avari | haroon moghul

Want a Summer Internship with the Islamic Center?

This position is open to both NYU and Non-NYU individuals. Interested applicants from NYU can apply for this position via NYU's Careernet by searching for job ID #769434

*_Employer: _*

The Islamic Center at NYU

*_Division: _*

Student Affairs

*_Title: _*

Summer Intern

*_Organization Description : _*

The Islamic Center at NYU functions within the Division of Student Affairs at New York University, a private institution of higher education and research located in lower Manhattan.


*_Description: _*

Interns will be expected to research specific topics and assist in specific projects that ICNYU will identify as beneficial to the growth and development of the organization. The research will result in
papers, projects or events, which will be finished by the end of the internship term. Each intern will be assigned a different topic for organizational development.

Interns will attend seminars, meetings and lectures, as they become available. Interns will also participate in regular educational sessions to better understand institution building and development as well as gain a deeper understanding of how activism relates to Islam.

Interns will be expected to perform administrative duties.

At the end of the internship, the performance of each intern will be measured based on reports as well as staff experience, and a letter of recommendation will be provided accordingly.

If students would like to have their internship count for school credit, they will need to provide the appropriate papers for the IC at NYU staff to sign.


*_Qualification: _*

A candidate must be a graduate student, an undergraduate student, or have graduated from college within a year of beginning the internship.

Interns are expected to commit 10 hours per week during an 8 to 12 week internship period.


*_Location: _*


City New York
   State New York
   Country United States


*_Position Type: _*

Part-Time, Internship, On-Campus Non Federal Work Study, Paid, Unpaid, Spring, Summer

*_GPA: _*

3.0

*_Salary Level: _*

possible stipend/ for credit if available


*_Job Function: _*

Administrative & Support Service, Communications - Media, Non-Profit, Social, Community Sv, Religious Services

*_Desired Start Date: _*

June 1st, 2009

*_Approximate Hours Per Week: _*

10 hours per week


If interested in the above position, please submit resumes to
kl442@nyu.edu

 _*Contact Information*_  Khalid Latif
60 Washington Square South, rm 806
New York, New York 10012
United States
(212) 998-4712

When I Have Hopes I May Cease to Be

Dear God:

It occurred to me tonight, while boiling a cup of tea in order that I might not fall asleep while reading Bergson, that in the last few days I have seen several scenes which together I should like to suggest for paradise.  (I do not know if the plans have been finished; somewhere along the line, I recall reading that we might have some say in the architecture.)

First of all, the streets should be broad and spacious.  They should be inundated with greenery, each leaf and each plant and Peachtree and flower bursting with life, as if it is in every moment of every day spring time all over again, yearning, straining, to express a kind of fertility and ridiculous desire that in this world comes far too rarely.  There should be majestic and giant streams, rivers even, the deepest blue and in other places, translucent and crystal, which have in them as much calm and as much solace as all the pain and all that hurts in all times and all places requires so that we be healed.

Secondly, might I suggest that the buildings be tremendous.  They should be edifices of eternity, chiseled from massive blocks of stone, solid and spacious and suddenly occurring, rising from sidewalks and hiding behind trees of unbelievable shade, ornamented in manners elegant and conspicuous and distinct and imperial.  They should speak of permanence, but they should seem to be nicely swept and watched, as if maintained at least once a week to a standard a high-class urban resident would expect.  I suspect the inhabitants of these buildings would be beautiful people, and that they would fill the streets from time to time, and would otherwise be invisible to me unless I suggest otherwise.

Thirdly, I would like to live in one of these mansions.  I would like to walk down the street and see stretched out before me huge stone skyscrapers and walls of glass that seem to melt away in layers after layers of moisture burned off by heat, punched into deep greens and electrocuted by smiling flowers, long lawns long enough for my life to walk by, and manicured shrubbery, all of them in the nighttime still enough to be asleep.  The weather at the end of the day (am I wrong to presume that we will still have the daytime and the night time?) should be perfectly hot, just a few degrees lower than impressive.  Not too hot that one would sweat, not too cold that one would ever feel regret at leaving my jacket in the apartment before going out.  It should be the kind of heat that makes it seem to me, every time I look at it, every time I walk around in it, that your mercy has itself excited the atoms at the prospects of forgiveness, and that they move ever more quickly, not enough to burn me but just enough to console me, to tell me in every instant and every gesture, each quark saying, “It is all over now.  It is okay.  It is done.”

