PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

11 JAM "DIGARAP" PENYIDIK KPK,

saco-indonesia.com, Wali Kota Tangerang Selatan, Airin Rachmi Diany, telah menjalani pemeriksaan selama hampir 11 jam terkait dalam penyidikan kasus proyek pengadaan alat kesehatan di Provinsi Banten.  
 
Airin telah menolak membuka materi pemeriksaan dengan berkelit bahwa detail kasus proyek alkes Banten sebaiknya ditanyakan langsung kepada penyidik Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi.
 
"Untuk prosesnya mungkin nanti bisa ditanya ke penyidik," kata dia usai diperiksa KPK, Jakarta Selatan, Selasa (11/2/2014) lalu.
 
Airin keluar dari Gedung KPK, pukul 20.53 malam WIB. Meski cukup lama diperiksa oleh KPK, Airin juga tetap terlihat cantik. Begitu keluar dari Gedung KPK, Airin juga telah mengumbar sekilas senyum kepada puluhan wartawan yang menunggunya.
 
Tidak terlihat kesan lelah di wajah Airin. Ia juga masih terlihat segar seperti saat pertama kali datang memenuhi jadwal pemeriksaan pada pukul 10.03 WIB.
 
KPK telah memeriksa Airin sebagai saksi bagi dugaan korupsi beraroma pemerasan yang telah dilakukan oleh Gubernur Banten, Ratu Atut Chosiyah, di proyek pengadaan alat kesehatan. Selebihnya, Airin telah memilih segera masuk ke dalam "Terimakasih ya. Terimakasih," ujar Airin seraya masuk ke dalam mobil Toyota Innova B 1043 NKO.
 
Ratu Atut Chosiyah saat ini telah ditahan di Rumah Tahanan Pondok Bambu, Jakarta Timur. Ia semula ditetapkan sebagai tersangka suap dalam penanganan sengketa Pemilihan Kepala Daerah Lebak, Banten, di Mahkamah Konstitusi.
 
Selanjutnya, Ratu Atut disangka telah menyalahgunakan wewenang hingga mengakibatkan kerugian pada keuangan negara di proyek alat kesehatan Banten. Terakhir, Ratu Atut disangka telah menerima gratifikasi bernuansa pemerasan di proyek alkes.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

50 PELAJARAN PENTING DARI HAJI

Berikut ini adalah, 50 pelajaran berharga dari Rukun Islam Kelima untuk kehidupan manusia. Semoga Alloh memberikan taufiq, bantuan, dan menunjuki kebenaran pada kami dalam menyelesaikan tulisan ini.

1. Pendidikan untuk mentauhidkan Alloh, baik dalam ucapan maupun amalan, hal ini terlihat jelas dalam beberapa amalan berikut ini:

a. Bacaan talbiyah, yang disebut juga dengan kalimat tauhid: Labbaikallohumma labbaik…

b. Dimasukkannya dalam talbiyah kata: la syarika lak (tiada sekutu bagi-Mu).

c. Kata la syarika lak yang diulangi dua kali dalam bacaan talbiyah, ini menunjukkan adanya penekanan dalam hal tauhid.

d. Kata-kata: “Innal hamda wan ni’mata laka wal mulk”, maksudnya adalah: “Sesungguhnya semua pujian, segala nikmat, dan seluruh kekuasaan hanya bagi-Mu ya Alloh”, dan ini juga mengandung nilai tauhid.

e. Larangan thowaf di selain Ka’bah, itu artinya kita dilarang untuk thowaf di arofah, di jamarot, di pemakaman, tempat keramat, tempat bersejarah, dll. Ini semua bukti keyakinan kita, bahwa tiada sesembahan yang berhak disembah kecuali Alloh, dan itulah diantara bentuk nyata mentauhidkan Alloh.

2. Pendidikan untuk banyak memuji Alloh. Hal ini tampak pada kata hamdalah yang ada dalam talbiyah. Meski saat datang ke tanah suci, jamaah haji sedang dalam keadaan tertimpa musibah, didera cobaan, sakit, miskin, dan terasingkan… mereka semua tetap memuji Alloh, seakan-akan mereka dalam keadaan lapang, sehat, dan kuat… Sungguh tak diragukan lagi, memuji Alloh dianjurkan bagi setiap muslim, baik di saat suka, maupun duka.

3. Pendidikan untuk selalu membasahi lisan dengan dzikir, ini tampak pada:

a. Disunnahkannya membaca talbiyah hingga sampai di masjidil harom, atau sampai melihat ka’bah, atau sampai memulai thowaf. Meski para ulama berbeda pendapat tentang kapan harus mengakhiri talbiyah, tapi semua pendapat itu mengisyaratkan anjuran untuk memperbanyak talbiyah.

b. Saat thowaf, kita dianjurkan untuk memperbanyak doa, atau dzikir, atau pujian pada Alloh, dan semuanya merupakan bentuk dzikir.

c. Dalam sai juga demikian.

d. Doa di Hari Arofah yang berupa dzikir: “la ilaaha illallohu wahdahu….

e. Hari-hari di mina adalah hari untuk makan, minum, dan berdzikir.

f. Disyariatkannya melempar jumroh adalah untuk berdzikir mengingat-Nya.

g. Disunnahkan untuk membaca takbir dalam setiap lemparan kerikilnya.

Dan masih banyak lagi tempat dan kesempatan lain untuk memperbanyak dzikir dalam ibadah haji ini. Itu semua mengajarkan pada seorang muslim agar lisannya selalu basah dengan bacaan dzikir.

4. Mengajarkan kita untuk mengingat mati, yaitu dari pengenaan kain kafan dalam pelaksanaannya. Dengan ini, seorang mukmin akan teringat dan merasakan bagaimana akhir hidupnya, sehingga hal itu akan mempengaruhi hati dan amalannya.

5. Mengajarkan manusia untuk zuhud pada dunia dan kenikmatannya. Baik dia seorang yang kaya, presiden, atau menteri, ia tidak akan mengenakan kecuali baju putih itu. Seandainya ia ingin mengenakan baju lain yang dimilikinya, tetap saja tidak diperbolehkan baginya.

6- Mendidik manusia untuk qona’ah, sekaligus memberi pelajaran bahwa kekayaan yang hakiki adalah pada sifat qonaah itu. Oleh karena itu, para jama’ah haji dilatih untuk cukup hanya dengan mengenakan pakaian yang menutupi auratnya, cukup dengan tidur sekedar bisa menghilangkan lelah dan malas, dan cukup dengan makan sekedar bisa menopang tubuhnya.

7. Mengajarkan pada manusia, bahwa kekayaan duniawi tidaklah memiliki kedudukan di sisi Alloh bila dilihat dari dzatnya. Oleh karena itu para jamaah haji sama-sama dalam pakaian dan amalannya. Adapun kekayaan, kefakiran, kedudukan, dan tempat tinggal mereka, sungguh hal itu tidak punya pengaruh apa-apa. Yang mempengaruhi mereka hanyalah keikhlasan dan mengikuti sunnah dalam beramal. Sungguh demi Alloh, betapa banyak para masakin di tempat itu yang lebih mulia, dari mereka yang kaya dan memiliki kedudukan yang tinggi!!.

8. Mengajarkan pada manusia dasar Persatuan Islam, hal ini tampak dari seragamnya perbuatan, amalan, tempat, dan waktu mereka.

9. Mengajarkan pada manusia untuk sabar dalam menghadapi kemaksiatan, hal itu tampak pada hal-hal berikut ini:

a. Sabar untuk tidak melakukan hal-hal yang dilarang ketika dalam keadaan ihrom.

b. Sabar untuk tidak melakukan kefasikan, sebagaimana firman-Nya: “Barangsiapa berkewajiban menunaikan ibadah haji dalam bulan-bulan haji, maka janganlah ia berbuat fasik dan keji”. Sehingga ketika ia pulang ke negerinya, ia telah terdidik dan terbiasa sabar dari segala kemaksiatan, sebagaimana ia sabar menghadapinya pada hari-hari itu.

10. Mengajarkan pada muslim untuk sabar dalam ketaatan. Dan barangsiapa mau merenungi masalah-masalah tentang haji, tentu ia akan menemukan makna ini. Hal itu terlihat diantaranya:

Ketika jama’ah haji ingin bersegera kembali ke negerinya, ia tidak diperkenankan sebelum tanggal 12 dzulhijjah.

Pulangnya juga harus setelah melempar dan thowaf wada’, meski ia berasal dari negeri yang jauh, tetap saja ia harus menjalani semua amalan ketaatan ini, baru setelah itu diperkenankan untuk pulang.

11. Mengajarkan pada manusia, agar menyiapkan diri sebelum melakukan ketaatan, oleh karena itu disunnahkan bagi yang ingin memulai ihrom, agar mandi, membersihkan diri, memotong kuku, membersihkan rambut kemaluan dan ketiaknya, dan memarfumi badannya, sebagaimana dituntunkan oleh Nabi -shollallohu alaihi wasallam-. Begitu pula ketika sudah tahallul awal dan akan melakukan thowaf ifadloh, disunnahkan baginya memakai parfum, sebagaimana dicontohkan oleh beliau. Tak diragukan lagi, tentunya hal ini akan berpengaruh terhadap jiwa ketika menjalani ibadahnya, sekaligus menambah kekhusyu’annya.

12. Mengajarkan pada manusia untuk ikhlas dan tulus hati, yang keduanya adalah puncak amalan hati, dengan keduanya sebuah amal akan diterima dan mendapatkan tempat yang mulia di sisi-Nya.

13. Mengajarkan pada manusia untuk tawakkal dan menyerahkan urusannya hanya pada Alloh semata, terutama dalam menunaikan dan memudahkan ibadahnya. Lihatlah bagaimana seorang muslim yang datang dengan meninggalkan keluarga, anak, dan hartanya, tentunya ia akan menyerahkan urusan harta dan sanak keluarganya pada Tuhannya, ia juga tentunya banyak meminta permohonan pada-Nya dalam menjalani beratnya perjalanan, terutama mereka yang datang dari negeri jauh.

