“First Ten Days“ is a collection of 33 photographs which will provide you a flavour of the First Ten Days of Ramadan 2012 from Masjids across Toronto.
This is our second collection.
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Comments Off on Day 10 – Ramadan in Toronto has been quite different than in Mumbai | By Zoheb Kherada
By Zoheb Kherada, Scarborough
This is a briliant idea by HiMY to enable us to report our Ramadan experience at one platform.
Ramadan in Toronto has been quite different than in Mumbai.
In Mumbai there are lot many people and food is available on the streets whereas in Toronto its more disciplined and despite the fact that the fast duration (summer) is 1.5 times than in Mumbai, it feels easier to keep roza here due to the fantastic facilities this city has to offer.
Will write in detail later.
Zoheb Kherada
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Introducing: 30 Masjids BIG photoblog!
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Bismillah…
Introducing 30Masjids BIG Photoblog !
First Collection is Turkish Tiles.
Inspired by the response to Boston.com’s BIG PICTURE Ramadan Series each year, we’ll continue posting our Ramadan Collections until Eid al Fitr.
The intention is also share Muslim Stories in BIG Photographs after Ramadan as an ongoing open submission photoblog the rest of the year.
Forgive the rough edges, there are many.
Our next collection will be posted as soon as possible, titled “The First Ten Days”
Ramadan Mubarak!
HiMY SYeD
30Masjids.ca/bigphotoblog
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VIDEO: Day 8 – Turkish Tiles
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The Story of Turkish Tiles by Tevfik Baba
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The previous Saturday on Day 2, Tevfik Baba invited me for Jumah Prayers.
Alhumdulillah, I biked from Downtown Toronto and arrived in time at the Sufi Centre to take some photographs that weren’t possible earlier.
We read Jumah Friday Prayers, then hung around for a while.
By the end of my Jumah in the Sufi Centre there was possiblity of three–not just one–blog posts.
This first post will only be a few photographs and something of the Khutbah.
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Comments Off on 30 MORE | VIDEO: “The First Knight of Ramadan – A Muslim Nerd’s Dilemma”
A Muslim nerd is excited for the new Dark Knight movie–but it releases on the first night of Ramadan.
a 30 Days Ramadan production
www.30daysramadan.comfeaturing Aman Ali (& his mom)
directed by Musa Syeed
shot by Omar MullickThis video is a Co‐Production of 30 Mosques, LLC and Independent Television Service, Inc. (ITVS), with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
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VIDEO: Day 2 – Whirling Dervish
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Comments Off on Day 1 – First Friday: First Jumah in Masjid Toronto
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Comments Off on 30Mosques.com | VIDEO: ’30 Mosques in 30 Days’ – Dansk Islamisk Center – Copenhagen
Performed by: Aman Ali (New York)
Date: Thursday April 11 2012
Venue: Danish Islamic Center, Copenhagen
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Comments Off on 30Mosques.com | VIDEO: Lecture Series: Stereotyping Muslims, Myths and the Media – The Tech Museum – San Jose, California
Sunday, November 13, 2011 – 2:00 p.m.
Panel discussion with Dr. Reza Aslan, Wajahat Ali, Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq, moderated by Angie Coiro
Dr. Reza Aslan, internationally acclaimed writer, multi-media entrepreneur and co-founder of BoomGen Studios, joins playwright, lawyer and humorist, Wajahat Ali, and authors of 30 Mosques in 30 Days, Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq’s, for our panel discussion.
Dr. Reza Aslan is Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of BoomGen Studios, the premier entertainment brand for creative content from and about the Greater Middle East and President of AppOvation Labs, a mobile applications company.
Born in Iran, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife (author and entrepreneur Jessica Jackley) where he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Dr. Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is the founder of AslanMedia.com, an online journal for news and entertainment about the Middle East and the world.
Reza Aslan has degrees in Religions from Santa Clara University, Harvard University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, where he was named the Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction.
He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and the Pacific Council on International Policy.
He serves on the board of directors of the Ploughshares Fund, which gives grants for peace and security issues; Abraham’s Vision, an educational, conflict transformation organization for Israeli and Palestinian youths; PEN USA, which champions the rights of writers under siege around the world; and the Levantine Cultural Center, which builds bridges between Americans and the Arab/Muslim world through the arts.
Wajahat Ali, local playwright, lawyer and humorist is joined by Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq’s, authors of 30 Mosques in 30 Days.
Wajahat Ali’s play, “The Domestic Crusaders” is one of the first major plays about the American Muslim experience premiering at the the Berkeley Repertory Theater to universal acclaim in 2005 and in New York on 9-11-09.
