small choir of other singers all sitting on the floor. The traditions of Persian poetry which influences qawwali have similarities here; in the 13th Century Persian poet Attar’s epic poem “conference of the birds”, a group of birds and a leader go a transformative journey. The collective experience of Sufism and qawwali is like this, but one can only truly understand the power of qawwali if one experiences the holiness and spirituality of the form.

The speaker was the biggest ever Qawwal star, known as ‘Pakistan’s Pavarotti’, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, died in 1997 aged just 49.

Makna QS. Yunus Ayat 5

Firman-Nya:

"Dia-lah yang menjadikan matahari bersinar dan bulan bercahaya dan ditetapkan-Nya manzilah-manzilah (tempat-tempat) bagi perjalanan bulan itu, supaya kamu mengetahui bilangan tahun dan perhitungan (waktu)." (QS. Yunus: 5)

Matahari terbit setiap hari dan terbenam di akhir waktu dengan satu cahaya akan tetapi dia berpindah-pindah tempat terbit dan terbenamnya pada waktu musim panas dan dingin. Wilayah kekuasaannya berada pada siang hari, maka ia termasuk bintang di siang hari. Adapun bulan, telah ditetapkan tempat orbitnya. Muncul pada permulaan malam bulan hijriyah dengan cahaya  yang sangat sedikit sekali. Kemudian cahayanya bertambah pada malam berikutnya dan semakin meninggi tempatnya. Kemudian setiap kali bertambah tinggi, bertambah pula cahayanya. Meskipun (cahayanya) didapatkan dari matahari, sampai sempurna cahayanya di malam empat belas (bulan purnama). Kemudian mulai berkurang (cahanya) sampai akhir bulan sehingga seperti  tandan tua.

Egypt’s President Turns to Religion to Bolster His Authority

When President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi opened a much-heralded extension to the Suez Canal in August, the official Friday Prayer sermon that week hailed it as a “gift from God”. When Egyptian voters elected a new Parliament in December, a preacher on state TV urged its members to “obey those in authority, specifically the highest authority”, and referred indirectly to Mr. Sisi as “God’s shadow on earth”.

In the latest decree, the Ministry of Religious Endowments on Monday instructed preachers that any call to protest on Jan. 25, the fifth anniversary of the revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, would lead to “sabotage, murder and destruction”, and constituted a “full crime”.

To some Western observers, Mr. Behery seemed to be taking Mr. Sisi’s call for a revolution in Islam at Al Azhar last January. In that address, Mr. Sisi urged Egypt’s clerical leaders to purge Islam of the ideas he said were used by extremists to justify violence and had made the religion “an enemy of the world”.

“Egypt is the country of injustice”, Mr. Behery wrote in a Facebook post before he was imprisoned.

Some clerics appeared to take Mr. Sisi’s speech last year as an attack on the integrity of Al Azhar itself, said Nathan J. Brown, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University who specializes in the Middle East.

“For people within Al Azhar, there was something remarkable and distasteful about a president and a general lecturing them about religion,” he said. “You saw some pushback, in the form of a proxy struggle. Then there was the episode with Islam Behery.”

In public, Al Azhar has always been loudly supportive of Mr. Sisi. Weeks later, Sheikh Ali Gomaa, a senior Al Azhar cleric, justified violence against Muslim Brotherhood supporters, whom he described as “putrid people” and “riffraff”. 

“The angels are supporting you from heaven,” Sheikh Gomaa told police and military leaders.

“I don’t see him as a dictator,” said Ashraf El-Sherif, a lecturer in political science at the American University in Cairo, referring to Mr. Sisi. “He’s the representative of an alliance of dictatorial state institutions.”

“It’s just another way of exerting control,” Amira Abd el Sayed, 20, said recently during her lunchtime break. “It’s important to control the discussion of religion,” said Adam Mustafa, a law student. “The media has made this into an issue, not the students.”

Sheikh Tayeb was “not even a proper sheikh,” or religious scholar, said Amira Mohamed, one of a group of students in hijab sipping coffee on a lawn. “In reality, the fatwa came from the president. Everyone knows that.”

“We have the cure to the diseases that ISIS and other groups are spreading,” said Dr. Ibrahim Negm of Dar al-Ifta, a state-funded body that issues fatwas, or religious edicts.

“There are no more outlets for discussion,” said Ali Kandil, a schoolteacher in a wealthy Cairo suburb who was ousted from his position as a prayer leader because he had spoken publicly against “tyrants”. “If anyone talks, he is killed or arrested,” he said. “If he’s not arrested, he flees the country.”

Pointing to the “ruin and chaos” that political upheaval wrought in neighboring Arab countries, the 3,100-word official sermon warned against any “destructive” public protests in Egypt.

“To avoid evil and please God,”  it said, “a person shall obey the rulers.”