14. mengajarkan manusia untuk bertawakkal yang benar, tentunya tawakkal yang tidak mengesampingkan usaha lahiriyah yang diperintahkan untuk mencari rizki, oleh karenanya Alloh berfirman: “Tidak ada masalah jika kalian ingin mengharapkan kemurahan (rizki) dari Tuhan kalian”. Ayat ini turun pada mereka yang menyangka bahwa makna tawakkal adalah dengan meninggalkan berdagang dalam haji.

15. Mengajarkan pada manusia untuk mewujudkan semua amalan-amalan hati. Sungguh tiada ibadah yang tampak padanya semua atau sebagian besar amalan hati seperti dalam haji ini. Terkumpul dalam ibadah haji ini amalan ikhlas, ketulusan hati, roja’, tawakkal, zuhud, waro’, muhasabah, keyakinan… dll”

16. Mendidik manusia untuk menundukkan hati dari apa yang diingininya, selama hal itu dilarang oleh syariat. Parfum, tutup kepala, dan semua larangan ihrom haruslah ditinggalkan oleh jama’ah haji padahal hatinya menginginkannya. Ia meninggalkannya bukan karena apa-apa, tapi karena syariat melarangnya.

17. mengajarkan manusia untuk taat dengan aturan dan batasan syariat. Hal ini nampak dalam aturan miqot dan batasannya, aturan waktu melempar, aturan waktu meninggalkan arofah, dll.

18. Mengajarkan pada manusia untuk membuka pintu qiyas yang shohih. Pelajaran berharga ini, bisa kita ambil dari ucapan Umar r.a. pada penduduk negeri Irak ketika mereka mengatakan: “Sungguh dua miqot itu, tidak pas dengan jalan kami”, maka Umar r.a. mengatakan: “Ambillah tempat yang sejajar dengannya di jalan kalian” (muttafaqun alaih).

Dengan ini, seorang muslim tahu bahwa aturan syariat bukanlah aturan yang kaku, dan tak bisa dirubah sama sekali. Tapi terbuka juga dalam aturan syariat ini pintu qiyas, tentunya hal ini hanya dikhususkan bagi mereka yang memiliki syarat dan ketentuan dalam ber-ijtihad.

19. Mengajarkan pada manusia tentang rukun kedua diterimanya suatu amalan, yakni mengikuti tuntunan Nabi -shollallohu alaihi wasallam-. Oleh karena itu, beliau menyabdakan: “Ambillah cara manasik kalian dariku!” (muttafaqun alaih). Beliau juga mengatakan dalam kesempatan lain: “Melemparlah dengan kerikil yang seperti ini!”. Begitu juga perkataan Umar r.a. pada hajar aswad: “Aku tahu, kau ini hanyalah sebuah batu, yang takkan mampu memberi manfaat atau mendatangkan bahaya, andai saja aku tidak melihat Rosululloh -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- menciummu, tentunya aku takkan menciummu” (muttafaqun alaih).

Dengan itu semua, seorang muslim akan lulus dari madrasah hajinya, dalam keadaan telah terbiasa mengikuti tuntunan Nabinya -shollallohu alaihi wasallam-, baik dalam hal yang besar, maupun yang paling kecil sekalipun.

20. Memberikan pelajaran akan mudahnya ajaran syariat, sehingga keyakinan ini bisa tertanam dalam hatinya dan terasa ringan ketika menerapkannya. Hal ini, bisa terlihat dalam amalan-amalan berikut ini:

a. Letak miqot yang menyebar dan terpisah-pisah, hingga memudahkan para jama’ah haji dalam memulai ihromnya.

b. Cara manasik haji yang bermacam-macam.

c. Adanya hukum khusus bagi para jama’ah yang lemah dan lanjut usia.

21. Mendidik manusia, agar memperhatikan adanya perbedaan diantara mereka. Sungguh tidaklah mereka berada pada derajat yang sama. Hal ini tampak pada adanya cara manasik haji yang bermacam-macam. Diantara mereka ada yang tidak mampu menunaikan hajinya, kecuali dengan cara ifrod. Diantara mereka ada yang hanya mampu melakukannya dengan qiron dan hal itu menjadi lebih mudah dan lebih utama baginya. Dan diantara mereka ada yang bisa menunaikan manasik dengan cara yang paling utama, yakni tamattu’.

Sungguh ini menunjukkan tingginya perhatian syariat pada keadaan, kemampuan, masalah, dan perbedaan mereka. Sekaligus merupakan bantahan bagi orang yang menuntut bersatunya umat dalam segala hal, baik dalam amalan maupun dalam hal kepentingannya.

22. Mengajari manusia bagaimana fikhul khilaf dalam kehidupan nyata, hal itu tampak pada hal-hal berikut ini:

a. Perbedaan para jama’ah dalam dalam memilih cara manasiknya.

b. Perbedaan para jama’ah dalam menjalani amalan yang dilakukan pada hari ke-10 bulan Dzulhijjah.

c. Perbedaan para jama’ah dalam hal dzikir yang dibaca ketika meninggalkan Mina menuju Arofah. Sebagaimana disebutkan, para sahabat dulu ada yang bertalbiyah, ada juga yang bertakbir.

d. Perbedaan waktu bolehnya beranjak dari Muzdalifah ke Mina, melihat keadaan masing-masing, bagi yang lemah ada waktu tersendiri, dan bagi yang kuat ada waktu tersendiri.

e. Perbedaan para jama’ah dalam memilih nafar awal atau nafar tsani untuk ibadah hajinya.

f. Perbedaan para jama’ah dalam memilih menggundul atau memendekkan rambutnya ketika hendak bertahallul.

Semua contoh di atas, mengajari para jama’ah bagaimana menyikapi perbedaan dan individunya. Sungguh, tidak ada nukilan tentang timbulnya cekcok atau tuduhan antara satu sahabat dengan sahabat lainnya, karena sebab memilih cara manasik tertentu, meski pilihan mereka adalah cara manasik yang kurang utama.

23. Mengajari manusia, bahwa tidak semua yang diterangkan oleh syari’at itu mungkin dicerna oleh akal, tujuannya adalah agar syariat tetap menjadi pemegang kendali hukum di atas akal, bukan di bawahnya.

Lihatlah sebagai contoh sabda Nabi -shollallohu alaihi wasallam-: “Perbanyaklah haji dan umroh, karena keduanya bisa menghilangkan kefakiran sebagaimana mampunya tengku pembakar menghilangkan karatnya besi. (Diriwayatkan oleh para pengarang kitab sunan, dan dishohihkan oleh Albani)…

Padahal jika di nalar dengan akal, memperbanyak haji dan umroh itu, akan mengundang banyak kebutuhan dan tentunya akan banyak menghabiskan uang, tapi syariat malah mengatakan seperti itu. Sungguh akal tidak akan bisa menerangkan secara rasional, bahwa orang yang memperbanyak haji dan umroh akan menghilangkan kefakiran, Alloh lah yang tahu akan hakikat di balik itu semua.

Dengan ini, seorang muslim akan terdidik untuk selalu menghubungkan dirinya dengan Alloh dan ilmu-Nya, sekaligus melatihnya untuk berjiwa besar dan mau mengakui kelemahan dan kekurangannya.

24. Mengajari manusia, bahwa yang paling afdlol, adalah yang sesuai dg syariat, bukan yang lebih berat dan susah, misalnya: Memulai ihrom dari miqot, lebih utama dari pada memulainya dari tempat sebelumnya, meski itu lebih berat dan susah. Sehingga dengan ini, seorang muslim terdidik untuk memuliakan syariat dan memperhatikannya.

25. Melatih manusia, untuk terbiasa tertib dan taat aturan. Budaya tersebut bukanlah keistimewaan negeri kafir, sebaliknya itu merupakah nilai Islam yang telah kita abaikan. Nilai ini tampak dari hal-hal berikut:

a. Harusnya tertib dalam menjalani amalan-amalan Umroh.

b. Sunnahnya tertib dalam menjalankan amalan-amalan pada hari ke-10 bulan dzulhijjah.

c. Harusnya tertib ketika melempar jamarot.
Tapi yang sungguh mengherankan, di zaman kita ini, justru ketertiban itu malah dijadikan cemoohan!…

26. Mendidik manusia untuk menekan syahwatnya secara khusus, oleh karena itu akad nikah menjadi larangan saat dalam keadaan ihrom, bahkan sampai rofats[1] dan jima’ pun dilarang. Tidak diragukan, ini mendidik seorang muslim agar waspada dan hati-hati dengan syahwat ini.

27. Mendidik manusia untuk menunaikan ibadahnya sesempurna dan sebaik mungkin, oleh karena itu Alloh berfirman: “Barangsiapa yang berkewajiban haji, maka janganlah ia melakukan rofats, kefasikan, dan debat (kusir) dalam ibadah hajinya”, beliau -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- juga bersabda: “Haji yang mabrur itu, tiada balasan lain baginya kecuali surga” (Muttafaqun Alaih). Ini semua mendidik muslim untuk menjaga kualitas ibadahnya.

28. Mendidik manusia untuk menyesuaikan dirinya saat keadaan dan kebiasaan lingkungannya berubah. Tentunya sepanjang tahun jama’ah haji terbiasa melakukan sesuatu di negaranya, lalu ketika datang haji, ia harus memaksa dirinya untuk menyesuaikan dengan waktu dan jam yang sedang ia jalani. Inilah maksud dari arahan Umar r.a. saat mengatakan: “Prihatinlah, karena nikmat-nikmat yang ada itu tidak akan langgeng selamanya”.

29. Mendidik manusia untuk banyak berdoa. Dalam manasik haji, disunnahkan bagi muslim untuk berdoa pada Tuhannya, di kebanyakan tempat yang dikunjunginya, misalnya:

a. Saat thowaf.

b. Saat sholat sunat 2 rokaat setelah thowaf.

c. Saat minum air zamzam.

d. Saat naik ke bukit Shofa dan Marwa.

e. Saat di tengah-tengah pelaksanaan sa’i.

f. Saat Hari Arofah

g. Setelah terbit fajarnya hari nahr (tanggal 10 dzulhijjah) hingga langit menguning.

h. Setelah melempar dua jamarot, Shughro dan Wustho.

