Contemplation or Fanaticism

Assalaamu'alaikum wa rahmatullah

Preface

I had discussed this matter with my friends in Malaysia and in Iran. All of these friends were and are of Shari'a Islamiah background and only their denominations were separated because of historical development of Muslim nations.

What I am so disappointed is that public were misguided by choppy risalat (fliers) spread off to them in masjid. I had also received these pamphlets and booklets which actually separates the Muslim ummat and hinders our unification. I also listened to one of an Arab guy I am not sure from which country he was because he talks in English to a random jama'at member in the masjid about Shi'a Ali before Juma'at prayer long time ago. I was sitting beside them silently chanting the dzikr at that time with my eyes slightly opened without looking around. The guy was not telling what is wrong or what is right but promoting hatred to the other and it is in a holy sanctuary, a masjid before holy time, the Juma'at! What is the difference between them and the ghullat Shi'as who magnify the figures that they support and over-placing allegiance to the figures more than Allah Azza wa Jalla be they ulamas or the imams?

Our Links with All Faithful Ahl Bayt Members Regardless Schools of Thought

I was from Shari'a background myself and it was actually my responsibility before I turned away after being deceived by the dunia (wordly affairs). But still Allah actually displays His mercy to lowly me as I was just a little kid back then. He leads me back to what I am now and my father. Though he is not religious but he actually brought me to see religious teachers in federal territory when he did interviews with them for religious column in newspaper where he worked as a bread winner for our poor family. I was furious last time when my maternal cousin brother looked down on my father just because my father was not properly educated like him. My father does not know his Ahl Bayt lineages origin but it was me who investigated it by calling museum departments in India (Gujarat) to confirm the information that I get from ex-Arab villages in Kedah state beside checking with our state's royal resources. I feel to check them again after pilgrimage to holy Mecca and asking for the lineages from elders. Not many are willing to help and many also had passed away.

Because of the awareness to our origin, I began to love my father (I hated him and everyone around last time and covert myself to Buddhism without family consent) and even willing not to find proper job just to take care of him who is affected by stroke with my mother because I feel pitiful to him as he didn't know his family identity and being an orphan thus hindering him from studying Quran and Sunnah when he was young. I am thankful and wanted to express gratitude to the writers of the Tarikh Salasilah Negeri Kedah, the Kedah Sultanate Royal House for giving our ancestors shelters in 17th century, the villagers representative of Kampung Pulau Timbul, Titi Gajah, Pantai Johore, Perlis those in Singapore for information and showing me the ancestors' graveyard and also to the academic researchers of Arabs in Kedah state.

We know where is our stance when we are aware about our origin and not simply being mere-followers of hear says. I don't care if people demand me to be a "Malay" just because I speak in Malay language. If I can't speak in Malay just because speaking in the language makes me a "Malay" and people can insult us who were humble and lowered our selves to the extent people could insult our brothers and sisters of other denominations then I don't care if I have to give up my status as a legal state-bumiputera (per-independent native) and transforming myself to be an Arab diaspora in all aspects of life including in spoken-language without any native homeland like others around the world. I don't care and we did not gain any benefit from that too because we never join any specific government services whether in state or federal or dealing with high profit business which requires us to be involved in politics like other Arabs for example Mr. Syed Mukhtar al-Bukhary. I recently had checked the sources about the figure I mentioned and the Arab ethnicity in his information has been changed to Malay but he still is using the Arabic title. If he is really a Malay, then he should also lose the Arabic title Syed as Malay nobility use different type of titles and Malay folks have no titles at their name, lol.

Personal Opinion When Listening Public around Talking?