Honored both as an “An Influential Muslim American Artist” by the State Department and as a “Muslim Leader of Tomorrow”, Ali also received the prestigious “Emerging Muslim American Artist” award.
He is a frequent contributor to the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and other publications.
His first short story, “Ramadan Blues,” was published in January 2009 and his first movie, “Ms. Judgments,” was a finalist for the LinkTV Muslim American Film Contest.
His blog, “Goatmilk: An Intellectual Playground” (goatmilk.wordpress.com), is ranked in the top 7% of political blogs by blogged.com.
Wajahat practices law in the Bay Area, California.
Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq are the co-creators of 30 Mosques in 30 Days, a Ramadan road trip adventure across the United States.
Using Facebook and Twitter to fundraise over $18,000 for the project, the two have driven over 25,000 miles to every state with the mission of telling authentic stories about Muslims in America on their site, www.30mosques.com.
During the trip they have prayed inside the infamous “Ground Zero Mosque” hung out with Muslims in Alaska and Hawaii and visited the first mosque ever built in the U.S. in Ross, North Dakota – a town with only 48 people.
They have told the stories of several refugees who fled their homes in Africa, Asia and Europe to settle in the U.S., a Singaporean woman who traveled across the globe to marry an incarcerated prison convict in South Dakota, a Native American Muslim who grew up on a Sioux reservation among others.
Their eye-opening journey explores what it means to be Muslim in America today, and serves as a powerful counter-narrative to the media’s image of a monolithic Islam, receiving coverage on ABC News, CNN, BBC, Time, PBS, NPR, Fox News, the Huffington Post and Aljazeera English.
About The Tech Museum
The Tech Museum is a hands-on technology and science museum for people of all ages and backgrounds. The museum-located in the Capital of Silicon Valley – is a non-profit learning resource established to engage people in exploring and experiencing technologies affecting their lives. Through programs such as The Tech Challenge presented by Cisco, our annual team design competition for youth, and internationally renowned programs such as The Tech Awards presented by Applied Materials, Inc., The Tech Museum celebrates the present and encourages the development of innovative ideas for a more promising future
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Comments Off on 30Mosques.com | Epilogue: We Will Meet Again
By Bassam Tariq
Dear friends,
It has been a while. We are back living the lives we left. I am in my advertising agency working on what advertising people work on. Aman is touring, flying across the world and writing incredible editorials. Life continues. There was a pause and in that pause we all met. It was only two to three weeks ago that we all were together. You were rooting for us, yelling at us, shaking your head, your fingers – your excitement and energy helped us continue.
And now I sit in my cubicle wondering if we will speak again. Will we disagree again publicly? Will we continue to challenge each other? Will we try to understand those that are not like us? Does it all stop here?
I take a bus and a train to work sometimes. The morning commute isn’t a long one. I pass by the same homeless men and street vendors on my way into my office. My cubicle has my two mugs ready sitting with my made in Pakistan tea bags. After being gone for a month, everything sat there waiting for me. I brew my tea and I make my way from meetings to meetings.
I eat during the day and sleep during the night.
And as everything fades to normal, will I not wonder what all this has meant?
I have these reoccurring flashes of Lutfullah Wali, the centurion from Nebraska, scribbling profusely on his wall. When I sit in the subway train on my morning commute, I sometimes wish the skyscrapers were replaced by the beautiful mountains of Denali National Park in Alaska or even the expansive cornfields of Indiana.
But as the days pass, the road trip and it’s memories are starting to fade. And it worries me.
The people, their hospitality, their candor, their plight – they cannot be forgotten. The spirit of what we started cannot die. We must remember them. That is how they will live on.
The day of Eid, I drove from Burlington, Vermont to New York City. I made it just in time for the morning prayer of celebration at Masjid Ar Rahman. This is where it all started for Aman and I. This is the place, where two Ramadan’s ago, we were so overwhelmed by the amount of Muslims and its diversity in New York City that we were compelled to visit a new community everyday. I felt like I had to pay my respects here.
It made perfect sense in my mind to drive seven hours all night to make it to a five minute prayer and 20 minute sermon that was inaudible from the back of the prayer space. For the hopes of giving me some kind of clarity. In my mind, it was all worth it.
The following photos were taken during the Eid prayers at the storefront mosque, Masjid Ar Rahman.
