Are We Predestined?

I have found the following question and answer from Reading Islam. That is the question that all of us want to know ” Are We Predestined to be a believer or a non believer? Do we have free will?

The questioned was asked by a sister who seems to be trying to be revert into Islam. The question and answer is as follows.

Question

Before asking my question, I want to thank you for providing this very informative and interesting service.

Over the past year, I have been learning a great deal about Islam – mostly from my husband – but, I also have been doing my own research and reading. During this time, I have been struggling with my religious beliefs and identity, yet I am finding it difficult to revert from what I have been – a Roman Catholic – to Islam.

From time to time, I have read parts of the Qur’an and recently decided to read the entire book. I was immediately struck by some passages that indicated that God opens the hearts of whom He wills and likewise seals the hearts of others.

Can you help me understand what these passages mean? The verses make it seem as if people have no choice in religion? Has God created non-believers?

Thank you for your assistance.

Discrimination, even during the time of disaster? Myanmar Muslims denied help.

Local news source said Muslim Cyclone Nargis victims were ignored by fellow Buddhist donors in Kun Chan Gone, Kayan Lay and some other villages.Burmese Muslims were active supporters of 2007 Golden Color Revolution.

The news source said Burmese Buddhist donors ignored the poor Burmese Muslim victim who were waiting at road side at Cyclone affected villages expecting food and money from the wealthy people and aid groups.

Following is the detailed report from Golden Color Revolution Blog

ျမန္မာမူစလင္မ်ားဒုကၡေရာက္ေနျခင္း

ရန္ကုန္
ဇူလိုင္-၉

၂၀၀၇ခုနစ္စက္တင္ဘာသံဃာလႈပ္ရွားမႈၾကီးမွာမူစလင္ဘာသာ၀င္မ်ားကတက္ၾကြစြာပါ၀င္ကူညီခဲ့ၾကေသာ္ျငားလည္း နာဂစ္မုန္တိုင္းေၾကာင့္ ဒုကၡေရာက္ေနတဲ ့မူစလင္ေတြကို ျမန္မာဗုဒဘာသာ အလ်ဴရွင္ေတြက သိပ္ျပီးမလႈတန္းလိုၾကဘူးလို ့သိရပါတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္မူစလင္ေတြ က ကြမ္းျခံကုန္း ၊ခရမ္းေလးနဲ ့အျခားရြာေတြျဖစ္ၾကတယ္။ သူတို ့ကားလမ္းေဘးကိုထြက္ျပီး ေတာင္းေနေပမဲ ့ အလူရွင္ေတြက သူတို ့ေနရာေတြကိုေက်ာ္သြားတယ္လို ့သိရပါတယ္။ ကိုဇာဂနာကိုအဖမ္းခံရျပီးေနာက္ မွာဒီလို အေျခအေနေတြကို စတင္ၾကားလာရတာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ျမန္မာ လူမႈေရးအသင္းေတြအေနနဲ ့ ဘာသာမခြဲျခားပဲ ကူညီၾကပါလို ့တိုက္တြန္းလိုပါတယ္။

က်ဥ္းေျမာင္းလွတဲ့ ျမန္မာအမ်ိဳးသားေရးနဲ ့ျမန္မာ့ဘာသာေရးအယူအဆမ်ားေၾကာင့္ က်ေနာ္တို ့ဒုကၡပင္လယ္ေ၀ခဲ့ျပီးပါျပီ။ ဒါေတြကိုသင္ခန္းစာယူသင့္ပါတယ္။။ ဒုကၡေရာက္သူတိုင္းကိုလူမိ်ဳး၊ဘာသာမခြဲျခားပဲကူညီၾကပါလို ့တိုက္တြန္းလိုပါတယ္။

Imam Gazzali, a great jurist, and theologian of Islam

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (450-505 AH/1058-1111 AD) [aka: al-Ghazzali , Algazel ] is one of the great jurists, theologians and mystics of the 12th Century. He wrote on a wide range of topics including jurisprudence, theology, mysticism and philosophy.

Ghazali.org (a virtual online library) provides the complete works of al-Ghazali in the original language -that have been published in print- and in translation. Additionally primary research material -hundreds of full length books and articles are available gratis – in communem delectationem.

read more at

http://www.ghazali.org/

Islam in China, youtube video