Yet more amazing pictures!

An amazing Sign! (AFP/Joel Saget)

The other post has been updated (again!) with a few more pictures. See the other post by clicking here.

Third survivor found at sea!

He prayed: "Allah I seek your forgiveness and I seek your help for myself and my parents" and "Please give me life. Please give me life."

"I never got angry," Afrizal said. "I was grateful to be alive. The heat comes from God. The cold comes from God. Death and life also come from God."

Read the full story by clicking here.

Ari drifted on the Indian Ocean for two weeks, living on coconuts that he pried open with his teeth while floating on pieces of wood, then a broken boat, and finally a fishing raft.(AP Photo/Al Yamamah, HO)

Reflections

Some reflections on the Tsunami:

An Audio by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, an American Convert to Islam (please click here to listen - MP3 file)

An article by Imam Zaid Shakir, another American Convert to Islam (please click here to read the article)

Propaganda

Some people, who have their own interests in mind, have been creating propaganda that the Muslims countries did not contribute as much as the non-Muslim countries to the victims of the Tsunami, even though many of the victims were Muslim.

The reality is that giving in charity is an Islamic obligation and when Muslims give, they do not give for the sake of publicity or fame and name, but to fulfil the command of God. So they will naturally not want to publicise what they have given to the extent of those countries who are giving just to get a good name in the media.

Here are a few things to bear in mind:

• Saudis responded enthusiastically to a telethon staged to raise money for victims of the Asian tsunami disaster, donating more than SR300 million ($82 million). (Arabnews)
• Tsunami Aid by OIC States Totals $561.7m (Article)
• ‘Saudi Arabia Highest Giver of Aid Per Capita’ (Article)
• 'There are 20 nations who donate more than the US on a per-capita basis' (Interesting Link - please note that this does not take into account the final amounts donated by the Muslims countries, which increased in subsequent days, and nor does it take into account the donations by the general public, which was quite astounding in Muslim Countries.)
  

This is not in any way to take anything away from those non-muslims in non-muslim countries who gave without any selfish motives in mind. The charity by the normal people here in England was amazing! But really, why should we have to use a disater for any political mileage, as some segments of the media and press seem to do, using it as another chance to put-down Muslims in the eyes of the public?

'Psuedo' Christians show true colours

Dozens of religious groups have moved in to Aceh, looking to help tsunami victims - and convert them and others, creating tensions in the disaster area.

The arrival of Western Christian groups with records of aggressive preaching risks confrontation with local Muslim leaders which could jeopardise the provision of aid to the 600,000 local people made homeless by the disaster. The death toll in Aceh stands at around 110,000 and is expected to rise.

Read the full article by clicking here. (From the Guardian Newspaper)

Even in Sri Lanka!

It's not only in Indonesia! Even in Sri Lanka, the mosques remain as a Sign!

COLOMBO, 14 January 2005 — Despite heavy damages to men and materials, most of the mosques on the Western coast of the island were not affected as a result of the tsunami waves.

“Five of us were inside the mosque and we started reciting the Holy Qur’an when we noticed the waves becoming rough,” the mosque’s imam, Alim Alavi, told Arab News. “At the time the waves crashed, there were 47 students in the madrasa attached to the south wing of the mosque. They came running to me. I made them recite relevant stanzas from the Holy Qur’an which sought Almighty Allah’s protection from natural calamities,” Alavi added.

“I could see fishing trawlers drifting, buildings crumbling and even five-meter-high rocks floating. But the mosque stood unmoved despite the surging waves,” he recalled. “It was a miracle."

The Maggona Mosque, a couple of meters from the sea, was not even touched by the waves even though adjacent buildings on the Colombo-Galle Road have been severely damaged.

Read the full article by clicking here (ArabNews article, by Mohammed Rasooldeen)

Pregnant woman finds her whole family!

As panic around them grew, her sister grabbed Haiwati's 10-year-old son and fled. Haiwati started running again with her terrified seven-year old boy, Sikno, but she was too weak and became separated from her sister. Seconds later the water caught up, washing her into the Lamteneung mosque.

She saw dozens of people clinging to the roof of the wooden village hall.

As the water rose, she lifted Sikno onto her shoulders. "Then I thought, 'okay, if I die at least I'll die with my boy," Haiwati said, Sikno standing shyly beside her.

At that moment, she said, a jerry can washed in through one of the mosque's windows and floated toward her.

"I had no energy left. I just stood there looking at it. Then I held onto it, with my son," she said.

"I guess yes, that was a miracle."

Read the full article by clicking here (Reuters article by Tomi Soetjipto)

New video of Tsunami released

JAKARTA: A videotape shot as a Tsunami swept through Indonesia's Aceh province and aired for the first time Sunday showed a roiling torrent of dark brown water engulfing a busy street, picking up cars and minivans.

The videotape was filmed by a cameraman named Hasyim who normally shoots weddings, but on Dec. 26 captured a horrific record of the unfolding disaster, starting minutes after a giant undersea earthquake toppled buildings to a scene hours after the Tsunami of a long line of corpses covered with cloth.

"Everybody was screaming 'Water!' Everybody scattered, running toward the grand mosque,'' said Hasyim.

