The New Bedouins

The New Bedouin
The New Bedouins
An Islamic Odyssey

The Society of Islam in England presents a multi-faceted exhibition that provides a unique insight into Europe’s longest standing community of new Muslims and their journey from sixties London and Morocco to their arrival in Norwich and ongoing impact on national and international perceptions of Islam

The Forum Atrium Norwich 13th-15th June 10am-6pm
Launch Presentation 3pm Friday 13th June

Lectures and discussions will be held at the Forum and other venues in the immediate vicinity throughout the weekend.

Full details of the programme available on the Mosque website www.muslimsofnorwich.org.uk For
enquiries contact Norwich Mosque Office on: +44 (0)1603 622 941

Headscarf ban

It is curious this matter of the headscarf being banned for judges in Denmark. The argument is that it is a religious symbol. Apart from any criticism of this bizarre reasoning, since I know of nowhere in the deen that proposes scarves as symbols, it is nevertheless clear that the reason the Danes and others have arrived at this conclusion is because a great number of people wear the scarf as if it were a symbol. This is the matter that needs to be addressed. “Allah does not change what is with a people until they change what is with themselves.”

Burma – Oil rears its ugly head yet again?

Current discourse in the media makes little sense. The international community wringing its hands in distress over the sufferings of the Burmese we knew for sure was hypocrisy of the worst sort, but we didn’t know why. However, this article from July 2007 makes it quite clear: They cannot afford to let the Chinese and the Indians get their hands on the oil. Add to the mix Naomi Klein’s analysis of disaster capitalism waiting for a propitious calamity, and you understand that a number of quite unscrupulous people are taking great advantage of the sufferings of many poor Burmese to further their strategic ends.

Burmese Oil Excites China, India

Natural Gas and Oil Make Burma a More Appealing Friend

© John Walsh

Jul 25, 2007

What is the impact of the discovery of oil and gas in Burma on international relationships with China and India?

 

Risala – To a Young Man on the Edge

By Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi

 
Ya Walad – with these words our great scholars and Awliya have started their letters of counsel and guidance on the path of our sublime Deen. They were in every case words on the future life of the youth so that he should achieve maturity, and strengthen the Muslim community not only by good actions in their service but by obeying the command to set up a family, treating both the wife and later the children of the next generation with that wisdom and compassion that would guarantee that the Deen of Islam would flourish as promised by the Merciful Lord, and spread in increase and nobility.

 

Ya Walad – today this does not happen. Today the Muslim youth is living in such a chaos, in such a disaster zone that he not only is frankly ignorant of the Deen but also ignorant about life. In the Qur’an, which, I can assure you, you have never been taught, Allah, glory be to Him, addresses the kuffar – and warns them: and the muminun – and guides them: and mankind itself, the human race – both guiding and warning them.

 

You will not know that to the palaeontologists who study the evidence of mankind’s presence on the planet, it is marked by the indication that the human species had human burial sites. In other words the human species begins with the knowledge that human life is sacred. Burial honours the dead. Man is buried with honour because he is in life the container or the vessel of a Divine Contract. 
 
Read the whole article from:
http://www.shaykhabdalqadir.com/content/articles/Art078_27042008.html

There will be blood

If art holds the mirror up to life, then the meaning of the film There Will Be Blood is that we are in serious trouble indeed: subjects of a drunken murderous capitalism in a life or death struggle with a pseudo-religiosity, a struggle which the former wins. But what this mirror shows us is so appalling that to award it an Oscar and rave reviews is almost an obscenity.

In the film’s denouement the protagonist forces a reverse shahadah from his hapless victim, the minister of the Church of the Third Revelation  “I am a false prophet and god is a superstition” and then himself announces “I am the third revelation” i.e. after the Old Testament and the New Testament, before bludgeoning him to death.

To applaud the mirror for showing us such a desperate picture is possibly a more serious sickness than even that in the picture it has shown us. However, even that picture is incomplete. There is a third figure who is not present but ought to be in order for this to be an accurate reflection: the financier.

The age of the rapacious robber barons is long gone, the empires of cash and property they built long since transformed into something else. Read the astonishing Barbarians at the Gate about the RJR Nabisco leveraged buyout of the 70s, which was emblematic of the transformation of American industry from its Protestant work-ethic base, sitting on a mountain of cash, into the scene with which we are more familiar today: lean, mean, debt-based companies, stripped of assets and staff, racing hurriedly to keep ahead of interest rates. The Daniel Plainview of There Will Be Blood is a dinosauric relic from an age that has long gone. He has been replaced by cool speculators who bid up the price of oil on fears of terrorist attacks or war, and who, when things crash all around them, calculatedly wait for the best moment to pick up the most for the cheapest prices, while the rest of us look around for soup-queues. It is in the trillions of dollars of fictitious money that they manipulate in their hedge funds and the derivatives market, many multiples the size of the entire world economy, that a crime is being committed beside which the excesses of the gargantuan Daniel Plainviews of our world will come to look miniscule.

