Often as Muslims we are challenged to find Muslim friendly holiday accommodation. The Green Palm Hotel in Bon Accord, Tobago, definitively eliminates that issue if you are planning a vacation on the island of Tobago.  An on site restaurant that provides halal food, or if you are inclined to prepared your own meals there is small kitchenette, a musalla (place to perform pray), clean rooms and great hospitality.  A few minutes from the best beaches in Tobago and the airport. Green Palm can also provide custom vacation packages inclusive of airport pick up, meals and island tours.  A great place to have a halal vacation.  Note that Green Palm does cater to a multi-faith clientele and is not an exclusive Muslim hotel.

With the development of the modern state in the middle east and it's evolution to totalitarianism (dictatorship and kingship) the list of things declared bidah keeps increasing.  Amongst the tools used in totalitarian states to control the population are the restriction of movement, the freedom to associate with others and the freedom to express oneself.  Proof of this is the dominance of secret/virtue police and the criminalization of normal human activities.  The totalitarian states in the middle east have successfully drafted religion into its social control mechanism to subjugate its respective populations.  Hence the growing list of religious/devotional practices that are deemed by official religious authorities as forbidden by Islamic Law.  For over 1400 years Muslims have been a people of association who found blessings in gatherings.

This totalitarian state defined bidah today bans association thus denying the blessings of the gathering with the consequence of the loss of the sacred and attachment to the Divine realm by the Ummah of Muhammad (s) resident in those parts.  As Muslims living in societies in the west, which guarantees freedom of movement, association and expression, we have also been victims of this totalitarian influence on our way of life.  By taking the praxis of our faith wholesale from the middle east (especially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) as the default arbiter of all thats correct in law, we risk importing the totalitarian influence into our own praxis.  By not filtering out  from the teachings of the official religious scholars the prism of their governing systems, we distort the praxis left to us in that living chain of scholarship which traces its interpretations and narrations back to the Prophet Muhammad (s).  The numerous locals who leave our shores to study on scholarships to institutions that teaches official religion using rote methodology are the wholesale agents and distributors of this totalitarian influence deen in our midst.  They absorbed these interpretations and then regurgitate these poisoned concepts as divine law upon us.  A university education's legacy is developing critical thinking skills.  The only critical skill learnt by these "graduates" is to criticise the praxis of the people who came before them and to "expel" them from the ambit of the faith.  Here in five minutes the Grand Mufti of Egypt explains the true meaning of the concept of bidah.  It is an essential defintion that is key to understanding our faith and the evolution of its legal principles.  To often it is used to stir confusion amongst us.  The definition is clear and deconstructs the facade of authenticity built by the "fundamentalists".

This film tells the story of the meeting between the Prophet Muhammad (Peace and Blessings be upon Him) and a Christian monk named Bahira. The meeting happened in the shade of a tree.

Here is a significant find.  The promoters of indiscriminate use of violence and rebellion depend on Ibn Taymiyyah's Mardin Fatwa.  Top scholars came together to deliberate on this fatwa.  They relied on the fatwa as is it is "popularly" reported.  Listen to the clip from Shaykh Hamza which is the mp3 file  attached.  Shaykh Hamza was speaking at the Rethinking Islamic Reform debate with Dr. Tarek Ramadan  held at Oxford University, UK.  It points out that Shaykh Bin Bayyah was not comfortable with the text as it was internally contradictory.  In that Ibn Taymiyyah analyzed Mardin, then declared it is neither Dar ul Kufr or Dar ul Islam but another classification of Dar al 'Ahd, yet the prescription is as if the Dar ul Kufr is equal to Dar al 'Ahd.  After the conference Shaykh Bin Bayyah tried to remove his doubt about the text of the fatwa, only to find out that the earlier manuscripts of the fatwa had amalu [sic] not qatalu [sic].  This is a significant alteration as reported by Shaykh Hamza.