His camera remained steady throughout. "I remembered God, my family,'' he said, adding that he knew his relatives were safe in a different part of Sumatra island. "Those are the only things I had in mind. ... I gave myself entirely to God, to my faith. I thought, 'If I die here, I am in God's house,' and I wasn't afraid of anything.''

This is quite an amazing article. To read the full article, please click here.

Mosques in India

In Indian, the Mosques cater for Tsunami-hit Hindus and Christians, according to this article from IslamOnline:

Click here to read it.

Amazing Satellite Images

One of the most amazing pictures I have seen! A close up of Gleebruck Village. You have to download the full image by clicking here (DigitalImage). There is devastation all around for what seems like miles! But try to find the sole surviving building - look in the top right of the picture) (Ikonos Image, © Krisp 2004)

Another amazing Satellite Picture of Before and After Scenes from the NASA Earth Observatory Website.

Amazing Pictures

Not just one mosque, but many, survived whilst around them buildings were destroyed. Even mosques made out of wood were largely unscathed, but heavily built buildings were washed away! Here are a few pictures of some of the Miracle Mosques - a Sign from Indonesia. Please read the article about this a few posts down.

In this arial view taken from a commercial plane, a mosque stands amidst a wide swath of destruction all around in Banda Aceh (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)


The whole village is washed away and the mosque remains. (REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco)


Right next to the ocean - everything else is just wiped out (AP Photo/U.S. Navy, Jacob J. Kirk)


An Acehnese girl reads the Koran at a mosque in a refugee camp in Banda Aceh (REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon)



Right next to the ocean! Wow! Devestation all around...


AP Photo: Andy Ames


REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon


"mosques stand alone amid apocalyptic destruction" (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)


AFP/Choo Youn-Kong


Source: AP Photo/Dudi Anung (Yahoo News)


An amazing Sign! It looks so beautiful! (AFP/Joel Saget)


(REUTERS/Kimimasa Mayama)


(REUTERS/Kimimasa Mayama) Same as the one above, but from a different angle)


(REUTERS/Kimimasa Mayama)

Video of Courage in Indonesia

You can see the video by clicking here.

You have to wait a few seconds before the video will begin, there is a 'countdown timer' on the page. If you can't see it, but can only hear the sound, then please read the comments for some suggestions!

The mosque and its cleaner survives

An Indonesian man has been found floating on tree branches in the Indian Ocean, eight days after a devastating tsunami struck the region. Rizal said he was cleaning a mosque in Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra on 26 December when the tsunami struck.

Click here to read the full article from the BBC.

Signs of God

Victor Tjahjadi - BANDA ACEH, Indonesia

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia : In Indonesia's tsunami wastelands on the northern tip of Sumatra island, little remains of whole towns lost to the colossal forces that came thundering in from the ocean.

But across these battered shores, dozens of mosques still stand, their minarets glinting defiantly in the sun - a phenomenon survivors in the deeply Islamic region credit as much to divine intervention as robust architecture.


"God's invisible hands prevents the mosque's destruction," said Mukhlis Khaeran, who saw the sea sweep away his home village of Baet outside the north Sumatran city of Banda Aceh, but leave the neighbourhood mosque relatively intact.

"He punishes us for our greed and arrogance but He will protect his house," Khaeran told AFP, his arms covered with injuries sustained in the disaster that killed at least 100,000 people around the north Sumatran province of Aceh.

Mosques are an everyday sight in most of Indonesia, but especially in Aceh, credited with the being one of Islam's main gateways into the archipelago of islands which now forms the world's largest Muslim-populated country.

Despite a long-lasting independence struggle, Aceh, parts of which are under traditional Islamic sharia law, has remained a Muslim heartland for Indonesia, which mostly practices a very relaxed interpretation of the faith.

Spiritual beliefs in Aceh and around the Indian Ocean were tested to the limit on December 26 when an epic earthquake sent towers of water crashing ashore, obliterating virtually everything in their path.

But while some spoke of "God's wrath", hundreds turned to their mosques, in panic for shelter from the advancing tides and later for spiritual comfort in a time of desperate need.

In the village of Kaju, also outside Banda Aceh, hundreds of homes were annihilated while the local mosque suffered only a few cracks in the walls.

"There is a saying among Acehnese that a mosque is God's house and no one can destroy it but God Himself," said Ismail Ishak, 42, who was digging rubble from his crumbled house while searching for seven of his relatives.

In Pasi Lhok, some 20 kilometres (12 miles) east of the north Aceh town of Sigli, 100 frightened people sheltering inside their mosque were spared while almost every house in the surrounding five villages was pulverised, according to chief cleric Teungku Kaoy Ali.

In Meubolah, a town on Aceh's western coast less than 150 kilometres (95 miles) from the quake epicentre which bore the full force of the tsunami, leaving at least 10,000 dead, mosques stand sentinel over a vanished town centre.

Banda Aceh resident Achyar said when he saw the waves pounding in from the sea, his first instinct was to turn and run for the nearest mosque.