Fourthly, I should like to know where I should apply, and how long is the waiting list, to get a space in this world.  I have not done much to deserve such residence.  I confess rather that I have failed more often than not, but at least there is in me the desire to speak in a time when most speaking declines to imagine an after, when most tongues insist that there is nothing more important than me.  If all I can do, if all my sagging heart and brutal intellect can bear, is to declare that you are unique, unlike anything the likes of which we can be like, then perhaps it might not be, if you deem it so, too much to ask to see this place one day with my own eyes and to walk in it with my own feet and to speak in it with my own words.  I should like to think that it would be a restoration, a reconstruction of me, because I am after all little more than an exhaustion of myself, perpetually wheezing in the face of a frantic modernity that I am not strong enough will still in my sight.  Perhaps there was a time when there were men and women big enough and great enough to conquer this world, but now is the time for men and women who have been conquered, and at least today, we like the enlightened colonized can complain in the innermost chamber of chambers, and then walk alongside giant streams and pretend as if we were making them follow us.

Sincerely,

Reading Qur'an for Cops: "The Muslim Constituency of the New York City Police..."

A five-minute, Current TV clip, available at the Islamic Center at NYU (or below).  Check out a very nice recitation by Imam Latif, opening an NYPD function, at 00:32:

What You Hear isn't What I Expected: An Iranian Qari

Islamic Finance Frontiers

This Monday, I'm thankful for Jeremy Harding's excellent review of Islamic finance, from its strengths, its origins, its questions and its new directions.  It's nice to see such a positive portrayal of Islam and its institutions, and by positive I mean probing, real, fair, balanced, understanding, fluent, comfortable, sympathetic and synthetic.  Islam is explicitly described as a living practice (I like that word more than "tradition" if you get my meaning), something that people do, think about, and keep doing.  It's not medieval, it's not calcified, it's not rigid, it's not stuck, it's not cement, it's life, and evolving, values translating... and interpreting... Good stuff.

Iran's Muslim Clones

It is Iran's scientific progress which causes much of its problems in the world: Because the country wants to develop certain capacities, it becomes a threat to regional and outside powers; it is important to understand that much of the world's opposition to Iran is tied to local states, unable to keep up (Saudi Arabia being one such example) that, as a result, become so intimidated, clutch ever more tightly to the prospect of outside intervention (to save Saudi Arabia from the mess it has made of its foreign policy, and its comparatively poor economic and social development.)  Now news comes that Iran has cloned its first goat, coming on Iran's cloning, two years ago, of a sheep.  Scary stuff.

Makkah's First Black Imam

The poor son of an immigrant father now leads prayers at the holiest place on Earth.

Two Middles to the Same East

From one of the harshest judgments on Dubai I have yet come across -- it seems like there's a bit of schadenfreude among a number of Western journalists eager to, in this downturn, bash any sign of Arab initiative (the opposite and twin of knee-jerk anti-Bushism); recession means the innate prejudices are born.  Doesn't mean the article doesn't raise great, by which I mean thunderously freaky, points, only that this harp-on-the-negative there-is-no-positive tone is petty and grating. 

Yes, Dubai has made a lot of mistakes.  But good God, it is 20 years old.  This downturn could be and should be a chance to re-evaluate.  I'm not defending everything, or even half the things, but I am defending the fact of creative thinking.  If we turn into naysayers we deny the fact that at least an emirate is making an attempt at an alternative to its past and to the Arab present, and with those negative realities come positive realities and institutions. 

How to balance what I do agree is Dubai's far too capitalist and elitist vision with local values, ecological respect and reserve and responsible growth should and God willing will come over time.  But twenty years is not time enough to pass a death sentence on that country.  And for all this eco-left-jihadism, take Abu Dhabi which, though it comes across as manic Dubai's evil twin in this article, is investing in 2009 as much money in green energy research as the entire United States thanks to the Obama stimulus package and is doing so through far more exciting initiatives.  You read that correctly.  (The same goes for Saudi Arabia.) 

So what about that?  The article wants it to be that Dubai is run by benighted, ignorant folks who have no idea what's happening.  All that money is going green out of a realization that oil is ephemeral, and new infrastructure and technology must be ready and waiting to take its place.

On the other end, a cannot-miss look at the Muslim Brotherhood in a moment of democratic transition.  Take that, dictatorship!