Another Day, Another Death

Well, today I came home from school and noticed one my birds was sick. It was fine yesterday. Within a few hours, it had died. It was one of the lovebirds. I have no idea what happened; I just hope it isn't something that will affect the other birds. My mom came down and helped me bury it in the back yard. The lovebirds are very young and I've only had them a few months, so I didn't know this one as well as some of the others; it takes a while for their personalities to really show. I just feel bad seeing a sick bird in my care and not knowing what to do to make it better or if I did something to cause it somehow.

Death is everywhere, every living thing dies; it is our destiny. Yet how little we prepare for it, how quickly we put it out of our minds, and how we even forget the dead that we had loved. And meanwhile, life continues. I had to write a graduate paper tonight, some lady came to try to sell me newspapers; two of the students in my graduate program called to ask me questions, my friend came to go to the gym with me, I am writing now, and we eat and sleep and pray. My aunt died yesterday, yet we all went to work today and I taught my students and smiled with them and got frustrated by them just like any other day. Just because death comes doesn't mean life stops.

inna ilahe wa inna lilahe rajeeoon

My aunt died last night. She had been suffering from cancer and had been fighting it for a long time. I really didn't know her that well - she is a relative by marriage rather than blood and we rarely visited their family. But what I know of her is that she was kind and spunky. Are you supposed to feel really bad when a relative dies even if you didn't know them well? It is sad, but also good because she was suffering, but I really don't feel too much at the moment. Then there's guilt for not feeling too much. I guess they're going to cremate the body and have some kind of service on Sunday. I have to work on Sunday and it isn't something that can be canceled - so I feel kind of bad that I probably won't be there as it seems I should. Cremation is becoming very popular here because burial is much more expensive. I know cremation is not permitted in Islam, right? I wonder why. Are we still attached to our bodies after death physically and emotionally? I mean, would we feel pain at cremation? I heard of feeling the grave squeezing on the body - so would we feel the burning? Or does that squeezing not really relate to being buried but is something else altogether - some kind of punishment or purification not really of the body?

I know that living where I do right now, it is highly unlikely I would be buried as a Muslim and have a Muslim funeral, etc. What difference does that make? Does it harm you in some way? Imam Hussein (as) did not get a Muslim burial, right? So what is the point of it all - why is it so important and why do we do it? Is it a big deal not to be buried Muslim or is it not really a big concern?

My aunt was not Muslim, still are there things I should do for her now in terms of dua, etc?

I will probably post this on shiaroses to see if people have answers, and maybe abdg also.

random thoughts

Lots of things to think about lately. Spring Break is that kind of time - it makes one think of the future, particularly summer! It is so hard to be back in school after a week off - it is so far from where the mind is at. Same for all the kids, that makes it harder with all the minds in the room somewhere else.

The last few days I didn't work too much. Watched my brothers' kids, took my dad on an errand, picked up some stuff for my brother and watched him lay sod, and lived in my own private fantasy world most of the rest of the time.

I found one of the hadith I've been looking for: --
 If a man lives in a town with a hundred thousand inhabitants or more, and there is someone in that town whose virtue is greater then his, then that man is not of our shi'ah.
Imam Ja’far as Sadiq (as)
http://home.swipnet.se/islam/books/Shia-faith/05.htm#37
I am not sure who is the author of that book, though - or any of its other pertinent details.

I decided to try to go to Vancouver for a week when school is out. That is like a pilgrimage to me, renews my faith a bit, insha'allah. There are some people there that are really important to me and that I really look up to. And it is very beautiful there. I struggle with the idea of moving there as opposed to just staying right where I am for the rest of my life. This little house and neighborhood fit me; they are comfortable and familiar. I grew up here. But it really lacks for some things I could use re: being a Muslim.

Maybe around that time I'll know if my husband is coming back this year or if we're getting divorced or what have you.

Today a student is coming to interview me for his english class. They're not supposed to do teachers, but he got an exception to interview me about being Muslim. I know his mom, she's another teacher in my department and the kid is a very thoughtful man - thinks a lot. I am kind of nervous about it, really. But excited too, I guess. Then, my cousin has a retirement party. Not sure what to expect there but I'll probably stop in with my mom. It'll probably be the last family get-together before my aunt Miriam passes on - her body is riddled with cancer right now and she is pretty sick. I kind of doubt she'll be there, actually. I don't know my extended family very well. My dad's family was in other places, and my mom's was feuding when I was a kid and so I was never around them. We were an independent family - my parents did everything on their own, masha'allah, and sometimes it was really hard on them. This cousin that is retiring for some reason is my favorite. He has lived in Fargo, ND most of my life but out of all of them he has seemed the most sane. Maybe that's because he hasn't been around.