"I climbed the mosque tower and hung on to an electric wire until water receded," he said. "Many of my friends, many of them ethnic Chinese, died because they climbed to the second floor of their shops and were trapped there," he said.


Another, less divine, explanation for the survival of the mosques is that many are built much more sturdily than most of the other structures in the towns and cities of Aceh.

However one mosque in Sigli was made only of wood but still survived unscathed despite all the other buildings around it being destroyed.

Banda Aceh's grand Baiturrahman mosque suffered partial damage from the quake and tsunami, but proved invaluable to the city's survivors in the minutes, hours and days that followed the cataclysm.

For many it became a rallying place to search for missing friends or relatives, a makeshift hospital to treat the injured and a morgue to collect the dead.

With much of Banda Aceh likely to remain in ruins for months, residents were quick to repay their debt to their cherished religious buildings, working swiftly to ensure the Baiturrahman mosque was one of the first places restored.

On Sunday, some 300 survivors gathered for their first prayers since their five-times daily ritual was halted - a major step on the long road back to normality in Aceh.

Banda Aceh

The centre of the earthquake, measuring an almost unfathomable 9.2, was very near to the city of Banda Aceh, which makes our story even more amazing!

To give an idea of scale, a scale 9 earthquake would be equivalent to about 32 Billion tonnes of TNT. If an earthquake were possible at magnitude 12, experts predict that it would be enough to split the entire earth in half!

Nearly 100,000 people have died in Indonesia.


Map of where the earthquaqe and tsunami took place

Why would God allow such suffering to take place?

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has recently said that it is appropriate that one’s faith in God should be shaken by the natural disaster which engulfed thousands of people on December 26. And historically, one of the chief causes of atheism in the Christian world has been the sense that the Bible’s God is unbelievable in a world filled with apparently arbitrary suffering. Should such a tension endanger Muslim faith as well?

This gets to the heart of Muslim-Christian difference, because perhaps the most salient Christian interrogation of Islam lies in Islam’s insistence on the divine transcendence. For Christians, it is axiomatic that God can only be fully engaged with by human beings when He is entirely a person like ourselves. The alternative is ‘Semitic legalism’, a system in which, supposedly, an abstract transcendence is worshipped from afar, through laws and rituals.

Written by Shaykh Abdul-Hakim Murad (Tim Winters), a revert to Islam, and a Lecturer at Cambridge University, England.

What the Shaykh is saying, is that this is one of the fundamental differences between the Christian way of thinking and the Muslim understanding of God, and that it is this very problem that has been the means of many Christians leaving Christianity in dissatisfaction.

The Islamic idea of God is that He is transcendent; There is nothing like Him; and He cannot be understood fully with our small intellects. But we know that He is the Most Wise and everything He does is with Wisdom, even if we cannot understand it. The (contempory) Christian idea is that God is just Love. That is why they cannot understand when things like this take place.

Isn't He the One that drowned Noah's people and isn't He the One that drowned the people of Pharoah? He does what He likes, and we submit and obey, and we know that in every one of His actions, there is Wisdom.

To read the scholars article, please click here.

He has also written another article, about the earthquake in Turkey a few years back. It is also a good read. Click here to read it. It is called - "When the Generous appears with the name Avenger".

Another article is this one - "What are the reasons for Calamaties afflicting us?"

Mufti Ebrahim Desai has also written about the Tsunami - you can read his article by clicking here.

What we have to realise is that none can fully comprehend the System and Wisdom of God - and these calamities that afflict us may be for a number of reasons which He has explained to us through His Prophets, but still, He is the One who understands the reasons the most.

How many people were killed?

Estimated Total number of dead: 145,968
(as of January 5, 4pm)

• East Africa 137 (Including Kenya, Seychelles, Somalia, Tanzania and Madagascar)
• Bangladesh 2
• Burma 59
• India 15,160 (dead or presumed dead)
• Indonesia 94,081
• Malaysia 74
• Maldives 74
• Sri Lanka 30,513
• Thailand 5,246

These figures are shocking. In just a few minutes, such power was unleashed from the waves that over a hundred thousand people were killed. How many were injured? How many were left homeless? God alone knows. We can take a lesson from it, to open our eyes and see how weak we really are. By some estimates, the energy released by the earthquake and the resulting tsunamis was perhaps equal to detonating a million atomic bombs. The epicentre was 5 miles under the crust of the earth, yet the scale of destruction was still so immense that we are witnessing the awsome power of it.

What was the Tsunami?

It started with the perhaps the largest earthquake known to modern civilization with a reading of close to 9.2 in the Richter scale. The precursor hit near the coastline of Sumatra, a series of shocks happened one after the other and before all was done, 625 miles (1000 Kilometers) of Andaman thrust or fault line broke.

The result was devastation never seen before in modern times. 45 feet tall Tsunamis (coastal tidal waves) originating from the epicenter of the earthquakes, crushed onto the shores of many countries, affecting Sri Lanka, India, Maldives, Thailand, Indonesia and other countries in the region, affecting people so far away as even the coast of Africa.

According to reports, this is not a simple earthquake, it is the mega quake that happens once every thousand years. Never ever in the known human history in modern times, has an earthquake happened that broke 1000 miles of fault line.