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The Connection Between Muslim Prayers (Namaz/Salah) and Yoga Poses

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Islam isn’t only about religious supplications; instead, it is also about human well-being. Some of us, Muslims, can also be unaware of Salah’s benefits and connection to yoga. People do yoga to stay fit and healthy, but most Muslims don’t understand how Islam promotes healthy living through prayers.

According to many case studies and researches, it is founded that Muslim prayers and Yoga poses have direct connections. Most mental health care clinics treat Muslim prayers as a basement to treat Muslim patients. In a stress-ridden world, it is not easy to stay mentally healthy or fit. People often need the right amount of counseling and therapy. Therapists search for novel ideas and strategies to treat patients. They try to implement new things to cater to patients’ problems. Reiki, Yoga, etc. are some of those methods that therapists attend to. Apart from these methods, religion, as a whole, plays a significant role in healing the mental illness of patients.

There’s therapeutic efficacy when the religious patients are connected with religious belief. Several research pieces concerning this new order have brought the direct connection between salah and Yoga to light. People have started looking for the reason why Muslim prayers have so much significance. Well, let me tell you why and how Yoga poses resemble Muslim prayers. 

How Does Yoga match With the Muslim Prayers?

Yoga is an ancient style of meditation and physical acts that was initiated by Hindus. There are so many scientific proofs concerning the healthy benefits of Yoga. Today, people around the world follow Yoga despite its religious connection. It has become one of the famous fitness programs in the world. 

However, Muslims have got the chance to enjoy similar benefits as Yoga through their prayers, which has been practiced for fourteen hundred years. It is a daily activity that Muslims around the world practice.

The Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him) has said “إن فى الصلاة شفاء” means “There is a cure in prayers.”

The word “Chakras” is used by Yogis, and it is attainted only when all the yoga poses are performed flawlessly. This is similar to the “feeling” that Muslims get when they perform all the salah postures. When salah is performed five times a day, it gives tremendous energy and stamina to run the day effectively. This is similar to the boost that you get when you perform yoga poses.

So there are similarities between yoga poses and Salah, let’s check them below.

Top Three Yoga Poses That Are Similar to the Postures of Muslim Prayers

  1. Qiyam vs. Namaste

Both Namaste and Qiyam require keeping both feet evenly distributed; thus, it balances the body and eases the nervous system. The body gets positive energy when the posture is maintained perfectly. In Muslim prayers, certain Quran verses recited while the individuals are in Qiyam position. According to research, it is stated that sound vibrations from the Quran verses stimulate the thyroid, heart, adrenal glands, pituitary, and lungs. It also uplifts and purifies them.

In a prayer, Qiyam begins with recitals while keeping the body straight in a standing position. While the person remains in the position, he/she will make sure to keep the back, and the overall body straightened. This will not only help steady blood flow but also increase the focus. According to Muslims, this position increases self-awareness and the health of the overall body. Next, when the person engages in dua (prayers), the chakra is activated. This is how the feelings of harmony, love, and peace play a role in the prayer.

In Yoga, Namaste isn’t very much different to Qiyam rather, and it’s just the same posture with a slight difference in what we say and how we move. Namaste means “I bow to you or Bow me you.” If you see the way how Yogis perform this movement, you will witness a slight difference. Instead of placing one hand over the other as Muslims do in prayer, they will place the hands at heart to enhance the divine love. Along with this, they will also close their eyes and bow their head to increase the flow of love.

During Namaste, Yogis come to a standing position in which their body muscles tighten. Yoga helps your body’s metabolism and blood flow, so you don’t have to engage in an intense workout. Also, the motions involved in Yoga will develop flexibility and efficiency.  

  • Ruk’u vs. Ardha Uttanasana

Both the positions support the muscles in the lower back, thighs, front torso, and calves. When engaging in these positions, your upper torso will receive adequate blood. The muscles in the stomach, kidneys, and abdomen will also be toned when you follow these positions.

In a prayer, Ruk’ u is performed by bending forward to portray the submission to Allah. It shows how a Muslim let go of his/her pride and lowers down to Allah. The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) has advised to lower oneself in Ruk’ u with much calmness and come to a standing position only when the body gets relaxed.

In Yoga, Ardha Uttanasana is a forward fold that in a half-standing position. This Yoga pose promotes relaxed breathing and increases the mind’s calmness. However, both the poses strengthen the spine and back while promoting body posture. When you perform the poses correctly, the muscles get stretched, resulting in ease of pack pain.

Besides, the positions send pressure to the abdomen; thus, it helps relieve peristaltic movements and constipation.

