Muhammad al husayn biography of christopher
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Christopher Paul Clohessy
Angels Hastening
The Karbalāʾ Dreams
By Christopher Paul Clohessy
Series:Islamic History and Thought 22
ISBN:978-1-4632-4209-1
When, on an autumn Medina night in 61/680, the night that saw al-Ḥusayn killed, Umm Salama was torn from her sleep by an apparition of a long-dead Muḥammad, she slipped effortlessly into a progression of her co-religionists who, irrespective of status, gender or standing with God, were the recipients of dark and arresting visions. At the core of those Delphian dreams, peopled by angels or ğinn or esteemed forbears and textured with Iraqi dust and martyrs’ blood, was the Karbalāʾ event. Her dream would be recounted by an array of Muslim scholars, from al-Tirmiḏī, stellar pupil of al-Buḫārī, and Ibn ʿAsākir, untiring chronicler of Syrian history, to bibliophile theologian Ibn Ṭāʾūs and Egyptian polymath al-Suyūṭī. But this was not Umm Salama’s only otherworldly encounter and she was not the only one to have al-Ḥusayn’s fat
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Husayn Muhammed al-Umari (1936-) was a leader of the PFLP-EO splintergroup, the 15 May Organization, who was responsible for the bombing of Pan Am flygning 830 on 11 August 1982, which killed one person and wounded sixteen.
Biography[]
Husayn Muhammad al-Umari was born in 1936 in Jaffa, Mandatory Palestine to a SunniMuslimPalestinian family, and he became the leader of the PFLP-linked 15 May Organization. al-Umari was a mästare bomb maker, and he decided to commit his skills to the struggle against Israel's occupation of Palestine; he was responsible for the 1982 Pan Am flygning 830 bombing over the Pacific Ocean and the 1985 bombings of the Marks and Spencer Department store in Paris and the Leumi Bank, both in France. His wife, two sons, and two daughters lived in Lebanon, and al-Umari lived in Ba'athist Iraq for several years. He was wanted by the State Department of the United States, and he was believed to have hidden in Lebanon or Iraq.
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A conference was planned by the Islamic Centre of England, the Iranian administered mosque in London, for the summer of 2020 to make known the life and example of Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, the third Imam in Shi’a understanding. The aim was to make his struggle for justice known to the widest possible audience of people who are not Muslims. To this end, I was asked to write a short book to be distributed at the conference re-telling the story from authentic Shi’a sources with introductory paragraphs giving reflections for today’s human society.
The conference did not take place due to restrictions to contain the spread of the coronavirus but the book was written and completed. It has now been printed by the Islamic Centre through their imprint Contemporary Thoughts Press under the title Hussain and the Struggle for Justice (isbn 978-1-914282-03-4). My text can be accessed as a pdf document: Husayn, the grandson of Muhammad: contemporary reflections on the struggl