I need to buckle down on my grad school stuff, too. I could've used this week to get ahead on it, but I didn't.

Rachel Corrie Died One Year Ago

Naomi Klein
Thursday May 22, 2003
The Guardian

Jessica Lynch and Rachel Corrie could have passed for sisters. Two all-American blondes, two destinies for ever changed in a Middle East war zone. Private Jessica Lynch, the soldier, was born in Palestine, West Virginia. Rachel Corrie, the activist, died in Israeli-occupied Palestine.

Corrie was four years older than 19-year-old Lynch. Her body was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza seven days before Lynch was taken into Iraqi custody on March 23. Before she went to Iraq, Lynch organised a pen-pal programme with a local kindergarten. Before Corrie left for Gaza, she organised a pen-pal programme between kids in her hometown of Olympia, Washington, and children in Rafah.

Lynch went to Iraq as a soldier loyal to her government. Corrie went to Gaza to oppose the actions of her government. As a US citizen, she believed she had a special responsibility to defend Palestinians against US-built weapons, purchased with US aid to Israel. In letters home, she described how fresh water was being diverted from Gaza to Israeli settlements, how death was more normal than life. "This is what we pay for here," she wrote.

Unlike Lynch, Corrie did not go to Gaza to engage in combat: she went to try to thwart it. Along with her fellow members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), she believed that the Israeli military's incursions could be slowed by the presence of highly visible "internationals". The killing of Palestinian civilians may have become commonplace, the thinking went, but Israel doesn't want the diplomatic or media scandals that would come if it killed a US student.

In a way, Corrie was harnessing the very thing that she disliked most about her country: the belief that American lives are worth more than any others - and trying to use it to save a few Palestinian homes from demolition.

Believing her fluorescent orange jacket would serve as armour, Corrie stood in front of bulldozers, slept beside wells and escorted children to school. If suicide bombers turn their bodies into weapons of death, Corrie turned hers into the opposite - a weapon of life, a "human shield".

When that Israeli bulldozer driver looked at Corrie's orange jacket and pressed the accelerator, her strategy failed. It turns out that the lives of some US citizens - even beautiful, young, white women - are valued more than others. And nothing demonstrates this more starkly than the opposing responses to Rachel Corrie and Pte Jessica Lynch.

When the Pentagon announced Lynch's successful rescue, she became a hero, complete with "America loves Jessica" fridge magnets, stickers, T-shirts, mugs, country songs and an NBC made-for-TV movie. According to White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, President George Bush was "full of joy for Jessica Lynch". Her rescue, we were told, was a testament to a core American value: as West Virginia senator Jay Rockefeller said to the Senate: "We take care of our people."

Do they? Corrie's death, which made the papers for two days and then virtually disappeared, has met with almost total official silence, despite the fact that eyewitnesses claim it was a deliberate act. President Bush has said nothing about a US citizen killed by a US-made bulldozer bought with US tax dollars. A US congressional resolution demanding an independent inquiry has been buried in committee, leaving the Israeli military's investigation - which cleared itself of any wrongdoing - as the only official investigation.

The ISM says that this non-response has sent a clear, and dangerous, signal. According to Olivia Jackson, a 25-year-old British citizen in Rafah: "After Rachel was killed, [the Israeli military] waited for the response from the American government and the response was pathetic. They know they can get away with it, and it has encouraged them to keep on going."

First there was Brian Avery, a 24-year-old US citizen shot in the face on April 5. Then Tom Hurndall, a British ISM activist shot in the head and left brain dead on April 11. Next was James Miller, the British cameraman shot dead while wearing a vest that said "TV". In all of these cases, eyewitnesses say the shooters were Israeli soldiers.

There is something else that Jessica Lynch and Rachel Corrie have in common: both of their stories have been distorted by the military for its own purposes. According to the official story, Lynch was captured in a bloody gun battle, mistreated by sadistic Iraqi doctors, then rescued in another storm of bullets by heroic Navy Seals. In the past weeks, another version has emerged. The doctors who treated Lynch found no evidence of battle wounds, and donated their own blood to save her life. Most embarrassing of all, witnesses have told the BBC that those daring Navy Seals already knew there were no Iraqi fighters left in the area when they stormed the hospital.