  • Sujud vs. Balasana (child pose)

This is the most critical position of Muslim prayer. Sujud stimulates the frontal cortex of the brain. When Muslims perform sujud, their heart gets placed in a top position than the brain, so the upper part of the body gets enough blood flow. Mainly, your lungs and head. According to hadith, it is mentioned that Muslims are closer to Allah when they are in sujud.

The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) said, “The nearest a servant comes to his Lord is when he is prostrating himself, so make supplication (in this state)” [Sahih al-Bukhari]

The belly fat can be controlled with Balasana and Sujud positions. Knees, forehead, and feet are on the ground, which means there’s more pressure for the abdomen’s muscles to get stronger.

In Yoga, a similar pose to sujud is called child post (Balasana). This is also treated as a famous stretching exercise that can be added to his/her daily routine. This pose relieves tension in the chest, shoulders, and back. As per certain researches, this pose activates crown chakra that deals with a spiritual connection with the world and spiritual pursuits. It also clears mental toxins.

Wrapping Up

People around the world perform Yoga to increase mental peace, stamina, and calmness. When they engage in Yoga, they chant the mantras in a low tone to increase efficiency. However, this is also similar to what Muslims do when they engage in prayers. Quran verses that are recited serve as a guidance and good deed.

Just like Yoga, salah serves as enlightenment and a source of peace. According to Islam, peace and guidance are promoted through five-times prayers. Through prayers, meditation is encouraged, so for example, whenever a Muslim feels worried or disturbed, they can easily get rid of it through prayers.

On the other hand, Quran verses deal with a lot of sociological and psychological benefits. I believe now it’s safe to say that we, Muslims, have been following Yoga since 1,400 years!

Five-time prayers is the Muslim version of Yoga!

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Jewish Nazism is reality not fiction

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Jewish Nazism

I realize that the title of this article might offend and provoke many people, especially those adhering to the Judaic faith. I do know that Jews, like everyone else, are not carbon copies of each other. There are many conscientious Jews who believe in fairness and basic human equality regardless of color, race and faith, and strongly reject racism and chauvinism in any form. Also, I will no longer be using euphemistic language in reference to Jewish Nazism especially in light of the latest Dresden-like bombing of Gaza by the Judeo-Nazi state also known as Israel.

Read Also: No forgiveness for Jewish Nazism

These people I salute for their rectitude, humanity and morality. They are our natural partners for peace and a better tomorrow for our children and their children.

But there are numerous other Jews who don’t believe in human equality and justice for all. Indeed, there are many Jews, e.g. followers of the hateful Chabad sect, who don’t even ascribe full humanity to people who are not members of the Jewish faith.

Needless to say, the venomous ideology adopted by these racist fanatics has much in common with Aryan Nazism.

Read Also: The futility of counting on the U.S. to pressure Israel

What else can be said to describe an ideology that teaches adherents that the life of a non-Jew has no sanctity and that goyem can be murdered without the slightest compunction or feeling of guilt?

The shocking reactions by the Israeli government, rabbis, and community leaders to the latest abduction, murder and subsequent burning of a Palestinian kids in Gaza are very telling.

In a certain sense, these reactions and attitudes can be compared to the reactions and attitudes of many Germans to the pogroms carried out against Jews by the Nazis prior to and during the Second World War.

The gleefully despicable embrace of the brashly hideous crime by the bulk of the Israeli Jewish society underscores the fact that millions of Jews in Israel and abroad do harbor certain Nazi tendencies, especially against the Palestinian people. These tendencies are too real and too tangible to be overstated.

However, we must call the spade a spade, even at the expense of upsetting the huge Zionist propaganda machine which habitually alters the black into white and the blatant big lie into a “truth” glorified by sheepish westerners who have long been brainwashed into believing that Israel is a modern, civilized and democratic state.

In the final analysis, when Jews (or anyone else) think, behave and act like the Nazis thought, behaved and acted, they simply become Nazis. Pure and simple.

Today, there are numerous Jews who openly call for the physical annihilation of Palestinians as retaliation for the abduction and killing of three Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

Saber-rattling rabbis speak menacingly of the need to adopt “the Biblical way” to combat the Palestinians.

For those not versed in Jewish phraseology, “Biblical way” is euphemism for genocide.

Today, the Israeli media reported that some army personnel openly appealed to the government to “give us the green light to annihilate them.”!!!

Just read what thousands of Jewish youths have been writing on their Facebook pages! It is outrageous, disgusting and sheer evil.