I found that it is annoying to listen to people around especially public talking about matters like rafidha (oppositors of evil human governance), taqiyyah (religious dissimulation) or muta'ah (marriage with contract term) and its relation with the Shi'a Muslims. They chant this and that without understanding the roots of these terms and without knowing the historical development coined with the terms by miming the words of people around or above them. I wanted to tell the world and the muhibb (lovers) of Ahl Bayt. There is a very very thin line between the "Sunna" and "Shi'a" lineages when it comes to Ahl Bayt and other high sufi lineages. Some of them even started the school of jurisprudence of Islam. It is blasphemous and haram to associate others with infidelity and there are Imams of Shi'a lineages of Ahl Bayt family. Some parts of our people in Northern Yemen, Egypt, Southern of Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan are also of Ahl Bayt lineages, does not matter of what school of thought they are from or whether being known as the "Sunni" or the "Shi'a". All of these ignorance happen when we filled ourselves with choppy information, hear says and build up our perceptions with those incomplete information. Later it turns to be a dogma and we put labels on people calling these people kafir and that people kafir without realizing that those accusations turned back to our very face! This is the quality and the morality of our ummat today.

Questions to Our Selves

Until this part, I would like to pose questions:

1. Why when we who are not studying the "secular" field such as economy or political science were not allowed to talk about economy or politics?

My answer after I took post-graduate classes in Social Science and International Studies is because Political Science is an established field of study. If we do not know the theories in Global Political Economy, so we have no authority to comment on economy development of certain countries though it also affects our daily life.

Now as an ex-Shariah student who had escaped Fourth Thanawi papers for Shariah Islamiah and the Malaysian High Islamic Religion Certificate (STAM) back then when I was 16 years old and being an out-caste in non-specific fields of studies in university and not recognized in job-world today:

2. My question is why public should avoid poking their nose on the Shi'a Muslims status in Islam matters?  

My own answer dear brothers and sisters, if you're only in the groups of reborn Muslims who had just recently involve yourselves in movements like Wahhabi-Salafi, Barelvi, Tabligh-Deobandi or Ikhwan Muslimin movements; you should first acknowledge yourselves that you have no sound knowledge about Shari'a Islamiah!  Unless if you're graduated from specific ulama and receiving chains like the imams of the past or the salafi imams then it would be another story because those scholars actually respect each other. Only rulers and administrators in past governments did not respect "sincere" ulamas who devoted their selves only for Allah 'Azza wa Jalla.

How about Background in Shari'a Studies?

Most people that I encountered talking about this is wrong or that is wrong, this is bida'a (innovation) that is bida'a (innovation) are not of Shari'a and Usuluddin studies background even the basic ones they are not aware. Now do I realize this and why I had problem to join them when they are in their "religious discussion" groups. Though they were educated in Science streams for example medical studies, information technologies, and etc but  they are not "formally" educated in Islamic sciences and studies. Islam for them was just a side-subject matter being discussed at certain times when they feel the need to impress others that they are talented in all traits or to use it to justify their deeds according to their desires. Islam was not part or never being part of their "life". I am sorry for having to be harsh. But people had already being harsh to me when I tried to comment about other worldly fields. And just because they are "Muslim" by identification makes them rightful to also act like they are experts in Islamic and Shari'a science fields without being viewed as "backward" and studying something which is not popular when being put in Shari'a stream in secondary schools in the context of our country?

So for me, they have no right to talk like they are experts in fatwa guidelines to others related to whatever schools of jurisprudence of Islam or practices of historical Muslims. Why am I talking about school of jurisprudence? My Shi'a Muslim brothers and sisters are following the school of jurisprudence established by Imam Ja'afar al-Baqir bin Muhammad bin Ali Zainal Abiddin bin Hussein bin Ali bin Abu Talib! The same applies to those who think that they have the right to judge Islamic Shari'a only based from their studies in newspapers and media-sphere, they have no right to talk about this! We shut our mouth in the public because we know that it is of no use to talk with ignorant and it would be a waste as they would just brought up hear says that they just listened not what they had experienced or learned their selves.
 

