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On the 11th Anniversary of 9/11, Islam & Muslims: An Overview

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Eleven years ago, the world was shocked seeing planes flying into the World Trade Center towers. The chaos was overwhelming. People jumping out of top floor windows, in hope to escape imminent death to end up facing the same destiny, was nerve breaking. The shock of the 9/11 tragic events was startling. It was unbelievable, and irrational.

In this post, I would like to share with you some of our personal experience in the aftermath of the event. For the following weeks, I spent long hours into the late night, till my head drops, researching, verifying, compiling and annotating the text in a power point slides to create my first presentation to fellow Lucent engineers in Indian Hill campus in Naperville, IL. I wanted to give a digestible, without too much details, end-to-end picture on understanding Islam and Muslims. It covers, as much grounds as possible, the essential and typical questions people ask. Over the following years, I revised the presentation, and would like to share with you today…”Islam and Muslims: An Overview,” in power point show format, and have it also in native (.ppt) format.

As Jesus, the Son of Mary, Said to the Disciples

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One evening in the fall of 2005, after finishing one emotional session during a weeklong Strictly for Scoutmasters training in the National Scout Center in Cimarron, New Mexico, the realization of the major test and its consequences that mankind is subject to came striking into my heart. The realities of things came vivid to my sight in black and white; there was no shades of gray. The first one was the smog that extends between the American people and the external world. Extending as a translucent barrier causing the American people being captive to an external image that does not reflect who they really are. From their side, the understanding of the external world is reciprocally unclear, being fed to them through pinholes in a semi opaque veil. This might have changed since then, but that was the image at that time. The other bold reality is as much as we, humanity, share vast concerns, goals and values in our lives, yet there is that a very fine thread that sets each individual’s destiny for eternity; that is our understanding of the salient truth about the existence. That is the universal truth about divinity; our choices of conviction, and how we interpret it. All of these came to me at once in the outdoors where the hustle and bustle of our city routine was absent. Feeling these thoughts, my heart was deeply aching, I was weeping the whole evening into the deep night, and I was not able to sleep.

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Points covered in this article are the description of Jesus, relation to prophet Mohammad, Jesus disciples as an example, the table from heaven, crucifixion, return at the end of time, the dialog between Jesus and God on the day of Judgment, the status of Jesus before God as is what humanity should aspire for, and concludes with a message from the Quran.
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