But while Lynch's story has been distorted to make its protagonists appear more heroic, Corrie's story has been posthumously twisted to make her, and her fellow ISM activists, appear sinister.

For months, the Israeli military had been looking for an excuse to get rid of the ISM "troublemakers". It found it in Asif Mohammed Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, the two British suicide bombers. It turns out that they had attended a memorial service for Corrie in Rafah, a fact the Israeli military has seized on to link the ISM to terrorism. Members of ISM point out that the event was open to the public, and that they knew nothing of the British visitors' intentions.

In the past two weeks, half a dozen ISM activists have been arrested, several deported, and the organisation's offices raided. The crackdown is spreading to all "internationals", meaning there are fewer people in the occupied territories to either witness the abuses or assist the victims. On Monday, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process told the security council that dozens of UN aid workers had been prevented from getting in and out of Gaza, calling it a violation of "Israel's international humanitarian law obligations".

On June 5 there will be a international day of action for Palestinian rights. One of the demands is for the UN to send a monitoring force into the occupied territories. Until that happens, many are determined to continue Corrie's work. More than 40 students at her former college, Evergreen State, Olympia, have signed up to go to Gaza with the ISM this summer.

So who is a hero? During the attack on Iraq, some of Corrie's friends emailed her picture to MSNBC asking that it be included on the station's "wall of heroes", along with Jessica Lynch. The network didn't comply, but Corrie is being honoured in other ways. Her family has received more than 10,000 letters of support, communities across the country have organised memorial services, and children from the occupied territories are being named Rachel. It's not a made-for-TV kind of tribute, but maybe that's for the best.

· Naomi Klein 's most recent book is 'Fences and Windows'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,961000,00.html

The Royal We - fascinating article

 

The Atlantic Monthly | May 2002
 

The Royal We

The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne
 
by Steve Olson
 
.....
 

few years ago the Genealogical Office in Dublin moved from a back room of the Heraldic Museum up the street to the National Library. The old office wasn't big enough for all the people stopping by to track down their Irish ancestors, and even the new, much larger office is often crowded. Because of its history of oppression and Catholic fecundity, Ireland has been a remarkably productive exporter of people. The population of the island has never exceeded 10 million, but more than 70 million people worldwide claim Irish ancestry. On warm summer days, as tourists throng nearby Trinity College and Dublin Castle, the line of visitors waiting to consult one of the office's professional genealogists can stretch out the door.

I suspect that many people have had a fling with genealogy somewhat like mine. In my office I have a file containing the scattered lines of Olsons and Taylors, Richmans and Sigginses (my Irish ancestors), that I gathered several years ago in a paroxysm of family-mindedness. For the most part my ancestors were a steady stream of farmers, ministers, and malcontents. Yet a few of the Old World lines hint at something grander—they include a couple of knights, and even a baron. I've never taken the trouble to find out, but I bet with a little work I could achieve that nirvana of genealogical research, demonstrated descent from a royal family.

Earlier this year I went to Dublin to learn more about the Irish side of my family and to talk about genealogy with Mark Humphrys, a young computer scientist at Dublin City University. Humphrys has dark hair, deep-blue eyes, heavily freckled arms, and a pasty complexion. He became interested in genealogy as a teenager, after hearing romantic stories about his ancestors' roles in rebellions against the English. But when he tried to trace his family further into the past, the trail ran cold. The Penal Laws imposed by England in the early eighteenth century forbade Irish Catholics from buying land or joining professions, which meant that very few permanent records of their existence were generated. "Irish people of Catholic descent are almost completely cut off from the past," Humphrys told me, as we sat in his office overlooking a busy construction site. (Dublin City University, which specializes in information technology and the life sciences, is growing as rapidly as the northern Dublin suburb in which it is located.) "The great irony about Ireland is that even though we have this long, rich history, almost no person of Irish-Catholic descent can directly connect to that history."

While a graduate student at Cambridge University, Humphrys fell in love with and married an Englishwoman, and investigating her genealogy proved more fruitful. Her family knew that they were descended from an illegitimate son of the tenth Earl of Pembroke. After just a couple of hours in the Cambridge library, Humphrys showed that the Earl of Pembroke was a direct descendant of Edward III, making Humphrys's wife the King's great-granddaughter twenty generations removed. Humphrys began to gather other genealogical tidbits related to English royalty. Many of the famous Irish rebels he'd learned about in school turned out to have ancestors who had married into prominent Protestant families, which meant they were descended from English royalty. The majority of American presidents were also of royal descent, as were many of the well-known families of Europe.

