Christmas letters from Muslims

Peace, Kapayapaan, Kalinaw, Kalinong, Salam, Shalom, to you this Christmas. I was pleasantly surprised to receive letters from Muslims working in Saudi Arabia reacting positively to last week’s column piece, ``The Christmas Story in the Koran’’ (12/22/05). First, I’d like to say that the Inquirer stylebook spells the name of the Muslims’ Holy Book as ``Koran’’ so the few times in the past that I wrote ``Qur’an’’ I always got a call from the proofreading department informing me that the spelling will changed. I again got a call regarding my title. At...

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The Christmas story in the Qur’an

The Christmas story is not only told in the bible of the Christians, it is also in the Qur’an of the Muslims. I went over the Qur’an which is not familiar terrain for me, I also browsed through an Islamic website where I found interesting stuff. In the Qur’an one will find an account of Mary’s own birth, the Annunciation and later, the Nativity and Jesus’ public life. Mary is mentioned in the Qur’an 34 times. But before Jesus’ birth is the story about the miraculous conception and birth of John the Baptist, the precursor of the Messiah that was...

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The milkman of Talavera

Guyito, the Inquirer’s carabao mascot, would be happy to know that his fellow ruminants have transformed the town of Talavera in Nueva Ecija into a land flowing with milk and milk products. Thanks to the dream and the daring of entrepreneur Danilo V. Fausto, carabao’s milk is now making a healthy comeback and finding a niche in the market. Another thing to moo about is fresh cow’s milk produced by small farmers’ cooperatives also finding its way into café society and boldly competing with imported milk that isn’t fresh at all. Fausto’s ``Dare...

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Oikocredit, small change, big impact

You must have seen a 20-peso bill with a circular doodle with three arrows coming out of it. You must have wondered whether that was someone’s way of venting his ire on the state of the Philippine currency. But when you looked closer, you must have read the words below that whorl--``UN Year of Microcredit 2005, Sustainable Microfinance Services for the Filipino Entrepreneurial Poor’’. With a big bang, the 2005 UN Year of Microcredit ended last week with the so-called ``Filipino entrepreneurial poor’’, composed mostly of mothers, bannering the...

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The missing face of AIDS

Today is World AIDS Awareness Day. Somewhere in today’s Inquirer I’ve written something on the Unicef campaign to help children affected by HIV-AIDS. ``Affected by’’ means these children have parents(persons) living with HIV-AIDS (PLH) or are themselves infected. By the way, you don’t say PWA (persons with AIDS) anymore. You say PLH. So much for being politically correct. Children, Unicef says, are the missing face of AIDS. According to the Lunduyan Foundation’s study on Filipino children affected by AIDS, silence, sad to say, best describes...

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