Dan tempat-tempat lainnya, itu semua mendidik seorang muslim untuk selalu mendekatkan diri pada Tuhannya dalam doa dan selalu kembali pada-Nya.

30. Mendidik muslim untuk ta’abbud dengan sifat maha mendengar dan maha melihatnya Alloh ta’ala, sebagaimana madzhabnya Ahlus sunnah wal jama’ah dalam menetapkan sifat dan maknanya, ini tampak dalam hal-hal berikut ini:

a. Banyaknya bahasa yang beraneka ragam, suara yang berbeda-beda, kebutuhan yang bermacam-macam, pun begitu, Dia yang maha suci tetap mampu mendengarkan doanya ini, dan mengabulkan doanya itu, serta mengetahui seluruh bahasa mereka.

b. Dia maha tahu niat para jama’ah haji yang berbeda-beda, dan seberapa tulus dan ikhlasnya mereka, meski jumlah mereka sangat banyak.

31. Melatih manusia, untuk tidak menganggap remeh apapun yang diharamkan Alloh, oleh karena itulah dalam ibadah haji ini, ada beberapa kalimat yang diulang-ulang, diantaranya:

a. Tanah haram.

b. Bulan haram.

c. Larangan-larangan ketika sedang ihrom.

Dengan begitu seorang muslim terlatih untuk mengagungkan apa yang diharamkan oleh Alloh ta’ala dari sekian banyak sesuatu yang diharamkannya.

32. Melatih manusia untuk meneguhkan prinsip “loyal pada kaum muslimin dan berlepas diri dari kaum kafirin”. Oleh karena itulah disunnahkan dalam sholat sunat setelah thowaf untuk membaca surat alkafirun, yang didalamnya menekankan dan menuangkan dasar prinsip ini.

Termasuk diantara bukti paling nampak dari petunjuk menyelisihi kaum musyrikin adalah, beranjaknya para jama’ah haji (dari Muzdalifah) sebelum terbitnya matahari.

33. Mendidik manusia untuk tenang, tertib, dan mempraktekkan prinsip itsar (mendahulukan orang lain dalam hal duniawi). Oleh karena itulah dahulu Rosul -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- ketika meninggalkan Arofah menyabdakan: “tenang dan tenanglah”, karena saat itu merupakan momen yang biasanya rame dan memungkinkan terjadinya saling menyakiti antara kaum muslimin.

Sifat waqor dan tenang adalah sifat yang selayaknya melekat pada diri seorang muslim, sebagaimana Alloh memberikan sifat itu pada mereka dalam kitab-Nya: “yaitu mereka yang berjalan di atas bumi dengan sopan”

34. Mendidik manusia untuk menyatukan kata, meski keadaan dan cara manasik mereka berbeda-beda. Ini merupakan dasar yang agung, dan ditunjukkan dalam banyak nash syariat dan juga tampak dari keadaan para sahabat -rodliallohu anhum-.

35. Melatih manusia untuk mengingat hari kiamat, yakni dengan banyaknya orang yang berkumpul saat itu, bahkan pada hari kiamat nanti, Alloh akan mengumpulkan manusia dari awal hingga akhir penciptaan. Tak diragukan lagi, dengan mengingat hari kiamat, hati seorang muslim akan hidup dan memiliki pengaruh besar dalam kekhusyu’an dan ibadahnya.

36. Mendidik manusia untuk memperhatikan dan menghargai waktu. Hari arofah adalah kesempatan yang tak ada gantinya bila telah hilang, hari-hari tasyriq adalah hari-hari yang diperuntukkan untuk berdzikir (mengingat Alloh), dan di 10 hari pertama bulan dzul hijjah amalan ibadah dilipat-gandakan pahalanya, itu semua melatih seorang muslim untuk memanfaatkan waktunya untuk apapun yang bermanfaat baginya.

37. Mendidik manusia untuk menjaga ukhuwwah imaniyyah, itu tampak dari bertemunya raga, yang akan menjadikan berkumpulnya hati, dan tentunya akan terlihat pengaruh pertalian persaudaraan itu dalam tingkah laku dan kehidupan sehari-hari.

38. Mengajari manusia untuk mewujudkan lahan yang riil untuk mendidik jiwa, misalnya:

a. Haji adalah tempat untuk mendidik jiwa untuk menjaga pandangan mata dari sesuatu yang diharamkan.

b. Haji adalah tempat untuk mendidik jiwa untuk itsar (mendahulukan orang lain) dalam urusan duniawi)

c. Haji adalah tempat mendidik jiwa untuk memberi bantuan dan sedekah.

d. Haji adalah tempat mendidik jiwa untuk menerapkan amar ma’ruf nahi mungkar.

Sungguh haji merupakan pusat praktek nyata dan tempat pelatihan untuk menguji kepribadian seseorang.

39. Mendidik manusia untuk membuktikan taqwanya, karena tempat ketakwaan adalah hati, dan sebagian besar amalan haji itu bertumpu pada hati dengan derajat paling tinggi, oleh karena itulah Alloh menyebutkan redaksi takwa dalam ayat-ayat haji, Alloh berfirman: “Sempurnakanlah haji dan umroh itu untuk Alloh…” di akhir ayat disebutkan: “dan bertakwalah kalian pada Alloh!”… Dia juga berfirman: “Siapkanlah bekal (untuk haji), sungguh sebaik-baik bekal adalah taqwa”.

40. Mendidik manusia agar berakhlak mulia, yang merupakan sesuatu yang paling berat dalam timbangan amal di hari kiamat nanti, hal ini tampak dari firman-Nya: “Janganlah berdebat (kusir) dalam haji!”. Maka anjuran untuk meninggalkan debat merupakan pendidikan untuk berakhlak mulia. Hal itu juga tampak pada anjuran Nabi -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- kepada para sahabatnya untuk tetap tenang ketika meninggalkan Arofah.

41. Mendidik manusia untuk mencintai seluruh Nabi -alaihimus salam-, hal ini tampak dari:

Pemenuhan panggilannya Nabi Ibrohim ketika memanggil manusia untuk haji.

Menziarahi ka’bah yang dibangun olehnya bersama Ismail.

Dan sa’i di jalannya siti hajar ketika mencarikan air untuk Isma’il.

42. Mendidik manusia untuk menjalankan macam-macam ibadah, seperti: Thowaf, sa’i, sholat, mabit, melempar, menyembelih, menggundul, dll. Sehingga seorang muslim terdidik untuk tidak hanya terpaku dalam satu macam ibadah saja, tapi menjadikan agar ibadahnya bervariasi dan merasakan nikmatnya melakukan ibadah.

43. Mendidik manusia untuk mengagungkan Alloh, hal ini tampak dalam beberapa hal berikut:

a. Kepala yang di… dan digundul untuk mendekatkan diri dan bersimpuh kepada Alloh.

b. Hadyu yang disembelih untuk beribadah pada-Nya, dialirkan darahnya karena wajah-Nya, dan nama-Nya juga disebut ketika menyembelihnya.

44. Mendidik manusia untuk mencintai Alloh. Siapapun yang mau merenungi pemandangan jama’ah haji yang mencapai jutaan, dan merenungi bagaimana Alloh memberi mereka rizki, mengatur, menjaga, dan menanggung kebutuhan mereka, ini akan menuntunnya untuk mencintai-Nya. Dengan ini dan poin sebelum ini, akan terkumpul kecintaan dan pengagungan pada Alloh, dan inilah hakekat dari ibadah.

45. Mendidik manusia untuk mengetahui jasa Nabi -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- dan para sahabatnya -rodliallohu anhum- dalam menyebarkan agama ke seluruh penjuru dunia. Ketika anda merenungi jumlah jama’ah haji yang sangat besar itu, mereka memiliki daerah, warna, dan bahasa yang beragam, tentu anda akan tahu jasa para pendahulu dalam menyebarkan agama Alloh ini. Lihatlah bagaimana ia bisa sampai ke negara-negara Asia Timur, Afrika, bahkan Eropa. Semoga Alloh membalas mereka dengan balasan yang paling baik atas tugas berat yang diembannya dengan sebaik-baiknya, dan semoga Alloh memgampuni kita atas kekurangan kita dalam meneruskannya, dan kita memohon kepada Alloh agar membantu kita dalam urusan ini.

46. Mendidik manusia untuk berusaha membuat jengkel kaum musyrikin, dengan cara apapun, oleh karena itulah beliau -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- menyariatkan roml ketika thowaf hanya untuk membuat jengkel kaum musyrikin saja, yakni saat mereka mengata-ngatai kaum muslimin ketika datang ke Mekah: “Mereka itu mendatangi kalian, dalam keadaan telah dilemahkan oleh Humma Yatsrib“.

47. Mendidik manusia agar merasakan pengaruh ibadah dalam kehidupan ini. Meski dengan banyaknya jama’ah haji, adanya keramaian, berdesakan, berat, dan lelah, tetap saja jiwa orang-orang itu lembut, dan jarang terjadi masalah, suara tinggi, dan saling marah. Sebabnya adalah -wallohu a’lam-, karena ibadah yang sedang mereka lakukan, mempengaruhi keadaan jiwa mereka, hingga merubahnya menjadi jiwa yang tinggi, yang tidak peduli dengan hal-hal yang remeh.

Beda halnya dengan pemandangan di pasar misalnya, banyak sekali terjadi jeritan, dan suara yang tinggi, banyak pula terjadi masalah dan hal-hal buruk lainnya. Itu semua memberikan pelajaran berharga bagi seorang muslim, tentang adanya perbedaan yang jelas terlihat antara dua keadaan itu.