***
Later that day, I found myself at a place that challenged everything I knew about Muslims in America. There was a mosque nestled away in the heart of hipster Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Inside of it, a table was set up with cookies and cake. There was a little bit of decoration and the few congregants were waiting. They were waiting for people to come and celebrate Eid with them. And when we finally arrived as uninvited guests, they gave us big hugs and said “happy holidays.”
These few men and women are descendants of Lithuanian/Polish Tatars. Their organization was established in 1907 and at the time they were known as Muhammadans.
They are a small community and live amongst one another. They keep amongst themselves and are dwindling in numbers. We were their only guests that day. No one else had come for the celebration.
Yes, I know. There are many questions about who these people are. There must be. I had many of them as well and instead of asking them, I had to leave to catch a flight to Texas.
My afternoon with the Tatars was cut short. I will go back one day to visit the community, but when that day will be? Who knows…
But is the connection for me and this congregation only seasonal? Is it similar in that way to the connection that you and I have? That we will only care to look at one another when we are hungry and bored? Or when there is a plate of food between us?
As true as it might be, I can’t let myself believe that. There is something deeper that has brought us together: the stories. And perhaps that is how we will speak and stay connected. By sharing stories that mean something to us — stories that upset or uplift us. Stories of communities we would have never heard of before or cared to learn about. People that we never stopped to pay attention that we started to take note of. These are the stories that make up our life. They are the ones worth sharing, the ones we live for. Because what else are we without them?
See you soon,
Bassam Tariq
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30Mosques.com | LOOKING BACK
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By Bassam Tariq
They say that nostalgia is one of the most useless human emotions. What do you get from sulking or waxing about the past? Maybe this isn’t that. Maybe this is just a reflection on some of the moments that can’t seem to leave my mind.
Day 3: Corvallis, Oregon – Letters To Your “Terrorist” Friend.
We meet friends of a convicted terrorist and ask them a simple question: If they could say anything to their friend, what would it be? In the beginning, many were nervous about sharing their thoughts, but as they eased into it we were able to get some incredibly thoughtful and emotional responses.
Day 5: Honolulu, Hawaii – Ten Hours Of Shoddy Tourism
I tried to break down my entire 10 hour Hawaii trip hour-by-hour. It was an ambitious idea. Not sure if people got what I was trying to do.
Day 8: Sioux Falls, South Dakota – Finding Love In Prison
One of the most unforgettable visits on the trip for me is when I met David outside of the mosque. Within five minutes of us meeting one another he started sharing stories about his stay in prison. He then cuts himself off and apologizes for having a big mouth.
“I talk too much.” he admits.
David is human like all of us and isn’t afraid to show it. His story about how he met his wife is one of the most incredible stories that we have ever found during our 30 Mosques trip. A must read.
Day 13: Little Rock, Arkansas – Lessons Learned
One of the most controversial posts this year came from my experiences in the Women’s side. Many people sadly missed my sarcasm in the writing and thought that I had forced my way into the women’s area. Just to set the record straight for those who still wonder, we had complete permission to go into the women’s side and all the photos have the women have been cleared.
Day 20: Plainfield, Indiana – Understanding the MSA Experience
Many Muslims have had very different experiences with the Muslim Students’ Association in their universities and colleges. I thought my experience of being stuck in a bubble was a unique one, but it turns out that many Muslims have also felt the same way.
Day 22: Washington, DC – Visiting A Gay Imam
Hands down, the most controversial post that 30 Mosques has ever made. Though we never said we agreed or accepted the Daaiyee Abdullah’s choices, we were thrown under the bus for empathizing with another Muslim. It was sad to see the lack of adab, Islamic values, people had when speaking about homosexuality.
Day 29: The Journey Of Arriving To America
Every time I see the photo of Fawaad and his son on an airplane, I can’t help but get goosebumps. The family is on their way to the US from a war ridden Congo. The mood of the photo is conflicting. There is uncertainty and concern riddled with hope and promise. It was one of the most vulnerable and honest photos I have ever seen.
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30Mosques.com | Live Chat – Round 3!
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@DEHausfrau thanks so much. join us tonight for our live chat at 11PM EST if you can at 30mosques.com #30mosques
— Bassam Tariq (@curry_crayola) September 4, 2011
RT @amanali #30Mosques live chat TONIGHT 11 pm EST http://t.co/6VgUi2z! Ensured happening AFTER Curb Your Enthusiasm comes on. #Priorities
— HïMY SYeD 🕌 30 Masjids in 30 Days of Ramadan 2022 (@30masjids) September 4, 2011
By Aman Ali
Third live chat was a blast! If you missed it, no worries, click the “More” button to relive the party
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