To put it in a nutshell, Nazism is being regurgitated and exuded all over Israel. This is happening in broad daylight while professional liars like Binyamin Netanyahu are filling the ether with all sorts of shameless lies about Israel being victimized by the Palestinians.

Seventy-six years have passed since Kristalnacht. Today Jewish settlers in the west Bank, in close cooperation and coordination, with the Israeli army could very well carry out a huge pogrom against an innocent and helpless community which really finds itself very much in the same precarious and vulnerable position that European Jewry experienced prior to WWII.

I am not a prophet of doom and gloom, but the signs are unmistakably bleak.

A final point, the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are surviving thanks to the good-will of the international public opinion. Should the international community go into a brief slumber, God forbid, Israel and its own Wehrmacht, SS, Gestapo and Hitler Youth might embark on the unthinkable. Don’t you ever say Jews can’t carry out a holocaust against their victims, the Palestinians?

Words can kill; words do kill.

Unfortunately, the chilling words we are hearing from many Israeli Jews these days leave no room for optimism.

Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine

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I’m most definitely Palestinian!

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Palestinian

In-your-face brutality, unending genocide, unending atrocities, mass slaughter directed against one’s people, one’s brethren, causes the most strong and unimaginable reaction, in response to the oppressor’s horrendous and barbaric deeds. The autocratic, despotic, tyrannical Israeli-hand systematically and with pre-planned engineered precision, massacres, annihilates, eliminates the young and the old Palestinian alike – in the most inhumane and most despicable of ways. Slaughters men, women and children in broad daylight. Bares its blood-thirsty intentions, its monstrous objectives in the most unashamed of ways. Mercy to none – not to the living, not to the severely wounded and dying; no mercy even on the dead or their lifeless remains.

The constant fear of being bombed anytime, rained down with missiles and all manner of munitions from within the vast arsenal of the Israeli side; definitely stockpiled high, with enough buffer inventory of munitions, deadly and lethal stockpile, to blow the receiving side multiple times over; so as not to leave a “shred” of evidence of your original physical-self on the surface of the land, which your people, generations and generations of your ancestors, since time immemorial have dwelt on.

Read Also: The age-old Palestinian-fear (of the Israeli thirst)

The inexplicable terror of seeing Israeli drones constantly “floating about” unopposed, in the skies above your unsheltered head. Drones with eyes like that of a greedy dog. Electronic pixels wanting to cast an evil eye, an evil-spell upon your very being. Eyeing upon your existence, wanting to blow-up, tear-up your physical being, seemingly wanting to devour your flesh and body; all by way of a few computer clicks / even the manual computer-clicks now, seemingly, are being replaced by more automated ways of executing these most evil deeds. Software, coded software, written programs to execute on the most Evil-intentions. Evil-intentions of the most evil amongst the human race.

Everybody knows, the Israelis have exterminated with their weaponry, uncountable numbers of Palestinians across a 40, 50km stretch of land, in front of the whole world, over the past so many weeks and months. And retain the capacity, the ability, the power, the means to slaughter, devour many, many more innocent ones, day in, day out.

The Israelis possess American technology, American weapons – the bedrock of their faith, the foundation stone of their belief in their never-ending invincibility. The Palestinians have their faith in Allah; that Allah will redeem his faithful people, from the clutches of these war-mongers, who rain down terror, day and night on the most innocent, the most vulnerable.

Most definitely, the Moslem spirit in me, the Palestinian spirit in me is not defeated; quite to the contrary, it’s rekindled, stronger than ever.

I’m definitely Palestinian, in every sense of the word, and Allah will save us, Allah will have mercy on us, Allah will guide us.

(Note: Azhaar Amayreh is a marketer stuck in war-ravaged Rafah with her child.)The following article is part of a campaign to raise money to help MZEMO contributor Azhaar Amayreh and her family leave Gaza. Please give what you can.

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The futility of counting on the U.S. to pressure Israel

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It is really ludicrous to see how dishonest the U.S “mediators” constantly demand that the Palestinians display more “good will” toward Israel at a time when Israel continues to perpetrate a real Holocaust against the hapless and helpless Palestinaians and steal Palestinian land in broad daylight.

It seems amply clear that the current Palestinian leadership, i.e. the Palestinian Authority (PA)  led by Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, neither learns from its own blunders nor from other people’s blunders. This is really a gigantic disaster befalling the Palestinian people and their enduring just cause.

How else can one relate to the unrelenting illogical insistence of the the whole world on accepting the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, as “mediator and honest broker” between us and our murderous tormentors and grave-diggers, Israel?

Read Also: The US and IsraelThe dog versus the wagging tail.