48. Mendidik manusia untuk selalu sadar tanggung jawab. Ketika terjadi kesalahan dari para jama’ah haji -kadang sebagian kesalahannya dalam hal-hal yang diperkirakan semua orang tahu bahwa itu salah-, ini mendidik muslim untuk sadar tanggung-jawab yang dibebankan di pundaknya untuk memberitahu saudaranya, menyodorkan sesuatu yang bermanfaat bagi mereka, dan menghilangkan kebodohan yang ada pada mereka. Penulis yakin inilah yang bisa memberi manfaat, bukan malah mencemooh atau menuduh yang bukan-bukan pada mereka yang salah.

49. Melatih manusia untuk berjihad, dengan adanya masyaqqoh, lelah, dan keinginan hati  yang tak dituruti. Oleh karena itulah Nabi -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- menamainya jihad, sebagaimana dalam sabdanya: “Bagi kalian (para wanita) ada jihad yang tanpa perang, yaitu haji dan umroh” (HR. Bukhori)

50. Mendidik manusia untuk bangga dengan agama dan keislamanya. Ini tampak dari keadaan setan di Hari Arofah, telah disebutkan dalam kitab Al-Muwaththo’ karya Imam Malik, bahwa Nabi -shollallohu alaihi wasallam- pernah bersabda: “Tiada suatu haripun, yang saat itu setan terlihat paling kerdil, paling hina, dan paling marah, melebihi Hari Arofah” (dihasankan oleh Ibnu Abdil Barr -rohimahulloh-). Hal ini juga tampak dari bagaimana Alloh membangga-banggakan hambanya yang sedang wukuf di Arofah di hadapan para malaikat, sebagaimana disebutkan dalam shohih muslim.

Baca Artikel Lainnya : TANDA-TANDA HAJI MABRUR

JASA PENGIRIMAN BARANG NAIK 2 KALI LIPAT

Penggunaan jasa kirim barang berupa paket meningkat selama bulan Ramadan, dan salah satu perusahaan jasa itu adalah Jalur Nugraha Eka Kurir (JNE) cabang Sabang Bussiness Center, Jakarta, telah mengalami peningkatan pengiriman hingga dua kali lipat.

"Jika dibandingkan dengan hari biasa, permintaan kirim barang selama bulan Ramadan ini sudah naik hingga dua kali lipat," kata salah seorang petugas JNE.

Uniknya, jenis barang-barang yang paling sering dikirim selama bulan Ramadan berbeda dari jenis barang-barang yang dikirim pada hari biasa, misalnya makanan, pakaian dan parsel.

Kebanyakan barang tersebut dikirim dari Jakarta ke kota-kota besar seperti Palembang, Medan, Surabaya, serta antar-wilayah di Jakarta. "Pengiriman paling banyak tercatat ditujukan ke Pulau Sumatera," kata Mei.

Namun dengan banyaknya permintaan kirim barang, perusahaan jasa itu tak luput dari kesulitan; salah satu kendala yang dialami adalah keterlambatan dalam proses pengiriman sehingga barang akan terlambat diterima oleh penerima.

"Terutama jika barang dikirim mendekati lebaran. Saat itu arus kirim barang sedang sibuk dan penuh. Barang bisa telat dikirim, namun kami berusaha agar telatnya tidak terlalu lama. Maksimal telat satu hari," ujar Mei.

Setelah Lebaran, diperkirakan arus pengiriman barang akan kembali normal dan stabil seperti pada hari-hari biasa.

LOWONGAN KERJA TERBARU DI PT. BUMA GROUP | PAPUA

Portal Lowongan Kerja Indonesia. Update Informasi Lowongan Kerja Terbaru Januari 2014 di BUMA GROUP sebagai Accounting Manager. Perusahaan tersebut sedang membutuhkan tenaga kerja profesional untuk menempati kursi kekosongan. Bagi anda yang berminat untuk menempati kekosongan tersebut, silahkan baca persyaratan pendaftaran dan simak artikel selengkapnya di bawah ini :

 

Lowongan Kerja di PT. BUMA GROUP

Profil Perusahaan : We are looking for highly motivated candidates to fill the following.

 

Admin dan HRD , Akunting , Asuransi , Desain , Hospitality, Makanan dan Minuman , Ilmu Pengetahuan, Lab, R&D , Konstruksi dan Bangunan , Lainnya , Manajemen , Manufakturing , Media dan Periklanan , Pelayanan Kesehatan , Pelayanan Profesional , Pemasaran, Hubungan Masyarakat (Humas) , Pendidikan , Penjual, Pelayanan Pelanggan dan Pengembang Bisnis , Perawatan Kecantikan, Kesehatan , Perbankan / Keuangan , Perdagangan dan Pembelian , Properti , Teknik , Teknologi Informatika , Telekomunikasi , Transportasi dan Logistik , Umum, Sipil ,

Alamat : Jakarta
 

Lokasi Kerja : Papua
Posisi Pekerjaan : Accounting Manager

 

Requirements:

 

• Candidate must have at least Bachelor Degree in Accounting from reputable university and (preferably) holding Tax Brevet A/B.
• Highly analytical and possess a comprehensive knowledge in Accounting, Finance and Tax Management.
• Has minimum 5 years of experience in related fields, minimum 3 years in managerial level.
• Have good knowledge and familiar with Budgeting, Treasury, Cost Control, Account Payable, Account Receiveable and Purchasing.
• Accurate in numbers, honest, presistent, hard worker, and able to work independently as well as a team.
• High intregity and proferssional in all aspects of accounting practice.
• Domicile in Jakarta and able to work in Papua.  

 

Kirimkan lamaran lengkap, disertai CV dan photo Anda ke :

Baca Selengkapnya di : Lowongan Kerja Terbaru di PT. BUMA GROUP | Papua

Tgl. Penutupan : -

 

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LOWONGAN KERJA JANUARI TERBARU DI PT. SHIMANO BATAM | BATAM

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With Iran Talks, a Tangled Path to Ending Syria’s War

UNITED NATIONS — Wearing pinstripes and a pince-nez, Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations envoy for Syria, arrived at the Security Council one Tuesday afternoon in February and announced that President Bashar al-Assad had agreed to halt airstrikes over Aleppo. Would the rebels, Mr. de Mistura suggested, agree to halt their shelling?

What he did not announce, but everyone knew by then, was that the Assad government had begun a military offensive to encircle opposition-held enclaves in Aleppo and that fierce fighting was underway. It would take only a few days for rebel leaders, having pushed back Syrian government forces, to outright reject Mr. de Mistura’s proposed freeze in the fighting, dooming the latest diplomatic overture on Syria.

Diplomacy is often about appearing to be doing something until the time is ripe for a deal to be done.

Now, with Mr. Assad’s forces having suffered a string of losses on the battlefield and the United States reaching at least a partial rapprochement with Mr. Assad’s main backer, Iran, Mr. de Mistura is changing course. Starting Monday, he is set to hold a series of closed talks in Geneva with the warring sides and their main supporters. Iran will be among them.

In an interview at United Nations headquarters last week, Mr. de Mistura hinted that the changing circumstances, both military and diplomatic, may have prompted various backers of the war to question how much longer the bloodshed could go on.

“Will that have an impact in accelerating the willingness for a political solution? We need to test it,” he said. “The Geneva consultations may be a good umbrella for testing that. It’s an occasion for asking everyone, including the government, if there is any new way that they are looking at a political solution, as they too claim they want.”

He said he would have a better assessment at the end of June, when he expects to wrap up his consultations. That coincides with the deadline for a final agreement in the Iran nuclear talks.

Whether a nuclear deal with Iran will pave the way for a new opening on peace talks in Syria remains to be seen. Increasingly, though, world leaders are explicitly linking the two, with the European Union’s top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, suggesting last week that a nuclear agreement could spur Tehran to play “a major but positive role in Syria.”

It could hardly come soon enough. Now in its fifth year, the Syrian war has claimed 220,000 lives, prompted an exodus of more than three million refugees and unleashed jihadist groups across the region. “This conflict is producing a question mark in many — where is it leading and whether this can be sustained,” Mr. de Mistura said.

Part Italian, part Swedish, Mr. de Mistura has worked with the United Nations for more than 40 years, but he is more widely known for his dapper style than for any diplomatic coups. Syria is by far the toughest assignment of his career — indeed, two of the organization’s most seasoned diplomats, Lakhdar Brahimi and Kofi Annan, tried to do the job and gave up — and critics have wondered aloud whether Mr. de Mistura is up to the task.

He served as a United Nations envoy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and before that in Lebanon, where a former minister recalled, with some scorn, that he spent many hours sunbathing at a private club in the hills above Beirut. Those who know him say he has a taste for fine suits and can sometimes speak too soon and too much, just as they point to his diplomatic missteps and hyperbole.

They cite, for instance, a news conference in October, when he raised the specter of Srebrenica, where thousands of Muslims were massacred in 1995 during the Balkans war, in warning that the Syrian border town of Kobani could fall to the Islamic State. In February, he was photographed at a party in Damascus, the Syrian capital, celebrating the anniversary of the Iranian revolution just as Syrian forces, aided by Iran, were pummeling rebel-held suburbs of Damascus; critics seized on that as evidence of his coziness with the government.

Mouin Rabbani, who served briefly as the head of Mr. de Mistura’s political affairs unit and has since emerged as one of his most outspoken critics, said Mr. de Mistura did not have the background necessary for the job. “This isn’t someone well known for his political vision or political imagination, and his closest confidants lack the requisite knowledge and experience,” Mr. Rabbani said.

As a deputy foreign minister in the Italian government, Mr. de Mistura was tasked in 2012 with freeing two Italian marines detained in India for shooting at Indian fishermen. He made 19 trips to India, to little effect. One marine was allowed to return to Italy for medical reasons; the other remains in India.

He said he initially turned down the Syria job when the United Nations secretary general approached him last August, only to change his mind the next day, after a sleepless, guilt-ridden night.

Mr. de Mistura compared his role in Syria to that of a doctor faced with a terminally ill patient. His goal in brokering a freeze in the fighting, he said, was to alleviate suffering. He settled on Aleppo as the location for its “fame,” he said, a decision that some questioned, considering that Aleppo was far trickier than the many other lesser-known towns where activists had negotiated temporary local cease-fires.

