Abdassamad Clarke is from Northern Ireland and studied Maths and Physics in Edinburgh. In 1973 he accepted Islam at the hands of Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi, later travelling to study Qur’an, Arabic and the deen in Cairo. He translates from Arabic, edits and typesets books on Islam, and is currently, along with Shaykh Ali Laraki, an imam of the Ihsan Mosque, Norwich, UK. This interview was originally conducted for the website of Mohamed Omar in Sweden and translated into Swedish by ´Abd us-Salâm Nordenhok as Sufierna har alltid lett jihad – intervju med Abdassamad Clarke

MO: How did you convert to Islam? Tell us the story Continue reading “Interview with Abdassamad Clarke”

Authorized by the Amir of the Muslim Community in Weimar, Hajj Abu Bakr Rieger, Weimar, 19th December 1995

Goethe said that there is “much nonsense in the doctrines of the [christian] church.” (Conversations with Eckermann, 11.3.1832) In his “Divan” Goethe stresses the value of the precious present moment rather than having the Christian attitude of only waiting for the next life and therefore, disgracing what God gives man in every moment of his life. Goethe refuses the christian view of Jesus and confirms the unity of Allah in a poem of his “Divan”:

“Jesus felt pure and calmly thought

Only the One God; Continue reading “Was Goethe a Muslim? – Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi”

from The Antichrist translated by: H. L. Mencken

If Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that it is dealing with men….

60.

Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down (—I do not say by what sort of feet—) Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin—because it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life!… The crusaders later made war on something before which it would have been more fitting for them to have grovelled in the dust—a civilization beside which even that of our nineteenth century seems very poor and very “senile.”—What they wanted, of course, was booty: the orient was rich…. Let us put aside our prejudices! The crusades were a higher form of piracy, nothing more! The German nobility, which is fundamentally a Viking nobility, was in its element there: the church knew only too well how the German nobility was to be won…. The German noble, always the “Swiss guard” of the church, always in the service of every bad instinct of the church—but well paid…. Consider the fact that it is precisely the aid of German swords and German blood and valour that has enabled the church to carry through its war to the death upon everything noble on earth! At this point a host of painful questions suggest themselves. The German nobility stands outside the history of the higher civilization: the reason is obvious…. Christianity, alcohol—the two great means of corruption…. Intrinsically there should be no more choice between Islam and Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here. Either a man is a Chandala or he is not…. “War to the knife with Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam!”: this was the feeling, this was the act, of that great free spirit, that genius among German emperors, Frederick II. What! must a German first be a genius, a free spirit, before he can feel decently? I can’t make out how a German could ever feel Christian….

____________________________________________________________________________________

For some reason, this post of mine on Nietzsche, which is now very old indeed, has recently attracted some comments of the variety “why don’t you towelheads go back to where you came from” laced with expletives and lacking not only refinement but any serious argument. Therefore, it seems only appropriate, because of the age of the post, to try and relocate it in the very different historical moment we live in.

First, some acknowledgement of the very serious crisis affecting many Muslims, particularly young Muslim men who resort to terrorism, ought to be faced. That is done superlatively well by Shaykh Abdalhaqq Bewley: http://www.bogvaerker.dk/wordpress/?p=1156

Second, although critical comments are more than welcome, particularly if they might lead to some beneficial discussion, the kind of abusive and profane comments I am receiving are immediately dispatched to the spam folder. Those who post them ought to understand their deep betrayal of the very distinctive elements that made the West and contributed to the Renaissance, Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modernity itself, however equivocally informed people regard these matters. These contributors are, in fact, merely symptoms of the utter collapse of our values and educational institutions, which I say not with any sense of Islamic triumphalism but with genuine alarm, because if the ship of the West goes down, for better or worse we are on that ship.

As to Nietzsche himself, if we can get away from his being tarred quite unjustly as a progenitor of the Nazis, whom Michael Lackey shows very cogently to have embraced a kind of Kantian Christianity, it is nevertheless probably time to re-evaluate his contribution to our age, whatever his kind words for Islam and Muslims. The work that I have found most valuable in that respect is Iain Thomson’s superb Heidegger’s Onto-theology, in which he tackles the distinctive contribution of Nietzsche to the metaphysics of an age that threatens to obliterate the human being.

In 1988, the Irish chose to celebrate the millennium of the foundation of Dublin during Viking times, a completely arbitrary date, but never mind.

One of the ways of celebrating it was to recreate a Viking village in a city centre location and people it with actors who had been well drilled in their roles. It was located in the basement of a spacious building and one entered the ‘village’ itself through a lift which, instead of floors, showed the years 1988 all the way back to 988 at which point the doors opened and we emerged into the ‘village’. My group included some Canadian tourists, women who were rather modestly dressed with skirts and their hair rather neatly trimmed. Continue reading “The Hijab”

In the Name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Most Merciful

Health is an Intention

AL-MANAAR MUSLIM CULTURAL HERITAGE CENTRE
244 Acklam Road, London W10 5YG

Saturday 7th April 2007

Our imam in Norwich, Shaykh ‘Ali Laraki, often told us:

“Reaching a judgement is a branch of having visualised it.”

i.e. before one can reach a judgement on any matter one must first have a proper picture of that matter. Continue reading “Health is an Intention”

There is something prior to technology without which it cannot be understood, and that is a method that analyses and breaks things down into what it regards as logical component pieces. The process that exemplifies this best is the search for the atom. The Greeks, notably Leucippus and Democritus, proposed that if one breaks something in half, and then breaks the half in half, that one can proceed only so far until one comes to something that is not divisible, which they call the “not divisible” or atom. For “a” means “not” and “tom” means “divisible. Of course, we all  know that what has been called the atom was itself divisible further into the sub-atomic particles, but the basic idea still stands. The inheritors of this thinking called the atom, “the basic building block of matter” for they thought that matter and thus the universe is essentially something that has been built, and by calling the atom a building block they of course implied that once one understands this process we too can build. Continue reading “Future Islam and the Secret of Technology”