“Do you not see what your Lord did with the Companions of the Elephant? Did He not bring all their schemes to nothing, unleashing upon them flock after flock of birds, bombarding them with stones of hard-baked clay, making them like stripped wheat-stalks eaten bare?”

Even the weather is out of sorts: one day hot and sunny and the next day blustery and autumnal, although in one sense this is entirely to be expected in England and should surprise no one. But because of a general sense of foreboding one easily interprets it as another epochal sign. Apocalypse is in the air. When I posted our previous article on-line, “A World Out of Balance”, there was almost no response, but when I posted a part of its first paragraph beginning “We are living in a time when history appears to be accelerating towards its destination” I was astonished to find sudden endorsement from a large number of people who thought we were talking about the end of time and the appearance of the Mahdi. Continue reading “The Year of the Elephant – Abdassamad Clarke”

“And the incorruptible Professor walked, too, averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.” Joseph Conrad – The Secret Agent

Against the background of a geo-political situation that has been lurching out of control for some years and a financial system that has suffered fantastic reverses that are widely anticipated to be eclipsed by what is to come, a number of events have been unfolding. We are living in a time when history appears to be accelerating towards its destination. Wars, natural disasters, industrial catastrophes, mass murders, public scandals, financial crises, terrorist attacks, popular uprisings, assassinations… the kind of momentous occurrences that used to define an epoch, a decade or a year, now visit us on a weekly, or almost daily, basis. We have chosen five apparently disparate, but equally emblematic, events that have converged upon us in little more than a single week, each of which warns us in different ways of a dark nihilism that is rapidly engulfing everything we have come to regard as our culture and civilisation. Continue reading ““A World Out of Control” – Uthman Ibrahim-Morrison and Abdassamad Clarke”

“Usury I put down, as the great pivot of all their (the Irish people’s) disasters – the main and primary spring that sets on motion the whole machinery of Ireland’s calamities.”

IN OCTOBER 1819, a priest, summoned to the bedside of a dying parishioner in Ross Carberry, Cork, refused him the last Sacraments unless the man made restitution for his ill deeds. The parishioner had not murdered, stolen, lied, risen in rebellion against the government, worshipped idols or committed adultery. He “retailed his goods, that is, flax seed, worth not more than nine shillings, to the poor, in the Spring, for sowing, and obliged them to pay in Autumn twelve shillings and sixpence; gaining therefore three shillings and sixpence, upon every nine shillings, for six months; or more than seventy-seven per cent. per annum. Though that seed would be certainly of less value at the time of making the payment: for it would not sell at all in the autumn.” He raised the price by three shillings and sixpence for allowing them to pay later. Continue reading “JEREMIAH O’CALLAGHAN 1780 -1861 – Abdassamad Clarke”