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What secularism and why secularism?

This blog post appeared in Tribune. It has touched upon many aspects of this topic but one important issue wasn’t touched.

Even if consider for a moment that theocratic state was an ideal solution, which religion or sect would that state follow? Islam has so many sects which are diagonally opposed to each other in their interpretation of Islam, it is practically impossible to come up with an unbiased theocratic state. The freedom of religion guaranteed in the Holy Quran is for all and not just for a select group of self-proclaimed Muslims. Hence we are left with no other choice but to separate religion and state for the functioning of a civilized society that maintains social harmony and freedom for all to practice their faith and interpretation of their religion without the fear of state persecution.

Ahmadi Muslims believe in separation of state and religion. Visit MuslimsForPeace.org to learn more about the Peaceful Islam.

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Muslims must learn to speak the language of bullies?

This article appeared in Tribune blog. It is an interesting piece no doubt about it and the author has elaborated on the double standards shown towards Muslims. However it is quite ironic.

The bullying goes on with full media and state sponsorship in Muslim countries by Jama’at-e-Islami and the like minded anti-Islamic ideologies that believe in force and compulsion against the very teachings of Holy Quran. A country that was created in the name of Islam, Pakistan, has introduced anti-Islamic laws in the very name of Islam to defame Islam world over under pressure of these mullahs (read: bullying), what could one expect as a reaction to these bullying? Actions speak louder than words.

Non-Ahmadi Muslims have to act like Muslims first and eradicate the elements of bullying from among themselves before they question others. They have utterly failed in that by keeping quiet for too long. The silent majority has to wake up now!

Ahmadi Muslims have been condemning this bullying which has no place in Islam for over 120 years. Visit MuslimsForPeace.org to learn more about the Peaceful Islam.

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How to become a published iPhone and Android Developer in a month

This is the story of my iPhone development experience so far.

Pre-Requisites:

For iPhone Development: Apple Mac computer, iPhone 3G, iPhone Developer enrollment

For Android Development: Windows or Mac, a supported Android Phone, Android Developer registration

That’s all you need to start. Item #3 can wait until you are ready in a couple of weeks of study and experiments.

There are two routes that one can take for iPhone development. I took both one by one and have seen the pros and cons of both.

The Easy Method

Appcelerator Titanium is an excellent tool for existing web developers to start developing iPhone and Android applications. They have free video tutorials that walk you through some very essential training of both iPhone and Android development setup. These are must watch videos as they’ll walk you through step by step guide on how to register as iPhone developer and setup the needed certificates for the app submission.

Titanium uses JavaScript as the main language of coding which makes it very easy for a web developer. I have been through it and was able to publish 3 apps for Android platform and 4 apps for iPhone within 2 months. Here are the pros and cons of Titanium:

Pros: Extremely easy, do not need to learn new programming language, with very little effort you can publish your apps on Android platform as well.

Cons: Its still in early stages therefore it may have some bugs but you can work around them, documentation and help is limited but growing, does not have 100% api support of the underline platform.

If you want to develop small apps which does not require too many complications, it works great. Many great apps have been developed on it including some games. I would strongly recommend Titanium for anyone who does not want to learn a new language – Objective C.

The Difficult Method

For many it may not be the difficult method if you are hard code c/c++ programmer, but since I’ve spent most of my time in system administration and web development, it was a rough ride.

Step 1. First thing you need to do is learn Objective C. There are some really good books in the market. If you know C, then its not difficult. But if you don’t know C then you need to go a step back and learn C first. Once you know C, you can start learning Objective C. The book by Apress is awesome. This is a must read book if you don’t know Objective C. Trust me I know what I’m talking about. There is no easy way out of this. I started looking into iPhone SDK before looking at this book but it was not making real sense until I stopped and started with this book. There are some cool tutorials on the web as well, some small some big, but this book will get you to stand up.

Step 2a. If you like video tutorials, I strongly recommend Lynda’s iPhone SDK tutorials. They are just too good to get you up to speed. You don’t have to do any reading. Just watch them and go through them as much as you want by hand.