Ordinary Non-Affiliated Guy Experience

Most people that I had mingled in various Islamic movement groups apart of they are not "formally and systematically" educated in Islamic studies stream since schooling time are not even proficient in the history and the background of the founders of their movements. Also those who follow their schools of jurisprudence in the popular denomination of "Sunnah" such as of Hanafi, Hanbali or Shafi'ie schools are not even aware about their imams and ulamas background, chains of the hadiths compiled by them and the way they issued rulings. When I choose to learn about Hanbali school of jurisprudence and the Kitab al-Musnad, I actually had read about Wahhabi-Salafi movements beside checking the information from the groups of Ikhwan al-Muslim movement because they are actually bounded to these school though they influenced people of other school of jurisprudence to join them. I learned about the imam, imam Ahmad bin Hanbal rahimahullah and his life story from various sources and teachers until I am well-versed and could write or honestly tell about him again without checking any sources because the sources were absorbed into myself the same I recite the Quranic verses and learned its exegesis. This Hanbali madzhab is prominent in Saudi Arabia and some parts of Iraq and those of Wahhabi-Salafi movements are subjects under this school of jurisprudence methods. Others of Shafi'ie, Maliki and from Hanafi schools please take note! By reading or listening the Usool Talata (the Three Principles), the studies of respectable Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baaz, works of Ibnu Taimiyya only is not enough for a person to simply put labels on others or giving them rights to issue rulings and implementation of their "own" jungle law! I am in no position to put nonsense labels on few of the ulamas of Saudi Arabia even if I do not agree with them but the studies of those ulamas were done by their selves. Not by those who used or quoting their thesis.

One have to begin from the basis and from the scratch and being educated again in Shari'a Islamiah branches of studies if they wanted to meddle with fatawa guidelines in the midst of public! People who simply think that they are eligible to bomb this and bomb that as per the extremists but were not properly educated in higher Shari'a studies are ridiculing Allah Azza wa Jalla, Islam, the noble prophet Muhammad s.a.w, the knowledgeable Ahl Bayt imams and all family members of prophet Muhammad s.a.w, the respectable sahabas of prophet Muhammad s.a.w, the honorable salaf imams and khalaf ulamas because they take the studies easily but they insist that they could take the position on judging people around!    

Closing

I have few minutes before 'Isha prayer service. I need to chant few obligatory dzikr and revise my Quranul Karim recitations. I wish brothers and sisters good luck in the quest to know your selves. Please pray for the safety of nations and everyone in the way to reach the resurrection and His eternal Kingdom.

Allahumma salli 'alaa Muhammad wa 'alaa aali Muhammad wa sahbihi ajma'in. Sealed with prayers for mercy, peace and love, amin!

One in Two New Graduates are Jobless or Underemployed

Assalaamu'alaikum wa rahmatullah

WASHINGTON (AP) — The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work. A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor's degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that's confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor's degrees.

Opportunities for college graduates vary widely. While there's strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor's degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.

Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.

"I don't even know what I'm looking for," says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.

Initially hopeful that his college education would create opportunities, Bledsoe languished for three months before finally taking a job as a barista, a position he has held for the last two years. In the beginning he sent three or four resumes day. But, Bledsoe said, employers questioned his lack of experience or the practical worth of his major. Now he sends a resume once every two weeks or so.

Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage, says he got financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career. "There is not much out there, it seems," he said.

His situation highlights a widening but little-discussed labor problem. Perhaps more than ever, the choices that young adults make earlier in life — level of schooling, academic field and training, where to attend college, how to pay for it — are having long-lasting financial impact.

"You can make more money on average if you go to college, but it's not true for everybody," says Harvard economist Richard Freeman, noting the growing risk of a debt bubble with total U.S. student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. "If you're not sure what you're going to be doing, it probably bodes well to take some job, if you can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college."

Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University who analyzed the numbers, said many people with a bachelor's degree face a double whammy of rising tuition and poor job outcomes. "Simply put, we're failing kids coming out of college," he said, emphasizing that when it comes to jobs, a college major can make all the difference. "We're going to need a lot better job growth and connections to the labor market, otherwise college debt will grow."

By region, the Mountain West was most likely to have young college graduates jobless or underemployed — roughly 3 in 5. It was followed by the more rural southeastern U.S., including Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Pacific region, including Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, also was high on the list.

On the other end of the scale, the southern U.S., anchored by Texas, was most likely to have young college graduates in higher-skill jobs.