“Everybody, at least in Europe, are very familiar with the value of Aleppo,” Mr. de Mistura said. “So I was using that as an icebreaker.”

The cease-fire negotiations, to which he had devoted six months, fell apart quickly because of the government’s military offensive in Aleppo the very day of his announcement at the Security Council. Privately, United Nations diplomats said Mr. de Mistura had been manipulated. To this, Mr. de Mistura said only that he was “disappointed and concerned.”

Tarek Fares, a former rebel fighter, said after a recent visit to Aleppo that no Syrian would admit publicly to supporting Mr. de Mistura’s cease-fire proposal. “If anyone said they went to a de Mistura meeting in Gaziantep, they would be arrested,” is how he put it, referring to the Turkish city where negotiations between the two sides were held.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon remains staunchly behind Mr. de Mistura’s efforts. His defenders point out that he is at the center of one of the world’s toughest diplomatic problems, charged with mediating a conflict in which two of the world’s most powerful nations — Russia, which supports Mr. Assad, and the United States, which has called for his ouster — remain deadlocked.

R. Nicholas Burns, a former State Department official who now teaches at Harvard, credited Mr. de Mistura for trying to negotiate a cease-fire even when the chances of success were exceedingly small — and the chances of a political deal even smaller. For his efforts to work, Professor Burns argued, the world powers will first have to come to an agreement of their own.

“He needs the help of outside powers,” he said. “It starts with backers of Assad. That’s Russia and Iran. De Mistura is there, waiting.”

Gilbert Haroche, Builder of an Economy Travel Empire, Dies at 87

Mr. Haroche was a founder of Liberty Travel, which grew from a two-man operation to the largest leisure travel operation in the United States.

Tribute for a Roller Hockey Warrior

Hockey is not exactly known as a city game, but played on roller skates, it once held sway as the sport of choice in many New York neighborhoods.

“City kids had no rinks, no ice, but they would do anything to play hockey,” said Edward Moffett, former director of the Long Island City Y.M.C.A. Roller Hockey League, in Queens, whose games were played in city playgrounds going back to the 1940s.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, the league had more than 60 teams, he said. Players included the Mullen brothers of Hell’s Kitchen and Dan Dorion of Astoria, Queens, who would later play on ice for the National Hockey League.

One street legend from the heyday of New York roller hockey was Craig Allen, who lived in the Woodside Houses projects and became one of the city’s hardest hitters and top scorers.

“Craig was a warrior, one of the best roller hockey players in the city in the ’70s,” said Dave Garmendia, 60, a retired New York police officer who grew up playing with Mr. Allen. “His teammates loved him and his opponents feared him.”

Young Craig took up hockey on the streets of Queens in the 1960s, playing pickup games between sewer covers, wearing steel-wheeled skates clamped onto school shoes and using a roll of electrical tape as the puck.

His skill and ferocity drew attention, Mr. Garmendia said, but so did his skin color. He was black, in a sport made up almost entirely by white players.

“Roller hockey was a white kid’s game, plain and simple, but Craig broke the color barrier,” Mr. Garmendia said. “We used to say Craig did more for race relations than the N.A.A.C.P.”

Mr. Allen went on to coach and referee roller hockey in New York before moving several years ago to South Carolina. But he continued to organize an annual alumni game at Dutch Kills Playground in Long Island City, the same site that held the local championship games.

The reunion this year was on Saturday, but Mr. Allen never made it. On April 26, just before boarding the bus to New York, he died of an asthma attack at age 61.

Word of his death spread rapidly among hundreds of his old hockey colleagues who resolved to continue with the event, now renamed the Craig Allen Memorial Roller Hockey Reunion.

The turnout on Saturday was the largest ever, with players pulling on their old equipment, choosing sides and taking once again to the rink of cracked blacktop with faded lines and circles. They wore no helmets, although one player wore a fedora.

Another, Vinnie Juliano, 77, of Long Island City, wore his hearing aids, along with his 50-year-old taped-up quads, or four-wheeled skates with a leather boot. Many players here never converted to in-line skates, and neither did Mr. Allen, whose photograph appeared on a poster hanging behind the players’ bench.

“I’m seeing people walking by wondering why all these rusty, grizzly old guys are here playing hockey,” one player, Tommy Dominguez, said. “We’re here for Craig, and let me tell you, these old guys still play hard.”

Everyone seemed to have a Craig Allen story, from his earliest teams at Public School 151 to the Bryant Rangers, the Woodside Wings, the Woodside Blues and more.

Mr. Allen, who became a yellow-cab driver, was always recruiting new talent. He gained the nickname Cabby for his habit of stopping at playgrounds all over the city to scout players.

Teams were organized around neighborhoods and churches, and often sponsored by local bars. Mr. Allen, for one, played for bars, including Garry Owen’s and on the Fiddler’s Green Jokers team in Inwood, Manhattan.

Play was tough and fights were frequent.

“We were basically street gangs on skates,” said Steve Rogg, 56, a mail clerk who grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, and who on Saturday wore his Riedell Classic quads from 1972. “If another team caught up with you the night before a game, they tossed you a beating so you couldn’t play the next day.”

Mr. Garmendia said Mr. Allen’s skin color provoked many fights.

“When we’d go to some ignorant neighborhoods, a lot of players would use slurs,” Mr. Garmendia said, recalling a game in Ozone Park, Queens, where local fans parked motorcycles in a lineup next to the blacktop and taunted Mr. Allen. Mr. Garmendia said he checked a player into the motorcycles, “and the bikes went down like dominoes, which started a serious brawl.”

A group of fans at a game in Brooklyn once stuck a pole through the rink fence as Mr. Allen skated by and broke his jaw, Mr. Garmendia said, adding that carloads of reinforcements soon arrived to defend Mr. Allen.

And at another racially incited brawl, the police responded with six patrol cars and a helicopter.

Before play began on Saturday, the players gathered at center rink to honor Mr. Allen. Billy Barnwell, 59, of Woodside, recalled once how an all-white, all-star squad snubbed Mr. Allen by playing him third string. He scored seven goals in the first game and made first string immediately.

“He’d always hear racial stuff before the game, and I’d ask him, ‘How do you put up with that?’” Mr. Barnwell recalled. “Craig would say, ‘We’ll take care of it,’ and by the end of the game, he’d win guys over. They’d say, ‘This guy’s good.’”

Police Rethink Long Tradition on Using Force

WASHINGTON — During a training course on defending against knife attacks, a young Salt Lake City police officer asked a question: “How close can somebody get to me before I’m justified in using deadly force?”

Dennis Tueller, the instructor in that class more than three decades ago, decided to find out. In the fall of 1982, he performed a rudimentary series of tests and concluded that an armed attacker who bolted toward an officer could clear 21 feet in the time it took most officers to draw, aim and fire their weapon.

The next spring, Mr. Tueller published his findings in SWAT magazine and transformed police training in the United States. The “21-foot rule” became dogma. It has been taught in police academies around the country, accepted by courts and cited by officers to justify countless shootings, including recent episodes involving a homeless woodcarver in Seattle and a schizophrenic woman in San Francisco.

Dave Goldberg Was Lifelong Women’s Advocate

Even as a high school student, Dave Goldberg was urging female classmates to speak up. As a young dot-com executive, he had one girlfriend after another, but fell hard for a driven friend named Sheryl Sandberg, pining after her for years. After they wed, Mr. Goldberg pushed her to negotiate hard for high compensation and arranged his schedule so that he could be home with their children when she was traveling for work.

Mr. Goldberg, who died unexpectedly on Friday, was a genial, 47-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur who built his latest company, SurveyMonkey, from a modest enterprise to one recently valued by investors at $2 billion. But he was also perhaps the signature male feminist of his era: the first major chief executive in memory to spur his wife to become as successful in business as he was, and an essential figure in “Lean In,” Ms. Sandberg’s blockbuster guide to female achievement.

Over the weekend, even strangers were shocked at his death, both because of his relatively young age and because they knew of him as the living, breathing, car-pooling center of a new philosophy of two-career marriage.

“They were very much the role models for what this next generation wants to grapple with,” said Debora L. Spar, the president of Barnard College. In a 2011 commencement speech there, Ms. Sandberg told the graduates that whom they married would be their most important career decision.

In the play “The Heidi Chronicles,” revived on Broadway this spring, a male character who is the founder of a media company says that “I don’t want to come home to an A-plus,” explaining that his ambitions require him to marry an unthreatening helpmeet. Mr. Goldberg grew up to hold the opposite view, starting with his upbringing in progressive Minneapolis circles where “there was woman power in every aspect of our lives,” Jeffrey Dachis, a childhood friend, said in an interview.

The Goldberg parents read “The Feminine Mystique” together — in fact, Mr. Goldberg’s father introduced it to his wife, according to Ms. Sandberg’s book. In 1976, Paula Goldberg helped found a nonprofit to aid children with disabilities. Her husband, Mel, a law professor who taught at night, made the family breakfast at home.

Later, when Dave Goldberg was in high school and his prom date, Jill Chessen, stayed silent in a politics class, he chastised her afterward. He said, “You need to speak up,” Ms. Chessen recalled in an interview. “They need to hear your voice.”

Years later, when Karin Gilford, an early employee at Launch Media, Mr. Goldberg’s digital music company, became a mother, he knew exactly what to do. He kept giving her challenging assignments, she recalled, but also let her work from home one day a week. After Yahoo acquired Launch, Mr. Goldberg became known for distributing roses to all the women in the office on Valentine’s Day.

Ms. Sandberg, who often describes herself as bossy-in-a-good-way, enchanted him when they became friendly in the mid-1990s. He “was smitten with her,” Ms. Chessen remembered. Ms. Sandberg was dating someone else, but Mr. Goldberg still hung around, even helping her and her then-boyfriend move, recalled Bob Roback, a friend and co-founder of Launch. When they finally married in 2004, friends remember thinking how similar the two were, and that the qualities that might have made Ms. Sandberg intimidating to some men drew Mr. Goldberg to her even more.

