Robert Luongo

Events took place in Iceland earlier this year that directly put the country‎’s citizenry in direct opposition to their elected officials in regards to the liability incurred for the failure of the Icelandic Bank. In the aftermath, it is most exigent that the story, conspicuously dropped from the designated headlines of what is newsworthy, and therefore presented to the general public, be re-opened. The citizens of that country created a referendum by acquiring the requisite number of signatures, which was then voted upon by them. By an overwhelming majority vote they have prohibited their government to bailout the Icelandic Bank in order to repay the people or associations (many of which were local councils in the UK, such as the Norwich City Council) who had invested large sums in high yield ‘financial products’ on offer at various Icelandic financial institutions.

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A great deal of modern Muslims’ misunderstandings of money as a subject stem from the fact that when Europeans were dealing with Muslims, during the long centuries of confrontation, trade and imperialism, they introduced their own paper money on the false premise that it was simply fulus. The convoluted history of European money and its infestation with usury, and its long transition from being a receipt for gold or silver deposited for safekeeping with a goldsmith to being an entity invented out of nothing by wealthy private bankers who then charge interest for its use, is probably too long a detour for this essay, and is beginning to be sufficiently well known to be dispensed with. Suffice it to say, that modern money encapsulates within itself enough usury to sink an ummah (which it did), and should definitely not be confused with fulus.

We come now to the students of Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi, whose long and determined propagation of the (by now better understood) critique of modern money has gained them well deserved affirmation and recognition amongst the few, but amongst the many made them somewhat suspect and, in some quarters, deeply unpopular. That was until the ongoing global financial catastrophe of 2008-2010 in the light of which they began to appear somewhat prescient and more widely appreciated. However, it would now appear that they have re-opened the door to suspicion by calling for the issuance of Islamic paper money, referring to it as fulus, which the great majority of Muslims still understand as money. “Subhanallah! Weren’t they against paper money, and didn’t they publish fatwas against it, declaring it haram?”

Therefore, given the crucial importance of what is at stake, it is imperative at this point that we clarify the matter as best we can.

The Muslims since the time of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and his Companions, may Allah be pleased with them all, used three things in the main for currency: the gold dinar, the silver dirham and fulus, these latter originally being small copper coins of no higher denomination than half a silver dirham. This can be seen in any work of fiqh or history, and is documented in the admirably thorough Mawsu‘ah Fiqhiyyah – Fiqh Encyclopaedia” published as a massive forty-five volume set from Kuwait.

“The employment by the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and his Companions of Roman dinars and Persian dirhams on which there were images of their kings, and they had no other currency except for fulus.”

The values of the gold dinar and silver dirhams depended on their weight and the purity of their precious metals. The value of the fulus, on the contrary, did not depend on the value of the copper, but rather on the number printed on their faces. They were merely tokens for the small transactions for which even small silver coins would be too valuable.

This is a matter that is beyond controversy. The works of fiqh of the madhhabs deal with it in detail, down to whether or not it is assessed for zakat, and whether or not zakat can be paid with it.

When launching the currency, Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi said, “At a meeting I had with Shaykh Mahmud Effendi of Turkey, the head of the Naqshabandi order, may Allah give him health and a long time with us and protection, Shaykh Mahmud Effendi said, ‘This (the dinar and dirham) is the currency of the Muslims, but you must have the fulus, for two reasons: there is no zakat on fulus because it is not a precious metal, and the widow must be able to buy her bread, a loaf of bread, with an untaxed currency that allows her to be halal in all her transactions.’”

So this is a vital part of Muslim commerce, for Muslim culture very naturally centres around the needs of the poor, contrary to capitalism which caters to the priorities of an oligarchical banking plutocracy, with the disingenuous assertion that wealth will ‘trickle down’ and ultimately reach the poor, which it demonstrably doesn’t do. Capitalism obscenely enriches a very few and reduces the global population to penury and debt-slavehood. The fulus represent the currency that is in daily use in countless transactions by all segments of the society for small everyday items, but of course, it represents the dominant currency of the poor, and as the Shari’a would have it, will in most circumstances be exempt from assessment for zakat.

Now, critics of modern money, rail against the retention by private banks, hidden behind names such as The Federal Reserve resonant with the sense of their being national institutions, of the power to invent new credit out of nothing and insist that such a right belongs only to the state. This is an echo of an earlier much more fundamental duty of the sovereign to authorise the minting of currency according to known purities of the precious metals and known weights and dimensions, stamping his name and, sometimes, his image on the coins in verification of that process and in acknowledgement of his responsibility in this regard. This was the case in the east and the west, in Christian lands and in the lands of Islam.

These monetarist reformers, however, being enthralled by the power of credit creation and the consumer society it has spawned, are reluctant to see this power to create money by fiat abolished; they want it retained by the state. They fail to see that the implications of this power are equally devastating no matter whose the hand that wields it. However, they are correct in identifying the ruling authority as responsible for the issuing of currency, but this should be in the sense of the authentication of the currency’s actual value, not the licence to create it at will out of thin air.

But what about the fulus? For here we have something of no intrinsic value, but rather something whose value is determined by the numbers minted or printed on it. As we said, its issuance belongs to governance and to no one else. Its value, however, is very limited; it is small change, and thus its effect on the economy ought, in the regular run of things, to be minimal. We note with caution that Muslim rulers at various points did wreak some havoc by an over-abundant supply of fulus.

Some confusion has arisen over the fact of the traditional minting of fulus as copper coins and this recent printing of fulus as paper; ought we not to follow the traditional mode? We were fortunate recently in Norwich to hear a remarkable discourse by Dr Muhammad Ghanem on “The Islamic Concept of Money,” which is also the title of his PhD thesis. Apart from being devastatingly forthright in asserting that modern paper currency is the very essence of usury, he also made very clear that while the usage by the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and his Companions of gold dinars and silver dirhams means that it is inconceivable that any Muslim ruler should ever prevent the usage of gold and silver as currency (even though all so-called ‘Islamic’ polities do in fact outlaw their use), it does not mean that we are obliged only to use them and no other currency.

The same principle applies to fulus; the fact of their historical use as copper does not preclude their being printed on paper. This is a specific application of a general principle; the fact that something was not done in the time of the salaf does not mean that it is not allowed to do it, nor does it mean that when it was done in their time in a specific way, that other ways of doing things are thus prohibited. Only a specific prohibition means that something is prohibited.

So, there is no reason for fulus not to be printed on paper, and very good reasons today why it should be, given the general acceptance of paper money by the global population. Interestingly, whereas with the dominant usury-based finance, minted coins are small change and paper is reserved for the larger denominations, with our Islamic currency the process is reversed and the gold dinar and silver dirham represent the larger denominations and paper currency represents the small change. This is really as it should be, because the global usury-driven finance system is based on a currency that is in every sense a walking debt, moreover a debt that is growing exponentially in a completely unstoppable way.

Now, the proposition that someone is muflis or bankrupt if they only have ‘money’ and have no gold or silver has become self-evident to a much greater number of people than could have been hoped for even a decade ago. It is time for the Muslims to restore a genuine currency with its gold dinar and silver dirham, which have proven to be non-inflationary over millennia, and the vital fulus for the small change that is used for the huge majority of daily transactions.

يعمل المسلمون الغربيون أسوة بنظرائهم في الشرق على التعريف بموطأ الإمام مالك باعتباره منهجا للتشريع قابلا للتأقلم والتكيف مع الحياة الإسلامية في جميع مناطق العالم بما فيها الغرب . بل من هؤلاء الغربيين من يبني مشروعه الإصلاحي الشمولي على موطأ مالك ومذهب عمل أهل المدينة، ولعل من أبرز هؤلاء ، والذي سيكون نموذجا لهذه المداخلة، هو العالم البريطاني الأصل ، أيان نيل دالاس، الذي اعتنق الإسلام على يد إمام مسجد القرويين في فاس سنة:1963م ، والذي أخذ النسبة الصوفية الدرقاوية من الشيخ المغربي محمد بن الحبيب الدرقاوي المغربي المكناسي ، ليصبح بعد وفاة هذا الأخير شيخا للزاوية الحبيبية الدرقاوية في الغرب (أوروبا والولايات المتحدة الأمريكية) . وقد وقع اختياري على الشيخ البريطاني المسلم عبد القادر الصوفي المرابط كنموذج لدراسة جهود مسلمي الغرب في التعريف بموطأ مالك ومذهبه وذلك :

1- كون الشيخ عبد القادر الصوفي يمثل حالة غربية فريدة ؛ فهو مسلم ابريطاني ينتمي إلى النخبة الغربية المثقفة ؛ فبالإضافة إلى شهرته بداية كمثل سينمائي ومسرحي فقد عُرف كأديب ألمعي له إسهامات عديدة في القصة والمسرح والشعر ، وقد صدرت له سنة :2005م “مجموعة الأعمال الأدبية” التي تتكون من ثلاث مسرحيات وأربع قطع نثرية،

(Ian Dallas , Collected Works , Budgate Press, Cape Town, 2005 )

 وكان قد صدر له قبل ذلك “كتاب الغرباء” ، وهو رواية تحكي رحلة البحث الباطني عن معنى الإنسان .

2- لكون الشيخ يتزعم تنظيما صوفيا كبيرا في الغرب ؛ فتنظيمه يضم عددا هائلا من الأتباع في كل أنحاء العالم ، وله امتدادات شاسعة في العالم الغربي ، إذ لا تكاد تخلو دولة أوربية أو ولاية أمريكية من وجود فروع لزاوية هذا الشيخ المغربية الأصل. 

3- لكونه يملك مشروعا إصلاحيا شموليا يعتزم تطبيقه في العالم الغربي ، وتقوم أركان هذا المشروع في أساسها على المذهب المالكي لاسيما كتاب”الموطأ” الذي يحتل المكانة الثانية في مشروعه بعد كتاب الله عز وجل. فمن هو هذا الشيخ؟ وماهو التنظيم الذي يمثله ؟ وما أركان المشروع الإصلاحي الذي جاء به؟ وكيف يسهم هذا المشروع في التعريف بكتاب الموطأ وبمذهب مالك في أوروبا والولايات المتحدة الأمريكية ؟ وما موقع التأثيرات المغربية في تبني هذا الاختيار؟ تلكم مجموعة من التساؤلات ستحاول هذه المداخلة التطرق لها ولو بإيجاز شديد . -

الشيخ عبد القادر الصوفي : 

ولد الشيخ عبد القادر الصوفي / السكوتلاندي ( أيان نيل دالاس) سنة:1931م . 

 كان دالاس في يوم ما رئيس تحرير جريدة The International Times ) 

 عمل أيضا ككاتب مسرحي ولعب دور الساحر في فيلم المخرج فيليني الذي كان يحمل عنوان:”الثامنة والنصف”. 