Step 2b. If you want to go to the book directly, Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK is the best book to get you started. It will walk you through step by step and within a week’s time you’ll be able to not only code yourself but understand an existing iPhone project if someone shares their code with you! 😉 First 11 chapters are good enough and then it gets into advance stage.

Step 3. Watch the Appcelerator Titanium videos as mentioned in The Easy Method. They will train you how to enroll in iPhone developer program and get the developer and production profiles setup on your Mac. You need those to test the app on your iPhone and later build distribution binary.

Here are the pros and cons of this development strategy:

Pros: Professional IDE (XCode) and Interface Builder (IB) provided free of cost by apple (XCode 4 coming soon will rock developers world, its just too awesome, watch WWDC video about it), basic UI design can be done in IB, lots of help available on the web plus many books.

Cons: Need to learn Objective-C, also need to learn iPhone SDK, you are limited to Apple products.

That’s all folks. If anyone has any question, feel free to ask me and I’ll update this blog post accordingly.

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BBC Urdu succumbs to terrorists of Pakistan? No more unbiased reporting?

It appears that BBC Urdu has stopped doing fair reporting. Instead of calling Ahmadi Mosques as Mosques, they are now under the influence of extremists and terrorist and calling a mosque as “place of worship”. This can be seen in recent news reporting after the massacre of nearly 100 Ahmadi Muslims in Lahore.

Evidence one: Calling mosque a mosque in old reporting

Evidence two: Not calling a mosque a mosque |  Still Not calling mosque a mosque

It is a shame for BBC for not upholding its old traditions of unbiased reporting. It appears that BBC Urdu staff is under the influence of terrorist and un-Islamic ideologies of Maudoodi and the like. They not only insulted the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community by calling the Islamic funeral prayers of its martys in Lahore mosques as “aakhri rasoomat” but crossed into yellow journalism as well by using these new terms.

Where should one complain about this prejudice by British Broadcasting Corporation?

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Martyrdom of Ahmadi Muslims in Lahore on 28th May 2010

The Promised Messiah (alaihi salam) wrote:

‘Don’t think that God will let you go to waste. You are the seed which the Hand of God has sown in the earth. God says that this seed will grow and flower and its branches will spread in all directions and it will become a huge tree. So, blessed is one who believes in what God says and does not fear the trials which he suffers in His path. For, the coming of trials is essential so that God may try you to see who is true in his declaration of Bai‘at and who is false. Whoever falters in the face of a trial would do no harm to God whatsoever and ill- luck would only land him in hell. Were he not born, it would have been better for him. But all those who remain steadfast till the end—they will be shaken with quakes of calamities, and battered with storms of misfortune, ridiculed and mocked by people, and hated and reviled by the world—shall at last come out victorious.’ (The Will, pg. 12)

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Is your web host really a web host or reseller? how to find out?

There are thousand of hosting companies out there that claim they own the hardware and data center but do we have that many data centers? Most are just fly-by-night hosting resellers. They rely on some other hosting provider for service and then just sell it to you for a higher prices. There are literally thousands of resellers who are actually not a hosting company by any definition. They add no value to the service and off load all support requests back to the original provider (adding delay). And the result is a degraded service to end customer on a higher price.

Real resellers will not hide the identity of their provider. They will add some value to the hosting packages such as development, design and support and you would be ready to pay a higher price for this added value. You can trust them for being honest.

If you want to know if your hosting company is actually a hosting provider, all you have to do is run a whois query on the IP address of your hosting account. You can do that at ARIN website www.arin.net. When you visit the website you can find a search box on the top right corner that says SEARCH WHOIS.

The query will show you which organization actually owns the IP address.

Another thing you can do is telnet to your domain on port 25 and see the SMTP banner which will show you your server hostname.

Third thing you can do is send email from your account and then check the email headers which will show the server hostname. Do a whois on the domain name part of the server hostname to see which company owns that domain.

You can also run a traceroute to your server IP (or tracert on Windows command prompt) to see which networks come between you and your hosting server. This can reveal a lot of information about the upstream provider of your web host. As the traceroute runs it will show you the IP address or hostname of each router on the way to your server.

