Sunni Sister: Give Me That Old Time Diyn

Valuable insight from a wise person.... ( A Must Read!)

"................Now, b/c of some ridiculousness with the ‘Eid this past month (as well as last year), some people are calling for Americans to have a new, different method of moonsighting or something. That’s on top of people around the world calling upon all of us to “follow Makkah and Madinah” in our sighting. When, in the entire history of the Ummah, was “following Makkah and Madinah” a valid, accepted opinion of the fuquha? Where is the dalil for this? What is wrong with global and local? People say, “We need to have a unified ‘Eid.” Well, do we all pray fajr at the same time? No. The Hanafis pray ‘asr later than the rest of us. Of course, there are many people in the US who think we ought to do away with madhabs altogether, but that’s for later. Did Allah subhannahu wa ta’ala say something about a unified ‘Eid in the Qur’an? Did the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) give “unified ‘Eid” as a method of deducing the start and end of the month?....................."

"..................In the US, we are still grappling with issues of identity and authority. The older immigrants who tend to run our “main” organizations, and who tend to be the donors, have a different mentality and worldview than those of us born and raised here. We struggle to come to terms with our interaction with Muslims outside of the US, especially after two decades of petro-dollars influencing what English speaking Muslims learn and hear about Islam. Some of us see the failures in these Muslim societies and conclude that the ‘ulema from those societies can’t possibly understand us, that they have nothing to teach us.

If someone wants to come up with some groundbreaking theory in physics or medicine, she or he will not be taken seriously until she / he has undergone extensive formal training (Swiss patent clerks notwithstanding). You have to understand what it is you’re talking about before you go about posing radical new theories, or undertaking innovative research. We all know it. It’s almost a tired analogy. It’s a shame people continue to reject it. We give knowledge of the diyn a lower status of importance than physics or medicine.................. "