The figures are based on an analysis of 2011 Current Population Survey data by Northeastern University researchers and supplemented with material from Paul Harrington, an economist at Drexel University, and the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. They rely on Labor Department assessments of the level of education required to do the job in 900-plus U.S. occupations, which were used to calculate the shares of young adults with bachelor's degrees who were "underemployed."

About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.

Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.

Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less.

In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).

According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving,  jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers.

College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level; those with nursing, teaching, accounting or computer science degrees were among the most likely.

In Nevada, where unemployment is the highest in the nation, Class of 2012 college seniors recently expressed feelings ranging from anxiety and fear to cautious optimism about what lies ahead.

With the state's economy languishing in an extended housing bust, a lot of young graduates have shown up at job placement centers in tears. Many have been squeezed out of jobs by more experienced workers, job counselors said, and are now having to explain to prospective employers the time gaps in their resumes.

"It's kind of scary," said Cameron Bawden, 22, who is graduating from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in December with a business degree. His family has warned him for years about the job market, so he has been building his resume by working part time on the Las Vegas Strip as a food runner and doing a marketing internship with a local airline.

Bawden said his friends who have graduated are either unemployed or working along the Vegas Strip in service jobs that don't require degrees. "There are so few jobs and it's a small city," he said. "It's all about who you know."

Any job gains are going mostly to workers at the top and bottom of the wage scale, at the expense of middle-income jobs commonly held by bachelor's degree holders. By some studies, up to 95 percent of positions lost during the economic recovery occurred in middle-income occupations such as bank tellers, the type of job not expected to return in a more high-tech age.

David Neumark, an economist at the University of California-Irvine, said a bachelor's degree can have benefits that aren't fully reflected in the government's labor data. He said even for lower-skilled jobs such as waitress or cashier, employers tend to value bachelor's degree-holders more highly than high-school graduates, paying them more for the same work and offering promotions.

In addition, U.S. workers increasingly may need to consider their position in a global economy, where they must compete with educated foreign-born residents for jobs. Longer-term government projections also may fail to consider "degree inflation," a growing ubiquity of bachelor's degrees that could make them more commonplace in lower-wage jobs but inadequate for higher-wage ones.

That future may be now for Kelman Edwards Jr., 24, of Murfreesboro, Tenn., who is waiting to see the returns on his college education.

After earning a biology degree last May, the only job he could find was as a construction worker for five months before he quit to focus on finding a job in his academic field. He applied for positions in laboratories but was told they were looking for people with specialized certifications.

"I thought that me having a biology degree was a gold ticket for me getting into places, but every other job wants you to have previous history in the field," he said. Edwards, who has about $5,500 in student debt, recently met with a career counselor at Middle Tennessee State University. The counselor's main advice: Pursue further education.

"Everyone is always telling you, 'Go to college,'" Edwards said. "But when you graduate, it's kind of an empty cliff."

___

Associated Press writers Manuel Valdes in Seattle; Travis Loller in Nashville, Tenn.; Cristina Silva in Las Vegas; and Sandra Chereb in Carson City, Nev., contributed to this report (Yahoo News).

P.S: This is what teachers in schools should talk about when talking to pupils and students. Don't just telling about going to university and people could get away with it. Man, this is just the same situation most of us here facing too. It's just a waste for me taking national study loan and now stuck in postgraduate, leaving behind my Lord. I should just continue working or applying to be absorbed into government service or simply working in factories as operator just after I finished my O-Level or A-Level around 2003-2005. I guess it's a global phenomenon and s.t.f up those who simply get good jobs or position out there after they graduated. They are just fortunate because the "time" and etc was just siding with them and now telling people to do this and that!!!! Dear young graduating brothers and sisters out there, I am just reminding you people to be prepared. I'm not trying to put you people down, but trying to be a good brother to all of you. If I am trying to put people down I would simply laugh at people who are unfortunate but I can't since I am also among those who are unfortunate, lol. This is the fact of the world. May the justice rise up, may the Truth rise up, amin! 

Sealed with prayer for mercy, peace and love, amin!