Indeed, one doesn’t have to be an expert on American foreign policy in the Middle East to know that the U.S represents the problem, not the solution, given its long-standing embrace of Israeli fascism and expansion.  After all, it is the US that not only enabled Israel to actively pursue its lebensraum policy at the expense of its neighbors but consistently shield it from any accountability or international condemnation.

Today, the U.S. administration is criticizing Palestinian “unilateralism” in reference to desperate PA efforts to get the UN Security Council to recognize Palestinian statehood and agree on a deadline for ending Israel’s Nazi-like occupation.

Well, we all know that the U.S. is being pornographically hypocritical when it accuses the virtually vanquished Palestinians of acting unilaterally as if its spoilt nefarious daughter, Israel, were ever acting in full conformity with international law.

Well, Mr. Abbas and Mr. Ereikat: Don’t be too gullible, too sheepish. Ask your American interlocutors, e.g. Mr. John Kerry, the following questions:

Since when did Israel ever behave bilaterally rather than unilaterally?

Was the usurpation of Palestine and expulsion of its indigenous people at the hands of Jewish terrorist gangs hailing from Eastern Europe, a bilateral or unilateral act?

Was the annexation by Israel of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights a bilateral or a unilateral act?

Was the building of hundreds of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as the transfer of 600,000 Jewish settlers to live on a land that belongs not to them a bilateral or unilateral act?

Was the wanton demolition of some 30,000 Palestinian homes by Israel a bilateral or a unilateral act?

Was the annexation of the bulk of the West Bank and East Jerusalem a bilateral or a unilateral act?

And what about this ugly structure, called Separation wall, which resulted in the theft of thousands of acres of private Palestinian land? Was it a bilateral or a unilateral act?

I could go on and on and on listing America’s hypocritical and duplicitous stands on Palestinian grievances and Israeli crimes. Indeed, the U.S dishonest stand on the Palestinian plight has only been consistent in its moral depravity. Indeed, hypocrisy in its most brazen form has always been and continues to be the modus operandi of American policy toward the Palestinian issue. I know it is politically incorrect to speak in this tone. However, truth must not be another victim of the dark evil embrace between the U.S. and Israel.

But morality is not and has never been part of American politics or policies, especially foreign policy. This is why the world looks so ugly, so gloomy and so unjust.

The U.S. is insisting that only a “negotiated” settlement to the Palestinian issue would be acceptable to the U.S.

Read Also: The Palestinian Authority: confused, frustrated and corrupt

In other words, Israel must always have the final say as to any possible peace deal with the Palestinians.

But since Israel would never ever end its occupation or dismantle the settlements, let alone allow for the repatriation of the refugees, it means there can be no negotiated settlement unless the Palestinians agree to surrender to Jewish Nazism. But that will never happen as Muslims, including the Palestinian people, would never allow the Ramallah leadership or any other leadership to commit adultery with the honorable Palestinian cause.

Let’s be honest. The purportedly honest American broker or mediator is neither honest nor a broker or mediator. The proverbial American judge is simply telling the insolent rapist (Israel) and the vanquished rape victim (the Palestinians) to sort it out amongst yourselves. Do we have to be the smartest humans on earth to understand the implications of this brutal ugliness?

It is tantamount to a total American embrace of Israeli fascism. It means that the American stance is actually Israel’s stance. It also means that that the U.S. would never accept or condone any settlement that Israel doesn’t accept.

That is why the Palestinians need to have a moment of truth with themselves.
And the message they need to internalize is that they would have to wait ages if they continued to put their trust in the U.S. to pressure Israel to walk in the path of peace.

Let us face it. Israel will never walk in the path of peace unless it is pressured and bullied to do so. However, Israel would never ever walk in the path of peace as long as it continues to receive nuclear submarines from Germany and the most advanced fighter jets from the U.S.

In a nut shell, America can’t and won’t exert any meaningful pressure on Israel to end its N-a-z-i-like occupation. We all know that Israel controls the American government or at least controls those who control the American government. Israel is intoxicated by its arrogance of power and Talmudic insolence. And the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, is not in a position to be an honest mediator and to impose a deal on Israel or even convince her to allow for one that would give the Palestinian a semblance of justice.

What should be done?

We must go ahead with our efforts at the U.N. Security Council, irrespective of American threats to veto any resolution favorable to the Palestinian cause. At least casting the veto would embarrass America itself and its treacherous Arab allies (they are not actually allies but cheap slaves and puppets as we all know).

We Palestinians must be confident of our inevitable triumph over Zionism and its evils. Yes, it may take time, but eventually Zionism won’t live forever in a sea where hundreds of millions live.

Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine

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