Humphrys began to notice something odd. Whenever a reliable family tree was available, almost anyone of European ancestry turned out to be descended from English royalty—even such unlikely people as Hermann Göring and Daniel Boone. Humphrys began to think that such descent was the rule rather than the exception in the Western world, even if relatively few people had the documents to demonstrate it.

Humphrys compiled his family genealogies first on paper and then using computers. He did much of his work on royal genealogies in the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web was just coming into general use. He began to put his findings on Web pages, with hyperlinks connecting various lines of descent. Suddenly dense networks of ancestry jumped out at him. "I'd known these descents were interconnected, but I'd never known how much," he told me. "You can't see the connections reading the printed genealogies, because it's so hard to jump from tree to tree. The problem is that genealogies aren't two-dimensional, so any attempt to put them on paper is more or less doomed from the start. They aren't three-dimensional, either, or you could make a structure. They have hundreds of dimensions."

Much of Humphrys's genealogical research now appears on his Web page Royal Descents of Famous People. Sitting in his office, I asked him to show me how it works. He clicked on the name Walt Disney. Up popped a genealogy done by Brigitte Gastel Lloyd (Humphrys links to the work of others whenever possible) showing the twenty-two generations separating Disney from Edward I. Humphrys pointed at the screen. "Here we have a sir, so this woman is the daughter of a knight. Maybe this woman will marry nobility, but there's a limited pool of nobility, so eventually someone here is going to marry someone who's just wealthy. Then one of their children could marry someone who doesn't have that much money. In ten generations you can easily get from princess to peasant."

he idea that virtually anyone with a European ancestor descends from English royalty seems bizarre, but it accords perfectly with some recent research done by Joseph Chang, a statistician at Yale University. The mathematics of our ancestry is exceedingly complex, because the number of our ancestors increases exponentially, not linearly. These numbers are manageable in the first few generations—two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents—but they quickly spiral out of control. Go back forty generations, or about a thousand years, and each of us theoretically has more than a trillion direct ancestors—a figure that far exceeds the total number of human beings who have ever lived.

In a 1999 paper titled "Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day Individuals," Chang showed how to reconcile the potentially huge number of our ancestors with the quantities of people who actually lived in the past. His model is a mathematical proof that relies on such abstractions as Poisson distributions and Markov chains, but it can readily be applied to the real world. Under the conditions laid out in his paper, the most recent common ancestor of every European today (except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in Europe in the surprisingly recent past—only about 600 years ago. In other words, all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the same man or woman who lived around 1400. Before that date, according to Chang's model, the number of ancestors common to all Europeans today increased, until, about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation prevailed: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or all their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living today.

Chang's model incorporates one crucial assumption: random mating in the part of the world under consideration. For example, every person in Europe would have to have an equal chance of marrying every other European of the opposite sex. As Chang acknowledges in his paper, random mating clearly does not occur in reality; an Englishman is much likelier to marry a woman from England than a woman from Italy, and a princess is much likelier to marry a prince than a pauper. These departures from randomness must push back somewhat the date of Europeans' most recent common ancestor.

But Humphrys's Web page suggests that over many generations mating patterns may be much more random than expected. Social mobility accounts for part of the mixing—what Voltaire called the slippered feet going down the stairs as the hobnailed boots ascend them. At the same time, revolutions overturn established orders, countries invade and colonize other countries, and people sometimes choose mates from far away rather than from next door. Even the world's most isolated peoples—Pacific islanders, for example—continually exchange potential mates with neighboring groups.

This constant churning of people makes it possible to apply Chang's analysis to the world as a whole. For example, almost everyone in the New World must be descended from English royalty—even people of predominantly African or Native American ancestry, because of the long history of intermarriage in the Americas. Similarly, everyone of European ancestry must descend from Muhammad. The line of descent for which records exist is through the daughter of the Emir of Seville, who is reported to have converted from Islam to Catholicism in about 1200. But many other, unrecorded descents must also exist.