Over the next decade, Mr. Goldberg and Ms. Sandberg pioneered new ways of capturing information online, had a son and then a daughter, became immensely wealthy, and hashed out their who-does-what-in-this-marriage issues. Mr. Goldberg’s commute from the Bay Area to Los Angeles became a strain, so he relocated, later joking that he “lost the coin flip” of where they would live. He paid the bills, she planned the birthday parties, and both often left their offices at 5:30 so they could eat dinner with their children before resuming work afterward.

Friends in Silicon Valley say they were careful to conduct their careers separately, politely refusing when outsiders would ask one about the other’s work: Ms. Sandberg’s role building Facebook into an information and advertising powerhouse, and Mr. Goldberg at SurveyMonkey, which made polling faster and cheaper. But privately, their work was intertwined. He often began statements to his team with the phrase “Well, Sheryl said” sharing her business advice. He counseled her, too, starting with her salary negotiations with Mark Zuckerberg.

“I wanted Mark to really feel he stretched to get Sheryl, because she was worth it,” Mr. Goldberg explained in a 2013 “60 Minutes” interview, his Minnesota accent and his smile intact as he offered a rare peek of the intersection of marriage and money at the top of corporate life.

While his wife grew increasingly outspoken about women’s advancement, Mr. Goldberg quietly advised the men in the office on family and partnership matters, an associate said. Six out of 16 members of SurveyMonkey’s management team are female, an almost unheard-of ratio among Silicon Valley “unicorns,” or companies valued at over $1 billion.

When Mellody Hobson, a friend and finance executive, wrote a chapter of “Lean In” about women of color for the college edition of the book, Mr. Goldberg gave her feedback on the draft, a clue to his deep involvement. He joked with Ms. Hobson that she was too long-winded, like Ms. Sandberg, but aside from that, he said he loved the chapter, she said in an interview.

By then, Mr. Goldberg was a figure of fascination who inspired a “where can I get one of those?” reaction among many of the women who had read the best seller “Lean In.” Some lamented that Ms. Sandberg’s advice hinged too much on marrying a Dave Goldberg, who was humble enough to plan around his wife, attentive enough to worry about which shoes his young daughter would wear, and rich enough to help pay for the help that made the family’s balancing act manageable.

Now that he is gone, and Ms. Sandberg goes from being half of a celebrated partnership to perhaps the business world’s most prominent single mother, the pages of “Lean In” carry a new sting of loss.

“We are never at 50-50 at any given moment — perfect equality is hard to define or sustain — but we allow the pendulum to swing back and forth between us,” she wrote in 2013, adding that they were looking forward to raising teenagers together.

“Fortunately, I have Dave to figure it out with me,” she wrote.

Taiwan party leader affirms eventual reunion with China

BEIJING (AP) — The head of Taiwan's Nationalists reaffirmed the party's support for eventual unification with the mainland when he met Monday with Chinese President Xi Jinping as part of continuing rapprochement between the former bitter enemies.

Nationalist Party Chairman Eric Chu, a likely presidential candidate next year, also affirmed Taiwan's desire to join the proposed Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank during the meeting in Beijing. China claims Taiwan as its own territory and doesn't want the island to join using a name that might imply it is an independent country.

Chu's comments during his meeting with Xi were carried live on Hong Kong-based broadcaster Phoenix Television.

The Nationalists were driven to Taiwan by Mao Zedong's Communists during the Chinese civil war in 1949, leading to decades of hostility between the sides. Chu, who took over as party leader in January, is the third Nationalist chairman to visit the mainland and the first since 2009.

Relations between the communist-ruled mainland and the self-governing democratic island of Taiwan began to warm in the 1990s, partly out of their common opposition to Taiwan's formal independence from China, a position advocated by the island's Democratic Progressive Party.

Despite increasingly close economic ties, the prospect of political unification has grown increasingly unpopular on Taiwan, especially with younger voters. Opposition to the Nationalists' pro-China policies was seen as a driver behind heavy local electoral defeats for the party last year that led to Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou resigning as party chairman.

Ghostly Voices From Thomas Edison’s Dolls Can Now Be Heard

Though Robin and Joan Rolfs owned two rare talking dolls manufactured by Thomas Edison’s phonograph company in 1890, they did not dare play the wax cylinder records tucked inside each one.

The Rolfses, longtime collectors of Edison phonographs, knew that if they turned the cranks on the dolls’ backs, the steel phonograph needle might damage or destroy the grooves of the hollow, ring-shaped cylinder. And so for years, the dolls sat side by side inside a display cabinet, bearers of a message from the dawn of sound recording that nobody could hear.

In 1890, Edison’s dolls were a flop; production lasted only six weeks. Children found them difficult to operate and more scary than cuddly. The recordings inside, which featured snippets of nursery rhymes, wore out quickly.

Yet sound historians say the cylinders were the first entertainment records ever made, and the young girls hired to recite the rhymes were the world’s first recording artists.

Year after year, the Rolfses asked experts if there might be a safe way to play the recordings. Then a government laboratory developed a method to play fragile records without touching them.

The technique relies on a microscope to create images of the grooves in exquisite detail. A computer approximates — with great accuracy — the sounds that would have been created by a needle moving through those grooves.

In 2014, the technology was made available for the first time outside the laboratory.

“The fear all along is that we don’t want to damage these records. We don’t want to put a stylus on them,” said Jerry Fabris, the curator of the Thomas Edison Historical Park in West Orange, N.J. “Now we have the technology to play them safely.”

Last month, the Historical Park posted online three never-before-heard Edison doll recordings, including the two from the Rolfses’ collection. “There are probably more out there, and we’re hoping people will now get them digitized,” Mr. Fabris said.

The technology, which is known as Irene (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.), was developed by the particle physicist Carl Haber and the engineer Earl Cornell at Lawrence Berkeley. Irene extracts sound from cylinder and disk records. It can also reconstruct audio from recordings so badly damaged they were deemed unplayable.

“We are now hearing sounds from history that I did not expect to hear in my lifetime,” Mr. Fabris said.

The Rolfses said they were not sure what to expect in August when they carefully packed their two Edison doll cylinders, still attached to their motors, and drove from their home in Hortonville, Wis., to the National Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass. The center had recently acquired Irene technology.

Cylinders carry sound in a spiral groove cut by a phonograph recording needle that vibrates up and down, creating a surface made of tiny hills and valleys. In the Irene set-up, a microscope perched above the shaft takes thousands of high-resolution images of small sections of the grooves.

Stitched together, the images provide a topographic map of the cylinder’s surface, charting changes in depth as small as one five-hundredth the thickness of a human hair. Pitch, volume and timbre are all encoded in the hills and valleys and the speed at which the record is played.

At the conservation center, the preservation specialist Mason Vander Lugt attached one of the cylinders to the end of a rotating shaft. Huddled around a computer screen, the Rolfses first saw the wiggly waveform generated by Irene. Then came the digital audio. The words were at first indistinct, but as Mr. Lugt filtered out more of the noise, the rhyme became clearer.

“That was the Eureka moment,” Mr. Rolfs said.

In 1890, a girl in Edison’s laboratory had recited:

There was a little girl,

And she had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very, very good.

But when she was bad, she was horrid.

Recently, the conservation center turned up another surprise.

In 2010, the Woody Guthrie Foundation received 18 oversize phonograph disks from an anonymous donor. No one knew if any of the dirt-stained recordings featured Guthrie, but Tiffany Colannino, then the foundation’s archivist, had stored them unplayed until she heard about Irene.

Last fall, the center extracted audio from one of the records, labeled “Jam Session 9” and emailed the digital file to Ms. Colannino.

“I was just sitting in my dining room, and the next thing I know, I’m hearing Woody,” she said. In between solo performances of “Ladies Auxiliary,” “Jesus Christ,” and “Dead or Alive,” Guthrie tells jokes, offers some back story, and makes the audience laugh. “It is quintessential Guthrie,” Ms. Colannino said.

The Rolfses’ dolls are back in the display cabinet in Wisconsin. But with audio stored on several computers, they now have a permanent voice.

Joseph Lechleider, a Father of the DSL Internet Technology, Dies at 82

Mr. Lechleider helped invent DSL technology, which enabled phone companies to offer high-speed web access over their infrastructure of copper wires.

Robert Patterson Jr., Lawyer and Judge Who Fought for the Accused, Dies at 91

Judge Patterson helped to protect the rights of Attica inmates after the prison riot in 1971 and later served on the Federal District Court in Manhattan.

Fatal Police Shootings: Accounts Since Ferguson

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William Sokolin, Wine Seller Who Broke Famed Bottle, Dies at 85

The bottle Mr. Sokolin famously broke was a 1787 Château Margaux, which was said to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Sokolin had been hoping to sell it for $519,750.

Don Mankiewicz, Screenwriter in a Family Film Tradition, Dies at 93

Mr. Mankiewicz, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter for “I Want to Live!,” also wrote episodes of television shows such as “Star Trek” and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”

As Vice Moves More to TV, It Tries to Keep Brash Voice

The live music at the Vice Media party on Friday shook the room. Shane Smith, Vice’s chief executive, was standing near the stage — with a drink in his hand, pants sagging, tattoos showing — watching the rapper-cum-chef Action Bronson make pizzas.

The event was an after-party, a happy-hour bacchanal for the hundreds of guests who had come for Vice’s annual presentation to advertisers and agencies that afternoon, part of the annual frenzy for ad dollars called the Digital Content NewFronts. Mr. Smith had spoken there for all of five minutes before running a slam-bang highlight reel of the company’s shows that had titles like “Weediquette” and “Gaycation.”

In the last year, Vice has secured $500 million in financing and signed deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars with established media companies like HBO that are eager to engage the young viewers Vice attracts. Vice said it was now worth at least $4 billion, with nearly $1 billion in projected revenue for 2015. It is a long way from Vice’s humble start as a free magazine in 1994.

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But even as cash flows freely in Vice’s direction, the company is trying to keep its brash, insurgent image. At the party on Friday, it plied guests with beers and cocktails. Its apparently unrehearsed presentation to advertisers was peppered with expletives. At one point, the director Spike Jonze, a longtime Vice collaborator, asked on stage if Mr. Smith had been drinking.