تعرف آيان دالاس على التصوف الإسلامي بفعل أسفاره المتكررة إلى شمال إفريقيا ، حيث اعتنق الإسلام على يد إمام مسجد القرويين في فاس سنة:1963م ، وفي سنة: 1967م أخذ النسبة الصوفية عن طريق الشيخ محمد بن الحبيب الدرقاوي (ولد سنة:1876م) ، بعد ذلك ، عيِّن كمقدم من طرف الشيخ ابن الحبيب لتمثيله في الغرب ولتأسيس زاوية في بلده الأصلي ابريطانيا ، لكن بعد موت شيخ الزاويـة الحبيبيــة سنة:1971م ، سيبدأ آيان دالاس رحلة بحث عن شيخ جديد حيت سيتصل سنة:1976م بالشيخ حمودة الفيتوري ، شيخ العليوية الدرقاوية في ليبيا ، الذي أعلن تعيينه لآيان دالاس كشيخ لفرعَي الدرقاوية الحبيبية والعليوية التي يعتقد أنهما سيتوحدان تحت إمرته

 ( Abdul Wahab el-Affendi , “A False Dawn” in Inquiry Magazine (January 1998) : p.54).

هكذا ، أعلن آيان دالاس(عبد القادر الصوفي) في أنجلترا سنة:1976م نفسه شيخا للزاوية الحبيبية التي بـدأت تستقطب حينـئذ أتباعـا في الغرب أغلبهـم من الشباب البريطانيين والأمريكيين المهتدين إلى الإسلام ليؤسس خلية صوفية في مدينة “نورويج” بابريطانيا . سنة 1973م ،سيهاجر إلى الولايات المتحدة ليفتتح أول رباط له هناك وبالضبط في ولاية بيركلي بكاليفورنيا . اليوم ، تنتشر هذه الرباطات تقريبا في جميع أنحاء الولايات المتحدة( تيكساس، جورجيا ، واشنطن العاصمة ، كاليفورنيا..) وفي جل أرجاء العالم (إنجلترا ، اسبانيا ، ماليزيا ، ألمانيا ، نيجيريا ، أستراليا، سويسرا ، جنوب أفريقيا ، والدانمارك)

( Fatima Harrak , « Le Soufisme Face A La Mondialisation : Cas Des Confréries D’Origine Africaine Aux USA » dans : Confréries Soufis d’Afrique : Nouveaux Rôles , : Nouveaux Enjeux ,2004 , Actes du Colloque International , Organise par l’Institut des Etudes Africaines Rabat,2-4 Octobre 2001, p :191)  .

 وما يزال عبد القادر الصوفي المرابط إلى يومنا هذا يعمل على تقوية حضور زاويته في العالم بأسره ، اذ استطاعت الزاوية الحبيبية الدرقاوية تحت إمرته في الغرب ، تحقيق مجموعة من الإنجازات ، وأهمها إيصال رسالة الإسلام كاملة (بحقيقتها وشريعتها) إلى مناطق نائية عن العالم الإسلامي ، كما هو الحال في المكسيك وأمريكا اللاتينية ، بالإضافة إلى نفضها الغبار عن التراث الروحي للمسلمين في العالم الغربي .

مسار الزاوية الحبيبية الغربية وتحولها إلى حركة المرابطين العالمية: 

1- مسار الزاوية الحبيبية الغربية:

إن المتتبع لمسار الشيخ عبد القادر الصوفي يمكنه أن يستخلص وجود مرحلتيـن متمايزتين في دعوتـه ، الأولى صوفيـة خالصـة والثانية مشوبة بالنشـاط السياسـي والاقتصادي والدعوي ، وقد ميز علي كوز( أستاذ مساعد بكلة الشريعة جامعة: مرمرة باسطنبول تركيا ، حاصل على الدكتوراة من جامعة لندن وعضو في الزاوية الحبيبية الدرقاوية ) بين طورين في تعاليم عبد القادر مبتـدئا بالمرحلة المبكرة للتصوف الباطني التي كان يُفضَل فيها العزلة عن المجتمع وبعد ذلك آثر دخول الطور السياسي النشيط

(Ali Kose , Conversion to Islam: A study of Native British Converts. London: Kegan Paul. (1996) ,p.181).

هذه التحولات –تبدو واضحة – في كتاباته التي تطورت من ” كتاب الغرباء” لآيان دالاس وهي رواية البحث / السعي الباطني ، إلى ” طريق محمد” لعبد القـادر الصوفي ، إلى ” الجهاد..” إلى ” ءاية السيف ” بواسطة عبد القادر المرابط ، إلى الأقرب حداثة ” رسالة إلى مسلم عربي” و ” تقنيات انقلاب البنــك “

(Marcia Hermansen , “The ‘other’ Shadhilis of the West” in The Shadhiliyya, (Op.Cit ) , 488). 

 2- المرابطون وعملية الإصلاح:

المرابطون هي الطور الثاني من تطور الزاوية الحبيبية الدرقاوية ، حيث تبنى الشيخ عبد القادر الصوفي هذا الاسم سنة:1983م تيمنا بالدولة المرابطية المغربية التي عرفت بمناصرتها للإسلام وبتمسكها الشديد بالفقه المالكي وبالجهاد خاصة في بـلاد الأندلس.

هكذا ، تقول مارشا هيرمانسن:

” يستدعي اسم: المرابطين الرباط باعتباره مكانا للانفصال عن الثقافـة “الجاهلـة” المحيطة ، والرباط يعني معقلا على حدود الإسلام ، وفي ذلك إعادة اعتبار لتراث حركة المرابطين المغربية التي حكمت شمال إفريقيا في القرن الحادي عشر حيث كان يُمزج الجهاد مع شدة الورع الديني”

( Marcia Hermansen , “The ‘other’ Shadhilis of the West” in The Shadhiliyya, (Op.Cit ) , p.489 ) .

تضيف معلقة : “أصبحت الحركة الصوفية لعبد القادر الصوفي أكثر تشددا وتعبدا ، متبنية اسم “المرابطين” سنة:1983م حيث سكت عملة ذهبية خاصة بها لمحاولـة تجنب التدنيس المرتبط بالنظام البنكي المبني على الفائدة” (Ibid , p.489)، كما ركزت الحركة على تلقيـن أتباعها تكوينا شرعيا متينا يرتكز بالأساس على المذهب المالكي ، وذلك من خلال تعزيز دراسة موطأ الإمام مالك كقاعدة شرعية واجتماعية مثالية ، مع إبداء تركيز أقل على التصوف الباطني . 

إن دراسة موطأ الإمام مالك أقنعت عبد القادر الصوفي للتشديد على الإصلاح المالي ، والعودة إلى الممارسة الإسلامية الأولى والتي سينبني عليها مشروعه التربوي الإصلاحي .

وصف موجز للمشروع الإسلامي الإصلاحي للزاوية الحبيبية:

يتوخى مشروع عبدالقادر الصوفي تحقيق خلافة إسلامية جديدة تقوم على التطبيق التام للشريعة الإسلامية . وفي نظره ، هذا التطبيق لا يمكن أن يتحقق الا اذا انبنى على ثلاثة أركان أساسية :

1-كتاب الله : يركز مشروع الشيخ عبدالقادر الصوفي على ضرورة اعادة ربط المسلم بكتاب الله في اطار فهم حقيقي وأصيل له الذي لن يتحقق ، في رأيه ، الا بمعرفة اللغة العربية وقواعدها أولا ، ثم بمعرفة المتشابه من الآيات ثانيا ، وبمعرفة أسباب النزول وكل مايرتبط بذلك ثالثا حتى لا ينزلق المسلم في خيالاته فيجنح الى الباطنية أو غيرها فيضل ويُضل ، وهكذا يقترح الشيخ تبني تفسير الجلالين لفهم القرآن الكريم بصيغة صحيحة لكونه أولا تتوفر فيه كل الشروط المذكورة ، ولكونه أيضا يحضى باجماع الأمة الإسلامية

(Abdal Qadir As-Sufi, Root Islamic education , Ch. 1. On line at http://bewley.virtualave.net Viewed July 2007).

2- فقه اسلامي أصيل: من أهم ثوابت المشروع الإسلامي الإصلاحي للشيخ البريطاني المسلم عبدالقادر الصوفي المرابط هو اعتماد فقه اسلامي حقيقي واجرائي يمكن تطبيقه على أرض الواقع وليس مجرد تشريعات مثالية ،طوباوية غير قابلة للتحقيق الا في الدعايات السياسية الواهمة ، وفي هذا السياق أيضا يركز الشيخ عبدالقادر الصوفي على انتهاج مذهب عمل أهل المدينة المتمثل في الفقه المالكي ، على اعتبار أن المدينة هي المكان الأول الذي تحقق فيه تطبيق الشريعة الإسلامية ، وفيها كان ، كما يقول ، “كتاب الله وسنة رسوله (صلى الله عليه وسلم)” شرعا يُعمل به وليس شعارات مدونة في المتون فقط ، فالحكم الإسلامي لا يمكن أن يقوم من جديد ، حسب مشروع الشيخ، الا من خلال العمل ب”الموطأ” ، يقول : 

” بالنسبة للنموذج الذي سنعتمده في السياسة والشريعة هو الكتاب المتعلق بالحديـث ، الأصول وأعمال المدينة وهو موطأ الإمام مالك الذي قال عنه الإمام الشافعي :[ إذا كان هناك أي كتاب أحلف به بعد كتاب الله ؛ فسيكون موطأ الإمام مالك ]، موطأ الإمام مالك هو الكتاب الثاني في التربية الإسلامية الأصلية بعد كتاب الله القرآن الكريم”

(Abdal Qadir As-Sufi, ‘Root Islamic education’ Ch. 1. On line at http://bewley.virtualave.net Viewed July 2007 .) .

3- محبة الرسول “صلى الله عليه وسلم”: بالإضافة إلى فهم حقيقي لكتاب الله الذي يوفره تفسير الجلالين ، والتشريع الإسلامي الأصيل الذي يقوم عليه الحكم الإسلامي والذي يشكل موطأ مالك دستوره الإجرائي ، يحتاج المسلم إلى قدوة روحية تضمن له السلامة من البدع، تتمثل هذه التزكية الروحية في محبة رسول الله “”صلى الله عليه وسلم ” ، ووفق اعتقاد الشيخ عبدالقادر الصوفي (أيان دالاس) تشكل محبة رسول الله عليه الصلاة والسلام العنصر الثالث في مشروعه المساعد على تطبيق الشريعة وتأسيس بنية السلطة السياسية ، لذلك فكتاب الشفا للقاضي عياض هو الركن الثالث في مشروع الرجل .يقول في هذا السياق:” يوفر الشفا للقاضي عياض بعدًا داخليا جوهريا لمحبة الرسول(“صلى الله عليه وسلم) ، ولكل ما هو ضروري لاستكمال إعادة تطبيق الحكم الإسلامي”

(Abdalhaqq Bewley, ‘The Recovery of True Islamic Fiqh: An introduction to the work of Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi’) 

وللاستدلال على ذلك يقول في مقام آخر: “..ولتحقيق هذا قمنا باختيار كتاب للسيرة ، رغم كثرة التآليف حول أدب السيرة ، فقد اخترنا كتابا قديما يعود إلى ألف سنة مضت ، كتابا لا وهم فيه ولا خرافة ولا مبالغة في سرد السيرة ولا تأملات ميتافيزيقية ، ولكن يحكي ببساطة القصة الرائعة لحياة رسول الله (صلى الله عليه وسلم)… لهذا اخترنا كتاب الشفا للقاضي عياض ككتاب ثالث لهذه التربية الإسلامية الأصلية . بعد القرآن الكريم بتفسير الجلالين وبعد موطأ مالك “

(Abdal Qadir As-Sufi, Root Islamic education, Ch. 1. On line at http://bewley.virtualave.net Viewed July 2007) .

* الموطأ ومذهب عمل أهل المدينة:

وإذا ما عدنا إلى النقطة الثانية في المشروع الإصلاحي للحركة الصوفية لأيان دالاس، نجد أن هذا الأخير يؤسس لمنطق جديد يبرر به اختياره لموطأ مالك كمنهج يرسمه لأتباعه بل كطريقة لإعادة إصلاح أحوال الأمة الإسلامية ككل ، يقول عنه عبد الحق بيولي(أحد أبرز أتباعه) في مقـال لـه بالإنجليزية تحت عنوان:The Recovery of True Islamic Fiqh: An introduction to the work of Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi ، “استرداد الفقه الإسلامي الصحيح: مدخل إلى عمل الشيخ عبـد القادر الصوفي”:

” من ثمة ؛ فإعادة اكتشافه (أي عبد القادر الصوفي) لإمام مالك لم تكن باعتباره مؤسس المذهب الذي تسمى بعده باسمه بل باعتباره إمام دار الهجرة، المدينة المنورة ، والمسجل والناقل لعمل أهل المدينة . رأى الإمام مالك أن من واجبه أن يدون للأجيال القادمة التراث الإسلامي الحي المتمثل في العمل بالكتاب والسنة في شكلها الأصلي النقي الذي وصل إليه دون تغيير خلال مدة جيلين التي انقضت منذ وفاة النبي (صلى الله عليه وسلم)”

(Abdalhaqq Bewley, ‘The Recovery of True Islamic Fiqh: An introduction to the work of Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi’ (Op.Cit ) .). 

صحة وصفاء مذهب مالك ومرجعيته المرتكزة على عمل أهل المدينـة ترجـع بحسب عبد القادر الصوفي إلى سببين رئيسيـن: :
” الأول هو أنه كان يمثل بوضوح الصيغة الأكثر قرباً للإسلام كما عاشه النبي(صلى الله عليه وسلم) وصحابته ، و تشكل دون شك البث المتواتر غير المنقطع للكتـاب والسنة النبـوية فـي المكان نفسه الذي أسست فيه ، محفوظة ومصانة من الطرف الجيلين الذين عاشا هناك بين الأيام الأولى للمجتمع الإسلامي وزمان الإمام مالك . وعليه ، يكون ما جلبه لنا الإمام مالك من الصدر الإسلامي الأول ومن زمـن الرسول (صلى الله عليه وسلم) نفسه هو تلك الطاقة الحيوية الخام حيث كان الدين في مرحلة التأسيـس والامتداد القوي ، لهذا السبب يطلق عليه أحيانا مذهب عمر”رضي الله عنـه”. .
السبب الثاني هو صحته غير القابلة للجدل التي تأكدت مرارا عبر توالي القرون ، وليس أدل على ذلك مما قاله العالم الحنبلي الشهير ابن تيمية ، الذي ألف كتابا تحـت اسم:سلامة المنطلقات الأساسية لمذهب أهل المدينة، ويوضح فيه أن الصورة الأكثـر كمالا للسنة النبوية ، سواء من حيث روحها أو ممارستها الفعلية ، هي التي جاء بهـا الإمام مالك ، وقيدها في كتابه الموطأ. والسبب في ذلك يرجع إلى موسوعية معرفـة الرجل ، والى تواجده الجغرافي في مدينة النبي (صلى الله عليه وسلم) حيث كان يقيم عددا كبيرا من رجال المعرفة الذين ظلوا هناك متمسكين بالحفاظ على الدين في أصالته كما كان في زمن النبي (صلى الله عليه وسلم)، والواقع أنه ، وكما هو معروف ، لم يلحق بالدين أي بدعة أو مستحدثـة علـى الإطلاق في المدينة المنورة خلال الأجيال الثلاثة الأولى للإسـلام”

(Abdalhaqq Bewley, ‘The Recovery of True Islamic Fiqh: An introduction to the work of Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi’ , (Op.Cit) .). 

وهكذا يخلص الشيخ عبد القادر الصوفي إلى أن كتاب الموطأ يعتبر الآن هو الدستور الإسلامي الأكثر صحة بعد كتاب الله عز وجل ، يقول عنه: ” الآن ، أي كتاب يأتي بعد الموطأ أو أية مجموعة أحاديث لايمكنها أخذ مكانة كتاب مالك في الريادة بعد كتاب الله القرآن الكريم لأسبقيته الزمانية ولمكانته بالمدينة ولقيمة كاتبه ، كل هذه الحجج تجعله يتموقع فوق أي شيء يأتي بعده تاريخيا . لا يمكن ، بأي حال، زعزعة الموطأ من ريادته بأي شيء آخر يأتي بعده ، ولاشيء يمكن أن يكون أكثر صحة منه ، وكل عمل جاء بعده إنما توقف عليه في الإسناد”،

(Abdal Qadir As-Sufi , Root Islamic education , Summary -Part One – , On line at http://bewley.virtualave.net Viewed July 2007 } ، 

وهذا ما يجعل الشيخ عبد القادر الصوفي يردد دائما في مقالاته وكتبه ما يفيد صحة وأهمية هذا الكتاب :

“There is no book after the book of Allah , which is more beneficial for people more than the Muwatta’” and “There is no book of knowledge on the earth more correct than the book of Malik”. 

-جهود عبدالقادر الصوفي وأتباعه في التعريف بموطأمالك ومذهبه:

من بعض تجليات هذه الجهود نجد:

1- ترجمة الموطأ إلى اللغة الإنجليزية ونشره وتوزيعه في الغرب على نطاق واسع. حيث أشرف على الترجمة الأولى للموطأ الشيخ نفسه ، قبل أن تسند الى الباحثة الأمريكية المسلمة عائشة عبدالرحمان بيولي الملقبة بالترجمانة(وهي من أبرزأتباع الشيخ في الغرب ، وأحد أهم المترجمين للأعمال العربية الكلاسيكية الى اللغة الأنجليزية ) مهمة الإشراف على ترجمة الموطأ وغيره من المتون الفقهية المالكية ، حيث قامت – بالإضافة الى الموطأ (Madina Press,1991)- بترجمة رسالة عبد الله بن أبي زيد القيراواني

(http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/aBewley/Page17.html ينظر الكتاب في الموقع الإلكتروني التالي : ) 

وكتاب الطبقات لابن سعد الذي صدر في جزئين الأول تحت اسم: نساء المدينة(منشورات طه 1995) والثاني: رجال المدينة (منشورات طه 1997و2000) ، وترجمت أيضا كتاب: أصول الفقه المالكي لأبي زهرة

(http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/aBewley/usul.htmlينظر الكتاب في الموقع الإلكتروني التالي : )

 The Fundamental Principles of Imam Malik’s Fiqh : ، وكتاب العواصم من القواصم للفقيه المالكي الإشبيلي أبي بكر محمد بن عبد الله بن العربي المعافري دفين فاس (منشورات المدينة بريس1991)، وكتاب الإعلام بقواعد الإسلام بحسب عمل أهل المدينة للقاضي عياض ، والعديد من المتون الفقهية الأساسية .

2- حث الشيخ أتباعه الغربيين على الاهتمام بالموطأ قراءة ودراسة وتمعنا. حيث تتركز أغلب دروسه ومحاضراته ومقالاته على توضيح أهمية التشريع الإسلامي الوارد في كتاب الموطأ ، كأسلوب فعال لحل مشاكل العصر ولبناء نهضة إسلامية جديدة قائمة على عمل أهل المدينة.

3- الاهتمام بالمتون المالكية الأساسية ، وتجلى ذلك في ترجمتها إلى مختلف اللغات الكونية وإصدارها ونشرها من طرف دور النشر التابعة للزاوية الحبيبية الدرقاوية ولشيخها عبد القادر الصوفي المرابط. وتملك الزاوية الحبيبية الغربية العديد من دور النشر أذكر من أهمها : Madinah Press ، Budgate Press و iwan Press 

4- الاستعانة بالشبكة العنكبوتية الدولية (الإنترنيت) لتوصيل المذهب المالكي إلى أكبر شريحة ممكنة من المجتمع الغربي ، وذلك عبر نشر المتون المالكية المترجمة إلى اللغات الغربية لاسيما الإنجليزية في مواقع الكترونية ذائعة الصيت ، ويكفي أن أسوق في هذا المقام موقعين شهيرين : الأول للشيخ عبد القادر الصوفي وهو غني بمجموعة من المقالات باللغة الإنجليزية التي تبرز أهمية كتاب الموطأ وقيمة صاحبه ، كما يتضمن العديد من الكتب الفقهية المالكية ، وعنوانه: http://www.shaykhabdalqadir.com/content 

والثاني للباحثة الأمريكية المسلمة عائشة عبد الرحمان ، وهو موقع جد غني يمكن متصفحه من التحميل المجاني لعدد من المتون المالكية المترجمة إلى الإنجليزية و على رأسها موطأ مالك ، عنوانه كما يلي: http://bewley.virtualave.net/index.html 

خلاصات:

وما يمكن استخلاصه مما سبق الحديث عنه:

1- حضور الأثر المغربي بشكل قوي في المشروع الإصلاحي الشامل للشيخ أيان دالاس ، سواء في تبنيه للمذهب المالكي أو العقيدة الأشعرية أو الطريقة الدرقاوية في التصوف.

2- اعتماد الشيخ أيان دالاس في مشروعه الإصلاحي على نماذج مستوحاة من الذاكرة المغربية ، أذكر منها :

أ* نموذجه في التصوف: سيدي محمد بن الحبيب الدرقاوي المغربي وغيره من الشيوخ المغاربة .

ب* نموذجه في السياسة : دولة المرابطين التي قامت في المغرب وعرفت بتعصبها للمذهب المالكي، مما حدا به إلى تغيير اسم تنظيمه الصوفي من الزاوية الحبيبية الدرقاوية إلى حركة المرابطين العالمية وذلك إحياء لهذا النموذج الإسلامي من الحكم .

ج* نموذجه في الحكم والقضاء: القاضي عياض أحد أعلام المغرب في الفقه والسيرة والحديث والأدب. كما نجد الشيخ عبد القادر الصوفي يتبنى المنظومة المغربية في التدين الموسومة بالمرشد المعين على الضروري من علوم الدين والمعروفة ب”متن ابن عاشر” : 

 (وبعدُ) فالعون من الله المجيد ** في نظم أبيات للأمي تفيد

في عقد الأشعري وفقه مالك ** وفي طريقة الجنيد السالك 

يقول عبد القادر الصوفي : ” ذهبت التعاليم الإسلامية الأصيلة غربا نحو شمال إفريقيا، وهذا جد مهم. وأقصد بالتعاليـم الجوهـر الأساسي للإسلام ؛ فالإسلام الذي نتحدث عنه لم يذهب شرقا إلى نيسابور ولم يذهب غربا إلى العراق ، لقد ذهب غربا إلى إفريقيا وهذه حقيقة تاريخية طمست من طـرف بنيـة السلطة التي تلتها” 

(Abdal Qadir As-Sufi, Root Islamic education , Summary -Part One – , On line at http://bewley.virtualave.net Viewed July 2007 } . 

خاتمة:

ومهما يكن موقفنا نحن كمسلمين أو موقف الغرب من مشروع الشيخ عبد القادر الصوفي (أيان دالاس) ، وهل بالفعل يمثل هذا المشروع رؤية حقيقية لواقع الأزمة في العالم الإسلامي؟ إلا أنه مع ذلك، لا يسعنا إلا أن نبارك مثل هذه الجهود الكبيرة والهامة في التعريف بموطأ مالك ومذهبه وسط المسلمين الغربيين ، وفي إبلاغ تشريعاته وفقهه إلى العالم الغربي الذي كان دوما يستفيد منها . ويكفي أن أذكر ما ذهب إليه الباحث : أحمد الواثق العمراني من أن تشريعات المذهب المالكي معمول بها فعلا في القانون الغربي ، يقول : ” لقد كان لموطأ مالك أكبر الأثر في تطعيم القانون الأوروبي ، وخصوصا قانون الأحوال الشخصية في فرنسا وغيرها باعتراف جمهرة الفقهاء الأوروبيين أنفسهم… وهذا ما جعل بعض المؤتمرات التي عقدت في أوروبا لدراسة القوانين تعترف أن الفقه الإسلامي يعتبر بحق من مصادر التشريع العالمي”

( أحمد الواثق العمراني، “مالك وأثره التشريعي الإسلامي-الأوربي”، مجلة الملتقى عدد خاص ب: الإمام مالك والمالكية ، عدد 18/2007 ،ص:195 ) .

 كما أن الإحساس بهذا التأثير دفع ببعض المفكرين والمسؤولين عن مراكز اسلامية وازنة بالغرب الى الدعوة لتبني المذهب المالكي كمصدر أساسي للتشريع عند المسلمين الغربيين ، ولعل من أبرز هذه الأصوات المؤرخ المغربي عبد الله بوصوف الذي يشغل منصب نائب رئيس المجلس الفرنسي للديانة الإسلامية والذي يرى بأن :

“المذهب المالكي وعلى الرغم من نشأته بالمدينة المنورة ، فإنه قد ترعرع ونما في الغرب الإسلامي وعلى أرض أوروبية؛ هي الأندلس. بالإضافة الى أن الكثير من رموز المالكية تأثروا بالعقلية الأوروبية وأثروا فيها بفضل تعاملهم المباشر مع الأوروبيين من مسيحيين ويهود وغيرهم (أمثال ابن رشد، وابن خلدون… إلخ)، كما أن أصول المذهب المالكي فيها من المرونة ما يمكنها من إيجاد حلول لما تطرحه المجتمعات الغربية من تحديات على المسلمين. وهو أيضا مذهب طور مبادئ مهمة مثل “المصالح المرسلة” و”العرف التشريعي” و”شرع من قبلنا”، وهذه المبادئ ستساعد حتما الأقليات المسلمة على الاندماج في مجتمعاتها الجديدة . هذا إلى جانب تشجيع المذهب المالكي للاجتهاد”

(http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=ArticleA_C&cid=1203758163946&pagename=Zone-Arabic-News/NWALayout) . 

لنخلص في الأخير ، إلى أننا نستطيع من خلال التركيز على الجانب الفقهي ، لاسيما المالكي ، الدخول إلى المجتمعات الغربية ، والعمل على إحداث التواصل والحوار المنشود بينها وبين العالم الإسلامي. 

الهوامش والإحالات :

1- أحمد الواثق العمراني، “مالك وأثره التشريعي الإسلامي- الأوربي”، مجلة الملتقىعدد خاص ب: الإمام مالك والمالكية ، عدد 18/2007 ،ص:195

2- Abdalhaqq Bewley, “The Recovery of True Islamic Fiqh: An introduction to the work of Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi”, (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/aBewley/saq.html) .

3- Abdal Qadir al-Murabit , The Sign of The Sword , (Norwich iwanPress)

4- Abdal Qadir As-Sufi , Root Islamic education , Ch. 1. On line at : http://bewley.virtualave.net Viewed March 2008 

5- Abdal Qadir As-Sufi , Root Islamic education , Summary -Part One – , On line at http://bewley.virtualave.net Viewed March 2008 

6- Abdul Wahab el-Affendi , « A False Dawn » in Inquiry Magazine (January 1998).

 7- Ali Kose , Conversion to Islam: A study of Native British Converts. London: Kegan Paul. (1996)

8- Fatima Harrak , « Le Soufisme Face A La Mondialisation : Cas Des Confréries D’Origine Africaine Aux USA » dans : Confréries Soufis d’Afrique : Nouveaux Rôles , : Nouveaux Enjeux ,2004 , Actes du Colloque International , Organise par l’Institut des Etudes Africaines Rabat,2-4 Octobre 2001,

9 – Ian Dallas , Collected Works , Budgate Press, Cape Town, 2005 - 

10- Marcia Hermansen , “The ‘other’ Shadhilis of the West” in The Shadhiliyya, ed. Eric Geoffroy, Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose , (2005)

11- http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/aBewley/Page17.html

12- http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/aBewley/usul.html 

13-http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=ArticleA_C&cid=1203758163946&pagename=Zone-Arabic-News/NWALayout 

Seeing Ulster hit the headlines again, one is revolted that the only thing offered its Catholics and Protestants is the severely over-rated virtue of ‘tolerance’ for each other. How about some facts that would make sense of their history, our history? For the truth is that Ulster straddles the fault-line whose recent shifts caused such tectonic shudders around the world: the great banking collapses of 2008 whose end we have by no means seen yet.

For the Northern Irish Protestant the date 1690 has an almost mythical status. At the Battle of the Boyne the Protestant King – William of Orange to history, King Billy to us – defeated the Catholic King James II, from which event stem many but not all of that province’s subsequent divisions. Never mind that the Vatican was lit in celebration of Billy’s victory and other inconvenient facts.

However, this date is certainly one of the most grave moments for all the world, even for people who have never heard of it. For prior to it the British throne and its people had been shaken by the Tudors’ (and all Europe’s) to-and-fro between Protestantism and Catholicism one of the main consequences of which was legislation governing interest rates, not only whether they went up or down but whether interest was charged at all, and the events of 1690 set the issue in stone. A major undercurrent of the Reformation had been the legalisation, in a Christian sense, of what had been the mortal sin of usury, a sin whose perpetrator would be refused the last rites and a Christian burial unless he repented and paid back all his ill-gotten gains. In essence Calvin legalised that sin in a modest sort of fashion, i.e. 4%, and subsequent controversy largely amounted to exactly what was the legal level of usury – sorry, I mean interest – to be?

Now we would have to be utterly naïve to interpret that event as Protestant usury fighting valiant and stalwart usury-free Catholicism, for under the Popes usury was illegal but widespread, and the interest-rate could be between 200% and 300%. The Medicis were bankers to the pope up to the point when they supplied the incumbent themselves. Well did Strathearn subtitle his magisterial history of the Medicis, “The Godfathers of the Renaissance,” for a very congenial bunch of thugs they were, but that seemed to be what the age required and supplied, and it was their uneasy consciences which led to their philanthropy which gave us the Renaissance and its dubious benefits.

Nevertheless, the transition from a basically underworld criminal usury to a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-the-mouth Christian banking system was a staggering one, whose price we are still paying, and 1690 and the Battle of the Boyne were right there at the fulcrum of this event.

The extraordinary thing is that if you find an average history of William of Orange, it will not contain any of the following information:

1. He licensed the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, which has had an incredible impact on the world’s history, and which was the first ‘national’ bank in history, even though a private bank for most of its life.

2. He secured the first ‘national debt’ in history, i.e. rather than securing a loan for himself and undertaking to pay it off, the loan contract recognised that it might never be repaid, and that only the interest had to be serviced.

3. During his reign the first really significant paper money of modern history was issued by the Bank. I qualify it in that way, because a Swedish king temporarily issued paper money to fund a war, but withdrew it as soon as the war was over, and of course the Chinese had experimented with it at some point. The British experiment in paper money has never been withdrawn and indeed has gone on to spread paper  all over the world.

What were the forces at work in this event? William was invited in by the British mercantile class who were appalled at the idea of any revocation of their recent privileges among which were the right to lend money at interest. 

Perhaps the case has not been made fully for regarding this as a matter of some significance. So let us take a modest interest rate of say 6% and consider the circumstance of a single 1p invested at the birth of the Christian era, 2000 years ago, invested at compound interest. After two years it has become 1.12p. After 20 years 3.27p. After 200 years £1,151.26. After 2000 years it is :

£4,090,068,009,880,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

This is what mathematicians call an exponential curve, i.e. one that shoots off the top edge of the paper very rapidly, and that is precisely where we are in history at the present. (Do not imagine that because compound interest is so dramatic we are endorsing interest per se. Interest is usury.)

So you can see that this process has the potential for making some people incalculably wealthy just as conversely it has the potential for impoverishing people, nations and the planet in ways previously never thought possible, since negative numbers, i.e. debts, grow at precisely the same exponential rate.

This is the issue that was fought over for so many centuries in Europe’s past. Not just the issue of Catholic and Protestant, but very fundamental matters of life beyond dogma and doctrine but which, nevertheless, grew out of that dogma and its becoming corrupted or ignored. Protestant banking grew directly out of Catholic banking, but whereas Cosimo de Medici had the good grace to have a guilty conscience the modern banker has no conscience whatsoever and doesn’t even know that he ought to have one or that he ever had one.

That battle of the Boyne was won by Billy, the bankers’ cipher. The Bank of England was established with a loan to the nation, not the King, of £1,200,000 at 6% interest. That was lent in REAL money, i.e. gold. But that loan to the nation was regarded as an asset, and thus the Bank was allowed to lend precisely the same sum to the nation again, i.e. to individuals, at the same rate of interest, but this time as the new paper money. 

But why did Billy agree to this deal? He was over a barrel. The British are islanders with a longstanding antipathy to people on the ‘continent’. The British have never been ‘Europeans’ in any acceptable sense of the term, or at least have never included themselves among them. The traditional dislike for a usurper of the throne fighting the rightful monarch was thus made all the stronger by the fact that he was extremely foreign. The merchants tried to get around this by making his wife, James’s daughter Mary, co-monarch: William and Mary.

However, in order to fight a costly war against James and his powerful French backers, William would ordinarily have had to have raised a usurious loan (that was a given at most epochs in history), fought his war and repaid the loan from the spoils of war and the taxes extorted from the conquered and, if necessary, from his subjects. But this war was not going to have much in the way of spoils, and there was nothing more to extort from the Irish, and his subjects were not going to look more kindly on a foreigner who took them off to war to fight the rightful king, if he subsequently taxed them heavily. The deal with the bank was very simple: don’t bother to repay the loan. Simply service the interest on it.  For ever. Therefore, rather than the repayment with interest ordinarily demanded, there was the much more reasonable 6% service charge. No one really liked it, but it was bearable. 

It would grow from that £1,200,000 to somewhere between £697.5 billion at the end of 2008 or £4 trillion (according to John Redwood¹) or an in-between figure of an “unprecedented £2.2 trillion – just under 150% of gross domestic product”². What is staggering is not the size of the debt but that we consider such matters normal. It is said that Japan’s situation is much worse, which ought, in their thinking, to make ours bearable.

And the interest: “The cost of paying interest on the government’s debt is very high. In 2008 debt interest payments will be £31 billion a year (est. 2.5% of GDP). In 2009, they will be £35 billion (similar to defence budget).”³

But there is a real danger in all of this that we consider the scale of the matter the issue, the very size of the national debt the matter to hand, rather than the fact of the national debt. The truth is that we are in the situation we are because we have accepted the fact of the national debt,⁴ and thus we are facing a national debt of the size we are, because, as we have indicated with our compound interest example, that is the nature of the usurious loan. It has nowhere to go but up. It is impossible for it not to increase. And history has borne this out in every age and in every country on the planet. This trend has never been reversed except for short periods of time after which it has resumed its inevitable upwards climb. This is the nature of the beast we have unleashed. 

The beast cannot be tamed, and like any vicious mad dog, it must be put down, for this current crisis is not just one in a cycle, so that we can compare it to the 30’s and finally admit that it is as bad as or possibly even worse than the 30’s. It is nothing to do with mismanagement and corruption and bonuses, for that would imply that there is such a thing as well managed banking and honest banking, something which all of the establishment commentators are desperately trying to establish. The fact is that as peoples we have been taken for a ride by what is little more than a mafia, something that is actually much more sinister and ruthless than the mafia, and we refuse to see it, because they have grown so effective at imitating elderly bishops or fuddy-duddy members of the aristocracy, because they can buy anything and anybody since we are so simple minded that we will accept a bit of paper with numbers and lots of zeros on it and because they own the ‘printing presses‘ (of course money is now largely digital).

Now, in all the quite substantial critique that exists in literature and around the Internet of this matter, the dominant response is that we should ourselves – or the state as our surrogate – take this dreadful power of interest-yielding and interest-demanding credit from the bankers. But a tremendously sharp blade is going to kill someone no matter in whose hand it lies, and we have seen that this mechanism is inexorable. We have no choice but to put an end to it. For that to happen, we must see that it is much deeper than a simple economic matter. 

The great poet Ezra Pound who fought over the matter of usury all his life, memorably said at the end of his life, “re USURY: I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is AVARICE.”⁵ This is far from being an acceptance of interest-banking, but rather Pound’s profound perception of the deep deep roots of this matter: the sickness of avarice or greed, a two dimensional condition the least of which is the desire for stuff, and the more serious and intractable aspect of which is the need for rank, social standing and all the paraphernalia of status. To that we would add another motor sickness: anxiety over provision. These twin psychological illnesses are the motors that drive this insane economic system which, in Cobbett’s memorable words, “…has produced what the world never saw before; starvation in the midst of abundance,”⁶ and we are blind to see it because we are driven by the same sicknesses as the bankers. That is the root cause of the entire affair, because a clique of psychotic bankers have no power to do anything whatsoever without our complicity. We are the criminals and we are the usurers who are destroying the planet.

This unfinished psychological business has unmistakable metaphysical roots, for in Dostoyevsky’s insight, “If you don’t believe in God and your accountability, then why not?” We must admit that the current pass to which we have been brought is perilous indeed and needs our urgent attention. It is more urgent than global warming and peak oil by many degrees of magnitude, because it causes them in the first place. How on earth would we have exhausted more than half of all the earth’s oil without an economy predicated upon perpetual growth because driven by usury’s inexorable logic of exponential growth? How could we not have global warming without that burning of oil and all its subsidiary processes pumping out CO₂ in such a manic exponential fashion?

As inheritors of this situation over which two kings fought, “We are all Ulstermen.” And Ulster, whose people are perhaps some of the most stubborn and obstinate on Earth, says “No!” Loudly and emphatically. It says, “No surrender!” No surrender to corrupt papism, to the “Scarlet whore of Babylon”, in Ian Paisley’s memorable phrase. Ulster must continue to say, “No.” It must say “No!” to the degraded Christianity that has divided it in two mutually hostile camps, while banks and corporations have made off with its wealth, leaving it with neither wealth nor the true heritage of Jesus, peace be upon him, afloat on the surface of the modern age as flotsam and jetsam, directionless and valueless.  It must say, “No!“ to a peace process that masked who knows what economic skulduggery while asking for nothing more than a mealy-mouthed tolerance whose sole result is to set in concrete the hostility that was once volatile and alive. 

Ulster must embrace Nietzsche’s liberating annihilation of God, the death of the anthropomorphic theological monstrosity that weighs down Catholic and Protestant alike. And in the open space left by the death of God it must embrace the freedom to encounter the One Whose likeness is unknown, Who resembles nothing accessible to our theological mind-games. And in the bewildering unlikeness of the Divine to anything we can conceive (for whatever occurs to the mind, ipso facto, the Divine is certainly not that) we must cling in this perplexity and confusion not to the Golden Calf of the Israelites, but to the final revelation sent to the Messenger Muhammad, peace be upon him, who alone brings a way that not only forbids usury, but recovers trade. 

Recovery from our tripartite sickness of usury-greed, provision-anxiety and nihilism-atheism will begin when we rediscover the tripartite way of Muhammad (peace be upon him):  

The shariah – law – is contravened by usury and the commercial practices of this age. As well as their prohibition shariah contains the life-giving, wealth-generating, profit and loss sharing trade and partnership forms that were the motor of almost a millennium and a half of a great civilisation. 

The tariqah – spiritual path – contains the healing for the hearts and their anxiety and greed, and is transmitted from one who was himself entirely free of these sicknesses and was the embodiment of generosity and a host of noble qualities that it is hard for modern man to imagine existing let alone united in one man. His tariqah has been passed down man to man, generation to generation to this day and is alive in men and women who themselves exemplify these qualities and are able to help others to purify themselves from base characteristics and enrobe themselves in the best. 

The haqiqah – spiritual reality – is the truth that there is no god, there is but Allah, that Allah, exalted is He, is true and real, and that the self is a fiction in a fiction. It does away with the endless mind-games of theology and its inevitable corollary of atheism.

Ulster must say “No!” until it comes to the life-affirming “Yes,” that is Islam.

Abdassamad Clarke⁷

________

1  The national debt – from billions to trillions:

2  UK national debt set to surpass £2 trillion

3  http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/uk-economy/uk-national-debt/

4  We have not even considered the concomitant debt which businesses and individuals owe the banks, which business debt German economist Margrit Kennedy says contributes 45% of the price of the ordinary goods we purchase.

5  Pound, Ezra. Ezra Pound: selected prose 1909-1965. New Directions. pp. 3. ISBN 0-8112-0574-6.

6  Cobbett, William (1763 – 1835), A History of the Protestant Reformation.

7 The author is from Carrickfergus.

noun ( pl. -lies)

a person who uses strength or power to harm or intimidate those who are weaker.

The figure of the bully springs to mind, writ large and wreaking infinitely more devastation than the casual sadism of the school bully, but in essence the same. What is the point of having all that weaponry if you don’t use it? Precisely! the only point of having it is not to use it. The strong do not need to kill; it is only the weak and the pathetic who go on the rampage. We all know the gentle giant who is slow to anger and can endure a thousand insults before being stirred slowly to fight, just as we know the small vicious thug who is alive to insults that have not yet been uttered except in his paranoia. If shame could kill, then the Israeli leadership should have died by now, for shameful indeed is the murder of men, women and children in this fashion.

The other theme that springs to mind is calculation. In this most calculative of calculating ages, everyone has been calculating outcomes and the effects on this one and that if they do this or that. How shameful this age of calculation, when its sums amount only to dead and dying women and children. Commentators reckon that Israel have planned this slaughter for six months. Presumably our appalled responses are already calculated, maybe even intended. Is that too much to assume when informed analysts see the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (when the Japanese had already tried to surrender) as being in order to send a calculated message to Stalin? For whom is the dreadful message of the Gaza carnage intended?

The Hamas leadership too, shameless in their brazen calculation and their endless silly provocation using their stricken people as pawns in the calculated effect they want to make on the world when their corpses are shown piled one on another. What sums, Hamas! What sums! They have already done the calculations as to how many young people they will need to sacrifice in renewed suicide bombings, but, of course, they have not calculated how many Israeli civilians must die, since they don’t count, if you will excuse an ugly pun. Such spawn of the tide of modernism, such careless shepherds of their poor people, for they do not care for them at all. What an evil age that allows such people to rise to the top, like scum to the surface of the torrent. Shame on you, Hamas! Shame on you, but you are without shame.

And we say with Shakespeare, “A plague on both your houses,” but who then will care for the stricken Palestinians who have been betrayed by everyone, including their own?

Enough lament. What drives these madmen? It is evident on the one side, this demented desire for a racially defined Zionist state as just compensation for being the perpetual victims of the Christian anti-semites. A state with no one in it but Jews. But the bully is an archetype who, if he did not exist, would invent himself and so the emergence of the bully brings forth his counterpart, the archetypal victim. The Christian anti-semitic bully being forever banned from the pure land of Israel, must now come to terms with the consequences of this dialectical process. Horror of horrors, what do we see? The gentle Jews are become horrendous bullies. So, who are the victims this time? The Palestinians? Surely, not again! These poor, downtrodden sons of Sam (Shem to some) a samitic people, probably the purest genetic reservoir of the lost tribes. Anti-semitic bullying once more, this time spiced with the cold resentment that cried, “Never again!” Indeed, but look with dread and amazement at how destiny has turned the erstwhile victim so exactly into the vengeful copy of his hated tormentor, and his new victim into the mirror image so exact of his own self of yesteryear?

But this state, let us hold on to that thread, and Hamas, don’t go away, we have not finished with you yet. There is some story here yet to be told. For remove Jew and Palestinian from the picture and we have seen it all before, far too many times. The tanks, the soldiers swaggering down the streets, with their sub-machine guns, casually past the shoppers, and note, dear reader, they swagger down your streets today too. Beware. For those brought up on the Hollywood films produced after the second world war, that evokes one thing alone: Nazi Germany. Uniformed men walking down the street with submachine guns and we are back in Nazi Germany with its SS and sinister Gestapo.

But how can this be? How can this be the victim who resolutely opposed that horror and who fled it to build something better? But more serious than that, how can this be gallant Britain, which fought that and demonised it as a manifestation of absolute evil? How is it that our streets are now patrolled by submachine gun-toting uniformed and sometimes un-uniformed men and women, moreover men and women who can and do summarily execute complete strangers, and the courts let them off?

How did we as a species get to this? I am sorry Israel, I know you want to plead your own special circumstances, but we have discerned a much broader pattern and are after bigger fish. I am sorry Hamas, we have seen your guerrilla war too many times before in too many lands, and we have seen the women and the children pay, over and over again. But we are after bigger game. For we have seen the beast, and we think that now we can name him: it is the ‘state’. He comes clunking into the room with his boots and his submachine gun and arrests whomever he wishes and executes whomever he wishes, he bombs whomever he wishes, wherever he wishes and whenever.

But, you say, there must be a state, there has to be some governance! People need law, they need rules! Criminals must be punished, etc., so there must be a state. But if the state is so necessary for us, why do we hate it so much? I mean, of course, ‘we’ as a species. Why do we fight against it so much, that it sends those submachine gun toting minions for us in the middle of the night in every country from East to West? And if the state is only governance of the people, for the people, by the people, why does it hate the people so much? Why does it arrest so many? Are such a huge proportion of the people so bad? And why in the US, are the bad so uniformly black? Look in their prisons and tell me that I am wrong.

But, please stick to the point: back to Israel and Gaza. Have the Jews become Goliath and the plucky little Palestinians brave David? Would that it were so simple. The Zionists had to dress up as Jews in order to obtain their state and, true to form, Hamas are, metaphorically speaking, be-turbaned in order to gain theirs. So, the Israelis are the state, are they not? Yes, indeed, but Hamas’s only wish is to become the state. Fostered in the mean cot of modernity, they lust night and day to have a state, any state. Look how long they have fought to get the one they have, look at how many young men and women they sacrificed in suicide missions to their lust to have a state. In that, they merely followed in the footsteps of the puppet Arafat, who in turn had looked in the mirror he held up to Israel and liked what he saw. And what purpose do they serve in all of that? Why they serve the purposes of the Israelis who have a serious demographic problem: a dwindling white Israeli populace and a burgeoning Palestinian one. There is nothing they need more than a separate Palestinian state, and Arafat and his Fatah, and Hamas are apparently only too eager to serve their desire, and how these things get arranged I don’t even pretend to know.

And the state? If you can understand a car, you can understand the state. Say the car is a Lamborghini. You like the sense of power when you get in and rev it up. You have all seen Top Gear and you can recognise car idolatry. Now, what you need to understand is that the state is a super machine. Whatever it is that makes people worship machines, worship the car, then the state is the super-idol. Yeah! I’d love to get into her cockpit. Vroom, vroom!

But the car and the state share a common problem: the price. There is no comparison in their prices, of course, but, nevertheless, paltry though the price of the Lamborghini is compared to the price of the state, its price to ordinary mortals is not the kind of cash we keep in our back pocket. Enter the bank. In both cases. Enter the bank. Don’t worry about that huge price tag. With our helpful service, you just pay a small regular amount, which you will hardly notice, and the Lamborghini or the state, whichever is your preference, is yours.

But the truth is that however much you want the Lamborghini or the state, and however reasonable the monthly payments seem, you simply don’t have that much money, which is, after all, the original cash price and a hefty dollop of interest, and interest on interest on interest, etc.

Thus, everyone who devotedly follows the lives of the rich and famous, the celebrities, is always gloating over the moment when they get their comeuppance, when the bill they cannot pay arrives and close on its heels the bailiffs, or to transpose our metaphor, when the welfare state and the pension funds become too expensive, and the former is closed down or privatised piecemeal and the latter siphoned off in the dead of the night and everyone is too pacified to do anything but whinge. An amazing phenomenon: people have worked their entire lives to put something aside for those few years before death when they won’t have to work like maniacs, and when it is stolen they are simply too tired to do anything except grumble.

And so Hamas wanted a state. Not because it would have done them any good, but because it was simply a kind of Ferrari which they had always longed to drive. No matter that the state is collapsing in terminal decline all over the world, no matter that its citizens are washed out, grey morons too exhausted to complain when their pensions are stolen. Hamas wanted a state.

Ibn Khaldun had an explanation for it. The conquered people: as people, they always believe, quite naturally, that they are the best. But as conquered people they have to square that with the uncomfortable fact of having been conquered. Clearly then the conquerors have something that sets them apart, some factor that distinguishes them, and it is that which gives them the edge. Know that, and we are on the royal road to recovery and we will become again masters of the universe.

So what did the Western colonialists have that was different? Let me see: capitalism and banks, paper money and credit cards, parliamentary democracy, technology, a modern military (technology) and so on. Clearly these are the things they have that are different and so these are the things which have given them power. If we master these things, we will becomes masters of our destiny again, and hopefully masters of others’ destinies as well. “If I ruled the world, every day would be the first day of spring…”

But a careful reading of history, of the colonial times, would show that it was not these things that gave the colonialists the upper hand at all, none of them. Intrepidity, bravery, ruthlessness, daring and sometimes even qualities such as honour and kindness, yes! and, moreover, some of them actually believed passionately in God and in destiny, but it was not parliamentary democracy or banking. Parliamentary democracy meant that the Middle East was the playground of three distinct entities: the Foreign Office, the India Office and the Arab Office, whose squabbling made a considerable mess of Middle Eastern affairs, arguably a mess which we have still not cleaned up today. So, no, it wasn’t democracy, but perhaps some of that reckless bravery and daring of men like Lawrence, who were legion in the 19th and 20th centuries. That was what the colonialists had, and a good deal of brutality and ruthlessness, no doubt.

Nevertheless, you cannot persuade the likes of Hamas who, in essence, are boys who want to drive the Lamborghini no matter what rational arguments you provide them, and of course, they will sign any contract to pay for it. Enter Shylock stage left. But of course today, Shylock doesn’t have to be a Jew, and may well be an Armenian or an American Baptist or a Saudi prince. But whatever the race the price is always the same and it is always unpayable.

Now, when it is only a fancy house at stake, then maybe you will have your house repossessed, and there is another homeless family and another broken family. But what happens when the state stops working? Hamas haven’t even got to that part, but a little thought would let them imagine it, which might remove some of the glitter from their feverishly imagined Shangri-La. Before the state stops working, the apparatchiks must somehow squeeze whatever taxes they can from the impoverished citizens to service the debt, a process that is naturally resented by the working poor, and has always led to riots and revolution. That was before our present time, but now people just change the channel and ignore the bailiffs as long as they don’t take the television.

So here we have two parties: the Israelis who have a state and consequently are beating people up all the time, as the apparatchik of the modern state does all over the world, no matter what race, creed, language or colour. The process is identical. Hamas eagerly wait in the wings for the day when they will take the stage in their little stretch of desert. “The ant’s a centaur in his dragon-world. Pull down thy vanity.”

And in all this, the Palestinians fall between the hammer and the anvil.

What a to-do! And what is there to do? The truth is that the Israelis are incapable of reasoned action, for although they seem to fight a Palestinian state with every last breath in their bodies, they earnestly desire it as their only salvation, but perhaps cannot be seen giving it too easily since that might give the game away. So the Palestinians must win their little heap of sand, their very own little concentration camp, by their own efforts, lest they suspect that it is exactly what their enemies want.

Clearly, the only intelligent solution is for the Palestinians to abandon immediately any desire for their own state,¹ and they should clamour to be admitted back into Israel right away. For in spite of what people say, a very good Palestinian friend once shocked me by affirming that Israel is a democracy and that it is a better one than most of the Arab states in the Middle East, and he still had the scars from beatings he got from the Israeli troops as a stone-throwing boy. Relinquish the obscenely silly fantasy of a Palestinian state, and within a generation the Palestinians will, through sheer force of numbers, be the dominant element in a pluralistic Israel, precisely the reality the Israelis fear.

And in the meantime, while losing the shackles of the Hamas designed entity they will gain the chains of the Israeli one. They will be one with the rest of us as prisoners of states that were once designed to serve us. We all live in states in which the state takes ‘taxes’ from us to pay exponentially growing, increasingly unpayable debts, and in order to pay bankers whenever they suffer the least inconvenience. We all walk down roads patrolled by edgy young men with submachine guns, blissfully unaware of the Nazi overtones.

And while in that condition, we re-establish genuine governance and community which come into existence the moment adult men and women can work together in brotherhood and sisterhood and defer to the better man. And we revive God’s tax which our betters will take from us and give to the genuinely poor and needy rather than to greedy bankers as in the present dispensation. And we turn to the true Source of power and away from all silly political wrangling and contesting over little piles of this silly dung-heap which we have made of the earth. And we praise and laud the Source of power, and look longingly towards the best of His creation, aspiring to have even the tiny fraction of his highest of all qualities that comes from simply loving him.

And we meet and sing the Nasiri du’a whose words include:

Look at what we have experienced from people!

Our state among them is as You see.

Our troops are few and our wealth is little.

Our power has declined among groups.

O You Whose kingdom cannot be pillaged,

give us shelter by Your rank which is never overcome!

O Allah, change the state of hardship

for ease and help us with the wind of victory.

Give us victory over the aggressors

and contain the evil among those who asked for it.

Overpower our enemy, O Mighty, with a force

which disorders them and crushes them.²

Hajj Abdassamad Clarke

—-

1 Since writing this, Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi has written extensively on this matter and in his article “Doing Nothing is not an Option”
writes:

“The Egyptian people must rise up and finish with the dictatorship of the Mubarak family. They must be consigned to the dustbin of history. The Egyptian crossing into Gaza should be opened immediately and the Gaza strip occupied by Egypt. Hamas leadership should be imprisoned and a governing Junta should be set up with Egyptian leadership. Gaza must be annexed by Egypt and the West Bank occupied by the Jordanians. The Jordanian leadership should abolish its disgraceful posturing pseudo-monarchy and at the same time imprison the corrupt Abbas regime prior to trial. Jordan should annex the West Bank into the state of Jordan.”

This is clearly an infinitely better proposal than for the Palestinians to accept passive suffering as Israeli citizens at the hands of that genocidal state.

² Read the Nasiri Du’a here
http://www.bogvaerker.dk/NasiriDua.pdf

And if it makes sense to you, then listen to it here
http://www.bogvaerker.dk/files/Audio/Nasiri.mp3

Read something about its author here
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ABewley/Nasiri.html

and learn to recite it. Recite it for the Palestinians and recite it for the Iraqis and recite it for the Afghans, and, not least of all, recite it for us here in the prison camp of the Enlightenment.

What is even harder to explain is the total absence of youth within their ranks of any race, colour or creed. This fact, combined with their latest declaration of war on our streets are the clearest evidence so far that our county is not immune to the spread of a growing trend in anti-youth/anti-child vigilantism which bears all the hallmarks of the modus operandi of similar gangs which have made the streets of South American cities such as Rio de Janeiro no-go areas for unaccompanied children and young adolescents.