Chang's model has even more dramatic implications. Because people are always migrating from continent to continent, networks of descent quickly interconnect. This means that the most recent common ancestor of all six billion people on earth today probably lived just a couple of thousand years ago. And not long before that the majority of the people on the planet were the direct ancestors of everyone alive today. Confucius, Nefertiti, and just about any other ancient historical figure who was even moderately prolific must today be counted among everyone's ancestors.

Toward the end of our conversation Humphrys pointed out something I hadn't considered. The same process works going forward in time; in essence every one of us who has children and whose line does not go extinct is suspended at the center of an immense genetic hourglass. Just as we are descended from most of the people alive on the planet a few thousand years ago, several thousand years hence each of us will be an ancestor of the entire human race—or of no one at all.

The dense interconnectedness of the human family might seem to take some of the thrill out of genealogical research. Sure, I was able to show in the Genealogical Office that my Siggins ancestors are descended from the fourteenth-century Syggens of County Wexford; but I'm also descended from most of the other people who lived in Ireland in the fourteenth century. Humphrys took issue with my disillusionment. It's true that everyone's roots go back to the same family tree, he said. But each path to our common past is different, and reconstructing that path, using whatever records are available, is its own reward. "You can ask whether everyone in the Western world is descended from Charlemagne, and the answer is yes, we're all descended from Charlemagne. But can you prove it? That's the game of genealogy."


What do you think? Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.





Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; May 2002; The Royal We; Volume 289, No. 5; 62.

What's Otowi?

My funny street name comes from a Tewa word "p'otsuivi". Otowi is a place in New Mexico 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe. Official gaging station for water on the upper Rio Grande. Nearby is one of the important pueblo ruins in the Pajarito region. During 1923, a post office was requested for Los Alamos Ranch, using the ranch name, but since a place near Las Vegas already had that name, three others were submitted and the department chose Otowi. How Otowi brought the indian world to the edge of this Los Alamos nuclear physics laboratory is told by Peggy Pond Church in her book 'The house at Otowi Bridge'. (1960).

Some Sayings of Jesus (as)

 Al-Tawhid
 
Words of the Word of God: Jesus Christ ('a) Speaks through Shi'i Narrations
Selected, edited and translated by
Mahdi Muntazir Qa'im and Muhammad Legenhausen
Vol 13. No. 3.- 4 Introduction:

From the following narrations we not only become reacquainted with the moral teachings of Jesus ('a) and with his character, but we also discover what the dear friends of Allah, the Household of the Prophet (s) found it important to transmit about him, and thereby we get a glimpse into their moral teachings and characters, too.


The Words of Jesus ('a)

Of Human Poverty:

4. One of the Imams is reported to have said: "It was said to Jesus the son of Mary ('a): 'How did you begin the morning, O Spirit of Allah?' He said: 'I began the morning with my Lord, the Blessed and Supreme, above me and the fire (of hell) before me and death in pursuit of me. I do not possess that which I hope for and I cannot avoid what I hate. So which of the poor is poorer than me?' " ( Bihar al-anwar , lxxvi, 17)

The World and the Hereafter:

5. Jesus ('a) said: "O assembly of disciples! I have thrown the world prostrate before you, so do not lift it up after me, for one of the evils of this world is that Allah was disobeyed in it, and one of the evils of this world is that the next world is not attained except by abandoning this one. So pass through this world without making it your home, and know that the root of all wrong is the love of this world. Many a vain desire leaves a legacy of lasting sorrow." ( Bihar al-anwar , xiv, 327)

6. [Jesus ('a)] said: "Blessed is he who abandons the present desire for the absent promise." ( Bihar al-anwar , xiv, 327)

7. Jesus ('a) said: "Who would build a house on the waves of the sea? This world is that house, so you should not take it as a dwelling.'' ( Bihar al-anwar ," xiv, 326)

On Wisdom

24. It is reported that Jesus ( 'a) said: ''O assembly of scholars ( 'ulama )'. Just as the sovereigns have abandoned wisdom, leaving it to you. So you should abandon sovereignty, leaving it for them.'' ( Adab al nafs . i, 134)

Self-knowledge'

29 It is reported by Mufaddal, one of the companions of Imam al-Sadiq ('a), from Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, Peace be upon him, in a long hadith, that he said: "Jesus the son of Mary, Peace be upon our Prophet and upon him, used to spend some time with the disciples and advise them, and he used to say: 'He does not know me who knows not his soul, and he who does not know the soul between his two sides, does not know the soul between my two sides. And he who knows his soul which is between his sides, he knows me. And he who knows me knows He Who sent me.' " ( Adab al-nafs , ii, 213)

