In fact, you may have guessed by now, and it might upset some of you to hear me say this, but I’m not, by any standards, an animal-lover. Unless the said animal is dead and on my plate. For me, animals, as they say, have two functions: to taste good and fit well.
But, in particular, I despise and loathe dogs (which, of course, have neither a culinary nor a sartorial function — unless you live in South Korea). They are disgusting, dirty animals that should never have become pets, let alone such popular pets (there are an estimated eight million dogs in the UK. I feel like vomiting as I type out this gruesome and dispiriting statistic.)
In today’s times there is much debate about extremism and religious intolerance. Terrorist acts committed in the name of religion and religious intolerance seems to be on the rise. In these uncertain times we can all learn lessons from the teachings of Baba Guru Nanak.
Baba Guru Nanak was born in India to a Hindu family in the 15th century. From a young age, he had both Hindu and Muslim friends. This helped him to gain a good understanding of Hinduism and Islam. Throughout his life he was accompanied everywhere by two close friends, one was a Muslim and the other a Hindu. He was once asked “who is better a Hindu or a Muslim”? he replied ‘neither, if they don’t do good deeds then they are both in darkness’.
There’s nothing like a good hadrah to get the breakdance juices flowing, as the young dervish in the video demonstrates. But not for the faint-hearted, the dogmatically challenged, the ideologically inflexible and the puritanically peevish. So be warned, don’t try that move at the East London Mosque with it’s promotion of the “narrow-minded, ahistorical, authoritarian bigotry of Salafi-inspired Islamism”, as Abu Faris says.
The Spittoon wishes our readers a Joyous, Tolerant, Secular and Happy New Year in 2010!
And here to play out 2009 is Sheikh Mehmet Nazim Adil al Qubrusi al Haqqani, leader of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi Order of Cyprus and the men from the Naqshbandi tariqa:
Then there’s this old new-school hip hop classic from A Tribe Called Quest which always goes down well at the London Muslim Centre New Year parties, I hear. Well maybe not but, in any case, this one is for you:
