In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Most Merciful and may Allah bless His slave and messenger Muhammad and his family and companions and grant perfect peace.
“Really a war of resources”Dr. Zalloum: Let us not forget that I lost my country, Palestine, because it was promised by a British Lord to another British Lord. I was always intrigued to find out about the insidious relationship between financiers and empires.   http://www.globaliamagazine.com/?id=244
Yes indeed, I was there at the famous Whipround Prize of 1988 when Salmonella rushed in to announce his latest revelation from Mammon. “Nothing is off-limits, neither God nor Prophets…,” he recited. “Except your bank account Salmonella, my little bacillus”, interjected Satan (his literary agent) furtively. “O yes of course,” Salmonella recanted and chanted the famous Satanic Verses, “Except my bank account – so saith the lord my god Mammon.” At this the assembled literati prostrated themselves, for he had indeed abased himself to their god most profoundly. Satan had a good laugh afterwards remembering how he had picked up the little virus (as he would affectionately call him). Satan’s old friend Mammon, for a lark, had dressed himself up as The Muse, famous inspiration of poets, musicians and creative people and despite the fact that Mammon was a hopelessly grotesque, old miscreant they were both vastly a-mused to find out that Salmonella couldn’t tell the difference. I mean Mammon never had any delusions about himself being any great beauty and to see him dressed up as a tart and spouting dross…., well this little hum-bug starts writing it all down as if it was straight from the source. The laugh was on Mammon because with a bit of astute management from Satan (he never thought it possible) people started buying it up as if it were Manna from heaven. They were both a mite alarmed that the little bacteria himself actually believed it all. They hadn’t had such a perfect tool for literally onks and were a trifle worried that he might get ideas above his station – “I and Mammon are one” or “Whoever hath seen me hath seen Satan” – set himself up in direct competition so to speak. Things worked out a real treat though. India (his home team) banned his pronouncements and – BOP – sales were doubled. A few people got a bit hot under the collar, burnt the book and, within a week, the printers were on standby for a reprint. All that opposition allowed Salmonella to spout off a good bit of guff about the sanctity of his Muse-ings. He was even seen to be heroically defending civilisation against barbaric hordes of Islamic fundamentalists. The story had a tragic ending though for it appears that despite all the warnings he rashly allowed himself to be rushed into eating Curried eggs and so the poor man succumbed to a virus whose name you’ll probably guess. Coincidence? Divine retribution? Who knows? No-one remembers Salmonella now at all. The great book muse-ums and micro-fiche archives that sprang up in 2010, when books went totally out of use, only had space for 42 million titles of merit so sadly they had to tell his executors there wasn’t room. They were a bit peeved because they accepted Joan Collin’s books. © Abdassamad Clarke, Dublin, 1988
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/stiglitz200804?printable=true¤tPage=all
“8. Add interest. The U.S. has borrowed most of the funds used to wage the Iraq war. We will have to repay this debt with interest. If we include in our tally the interest payable on what we are borrowing over only the next 10 years, this adds another $615 billion to the price tag, and brings the total budgetary cost of the Iraq war into the neighborhood of $2.8 trillion.â€Â War as business, with Lockheed-Martin et al in the pigs’ trough, but clearly exceptionally good business for bankers.Â
What explains mankind’s rush to extinction and to destruction of the biosphere if not hypnotic trance? Allah, exalted is He, says in Surat al-A’raf about the magicians of Pharaoh:Â
“And when they threw,Â
they cast a spell on the people’s eyes
and caused them to feel great fear of them.
They produced an extremely powerful magic.” (Surat al-A’raf: 115)
They “magicked their eyes†literally.Â
“As a medium of exchange, money needs to have convertibility and liquidity. Paper currencies have these qualities, so does gold. To add to the store of value, money needs to retain its value over long periods.
“Gold has retained its value, though with fluctuations, over centuries. Even now its purchasing power in terms of physical assets is not far distant from 300 years ago, before Isaac Newton’s recoinage of 1717. Most paper currencies lost more than 98 per cent of their purchasing power in the 20th century alone.” (William Rees-Mogg, The Times, February 25, 2008)
I Allahs navn, Den Alnådige, Den Nådefulde
1Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Alif Lam Mim.
       Det er Bogen uden tvivl.