“My assistant tried to cut me off,” Mr. Smith replied. “I’m on buzz control.”

Now, Vice is on the verge of getting its own cable channel, which would give the company a traditional outlet for its slate of non-news programming. If all goes as planned, A&E Networks, the television group owned by Hearst and Disney, will turn over its History Channel spinoff, H2, to Vice.

The deal’s announcement was expected last week, but not all of A&E’s distribution partners — the cable and satellite TV companies that carry the network’s channels — have signed off on the change, according to a person familiar with the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks were private.

A cable channel would be a further step in a transformation for Vice, from bad-boy digital upstart to mainstream media company.

Keen for the core audience of young men who come to Vice, media giants like 21st Century Fox, Time Warner and Disney all showed interest in the company last year. Vice ultimately secured $500 million in financing from A&E Networks and Technology Crossover Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has invested in Facebook and Netflix.

Those investments valued Vice at more than $2.5 billion. (In 2013, Fox bought a 5 percent stake for $70 million.)

Then in March, HBO announced that it had signed a multiyear deal to broadcast a daily half-hour Vice newscast. Vice already produces a weekly newsmagazine show, called “Vice,” for the network. That show will extend its run through 2018, with an increase to 35 episodes a year, from 14.

Michael Lombardo, HBO’s president for programming, said when the deal was announced that it was “certainly one of our biggest investments with hours on the air.”

Vice, based in Brooklyn, also recently signed a multiyear $100 million deal with Rogers Communications, a Canadian media conglomerate, to produce original content for TV, smartphone and desktop viewers.

Vice’s finances are private, but according to an internal document reviewed by The New York Times and verified by a person familiar with the company’s financials, the company is on track to make about $915 million in revenue this year.

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It brought in $545 million in a strong first quarter, which included portions of the new HBO deal and the Rogers deal, according to the document. More of its revenue now comes from these types of content partnerships, compared with the branded content deals that made up much of its revenue a year ago, the company said.

Mr. Smith said the company was worth at least $4 billion. If the valuation gets much higher, he said he would consider taking the company public.

“I don’t care about money; we have plenty of money,” Mr. Smith, who is Vice’s biggest shareholder, said in an interview after the presentation on Friday. “I care about strategic deals.”

In the United States, Vice Media had 35.2 million unique visitors across its sites in March, according to comScore.

The third season of Vice’s weekly HBO show has averaged 1.8 million viewers per episode, including reruns, through April 12, according to Brad Adgate, the director of research at Horizon Media. (Vice said the show attracted three million weekly viewers when repeat broadcasts, online and on-demand viewings were included.)

For years, Mr. Smith has criticized traditional TV, calling it slow and unable to draw younger viewers. But if all the deals Vice has struck are to work out, Mr. Smith may have to play more by the rules of traditional media. James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s son and a member of Vice’s board, was at the company’s presentation on Friday, as were other top media executives.

“They know they need people like me to help them, but they can’t get out of their own way,” Mr. Smith said in the interview Friday. “My only real frustration is we’re used to being incredibly dynamic, and they’re not incredibly dynamic.”

With its own television channel in the United States, Vice would have something it has long coveted even as traditional media companies are looking beyond TV. Last year, Vice’s deal with Time Warner failed in part because the two companies could not agree on how much control Vice would have over a 24-hour television network.

Vice said it intended to fill its new channel with non-news programming. The company plans to have sports shows, fashion shows, food shows and the “Gaycation” travel show with the actress Ellen Page. It is also in talks with Kanye West about a show.

It remains to be seen whether Vice’s audience will watch a traditional cable channel. Still, Vice has effectively presold all of the ad spots to two of the biggest advertising agencies for the first three years, Mr. Smith said.

In the meantime, Mr. Smith is enjoying Vice’s newfound role as a potential savior of traditional media companies.

“I’m a C.E.O. of a content company,” Mr. Smith said before he caught a flight to Las Vegas for the boxing match on Saturday between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao. “If it stops being fun, then why are you doing it?”

From T Magazine: Street Lit’s Power Couple

THE WRITERS ASHLEY AND JAQUAVIS COLEMAN know the value of a good curtain-raiser. The couple have co-authored dozens of novels, and they like to start them with a bang: a headlong action sequence, a blast of violence or sex that rocks readers back on their heels. But the Colemans concede they would be hard-pressed to dream up anything more gripping than their own real-life opening scene.

In the summer of 2001, JaQuavis Coleman was a 16-year-old foster child in Flint, Mich., the former auto-manufacturing mecca that had devolved, in the wake of General Motors’ plant closures, into one of the country’s most dangerous cities, with a decimated economy and a violent crime rate more than three times the national average. When JaQuavis was 8, social services had removed him from his mother’s home. He spent years bouncing between foster families. At 16, JaQuavis was also a businessman: a crack dealer with a network of street-corner peddlers in his employ.

One day that summer, JaQuavis met a fellow dealer in a parking lot on Flint’s west side. He was there to make a bulk sale of a quarter-brick, or “nine-piece” — a nine-ounce parcel of cocaine, with a street value of about $11,000. In the middle of the transaction, JaQuavis heard the telltale chirp of a walkie-talkie. His customer, he now realized, was an undercover policeman. JaQuavis jumped into his car and spun out onto the road, with two unmarked police cars in pursuit. He didn’t want to get into a high-speed chase, so he whipped his car into a church parking lot and made a run for it, darting into an alleyway behind a row of small houses, where he tossed the quarter-brick into some bushes. When JaQuavis reached the small residential street on the other side of the houses, he was greeted by the police, who handcuffed him and went to search behind the houses where, they told him, they were certain he had ditched the drugs. JaQuavis had been dealing since he was 12, had amassed more than $100,000 and had never been arrested. Now, he thought: It’s over.

But when the police looked in the bushes, they couldn’t find any cocaine. They interrogated JaQuavis, who denied having ever possessed or sold drugs. They combed the backyard alley some more. After an hour of fruitless efforts, the police were forced to unlock the handcuffs and release their suspect.

JaQuavis was baffled by the turn of events until the next day, when he received a phone call. The previous afternoon, a 15-year-old girl had been sitting in her home on the west side of Flint when she heard sirens. She looked out of the window of her bedroom, and watched a young man throw a package in the bushes behind her house. She recognized him. He was a high school classmate — a handsome, charismatic boy whom she had admired from afar. The girl crept outside and grabbed the bundle, which she hid in her basement. “I have something that belongs to you,” Ashley Snell told JaQuavis Coleman when she reached him by phone. “You wanna come over here and pick it up?”

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In the Colemans’ first novel, “Dirty Money” (2005), they told a version of this story. The outline was the same: the drug deal gone bad, the dope chucked in the bushes, the fateful phone call. To the extent that the authors took poetic license, it was to tone down the meet-cute improbability of the true-life events. In “Dirty Money,” the girl, Anari, and the crack dealer, Maurice, circle each other warily for a year or so before coupling up. But the facts of Ashley and JaQuavis’s romance outstripped pulp fiction. They fell in love more or less at first sight, moved into their own apartment while still in high school and were married in 2008. “We were together from the day we met,” Ashley says. “I don’t think we’ve spent more than a week apart in total over the past 14 years.”

That partnership turned out to be creative and entrepreneurial as well as romantic. Over the past decade, the Colemans have published nearly 50 books, sometimes as solo writers, sometimes under pseudonyms, but usually as collaborators with a byline that has become a trusted brand: “Ashley & JaQuavis.” They are marquee stars of urban fiction, or street lit, a genre whose inner-city settings and lurid mix of crime, sex and sensationalism have earned it comparisons to gangsta rap. The emergence of street lit is one of the big stories in recent American publishing, a juggernaut that has generated huge sales by catering to a readership — young, black and, for the most part, female — that historically has been ill-served by the book business. But the genre is also widely maligned. Street lit is subject to a kind of triple snobbery: scorned by literati who look down on genre fiction generally, ignored by a white publishing establishment that remains largely indifferent to black books and disparaged by African-American intellectuals for poor writing, coarse values and trafficking in racial stereotypes.

But if a certain kind of cultural prestige is shut off to the Colemans, they have reaped other rewards. They’ve built a large and loyal fan base, which gobbles up the new Ashley & JaQuavis titles that arrive every few months. Many of those books are sold at street-corner stands and other off-the-grid venues in African-American neighborhoods, a literary gray market that doesn’t register a blip on best-seller tallies. Yet the Colemans’ most popular series now regularly crack the trade fiction best-seller lists of The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. For years, the pair had no literary agent; they sold hundreds of thousands of books without banking a penny in royalties. Still, they have earned millions of dollars, almost exclusively from cash-for-manuscript deals negotiated directly with independent publishing houses. In short, though little known outside of the world of urban fiction, the Colemans are one of America’s most successful literary couples, a distinction they’ve achieved, they insist, because of their work’s gritty authenticity and their devotion to a primal literary virtue: the power of the ripping yarn.

“When you read our books, you’re gonna realize: ‘Ashley & JaQuavis are storytellers,’ ” says Ashley. “Our tales will get your heart pounding.”

THE COLEMANS’ HOME BASE — the cottage from which they operate their cottage industry — is a spacious four-bedroom house in a genteel suburb about 35 miles north of downtown Detroit. The house is plush, but when I visited this past winter, it was sparsely appointed. The couple had just recently moved in, and had only had time to fully furnish the bedroom of their 4-year-old son, Quaye.

In conversation, Ashley and JaQuavis exude both modesty and bravado: gratitude for their good fortune and bootstrappers’ pride in having made their own luck. They talk a lot about their time in the trenches, the years they spent as a drug dealer and “ride-or-die girl” tandem. In Flint they learned to “grind hard.” Writing, they say, is merely a more elevated kind of grind.