Although it is still early days here in Norfolk, these gangs have made a grim name for themselves in other metropolitan areas where they have been known not only to use guns in the killing of innocent people, they have also been known to turn a blind eye to murder and violence carried out by racist thugs. High profile incidents of this kind have raised the question in the minds of the public as to the likely involvement of their members in the organisation of such crimes from behind the scenes.

If we are to avoid similar developments in Norfolk, a zero tolerance strategy will have to be adopted on the part of the public in general and parents of adolescents in particular, who are rightfully concerned that their children should be free from verbal intimidation, physical brutality and criminalisation on the streets of Norwich. Thanks in no small part to knee-jerk reactions from local MPs and city councillors, WiN has brought the deadly threat of its numerical and well armed superiority to bear to crack a small nut called LMS (Last Man Standing), three black schoolboys connected to the Chapelfield Mosque whose only crime appears to have been a penchant for the excitement of hip-hop competitions and the colour of their skins, which in Norfolk means high visibility and easy targeting by genuine hardcore street gangs like WiN whose reputation for violence promises a one-sided bloodbath more suited to the ghetto neighbourhoods of Los Angeles than Vauxhall Street.

As concerned citizens we all have a part to play in catching these developments before they become an epidemic. We all know who they are, we all know what they do and we all know how they operate!

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This kind of sensationalism is not difficult to concoct. It required no research whatsoever and contains a bare minimum of useful or factual information. We can even see why so much tabloid style journalism is written. It could be such a nice, easy and innocuous way of earning a living if it wasn’t for the amount of careless damage it does to people’s lives and reputations. Why let awkward considerations like balance, accuracy and proper investigation disrupt an easy life?

Having got that off our chests, what follows has been honestly written for the benefit of our community members whose children, brothers, friends and acquaintances have seen the other side of the EDP’s extravagant “GANG WARFARE” headline of last Friday, and who deserve an explanation as to how such headlines can still appear after all of the time and effort that has gone into consultation and co-operation with the police by their community leaders over recent weeks.

What can we expect when young people who happen to be black and male meet up regularly in a public place? They will stand out from the general populace because of their age and even more so because of their colour. Next, this group of friends will soon be given reason to believe that there is a concerted effort by those in authority to use all the resources available to demonise them as the dangerous fallout from fatherless families and social disintegration, to label them as violent criminals, a scourge on society and the promoters of gang warfare.

Their first resort will be to tell their parents (both in every case!) that they feel they are being dealt with unjustly. In the first instance they may simply get a warning from their parents who may have seen it all before, “What do you expect if you hang around in large groups in public places… this is Norwich not Brixton! When white people see groups of young black boys they panic, they think you must be up to no good…you’d better be careful!”

But what then happens when one of them comes back and says he’s been stopped over 50 times within a two month period without being arrested or charged with anything? And that it all started when he and a group of friends were subjected to a dispersal order because they were hanging out at Jenny Lind Park and were accused of anti-social behaviour when they weren’t doing anything except being a bit loud?

It became instantly clear that there was more to all this than meets the eye when the Assistant Chief Constable of Norfolk Constabulary, Sarah Francis suddenly called an emergency meeting bringing together professionals and representatives of the Chapelfield Mosque to a create a community cohesion engagement group. Norfolk Constabulary’s officers from the Partnerships, Youth and Community Division were in attendance to engender a partnership approach with community representatives to develop a plan of action to investigate, monitor and evaluate the data compiled relating to this group of boys. Her opening gambit being, “I believe we may have got it terribly wrong… and are potentially criminalising some of your youth… we need your help… to get this right!”

The expectations raised from the invitation to these meetings was that the Police were concerned to get this right and were being sensitive to ensure they got the facts right about the intelligence they had collected.

On closer examination of the dossier compiled by the Police it was found that the boys in question were, in fact, innocent of the allegations of anti-social behaviour, street robberies, posing with guns and knives online and being the architects of postcode gang battles. It became evident that these boys who have been targeted by the Police, have been victims of the adverse publicity in the local press and erroneous interpretation of the ‘word on the street’. It was this very data, much of which came from calls from local residents, who on seeing these young boys grouped together in numbers of three or more, reacted according to well established prejudices and the usual stereotyping, reinforced by negative and hysterical press reporting.

The series of articles published by the Norwich Evening News with the hard hitting headlines “Don’t let City Gangs take over our Streets” and “Action to Tackle City Gangs” did not enhance the image of these boys who have grown up in Norwich, attended local schools, and received recognition for their good citizenship and positive contribution to the fine reputation of our city.

As part of the engagement process the young boys made themselves available for informal meetings and even made a video, ‘What’s in it for Them? A Moral Panic or Something Else?’ giving the history of their music group and their experiences at the hands of the Police, the local press and the wider community. For this they were praised at a meeting where they met the District Superintendent Nick Dean and were offered a hand of support and commendation from the top cop in Norwich. But it now appears that this was less than sincere.

The sting in the tail is that during these community cohesion meetings police representatives, whilst acknowledging the erroneous interpretation of their intelligence and that the frontline service meted out to these youngsters fell way short of the standards to be expected and may well have amounted to direct racism, they have continued to publicly paint the picture that these boys are primary players in grooming unsuspecting teenagers into underground criminal fraternities.

We have found the Police response to the issues surrounding their engagement with us as a community, their treatment of the young boys in particular and their attitude to dealing with adolescents in general, wholly inappropriate. We have advised them in no uncertain terms that the culture of their organisation and its result orientated norms will further alienate sections of the community (or “you people” as one senior officer put it) while their management of the engagement and cohesion initiative betrayed an ineptness and lack of professionalism which leave them open to suspicion of direct and institutional racism.

In our view, the senior management in Norfolk Constabulary need to get out of the fast lane of career advancement and listen to the advice given by those on the receiving end of their organisation’s lack of responsiveness in the case of these boys. When asking questions about fairness and equity towards young people, we asked, “Whatever happened to the multi-agency strategic approach to Every Child Matters?” and “What happened to the recommendations in the (Sir William) MacPherson Report about the need to re-establish trust between BME communities and the police?” “What about the recommendations for race awareness training and all officers valuing cultural diversity?” “What about quality control?”

To top it all, after his own officers came to the conclusion that they had got it wrong concerning our boys and then rushed to conclude that there was no further need to continue to meet with us, the Norfolk Chief Constable Ian McPherson, echoing the national mood to suit his own public image, political ambition and by default the image of his organisation, used his position to issue a carefully worded press release, which became last Friday’s EDP headline story “GANG WARFARE” adding further insult to the injuries done to these boys and their parents by claiming they are at the centre of impending gang warfare in Norwich while conveniently stating repeatedly that it has nothing to do with race or faith. These exaggerated protestations serve only to encourage impressions to the contrary.

A measured response based upon a unified strategy involving all of the professional agencies tasked with dealing with young people who are possibly at the margins of entering into criminal behaviour would have been far more convincing and less like opportunistic grandstanding. Imagine therefore, how reassuring it is to know that Chief Constable Ian McPherson is taking the lead in The Association of Chief Police Officers’ first business group devoted to Young People for which he has once again had much press! How much emphasis should we expect him to place on ensuring that a sense of equity will prevail when presented with the highly political issue of how to deal with young black boys on his own doorstep?

There is nothing new about the scapegoating of vulnerable groups that usually have no one to act as advocate for them in situations like these, where professional integrity on the part of officials can often mean the difference between being heard and dealt with in a just manner or being crushed by the power of people in authority who should know better. Rather than being a source for cheap headlines, it is important that this issue becomes a priority for any police chief who is seeking to develop a Youth Crime Strategy that could potentially become a national model.

In the wake of Chief Constable McPherson’s front page ‘sensation’, the question we, as representatives of the community, are facing from parents is, “What use were those so called community cohesion and engagement meetings?”

Our only response at this juncture is to pose a question of our own, “What has a young person got to do to get justice in Norwich, especially if they’re black?”

First, before we approach the story of wahhabism, we must locate it within Islam itself. As it has reached us, Islam comprises three distinct dimensions.

First, outward practice such as both the acts of worship and ordinary transactions, i.e. law, covering all aspects, commercial, civil and criminal, etc. This is the Shari’ah which has been transmitted by the four accepted legal schools.

Second, a rational science which encompasses what is necessarily true about the Divine, what is inconceivable for Him and what conceivable, and similarly for the prophets, the angels, etc. This is transmitted by two acceptable schools.

Third, the spiritual path which is generally known as Sufism, which is transmitted by a number of different tariqas. All three of these dimensions with their different schools were universally agreed upon. All of this exists under the umbrella of governance by a known contract. That contract has clauses for muslim subjects and non-muslim subjects. All of this is sustained by a very necessary scholarship involving deep knowledge of Arabic, Qur’anic commentary and exposition of legal cases.

Wahhabism was originally an eighteenth century movement among desert Arabs who rose in insurrection against the Ottomans. Their teaching was characterised by being:

simplistic and literalist, i.e. it rejected all the above three dimensions and their schools in favour of directly deriving theology and law from a literalist understanding of the Qur’an and books of traditions,

insurrectionary; they overthrew legitimate governance and began an insurgency movement against the Ottomans who were forced to stamp them out,

fanatical; I use this word advisedly, but intend by it their declaration of Muslims who disagreed with them beyond the pale of Islam. In our time, this is evidenced by the fact that huge numbers of the victims of suicide bombers are Muslims.

The first phase of wahhabism ended with their containment as a movement to the eastern area of the Najd.

We pick up the thread again, when in the early twentieth century, an inheritor of the ruling wahhabi clan, ‘Abd al-Aziz ibn Sa’ud, a remarkably talented and adventurous man, embarked on the exploit of restoring his family’s fortunes. Along the way to that he met the remnants of the wahhabi sect, and saw the advantage their steely ruthless fanaticism gave him in his fight. He set in process the conversion of the desert tribes to their creed. None of that might have made any enduring impact on history if it had not happened when it did, when the eyes of European foreign policy makers were glued on the fortunes of the Ottomans. I pass no judgement on this, but simply want to tell it as factually as possible.

Thus, Ibn Sa’ud, who was a wily and worldly-aware man, understood what none of his rather simple followers did, that on the international stage he would have to be under the patronage of one of the great world powers. It was initially the British. They fostered him. Although undecided for some period between him and Sharif Hussain of Mecca, in the end his undoubted intrepidness won the day and he became the undisputed ruler of the Arabian peninsula. Saudi oil came to prominence. British influence wained. The patronage of the now Saudi Arabia passed to the USA, at the time of Roosevelt who personally met Ibn Sa’ud. Built into the new state, however, was Ibn Sa’ud’s courtship of the wahhabis and the manner in which he transformed the desert Arabs into wahhabis and then used them as the force to underpin his kingdom, as he and his family and their doctrine were not widely liked in Arabia.

