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Originally Posted by Craven Morehead
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this is something that's been mentioned numerous times in the media here. i think obama's a fresh change. he's said he's going to make a change, and theres a lot of hope that he will.
Past US presidents rhetoric has gone unfufilled, and the last president was a disaster for middle east poilitics, so the 'Arab Steet' is hopeful of some sort of change to US policy. Most people here welcomed his victory, but questioned whether he would make this change or whether the hawks i the whitehouse would call the shots.
His popularity here is quite high, particularly because of the last paragraph in that article craven. Obama is a dark skinned american who is of mixed race, who grew up in indonesia, has jewish friends, has muslim ancestry and is leader of the most powerful nation on earth.
i think that means something to the arabs. however, it means in peoples actions, and so far with the recent speech in cairo calling for islam to start afresh with the US as well as his calls to shut down guantanamo, i think he;s doing well. you will also notice that two speeches made by osama bin ladin and ayman al zawahiri about president Obama have almost gone without notice in the arab world. i think it says a lot about the arab street.
---------- Post added at 11:16 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:00 PM ----------
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Originally Posted by Crack
Just the other day I was curious about how a person of the Muslim faith would cope with the difficulties of being in space, and I found a very cool article about the subject:
Fascinating stuff.
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crack, thats in interesting article.
i remember reading about these issues just before the astraunaut took off. he went to seek advice from different sheikhs on islamic practice is zero gravity.
obviously, during the time of muhammad space travel wasnt around, so it would be hard to see how the Qur'an or hadith would accomodate for such things within islamic law. but like i mentioned earlier, islamic scholars are able to deduce islamic verdicts from hadith based on sound reasoning.
so for example, the 80 prayers a day would be unreanable. so scholars are able to extrapolate a verdict based on his last place on earth, and his prayer timings would be at those specific times. the same goes with ablution prior to prayers, as well as all things including his food. in this sense, islamic jurispudence is keeping abreast with science. some scholars want the doors of interpretation of hadith to be closed, but the vast majority want to keep the interpretation of islam of new innovations in science open.