Similarly if you check phpinfo you can see the hostname of the server at the very top.

If you have secure shell access (real hosting providers will provide you ssh access), you can run this command

uname -a

which will show you server hostname and linux kernel.

Speaking of linux kernel, it can provide you details if your hosting server is actually a hosting server or a virtual machine sharing its hardware resources with another reseller or user. For example the popular Virtuozzo or OpenVZ kernel has “stab” in its name. You can then discuss with your provider if they are on a VPS for a reason or are they reselling the service?

Honesty is the best policy. Honest hosts are hard to find. But I’ll recommend one – Webx Networks is the best web hosting company and has very qualified support. They provide support for all the latest in technology such as php5, MySQL5, Perl, Ruby on Rails, and Apache2 on the Linux CentOS platform. I use them for some services but I have my services spread out to some other providers as well. I just wanted to acknowledge their good services in this post as being an honest and reliable web host for 12 years.

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No to Terrorism – Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Defending Islam while other Muslims are sleeping

Dr. Faheem Younus is the president of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association (USA) and was interviewed this morning by Fox News. While other non-Ahmadi Muslims are sleeping and waiting for the “Messiah”, the community founded by the Messiah is marching forward in defending Islam and spreading its true peaceful teachings. It is high time that non-Ahmadi Muslims should realize they are being left behind with terrorists and non-Islamic ideologies which are currently plaguing the Muslim Ummah. It is not too late to accept the Imam of the Time as was promised and prophesied by The Holy Prophet (saw) himself as the Mahdi (The Guided One) and Messiah, and join Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in spreading the real Islam.

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Islam Condemns Terrorism

Transcript of comments made by Mr. Naseem Mahdi on May 4, 2010 at a Press Conference held at the National Press Club, Washington, DC

We live in an expanding universe but the world is shrinking daily and it is so highly important for us all to discover and follow the paths that lead to peace.

I am going to make a few brief comments prompted by the recent attempted bombing in NY but necessitated by much broader considerations.

Islam condemns terrorism unreservedly and totally.

The Holy Founder of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian, India, had declared over 120 years ago that there is no place or justification found in Islam for violence whatsoever.

He said that Islam requires all Muslims to live in peace and harmony wherever they may be.

It is thus the duty and responsibility of all Muslims living in the US [or Canada in our case – Rationality.ca] to be loyal to the flag and to be law abiding citizens.

It is clear from the events happening all around that a small, fanatic, extremist minority of Muslims has hijacked the faith and continues to mislead and misguide the Muslims and ruin their total life.

In my considered opinion, such fanatics present a distorted view of Islam based on false and misguided interpretations.

For example such people say that it is not necessary for a Muslim to follow any non-Islamic government…This is utterly false..

If the vast majority of reasonable, peace-loving and law-abiding population of Muslims living in the US do not speak out and speak out loudly this will continue and ultimately ruin the lives, economic and social, of all Muslims and the community at large.

I am calling today on ALL MUSLIMS IN THE US to join me in condemning all actions of violence and terror caused or carried out by anyone whoever he or she may be.

I call on all of them to boldly claim and express with their tongue and action that they are loyal and law-abiding and obedient citizens of the United States of America.

This is fully in accord with the teachings of Muhammad, peace be on him, the Holy Founder of Islam, who said that hubbul watanay minal eeman.. (Love of one’s homeland, one’s place of residence, is a part of the Muslim’s faith..)

It is high time that Muslims living in the US wake up to their responsibilities and declare openly and repeatedly and loudly that they stand for peace and loyalty and are proud of it and that this is in fact what Islam itself requires of them.

Let me end by being totally forthright.

I say to those among Muslims living in the US who are not loyal or who do not want to be loyal that they are benefitting and enjoying all that this open, free, Country has to offer and yet they say that their loyalties are to another country or government.

I want to say to such people that they are not only living a false and hypocritical life but that they are thus also ungrateful and my advice to them is to be bold and leave and go and live in the lands where their loyalties belong.