Given the centrality to Muslims of Mecca and Medina, and the astonishing oil wealth after the price hikes of the seventies, Muslims from all over the world went to Saudi Arabia to find donations for all the worthy projects they had, most importantly the building of mosques. The donations they received had an implicit price: sing the wahhabi tune in your countries and in your mosques, which many did. The great majority of British mosques, however, are from small Pakistani communities often hostile to wahhabism and funding their mosques from their own hard-earned cash.
The second matter that affected us here in Britain were the graduates of Medina university who returned as propagandists for wahhabism.

The result was that both a strong and a dilute form of wahhabism spread, based on a primitive fundamentalist idea, in a christian sense, that anyone could take the divinely revealed book and make judgements from it and from traditions by reading them literally, although now with non-Arabs this interpretation was dependent on translations, which were often atrociously bad.

Within this new form, the dissatisfactions of some of the youth were vented by their fighting in Afghanistan, and later Chechnya and Bosnia, or by their going to Medina to get a programming in a more erudite kind of wahhabism.

The Afghanistan fighting entered into the arena of modern geopolitics. The Mujahidun leaders went to Washington and then the CIA reciprocated and trained fighters, like Bin Laden, who would later turn out to be the core of the new threat. It did not stop in Afghanistan. There was Chechnya, another land on the frontier between different geo-political interests. When the Bosnian crisis erupted, brigades of these young fighters were recruited by the Americans for Bosnia, thus cementing their sense of identity as an international movement.

When the geopolitical winds changed, they of course, found themselves on the outside. In many cases they either went on as lone volunteers to new conflicts or returned disgruntled to their own countries or to other lands.

An international culture had been created, whose fruits we see today. However, that movement ought better to be seen as an expression of the natural idealism of young people and their frustration with the political processes of the age. Every society and every generation is confronted with that, and it is a measure of the wisdom of a society how it deals with it.

To return to our other theme.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries young Europeans tied dynamite to themselves and blew themselves up in crowded public places. Our greatest intellectuals looked closely at this phenomenon, and diagnosed it clearly as nihilism. They saw nihilism as the result of a high idealism, so high as to be unattainable. The idealist despises other people for not having and striving for ideals, and in the end comes to despise himself for not attaining his own. Thus, the suicide bomber can blow up men, women and children, and he can also blow himself up. Wahhabi idealism is marked theologically by the elevation of God literally high above the seven heavens, a creed which, if believed literally and physically, removes them from the community of Islam.

However, it is important for us to recognise that this phenomenon is as much and perhaps more a product of our late capitalist society as it is of a particular sect. Understood within the context of societal breakdown in terms of our mounting criminal statistics – wife-beatings, rapes, murders, child abuse and more – then it is a part of a complete symptom picture of the nihilism of our age.

As a sect it has to be seen that a rather weak signal from an extremely peripheral movement was greatly amplified first by oil wealth, and then later by its usefulness to geo-political considerations of other powers. Otherwise, we might have seen it die away of its own accord long ago. This strange seed found some soil in which to sprout in our society.

Thus seen, it is for the Muslims to deal with by restoring that picture of Islam which I outlined at the beginning. That deprives this sect of its oxygen. The process is both a restoration of Islamic learning and of Islamic social mores and key aspects of shari’ah such as zakat, the charitable tax.

Undoubtedly police activities to find and prevent terrorist activities must proceed. These people are merely criminals and Muslims must help the authorities to detain them and prevent them. In that the terrorist is no different from a murderer, rapist or robber.

But possibly the gravest danger of the terrorist threat is that it distract us from the genuinely deep crisis of the chronic nihilism of modern society, which extends a great deal further than the activities of a few madmen. It is the nihilism of our age at all levels of our society that is the matter facing us, and it has disturbing consequences. In that we rely on Dostoyevsky’s key insight: that the destructiveness of the anarchists of his time was their expression of the nihilism of the previous generation. In that, the suicide bomber is also a symptom of a deeper malaise of British society. In these circumstances, perhaps the Muslim community might render a deeper service to Britain, and certainly stand ready to do so.

Abdassamad Clarke, Norwich

The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk describes the pressure to change that is clearly being exerted by global capital on the nationally bound democracies. Sloterdijk believes that, within a world interior of capital‚ even freedom (which from his point of view could only be rescued by an unrealistic union of asceticism and democracy) is a matter up for debate. The space in which freedom can operate, claims Sloterdijk, is shrinking, and we are living through nothing other than a transition to post-liberal forms: We have the choice between a party-dictatorial mode, as in China, a state-dictatorial mode, as in the Soviet Union, an electoral-dictatorial mode, as in the USA, and finally a media-dictatorial mode as in Berlusconi‚s Italy. Berlusconism is the European test-balloon of the emerging Neo-authoritarian Age.

Today, a profession of belief in democracy is conditional on an answer to the question, What kind of democracy? But the prevailing superficial debate does not wish to make time for that. We as Muslims, however, required, as we are to obediently embrace democratic values, are the very people to begin asking. What are human rights worth without civil rights? What does global democracy mean today? Is China a democracy? Or is China perhaps a kind of new capitalist Ideal State with unfettered freedom for capital, and with a government that undertakes the dirty work of monitoring the workers, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek so powerfully expresses it. Zizek also identifies the creeping erosion of the democratic form in that keen role model, the West. He examines the weight of real possibilities for political participation, comparing them with the “Close-doors” button in a lift. Involvement is becoming abstract, inconsequential; to the politically minded human being, participation appears almost illusory.

Of course, Earth remains an unsettled place, and compared with large tracts of our planet, life between Berlin and Baden-Baden is still fairly cosy. But this cosiness may be deceptive. The Melilla refugee drama showed that the world‚s new divide does not lie between cultures, it separates the Rich and the Poor. Materially speaking we Germans still live in a sheltered zone. The establishment of Camps around the edges of our affluent society and the emergence of the political figure of Homo Sacer, who has nothing left but his body, is the fault of the modernism of our global principles of order. Our corporations are marauding in Africa and they are not establishing a Nomos. It is in our relationship with the South that the gaping chasm is revealed between the Christian claim of Europe and its actual policies.

In the Islamic world, it is widely known that the political realm is cleft with deep contradictions. In the Arabian lands, led by despots and little more than makeshift dictatorships, the masses hope of democracy is that it will bring them civil rights and a just distribution of prosperity. Zakat, which is an indicator of the just distribution of prosperity from within Islam, has been degraded in the Islamic world to a politically insignificant ritual. And yet the Muslim intellect remains unsettled by the hypocritical question aimed at Islamic nations – whether they are capable of democracy? when everyone knows full well that barely a despot would remain a day in power without the support of the West. Our wealth depends to a considerable degree on the daily battle for a share of scarce resources. What would happen if democratically elected governments in Riyadh or Tripoli were to sell their oil to third parties?

In liberalism, wanting to die for a political cause is unthinkable; hence in political theory and within the value-scheme, the terrorist or suicide bomber is a political figure of absolutely no worth whatsoever. He is not even an enemy, he has no values, and since inhuman, he is basically an animal. Cage, camp and leash are the reasonable civilising counter-measures. The outrageous acts themselves pursue an inescapable bio-political logic: the perpetrator utilises his body, but not his faith, against an opponent imagined to be overwhelmingly more powerful. He has nothing left other than this body, and in contravention to the Revelation he finally defiles that very existence which should have brought him to the Next World. All’s bad that ends bad.

The political consequences of terrorism are especially devastating for the Islamic community, but also for non-Muslims. One has only to reflect on the obvious weakening of the important anti-globalisation movement, which has invigorated the political debate. As Muslims we do not just bemoan the superficial loss of image; that longing for recognition, which can be observed among today’s Muslim functionaries, is in fact a secular activity.

But this does not preclude annoyance. The limitless political term Islamist‚ is of course a gross simplification, and like every other simplification it is one of the known preludes of a persecution which must be genuinely feared, quite aside from the typical, inscrutable German incapacity to respect orthodox religious life-practices. The political observer will also have noticed that the term racism has been silently removed from the debate. But more to the point is the regrettable fact that, beneath Terror’s clouds of dust, even Islam itself is hardly recognisable. In the public arena, when advice is sought about Islam, it is as if all that existed were hair-brained fundamentalism or a banal esotericism. In either case, Islam loses its character as a credible alternative way of life.

The denunciation of belief has now assumed shocking proportions. On the Muslim side what is needed is a critique of Islamic modernism, but a critique that leads into Islam, not out of Islam.

The key points are clear:
Islam is neither an ideology nor a totalitarian life-form. Neither is it, as an organic life-pattern, a system with totalitarian ambitions. Islamic thinking lives from the autonomy of its own terminology. Even without the flowery language of tolerance, Islam respected other ways of life in close proximity and for hundreds of years on end.

Abu Bakr Reiger, Berlin

The fact is that the Muslims, denied any other kind of legal redress, have had no choice but to react in this way in order to make it clear beyond doubt that such a fundamental law of Islam cannot be broken with impunity and to deter any future breaches being perpetrated. The inexcusable overzealotry of an extremist fringe of the Muslim community, which has been expressed in writing in this country and by more direct action elsewhere, is regretably the inevitable consequence of the outrage felt by all Muslims everywhere. What must be repeated is that none of this is an attack by the Muslims on the general principle of freedom of expression; it is merely the response to the perpetration of a very specific crime – the depiction and defamation of the Prophet Muhammad.

There is, in fact, an interesting parallel in the legal systems of two of the countries responsible for reprinting the cartoons. In both France and Germany it is a criminal offence to deny the Holocaust. This shows that in certain specific instances a legal limit can and should be placed on the general principle of freedom of expression. It is also noteworthy that, in the several instances that this law has been enforced to prevent those who have contravened it from making their views known or to prosecute them for doing so, there has certainly been no general outcry against the legal authorities concerned, claiming that their action consitutes an attack on freedom of expression.

It may well be rightly argued that no law prohibiting defamation of the Prophet Muhammad exists in the countries where the cartoons were published. However, this is, in fact, beside the point. The Muslims are not claiming this to be the case. They are saying that a law of Islam – one of the few Islamic laws which encompasses non-muslims – has been cynically flouted. It is possible that this was done in the first instance out of ignorance, although there is no excuse for this because all the issues involved were thoroughly aired at the time of the Rushdie affair only fifteen years ago. But it is quite clear that the republication of the cartoons was a blatant act of provocation on the part of those who did so, who must have been aware, in the age of global communication in which we all now live, that their action would inevitably incite the active indignation of Muslims everywhere.

Ironically, the truth is that freedom of expression is highly valued by the Muslims. Traditionally the highest expression of this freedom has been when it has been employed in the press and elsewhere to right wrongs and counter injustice on the part of unjust authorities, particularly when doing so requires courage on th part of those who do so. The Prophet Muhammad advocated precisely this freedom by saying: “The highest act of jihad is speak the truth in the face of a tyrannical ruler”.

<strong>Abdalhaqq Bewley Translator of the Qur’an &<br />
Lecturer in Islamic Studies</strong>