‘Fast’ is an intriguing word in English. Apart from its meaning of abstaining from food and drink for a specific period of time, it has also the sense of speed, as well as to make something secure or to tie or fix it: to make it fast. The morning meal is called ‘breakfast’ i.e. the breaking of the fast. “In Old English, a regular morning meal was called morgenmete, and the word dinner, which originated from Gallo-Romance desjunare (“to break one’s fast”), referred to a meal after fasting.” The French word déjeuner is from dé– +? jeûner (“un-fast (to break fast)”). The story of how Christian fasting moved from a daytime activity to a nighttime one concluded by ‘breakfast’ is an interesting one indeed but not our purpose here.
Sura al-Baqara
We might not need anything but the Opening of the Noble Book, the Fatiha, and another sura or two, particularly that on the Divine Unity, the sura called Ihklas – Sincerity.
If we do go further, we start with the first sura of the Qur’an after the Opening, Sura al-Baqara.
Usurocracy
We owe to Ezra Pound his coinage of the word ‘usurocracy’ from the Latin usura and –cracy, which latter is from the Greek –kratia ‘power, rule’. Democracy is the rule of the demos – the people, and usurocracy is the rule of usury. Note that there is no agent empowered here but a process. That process elevates some and demotes others, and it does so continually, and thus produces chaos. Usury rules. Chaos rules.
‘Tradition’
The deeply incautious use of the word ‘tradition’ in the Western context by some people actually points to something appropriated by the Roman Empire, a religion founded by a Pharisaic rabbi from a Hellenic background, and propagated among other Hellenes, a man who never met the Prophet of his time, peace be upon him, and who was rejected by his disciples.
The Phenomenon and thought
Before passing judgment, one must of all see the phenomenon and see what it is.
An ijtihad
I who am entirely unqualified to do so had today to make an ijtihad. Fortunately, it was only for myself.
“GOING VIRAL”
CELEBRITY & TECHNOLOGY
One ought to pay attention to the vehicle of the metaphor “going viral”, for this is contagion, infection, and plague, and yet, entranced by media, people lust after it.
Celebrity is as old as history and probably older, but tools change it, the pen for example. Caesar’s pen in writing the Gallic Wars was as devastating in Rome as was his sword against Gallic and Germanic tribes, which is said to have been his intention in wielding the sword: to write his book, and thus to gain absolute power in Rome.
The Collaborative Couple
A lecture entitled delivered in 1990 by Shaykh Abdalqadir at the University of Malaya, Malaysia.
I took the title of “The Collaborative Couple” being moved by where in Qur’an, Allah, telling of people entering into the “garden” says, “They will come singly and in couples”. I felt this contained a great insight for us, if we were to take benefit from it.
Do ‘they’ really ‘live’?
The –onomy of the oikos
–onomy is, of course, from nomos – which, as much as it is law, is custom. Astronomy is thus the observation of the customary behaviour of the heavenly bodies. It became a regular science with Isaac Newton and others who expressed that customary behaviour in terms of the mathematical relations between mass, length and time, and expressed a great many other matters in those terms as well. So far so good. Or not, as the case may be.
Continue reading “Do ‘they’ really ‘live’?”Bits and pieces, parts and wholes
“The piece [das Stück] is something other than the part [der Teil]. The part shares itself with parts in a whole. It takes part in the whole, belongs to it. The piece on the contrary is separated and indeed, as the piece, is even isolated from the other pieces. It never shares itself with these in a whole.”
Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures
Capitalist society, an oxymoron, is organised as pieces that aggregate. The pieces periodically have moments of intense activity choosing other bits to represent them. But then the representative pieces find they are owned, if they haven’t simply themselves sold themselves. The aggregate of pieces is called the demos – the people, and the periodic activity of electing representatives democracy. The representatives then make the law, which is thus in constant flux and a matter of contest between ideological parties. Because of that it is not a nomos known to all but a specialism known to lawyers who are trained to fight it in every detail.