On Prayer and Worship:

30. Jesus ('a) said to a worshipper, "What do you do?" He answered, "I worship." He ('a) said, "Then who provides for you?" He said, "My brother." He ('a) said, "Your brother is more of a worshipper than you are!" ( Adab al-nafs , i, 215)


On Company:

52. It is reported that Abu 'Abd Allah [Imam Sadiq], Peace he upon him, said: The Apostle of Allah, may the Peace and blessings of Allah be upon him and his progeny, said: 'The Apostles said to Jesus, Peace he upon him: "O Spirit of Allah! With whom should we keep company?" He said: "He the sight of whom reminds you of Allah, the speech of whom increases your knowledge, and the works of whom make you desirous of the other world." ' " ( Al-Kafi , i, 39)

The Heart's Sickness:

55. Verily, Jesus ('a) said: "Why do you come to me clothed in the garments of monks while your hearts are those of ferocious wolves? Wear the clothes of kings, but soften your hearts with fear." ( Bihar al-anwar , lxxiii, 208)

Anger and Its Source:

56. It is reported that Abu 'Abd Allah [Imam Sadiq] ('a) said "The disciples said to Jesus the son of Mary ('a): 'O teacher of the good! Teach us what is the most severe of things.' Then he said: the most severe of things is the wrath of Allah.' They said: 'Then what prevents the wrath of Allah?' He said: 'That you not be wrathful.' They said: 'What is the source of wrath?' He said: 'Pride, haughtiness and contempt for the people.' '' ( Bihar al-anwar , xvi, 257)

The Richest of All Men:

60. Jesus, Peace be upon him, said: "My hands 'are my servant and my feet are my mount; the earth is my bed, a stone my pillow; my blanket in the winter is the east of the earth and my lamp in the night is the moon; my stew is hunger and my motto is fear; my garment is wool and my fruit and my basil what grows from the earth for wild beasts and cattle. I sleep while I have nothing and I rise while I have nothing, and yet there is no one on earth wealthier than I" ( Bihar al-anwar , xvii, 239)

Others Opinion of Oneself:

63. The Messenger of God (s) said: "Jesus the son of Mary ('a) said to John the son of Zachariah, 'If something is said of you which is true, then know that it was a sin that you had committed, so ask God's forgiveness for it, and if something is said of you which is not true, then know that a good deed will be recorded for you for this, for which you did not have to labor.' " ( Bihar al-anwar , xiv, 287).

The Life and Acts of Jesus ('a)

68. Jesus, Peace he upon him, served a meal to the Apostles, and when they had eaten it, he himself washed their hands. They said: "O Spirit of God! It would have been more proper for us to wash yours!" He said: "I did this only that you would do this for those whom you teach." ( Bihar al-anwar , xiv, 326)

God's Words Addressed to Jesus

80. One of the Imams [Imam Sadiq or Imam Baqir] said: "Verily, a man of the Children of Israel exerted himself for forty nights. Then he called God, but He did not answer him. Then he came to Jesus complaining to him and asking him to pray. So Jesus purified himself and prayed to God, the Supreme. Then God revealed to him: 'O Jesus! Verily, he came to me by a door other than that by which one should come. Verily, he called Me while there was doubt about you in his heart. So had he called Me until his neck broke or his fingers had fallen off, I would not have answered him.' "( Al-Kafi , ii, 400)

The Remembrance of God:

88. Imam Rida, Peace be upon him, said: "Engraved on the ring of Jesus, Peace be upon him, were two sentences from the Gospel: 'Blessed is the servant who remembers God for His sake, and woe unto the servant who forgets God for his own sake.' " ( Bihar al-anwar , xiv, 247)

Humility and the Etiquette of Prayer:

90. Among things that were revealed by God to Jesus is: "Do not call upon Me except by praying humbly to Me and with all your heart. Then verily when you call upon Me thus I will answer you." ( Bihar al-anwar , xiv, 290)

On Lying and Hypocrisy:


96. God said to Jesus, Peace be upon him: 'O Jesus! Yours must be a single tongue in secret and in public, and likewise your heart. Verily, I warn you of yourself, and I suffice as the All-aware. [12] It is not proper that there be two tongues in a single mouth, nor two swords in a single scabbard, nor two hearts in a single breast, and likewise two minds." ( Al-Kafi . ii, 343)