       Den indeholder vejledning for de som vogter sig;
2              de som tror på det usete og iværksætter bønnen
              og giver ud af det som Vi har forsørget dem med;
3              de som tror på det som er blevet sendt ned til dig
              og det som blev sendt ned før dig
              og er sikre på det endelige.
4Â Â Â Â Â Â Â De er vejledt af deres Herre.
       Det er dem som har succes.
What the affair of the Archbishop and his thoughtful talk on the Shari’a has underlined is the appalling level of public discourse in the media today. This applies to parliamentarians, journalists and writers, intellectuals, artists, and a wide range of public figures. They were simply incapable of handling his nuanced arguments, and I am not saying that I agreed with everything he said, but they did not even understand it. They disagreed before taking the trouble to understand. But what brought about this disgraceful conduct of people many of whom have high educational achievements? It is something more than ugly prejudice, although that certainly figured in the equation. It relates very strongly to our previous theme, for this is the information culture par excellence. Not only do people not know the difference between information and knowledge, but they would furiously deny that there is any difference. Knowledge and concepts in this society are second-hand. It is the difference between going to the tailors and buying mass-market clothing off the rack. Our intellectuals, with honourable exceptions, use ready-made concepts, which they have subjected to no scrutiny. They choose them on the mere basis of whether they suit their fashion, for this is the age of fashion. All that marks them out as intellectuals is the abundant supply of concepts on which they can draw and with which they play. This exposes the rottenness at the heart of the information society, the mediocrity of people who regard the intellect and culture as higher forms of consumerism, who go shopping for culture as they would for a good wine, but when the chips are down are barbarians.
One of the vital matters for the information age is to know the difference between information and knowledge. If one is informed of something that someone else knows then that is information. When one knows it oneself with genuine knowing then it is knowledge. Quite properly in every culture there are means to verify information. This differs from discipline to discipline. In the sciences of Islam, there are, for example, the sciences of intellect (‘aql) and the informational sciences of transmitted reports (naql). For this latter there are very necessary sciences of verification of the authenticity of the chains of transmission and other sciences. So the sciences of naql revolve around isnad and ijazah.  However, if a person fulfils all of these criteria he does not necessarily yet have knowledge. He is a master of information but is not necessarily a person of knowledge. What it takes to become a man of knowledge is another matter, which is not well attended to. One of the great afflictions of the age is that people take the masters of information for people of knowledge.
Lecture Nightmare
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By Daniel Politi
Posted Friday, Feb. 15, 2008, at 6:17 AM ET
USA Today and the Los Angeles Times lead with the shooting at Northern Illinois University, where a gunman walked into a geology class and began firing. The gunman, who was identified as a former graduate student, killed five students and injured 16 others (at least two remain in critical condition) before turning the gun on himself. Carrying a shotgun and two handguns, the shooter apparently walked into the lecture hall that had at least 100 students and, without saying a word, shot the instructor (who survived) and then began firing randomly. The LAT points out that it was the fifth school shooting in a week.
(Slate:Â http://www.slate.com/id/2184560/?from=rss)
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We have not even got the basic elements with which to gingerly approach this issue, and while all the pundits dive into the maelstrom of debate, lining up in a strange consensus that unites odd bedfellows and produces the predictable reactions and antinomies, who is there to point out that our vaunted democratic institutions have already been cynically dismantled and that we are apparently sliding inexorably into a totalitarianism worse than anything we have seen? The rule of law and all equal before the law are admirable sentiments, but the law has never been applied to the upper echelons who actually manipulate the levers of power, let alone their moderately well-paid servants such as Bush, Blair and Brown, universally admitted war criminals who have killed more than a million people. And who is there to point out that democracy and its institutions have now achieved the status of unquestionable religious dogma, their votaries displaying more unquestioning and unthinking adherence to their doctrine and greater bigotry and intolerance than anything they ascribe to their bêtes noires? The greatest casualties in this furore are thought, reflection and the truth. The winners? Two-faced hypocrisy and programmed roboticism. And Allah has power over all things. Who could have foreseen that England’s foremost clergyman would have unleashed this bolt from the blue? Certainly not he himself. It comes as a stroke of lightning that quite suddenly illuminates the protagonists on all sides and catches them unsuspecting in their true postures, so that some we thought friends are seen in their true colours and some we previously thought enemies are seen as possible allies, even friends. Glorious is Allah Who brings the living from the dead and the dead from the living.
