Chill Yo Islam Yo

Salam,

Mashallah a great article from the Reader’s Digest

One Step at a Time

To get your heart pumping hard enough to provide cardiac benefits, all you need is a decent pair of walking shoes.

According to the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study, which followed 80,000 women for more than 20 years, just a half hour of brisk walking a day — that’s 30 minutes, or the time it takes to watch one sitcom — can slash your risk of a heart attack by 30 to 40 percent.

There are many reasons why walking is ideal for the core of your exercise plan. Among them:

Walking is safer than jogging. Because a walker lands with just one-fifth the force of a runner, walking is much easier on your joints and ligaments.

Anyone can walk. It’s a good option even for people who are pregnant, have arthritis, have heart disease, or are just recovering from a heart attack.

It’s inexpensive. A pair of shoes and socks are all you need. (Well, you should wear clothes.)

You’ll stick with it. Only 25 percent of people who walk for exercise quit, compared to 50 or 60 percent of those who start other exercises.

You can do it anywhere, anytime. Bad weather? Walk in the mall. On vacation? Walking is a great way to see the sites. Overdue for an outing with friends? Schedule a scenic hike.

It’s easy to vary the intensity. To work harder, walk faster or walk up and down stairs or hills. Feeling tired or recovering from an illness? Slow it down.

In order to lower your risk of heart attack, gradually start walking at least 30 minutes a day (60 if you need to lose weight) on most days. On top of that you’ll look for opportunities to fit walking into the rest of your day.

What are you waiting for? Cut the Chicken Biryani and hamburgers out of your diet and start walking to the Masjid. =)

Oh and I wanted to share one Ayah from the Quran that talks about how we should walk, a little random but it’s all good.

“the servants of God the Most Gracious”. These are the people “who walk gently on earth, and who, whenever the ignorant address them, say: Peace ( Chapter 25, verses 63)

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Salam,

Source: www.helpimamsiraj.com

Imam Siraj Wahhaj, the voice of Da’wah in the West was diagnosed with prostate cancer on the week of March 2009. Since then, he has been receiving treatment and needs help to pay his medical bills.

He was there when we needed him; now he needs us!

May Allah swt give him full recovery and patience through these challenging times, Ameen!

Shout out to - middle-east-online.com and digg.com

GENEVA – Israeli soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the war on the Gaza Strip, UN human rights experts said Monday.

The Israeli Defense force ordered the boy to walk in front of soldiers being fired on in the Gaza neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa and enter buildings before them, said the UN secretary-general’s envoy for protecting children in armed conflict.

The boy also was told to open the bags of Palestinians — presumably to protect the soldiers from possible explosives — before being released at the entrance to a hospital, Radhika Coomaraswamy said.

She said the Jan. 15 incident, after Israeli tanks had rolled into the neighborhood and during “intense operations,” was a violation of Israeli and international law.

It was included in a 43-page report published Monday, and was just one of many verified human rights atrocities during the three-week war that ended Jan. 18, she said.

Coomaraswamy accused Israeli soldiers of shooting Palestinian children, bulldozing a home with a woman and child still inside, and shelling a building they had ordered civilians into a day earlier.

“Violations were reported on a daily basis, too numerous to list,” said Coomaraswamy, who visited Gaza and Israel for five days in February.

Israel criticized the report as “unable or perhaps unwilling” to address Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza.

An Israeli army spokesman rejected the UN claim.

“We are an army to which morals and high ethical standards are paramount,” said Capt. Elie Isaacson.

Coomaraswamy said her list of Israeli violations constituted “just a few examples of the hundreds of incidents that have been documented and verified” by UN officials who were in the territory.

She was the only one of the nine UN experts who compiled the report that was allowed into Gaza following the war. The experts covered issues ranging from health and hunger to women’s rights and arbitrary executions.

The report called for Israel to investigate human rights abuses that occurred during the conflict.

Last week Israel’s military ordered a criminal inquiry into published reports from soldiers that some troops had knowingly killed Palestinian civilians, including children.

Now that’s terrorism!