And, my reader will understand, they will only be brought to an end by an act of worship from a purified religiosity, the simple payment of the zakat of Islam in gold and silver coins according to the sunnah by growing numbers of the world’s Muslims will rob them of the base of their power: the deceitful creation of wealth by the repellently simple concept of writing numbers on bits of paper. This purified religion will lead to a new commerce based on paying in gold and silver with contracts void of the usury that is plunging our age over the abyss.

Makkah Imam Calls for Islamic Common Market

 

 

 
Makkah Imam Calls for Islamic Common Market

 

15 March 2008 — Sheikh Saud Al-Shuraim, imam of the Grand Mosque in Makkah and a member of the teaching staff at Umm Al-Qura University, has called for the establishment of an Islamic common market.

 

Delivering his Juma sermon at the Grand Mosque yesterday, the imam said the proposed market should follow the teachings of the Shariah, keeping away from interest-based financial dealings.

 

Many international financial organizations have started adopting Islamic financing systems after the latter proved successful in terms of achieving substantial profits, Al-Shuraim said, adding that the Qur’an and Sunnah have explained the basic principles for financial transactions.

 

Ezzuddin Khoja, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Financial Banks, said Islamic banks in Arab and Muslim countries alone now handle more than $250 billion.

 

Islamic bank deposits in the Gulf rose by 29 percent to $58 billion in 2005 compared to the previous year. Islamic finances worldwide are estimated at about $450 billion, he explained.

 

Islamic and traditional banks apply different rules.

 

The Islamic banking system does not depend on loans and offers a variety of products such as murabaha, mudaraba, musharaka, ijara and istisna based on profit and loss sharing.

 

The Islamic banking system began in Saudi Arabia and Prince Muhammad Al-Faisal and Saleh Al-Kamil have played a pioneering role in promoting it, Khoja said.

The story above is interesting only if they understand that usury is much more than charging interest. As Umar Ibrahim Vadillo said, in my paraphrase, it is not important that Muslims have an ‘Islamic Market’ using usurious instruments, but what would be interesting is Muslims and non-Muslims having a market using non-usurious instruments.

But some kind of market of ethnic Muslims using the instruments of the ‘Islamic banking’ movement will get us nowhere. What they outline above is usury with a turban and a long beard on it, unfortunately.

What is needed from the Muslim governments is the protection of existing Islamic markets and the creation of new ones according to the Sunnah of there being no charge on them and no tax levied on their trade per se. If the only reason they did this was to avoid the coming storm of popular discontent because of the rising prices of basic commodities, that would be sensible. We have already had the first signs of that storm in the rioting in Egypt.

They should also monetise gold and silver, i.e. issue gold and silver coins, as well as flous for smaller denominations for use in their societies. It would make a great deal of sense to do this now, before the very major shock waves that are certain to come soon in the debacle of the burgeoning hedge fund and derivatives markets, a collapse that will make the sub-prime mortgage credit crunch, of which we have not seen the end yet, seem comparatively trivial. Currencies and commodities are going for a ride that is certainly to be rocky, whereas gold and silver have suffered hardly any real inflation in thousands of years.

Malikis praying with their arms by their sides

A fabricated story has gained some credence among some Muslims who say that Imam Malik’s arms had been damaged, may Allah be merciful to him, in the punishment inflicted on him by the governor of Madinah, and that he was thus unable to fold his arms over his chest in prayer, and that the Malikis mindlessly imitate him. However, if the Imam’s arms were so hurt that he could not fold them across his breast, then when he went into prostration he would have not been able to support himself and would have fallen over, but to my knowledge not one single narrator has ever reported such a thing. 

What is called ‘sadl‘, letting the arms hang by the sides in prayer, is transmitted by Abdarrahman ibn al-Qasim who accompanied Malik for almost 20 years until the time of his death, whom Malik himself respected highly, and whose integrity as a transmitter is acknowledged by the great muhaddithin. An-Nasa’i said he was reliable (thiqah), as did Ibn Ma’in and Abu Zur’ah. Al-Bukhari narrated a hadith from him and so he is one of the narrators of the sahih hadith. To cast aspersions on him is to cast aspersions on the entire science of narrators and the sahih hadith. That he would make a mistake over such a matter is a ridiculous assertion. Those who repeat it should either produce sound narrations concerning it from reliable transmitters, and if they do that, they will have to match the integrity and reliability of Abdarrahman ibn al-Qasim, or they must know that it is fabricated story and that by narrating it they place themselves in the position of those who narrate fabrications, i.e. as unreliable scholars.

War is a racket

Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 June 21, 1940), nicknamed “The Fighting Quaker” and “Old Gimlet Eye,” was a Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps and, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history.
In his 1935 book, War Is a Racket, Butler presented an exposé and trenchant condemnation of the profit motive behind warfare. His views on the subject are well summarized in the following passage from a 1935 issue of “the non-Marxist, socialist” magazine, Common Sense one of Butler’s most widely quoted statements:
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangsterfor capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for theInternational Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”[19]