“Instead of hitting the block like we used to, we hit the laptops,” says Ashley. “I know what every word is worth. So while I’m writing, I’m like: ‘Okay, there’s a hundred dollars. There’s a thousand dollars. There’s five thousand dollars.’ ”

They maintain a rigorous regimen. They each try to write 5,000 words per day, five days a week. The writers stagger their shifts: JaQuavis goes to bed at 7 p.m. and wakes up early, around 3 or 4 in the morning, to work while his wife and child sleep. Ashley writes during the day, often in libraries or at Starbucks.

They divide the labor in other ways. Chapters are divvied up more or less equally, with tasks assigned according to individual strengths. (JaQuavis typically handles character development. Ashley loves writing murder scenes.) The results are stitched together, with no editorial interference from one author in the other’s text. The real work, they contend, is the brainstorming. The Colemans spend weeks mapping out their plot-driven books — long conversations that turn into elaborate diagrams on dry-erase boards. “JaQuavis and I are so close, it makes the process real easy,” says Ashley. “Sometimes when I’m thinking of something, a plot point, he’ll say it out loud, and I’m like: ‘Wait — did I say that?’ ”

Their collaboration developed by accident, and on the fly. Both were bookish teenagers. Ashley read lots of Judy Blume and John Grisham; JaQuavis liked Shakespeare, Richard Wright and “Atlas Shrugged.” (Their first official date was at a Borders bookstore, where Ashley bought “The Coldest Winter Ever,” the Sister Souljah novel often credited with kick-starting the contemporary street-lit movement.) In 2003, Ashley, then 17, was forced to terminate an ectopic pregnancy. She was bedridden for three weeks, and to provide distraction and boost her spirits, JaQuavis challenged his girlfriend to a writing contest. “She just wasn’t talking. She was laying in bed. I said, ‘You know what? I bet you I could write a better book than you.’ My wife is real competitive. So I said, ‘Yo, all right, $500 bet.’ And I saw her eyes spark, like, ‘What?! You can’t write no better book than me!’ So I wrote about three chapters. She wrote about three chapters. Two days later, we switched.”

The result, hammered out in a few days, would become “Dirty Money.” Two years later, when Ashley and JaQuavis were students at Ferris State University in Western Michigan, they sold the manuscript to Urban Books, a street-lit imprint founded by the best-selling author Carl Weber. At the time, JaQuavis was still making his living selling drugs. When Ashley got the phone call informing her that their book had been bought, she assumed they’d hit it big, and flushed more than $10,000 worth of cocaine down the toilet. Their advance was a mere $4,000.

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Those advances would soon increase, eventually reaching five and six figures. The Colemans built their career, JaQuavis says, in a manner that made sense to him as a veteran dope peddler: by flooding the street with product. From the start, they were prolific, churning out books at a rate of four or five a year. Their novels made their way into stores; the now-defunct chain Waldenbooks, which had stores in urban areas typically bypassed by booksellers, was a major engine of the street-lit market. But Ashley and JaQuavis took advantage of distribution channels established by pioneering urban fiction authors such as Teri Woods and Vickie Stringer, and a network of street-corner tables, magazine stands, corner shops and bodegas. Like rappers who establish their bona fides with gray-market mixtapes, street-lit authors use this system to circumnavigate industry gatekeepers, bringing their work straight to the genre’s core readership. But urban fiction has other aficionados, in less likely places. “Our books are so popular in the prison system,” JaQuavis says. “We’re banned in certain penitentiaries. Inmates fight over the books — there are incidents, you know? I have loved ones in jail, and they’re like: ‘Yo, your books can’t come in here. It’s against the rules.’ ”

The appeal of the Colemans’ work is not hard to fathom. The books are formulaic and taut; they deliver the expected goods efficiently and exuberantly. The titles telegraph the contents: “Diary of a Street Diva,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Murderville.” The novels serve up a stream of explicit sex and violence in a slangy, tangy, profane voice. In Ashley & JaQuavis’s books people don’t get killed: they get “popped,” “laid out,” get their “cap twisted back.” The smut is constant, with emphasis on the earthy, sticky, olfactory particulars. Romance novel clichés — shuddering orgasms, heroic carnal feats, superlative sexual skill sets — are rendered in the Colemans’ punchy patois.

Subtlety, in other words, isn’t Ashley & JaQuavis’s forte. But their books do have a grainy specificity. In “The Cartel” (2008), the first novel in the Colemans’ best-selling saga of a Miami drug syndicate, they catch the sights and smells of a crack workshop in a housing project: the nostril-stinging scent of cocaine and baking soda bubbling on stovetops; the teams of women, stripped naked except for hospital masks so they can’t pilfer the merchandise, “cutting up the cooked coke on the round wood table.” The subject matter is dark, but the Colemans’ tone is not quite noir. Even in the grimmest scenes, the mood is high-spirited, with the writers palpably relishing the lewd and gory details: the bodies writhing in boudoirs and crumpling under volleys of bullets, the geysers of blood and other bodily fluids.

The luridness of street lit has made it a flashpoint, inciting controversy reminiscent of the hip-hop culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. But the street-lit debate touches deeper historical roots, reviving decades-old arguments in black literary circles about the mandate to uplift the race and present wholesome images of African-Americans. In 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois slammed the “licentiousness” of “Home to Harlem,” Claude McKay’s rollicking novel of Harlem nightlife. McKay’s book, Du Bois wrote, “for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Similar sentiments have greeted 21st-century street lit. In a 2006 New York Times Op-Ed essay, the journalist and author Nick Chiles decried “the sexualization and degradation of black fiction.” African-American bookstores, Chiles complained, are “overrun with novels that . . . appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures — as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner.”

Copulating paperbacks aside, it’s clear that the street-lit debate is about more than literature, touching on questions of paternalism versus populism, and on middle-class anxieties about the black underclass. “It’s part and parcel of black elites’ efforts to define not only a literary tradition, but a racial politics,” said Kinohi Nishikawa, an assistant professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University. “There has always been a sense that because African-Americans’ opportunities to represent themselves are so limited in the first place, any hint of criminality or salaciousness would necessarily be a knock on the entire racial politics. One of the pressing debates about African-American literature today is: If we can’t include writers like Ashley & JaQuavis, to what extent is the foundation of our thinking about black literature faulty? Is it just a literature for elites? Or can it be inclusive, bringing urban fiction under the purview of our umbrella term ‘African-American literature’?”

Defenders of street lit note that the genre has a pedigree: a tradition of black pulp fiction that stretches from Chester Himes, the midcentury author of hardboiled Harlem detective stories, to the 1960s and ’70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, to the current wave of urban fiction authors. Others argue for street lit as a social good, noting that it attracts a large audience that might otherwise never read at all. Scholars like Nishikawa link street lit to recent studies showing increased reading among African-Americans. A 2014 Pew Research Center report found that a greater percentage of black Americans are book readers than whites or Latinos.

For their part, the Colemans place their work in the broader black literary tradition. “You have Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, James Baldwin — all of these traditional black writers, who wrote about the struggles of racism, injustice, inequality,” says Ashley. “We’re writing about the struggle as it happens now. It’s just a different struggle. I’m telling my story. I’m telling the struggle of a black girl from Flint, Michigan, who grew up on welfare.”

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Perhaps there is a high-minded case to be made for street lit. But the virtues of Ashley & JaQuavis’s work are more basic. Their novels do lack literary polish. The writing is not graceful; there are passages of clunky exposition and sex scenes that induce guffaws and eye rolls. But the pleasure quotient is high. The books flaunt a garish brand of feminism, with women characters cast not just as vixens, but also as gangsters — cold-blooded killers, “murder mamas.” The stories are exceptionally well-plotted. “The Cartel” opens by introducing its hero, the crime boss Carter Diamond; on page 9, a gunshot spatters Diamond’s brain across the interior of a police cruiser. The book then flashes back seven years and begins to hurtle forward again — a bullet train, whizzing readers through shifting alliances, romantic entanglements and betrayals, kidnappings, shootouts with Haitian and Dominican gangsters, and a cliffhanger closing scene that leaves the novel’s heroine tied to a chair in a basement, gruesomely tortured to the edge of death. Ashley & JaQuavis’s books are not Ralph Ellison, certainly, but they build up quite a head of steam. They move.

The Colemans are moving themselves these days. They recently signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press, which will bring out the next installment in the “Cartel” series as well as new solo series by both writers. The St. Martin’s deal is both lucrative and legitimizing — a validation of Ashley and JaQuavis’s work by one of publishing’s most venerable houses. The Colemans’ ambitions have grown, as well. A recent trilogy, “Murderville,” tackles human trafficking and the blood-diamond industry in West Africa, with storylines that sweep from Sierra Leone to Mexico to Los Angeles. Increasingly, Ashley & JaQuavis are leaning on research — traveling to far-flung settings and hitting the books in the libraries — and spending less time mining their own rough-and-tumble past.

But Flint remains a source of inspiration. One evening not long ago, JaQuavis led me on a tour of his hometown: a popular roadside bar; the parking lot where he met the undercover cop for the ill-fated drug deal; Ashley’s old house, the site of his almost-arrest. He took me to a ramshackle vehicle repair shop on Flint’s west side, where he worked as a kid, washing cars. He showed me a bathroom at the rear of the garage, where, at age 12, he sneaked away to inspect the first “boulder” of crack that he ever sold. A spray-painted sign on the garage wall, which JaQuavis remembered from his time at the car wash, offered words of warning:

WHAT EVERY YOUNG MAN SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT USING A GUN:
MURDER . . . 30 Years
ARMED ROBBERY . . . 15 Years
ASSAULT . . . 15 Years
RAPE . . . 20 Years
POSSESSION . . . 5 Years
JACKING . . . 20 YEARS

“We still love Flint, Michigan,” JaQuavis says. “It’s so seedy, so treacherous. But there’s some heart in this city. This is where it all started, selling books out the box. In the days when we would get those little $40,000 advances, they’d send us a couple boxes of books for free. We would hit the streets to sell our books, right out of the car trunk. It was a hustle. It still is.”

One old neighborhood asset that the Colemans have not shaken off is swagger. “My wife is the best female writer in the game,” JaQuavis told me. “I believe I’m the best male writer in the game. I’m sleeping next to the best writer in the world. And she’s doing the same.”

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