Also check this article from the

Israeli soldiers report abuses in Gaza

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From Zaytuna:

Curing Extremism: Three Voices, One Message: High Quality Video

In this three part lecture series Imam Zaid Shakir, Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad and Shaykh Hamza Yusuf diagnose and offer curative solutions to one of the most pressing problems we face as a globalized human society…. religious extremism.

Is Islam intrinsically extreme? Who’s to blame? What is the role that the individual, the community and the society at large can play in combatting and preventing religious extremism?

Find the answers to these essential questions and more in this critical series

Purchase it here Inshallah

Salam,

Shout out to HalalFocus on this.

We need this in New York!

Accredited by the Halal Food Authority (HFA), the store will be the first in the country to offer quality, hand-made Domino’s pizzas to customers who prefer to eat halal.

The new halal menu still includes many of the country’s favorite pizzas, but with a halal twist on the toppings. Items on the menu include halal spicy beef sausage, roast and tandoori chicken, halal pepperoni and halal cured turkey – all produced and stored within the HFA’s strict guidelines – and menus at the store will feature the HFA logo.

Abdul Mumtaz, proud franchisee of the Hall Green store, comments: “I am delighted to be opening the UK’s first 100% halal Domino’s Pizza store to better serve the needs of local residents. Domino’s is a national brand with a strong sense of the local communities in which it operates, and the halal store has been launched following huge demand from the people of Hall Green, where a high proportion of customers are followers of the Islamic faith.

“We’re really excited to open our first 100% halal store and be able to serve the people of Hall Green the delicious hand-made pizzas and positively outrageous service that Domino’s is famous for.”

Domino’s has worked closely with the HFA – the UK’s leading accreditation authority for halal food – which has examined every stage of the pizza-making process, from where ingredients are sourced to how they are stored and prepared, ensuring Domino’s meets its strict criteria.

Masood Khawaja, President of the HFA, comments: “We have been delighted to work with Domino’s to create its first 100% halal store. Our team has been extremely impressed by the Company’s commitment to halal and we hope to work with them to open other halal Domino’s stores in the future.”

Mashallah, I guess when times are rough you gotta start catering to other Markets to maximize revenue.

Anyways If your the CEO of Domino’s and your reading this, there are hundreds of domino’s in New York and thousands of Muslims. I’m sure you can test the market here by allowing a franchiser to introduce the halal menu. I’ll be your first customer  =), oh yea it’s not an option, You Got 30 Minutes! Ha.

Oh and one more thing to the CEO of Pizza Hut, Maybe you should consider this also.

If you haven’t subscribe to Chill Yo Islam Yo via email, click here, it’s quick and easy. 

You’ll get all my posts directly in your inbox inshallah.

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Salam,

If your a blogger with a twitter account, I figured this would be cool for you also. The best part about this is you can automatically configure your wordpress plugin settings to publish a post from your tweets on twitter.

Shout out to Azeem for the idea

Twitter Tools Wordpress Plugin

Download it by clicking on the link below.

http://tinyurl.com/2wgmtt

So what does exactly does the Twitter Tools wordpress plugin do?

Twitter Tools integrates with Twitter by giving you the following functionality:

• Archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 10 minutes)
• Create a blog post from each of your tweets
• Create a daily or weekly digest post of your tweets
• Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post
• Post a tweet from your sidebar
• Post a tweet from the WP Admin screens
• Pass your tweets along to another service (via API hook)

Follow me on twitter - Saadyo is my user name

have fun with the plugin!

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Source Associated Press —

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker says a catastrophe has befallen the Gaza Strip and that she hopes she and others can help President Barack Obama “see what we see.”

Walker, the U.S. author best known for her novel “The Color Purple,” toured Gaza this week, including an area destroyed in Israel’s recent war on the territory’s Islamic militant Hamas rulers.

Several neighborhoods along Gaza’s border with Israel were leveled by Israeli forces during the three-week offensive, which ended Jan. 18. Israel says Hamas is to blame for the destruction because its fighters used civilians as shields and operated from crowded areas. About 15,000 houses were destroyed or damaged, displacing thousands of Gazans.

