Bookwright

When Paris of Troy abducted Helen (or did they elope? depends on who you believe), her husband Menelaus demanded of his brother Agamemnon, king of the Greeks, and all the other Greeks, help in retrieving her. Agamemnon agreed because if he had not done so then no Greek woman would have been secure since the other nations would have seen the Greeks to be passive in the face of an abduction.

So Agamemnon assembled a huge army ready to sail over to Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) for the siege of Troy and in order to bring Helen back to her husband. This was in a time before the Greeks had standing armies, and so each Greek left behind his trade and farmlands to go on this mission from which he might never return, and thus made a considerable sacrifice.

However, the fleet was becalmed. No wind blew. This went on for some time, until the army grew restless and began to suspect there was something inauspicious in it all. Agamemnon was forced to consult the oracle to find out if divine displeasure was the cause. The reply came that although all the Greeks had made considerable sacrifice to go on this expedition, Agamemnon himself had made none.

Now this is the secret of leadership when it is a divine affair. If the leader does not move, does not sacrifice, the entire army is becalmed and nothing can happen.

It is a commonplace among the Muslims that Allah has declared war on usury, but the reality is much more serious than that: Allah, exalted is He, has declared war on believers who will not give up usury. He says in His Noble Book:

277 You who have iman! have taqwa of Allah
and forgo any remaining riba
if you are muminun.

278 If you do not, know that it means war from Allah
and His Messenger.
(translation of meanings from The Noble Qur’an, Abdalhaqq and Aisha Bewley)

Listen to the proceeds of The 11th International Fiqh Conference in Cape Town, and in particular to Dr Habib Dahinden’s utterly lucid exposition of exactly why we are experiencing the crisis that we are. Audio only at present. I believe that the transcripts are going up soon. But it is well worth listening to.
http://www.shaykhabdalqadir.com/content/conference2008.html

Being at present in South Africa, I have had the chance to visit one of the townships springing up around Cape Town and to pass the enormous areas of ‘informal settlements’ (doublespeak for shanty towns).

My companion on the journey told me that surprisingly the people who live in these corrugated iron dwellings in what we would consider atrociously difficult conditions are often remarkably clean and smartly dressed, something I had myself observed in Moroccan shanty towns. Indeed, it is not unusual for such people to be better dressed and cleaner than many UK citizens who would consider the shanty town dwellers utterly impoverished and bereft. But how can that be?

One thing that occurs to me is that these people although poor are not in debt; it is entirely unknown to them and they probably could not get a debt even if they wanted to, whereas most modern people are used to living in debt (interestingly, the idea of a negative number troubled Europeans for some centuries, even while they worked with it in their trade, for how can there be a number less than nothing?).

So although these people have almost nothing, they have more than us who have less than nothing, who have minus wealth, who live in debt. Who’s the beggar now?

Those who insist that there can be no amirate but there has to be caliphate, and that thus the zakat cannot be collected until there is a caliph are like someone who being told to build a palace to live in refuses to build himself a hut to shelter in while he builds the palace and thus lives exposed to the elements, the wind, the rain and the snow. The fact of him building himself a hut or a small house does not mean that he has given up on the palace, but just that he understands that palaces are not built in a day.
I am not only talking about the Hizb at-Tahreer but also those rigidly doctrinaire Hanafi scholars who say that the zakat cannot be collected because there is no caliph and individuals must themselves give it to the categories who are allowed to receive it.
The truth is that they themselves ought not to celebrate salat al-jumu’ah because it has to be authorised by the caliph, but they do celebrate it anyway.

(Irene O’Donoghue’s Essay on the Period)

The Crash has almost inevitably become over the years the stuff of legend. Such a massive dislocation of ordinary existence must, perhaps unavoidably, grow in dimensions with the passage of time. Primitive peoples had the natural phenomena of lightning, wind and rain, of earthquake and pestilence which they clothed in the garments of the gods, to render them a little more familiar and amenable to propitiation. How much different are we from those ancient peoples, discounting our once-upon-a-time technology and the veneer of culture with which we ornament the dormant savage within? Certainly the events of those fateful years only served to underline the essentially flimsy nature of our vaunted civilisation, even if subsequent history might be interpreted to bear out the optimism of those who believe in man’s basic goodness.
From the unpublished novel Wings of the Butterfly
http://bogvaerker.dk/3.TheCrash.html

Last week the Church of England rolled out its big guns, in the form of the Archbishops of York and Canterbury, and trained both barrels on the perceived culprits behind the current world financial crisis in a ‘good cop-bad cop’ duo where the ‘bad’ cop (Canterbury) is so good that the ‘good’ cop (York) is forced to be positively obsequious. Eloquent testimony to the mollifying powers of the English shires when even the plain speaking man from Uganda chose to address the gathered fraternity of international bankers in terms more suited to a Harrogate tea parlour than the fire and brimstone which their unbridled consumption of usury truly deserves. As he approaches the end of his speech one soon realises that the whole thing has been a genteel preamble to a request for a share in the proceeds of what his colleague (Canterbury) rightly describes in the Spectator as, “…that almost unimaginable wealth [which] has been generated by equally unimaginable levels of fiction, paper transactions with no concrete outcome beyond profit for traders.” Our bad cop should perhaps take note that these transactions rarely involve anything quite so tangible as paper!

Read the full article here