Imam Feisal spoke with Kate Bolduan on CNN’s This Hour about President Donald Trump’s visit to the Middle East and his speech to the Muslim world. Watch the video by clicking on the image below.
Making Urban Sacred: Imam Feisal at UPenn
Imam Feisal took part in an interreligious panel as part of the Boardman Public Symposium at the University of Pennsylvania on April 20, 2017. The panel also included Venerable Rath Muni, Buddhist monk, Wat Preah Rangsey; A. Robert Jaegar, President of Partners for Sacred Places; and Sophia Rabliauskas, indigenous cultural sovereignty activist. The theme of the conversation was “Making Urban Sacred: Religion, Migration, and Contested spaces in the City.”
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In advance of this event, Imam Feisal published an op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Let Our Image of God Unite Us.”
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Cordoba House Isra Mi’raj 2017
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Op-Ed by Imam Feisal: Let Our Image of God Unite Us
In this op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Imam Feisal encourages us to expand our faithfulness in God beyond the “local”—to see the connections that exist between ourselves and other people of different communities, beliefs, and cultures and let our common love of God unite us.
We are caught now on a divide between self-affirmation and affirmation of those different from us. Is my ultimate address Philadelphia or the mind of God? Are my neighbors only other Muslims or all created in the image of God? — that would be all humanity, as both the Prophet Muhammad and the Bible teach. Our charge as religious leaders is to remind us all that no ethnicity, nationality, or religion is our ultimate address. God is.
Read more (Philadelphia Inquirer) | Download PDF
Cordoba House Stands with the Jewish Community
“A Hebrew prayer sometimes recited in Jewish cemeteries is the El Maleh Rahamim, which means ‘God full of compassion.’ It invokes the images of divine wings, spread protectively over the soul of the deceased. May we find our common humanity under the loving protection of God.” – Imam Feisal
Cordoba House Stands in Solidarity with Our Jewish Friends
Our hearts break over the antisemitic acts recently reported in the national news. We learn of yet another wave of bomb threats against Jewish schools and centers. These so far appear to be hoaxes. But the hundred headstones overturned in the Mount Carmel Jewish Cemetery in Philadelphia, discovered Sunday morning, was no hoax. This was only a few days after a similar act of vandalism committed at Chesed Shel Emet Cemetery in University City, Missouri. Police are seeking the perpetrators. But whatever the motives behind these acts, they help channel and foment hatred and fear. Antisemites have often chosen this surreptitious method to vent their unholy anger.
We stand firmly with our Jewish brothers and sisters against these acts. We mourn the cruelty of this behavior and condemn it, even as we hope for remorse in the perpetrators. We deplore the desecration of any cemetery. These are hallowed places of memory and hope-memory of the beloved deceased and hope in the life to come. The Prophet Muhammed commended cemetery visits for putting us in mind of the afterlife. The Talmud, a sacred text of the Jewish people, likens tombstones to palaces. Just as for both Muslims and Jews, to take a life is to destroy a world, so to overturn a tombstone is to raze a home.
We especially feel for the suffering of our Jewish friends. It is not just that we are bound together in descent from Abraham. The Quran proclaims to all the earth: “O Children of Israel, remember My favor that I have bestowed upon you and that I have preferred you over the rest of the peoples” (2:47). We ponder these words in humility. They bind us in friendship and deep regard for the Jewish people. We suffer with their sufferings, as they have most recently with ours over immigration bans. And we call, with them, for our highest government officials repeatedly to condemn the scourge of antisemitism until it finally disappears. May the harmony God meant for us to know across all our differences rise up and prevail.
Read and Discussion Huffington Post | Read and Discuss on OnFaith