Walker, 65, said in an interview Tuesday that she saw widespread devastation.

“Lots and lots and lots of houses of just ordinary people have been completely and utterly destroyed, and people are living in the rubble,” she said, speaking in the garden cafe of her Gaza City hotel. “Some of them are struggling in tents, and some are just sitting in what remains of their homes.”

Walker said her decision to visit Gaza, along with members of the U.S. anti-war group Code Pink, was spurred by the recent death of an older sister. She said she felt a connection to Gazans who lost loved ones in the war.

“I wanted very much to be with them and to bear witness to what is happening to them, this horrible, catastrophic, terrible thing,” she said.

Israel says it launched the Gaza offensive to halt rocket fire from Gaza at Israeli border towns. Some 1,300 Gazans were killed in the war, according to Gaza human rights groups and medics. Thirteen Israelis also were killed.

Walker said she believes Americans have mostly been exposed to the Israeli narrative since the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 and know little about the plight of the Palestinians. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled their homes at the time.

“We were indoctrinated to the song in that film Exodus, you know, `This land belongs to us, this land is our land,’ meaning the Israelis, the Jews, and for so long, we were told that nobody lived here, that it was a land without people, for a people without land,” she said.

Walker said she hopes she and others can make Obama more aware of the plight of Gaza.

“Believing that he (Obama) is a decent person, and I do believe this, our job then is to help him see what we see, and then he can decide how he will behave and it’s on his soul, it’s not on my soul.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Israel and the West Bank last week. Clinton said she would work vigorously for a peace agreement that includes the formation of an independent Palestinian state, but gave no indications she would try a new approach. Many Palestinians and other Arabs view U.S. policy as lopsided in Israel’s favor.

Walker did not respond directly when asked whether Hamas — classified as a terrorist group by the U.S. and Israel — should be held responsible for Gaza’s hardships.

“I think all of us have an opportunity here to just say what we believe, which is we think killing is wrong, we think stealing land is wrong, we think abusing people is wrong,” she said.

Gaza’s borders have largely been sealed by Israel and Egypt since June 2007, when Hamas seized control of the territory by force, ousting troops loyal to moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Walker, who is black, grew up in segregated Georgia, an experience reflected in some of her work. She won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for her 1982 novel “The Color Purple,” which was later turned into a movie and a musical.

If you haven’t subscribe to Chill Yo Islam Yo via email, click here, it’s quick and easy. 

You’ll get all my posts directly in your inbox inshallah.

Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work.

( Robert Oden)

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Image via Wikipedia

Salam,

Shout out to the Washington Post for publishing this article, and my uncle for sharing it with me.

- The Vatican said banks should look at the rules of Islamic finance to restore confidence among their clients at a time of global economic crisis.

“The ethical principles on which Islamic finance is based may bring banks closer to their clients and to the true spirit which should mark every financial service,” the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, said in an article this week.

Author Loretta Napoleoni and Abaxbank fixed-income strategist Claudia Segre say in the article that “Western banks could use tools such as the Islamic bonds, known as sukuk, as collateral.” Sukuk may be used to fund the “‘car industry or the next Olympic Games in London,” they say.

Pope Benedict XVI reflected on crashing financial markets in an Oct. 7 speech, saying that “money vanishes, it is nothing,” and he concluded that “the only solid reality is the word of God.” The Vatican has been paying attention to the global financial meltdown and ran articles in its official newspaper that criticize the free-market model for having “grown too much and badly in the past two decades.”

Now that’s official, Islam financing is the truth!

If you haven’t subscribe to Chill Yo Islam Yo via email, click here, it’s quick and easy. 

You’ll get all my posts directly in your inbox inshallah.

Wasalaam yo.

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Salam,

I found this written by Tayyibah Taylor very relevant to the times we are living in, the Muslim Ummah needs to unite and prosper so we don’t divide ourselves and get conquered. Shout out to Gallup.com for publishing this!

Read carefully.

Let’s agree to disagree, time to set aside our differences and wake up.